Mastery of Natural Self-Evidence: A Phenomenological Psychopathology Study of Shamanic Illness in Modern China

Abstract

Medical anthropology has played a major role in destigmatizing shamanic illness. It has liberated shamanic illness from psychiatric labels such as hysteria, superstition, and mental disorder, and has relocated it within cultural, social, and historical contexts. However, shamanic illness in contemporary China now faces new challenges of stigmatization. This paper adopts phenomenological psychopathology, using its philosophical resources to enrich and extend the empirical research of medical anthropology. Drawing on both literature and multi-sited ethnographic research conducted in Inner Mongolia and Jilin in 2026, it articulates the first-person subjective experiences across the four stages of shamanic illness in modern China—pre-onset, onset, training, and consecration. It thereby furnishes a theoretical basis for shamanic illness and for interpreting its novel developments. The study ultimately shows that shamanic illness is neither a purely organic psychopathology nor a mere process of acquiring bodily skills, but rather a dynamic interplay of resonance, exhaustion, restoration, and coupling of vitality and conation, which finally culminates in the subject’s mastery of natural self-evidence. This research extends the perspective of medical anthropology, offers a new theoretical framework for understanding non-ordinary spiritual experiences embedded in cultural contexts, and simultaneously extends the empirical scope of phenomenological psychopathology to cross-cultural applications.