By drawing on shamanic dreaming, this article approaches the conceptualisations of Indigenous thinkers, such as Davi Kopenawa Yanomami and Ailton Krenak, who envision a future of interdependence and care between human beings and all matter on Earth, increasingly harmed by predatory capitalism. It specifically explores the visuality of the Yanomami cosmology and Ailton Krenak’s concept of...
Chemistry of plant raw materialOctober 10, 2026Vasily Ivanovich Dunkay, Mayya Petrovna Razgonova, Alexander Mikhailovich Zakharenko et al.
Ledum palustre L. has been actively used in ethnomedicine in Mongolia, China and Russian Far East (indigenous peoples: Udege and Evenki) for centuries, as an antioxidant, immunomodulating, anti-inflammatory, vitality-restoring agent. L. palustre contain various phenolic compounds and fatty acids with valuable biological activity. This plant is especially actively used in shamanic and healing...
Abstract: This chapter revisits the films Corumbiara (2009) and Isolados de Corumbiara (The Isolated of Corumbiara, 2021), both directed by filmmaker Vincent Carelli, set in the Igarapé Omerê in the Brazilian Amazon and involving the Kanoê and Akuntsu peoples. The first film stages national society’s establishing contact with the Kanoê and Akuntsu, peoples who have survived previous...
This paper proposes shamanic practices as an analogue model for communication with an extraterrestrial intelligence. Drawing on examples of cross-species communication and shamanic embodied signalling, it identifies six signalling principles: rhythm, movement, mimicry, repetition, reciprocity, and reception and cooperation. These principles may provide a basis for communication where a shared...
Ecstatic rituals are regarded as among the oldest religious concepts across diverse cultures. These rituals occupy a central and foundational position within certain spiritual traditions and belief systems, while in other religious or cultural contexts, they are rejected or marginalized. In several intellectual and faith-based traditions, trance is understood as a form of altered consciousness...
This article theorizes the concept of ‘shamanic audiovisualization’ – a process whereby the cinematic apparatus itself functions as a ritualistic medium channeling alterity – to challenge logocentric models of testimony and trauma that dominate the archive. Moving beyond the imperative to ‘give voice’, which risks re-performing the violence of the event, I examine how Korean screen media offers...
The article is devoted to the analysis of the historical and ethnocultural transformations of Kyrgyz shamanism in the 20th – 21st centuries. Attention is focused on the evolving roles, practices, and worldviews of sacred specialists such as bakshi, bubi, kuuchu, and dubana. The impact of major historical factors, including the gradual Islamization of the region, Soviet anti-religious policies,...
This article examines how patients and their relatives in contemporary Xibo families come to understand whether shamanic healing has “worked.” Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2017 and 2026 in Qapqal Xibo Autonomous County, Yili, Xinjiang, it analyzes two closely observed healing rituals performed by the same shaman for two members of one family: a mother suffering...
Shamanism generally refers to indigenous ritual systems involving relationships between humans and spiritual or non-human realms, often associated with healing, spirit mediation, trance, and altered states of consciousness. In the Khambu worldview of eastern Nepal, Dowang refers to an indigenous ritual institution associated with ancestral calling, sacred knowledge, and the transmission of...
Cancer incidence among Hmong Americans has increased significantly since the early 2000s. Familiarity with and understanding of the disease is low due to limited exposure in countries of origin, lack of terminology, reliance on shamanic healing practices, and restricted access to screening. Health and healing within Hmong culture have been the domain of shamans, whose practices focus on...
ABSTRACT Ecospirituality embodies the sacred interdependence between humans and the natural world, drawing from indigenous cosmologies, ritual practices, and mythic traditions. For communities negotiating the pressures of colonialism, modernity, and cultural erosion, these beliefs constitute vital systems of identity, memory, and ecological ethics. Yet, scholarly documentation on the ritual,...
This study conducts a comparative analysis of community restoration mechanisms in Donghae-an Byeolsingut and KPop Demon Hunters (hereafter KPDH) based on systems thinking. Each cultural system was analyzed through four structural dimensions — relational, participatory, symbolic, and affective — from which four cultural mechanisms were inductively derived: Mediation, Collective Participation,...
The article discusses the abandonment of shamanic beliefs among the Naga indigenous tribes, reflecting a cultural stigmatization inflicted by colonialism. The article contextualizes two select novels, “Spirit Nights” and “Son of the Thundercloud” by Easterine Kire, situating the narratives within the Indian decolonial discourse. Employing a close textual reading method, the article reassesses...
The article explores the cultural significance of the sacred groves (kāvus) of Kerala and their relationship to various notions of nature, ecology and indigenous spirituality. We employ a mixed method of research that combines textual sources and oral exegesis as well as anthropological fieldwork to investigate the spaces within the kāvus that are designated for Tantric healing and empowerment....
Due to its brilliant literary narrative and profound ideas, Xiao Hong’s Tales of Hulan River has had a profound influence on the history of Chinese modern literature. Academia has conducted in-depth discussions on Tales of Hulan River, but these have largely overlooked the folk shamanic rituals and their crucial significance in this novel. The expression of literary narrative ideas cannot be...
For over five decades, there has been a significant quantitative discrepancy between the traditional knowledge of psychoactive plants of Old World and New World. While some 20th century scholars believed that it was motivated by cultural differences between the populations of the two regions of the globe, this consideration failed to take into account that the acquisition of awareness of the...
ManuscriptJuly 7, 2026Elena Alekseevna Okladnikova, Alexander Mikhailovich Prilutskii
The aim of the work is to rethink the sacred functions of shamans with an emphasis on the social functions that shamans/ritualists performed in primitive and then traditional societies, and not only on the mystical content of early forms of religious ideas described by ethnologists and art historians. The article implements a theoretical transfer of the postulates of biopolitics (M. Foucault,...
This review integrates anthropological and neuroscientific perspectives to elucidate music-induced trance processes and their relevance to non-ordinary states of consciousness (NSCs). The objectives are to deepen the understanding of trance phenomena, delineate links across diverse trance expressions, and inform future neuroscientific research. Drawing on anthropological insights, we examine...
This article focuses on the connection between the refusal of the shamanic vocation and its hereditary transference with lhaba and lhamo – shamanic religious specialists who embody deities known as lha during organized ritual séances. Drawing on ethnographic material collected from the Brogpa community in Ladakh, India, I examine the nature of lha as a presence deeply woven into social and...
Background.The article addresses the problem of the genesis of stage action and considers shamanic ritual as one of the early cultural forms in which the basic mechanisms of theatricality emerge. The relevance of the study is determined by the fact that, in contemporary cultural studies and theatre studies, the relationship between ritual and theatre remains methodologically significant, while...