Evidence-based Complementary and Alternative Medicine
December 28, 2013
Rainer W. Bussmann
79 citations
Northern Peru represents the center of the Andean "health axis," with roots going back to traditional practices of Cupisnique culture (1000 BC). For more than a decade of research, semistructured interviews were conducted with healers, collectors, and sellers of medicinal plants. In addition, bioassays were carried out to evaluate the efficacy and toxicity of plants found. Most of the 510...
Global Advances in Health and Medicine
November 1, 2013
D. Steinhorn, Wendy Dimmette, R. Alcorn et al.
Focus Area: Integrative Approaches to Care Over the last 4 decades, a wide range of energy healing modalities and spiritual disciplines have surfaced in Western society. As health maintenance and therapeutic modalities, energy healing and mind-body techniques are widely recognized as essential tools of contemporary integrative medicine. While still outside the realm of mainstream allopathic...
positions asia critique
August 1, 2013
David J. Kim
On July 13, 1990, a group of shamans innovated and performed a ritual they refer to as the haewŏn chinhon to appease the deceased spirits of Japanese military “comfort women.” Caught unprepared for the large number of spirits who appeared, as well as the accompanying spiritual and emotional toil, they made a promise to the spirits that they would perform the ritual in all eight provinces of...
Anthropology of Consciousness
May 1, 2013
Nathan Porath
AbstractAnthropologists working on altered states of consciousness (ASC) have suggested that we should do away with psychologizing concepts and use people's own terms for these experiences. With material drawn from the Orang Sakai of Sumatra this paper shows that practitioners who utilizeASCdo recognize the alteration of states of awareness as preconditions for numinous interactions. Also...
Anthropology of Consciousness
May 1, 2013
Hillary S. Webb
25 citations
AbstractWhere has the Western attraction to the study and practice of shamanic techniques brought us? Where might it take us? In what ways have our Western biases and philosophical underpinnings influenced and changed how shamanism is practiced, both in the West and in the traditional cultures out of which they emerged? Is it time to stop using the umbrella term “shamanism” to refer to such...
Identities
February 1, 2013
Ana Mariella Bacigalupo
10 citations
The biographical mythohistory of Rosa Kurin, an ethnically mixed Mapuche-German shaman in southern Chile in the late 1800s, expresses a ‘shamanic historical consciousness’ that advances current debates over the dynamic relationship between history and myth and between indigenous and national history. Biographical mythohistory is a mixed genre that mediates among different memoralisations of the...
International Journal of Transpersonal Studies
2013
Michael Winkelman
11 citations
The biological foundation for a shamanic epistemology is indicated by the cross-cultural distribution of a shamanic cosmology derived from knowledge obtained during altered consciousness. These special forms of consciousness involve integrative brain conditions that access ancient ways of knowing, expressive systems which have evolutionary roots in the communicative and social processes...
PRISM (University of Calgary)
2013
Matthew Koczkur
The past decade has witnessed a surge of popular interest in the mestizo tradition of ayahuasca, variously referred to as curanderismo, vegetalismo, and/or ‘shamanism’. This interest in Ayahuasca, a psychotropic plant brew, is evidenced by the thriving industry of ayahuasca tourism that exists in Peru. Such ayahuasca ‘tours’ are predominantly attended by European, and North American...
Journal of Korean Religions
October 1, 2012
Dong-kyu Kim
In this paper, I suggest that shamanic rituals should be understood as negotiating practices between shamans, clients, and competing ideologies rather than as expressing or conveying an unchanging essence or meaning. Here, the ritual space is assumed to be a "matrix" in which these practices occur and hence shamans can verify and reinforce their shamanship, which is constructed by the looping...
Health Culture and Society
September 8, 2012
E J Langdon, I S Rose
9 citations
The psychoactive substance known as ayahuasca has long been identified with Amazonian shamanism and traditional medicine. Over the last two decades its use has spread outside this region to urban populations in different parts of the world. This paper examines the adoption of the ritual use of the beverage by the Guarani Indians along the southern coast of Brazil. We argue that this process is...