The history of the terms and expressions associated with smallpox offers evidence of semantic change and reflects both the internal and external worldviews of Korean people with regard to smallpox. In Korean shamanic language, smallpox is personified as gods known by various names with their own linguistic registers, personalities, and behaviors. The present paper first analyzes the semantic...
Abstract The Indigenous cultures of South America developed a diverse array of traditional uses for psychoactive plants. This chapter surveys the historical and anthropological literatures on these practices. Pre-Columbian usage, later labeled as idolatry, was transformed by European colonization of the Americas. However, chroniclers such as Sahagun, Hernández, de Acosta, and Monardes, as well...
Intense and persistent perception of the presence within absence of the deceased does not necessarily dissipate spontaneously but may become a disabling and unalterable fixation of grief. Many traditions describe fixations as not only caused by the absence of the deceased but sustained by a deep fissure within the soul of the bereaved. Shamanic healing may offer a connection with the imbalanced...
Amerindians, living in a perspective of synchronicity, attribute to symmetry a negative value that produces an understanding of unstable dualism cosmologies, in a continuous and dynamic imbalance, in a notion of complementarity between conscious and unconscious. These notions are in line with the view of synchronicity proposed by Jung (1952/1972) and Cambray (2013), a view that expands...
In its simplest form, the shamanistic theory of schizophrenia proposes that the core features of schizophrenia are akin to the primary qualities of shamanism; and that psychosis provided certain evolutionary advantages to prehistoric hominid tribes. The idea that shamanism could be comparable to medical forms of insanity can be traced back to early academic expeditions assigned to explore the...
The present contribution offers a descriptive account of two recent books concerning shamanism, Homayun Sidky’s The Origins of Shamanism, Spirit Beliefs, and Religiosity: A Cognitive Anthropological Perspective (2017) and Sergio Botta’s Dagli sciamani allo sciamanesimo. Discorsi, credenze, pratiche (2018). The commentary starts by supplying a brief historical contextualization of the subfield...
Jung JournalJanuary 2, 2022Robert M. Carriger, Haar Suor
ABSTRACT Shamanism is generally considered to be humankind’s original religious practice. Centuries of Russian oppression followed by more recent exposure to Western media culture may have weakened the transmission of traditions of the Sakha people in Arctic Siberia, but a new generation of Sakha healers still strives to keep their traditions alive in a modern world. These contemporary healers...
Genre features and structure of shamanic narratives existing in Tuvan folklore are analyzed. Two types of stories have been identified in the performing tradition – from the ritual specialist and the bearer of the tradition. The mythological picture in both types of stories complement each other, in them the general narrative model characteristic of shamanic narratives is preserved. It is...
This article foregrounds an unofficial, “dark” strand of shamanic revival, which lies at the interstices of local inspirational religion and the state’s law in a Siberian periphery. Focusing on consultations concerned with ritual healing and counter-cursing in the Russian Republic of Tuva/Tyva, southern Siberia, the article documents a field of metaphysical disorder which is governed by shamans...
Shamanism in the Contemporary Novel examines how shamanism is used as a significant trope in a selection of novels. Özlem Öğüt Yazıcıoğlu contends that the shamanic figures and societies featured in these works have been subjected to marginalization, dislocation, and dispossession through imperialist, colonialist, and capitalist encroachments in different historical contexts.