Retriving the Lost Souls of Modernity a Study of Neo Shamanic Practice

RETRIVING THE LOST SOULS OF MODERNITY: A STUDY OF NEO-SHAMANIC PRACTICE A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for graduation with Honors in Anthropology 2014 ________________________ ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract _________________________________________________________________________________________ iv Chapter 1—Enter the Neo-Shaman ________________________________________________________ 1 The New Age of Shamanism _____________________________________________________________________ 1 Mapping ‘the Way’ _______________________________________________________________________________ 7 Frameworks of Magic and Modernity _________________________________________________________ 10 Chapter 2—The Global Rise of Modern Shamanisms _________________________________ 18 African Witchcraft ______________________________________________________________________________ 24 Refashionings of Buryat Shamanism __________________________________________________________ 29 Peruvian Mystical Tourism _____________________________________________________________________ 37 Modernity in the New Age ______________________________________________________________________ 45 Chapter 3—Power and Alternative Ways of Knowing ________________________________ 57 Core Shamanism—Harner’s Way ______________________________________________________________ 58 Journeyers Set Out ______________________________________________________________________________ 70 Chapter 4—Layers of Enviornmental Relation ________________________________________ 78 Everyday Shamanism ___________________________________________________________________________ 78 Finding a Community to Heal ing ______________________________________________________________ 82 Technology, Shamans and Getting in Touch with Nature ____________________________________ 91 Shamanism as Environmentalism: Potential for Global Healing? ___________________________ 96 Chapter 5—Time and Re-membering __________________________________________________ 102 Nostalgia for the Primative ___________________________________________________________________ 102 Soul Retrieval, Dismemberment and Re-membering ______________________________________ 105 Conclusion: Re-enchanting “the Fabric of Reality” _________________________________________ 112 Bibliography ________________________________________________________________________________ 118 iii ABSTRACT Since the 1980’s shamanism has experienced a global “renaissance” after being a popular and academic dead issue for decades. This resurgence includes increased scholarly attention, as well as an increase in practice and new forms of shamanism— particularly neo-shamanism in the West. By asking: how do contemporary shamanic practitioners interact with modernity, I hope to disentangle more than just the ways contemporary practitioners have appropriated or adapted shamanism to fit their contexts, but also what shamanism has to offer modernity in way of social critique. I focus on core shamanism, one such “brand” of neo-shamanism. Developed by anthropologist “gone native” Michael Harner, core shamanism draws from multicultural techniques—such as drumming to attain an altered state of consciousness—to form a distilled set of practices for a Western audience. I will discuss both the Western assumptions and potential for social critique embedded within core shamanism. iv Chapter 1—Enter the Neo-Shaman The New Age of Shamanism The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization, and, above all, by the ‘disenchantment of the world.’ —Max Weber (1967) In these times of chaos, crisis and hope, shamanism is a reservoir of wisdom that is as relevant to our survival today as it was to our forebears hundreds of generations ago. —Foundation for Shamanic Studies (2013: brochure) Contrary to the Enlightenment trope of Weber’s ‘disenchantment’ of magic from the world with the rise of capitalist modernity, the contemporary global florescence of shamanic practice suggests a different relationship between magic and modernity. A relationship mutually informed where forms of contemporary magic are inseparable from their specific contexts of modernity. By asking how contemporary shamanic practitioners interact with modernity, I hope to disentangle more than just the ways contemporary practitioners have appropriated or adapted shamanism to fit their contexts, and what attracts people to it, but also what shamanism has to offer modernity in way of social critique. The figure of the shaman has long occupied an elusive and mystical position in Western imagination, shrouded in the primordial mysteries found in the depths of human consciousness. While definitions of shamanism remain highly contested, key shamanic characteristics include; a layered cosmology, with the flight of the shaman’s soul to other levels of this cosmos, and the power to use this journey to fight, command and control spirits which inhabit these realms and affect human destiny. Thus shamanism is both an epistemology, that is a system of contemplative thought with an implicit set of propositions, and a blueprint for action, as 1 in the location of game animals or the retrieval of kidnapped souls (Vitebsky 2003: 279). It is perhaps unsurprising that a generation of Westerners faced with the turmoil of American modernity and late capitalism have turned to various forms of shamanism as an alternative source of knowledge and spiritual guidance (Johnson 2003). Indeed, today one need not stray far into the depths of distant jungles or frigid tundras to find contemporary shamanic practitioners. One may only have to travel as far as the nearest New Age bookstore, a now pervasive motif woven into the fabric of urban and suburban America. I participated in my first drumming circle at just such a location in Lakewood, CO, on the outskirts of Denver proper. The neon glowing sign of Full Moon Books gently illuminated the prayer flags and colorful wares within. The back room of the bookshop opened into a large event space open to various spiritual groups to hold classes, workshops and metaphysical fairs. Faces of Guan Yin and Ganesh gazed down from the walls, interspersed with tapestries with healing mandalas and seven chakras. I watched and chatted with fellow practitioners who came in and sat in a circle of hodge-podge cushions on the floor, their shaman drums and journeying blankets tucked safely beside them. When it was time to begin we stood, and, guided by our experienced leader who had studied core shamanism from Michael Harner and Sandra Ingerman, drummed to the four directions. We then formed a circle, and one by one joined hands after verbally bringing our intentions and other attributes to the circle. “I, Janaki, bring my energy, empathy and intention, to create this circle.” After setting the space in this way, we traced the outline of the person on our left with our rattles, purifying our circle-mates of any unwanted spiritual attention. We then got out our drums and stuck up a steady beat, 2 inviting the spirits into the space and having an opportunity to merge with our power animals and dance and sing our power songs. Once the drumming, rattling, wolf howls and bird cries had subsided, the time had come time for our first journey of the evening. We spread out our blankets and got comfortable on the floor with our blindfolds on. Our leader struck up a ten minute long monotonous drum beat and we were off on our respective journeys in a shamanic state of consciousness to the Lower and Upper Worlds of the spirits. I decided to make a trip to the Lower world to visit a power animal that had been retrieved for me by another practitioner during the end of the beginner’s workshop I went to in Portland.1 We all came racing back to ordinary reality when our guide sped up the drum beat. Our guide, her long silver hair flowing about her shoulders, instructed us, that for our next journey, we would journey with a common theme. As it was the first drumming circle of the New Year 2014, and since 2+0+1+4 = the cosmic number 7, which correlates to the Chariot (the seventh major arcana in the tarot deck), we would be journeying on the question of how to set direction in the New Year. Our guide asked us to investigate what’s pulling our chariot and how we can steer. She reminded us to “move into the zone outside logic.” This time half of the room drummed at a steady beat while the others journeyed, and then we swapped. Since roughly the late 1970’s, tens of thousands Westerners have begun to practice various forms of neo-shamanism (Mokelke email to author, March 10, 2014). The term ‘neo-shamanism’ refers to new forms of shamanism that developed in cultures where shamanism is not necessarily indigenous as well as countries where 1 While I haven’t been met with overwhelming success in my attempts at personal journeying, I have approached it with and open mind. Although I have never forgotten that I am lying on the floor in ordinary reality, I have been able to come back with some insights that have been meaningful to other practitioners. 3 indigenous shamanism in experiencing a significant revival. In America, the term carries all the challenges, nuances and disturbing elements associated with the idea of ‘white shamans’: often called ‘plastic medicine,’ and accused of stealing Native American spirituality and continuing the colonial legacy. The uneasiness neo-shamanism provokes stems from the culmination of the West’s long romantic fascination with shamans, which by the twentieth century, progressed to the its appropriation by many, leading to associations of fraud, trickery and the accusation of being ‘plastic medicine men’ (Wallis 2003). Core shamanism, developed by anthropologist “gone native” Michael Harner, represents one such “brand” of neo-shamanism which I will focus my attention on. Harner published his methods in the core shamanist bible, The Way of the Shaman, in 1980 and began teaching workshops after establishing the Foundation for Shaman Studies (FSS). Core shamanism draws from a range of cultural traditions and techniques, such as drumming, to attain an altered state of consciousness. Harner then brings these distilled set of practices and teaches them to a Western audience. The shamanic “renaissance” began in the 1980’s, after being a “dead issue” for decades (Atkinson 1992). This resurgence has included increased scholarly attention, as well as an increase in practice and new forms of shamanism—particularly neoshamanism in the West. According to Atkinson the blossoming of new Western shamanism is associated with the 1960-70’s drug culture, the human potential movement, environmentalism, interest in non-Western religion, and popular anthropology (authors such as Carlos Castaneda and Michael Harner) (Atkinson 1992: 322). She contends that this “cottage industry” of neo-shamanism and urban-shamanism provides a spiritual practice to Westerners that aligns participants at once with nature and the primordial 4 Other—keeping alive centuries old nostalgic notions of the Noble Savage. While opposing Western modernity in some aspects, practices are made compatible with contemporary New Age emphasis on self-help, self-actualization and rapid results. Michal Harner himself emphasizes adaptability to contemporary lifestyles and rapid results; “classic shamanic methods work surprisingly quickly,” he tells us in The Way of the Shaman, “with the result that most persons can achieve in a few hours experiences that might otherwise take them years of silent meditation. For this reason alone, shamanism is ideally suited to the contemporary life of busy people, just as it was suited, for example, to the Eskimo (Inuit) people whose daily hours were filled with tasks of struggle for survival, but whose evenings could be used for shamanism” (1990: xii). Harner fills the pages of The Way of the Shaman, with similarly problematic comparisons between Westerners and native shamans. Harner builds on the work of scholar of religion Mircea Eliade, who initially saw similarities between cultures around the world and extended the definition of shamanism to peoples beyond the classic Siberian region. Harner defines the shaman as “a man or a woman who enters an altered state of consciousness—at will—to contact and utilize an ordinarily hidden reality in order to acquire knowledge, power, and to help other persons. The shaman has at least one, and usually, more, ‘spirits’ in his personal service” (Harner 1990: 20). Harner’s teachings include how to journey to the lower world by attaining a shamanic state of consciousness (SSC) through monotonous drumming. The goals of this journeying include discovering power animal(s), restoration of power, power practice and healing by extracting harmful intrusions along with seeking answers to personal questions. 5 Unlike Harner and Eliade, contemporary anthropologists tend to resist the reproduction of the category ‘shamanism’ at the expense of history, culture, and social context. Instead, anthropologists have problematized shamanism as a category, focusing on local “shamanisms” rather than shamanism writ large. As Vitebsky comments, “There is no agreed cross-cultural definition of ‘shamanism’. Indeed it is characterized by a chameleon like elusiveness” (1995: 292). Hence, anthropologists ask how various practices have come to be labeled as “shamanism,” while others such as “witch-doctors” or “medicine men” are not. In this way shamanism falls under the category of “indigenous knowledge” and marginalized, especially as we move into the modern era. As Taussig notes, “shamanism is…a made up, modern, Western category, an artful reification of disparate practices” (quoted in Atkinson 1992: 307). Many have argued that Harner’s core shamanism is just that—“an artful reification of disparate practices”—a clumsy attempt to thread practices together to fit the West’s tailored image of shamans. However deeply embedded in the Western context this cultural phenomenon may be, it fundamentally challenges many practitioners’ realities. Offering them an avenue of selffashioning that contains a radical self-critique. Some secondary questions scholars have raised about shamanism have led to productive lines of inquiry that can help tease out the tangles of various modern shamanisms. For example Nicholas Thomas and Caroline Humphrey ask: “How does the content of shamanic activity change as the political contexts of shamanism and religious inspiration change” (1994)? This question becomes especially pertinent when not only considering shamanic traditions that continue into the present, but also when looking at emergent practices of Western neo-shamanism. In addition to this question I will also be 6 guided by questions such as: how does the rise of neo-shamanism compare to the rise of other modern forms of magic globally? How do core shamanists integrate shamans into their daily lives and communities? What Western assumptions concerning healing and the “soul” permeate core shamanism? What happens when shamanic teaching and experience enter the marketplace? How do practitioners see themselves reviving ancient wisdom although it is not an “indigenous” practice? What are the implications of this particular type of nostalgia for ancient cultural wisdom, what does it say about our dissatisfaction with contemporary American modernity? Mapping ‘the Way’ In order to address these questions I will structure my discussion into five parts. I will follow this conceptual map shortly with a theoretical grounding in the recent anthropological scholarship, which has rethought the relationship between magic and modernity. I will locate Harner’s core shamanism within this framework as well as address the forces at play in the global fluorescence of shamanism. Why this wave of reenchantment, and why now? Chapter two addresses the cross-cultural face of modern shamanism more in depth. I begin with a brief interrogation of the history of shaman studies and the issues of categorization, in order to critically understand the comparative grounds upon which we can stand to view these contemporary practices under the umbrella of “shamanism.” In addition to situating core shamanism within the New Age movement, I will draw on three additional examples of shamanic practice to see how magic has been fashioned to suit various other conditions of modernity: the Buryats of Siberia and Mongolia (Humphrey 2002, 1996 &1994, Buyandelgeriyn 2007), witchcraft and witch-doctors in Cameroon 7 (Geschiere 1997, Moore & Sanders 2001), and shamanist tourism in the Andes (Dobkin de Rios 1994, Hill 2008, 2012). These three locations will cover two of what Vitebsky calls the contrasting ways in which local knowledge interacts with the global (1995). The Buryats represent a system where ethnic identity asserts itself against the state while the Cameroonian case is a standard modernization scenario with a sense of ethnic inferiority. The Latin American case represents a third scenario, where local knowledge becomes comodified for global tourists seeking an authentic experience. Within these nodes I pay attention both the local and the global, both acknowledging and interrogating multiple trajectories and meanings of modernity (Appadurai 1996). Chapter three will delve more directly into core shamanic beliefs and practice. Arranged thematically around power and alternative ways of knowing, it paints a more comprehensive picture of Michal Harner’s career and the Foundation for Shamanic Studies mission to bring shamanic practice to the West. It examines the circulatory nature of the concept of “shamanism” flowing from academia’s citadel to popular culture, and the controversies of an anthropologist “going native” and donning the mantle of the shaman. I will discuss Harner’s ideas about the relationship between shamanism and empiricism, and the ways in which the New Age understanding of the individual becomes central to core shamanic healing. The chapter brings home the cardinal critique core shamanism levels at society: the pitfalls of rational thought and the struggle to recognize other ways of knowing in contemporary society. Overall the chapter concerns itself with the power and politics of spiritual and material ways of knowing. Chapter four examines the relationship between core shamanism and the environment, paying attention to multiple layers and scales of the practitioner in-relation. 8 I will zoom in on the daily practices of shamanism in participant’s everyday environment, looking at how participants struggle to form communities of healing, and zoom out to the larger planetary environmental concerns. Along the way I examine the prospect of ‘getting in touch with nature’ as major draw to shamanism, and the double edged sword of technology in the life of many core shamanic practitioners. I turn to ask: what potential does core shamanism contain to battle the anxieties brought on by the impending Anthropocene and large scale environmental degradation? As a spiritual practice that understands spirits as immanent in the world, core shamanism contains ethical implications for world healing that can have beneficial implications. For core shamanists, the challenge remains to form meaningful communities, and become socially engaged in ordinary reality, as well as providing spiritual support in nonordinary reality. My final chapter centers on the ever nebulous theme of time. This temporal focus helps unravel why “magic,” so often located in the pre-modern past, continues to be engaged with in the present. The FSS aligns itself directly to an ancient past; a recent brochure beckons members to “Be on the cutting edge of a 40,000 year old technology” (FSS brochure). This temporal alignment sheds light on the ways nostalgia for the primitive says something about the ways the west has become discontent with what it means to be modern. I focus on the practices of soul retrieval and dismemberment to interrogate the ways in which core shamanism disrupts notions of linear time; allowing practitioners to dabble in their own pasts by retrieving old fragments and re-membering themselves in new ways that allow for new possibilities to emerge. I conclude with the ways core shamanist seek to re-enchant and reweave “the fabric of reality” in ways that positively contribute to the legacy of shamanism. Shamanism offers a dynamic and 9 spiritual way of engaging with the environment, as well as providing the tools for practitioners to refashion themselves in more sustainable and ethical ways—a resource Harner and others see as absolutely necessary in an age of environmental degradation reaching levels of crisis (Harner 1990, 2013). My own field experience with core shamanism will appear braided into my discussions. I attended the weekend FSS basics workshop in Portland, OR titled: The Way of the Shaman® Shamanic Journeying, Power, and Healing. While I have relatively few informants, the majority of those I interviewed went through this foundational workshop with me. I also attended a shamanic drumming circle in Lakewood, CO held in a New Age bookshop. One of the chief complaints core shamanists level at academics for critiquing their practices regards their reluctance or refusal to try out these practices for themselves. I made efforts to experience their techniques for myself not only in response to these critiques, but also out of personal curiosity. While I have no previous experience with neo-shamans, I grew up Hare Krishna and after leaving temple life my mother became interested in numerous New Age spiritual practices. Due to her influence I have had a variety of experiences with alternative religions and healing practices, including aura cleansing and meditation. Frameworks of Magic and Modernity In today’s world, magic frequently appears either as a trope of fantasy or as a rudimentary explanation for how people without science and technology make sense of their world. Magic—once understood in purely the theological frame of evil, “came under a very different set of attacks since the nineteenth century by secular ideology. Mainly through portrayals as a remnant of the pre-modern era” (Romberg 2003: 1). 10 Contrary to this belief which sees magic as an irrational cultural hold-over, I will follow in many contemporary anthropologists’ footsteps when I suggest that magic is part of, and inseparable from our everyday realities. Indeed, “magic belongs to modernity” rather than being posited as modernities’ fundamental opposite (Pels 2003a: 3). I argue that forms of American neo-shamanism and core shamanism fall into this ever-growing flourishing of magic that seeks to make sense of, contest, and control the increasingly inexorable whims of global capitalism. As E. E. Evans-Prichard once succinctly suggested: “New situations demand new magic…” (in Comaroff & Comaroff 1998: 279). As touched on earlier, Enlightenment-age thinkers established the idea of a disenchanted, rational modernity. Although their efforts have not entirely succeeded; “the Enlightenment has nonetheless left a still-pervasive legacy of an imagined modern world opposed to an equally imagined traditional world” (Romberg 2003: 1). The view has been influenced by an “Evolutionist view that magic is quintessentially ‘other’” (Pels 2003a: 3). More than simply “other,” these social thinkers also located magic firmly in the longago past. A stance that quickly became problematic whenever they encountered contemporary enchantment. As anthropologist Peter Pels notes; Anthropological discourse about magic was, from the time of some of the first ethnographic contacts with ‘others’ onwards, characterized by a central paradox: that by exposing the backwardness or delusions of shamanism, fetishism, magic, and witchcraft, anthropology and folklore studies also revealed their existence. Evidently, the temporal distancing of magic as classifying it as pre-modern could only take place in the anthropologist’s own time and language (2003a: 6). Pels goes on to suggest the further paradox that this evolutionary confidence arose in a time that can also be considered to be romantically reenchanting the world. A time when armchair anthropologists like Tylor and Frazer “were faced with a multiplicity of modern 11 reenchantments” amidst the troubling context of high imperialism, colonial uprising and bourgeois anxiety (Pels 2003a: 9). “Haunted by their own diagnoses of the process of modern development, even the classical theorists of ‘modernity’ acknowledged how much it was riven by contradiction, regression and paradox”(Pels 2003a: 29). Like the Weberian idea of charisma, “a residual form of authority that is necessary both to the maintenance of enchanted traditions and to the production of prophets of disenchantment” (Pels 2003a: 29). These internal contradictions go a long way to demonstrate the need to re-think the relationship between magic and modernity. Peter Pels’s analysis of magic highlights two aspects of this relationship between magic and modernity that allows for magic to be theorized as part of the present instead of the past. First the nature of the supplementarity of magic and modernity, not only in the way modern discourses reinvent magic in the process of positioning magic as their antithesis, but in the way creating “correspondences and nostalgias by which magic can come to haunt modernity” (Pels 2003a: 4-5). Indeed, Pels points us toward an understanding of modernity that is haunted by the ghosts of its own making—the social scientific construction of invented memories of a lost magical past. “In a sense, ghosts of this ilk also haunt the understandings of three of its most profound theoreticians: Emile Durkheim, Karl Marx, and Max Weber” (Pels 2003a: 18). Secondly, Pels orients us towards the specific forms of the magic of modernity itself—“those enchantments that are produced by practices culturally specific to modern states, economies, and societies— practices labeled as representation, commodification, and discipline” (Pels 2003a: 5). Like how the flag comes to stand in for the nation, or, in Pel’s example, how the media storm around Princess Diana’s death came to threaten the magic of monarchy 12 (2003a: 2). As the Comaroffs put it; “modernity—itself always an imaginary construction of the present in terms of a mythic past—has its own magicalities, its own enchantments” (1993: xiv). It is towards these particularly modern enchantments that I will turn, in order to question what exactly it means to be modern. Even more than the term ‘shamanism’, ‘modernity’ has come to denote an increasingly diffuse and fluid set of ideas about the world. These ideas are profoundly ideologically and historically grounded, and when examined up close the concept appears to dissolve into air (Comaroff and Comaroff 1993: xii). Rather than insisting modernity can take only the Western form—as a “terminus toward which we constantly edge, but never quite achieve”—modernities are multiple (Comaroff and Comaroff 1993: xii). The acknowledgement of different ways of being modern articulated through local practices opens up the discussion to more vigorous ways of thinking. This way, rather than seeing contemporary African discourse of witchcraft as an indicator of pre-modern mentalities, we can look at is as reacting to their particular conditions of modernity where powerful invisible forces allow the wealthy few to feed off of the many destitute. As Moore and Sanders note, “the notion of multiple modernities refocuses social theory on questions of heterogeneities, differences, structural and other inequalities and competing discourses about power (Escobar 1995; Ferguson 1994, 1999)” (in Moore amd Sanders 2001: 12). With this new focus on multiple trajectories and conditions of modernity, different articulations of magic, occult beliefs and practices can be better understood within their contexts. Instead of being understood as a linear appropriation, neo-shamanism can be seen in context, as reacting and dependent upon on its own trajectory of modernity. 13 Magic and witchcraft have not withered under modernity’s glaring eye, instead they have dawned new guises and configurations. Such practices have often been thought to be “mustered to ‘resist’ changes and are creatively refashioned to suit new situations” (Moore & Sanders 2001: 11). Terms such as witchcraft and shamanism have “come to circulate, almost worldwide, as a metaphor of new means and ends, of new materialities and meanings (Comaroff and Comaroff 1993: xiii). The Comaroffs suggest that in such situations, reified analytic categories of witchcraft—or shamanism in this case—should rather be appreciated as a situated moral discourse about the state of the world (1993: xviii). More than a moral discourse, such practices can be a form of historical consciousness, social memory and a sort of social diagnosis (Moore & Sanders 2001: 20). For example, the Buryat case in the next chapter shows the ways Buryats blame today’s misfortunes on the lack of ancestor worship during the Soviet period. Such practices are fluid, capable of flowing around and shifting the sands of modernity’s banks. Magic, an ‘invention of tradition,’ is reinvented in modernity in a way that breaks with the past, “in an encounter that transforms both” (Pels 2003a: 32). In this light, magic makes up a creative force enacted within and constitutive of social realities. Ritual has been an instrument of history throughout time; “a vital element in the processes that make and remake social facts and collective identities. Everywhere” (Comaroff and Comaroff 1993: xvi). Ritual, once seen as a force that insulates enchantments in the world, in this framework becomes vastly more integrated in creative and dynamic ways. The Comaroffs offer three facts about ritual that give rise to this creative ability: (i) it exists in continuing tension with more mundane modes of action, of producing and communication meanings and values; (ii) its constituent 14 signs are ever open to the accumulation of new associations and referents; and (iii) it has the capacity to act in in diverse ways on a contradictory world (1993: xxi). In global times, experimental practitioners seek to make universal signs speak to particular realities. Magic becomes potent because of the historical circumstances in which they acquire meanings, and the ways they hitch local understandings to global systems. New fields of signification emerge from the juxtaposition of the unfamiliar and more enduring tropes, nuancing conceptions of evil and affliction as well as establishing incipient identities. “And so, over time, the exogenous becomes indigenous, the strange is synthesized into the ‘established’ order—itself evanescent” (Comaroff and Comaroff 1993: xxii). This process is what Marshal Sahlins refers to as the “indigenization of modernity,” by locating their own cultural space in the global scheme of things (Sahlins 1999:410). Often times such ‘indigenization’ carries with it an implicit critique of modernity, but that it not the only case, and to think so would be an over-simplification. As African philosopher Achilles Mbembe cautions: “it would be wrong, it seems, to continue to interpret postcolonial relationships in terms of resistance or absolute domination, or as a function of the binary oppositions usually adduced in conventional analyses of movements of indiscipline and revolt” (1992: 5). Especially in the case of Africa, where the discourse of magic indicates the “efforts of people to empower themselves, thus to assert a measure of control over worlds often perceived as rapidly changing” (Comaroff and Comaroff 1993: xiv). There is more to magic than resistance of foreign systems. Magic has a way of exposing the magic of modernity; embodying “all the contradictions of the experience of modernity itself, of its inescapable enticements, its self-consuming 15 passions, its discriminatory tactics, its devastating social costs” (Comaroff and Comaroff 1993: xxix). Within such mythic modernities, ritual should be visualized as an “experimental technology intended to affect the flow of power in the universe” (Comaroff and Comaroff 1993: xxx). One that is particularly responsive to the internal and material contradictions of international capitalism and the elusive effects of transnational forces (1993: xxx). Such contradictions are not restricted to exotic places where modernity is not ‘indigenous,’ but can be found riven through its original homeland: the West. Magic comes into our narratives and popular culture as well. let us remind ourselves of contemporary forms of witchcraft, witchcraft that addresses the contradictions of advanced capitalist societies. A clutch of images in the recent popular culture of North America are especially revealing in this respect: the ‘Fatal Attraction’: of the corporate harridan who would use sexual and professional wiles to destroy home, husband, and family—and will not die; the dangerous market woman of Wall Street, a trader in the vortex of voodoo economics, who will consume all before her, including the honest ‘Working Girl’ ( Comaroff and Comaroff 1993: xxviii). Money has a mystical power to possess and destroy those who go after it. Do we not in everyday life invoke the workings of magic in the world? When we personify the market, as in Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” or wonder at the magic of the internet on our iPhones, are we not calling upon the magic of modernity? Be it countering or controlling, the practices of shamanism, witchcraft or the occult battle with the imponderabilities of the modern world. Once again the Comaroffs clue us in to the dynamics of how rationality becomes confused and mystified. They point out the cosmic oxymoron at the heart of the historic irony of the teleology of modernity: 16 the more rationalistic and disenchanted the terms in which it is presented to ‘others,’ the more magical, impenetrable, inscrutable, uncontrollable, darky dangerous seem its signs, commodities, and practices. It is in this fissure between assertive rationalities and perceived magicalities that malcontent gathers, giving rise to ritual efforts to penetrate the impenetrable, to unscrew the inscrutable, to recapture the forces suspected of redirecting the flow of power in the world (Comaroff and Comaroff 1993: xxx). Perhaps then, as the conditions of our world become increasingly more inscrutable to us, as we are continually mystified by the structural conditions of our existence, magic becomes a recourse to which we can turn. Is the contemporary proliferation of magic, and indeed the ‘shamanic renaissance’ anything other than part of a moral discourse about the state of modernity? That this fluorescence of enchantment represents a social diagnosis does not necessarily preclude the idea the magic can operate as an active partner of capitalism or other aspects of modernity. As Raquel Romberg notes, the practices of brujos in Puerto Rico actually reproduce the forces of modernity, blending material and spiritual worlds into a ‘spiritualized materialism’—then seeking a holistic treatment (2003: 25). Similarly, the enchantments contained in the American New Age movement are neither entirely critical of Western modernity and, indeed, reproduce many of its components. Western neo-shamans’ practice are deeply embedded in its own cultural matrix. A matrix Johnson refers to as “radical modernity” (Johnson 2003: 335). A concept that entails: (1) the rationalization of society which relies on (2) universal, standardized conceptions of time and space and (3) the confrontation with a plurality of religions, which leads to (4) a focus on individual agency, choice, ‘needs’ and preference in the religious ‘marketplace’, and (5) and obsession with the ‘self’, subjectivity and reflexivity; (6) the discourse of mobility—individuals are free and capable of converting to any religious system in any place and at any time because (7) space is phantasmagoric 17 and dislocated from space—there are really no sacred spaces but rather only sacred states of mind and sacred relationships with abstract deities (Johnson 2003: 349). In this “radical modernity” shamanism becomes more about entering sacred states of altered consciousness for self-healing as a part of an individualized spiritual quest. As Jakobsen notes, “The Harner method of urban shamanism or core-shamanism is a conglomerate of different cultural forms of shamanism and is therefore peculiar to Western man” (Jakobsen 1999: 162). Through core shamanism, modernity becomes ‘reindigenized,’ in a way; the established order synthesized into the strange, giving rise to new incipient identities. This peculiarly Western form of magic contains a plea on behalf of the irrationalities and emotionalities of modernity. Although it frames itself in terms of empirical experience, the experience it promotes is both deeply subjective and intersubjective, valuing a different kind of knowledge production than rational objectivity: direct spiritual knowledge as it is experienced by individual participants that can only be obtained by leaving ordinary reality and delving into non-ordinary reality. Core shamanists embrace the magicalities of modernity, but none the less continue to be haunted by the ghosts of an imagined magical past. 18 Chapter 2—The Global Rise of Modern Shamanisms Inevitably when broaching the subject of shamanism, one runs into a slew of definitional issues. Indeed today, just as it always has, “the word ‘shaman’ has come to mean many things to different people” (Flaherty 1992: 6). As Jakobsen notes, “The term shamanism has been broadened to cover almost any attempt to contact the spirit-world worldwide and at the end of this century is applied to weekend courses for Westerners in search of a new spirituality” (1999: 3). This chapter examines how the category became so broad and inclusive in order to better understand the multiple forms of shamanic practice contained within the global florescence of modern shamanism. By referring to a localized set of spiritual practices as shamanism, anthropologists come dangerously close to understanding individual shamanic traditions as a codified religious phenomenon, which keeps them from acknowledging its dynamic, regionally specific, adaptive and un-doctrinal practices. Rather than focusing on some sort of fundamental checklist of qualifications to identify ‘a shaman,’ it is more important to realize how, and by whom (often scholars) the very category has been constructed throughout time. This shift of focus does not preclude cross-cultural comparison of magical practices. By allowing for the fluidity of categories, it becomes easier to see the way such practices can be dynamic and creative resources that can speak to local conditions of modernity, while perhaps still speaking to universal conditions. The question about why use the term ‘shamanism’ instead of others such as ‘witch doctors’, ‘medicine men’, ‘magicians’, ‘conjures’, ‘sorcerers’ or even ‘jugglers’, speaks more to the way the West has encountered indigenous practitioners and their need for classification. This contact has too long of a history to be related here, but a brief 19 overview is possible. The figures of shamans “were first noticed by academics in the writings and reports of travelers and traders who had visited among indigenous peoples” (Harvey 2003: 5). Narby and Huxley, in their 2001 collection, provide rich examples of this circulatory process where some accounts were based on secondhand rumors and fantasies picked up from yet other travelers. In Flaherty’s meticulous work on the Western fascination of shamanism, she discusses how shamanism became assimilated into the intellectual mainstream of eighteenth century Europe. She finds that, “Until well after the middle of the eighteenth century, the shaman was being described with the words giocolare in Italian, jongleur in French, Gaukler in German, and wizard in English” (1992: 6). She comments upon the fact amount of arbitrary chance involved that early explores of Siberia happened to settle on the word Tungus word šamán, from the Sanskrit sramana/srama, in lieu of scores of other words in many languages for such a phenomena (Flaherty 1992: 6). This linguistic adoption would later become a major linguistic tenant for later scholars like Eliade, allowing him to posit such a thing as a pure ‘primal Indo/European shaman’. During the Enlightenment, indigeneity, or rather “primitivism,” became a key in academic definitions of shamanism. It was always something that “others” did, never at home. Flaherty argues however that Europeans were not exempt from shamanism’s influence. “The eighteenth century was too deeply involved with the occult to have us continue to associate it exclusively with rationalism, humanism, scientific determinism, and classism. Manifestations of irrationalism, supernaturalism, organism, and romanticism appeared uninterruptedly throughout” (Flaherty 1992: 7). That the West always separated itself from such magic is also evidenced through temporal distancing. 20 Shamanism was not “deemed a subject worthy of history because it has often been viewed as existing only in cultures the West believed antedated its own invention of history. The possibility that something [they] so closely associated with primitive stages of human development might have had a lingering effect on Western arts and sciences is difficult for many to entertain” (Flaherty 1992: 15). These denials of enchantment lead to discriminatory characterizations that have a lingering effect today. The category received a renovation in the 1950’s when the distinguished historian of religion Mircea Eliade took up the matter and breathed new life into it. He took a major first step in “presenting shamanism in a positive and popular way” (Wallis 2003: 38). Eliade aimed in his groundbreaking book Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy to first, “cover the entire phenomenon of shamanism at the same time to situate it in the general history of religions” (Eliade 1964: xi). He considered it, “advantageous to restrict the use of the words ‘shaman’ and ‘shamanism,’ precisely to avoid misunderstandings and to cast a clearer light on the history of ‘magic’ and ‘sorcery’. For, of course, the shaman is also a magician and medicine man; he is believed to cure, like all doctors, and to perform miracles…like all magicians, whether primitive or modern. But beyond this, he is a psychopomp, and he may also be a priest, mystic, poet” (Eliade 1964: 4). In Eliade’s remarkable work, rather than “showing shamanism to be backward, as previous researchers had erroneously done, Eliade perceived shamanism as the true, ‘paradisiacal’, Edenic religion in which a Supreme Being reigned” (Wallis 2003: 37). Eliade clearly delineates his understanding of shamanism at the forefront. He claims that in central and northern Asian, “the shaman remains the dominating figure; for through this whole region in which the ecstatic experience is considered the religious experience par excellence, the shaman, and he alone, is the great master of ecstasy. A first definition 21 of this complex phenomenon, and perhaps the least hazardous, will be: shamanism = technique of ecstasy” (Eliade 1964: 4). For Eliade, the shamanic state of ecstasy realigns humans with an archaic state of being. As he says, during ecstasy the shaman “abolishes the present human condition and…recovers the situation as it was at the beginning” and in so doing; “re-establishe[s] the ‘paradisiacal’ situation lost at the dawn of time” when man had friendship with animals, and had knowledge of their language before the ‘Fall’ (Eliade 1964: 99). He sets out to find the “primal Indo-European” shaman by tracing the term linguistically. In doing so he distinguished between what he calls pure archaic and degenerative forms of shamanism. Despite his pioneering work on shamanism, contemporary scholars of shamanism have critiqued Eliade on a number of issues. Wallis, like many others, has found this approach based on the ‘original’ Siberian model to be misguided, resulting in “the hailing of a singular shamanism as the oldest of all religions, even the proto-form of many established religions” (Wallis 2003: 36). Geertz has criticized Eliade for his primitivism in this respect, “according to which tribal peoples are perceived by the rest to have inherited the simplest and therefore most archaic forms of religion” (in Wallis 2003: 37). Although highly influential, his work must not be accepted unquestioningly, as it contains positivist strands and must be balanced with an understanding of Eliade as a person, Christian, novelist, and scholar (Wallis 2003). In this light, Eliade’s quest of locating ‘shamanism’ within the history of religion driven by a cultural evolutionist tendency becomes clear, as does his implicit spiritualist agenda or bias to discover a fundamental Ur-Christianity. While he had an ambitious goal in mind in, he also created new artificial 22 categorical divisions and placed too much emphasis on the role of ecstasy in shamanic healing, thus popularizing and romanticizing this aspect as a timeless mystery. Despite criticism, during his significant career, Eliade paved the way for universalism in shaman studies and cauterized the category of shamanism in the history of religion. Many contemporary scholars of shamanism have turned away from Eliade’s pioneering work. Caroline Humphrey in particular prefers to view shamanism as a discourse, more of a kind of dispersed religion than one meant to define a certain category. This allows for an understanding of shamanism as, “constitutive of social realities in contexts of power, and to anticipate, rather than be puzzled by, it multiplicities, contradictions, and changes of content, in different historical situations” (Humphrey 1994: 193). In this way “the agency of shamans waxes and wanes, and can change in style and content, in relation to the effectiveness of political rule” (Humphrey 1996: 360). These regionally specific practices consist of more than a set of marginalized subversive coping tactics that provide religious meaning in and of themselves. Rather, “the various inspirational practices called shamanism should be seen as intervening in religious life, as struggling to construct meaningful parts of it rather than as simply being it” (Humphrey 1994: 200). This understanding of shamanism will prove helpful as we now turn to examine how various shamanic discourses play out in multiple trajectories of modernity. If one looks closely in today’s globalized world, discourses of magical practices such as shamanism abound. Piers Vitebsky has paid close attention to such circulations and outlines four major implications of the appropriation of shamanism by global culture today: it is local, holistic, eristic (acknowledging the role of battle and risk in human 23 action) and politically dissident (1995). He identifies three contrasting ways in which local indigenous knowledge interacts with global: the modernization scenario in which a sense of ethic inferiority pervades, the revitalization scenario where there is an ethnic reassertion over the state, and thirdly, the western New Age movement where shamanism has never been indigenous. Overall Vitebsky suggests shamanism cannot avoid the fate of any other kind of indigenous knowledge in the industrial world, as it goes from a holistic way of being to take on the fragmentary nature of the society who appropriates it. While it is interesting to note his disdain for neo-shamanism, I do not intend to tread further down that path. I will however now turn to the above three scenarios he outlined plus an additional scenario: witchcraft and witch-doctors in Cameroon for the modernization scenario, the Buryats of Siberia and Mongolia as a revitalization scenario, shamanist tourism in the Andes represents a third scenario where local knowledge becomes comodified for global tourists seeking an authentic experience and finally Harner’s core shamanism within the New Age movement. African Witchcraft For many millions of Africans today, witchcraft is an ontological given, part of “being-in-the-world” that is inextricably linked to the modern moment, with all the uncertainties of millennial capitalism. Far from dwindling into history, as many Westerners would expect as we ‘progress’ ever further into a state of ‘modern rationality,’ Africa has witnessed a rise of what the Comaroffs call occult economies (1999) since independence, which for many African countries came in the 1960’s, and another surge in the 1980’s. This latter proliferation coincided with the whirlwind of changes brought on by the World bank and IMF’s structural adjustment programs (SAPs) 24 which left many more abject than before (Moore and Sanders 2001). These people experience witchcraft as a means to exert control over those changes or to find meaning amongst the uncertainties, the moral disquiet and (im)possible aspirations this world holds (Comaroff and Commaroff 1993). New forms of magic emerge to speak to new situations. Witchcraft has become a medium through which Africans can critique power and wealth that comes with what Bayart describes as “the politics of the belly” that dominates the way states function in Africa today: as gluttonous politicians get fatter off of the many destitute (1993). If we are to make sense of this postcolonial moment we have to look past easy dichotomies of tradition/modernity or as Mbembe says, domination/resistance, in order to really make sense of what is going on the ground. As mentioned before, witchcraft and magic can be understood as a sort of social diagnosis; and in Africa it is malcontent with what it sees. Briefly, before looking into examples of witchcraft it is important to address issues of terminology as was done with shamanism earlier. To be clear there is a considerable difference between witchcraft and shamanism—mostly having to do with the moral uses/abuses of power. Harner urges this distinction to be made, as he says “Sorcerers are not healers and commonly cause pain and suffering” (2013: 48). Such terms however, do have a colonial legacy. The Western terms ‘witchcraft’ and French ‘sorcellerie,’ caring the weight of European connotations, have been adopted by Africans since their introduction in colonial times. The original African terms are more nuanced, such as the Cameroonian djambe which can also mean something like a ‘life force’ that everybody has (Geschiere 1997). However, although it would be more analytically 25 correct to the moralizing term ‘witchcraft’ for ‘occult force,’ Africans use these terms, and we should continue to use them as they have social meaning. Geschiere has identified two sides of witchcraft that form its central ambiguity: its leveling affect and its use for accumulation (1997)—or “magical means for material ends”, as the Comaroffs would say (1999: 297). Both of these sides seek to address the invisible but omnipresent force of capitalism in people’s lives—in age the Comaroffs call: the Age of Futilitarianism—“in which the rampant promises of late capitalism run up against the thoroughly postmodern pessimism” (1999: 392). It’s a world in which “ends far outstrip means,” where “the possibility of rapid enrichment, of amassing fortune by largely invisible methods, is always palpably present” (1999: 394). In is in this gap between the actual conditions and the possibilities that these two logics of witchcraft flourish. Leveling has long been a part of the violence of redistribution in the postcolonial state, where the legacies of African Socialism, communalism, and nostalgic egalitarianism have left their mark. In this light, Geschiere has called witchcraft “the dark side of kinship” (1997: 11). Accusations fly when jealousy and rumors (a sort of black market of information when official sources are silent), abound. Witchcraft is a way of addressing the ‘whys’ in life, like why a child got sick at that precise moment when your aunt suddenly appears to be doing particularly well. In this way, witchcraft is a way of reassigning human agency where it has been abstracted, “it is about the desire to plumb the secret of those invisible means…to stem the spread of a macabre, visceral economy founded on the violence of extraction and abstraction” (Comaroff and Comarof 1999: 293). A way of “personalizing the universe” (Geschiere 1997). For example, in the 26 1970’s when modernization theories ran rampant, witchcraft was seen as a huge subversion of development. In Cameroon, Fisiy and Geschiere note the emergence of a new kind of witchcraft called gbati, performed by the youth to sabotage development projects for their gain (2001: 224). It was seen as particularly nasty because it undermined the authority of elders. The leveling powers of witchcraft have become banal and part of the everyday. People search out witchdoctors to counter out perceived threats. In this way witchcraft has torn many already unstable networks of kinship apart. The flipside of witchcraft’s leveling effect is its use for accumulation of wealth and power. This for has become the most dominant since the 1980s (Geschiere 1997). New forms have emerged as late at 2007, as in the case of albino fetishizes used by miners in Tanzania (Bryceson et al.: 2010). Many Africans see witchcraft as an essential part of power relations, especially of the source of power is invisible, undemocratic, or if wealth accumulation was rapid. How is it that someone can get something out of nothing? In this way rumors about witchcraft are a heated part of everyday politics. Forms that have sprouted up formulaically in Cameroon are sorcerous practices such as nyongo associated with the nouveau riche (Geschiere 1997: 147). Rumors abound about ritual murders for power and money, where if people want something desirable they have to sacrifice something of equal value. This tit-for-tat thinking can also be seen in Tanzanian albino fetishism. In these instances, the rarity of albino body parts equal the rarity of gold and diamonds, and so will grant miners luck. Along with rumors of using zombies for secret wage labor, these practices express the fear of an ever encroaching capitalism; that the human body and even life itself become a commodity (Comaroff and Comaroff 1999). 27 Since colonial times, witchcraft has been illegal under colonial law (Geschiere 1997). Many witchdoctors were prosecuted under these terms. This created the impression that the colonialists were on the side of the witches, because witch doctors are viewed as the protectors against witchcraft, using magic for good. Since independence, politicians instated new laws in many countries further criminalizing witchcraft. Even though many Africans see this as a good thing—as the state stepping up to this moral epidemic that cannot be contained otherwise—it creates as many problems as it solves. The burden of proof is always difficult to establish, and in Cameroon, nganga (witch doctors) are called in to testify. Many countless innocents are jailed, however such laws save them from the mob justice of beatings, burnings and burials that would take place if they were not convicted. This type of violence often takes forms that are both gendered and age-based. Many vulnerable older women are harmed. This vicious cycle doesn’t end on their release, and the witches have not been ‘cured’ in prison and are in fact perceived as becoming more powerful than before (Geschiere 1997). If change is to come to governance, as Mbembe argues, it must come from within the state and address the everyday lives of Africans (Geschiere 1997: 7). Understanding witchcraft as a bar to developmental progress is fundamentally misinformed. It shows that we need new terms to conceptualize modernity, un-moralizing terms. It is quite evident at this point that globalization does not produce homogenization. The rise of occult economies is not limited to Africa, but instead represents a global phenomenon. Magic is a form of historical consciousness that reflects the ways people struggle to find meaning in their misfortune. Witchcraft is not merely traditional; rather it is a re-tooling of culturally familiar technologies to act as a new means to new ends 28 (Comaroff and Comaroff 1999). This adaptation, dynamism, and re-inventive ambiguities of magic critiques the Western paradigm of rational progress which needs to be fundamentally rethought, as it is a hangover from our past that has caused social harm since the enlightenment. Refashionings of Buryat Shamanism In the past several decades scholars have begun to reexamine and “recontexualize shamanic activities in their political contexts,” in order to understand their particular manifestations as resulting from unique historical processes (Thomas & Humphrey 1994: 2). In the volume Shamanism, History, & the State editors, Nicholas Thomas and Caroline Humphrey raise two questions relevant in addressing the various manifestations of Buryat shamanism: How does the content of shamanic activity change as the political contexts of shamanism and inspiration change? And to what extent have shamanic activities provided contexts or focuses for anticolonial protest (colonialism being understood loosely as encroachment by any sort of state system, including socialist and precapitalist)? (1994: 5). Tracing the contours of Buryat shamanic practice through the tribulations of state systems, from the times of the Mongol empire though today, reveals manifestations both reactive and vital to central forms of power (Humphrey 1994: 192). Changes in the political landscape over the millennia cause tremors though Buryats’ spiritual landscape, instigating transformation in the face of domination; a continuous process of refashioning practice to provide new ways of understanding and coping with the political and spiritual environment of the present. Today nearly half a million ethnic Buryats are spread across the nations of Russia, Mongolia, and China. Descended from Mongol and Siberian peoples, Buryats nomadic 29 pastoralist way of life in the region of Lake Baikal preceded the Mongol Empire. Their territory has been a “region of empires that ebbed and flowed over the land”; empires that often treated shamanism with hostility (Humphrey 1994: 223). Indeed Heissig argues (1992) that states have always persecuted shamanism in Inner-Asia from the ninth century onwards, shaping it into an essentially oppositional religion (In Humphrey 1996). Caroline Humphrey disagrees with his ‘oppositional’ stance, arguing that shamanism “did not define itself in relation to a dominant polity so much as create its own way of operation in the world in all its facets, reacting to stones and stars as well as monasteries, emperors, and wars” (Humphrey 1996: 2). While shamanic inspirational practices were not always explicit forms of resistance, their alternative, often fragmented and decentralized practices provided strength, resilience and far-sightedness when dealing with imperial powers; their vast mythic landscapes effortlessly encompassing the state (Humphrey 1996). As French anthropologist Hamayon notes; “Shamanism is experienced as the ultimate recourse, the one which is always able to provide a possibility for individual expression and for human victory over adversity” (1998: 58). With such a flexible spiritual resource, Buryats have been able to adapt their practices to circumstances that befell them while still retaining a strong sense of ethnic identity, historical awareness and social and ancestral continuity. In this struggle over the construction of meaning throughout Buryat’s history of oppression, Thomas & Humphrey caution us against replacing the Eliadian essentialism of the properly shamanic with an essentialism of resistance, “which could equally restrain our vision by privileging those forms of inspirational religion that are oppositional or 30 subversive relationship with hierarchy” (1994: 5). As we shall see in relation to the Mongol era, shamanism can be central to state power. Chinghis Khan swept up through the lake Baikal region, subjugating Buryats at the beginning of the thirteenth century. In the case of the Mongols, political actions and inspirational religious practices were inseparably intertwined (Humphrey 1994). Shamanic practices of prophesy, interpreting omens and sacrifices to heaven (tenggri) rose to prevalence during this time. Chinghis himself was said to be able to discover the will of heaven, often cross-checking with other diviners (Humphrey 1994: 196). Not all shamans participated in the more bureaucratized and liturgical state rituals, but these ‘marginal’ practitioners were still necessary for the legitimization and identity of the center, just as the centers of power were for the self-identification of the peoples on the periphery (Humphrey 1994: 193). The next major political tremor hit when Lamaism penetrated Buryatia from Mongolia at the end of the 16th century, initially destroying ancient shrines and persecuting shamans, in some regions to the point of extermination (Basilov and Zhukovskaya 1989). Buddhists missionaries did not entirely succeed in eliminating and converting shamans in Buryat regions. As scholar turned shaman Sarangerel notes, “Zaya Pandita and other Buddhist clergy realized that rooting out certain shamanist practices was impossible and ‘Tibetanized’ certain deities and practices” (2002: 320). This uneasy syncretism extended to the sacred geography of shaman cosmology where oobo, or stone cairns that marked sacred sites took on a dual Buddhist meaning. The patriarchal influence of Lamaism caused many of the female goddesses to be forgotten and turned its primary focus to ‘father’ sky-spirits (Sarangerel 2002, Humphrey 1994). The concept of 31 the sky or heaven (tenggri) served as an idiom of legitimization for lamas, an “allencompassing symbol of cosmic order and human destiny” (Humphrey 1994: 196). In this way, a claim by a shaman to be able to ascend to the sky in trance or to know the will of heaven became a highly charged political statement that could potentially destabilize lamas’ right to rule. Further influences swept the steppes of Buryatia late in the seventieth century, after the annexation of Siberia by the Russian Empire (Basilov and Zhukovskaya 1989). The Tsarist Empire encouraged the rapid spread of Lamaism, inviting it into TransBaikalia the better to underline the frontier with China; “Buddhism thus became an important political instrument in Russia” (Hamayon 1998: 55). The socio-religious institution of shamanism became squeezed from the center and pushed towards the periphery (Hamayon 1998). Russians viewed shamanic practice as ‘charlatanism’, ‘primitive and savage’ as well as an ‘obstacle to progress’. Governed by various forms of direct or indirect rule, Buryats held the status of a marginalized minority within a vast game of empires and authority (Humphrey 1994, Hamayon 1998). During this period, shamanic function “ceased to correlate with the central social position of highly valued masculine power, and became the expression of a form of shattered, feminized and denigrated counter-power” (Hamayon 1998: 53). This feminization and privatization continued into the Soviet era where it became more pronounced and clandestine. Russian imperial attitudes towards shamans continued into the Soviet era, when the Soviet government reinforced it with Marxian understandings of historical materialism. Soviet scholars adopted the idea of shamans as representatives of an embryonic priesthood. “The appearance of shamans, they argued, had been part of the 32 process by which ‘primitive Communism’ was destroyed by a more hierarchical form of society”, this interpretation, interlinking shamanism with abuse and exploitation provided Soviet justification for their campaign to eradicate shamanism in Siberia (Willerslev 2007: 119). Following this line of reasoning, Stalin instigated the mass executions of the 1930’s. Stalinist policies killed approximately 30,000 Buryats, about half the adult population. “Following the purges, shamanism shrank and became a secret, underground practice mostly carried out by women” (Buyandelgeriyn 2007: 133). With nearly a generation of Buryats killed, those who remained were terrified to let their children see them conduct their rituals, only daring to perform at night in forests away from prying eyes (Buyandelgeriyn 2007). Despite Soviet efforts, Buryat sacred topology, “continued to exist during the Socialist period, fostered though individual and collective memories and clandestine practices” (Hurelbaatar 2007: 138). The informal and supple character of shamanism allowed for adaptation and persistence in Soviet times (Hamayon 1998). Resurgence in shamanic activity accompanied a renewed interest in minority cultural heritage prior to the disintegration of communism. Hamayon notes during the 1960s and 1970s Buryats revived open-air rituals at the oboo mountain-shrines (1998). With the dissolution of the Soviet system in 1991, Buryats established the first Shamans’ Association in 1993 in Ulan-Ude, and by 1997 there were 83 members (Hurelbaatar 2007). In the formative time of ‘unmaking’ socialism, Buryats of Mongolia experienced a remaking of identities, specifically through a shamanic reading of the past where ‘awakened’ origin spirits suppressed by socialism cause current misfortunes (Buyandelgeriyn 2007). These initial forms of shamanism hardly went beyond the level of rituals performed at the individual and circumstantial level. Hamayon argues, “the 33 absence of doctrine, of clergy, and of official cult sites which makes it institutionally fragile, is also what enabled shamanism to persist as a practice” (1998: 54). In the past ten years shamanism continues to grow and diversify. The persistence of shamanism in the modern or perhaps post-modern world no longer appears as a puzzle in light of the new frameworks of magic and modernity. Closer inspection of contemporary, even urban practices reveals close ties between shamanism and how Buryats understand and interact with their modern histories. Anthropologists such as Michael Taussig (1980) and Aihwa Ong (1987) have given much attention to the relationship between traditional or occult beliefs and capitalist modernity in post-colonial contexts, noting how new conditions of incipient capitalism have first been interpreted through local beliefs and symbols before they have been accepted as natural (Buyandelgeriyn 2007: 128). Current practices of shamanism reflect how Buryats have coped with privatization and the market economy. As Moore and Sanders would say, their practices are vibrant forms of historical consciousness as well as a sort of social diagnosis. The Buryats creatively refashion shamanism to suit new situations. While creative refashioning is a feature of many contemporary worldwide occult practices, it is especially noteworthy among Buryats who face a loss of traditional knowledge due to historical trauma alongside a rapid economic decline. In these newest fashioning of shamanism, Buryats confront a slew of issues that contribute to their misfortune. Buyandelgeriyn, who conducted her fieldwork in BayanUul Mongolia from 1996-2000, notes, Shamanic practices among ethnic Buryats proliferated in the context of ongoing economic impoverishment, failed expectations of democracy, disbelief in the government, and intracommunity hostility. As the sense of anxiety, fear, and panic mounted, fueled by events that did not necessarily make sense to Buryats, 34 shamanic practices seemed to offer an explanation for poverty and other misfortunes (2007: 130). As a source of explanation, shamans attribute their troubles to “their origin spirits (ug garval), who have returned to seek revenge against their descendants for abandoning them during the socialist state’s suppression of religion” (Buyandelgeriyn 2007: 127). However since the sources of true shamanic knowledge have only barely survived though elders, newly emerged shamans are greeted with skepticism by those who believe they are trying to profit from the misfortunes of others, and occasionally don’t understand what they should be doing (Humphrey 2002, Buyandelgeriyn 2007). In response, Buryats sponsor endless rituals in search of more powerful shamans and authentic origin spirits, creating the paradox whereby “the more the Buryats believe in the loss of that tradition during socialism, the more shamanic rituals they generate” (Buyandelgeriyn 2007: 128). The practices that persist today are both divinatory and therapeutic, still mostly taking place on the personal rather than the collective level, relating to health, as well as “everything requiring luck: love, fertility, success, and most particularly these days, achievements in business” (Hamayon 1998: 57). Shamans seek to refigure patients luck and their relation to their ancestor spirits, but in doing so they also spiritually interpret the past. Buryat shamans engage with the political scars in their sacred terrain. Since the collapse of socialism, uheer and other origin spirits have become particularly fierce due to their descendants neglect (Buyandelgeriyn 2007). Shamans combat the silenced memories of the Soviet purges by ‘diagnosing’ patient’s misfortune as abandonment of their ancestor spirits in the past. “Through possession by their origin spirits, Buryat shamans turn into metaphoric condensations of disrupted ancestral genealogies and living 35 nodes of oral history” (Buyandelgeriyn 2007: 128). Shamans render visible Buryats’ collective history, countering the socialist state’s official account. In this inspired process, Buryat shamans perhaps inadvertently create their history, and turn themselves into living nodes of historical consciousness. For Buryats who are searching for their past and future, “only by becoming metaphoric extensions of their ancestral lineage can they make their surroundings meaningful” (Buyandelgeriyn 2007: 143). More than an explicit form of resistance, the history they fashion contains an anticolonial protest with calamitous consequences if forgotten by descendants. Buryat shamanic landscape, perpetually in a state of fluidity, erodes and reforms as the gales of powerful states pass over them. Far from an irrational hold over from a primitive past, patterns emerge from centuries of changing practice. Over time, state systems have pushed shamanism away from positions of centralized power in society into more private spheres. Shamanism became more feminized as the practice became private and personalized, experiencing a gender swap as rituals again gain increasingly public roles. Today, shamanism’s inherent absence of structural organization continues to prevent it from having real political weight in Russian and Mongolian society, however this same factor allowed for contemporary adaptability (Hamayon 1998). As this section demonstrates, while at times shamanic practices have served as sites for anticolonial protest or for sources of ethnic identity, they are not essentially forms of resistance. In the creation of new state identity, Buryats instead seek to singularize themselves in their unique ethnic identity, in part though shamanic condensations of their repressed histories. Buryats refashion shamanism in historically conscious ways that continue to provide meaning by linking present circumstances with ancestral causes. 36 Peruvian Mystical Tourism Since the end of the civil war in the early 1990s, Peru witnessed a rapid increase in a particular type of tourism revolving around appropriation of indigenous healing techniques for a Western “New Age” audience (Gómez-Barris 2012). Every year thousands of spiritual tourists search out an “authentic” encounter with the romanticized legacy of Incan shamans and healers, seeking ayahuasqueros to guide them on their botanically induced journeys of “inner discovery.” These encounters reveal the consequences of what happens when indigenous knowledge enters what Vitebsky calls “the rigged market place” (2003). Mystic tourism exposes racial inequality and essentialisms on a troubling scale, while supposedly bringing the world closer to a utopian Incan future. Although mystic tourism relies on essentialist discourses of indigenous bodies, for many mestizo and New Age tourists, it provides a way of making sense of global capitalism. Pre-colonial spiritual nostalgia provides the possibility of a utopian future for some, simultaneously making New Age spiritualist aware of inequality even as they employ indignity for their own intensions. Several factors have come together in the last three decades that have sparked and fostered the growth of mystic tourism—or “turismo mistico” as anthropologist Michael Hill calls the industry (2008)—both in and outside of Peru. First, since the 1980’s Michael Harner's “shamanic renaissance” tremendously bolstered the New Age movement’s interest in indigenous shamanism. The Way of the Shaman begins with his decisive experience of drinking the shaman’s hallucinogenic drink ayahuasca when on a fieldtrip to the Peruvian Amazon (1980). Since then popular New Age media such as Shaman’s Drum, the journal for experiential shamanism, have been full of ads of 37 Peruvian shamans beckoning Westerners. Secondly, Greene argues the 1980-90’s furthered “the climate of therapeutic intrigue surrounding the possible efficacy of ‘alternative’ healing methods” which has led to a multimillion dollar industry in nonbiomedicinal healing (1998: 641). Lastly, the past three decades of neoliberal economic development in Peru have worked in tandem with the global tourist industry to transform meanings of indigeneity and national identity that rely on the Incan past (Gómez-Barris 2012). Tourist agencies give visitors an opportunity to dabble in ideas of the Incan past though participation “in a ritual offering (or despacho) to Pachamama (feminine Earth deity) at nearby Inca ruins or to have their coca leaves read by an authentic pampamesayoq (Quechua herbalist and healer)” (Hill 2008: 252). As Peru competes to establish a unique ‘brand’ in the competitive global tourist market, ethnic identity becomes comodified for New Age spiritualists. An understanding of how this commodification occurs requires a familiarity of what New Age spirituality entails and the components it relies on. New Age Andean religion, as Hill defines it, is “characterized by a patterned combination of Inca state religion and contemporary Quechua religious practice, elements of official or vernacular Catholicism, elements of other religious traditions popular within the New Age movement (such as Eastern, especially Hindu, traditions), [and] modern techno-scientific discourses” (2005: 265). As Joralemon comically puts it; “In the great mall of world cultures, the New Agers have the spiritual ‘fashions’ from virtually every nation on which to model their own cosmic conceptions” (1990: 111). During his fieldwork at a New Age center in Cusco, Hill recorded services such as “bioenergetic reorganization, 38 shiatzu, chiropractic care, massage therapy, reflexology,…aura cleaning, chakra activation and alignment, and emotional release therapy on energies of low vibration” (Hill 2012, 272). He argues that these diverse practices demonstrate the extent to which urban mestizos have woven together multiple cosmological and ritual frames and frameworks—and it is precisely this use of multiple frameworks that gives them a competitive edge in the market place (2012, 272). In the market, ‘Inca-ness’ becomes detached from contemporary realities of indigeneity. ‘Inca’ becomes fluid and ascribable, while still indicative of location. Prominent scholar of tourism Dean MacCannell refers to this process as “reconstructed ethnicity”, whereby ethnicity merely stands as a diffuse marker of ethnic difference for the purposes of entertainment (in Hill 2008: 254). De la Cadena has noted this process of “de-ethnicization of ethnicity” and specifically of “de-Indianization” in the Andean context that marks the reconstruction of racial identity for tourist consumption and the de-territorializing effects of tourist appropriations (2000 in Hill 2008). New Age tourists desire this fluid ascribable aspect, as many have felt a disturbing lack of ethnic community, identity, or pride. As Hill notes, “the global New Age movement and marketplace can provide an alternative type of symbolic, holistic (but nonspecific) ethnicity that also certainly marks a position of privilege relative to those who cannot “choose” their ethnic ascription so easily” (Hill 2008: 256). In making ethnic identity a symbolic set of traits, an insidious form of racism occurs. Whereby the contemporary realities of Quechua and Aymara cultural worlds are overlooked and devalued (Hill 2008). 39 This leads to the central paradox of mystic tourism. Hill argues, “mystical tourists imagine Quechua bodies as essentially and ‘authentically’ spiritual, even as they paradoxically de-ethnicize, de-territorialize, and ‘disembody’ Quechua religious belief and practice for their own use” (2008: 253). In a book written by New Age author Joan Wilcox titled Keepers of the Ancient Knowledge: The Mystical World of the Q'ero Indians of Peru, she disturbingly maps spiritualism onto genetics. She remarks that the “Andean tradition” is “part of every fiber of their being” and that ancient spiritual knowledge “is carried in their genes, entwined in the spiral of their DNA” (2001: xviii in Hill 2008: 258). New Age Andean writer Elizabeth Jenkins expresses the other side of this paradox in her account of how her mestizo spiritual mentor taught her that it was “no longer necessary to be an ‘Inka of the blood’” to be a Quechua priest; the only requirement was that one be an “Inka of the soul” (Hill 2008: 257). Much like earlier white and mestizo generations’ indigenismo, in New Age incanismo Incas are exalted— separating the contemporary Indian from the Incan. This separation takes the form mystical objectification stemming from the West’s melancholy desire to absorb indigenous healer’s knowledge (Gómez-Barris 2012). Gómez-Barris points out the underbelly of these embodied performances of consumer capitalism, where indigenous rituals offer “an escape from the existential problem that late-capitalist economic and cultural formations pose—the loss of connection that comes from the fragmented experience of capitalist subjectivity. A self-oriented search for meaning is projected onto native people and their imagined purity” (2012: 76). A search for inner meaning and self-discovery are key stones of New Age doctrines. 40 To assist in this quest for inner self-exploration many spiritual tourists turn to shamans who conduct hallucinogenic rituals. The figure of the shaman as the embodiment of ancient culture and spiritual authority—as the ‘spiritual Inca’—has undoubtedly become a trope of Peru’s global tourist market (Gómez-Barris 2012: 71). Ayahuasca meaning “vine of the dead” in Quechua (also called yagé), possesses sacred qualities for Westerners; as can be seen from the classification of ayahuasca as an ‘entheogen,’ or “an agent that awakens the divinity within” (Doyle 2005: 13). Doyle notes the draw for many to the South American ayahuasca experience “is a unique, albeit globalized context of an erudite and healing shaman guiding visions in a vanishing rain forest, the very habitat of the alkaloid exuding plant allies. This is most certainly what is being sold in ayahuasca tourism” (Doyle 2005: 9). Many strains of New Age spirituality contain exoticism and romantic environmentalism which intermingle with conceptions of ethnomedicine, argues Greene (1998). He points out how these conceptions “are true holdovers from a ‘development’ vision and the colonial vision before; at least, all share the vision of primitive stasis” (1998, 641). ‘Primitive stasis’ or ‘timelessness’ comprises the largest danger inherent in incanismo. Since colonial times studies of shamanism (or curanderos in Spanish) substitute the past for the present. Colonialism gave shamans power by enshrining their knowledge in a mystical and arcane part of Western consciousness—the quintessential “anti-self” (Taussig 1987). Shane Greene pushes this analysis further, understanding the shaman as “the West's historically and temporally subordinated ante-self, that perennial prior-self doomed to the temporal stasis of primitivity” (emphasis mine 1998, 642). In the Western imagination, shamans are understood as having an essential connection to the primordial, 41 to the mythic timeless ‘first shamans’. This perspective casts shamans as a culturally stagnant form (Greene 1998, 643). ‘Primitive medicine’ is always contrasted to Western biomedicine in the familiar pattern of asymmetric binaries; “science versus magic/religion, modern versus traditional, all of which fall directly in line with: progress versus stasis” (Greene 1998, 635). Many scholars run into the trap of either, “lamenting shamanism's corruption and decline from a ‘pure’ primitive state” or “denying the significance of change in shamanic complexes under European colonialism” (Greene 1998, 644). Such traps and issues of authenticity surround contemporary shaman studies—as many fear the guise of ‘shaman’ may simply be a ruse put on for the sake of profit. Donald Joraleman struggles with this issue in his article dealing with informant legitimacy. He asks: “What happens to the status of a shaman qua anthropological informant when he/she is ‘discovered’ by New Agers?” (1990: 106). He observed informant Eduardo Calderón Palomino’s transform from local curandero to New Age ‘guru’. After serving as an anthropological informant, the New Age Movement championed Calderón as a “modern wise man in touch with separate realities and ultimate truths” (1990: 105). While watching a television special in which Calderón led Westerners around Incan sacred sites—“adopting the role of a shamanic clown in a New Age circus”—Joralemon felt embarrassed, angry and betrayed as an anthropologist (1990: 109). He asked how could Calderón “sell out” and “allow himself to be so exploited, to adulterate Peruvian curing traditions for a bunch of aging ‘flower children’ still searching for the ‘crack in ordinary reality’?” (1990: 109). However, after watching Calderón return to his local community and resume healing, Joraleman noticed he was 42 able to shift back to the Peruvian ‘idiom of distress’. As he says, “Seeing Calderón successfully navigate between local and international frameworks for understanding sickness, I started to question the precise basis for my objections” (1990: 110). After all he wondered, was Calderón “really doing for tour group members anything different from what his Peruvian predecessors had done for generations?” (1990: 110). Instead of falling into Greene’s trap of holding shamanism static, Joraleman eventually worked through his objections to understand shamanism as a dynamic practice. Many anthropologists have come to view urban shamans like Calderón as ‘culture brokers’ because of their intermediary position, their innovation and inventions of tradition (Joralemon 1990, Hill 2012). The adoption of biomedical idioms of healing such as injections by local curandero provides further evidence of the innovative features of shamanism. Greene notes Yankush, a shaman he observed, “demonstrates that shamanism is a creative and dynamic ethnomedical knowledge and practice, not a static conservative one” (1998: 653). The hybridized version of Q’ero culture taught to foreign spiritual tourists exemplifies a form of creative resistance to neoliberal encroachment (Gómez-Barris 2012). New Age spiritualty thus cannot be separated from local agency and viewed solely as a tourist import copied by locals. Urban mestizos “are as central to the production of a New Age movement in Cusco as are international mystical tourists” (Hill 2012: 264). As the historical syncretism between pre-conquest Andean traditions and post-conquest Catholicism reminds us, changes in beliefs are part of attempts to make sense of a changing world. The contemporary turismo mistico industry marks “new configurations of postcolonial religious and ethnic identities in the context of globalizing circuits of economic and symbolic exchange” (Hill 2012: 264). 43 New Age spirituality grounded in incanismo provides a medium for refashioning ethic identity in the context of globalization. New forms of spirituality allow urban Andean mestizos to ground their identity in both indigeneity and colonization through the construction of a cosmology that encompasses a mythic-historical, nationalist narrative and a postcolonial subjectivity. While arguably repressing the trauma of conquest and perpetuating racialized hegemonies, mestizos are also “clearly reconciling multiple traditions and religious influences in a way that is relevant to them, in a way that facilitates their coming to terms with the history of conquest and colonization that has forever shaped cultural identity in the Andes, and in a way that rewrites the script of globalization so that it is grounded in Andean locality and place” (Hill 2012: 282). While I agree with scholars who remain skeptical about the possibility that turismo mistico will translate into any benefit for indigenous communities (Gómez-Barris 2012), it does provide a new context for tourists to become more conscious of global inequalities in ways they haven’t been able before (Hill 2008). The utopian strains of incanismo make the possibility of actual change hard to ignore, although these visions are exclusive. They leave out the contemporary realities of indigenous campesinos. New Age incanismo requires a “reflexive demystification of the political, social, and medical asymmetries that Western development of the Third World, with its colonial legacy, engenders” in order to deal fully with global inequalities they encounter (Greene 1998: 654). Only then can New Age tourists ever hope to stand on equal ground with the decedents of the Incas. Now it is time to turn to the contexts which gave rise to the New Age movement in the West. 44 Modernity in the New Age Many aspects of the New Age have trickled into mainstream America’s consciousness: from meditation to yoga, vegetarianism, food cooperatives to holistic healing—alternative spiritualties abound. Of the many inner spiritual paths the New Age yielded over the years, Neo-shamanism as well as Harner’s core shamanism is but some of them. When asked how they became involved in core shamanism, all of my informants, as well as fellow drumming-circlers, responded with a long list of other New Age practices they had encountered and explored with various degrees of success. These included; meditation, reiki energy work, apprenticeship with a Native American healer, vision quests, Celtic neo-paganism, sensory deprivation chambers and a veritable smorgasbord of other tools and techniques that all came with a story and several book recommendations. In order to appreciate core shamanism in its context, on ‘the New Age bookshelf’ so to speak, I will turn to uncover the contradictory ways the New Age fluorescence of enchantment both exemplify and break with aspects of modernity. At its core, the New Age finds its home bridging so called ancient traditions with a utopian vision of the future, embracing both the uncertainties and certainties of modernity. The term ‘New Age’ has had currency at least since the American Revolution, after which it was taken up self-consciously by Theosophists. It became relevant again to 1960s counterculture, which “looked toward the Age of Aquarius as a utopian future of peace and equality” (Pike 2004: 145). Not only utopian in its imagining, the New Age has made a handful of dynamic changes in society since the 1960’s, including gender dynamics, healthier diets, and holistic healing practices. The latter includes a diverse array of practices on the rise, such as; herbal therapies, aura cleansing, psychic healing, 45 neo—shamanism, massage and other types of body work. “The goal is to enable the practitioner to participate in developing a more peaceful, tolerant, healthy, and spiritually enlightened society” (Pike 2004: 15). The movement has spread globally. Paul Heelas gives examples that range from Brazil, India, the Philippines, Russia and West Africa (1996: 5). In America the market booms: “Annual spending on workshops and seminars of this kind, channeling, self-help businesses, and alternative health care was $10 to $14 billion at the end of the twentieth century. An estimated 12 million Americans are involved with New Age activities, although they may participate in other religious organizations” (Pike 2004: 25). Most recently the New Age has “expanded to include a vast Internet presence and voluminous book sales by mainstream presses as well as obscure cottage industries” (Pike 2004: 15). “In fact, ‘how I became a shaman’ is becoming a distinct literary category” (Clifton quoted in Wallis 2003: 1). The wealth of literature is truly astonishing and can easily overwhelm a newcomer stepping into the bookstore as religious market-place for the first time. A starting question might be: who and what kinds of things draw people to the movement? The first thing to realize is just how astonishingly diverse, hodgepodge, and eclectic practices labeled as ‘New Age’ are. Just as modernities are multiple, “neither is the New Age one thing” (Heelas 1996: 150). Heelas see the ‘New Age’ as an umbrella term for a broadly similar lingua franca to do with “the human (and planetary) condition and how it can be transformed” (1996: 2). “As a general rule of thumb,” however, he offers that, “well-educated people who have become disenchanted by, or are reacting to, what the mainstream of society has been able to offer are the most likely to take the New Age seriously” (Heelas 1996: 137). Participants’ particular socioeconomic standing 46 greatly magnifies the movement’s cultural impact (Brown 1997: 8). Sarah Pike approaches the New Age as a New Religious Movement (NRM), and offers a similar attempt at a characterization: “it is hard to say that anything is typical of the New Age and Neopagan movements, which have been from the start diverse and individualistic…A disproportionate number are baby boomers who express their generation’s disenchantment with traditional religious experience and desire for selffulfillment and personalized religious worlds. Exceptions will be found for almost any generalization that can be made, so categorizing participants in these movements is a near impossible project” (2004: 14). Brown further investigates what makes certain Baby Boomers more prone to New Age philosophy, suggesting that; “Although the majority hold white collar jobs, the frequency with which they change residences, jobs, and friends suggest that they have more unsettled lives than other Boomers” (Brown 1997: 7) In their rejection of ‘the rational,’ the mainstream and traditional religious dogma, the New Age has turned within to establish “a cultural and practical resource employed in everyday life” (Heelas 1996: 5). A set of assumptions about the relationship between the self and the wider universe underscore New Age beliefs—certain ideas that that are utterly dependent upon modernity. Members of the New Age movement assume a large degree of holism in their vision of the world and personal healing, which involve intimate connections between mind, body, and spirit. According to Pike, “They are more likely than people of other faiths who adopt one or more of these [holistic healing] practices to see them as components of an evolved lifestyle that is part of a growing change in a planetary consciousness” (2004: 31). If it had to be categorized, the New Age would most likely be classified as ‘pantheism,’ a perspective that understands “the universe itself as divine or assume that god is everywhere, and more important, in everyone” (Pike 2004: 27). Indeed 47 New Age participants “enjoy intimate and highly personalized relationships with spiritual beings”, consulting them for help with everyday issues like “finding jobs and lovers, as well as spiritual growth and global health” (Pike 2004: 29, 28). This attention on the individual is inextricably linked with “the fact that western society has become obsessed with what the person has come to offer; the value, the depth, the potential” (Heelas 1996: 160). New Age self-spirituality finds its roots firmly entwined with Western conception of the individual. The spiritual turn within the self, mirrors the subjective turn in modernity. The subjective turn “has become the defining cultural development of modern western culture” (Heelas and Woodhead 2005: 5). In their study on why religion is giving way to spirituality, Heelas and Woodhead make a distinction between ‘life-as’ and ‘subjectivelife’: “The subjective turn is thus a turn away from ‘life-as’ (life lived as a dutiful wife, father, husband, strong leader, self-made man etc.) to ‘subjective-life’ (life lived in deep connection with the unique experiences of my self-in-relation)” (2005: 3). Instead of finding meaning in external structures, subjective-life thus “has to do with states of consciousness, states of mind, memories, emotions, passions, sensations, bodily experiences, dreams, feelings, inner conscience, and sentiments—including moral sentiments like compassion” (Heelas and Woodhead 2005: 3). In this way when New Age enthusiasts adopt neo-shamanism, wiccan witchcraft, neo-pagan rituals, channeling or any other modern magic, their practices operate intimately close to their everyday experience, often revealing “their hopes, their troubles, and the language in which they frame their personal search for meaning” (Brown 1997: 11). Like African witchcraft as social diagnosis or Buryat shamanism as historical consciousness; New Age 48 enchantments can act as such, but on the micro-individual level—revealing troubled personal histories and unsatisfactory work-place relations. In this way the New Age idea of self becomes both intensely spiritual as well as utilitarian. As Heelas notes, “this is a self which values itself. Valuing its own identity, its own freedom of expression, its own authority and agency, power and creativity, its own right to decide how to live the good life, it necessarily follows that this self is critical of the tradition-informed” (1996: 160). Self-spirituality necessarily seeks an “authentic connection with the inner depths of one’s unique life-in-relation” (Heelas and Woodhead 2005: 4). But this ‘turn within’ becomes rather utilitarian, resting on three key assumptions: “that something powerful lies within the person; that this can be tapped and improved; and that it can then be utilized to enable the person to operate more successfully in obtaining what the materialistic world has to offer” (Heelas 1996: 166). When asked about what is the best way to go about living as a witch, shaman, healer, or medium, ‘whatever works best for an individual’ is the constant response of Neopagans and New Age devotees. As Pike notes, “The consensus seems to be that the practices for changing one’s consciousness can be myriad, with no right way for everyone” (Pike 2004: 31). However this emphasis on the self and individual paths to achieve a healthier humanity also shifts the role of responsibility away from the societal level. “Because they begin with the assumption that the self is sacred or divine, they place responsibility for change with each individual” (Pike 2004: 37). How does such an individual face the realities of the modern world? While dependent on the conditions of modernity, or “radical modernity” as Johnson would have it (1995: 349), the New Age seems to reject many of modernity’s 49 tenants and look nostalgically back to ancient times to inspire a visionary new future. Heelas points out this paradoxical situation, where the movement’s appeal lies both in the uncertainties and certainties of modernity, the New Age provides “something new—there by breaking with modernity—whilst at the same time sharing, indeed exemplifying a number of those values and assumptions to be found in the mainstream” (Heelas 1996: 137). Heelas understands New Age members as roughly falling into two camps: “those who see the solution as existing with an alternative to life in the heartlands of modernity, and those who seek provisions which promise to enhance what the mainstream has to offer” (1996: 138). That is those who use magic as an alternative to capitalism, to some extent in order to thwart its systems of commodification and extraction bound to end in planetary disaster, versus those who wholeheartedly pursue the promises of capitalism through magical means. These camps are not even mutually exclusive. That many dabble in both camps only allows for this paradox to grow. In order to reconcile this, Paul Heelas takes a closer look at the two visions of modernity these camps entail. The first case represents the uncertainties of modernity. This general outlook on modernity’s uncertainties somewhat resembles the relationship revealed by Buryat shamanism, though the contexts drastically differ. For those in the New Age who believe modernity to be in crisis, “Work is seen as alienating; politicians are taken to be corrupt; consumer culture is taken to be undermining the future of the planet” (Heelas 1996: 138). For many the all too familiarly depressing question becomes: ‘is this really all there is to life?’ They turn within because they believe conventional institutions have failed to provide meaningful identities (Heelas 1996: 144). 50 Heelas points to the argument “that capitalism destroys those cultural formations which have traditionally sustained identity,” and in its place constructs a meager ideology of individualism, “which only serves to mask the fact that people are devoid of any substantive autonomous identity” (1996: 147). The New Age responds to this devaluing with a radical move to make the self sacred. Historically speaking, “The idea, then, is that the failure of 1960s activism to bring about a new social order helped fuel 1970s interest in that other alternatives, the world that lies within. If one cannot change corrupt society, at least one can change one’s self” (Heelas 1996: 142). However the New Age doesn’t seem to understand all of society as corrupt. The second case deals with the certainties of modernity. Indeed, the New Age provides radicalized sacralized versions of some of the central aspects of our time, exemplifying long-standing cultural trajectories whilst still embedded in them (Heelas 1996: 153). Here we might be reminded of Romberg’s study in Puerto Rico where practices of brujos actually have become a close partner of consumerism and welfare capitalism (2003). Even beyond becoming a close partner, Heelas considers the New Age the climactic summation of long-standing cultural trajectories of modernity. “Thus in the context of our culture, it is impossible to think of a self which is more autonomous or free, more in control or powerful, more responsible, more perfect, more internalized, more expressivistic than presented in various New Age discourses” (Heelas 1996: 154). Even in their opposition to the stifling bureaucratic control, Brown sees the New Age as keeping within a long standing American tradition: “As a form of activity protected by the Constitution, religion is one of the last remaining frontiers of personal experimentation, a place where people can explore ideas and social arrangements that 51 would be prohibited in other spheres of life” (1997: 185). In a way then, when mediums or shamans establish their own contact with the divine, they follow “a tradition of American religious democracy at least two centuries old” (Brown 1997: 185). A fact that even Michal Harner picks up on, as seen in his characterization of the shaman’s drum as “the ballot box of spiritual freedom” (2013: 216). In order to get a better understanding of how these principles play out, I will introduce two of my informants’ life histories, and their transitions from forms of Christianity to core shamanism. While Steve Summers appearance does not belie his alternative spirituality leanings, he has been investigating different New Age paths for over a decade. Now in his forties with short cropped hair, Steve told me about a time in his life, around 2000, when he really struggled with “what I should be doing,” and searching for answers to the questions in his life. At the time he frequented a church in Ashland where he met a particularly “wise priestess” who renewed his path towards Jesus. Steve would often read the bible, particularly the more spiritual Gospel of Judas. As he read, Jesus’s stories of healing were really “coming up” for him, making him wonder, what does this mean? Why are people still suffering? About this time he discovered reiki, a Japanese Buddhist inspired practice of energetically flowing healing energy to people. Steve made the parallel between this and what Jesus was doing, flowing energy from God/Universe because he was open to enlightenment. Steve had a realization that he needed to learn how to do this. There was never any conflict for him between Christ and reiki, but somehow reiki wasn’t quite working for him. Around 2010 he found a book about Celtic shamanism and thought “this feels right!” In the next few years he transitioned from reiki to shamanism. Since then he has been exploring a great number of 52 books about Westerner’s experiences of shamanism and eventually found Harner’s and decided to enroll in the beginner’s class, although he had been journeying on his own for quite some time. Matt Knew, another of my informants came from a born-again Christian background where he met his wife. In what appears to be the latter half of his thirties, Matt has a goatee and long curly hair that comes down to his wide-set shoulders. With an earnest and compassionate demeanor, Matt told be about his dissatisfaction with Western religion. While he still had a really significant spiritual experience being baptized, he began to explore meditation and Buddhism, which was still “so complicated, and had so many rules.” He finds religious texts like the Quran important to understand, and loves pictures in the Baghavad Gita, he confesses he’s a slow reader. “I’m more of a listener.” He still loves to check out books from the library, and happened to check out a book about totem animals from about the same time he found the FSS’s website. He told me that although he had experimented with reiki, animal spirits were more of what he was looking for, and he checked out Harner’s book about the same time, and signed up for the class soon after. Matt feels like he’s been going through a rough patch and is looking to find “something bigger, more universal to ‘believe’ in [although he doesn’t really like to use the word ‘believe’] something more.” “My denomination is do what you will,” he told me. “Shamanism makes sense” for him, as he feels that nature has “a bigger role that we cut ourselves out to believing.” For him the workshop was just a window, a way to “make awareness possible,” using only intention rather than drugs. Matt drums “for power—for something real.” 53 The modus operandi of the New Age appears to be inspired by, older religious and cultural traditions which they borrow upon to create paradigms for the future (Pike 2004: 35, 38). New Age discourses “tend to emphasize newness, creativity, imagination and invention over tradition, creed, established doctrine, and institutionalized religion, but they also claim ancient traditions as their heritage” (Pike 2004: 26). It is little wonder then that the category of ‘shaman’ has fed right into the movement’s appetites. The term ‘neo-shaman’ came in to parlance in order to accommodate the changes made to a variety of indigenous practices (and not just New Age appropriations). They are ‘Neo’ in the sense that they are revising and updating ancient traditions to meet their needs today, Pike tells us: “They believe that in some aspects of life ancient cultures have much to teach us, such as respect for the earth and maintaining balance between humans and nature” (Pike 2004: 27). However academics have leveled many a scathing critique, ranging from accusations of indigenous romanticism (true), to those of neo-imperialism (hotly contested). As Harvey notes, indigeneity has become such a key in academic definitions of shamanism that recently, “the label ‘neo-shaman’ has been used to vilify those who claim to be shamans, or to practice shamanism, without being indigenous. Of course, this misses the point that Western and academic rather than indigenous people invented shamanism” (2003: 5). Neo-shamanism very much embodies the notion of an invention of tradition. Neo-shamanism in the hands of the New Age, while uncritically perpetuating Eliade’s legacy, also promotes a much needed spirituality of immanence that may be beneficial for planetary welfare. Some authors such as Noel (in Wallis 2003), have pointed to Eliade as the father of neo-shamanism, despite the fact that he never actually 54 made it out of his ‘armchair’ to actually meet a shaman in the flesh. If not the father, he may have anticipated the rise of neo-shamans: “interest in shamanism and the awareness of the psycho-mental risks involved in hallucinogens, may have another consequence in the near future: helping contemporary Western man undergo sickness…as a series of initiatory ideals” (Elide in Wallis 2003: 38). As the past three decades of New Age neoshamanism has shown, Western man has indeed dabbled in hallucinogens, initiation and shamanic ecstasy. This experience has led many involved to radically question their understanding of reality. Shamanism has not become their only worldview, but rather accompanies the astonishing “sense of synchronicity [that] appears in many New Age and Neopagan account of individuals’ spiritual paths” (Pike 2004: 17). The other shift has been one toward immanence, the understanding that “divinity permeates the world around us and runs through other humans, the earth, and all living beings” (Pike 2004: 32). In this way, it becomes possible for neo-shamans to embody alternative responses “to environmental problems that does not require social and political activism” (Pike 2004: 33). They feel the energy and magic of the universe coursing through them. Although some may find their claims gibberish, we can learn a lot about ourselves from their peculiar brand of modern magic. According to some New Age authors “destructive ways of relating to one another, ongoing interpersonal and global violence, and environmental devastation are some of the ills that need to be addressed as personal healing takes place” (Pike 2004: 37). By beginning with the deeply personal and intimately interpersonal, New Age holistic healing practices open a unique vantage point for us “to observe the mutability or fragmentation of the self that social philosophers have identified as a key feature of postmodern experience” (Brown 1997: 12). In our 55 postmodern world the New Age offers participants “opportunities to experiment with different identities” along their spiritual path (Brown 1997: 12). In this schematic, value and meaning emanate from the sacred realm of firsthand experience. As we shall see more in depth in the next chapter, if we can learn nothing else from these alternative spiritualties, the New Age reminds us that, “experience may have a magical quality that simply cannot answer to rational thought or argumentation” (Brown 1997: 13). The New Age argues we should listen to the magic in the world. 56 Chapter 3—Power and Alternative Ways of Knowing As we have seen, knowledge about shamanism has a long intellectual history. But what happens when a western anthropological concept meant to refer to indigenous people gets taken up by a western anthropologist and re-tooled for a popular audience as a spiritual technology? This chapter examines the ways in which anthropological knowledge leaves what Martin would call the “citadel” of scientific knowledge through an interpenetrating system of rhizomes connected with broader cultural life (1998). Michael Harner, one such rhizomatic tendril, stands accused of “going native,” a long standing stigma in the discipline of anthropology that marks out an individual who has lost their “objectivity” as an observer. Thus when Harner takes anthropological knowledge from the citadel and popularizes it as a spiritual technology to help Westerners create their own subjective healing experiences, scholars respond with much skepticism. They don’t think indigenous shamanic knowledge will be able to survive the transition to the western context, that practitioners will never be able give up their deep seated western understanding of reality for a shamanic one (Johnson 2003; Vitebsky 2003). However, as a practice, core shamanism challenges traditional divides between popular and anthropological knowledge, tradition and modernity, authenticity and the inauthentic. Those who take traditional modes of shamanism as inherently more authentic, “present a dangerous concept of what is ‘tradition’: the naïve and outmoded ‘old is real, new is not’ understanding here misunderstands the way in which traditions are actively constituted” (Wallis 2003: 205). At its heart, Harner’s tradition of core shamanism directly challenges Western rationality and objectivity that have been around 57 since the Enlightenment. Harner frames shamanic journeying as empirical first-hand knowledge, and uses scientific language to argue in its favor: for the empirical existence of the spirit world (2013). Rather attempting a rigid separation of anthropological knowledge from New Age experiential knowledge about shamanism, this chapter looks for ways in which they are mutually permeable, both caught up in the same Western cultural matrix. An eye to these relations, and the power dynamics involved, complicates simple questions like appropriation and emphasizes the neo-shamanic quest for alternative ways of knowing beyond the rational. Core Shamanism—Harner’s Way Michael Harner’s career began along a traditional route for a student of anthropology in the 1960’s, performing fieldwork with the Jívaro of Ecuador (now known as the Shuar) before receiving his PhD in 1963 from the University of California, Berkeley. His interest in shamanism arose, when on a field trip to the Peruvian Amazon he went through the decisive experience of drinking the shaman’s hallucinogenic drink of ayahuasca, a story he relates in the first chapter of The Way of the Shaman (1980). He later reflects that during this time, he not only had had a visionary experience with the Conibo, but the experience incredibly closely coincided with what the tribal shaman later revealed to him. As he reflects: “I began to realize that the cultural theories I had been taught as an anthropology student were inadequate to explain this consistence of experience, apparently regardless of culture. This discovery radically challenged my Western views of reality and started me on a truly serious search for knowledge” (Harner 2013: 36). In the early 1980’s after teaching at Berkeley and Yale, he disappeared from academia and began developing his own method to teach participants how to reach a 58 shamanic state of consciousness (SSC) without the use of drugs (Hoppál 1998). He went on to publish the results of his experimentation as The Way of the Shaman in 1980, taught workshops, and established the Foundation for Shaman Studies (FSS). After recently turning 84, Michael stepped down from his position of FSS president after publishing his much anticipated follow up book titled: Cave and Cosmos: Shamanic Encounters with Another Reality (2013)2. In his announcement he stated; It has always been my intention, as stated in our mission statement — the preservation, study, and teaching of shamanic knowledge for the welfare of the Planet and its inhabitants — that the Foundation continue to grow long beyond my lifetime until humankind finally recognizes that there is another reality that people can access shamanically to help us solve the problems of humanity and the planet (Harner 2013b). Hungarian scholar of shamanism Mihály Hoppál is one of few academics to take a nonjudgmental stance towards Harner’s work, arguing that he is indeed a “real” shaman. On one hand Harner works to spread simple healing methods in urban settings. On the other, he works to make shamanic traditions conscious among people who have lost their shamanic culture through the FFS’s indigenous assistance program. In this way he mediates between peoples and cultures, traditions and communities, past and present (Hoppál: 1998). In Cave and Cosmos, Harner describes himself as, “an anthropologist, a shamanologist, a practitioner of shamanism, and in the case of this book, a cosmographer of Western shamanic experience” (Harner 2013a: 5). In the Way of the Shaman, Harner builds on the foundations left by Mircea Eliade. Harner’s definition of shamanism also emphasizes ‘ecstasy’ or as he says ‘altered state of consciousness’: “a man or a woman who enters an altered state of consciousness—at 2 I will be drawing more extensively from his newer work, as very little scholarship has been published on in, it offers some rich reflections on Harner’s long career and includes extensive first-hand narratives of dozens of Westerners’ journeys. 59 will—to contact and utilize an ordinarily hidden reality in order to acquire knowledge, power, and to help other persons. The shaman has at least one, and usually, more, ‘spirits’ in his personal service” (Harner 1990: 20). Harner’s teachings include how to journey to the Lower, Middle and Upper world by attaining a SSC through monotonous drumming. The goals of this journeying include discovering power animal(s), restoration of power, power practice (maintaining spiritual power) and healing by extracting harmful intrusions along with divination and soul retrieval. As in classic shamanism, core shamanism contains a layered cosmology composed of the Upper, Middle, and Lower worlds—often visualized as a ‘world tree’ with its roots constituting the Lower, its trunk the Middle, and branches the Upper (Harner 1990). Harner’s first lesson of journeying is a visit to the Lower world, which he assures, is nothing like the western conception of a hell, but are rather filled with compassionate spirits. To begin the journey, Harner instructs you must first find and visualize a portal or a tunnel in ordinary reality that will lead you into the shamanic state of consciousness (SSC) (Harner 1990: 30). This opening must be a real place visited in life and somehow lead into the earth, such as a body of water, a cave, a hollow tree stump or the like. The other essential component at this stage is “sonic driving”—the rapid monotonous beat of the drum at a rate of 205 to 220 beats per minute, which falls in the theta-wave EEG frequency range, known to be conducive to trance states (Harner 2013: 44). Practitioners ride these sound vibrations you into the tunnel leading to the lower world (Harner 1990: 30). Harner recommend first journeys last ten minutes, and the drummer (performed either by another shamanic practitioner or listened to electronically, 60 as it can be difficult and hazardous to drum for yourself), will play a call back beat at the end to guide you back into ordinary reality (Harner 1990). In these spirit realms, practitioners encounter and accrue a host of power animals and spirit guides. They may take many forms and are being of great compassion and wisdom. However the Middle world contains spirits of the deceased, and for this reason the Middle world can be more treacherous. FSS classes teach practitioners how to meet with and ask their guiding spirits questions or ask for healing for themselves or on behalf of their client. The classes are structured in a basic hierarchy from beginning to advanced and each costs about $250. Currently the FSS offers 203 courses to approximately 5,000 individuals annually (Mokelke email to author, March 10, 2014). Beginning with the Basic Workshop—The Way of the Shaman®, a prerequisite for all other workshops and trainings, pupils may go on to take in roughly ascending difficulty: Shamanic Extraction Healing Training, Shamanism, Dying, and Beyond, Shamanic Divination Training, Shamanism and the Spirits of Nature, Shamanic Dreamwork™, Shamanic Training in Creativity™, Core Soul Retrieval Training™, and Shamanism Practicum: Guidelines for a Healthy Shamanic Practice™. In addition to these weekend courses, the FSS also offers longer more intensive courses like: the five day Harner Shamanic Counseling™, TwoWeek Shamanic Healing Intensive™, and even a Three-Year Program of Advanced Initiations in Shamanism and Shamanic Healing™. Notice all FSS workshops and training courses have been copyrighted by Harner. Some, like Vitebsky remain skeptical about the commodification of indigenous spiritual practices, pointing out, “even as habitus becomes packaged into facts, it comes with a trademark and a copyright” (2003: 286). Yet core shamanic healing practices are principled on the belief that spiritual illness 61 comes from either “(1) those that involve a loss by the patient of a spirit important to the patient’s well-being [including a fragment of their own soul]; (2) the acquisition by the patient of a spirit detrimental to the patient’s well-being” (Harner 2013: 257). As Harner says, there is potential to reap immeasurable benefits from these realms (Harner 1990). Many academics have critiqued Harner’s appropriation of shamanism despite their supposed benefits for Westerners (Vitebsky 2003; Wallis 2003; Johnson 1995; Jakobsen 1999). Robert Wallis usefully lays out the four main critiques academics have leveled at Harner’s core shamanism over the years in his book Shamans/Neo-Shamans. They include: 1. 2. 3. 4. Decontextualizing and universalizing Psychologizing and individualizing Reproduction and reification of cultural primitivism Romanticizing of indigenous shamans (Wallis 2003: 49). In regards to the first of these critiques, in creating core shamanism, Harner claims to take the “universal, near-universal, and common features of shamanism” from their cultural contexts to hand them over as condensed ‘techniques’ to Westerners who fill in the rest with their own experience (Harner 1990, 2013). In this understanding of shamanism, Harner clearly builds on Eliade’s work, emphasizing “what is perceived to be shamanic universally across space and time” (Wallis 2003a: 51). Wallis reminds us that striping away specificity to reveal the universal is an often misleading approach (2003: 52). Core shamanism, despite Harner’s efforts, is not universal shamanism. However core shamanists have no need for the ‘cultural baggage’ that comes with traditional shamans; as Harner argues, [It] is a far more productive approach than imitating a shaman’s practices in a single culture, for each culture has its own symbolism, mythology, and conceptual elaborations. If that is not your own culture, then 62 those…meanings will not be appropriate for you in the way they are appropriate for that particular indigenous people (2013: 46). Furthermore these assumptions contribute to a unique and innovative new conception of the shamanic realms. Harner argues that in a shamanic state of consciousness, all shamans have access to the same ancient realms of spiritual wisdom—more than universalism; this claim becomes more of a foundation for the core shamanic cosmology. Johnson argues the FSS seems most active in innovation of a distinctively modern quasi-ritual practice; reducing shamanism to shared traits and universalizing ‘core’ traits, thus rendering them fluid and mobile (Johnson 1995). More than just becoming fluid, this universalism becomes a distinctly new conception of the universe accessed through the SSC. Over and over again, Harner provides examples from his journeys (like with the Conibo) or from his students, where, despite Westerner’s ignorance and independence of a particular shamanic culture, they experience the same phenomenon as indigenous shamans. For example, a spirit guide tied a cord around a practitioner’s waist to ensure her return, or instances of ‘classic’ dismemberment. Harner gives examples ad nauseam supported by his impressive encyclopedic knowledge of shamanism to demonstrate “how very specific and ancient shamanic techniques are taught again and again to us in nonordinary reality regardless of our cultural background” (2013: 87). The realms of nonordinary reality accessed through the SCC composes the universe in which core shamanism takes place, and in this regard rather than just critiquing Harner for his universalism, we must understand this universalism is also a fundamental claim about the cosmos. In the 1970s, this underlying principle lead Harner to begin collecting the accounts of Western students, using “good old-fashioned” ethnographic techniques and considering 63 each journey as a “cosmographic fact” (2013: 72). This endeavor became part of the FSS’s ‘Shamanic Knowledge Conservatory (SKC)’ called ‘Mapping of Nonordinary Reality’ or (MONOR). The FSS gives this following description on their website: These research materials are being used to begin to construct a map of the hidden universe discovered and rediscovered by shamans and others through the ages, independent of culture. This requires a great deal of anthropological experience and knowledge in order to accurately compare these shamanic experiences cross-culturally. The results of this ambitious project are expected to challenge orthodox scientific definitions of reality. Since the study begun, 2,528 ascensions to the Upper World have been recorded that compose the “Celestia Study” (contained in Cave and Cosmos) and 2,397 descents to the Lower world that have yet to be complied into a “Netheria Study.” Harner argues staunchly, using familiar academic terms backed up by what seems to amount to 4,925 accounts he takes as empirical experiential evidence, for the existence of these realms and the beings that populate them. In Cave and Cosmos, he dedicates a whole chapter, “We Exist! The Spirits Call for Recognition,” to his challenge of the scientific, disenchanted understanding of the world by providing documentation of five miracles caused by the spirits. It is little wonder academics don’t take kindly to Harner, as he so directly seeks to undermine their world view. Like Lindquist urges, I would agree that in approaching core shamanic understandings of the cosmos, “We must take them as descriptions of phenomenological worlds that, by being narrated, performed, and acted upon, become subjectively and socially real” ( 2004: 159). Despite their ‘social reality’ academics have a hard time stomaching core shamanism as well as a slew of other New Age practices. When Brown conducted research with a New Age channeling community in New Mexico, he received caustic comments from fellow academics such as; “I don’t know how you can spend time with 64 these sickening New Age types. They’re just rich people who have too much time in their hands”, or regard them as “the lowest of the low,”—where as they would never think of making such disparaging comments about the religious beliefs of many indigenous peoples. (1997: 10). Brown also comments on the scarcity of academic studies “especially ones based on first-hand experience,” which he takes as a sign of intellectual circles’ wariness of the New Age (1997: 9). However some scholarship has responded better than others. Scholars of New Religious Movements (NRMs) are often viewed suspiciously by the general public, and have frequently been forced into the position of defending them against anticult tactics and charges of brainwashing (Pike 2004: 38). Harner responds to critiques from academia with the concept cognicentrism—that is, “a tendency to judge the validity of other people’s experiences in altered states of consciousness without having experienced those states themselves” (2013: 32). As Heelas notes in relation to such objections, their case, “quite simply, is that the ‘egooperations’ of the academic cannot do justice to what the New Age is all about—the wisdom of the experiential” (1996: 9). That has not stopped a handful of academics who have ‘braved’ the New Age and encounter the age-old taboo in anthropology of “going native.” Robert J. Wallis has dealt admirably with this dilemma ever since he ‘came out’ as a so called ‘neo-shaman’ while being a formally trained archeologist (2003: xiii). In response to conventional anthropologists who would reject any of his findings on the basis of having ‘gone native’ he challenges the insider—outsider dichotomy. He notes: The origins of concern with ‘going native’ lie in an era when ‘turning Indian’ was seen as politically suspect, if not heretical, because turning your back on the West (the best) in favor of the ‘savage’ (the worst) was treasonous. In intellectual terms, the fear is of going against rationalist 65 science in favor of primitive myth and, in religious terms, turning away from god towards superstition (2000: 254). This trope is a holdover from the colonial fear of becoming a ‘savage’. Harner too picks up on this when he notes that implicit in his graduate school training on maintaining objectivity (not going native) “was the patronizing assumption of the superiority of modern Western knowledge and that the natives’ function was to be subjects for the study, rather than to be possibly the teachers of us in the West” (2013: 34). Edith Turner, who took a class with Michael Harner in 1987, found herself challenged by the taboo of ‘going native’ when doing field work with her husband Victor in Zambia (2003). By distancing their beliefs from the Ndembu’s belief in spirits, “we denied the people’s equality with ours, their ‘coevalness,’ their common humanity as that humanity extended into the spirit world” (Turner 2003: 145). Wallis has dealt with this issue by critically locating himself in queer theory and what he calls ‘autoarcheology,’ and appreciates “the peculiar nature of my own standpoint and those of neo-shamans, visa-vis the normativity of Western society and academia” (2000: 253). Wallis understands queer as acquiring its meaning from its oppositional relation to the norm and advocates for an experiential anthropology that is politically explicit from the outset about the position of the researcher and not claim absolute objectivity (2003: 12). I hoped to emulate this stance when I took the beginner’s workshop and later attended a drumming circle. This is not to say however that all of academia’s critiques are unfounded or that neo-shamanism should be absolved of all criticism—rather they should seek to have a closer, more informed relationship with one another. Indeed Wallis points out the troubling notion that core-shamans ignore or never need to learn about traditional 66 shamans in their practices (2003: 51), information they could gain second-hand from contemporary anthropologists. As Harner states, “The ancient way is so powerful and taps so deeply into the human mind, that one’s usual cultural belief systems and assumptions about reality are essentially irrelevant” (1990: xviii). In this way the often harsh realities of modern indigenous life traditional shamans are faced with “need not be encountered, and certainly would not match up to the romantic image” (Wallis 2003: 51). However it is not as though they are in any way disinterested in the realities of indigenous life. When I told fellow practitioners I was doing my senior anthropology thesis on modern shamanism they all expressed great interest, one fellow even expressed a desire to be able to go back in time and study anthropology in college. Matt, one of my informants, told me that while he considered Western Shamanism a good starting point, he found the direct lineage missing. He is not alone when he expresses his desire to seek out a deeper connection with native cultures, like being taking on as an apprentice or something of that nature. For Matt, Harner-ism is like “the Starbucks of shamanism. He makes it accessible which I appreciate, and the Foundation is doing good things, but I like to go to the ‘local coffee shops’ whenever I can, you know?” Recently I received an email from another informant who wanted advice on graduate programs in anthropology because he wanted to study the specific healing practices of indigenous cultures. One particular part of the Foundation of Shamanic Studies does allow members to get in contact with indigenous shamans. However, their Indigenous Assistance Program and Living treasures of Shamanism could stand an appraisal from anthropologists. The Indigenous assistance program responds to requests from native peoples to help revive 67 and maintain their own shamanic traditions, providing both financial support, to say help build a shamanic teaching center in the Amazon or send Foundation members to assist in revival. Their Living Treasures program “provides an annual lifetime stipend to exceptionally distinguished indigenous shamans in less-developed countries where their age-old knowledge of shamanism and shamanic healing is in danger of extinction” (FSS). While totally admirable, and a reason many foundation members continue to donate, the Foundation needs to more critically understand its role in knowledge production. From their website they state their mission as: Helping to preserve shamanism where it is being threatened, and assisting its revival when invited, are critical dimensions of the Foundation's mission. The FSS has a network of specialists in shamanism throughout the world to help save indigenous shamanic knowledge in imminent danger of being lost. The FSS also responds to requests from native peoples to help revive and maintain their own shamanic traditions (FSS). In a twist of irony, Johnson notes, the foundation “promotes itself to arbiter and authority over who is and who is not a ‘true shaman’” (2003: 346). What kind of shaman is worth saving? Indeed the problem of authenticity becomes even more convoluted when core shamans seek to revitalize shamanism in indigenous communities. In the Foundation’s YouTube video titled “Tuva: Shamans and Spirits” of a 1993 expedition to “revive shamanic traditions, nearly destroyed under Soviet Communism” Michal Harner’s voice over can be heard to say: One of the reasons it is possible for a team from the Foundation to help a people in a short period of time is that, this mere presence of outside Westerners, educated Westerners, endorsing and even in fact themselves practicing shamanism is a tremendous boost to the moral of the people in the indigenous society, and also the people in the indigenous society who have had some question about the authenticity of their own heritage, feel encouraged to explore it further (shamanicstudies 2009: 6:05-6:43). 68 Here Harner employs a seemingly insidious form of salvage ethnography in a truly bizarre reverse-missionization context. However, as Wallis points out, “As indigenous shamans revitalize their own traditions with ‘borrowed’ Western (core shamanic) element, as they enter the ‘global village’, the neo-colonialism charge levelled at neoshamans becomes too simplistic; mechanisms of colonialism have never been purely onesided” (2003: 225). In order to navigate these complexities of power and knowledge Wallis advocates that, “it is imperative that we—all the interest groups—are acutely aware of the polemics of such relationships” (2003: 225). Unfortunately, Harner denies the political nature of shamanism. Harner holds an apolitical understanding of shamanism. “Spiritual power is not political power over others. It is power essential to one’s health and ability to survive” (Harner 2013: 11). More than this claim however, Harner suggested in an interview with Wallis that the healing aspects of shamanic practice are paramount while politics on the other hand, “is an aspect of cultural baggage that is either added onto the essence or does not typify shamans” (Wallis 2003a: 56). This idea of shamanism as “pre-political” has been problematized by anthropologists like Nicholas Thomas and Caroline Humphrey (1994). Jakobsen views Harner’s attempts to de-politicize and yet democratize as removing the power of the specialist; “the knowledge of the shaman is no longer of an esoteric character but instead available to all” (Jakobsen 1999: 217). In this vein, Harner does acknowledge that in the past shamanism was “inherently subversive” to state and organized religions for their claims of ascension to divine realms, and in this light the worldwide persecution of shamanism “was politically logical” (2013: 101). This view of shamanism devoid of political claims except in the past silences too many questions 69 about core-shamanism and the Foundation. Having left academia in the early 1980’s perhaps Harner missed out on a lot of critical turns in anthropology core shamanism and the Foundation could benefit from, such as being able to critically understand their role knowledge production about shamans. Journeyers Set Out When instructing Westerners in core shamanic techniques, Harner and members of the FSS try to give as little guidance as possible so the journeyer has the freedom to have their own experience. In Harner’s words, “The classic shamanic way is to accept one’s own responsibility and potentiality to achieve first-hand knowledge by personally entering the spiritual realms. This is the spiritual democracy of our ancient ancestors” (FSS brochure 2013). In journeying the practitioner can be seen as “frequently engag[ing] in a procedure that Foucault once described, in a different context, as the ‘games of truth,’ the process of ‘subjectivation’ or self-formation whereby the individual converts his or her experience into Truth” (Duara N.d: Ch. 4, 27). Shamanic knowledge for Harner is based on firsthand experience of mediating between ordinary reality (OR) and nonordinary reality (NOR). “These states are both called realities because each is empirically encountered and has its own forms of knowledge and relevance to human experience” (Harner 2013: 49). The first journey one undergoes is usually a trip to the Lower World to meet one’s power animal. Once in NOR, practitioners have the opportunity to ask for healing or ask questions and bring back hidden, or occult knowledge to OR. No question is too trivial, even if your spirit guide is Jesus Christ, as one report shows, and your question happens to be: “What am I going to do as the next step in my moneymaking career?” (Harner 70 2013: 146). In the core shamanic conception of this connection to spiritual knowledge, “the power animal, or guardian spirit, might be compared to an electric transformer or adapter that receives the immense power of the universe and modulates it into a form that can be safely transmitted to a human…This power also has knowledge and can pass qualities on to the individual human. So this power is not exactly the same as the “energy” defined in college physics classes” (2013: 76). The next step becomes learning how to interpret what your spirit guides or power animals tell you, and how to make it relevant to your experience. Only the journeyer may interpret her journey for herself, and while beginners may ask for guidance in how to interpret esoteric signs and symbols, ultimately it is up to them extract the meanings. However the spirits are eminently helpful and compassionate, Harner tells us. While, “There is no ‘official’ meaning of the visual symbols encountered by shamans in their journeys. Each shaman and shamanic journeyer discovers these meanings for him or herself.” However, “the spirits know everything about the journeyer and take it all into account in their communications and advice. If the journeyer is a Freudian psychoanalyst, “the spirits will be aware of that and communicate appropriately using the symbolic framework that person understands” (2013: 93). In this conception, the shamanic realms of NOR are not only universal, but by the volition of benevolent spirits, endlessly adapt themselves to the particular cultural, social and personal location of the shamanic journeyer. “This is the perfection of direct spiritual experience, a perfection that does not normally characterize ordinary reality” (2013: 94). Harner tells us, “all of nonordinary reality is perfectly “tailored” to the person experiencing it” (2013: 204). As for indigenous shamans, like the Buryats, whose cosmology depends on 71 ancestor spirits, Harner solves this by calling them “quasi-compassionate ethnocentric spirits” (2013: 14). Beings that reside in the Middle World with us are the exception to the “compassionate being” rule of thumb and may be malevolent. It appears in this way that core shamanism selects some shamanic traits and rejects others in the name of safety and control. While anthropologists have documented many pre-industrial societies where shamanic experience is known to be painful and hazardous, there is, “a decontextualizing of shamanisms by neo-shamans where what seems useful and safe is enthusiastically adopted, while the potentially dangerous is atrophied” (Wallis 2003a: 56). Neo-Shamans avoid what Brown (1989) calls the ‘dark side of shamanism,’ such as battling with evil spirits and death threats” (Wallis 2003a: 51). For example in preforming a core shamanic power animal revival students are instructed, “No reptiles or insects should be introduced to the other person’s body as they can be carriers of illness. Animals that show their teeth are also connected with disease” (Jakobsen 1999: 191). Wallis notes that this is due partly to the negative connotations of these creatures in the West and unlike indigenous shamanism—where these creatures may be the most powerful because of their difficulty—core shamanism recommends less dangerous creatures to make beginners feel ‘safe’ (2003a 53). The emphasis on ‘control’ in what has come to be known as “Harnerism” extends to the shamanic state of consciousness (SSC), where all tape-recorded and live drummers include a call back beat to ensure the safe return of practitioners. While in many cultures the trance state can be dangerous and hallucinogenically induced, this aspect of core shamanism reveals “the Western need for control (over consciousness, emotions, finances)” (Wallis 2003a: 54). 72 Feeling safe and in a compassionate environment are foundations laid by the New Age, but important when you meet a complete stranger at a weekend workshop, and the next thing you know you are laying on a blanket on the floor next to them, blindfolded, and letting the sound of the drum propel you into the Lower World with the no-longerstranger’s name, and a question on their behalf. I had the privilege to be paired with Matt Knew. When we introduced ourselves to each other over lunch he excitedly told me the memorable mnemonic trick “my name is a complete sentence!” Some months later when we conversed over Skype I asked him how his journeying had been going. He said since the workshop he had been trying at least one day a week to go on a personal journey, but had met with little success. Even after “setting the space,” lighting the candle, stetting intentions, calling spirits, but he nonetheless enjoyed the process of the set up. He found the group setting of the workshop helpful, and had profound experiences: “It was really nice to have an experienced facilitator, a ‘ringmaster’ to call the spirits”. He did however have a revelation in ordinary reality about the form of his power animal he discovered in the workshop: perhaps she was not a dog but a dingo!3 Our conversation even prompted another light bulb to go off for Matt. The clearest journey he had had was when he journeyed on behalf of my question: perhaps he needs to try journeying for others. Indeed Harner has noted the spirits have more compassion when the practitioner journeys on a non-selfish impulse, on behalf of others, or when the practitioner herself is suffering. The prospect of practicing with his wife gave Matt something to look forward to. Although he had yet to purchase a proper shamanic drum, he bought the Foundation’s CDs when he became a member. Matt often picks up 3 Some core shamans believe that revealing ones power animals and spirit helpers can lead to loss of power. For this reason I have chosen to present a different set of animals . 73 African and Native American drumming CD’s from the library to meditate along to, and appreciates the spiritual power of “riding” the drum’s sound vibrations. We discussed the ‘shaman kits’ the FSS sells on their website, which includes a drum. We were both put off about the pre-packaged-ness about it all, very “Starbucks” shamanism. Matt said he is cynical of systems—he hates shopping malls and tries to resist their necessary evil. When I asked Matt about whether or not he thought shamanism had the potential to go mainstream and help breakdown harmful Western conceptions of reality, he answered pessimistically. While he would “LOVE to because it does,” he thinks we have too many societal issues where “anything good becomes watered down and corporatized.” On the other hand, other informants, Steve Summers and Rebecca Peters, had met with a great deal of success in their journeying after the basics workshop. Rebecca quickly went on to take the ‘Shamanic Extraction’ workshop the next month. Steve excitedly related to me one particular journeying experience he had as well his innovative ideas about shamanism in the work place. He’s a scientist of sorts, he explained, providing technical support, problem solving and oversees a food processing plants that makes cheese and other dairy products (although he’d love to quit and become a full time shaman). Companies that have technical problems call him in. When he recently received a call about why the Greek yogurt wasn’t turning out so well, he decided to journey with this question to ask his spirit helpers for insight. He explained to me, at a certain point, the whey must be separated from the milk protein, a process that concentrates and increases the amount of protein. They had a problem with this separation point in a 500 gallon batch. When he asked his power animals what the problem was with this separation, his first animal, a bird, showed him a broken wing. His second animal carried 74 an instrument in their mouth; it was a pitch pipe that only plays one pitch. Upon his return to OR, he was initially puzzled by this: what does it mean? After some consideration, he realizes in the processing stage there is a “break” point—when it’s time to do the separation, also this occurs when a certain pH is reached, the “break pH”. Then the answer came: the bird’s wing was the ‘break’ and the pH was the pitch pipe! They were processing at too high a pH. He was shocked when he found out that this scenario turned out to be the actual problem. Steve went on to tell me about his dream job: becoming a company consultant shaman. He would approach problems and solve them without recourse to the rational mind. He imagines such a figure would appeal to cutting edge young CEO’s to hire a company shaman. “Can you imagine if it caught on?,” he asks. So many problems would be solved and many lives would be enriched. He even imagines shamans in professional football teams, consulted on the sidelines about “what play should we run?” Before getting too carried away Steve considered some of the ethical implications involved: Would this be almost immoral—egotistical? Could it lead to corporate shamans attacking other corporate shamans in the name of competition? He decided that it all came down to intentions (a truly favorite word in the New Age vocabulary), and about the ethical use of power. This chapter sought to shed light on the complex ways anthropological knowledge has been used, capitalized and innovated upon to produce distinctly modern forms of magic. Rather than insisting on a staunch dichotomy between authentic traditional shamans and inauthentic Western neo-shamans, academics need to acknowledge the lines between these categories are permeable, but it seems not enough so. As Wallis points out: 75 By virtue of having intertwined histories, some neo-shamans share their romantic yearnings and primitivistic tendencies with academics albeit from earlier generations. Where academics can revise the work of their forbearers, however, it is vital to express current ideas in the popular realm so that stereotypes embedded in popular imagination can be addressed (2003: 229). There seems to be a dearth of recent academics willing to get involved in ideas about New Age spiritualties. I would encourage more of a conversation both ways—with anthropologists teaching neo-shamans about their concept of ‘culture’ and neo-shamans teaching anthropologists how to let go of their disdain for non-rational knowledge. Edith Turner is one such anthropologist who discovered for herself: “there is spirit stuff, there is spirit affliction: it isn’t a matter of metaphor and symbol, or even psychology” (2003: 146), and she began to see the ways in which anthropology has perpetuated in this harmful positivist’s denial. A solution I might propose would be to invite contemporary anthropologists to speak and give workshops at New Age conferences. Alongside (not ‘above’) wiccan witches and neo-pagans, anthropologists could use this opportunity make knowledge accessible on topics that range from the specifics of an indigenous community (say in the Andes who have been affected by spiritual tourist), to the history and harm of the “vanishing savage” trope, critical understandings of the tradition/modernity binary; even on how to have a critical self understanding of the politics involved in ‘cultural appropriation’. All these lessons would fit right in with the New Age goal of self enlightenment if anthropologists were willing to take a step down from the citadel and present their knowledge alongside other ways of knowing the New Age and core shamanism has to offer. In return they could perhaps try ‘going native’ themselves. For Edith, “‘going native’ achieved a breakthrough to an altogether different worldview, foreign to 76 academia, by means of which certain material was chronicled that could have been gathered in no other way” (Turner 2003: 146). She identifies a sort of force field between the anthropologist and their subject matter, “making it impossible for her or him to come close to it, a kind of religious frigidity. We anthropologists need training to see what Natives see” (Turner 2003: 150). If a time for transparent communication along with dialogical tolerance for alternative ways of knowing, it is now in the face of irreversible planetary degradation. 77 Chapter 4—Layers of Environmental Relation Many scholars have found shamanism to be more of a way of relating to the environment rather than an actual religion (Humphrey 1996; Willersev 2007). Michael Harner himself, following Eliade, understands shamanism more as a methodology than a religion (2013: 33). The pages of Cave and Cosmos are filled with Westerners’ journeys that are enormously syncretic, encountering historical figures as well as spiritual teachers. In this sense core shamanic techniques and discourse exist alongside a large variety of religions and cultural beliefs—providing ample evidence that shamanism has more to do with people, animals, spiritual being, and the environment, in relation to one another. This being-in-relation occurs on multiple scales, from the micro to the macro. This chapter will begin with the every-day and end with the planetary concerns. Along the way I will examine issues of finding community and the problems of getting in touch with nature in the technologic era, full of mental barrages and distraction. Some however, are skeptical that core shamanism can be true to the indigenous knowledge it appropriated. For Vitebsky, “indigenous knowledge, whatever this is, filter[s] through this process only as a thing and not as a way of doing or being” (2003: 294). I contend that even if for the large part core shamanic practitioners may never leave their Western trappings and problems behind, they can still offer the West many valuable social critiques and offer a spirituality that promotes a sustainable way-of being. Everyday Shamanism Not everyone who takes the Foundation’s beginning workshop continues their shamanic practice. In an article in Shamanism, the FSS magazine sent out to members, cultural anthropologist, FSS member and field associate, Bill Brunton writes, “It is 78 difficult to know how many trained people continue to practice and what the level of practice is of those who continue” (Brunton 2003: 4). However a small number do continue their shamanic work, “year after year, in drumming circles and some practice shamanic healing in private practice settings. Of those, we hear that some have remarkable careers and are judged by their clients as genuine shamans or shamanic practitioners (the term usually preferred in the West)” (Brunton 2003: 4). In this way, Brunton argues that this winnowing process matches that of any shamanic society where “some individuals achieve modest success doing healing work and are recognized for this by a small local group” (2003: 4). Eventually only a small few become truly “great shamans” known regionally for their prowess. While some academics might argue that this comparison overlooks a considerable number of factors—like the hardships involved in shamanic initiation in many societies, where becoming a shaman is involuntary and dangerous, versus the freedom Western practitioners have to ‘try on’ shamanism in the mall of world religions—Brunton’s observation concerning the winnowing process remains valuable. So while only a handful of dedicated and disciplined Westerners who ‘try on’ shamanism go on to forge a community and steady clientele, the lessons beginners learn still impacts their daily lives. When I asked Matt Knew how and if he saw his practice interacting in his daily life, he gave a thoughtful and unexpected response. Although we had already spoken about the difficulty he experienced journeying on his own (despite his weekly attempts and listening to the drumming tapes), his response didn’t directly address his actual ritualized practice. Instead he told me about his new motorcycle. 79 Brimming with excitement, he told me about the new addition to his life that, in a way, “feels oddly spiritual.” Although he doesn’t readily identify himself as a ‘manly man,’ admitting to being more in touch with his feminine side, he decided to make the jump into the world of bikers. He took a safety class which made him feel really confident, comfortable and safe on the bike. It’s the “closest to feeling like flying!” He remarked to me about some of his solo rides. Although he hasn’t had any sort of shamanic relationship with Bison, he decided to name his bike Tatanka (Lakota for bison); a powerful machine coming it at 750ccs. When he’s riding it he appreciates that sort of power, both physical and spiritual. It reminds him what a powerful animal like a bison might feel like. In addition to the feelings he gets on the bike, Matt also reported that he found himself thinking more about all the unseen spirit animals connected to people since the workshop. Matt’s acknowledgement of the divinity—or ‘spiritual power’—pervading the everyday world around us, including people, the earth and all its creatures demonstrates a shift from a Western disenchanted worldview to a worldview called immanence. Immanence characterizes animistic religions and have certain ethical and environmental implications. In Dark Green Religion: Nature Spirituality and the Planetary Future, scholar of nature and religion Bron Taylor argues for just such a biocentric orientation and metaphysics of interconnections (2010). Taylor classifies spiritualties like animism as “dark green” as they “are often accompanied by ethical mores specifying the sorts of relationships that human beings should have, or avoid having, with nature’s diverse forces and beings” (2010: 15). While Taylor is mostly concerned with finding a postDarwinian religion without supernatural worldviews, core shamanism still fits within his 80 category of “dark green”. While perhaps not a major step towards saving the planet, core shamanism can and does promote an everyday understanding of the world as spiritually immanent. In Harner’s words, “as Westerners do shamanic journeying, they spontaneously become more aware of this sacred connectedness” (2013: 158). This awareness comes with a set of ethics concerning how to relate to the environment; perhaps a small personal step to stop abusing our natural resources. In addition to a world view of immense, core shamanism encourages practitioners to cultivate strong responsible connections with their own personal power animals and spirit guides. As mentioned earlier in relation to the New Age turn within, relationships with these spirits become highly individualized. Part of creating this relationship entails being able to ask for help and not being embarrassed to contact them with every-day trivialities, as Harner’s story about Jesus illustrates. An essential part of core shamanism is the ability of the practitioner to go straight to the source of sacred wisdom at will. As Jonson puts it (albeit somewhat cynically); they “can have and create their own healing experience; that is, can act as their own shaman”4 (2003: 246). Harner warns this should not become an excuse or an opportunity to escape responsibility by justifying your actions by saying “the spirits told me so.” Such a person, “does not yet understand that he or she is in an equal relationship with the helping spirits and commits a serious error in abdicating responsibility for consequent actions in ordinary reality” (Harner 2013: 148). Harner insist that practitioners learn how to listen and learn from their spirit teachers (2013” 135-152); practitioners may go on to incorporate that knowledge into their lives. 4 However core shamanic practitioner Sandra Ingerman, a pupil of Harner and accomplished core shamanic author, qualifies this statement in regards to soul retrieval and extraction (Johnson 2003: 347). While simple healing practices on the self are encouraged, more advanced healing can be hazardous and should be done by a fellow shamanic practitioner. 81 The next step for practitioners who want to peruse core shamanism as a vocation involves learning how to pass that information along to others—which of course means finding or creating a community to heal in. Finding a Community to Heal in A major difference between neo-shamanism and ‘traditional’ shamanism I have yet to address, involves the role of a shaman in a localized community. In a traditional shamanic society, the shaman occupies a central place in the community “as keeper of generations of accumulated knowledge and experience” (Ott 1995: 280). As Brown expresses: Among tribal and peasant peoples, shamanism takes place in a world of extraordinary social destiny. The players in communal religious dramas share a wealth of collective experience. They have been raised on the same myths, seen in the same rituals, tilled identical fields, witnessed the same moral crises. Their world is crosshatched with common dreams and shared meanings, just as it is with smoldering resentments and petty jealousies (1997: 79). In traditional settings, the shaman must carefully negotiate the social realm by using a very specific shared set of symbols. In so doing they “entered ecstatic flight not for personal gain or to foster inner growth, but to maintain a reciprocal relationship between the human and the other-than-human worlds, talk with spirits and return with healing” (Ott 1995: 280). Within this community role, shamans “manipulate highly specific, shared symbols that shape the understanding of a tightly-knot group of kinsmen and allies” (Brown 1997: 79). While they may have special access to the spirit world through discipline and practice, the community around them shares in the shamanic worldview. Contemporary America, the ‘home village’ of the core shaman, on the other hand, has no such shared understanding of the world. More specifically, the New Age milieu 82 offers a sharp contrast to the ‘traditional’ model. In their case, people will “come together for a single event—a lecture, a weekend workshop, or perhaps a personal counseling session lasting for an hour” (Brown 1997: 79), but the sense of lasting community becomes rather restricted. Although the longer workshops do have quite a potential to become significant community builders, and the Foundation “encourages the growth of ‘drumming circles,’ relatively informal groups of practitioners who meet more or less regularly to journey and work together shamanically” (Brunton 2003: 3,4). Brown continues, that while many in the New Age may hold “vaguely similar ideas about personal growth and the nature of the spirit world”, their symbolic vocabulary becomes dominated by rather abstract terms and referents “into which clients can read whatever they like” (1997: 79)5. The issue here, as Ott points out, is that many neo-shamans, “no longer belong to a culture or community embedded in a shamanic perspective” and thus may find themselves ill-equipped to deal with “a variety of physical, psychic and spiritual ailments” (1995: 280). An example of this inability may, as Brown points out, surface in regards to abstract language a neo shaman might use with their client. When Harner states that spirits “tailor” the shamanic cosmos to each individual and therefore only they can distill meaning from, how can shamanic knowledge be conveyed to the community? Indeed a whole slew of ethical questions arise around the problems of neoshamans finding and operating within a community. New shamans may find themselves “isolated from a conceptual and contextual community that has an integrated world view and mythos that is incomplete without the role of the shaman” (Ott 1995: 281). This absence of a shared conceptual community leads American anthropologist Eleanor Ott, to 5 While in this comparison Brown is referring to specifically to channeling, I find the comparison to model rather closely the core shamanist scenario. 83 ask; how can a shaman act ethically outside the bonds of a system of checks and balances a supportive and critical community provides? What makes these people shamans besides the fact that is the label they choose for themselves if they act “without a community that recognizes the new shaman as an integral part of that culture”? How in all of this, can they avoid the traps of ego inflation, lust for power, greed and other pitfalls (Ott 1995: 282)? Core shamanic practitioners who are just beginning face the last of these three questions most directly. The latter two pertain more to accomplished practitioners, and these issues will be addressed shortly. Issues of overcoming the ego (and therefore not simply willfully imagining a journey) are not only central concerns within the New Age, but also become central when core shamans stand accused of “psychologizing” shamanic healing. This brings us back to the second main critique of Harner briefly mentioned in the previous chapter: that he “psychologizes and individualizes” shamanism (Wallis 2003: 49). Harner assumes that every individual has the potential to tap into a deeply imbedded shamanic state of consciousness (SSC). Vitebsky argues neo-shamans have a “tendency to annihilate the distinction between humans and cosmos by psychologizing the realm of the religious, that is, to take the cosmos into one’s self and use it as a tool for therapizing the psyche” (2003: 287). In this equation, core shamanism contains many ties to deep seated Western understandings of the inner processes of the human mind, and bears considerable similarities with psychotherapy. Critics argue that when Harner removes the Siberian tripartite cosmological world6 from its socio-environmental context and sets it the backdrop of a shamanic ‘inner landscape,’ the figures that come to populate it instead are Jungian archetypes like ‘the teacher within.’ “Rather than traveling into a ‘real’ spirit 6 This refers to the Lower, Middle and Upper world Harner teaches Westerners to journey to. 84 world, neo-shamanic journeyers are often perceived as being trips into oneself, and ‘Soul Loss’ involves healing emotional wounds rather than the actual retrieval of someone’s lost soul” (Wallis 2003: 59). At its heart, this critique contends that Westerners are irrevocably imbued with a scientific Cartesian world-view, and thus have immense difficulty accepting an entirely ‘spiritual’ cause for illness. Instead they understand the shamanic journey as representing psychological metaphors, which is not necessarily the case for many practitioners. The healing aspect draws many to core shamanism—healing on the physical, emotional, spiritual and yes psychological levels. For Rebecca Peters, helping facilitate spiritual healing drove her to get her masters in social work. From the outset, Rebeca knew that this was how to officially “get in the door” of healing, but for her it was always something more spiritual, she identifies as a deeply empathetic person. She reports going on journeys to help her understand how to go on to help particular clients. As a therapist however, she finds that some of her clients don’t know about shamanic healing and for some of them she tries to educate them. However she finds herself trapped by the “medical limits” of her practice, and worries she could upset the State licensing board by using such untraditional methods. She doesn’t want to have two separate practices; she wishes she could integrate them, because many people are, in her opinion, desperately in need of spiritual healing. Without a community-shared cosmos, it becomes even more difficult for neo shamans to distinguish ‘ego’ from ‘actual’ journey. While Harner uses the tripartite cosmos as the cosmographic setting for westerners to make discoveries in, no two participants will report the same cosmological phenomenon. Inexperienced journeyers 85 may have difficulty recognizing or acknowledging “that the spirit who visits them may be a projection of their own mind and not a genuine vision visited on their trance mind from the spirit world.” Without a “map of the cultural, contextual mythos to which the practitioner belongs,” how can they hope to ever go “beyond one’s own shadow self” (Ott 1995: 284)? Harner, who would adamantly refute the idea that core shamanism is just a mental fabrication, responds to the worry many beginners might have that they are simply “‘making up’ what is happening in the shamanic state of consciousness” with the following antidote taken from a woman’s first time journey (2013: 81). The intention for her journey was simply to meet an animal, and she had hoped to meet an eagle. When instead she encountered a wolf, she reported being “completely surprised.” Harner goes on to state that “such encounters with the unexpected are typical of shamanic journeying” a fact that many experienced journeyers have “come to understand that normal psychological models do not easily explain the mysteries of shamans” (2013: 81). Harner takes the fact that so many Westerners have similar experiences with minimal instruction, as proof that their experiences are ‘real’ along with the considerable effectiveness practitioners report. Even if workshops and drum-circles offer journeyers a limited opportunity to ‘compare notes,’ journeyers must ultimately go it alone. In a talk given for Sounds True, a New Age multimedia publishing company, Sandra Ingerman gave some advice. As humans, she tells us, we have a need to constantly compare our experiences. Something we need to drop when in regards to journeys, otherwise some people might be lead to believe that because they weren’t having the same experiences shamanism might not be their path. “I know that we’re in a group situation, we are in a community, but it’s really important to understand that the spirits are dancing with you 86 on a very individual basis” (Sounds True, 3:08-3:23). She goes on to relate a metaphor given to her by one of her guides the Egyptian goddess Isis: imagine you’re at a ballroom dance and you’re having a really intimate dance with your partner, there’s a magic that happens when you look in their eyes, but if you’re constantly looking over your shoulder at all the other dancers the magic is broken. “It’s about trusting and honoring our own experience” (4:20-4:25). For her, shamanism is about direct revelation, and about leaving rationality at the doorstep and move into a “heart place” where the spirits can communicate. After all for Harner, shamans “see with their heart, not just the mind” with vigilance and discipline (Harner 2013: 94); and such sight comes with ethical implications. Current president of the Foundation for Shamanic Studies, Susan Mokelke has written an article titled “Ethical Considerations in Shamanic Healing” (2008), which has come to occupy the place of an ethical charter for the foundation. She begins by acknowledging that “because shamanic healing deals with the spiritual aspect of illness, the parameters of ethical practice often seem unduly broad, vague, and imprecise” Within this frame, she contends that the power of the spirit world “deserves our respect and serious consideration about where and how it is used” (Mokelke 2008: 34). This understanding reflects the idea that “power itself is neutral and available to the shaman who shapes power by his own, by her own intention, desire, motive, drive and will” (Ott 1995: 283). In order to ensure that this use of power “will in fact be healing; there is one essential ethical requirement: permission” (Mokelke 2008: 34). This permission means the “expressed, informed consent” of the client. Healing without permission is unethical and strays into the realm of sorcery. It is unethical because each person has the right and the responsibility to 87 decide what to do in matters of his or her own soul. Each person has the right to choose their path without interference or undue influence (Mokelke 2008: 34, emphasis mine). From this statement it becomes clearer, that while core shamanic practitioners do not operate within a community-shared cosmos that keeps shamans in check, their ethical stance still relies on a shared value: the sacred place of the individual. This sacralized role of the individual emphasizes the decisions, feelings and the intentions of that person. In this way ethical choices have to be made by the individual rather than ethically enforced by the community. While a shamanic practitioners may have the best intentions, it would still be unethical to perform any work that has not been expressly consented to. Mokelke offers the example: “if the request is for a ‘successful knee-replacement surgery, with minimal pain and fast recovery,’ there is no need for you to also ask for ‘release of fear,’ a competent surgeon, and so on” (2008: 36). If one is asked to perform healing on behalf of client for another entity that cannot give permission in ordinary reality (like coma patients, very young children, animals or even the spirits of an environment, say after a recent natural disaster), the shamanic practitioner must journey to the spirit of that being and ask their permission before undertaking any work. If permission is denied, or unobtainable, the work is unethical. Although core shamanism adheres strongly to a set of ethics; many practitioners still struggle with other issues surrounding an individual’s role in the community. These issues begin at the interpersonal level. Steve Summers related an incident where, on the brink of cutting someone out of his life, he received a serious warning in the Upper World. His spirit guide gave him some helpful and powerful words that moved 88 his so much he could no longer bring himself to end this particular relationship. Three weeks after he had received this message, he reported that things “could have been totally different,” and he was thoroughly relieved he still had this person around. Steve said he really appreciates “having shamanism as a recourse to deal with life issues,” sometimes things just “come up” during journeying that gives him clues to everyday things as well as relationships. Following Steve’s example, many core shamanic practitioners would take their questions about how to find community ‘straight to the source’ and journey with it. In my first drumming circle in Lakewood, I had a peculiar experience that speaks strongly to the quest for community—and the lengths some will go to in order to find it. The afternoon before my drumming circle I sat in my local rec center’s outdoor hot tub discussing my thesis with my mother over winter break7. She expressed a great deal of interest in my thesis, and I was just telling her about how a lot of scholars think shamanism is more a way of engaging with the environment than a religion, when we were interrupted. A fellow in his late-thirties with memorable sideburns leaned over and said “I don’t mean to eavesdrop, but I’ve overheard a lot of things in this hot tub, but I never thought I would hear people talking about whether or not shamanism was a religion!” He went on to introduce himself as Greg and struck up a conversation with my mother about energetic gardening, she eventually mentioned I was going to a drumming circle that night at Full Moon Books. I arrived early and wandered through the standard fair 7 Since I was born, and even before, my mom has had a considerable involvement in alterative spiritualties, taking her far beyond her Catholic school upbrining. After leaving the Hare Krishna movement when I was about seven, she dragged me (at various states of willingness) to things like the Dances for Universal Peace, aura reading, naturopathic clinics to be muscle tested for allergies, laughter yoga, as well as takinng me on New Age retreats to places like the Rockies and New Mexico to see the guru Ammaji. Suffice it to say that I feel comfortable in a New Age book store. 89 selection of crystals, candles, incense, prayer flags and singing bowls. A large space sat at the back of the bookstore in which they hosted events. I had a look at the calendar and it was packed full of events from Qi Gong, belly dancing, psychic reading, to Tarot session, Open Circle Wiccan rituals, and scrying (a form of divination using a mirror or crystal ball)—sometimes up to three classes a day. As the starting time approached, we all sat on cushions in a circle on the floor. Our leader went to the center of the circle to turn an electric candle ‘on’ as she joked about the time over the summer when the fire department was called because of some sage incense that had gotten out of hand. Now they were no longer allowed to burn things indoors. Just then a late comer came and sat next to me. I glanced over my shoulder and did a double take. I recognized those sideburns! Greg, the gentleman we had met in the hot tub earlier, had followed me here and brought two different sized shaman drums that he apparently had at home (even though he said he was less familiar with this kind of work). I was so surprised. He said he couldn’t pass up the opportunity to meet people in his neighborhood who were ‘like-minded’. After our first solo journey around the theme of setting direction for the New Year, our guide had us split up into groups for “pod journeys.” These were to be short errands into the spirit world accompanied only by our own rattling. We sat upright, with four of our backs together and touching. The question or intention of our journey—for there is always and intention—was: how do you recognize fellow companions on the path to your new direction? How do you find community? In our small groups we all shared the answers we had gained form this question. I couldn’t help but appreciate the situational parallel to this question: you find 90 community by overhearing a conversation in a hot tub and jumping at the opportunity to join in on a new circle. Although core shamanism does not provide the most supportive foundation to build community, emphasizing a ‘you’re on your own’ attitude in terms of your journeying, practitioners nonetheless find creative ways to create their own community. Indeed Wallis found that “many I have met complain that there is no ‘after-workshop’ opportunity for communal interaction. Hernerists essentially teach the practice, then you are on your own” (2003: 61). Like Rebecca, some may try to introduce neo-shamanic idioms of healing into a pre-existing therapeutic community. Some may journey for wisdom about their more intimate personal relationships, like Steve did. Yet others like Greg find community by following up leads, going to new events and trying out new practices. Luckily for neo shamanic practitioners, they have a great community-building tool at their fingertips: the Internet. I found out and signed up for the drumming circle online, the group had over five hundred members (although only about sixteen showed up for that session). Technology has come to be a huge tool for practitioners to forge a community, from message boards on the FSS site, to countless YouTube lectures and novice drumming meditations. As we shall see however, technology has come to play ambiguous parts in the life of a neo-shaman. Technology, Shamans and Getting in Touch with Nature Technology has come to occupy a tenuous position in the lives of many core shamanic practitioners. Technology has become integrated into nearly every sphere of contemporary life and many practitioners find it eminently useful; looking up the phases of the moon on their iPhones, listening to Michael Harner's Shamanic Journey Solo and 91 Double Drumming™ CD on their iPods, and preforming long distance healing over email. For some, technology can also be an obstacle, making it harder to journey away from the mental barrage of the digital age, to just “un plug” and get back in touch with nature. For the Foundation however, the ancient isn’t juxtaposed with the modern. When the FSS invites practitioners to “be on the cutting edge of a 40,000 year old technology,” they align themselves as contiguous with the ancient, merely providing an updated version of shamanism to serve the pace of the modern. This understanding of an ‘updated’ shamanism is reflected in what Mokelke distance healing. She explains that because, “shamanic healing works in a dimension beyond space and time,” it offers the possibility offering this method “method effectively at a distance, without being in the presence of the client. Lately there has been a proliferation of requests for distance shamanic healing, often communicated via email or in drumming circles” (2008: 35). It becomes possible, like many things in our age, to ‘phone-in’ a shamanic healing! Experienced shamanic practitioners learn how to journey to the client’s location in the Middle world while in nonordinary reality. Not all shamanic practitioners find technology so unproblematic. Matt struggles to find a good balance of technology in his life. He complained about being bombarded by technology at all times; from his state job’s office, his ever present iPhone, to coming home, he’s surrounded by computers. Dissatisfied, he said he wants to downgrade his iPhone and reduce the daytime hours he spends on Facebook. “I just want to simplify,” he says. He expressed a desire to “tap into something more primitive,” and appreciates the purpose, solace and animistic side shamanism provides in this regards. In his appeals to simplicity he qualifies, “but not in the ‘caveman’ sense.” 92 He explained, “We think we’re so advanced,” but yet we fail to appreciate a lot of the human aspects that goes in to things. “We have a lot to learn from the past.” Matt’s wife is a ceramic artist and his house is filled with her work. He loves the handmade aspect of it—really appreciating “the human hand of it.” A quality he extends to ancient pottery and archaeology; he finds a sort of “real magic” in their creation, and not that “Disney/Pixar magic” either. Its seems that his admiration for human construction ends at mass production, when we lose the feel of things—although he still appreciates what technology can do for us: like the power he feels riding his motorcycle. Matt’s suspicion for consumerism extends to another interesting neo-shamanic innovation: shamans with websites. Matt found it sort of bizarre to see these figures that purport to hold ancient wisdom surrounded by “the trappings of the modern world.” Despite his distaste, many people searching for alternative spirituality have found guidance and a haven in the multitude of New Age material the Internet offers. Anthropologist Michael Brown comments that “by limiting interpersonal contacts to those who share identical interests and goals, New Age workshops and Internet discussion groups create a sense of connection, of virtual community,” sometimes even stronger that the increasingly tenuous relations of the everyday world (1997: 126). This also has the unfortunate effect off limiting the community down to people with shared interests, reducing the pool pf potential newcomers. Brown even ran across a group a group of self-described “cybershamans” who purport to use the power of the Net itself, manipulating virtual space “much as a tribal shaman controls the visionary space of trance” (1997: 125). While the idea of a cyborg-shaman ala Donna Haraway may be a fascinating topic for another research project entirely, the “cybershaman” perspective 93 holds only a peripheral position in the neo-shamanic mix, as most would choose rather to realign themselves with nature. Many core shamanic practitioners can’t afford to drop everything and move out into nature, most live in urban or suburban areas. Matt, like many Americans far left of center, expresses his frustration with suburbia: “nothing about this nature is nature.” The phenomenon of urban shamanism is not unique to America and Europe; although urban centers may be core shamanisms’ “natural habitat”. Humphrey and Hurelbaatar document the phenomenon of ‘urban shamanism’ in Buryatia where it reconfigures the urban environment in a production of locality tied up in the spiritual landscape. Humphrey’s work in Ulan-Ude led her to see the ways urban shamans actualize space; “shamans vitalize urban places by transmogrification, re-envisioning them in relation to other spaces and times and turning them into sites of energy where social relations are refashioned” (Humphrey 2002: 204). By perceiving the cause of misfortune in ancestral beings, Buryat shamans shift the plane on which the city is imagined, recalibrating the city within sacred space and ancestral time, reuniting clients with spirits in the wilderness beyond the impassive Soviet city (Humphrey 2002: 207). While this may not be the same case in urban America, neo-shamans and Buryat shamans may share in the creation of new spacialities within the city. Although they do not physically change the structure of the city, they are hidden away in modern buildings and tucked into the urban terrain where they are providing unique new way of interacting with space (Hurelbaatar 2007: 142). Core shamanic workshop spaces become overwhelmed by the spirits practitioners call to join them and merge with them. 94 Most practitioners do value getting out in nature. Rebecca began down her shamanic path after a three year apprenticeship with a Native American spirituality healer in the 1980’s during which she experienced sweat lodges and vision questing. Afterward she worked as a counselor for a therapeutic wilderness program for troubled teens. The program sought to get inner city “tough as nails” kids out into the wilderness on several week-long backpacking trips. During this time Rebecca would ask for advice from her spirit guides on how to better heal the kids. She felt that being in the wilderness helped her access these “altered states” and helped her empathically reach out and help heal those kids. Steve also felt a draw to a more nature-based spiritual path. A year from the time of our interview he had taken a hike in Oregon that took him by some petroglyphs. As he sat he “really connected with it,” and to all his surroundings. “When you spend solitary time in nature,” her reflected, “all cultural stuff is put aside.” He also told me about a three day vision quest in Utah. The experience was ground breaking and shamanism affirming for him, he realized it was “a good path to explore.” During his time founds nature to operate “as a mirror into your soul—it tells you what’s going on inside.” For Steve, nature can be both devoid of “cultural stuff” while still acting as inner mirror. The West’s separation of ‘nature’ from ‘culture’, allows for both of these understandings of nature to flourish, and Western culture to remain invisible. How do core shamanic practitioners—deeply seated in Western cultural understandings—confront environmental planetary concerns, from what they would see as an ‘indigenous’ perspective? 95 Shamanism as Environmentalism: Potential for Global Healing? In traditional settings, the shaman need not contend with the non-local or the global. In today’s world however, the shaman cannot avoid the global. As Ott eloquently lays out: “in the past the shaman has found themselves at the center of a close-knit community of a single people”—in today’s globalized world, no people can afford such a luxury, all are interconnected. Thus, today’s shamans, “must break free of the limited, restricted, ethnocentric view of the past, and must regard the whole world as the home place. They must go beyond all national, cultural, and ethnic barriers. The term ‘shaman’ may no longer be able to carry the additional meaning of the person whose community is the world, and whose duty it is to engage in helping to heal the world” (Ott 1995: 285). Can there be a shaman who takes on world healing? What about a neo-shaman, a figure who has already stretched the perhaps too flexible category to its ‘breaking point’? In a recent brochure, the Foundation for Shamanic Studies declared: “In these times of chaos, crisis and hope, shamanism is a reservoir of wisdom that is as relevant to our survival today as it was to our forebears hundreds of generations ago. For Western practitioners who are inspired by ancient traditions, shamanic practice can offer healing the planet needs, but as Harner says, it is not a panacea (2013). Perhaps even if core shamans never transcend their Western cultural perspective (which they maintain they do), their practice might offer a way of “linking locality and local identity with the transcendent goal” (Duara N.d: Ch. 1, 16) in a way that might support a sustainable modernity. When asked if shamanism has the potential to affect positive change in the world, Steve Summers saw it playing an “unbelievably huge and important” role. “Because shamanic energy like ours, and like native peoples put out is basically going to be holding the world together” Steve elaborated. It will take a certain volume and momentum before 96 it can gain general acceptance. “Like the Berlin wall,” he told me, no one really knew it would happen, but the energy built up and carried through. Same thing, he went on, with the turn in the age of Enlightenment. “It can’t sustain itself; it can’t provide the answers people need.” With shamanism, some people know its benefit, energy will build up and eventually there will be a tipping point around this and other spiritual practices. Steve predicts a buildup in world religions that signals the end of the time of dogma, pointing to terrorism and fundamentalism as the extreme results of this age. This age is unsustainable he says, “the Truth about spirituality has been suppressed so long.” If we are to follow Duara’s recent works, it seems that Steve is genuinely on to something. Duara also points to the underside of Enlightenment modernity—“chiefly the freedom to treat nature and the world as objects and resources for man—leading to unsustainability” (N.d: Ch. 3, 35). Turning Max Weber’s work on its head, Duara looks to Asian modes of transcendent thought for a source of cultural sustainability in the face of environmental destruction brought on capitalist patterns of consumption. For Duara, “a sustainable modernity needs to forge once again an equilibrium among the logics in order to maintain the balance between the humans and the world” (N.d: Ch. 3, 36). In this search Duara specifically looks for a concept he calls “dialogical transcendence,” defined by “a capacity for co-existence on different levels and expressions of truth” that often took place thought debate, disputation and “by covert circulatory practices of absorption or unacknowledged ‘borrowings’ and hierarchical encompassment” (N.d: Intro, 6). Briefly, he outlines four characteristics of this concept that are both immanent and transcendent: 1) “two or more levels of truth are seen not as exclusive of each other but negotiatory. There is a frequent acknowledgement that there are different modes of 97 accessing different levels of transcendent power.” 2) Encompassment, where by and large “there is a stronger tradition of tolerance of different religions and practices and inclusion of nature and creatures.” 3) Where “access to the higher levels of transcendence is more often than not achieved by practices of cultivation and discipline” as in Foucault’s ‘games of truth.’ And finally 4) the significance of the dialectic between immanence and circulation “emerges not only from a metaphysical perspective but form a sociological one as well” (N.d: Ch. 4, 26-27). In Duara’s expansive survey of Chinese and Indian transcendent spiritualties, he perhaps overlooks the possibility that such a dialogically transcendent spirituality might already exist in the West. He does note however the possibility for popular religious groups to invoke the gap between the present order and transcendent ideals; for such groups to be “both against and from within the mainstream” (Ownby in Duara N.d: Ch. 5, 23). While not a perfect model, core shamanism certainly comes from within the mainstream and acts against it. To an extent, Duara’s four characteristics can be found in core shamanism. 1) Truth is not exclusive, anyone might access it. Harner also acknowledges different religious pathways to access what he calls the SSC. 2) Located in the New Age matrix of ‘pantheism’, core shamanism certainly encompasses a multitude of religious traditions; practitioners report meeting world religious figures such as Jesus, Mohamed, the Buddha as well as various gurus and Christian saints on equal terms, as well as a multitude of animals and nature spirits. 3) Core shamanism is mainly a set of techniques or disciplined practices and fit into the idea of ‘games of Truth.’ 4) Finally while core shamanism does include a metaphysical perspective it needs work on the 98 sociological aspect—that is core shamanism needs to be able to address social problems more directly. As alluded to earlier, the particular kind of immanence located in core shamanism promotes a worldview of immanence and biocentrism. However, as Vitebsky argues: “shamanistic cosmologies are anthropocentric, but in a certain holistic way which makes the activity of man indispensable, even while constraining it,” in this sense action “done by humans for humans” (Vitebsky 2003: 294). The difference has to do with divergent understanding of the role of the human in the environment. Biocentrism notably falls into the Western tradition of Deep Ecology, “a philosophical and social movement that seeks to de-privilege humans as the center of the planet because this has led to untold destruction and mass extinction” and “takes non-human life as an intrinsic value” (Duara N.d: Ch. 1, 14). The problem seems to be the debate this sparks between environmental preservation and sustainable development. (Duara N.d: Ch. 1, 15). That is between an untouchable nature left to its own devises and one where humans may use it respectfully and sustainably. Duara gives the following comparison to illustrate this distinction: In 1993, on the 42nd anniversary of Gandhi’s martyrdom, Medha Patkar resolved to drown herself in the filling reservoir of the Narmada dam for the sake of ‘our ultimate goal of [a] socially just and ecologically sustainable model of development.’ The Indian government prevented the martyrdom by agreeing to a set of compensation measures for the displaced. Guha has compared her attempt at martyrdom with that of Mark Dubois who chained himself to a boulder to sacrifice his life to protest the damming of the Stanislaus River in California in 1979; Dubois was saved by a helicopter search team. While both acts of intended self-sacrifice derived from commitment to a transcendent ideal, Dubois sought to rescue the wilderness; Patkar, to save livelihoods and sustainable ways of life. (N.d: Ch. 1, 37). 99 In order to become a more viable model for sustainable change, core shamanism needs to become more centered on human needs beyond the limed scope of Middle-class America. “Neo-Shamanisms, like shamanisms, have a socio-political imperative. The claims by some practitioners that particular neo-shamanic paths are unbiased, non-cultural or apolitical are erroneous and facilitate elitist avoidance of the polemics” (Wallis 2003: 227). Not to say all practitioners haven’t already, just that Harner’s staunch apolitical stance towards shamanism limits the potential for social action. Some core shamans have taken on the role of world healing. In Susan Mokelke’s she points out, “there are many kinds of ‘non-local’ healing requests one can receive: for prayers, sending light, holding a specific intention—world peace, for example—and many others” (2008: 35). However “holding intention” is not the same as political action taken in ordinary reality. There is only so far a core shamanic practitioner may go in nonordinary reality before they run into a mire of ethics. As Mokelke points out, requests to do shamanic work to influence a specific outcome in the larger world, for instance “elect a certain candidate to public office, ‘open the heart’ of a person in power, even stop a war, etc. There is no permission for shamanic work in these cases, which are beyond the scope of ethical shamanic practice and, however well-intentioned, border on sorcery” (2008: 36). As Vitebsky points out, the shamanic sense of place, at one cosmic and local, “difficult to sustain but is replaced largely by a sense that each person carries the totality of space within themselves; the impetus of the eristic element of struggle moves into new arenas such as environmental agendas” (Vitebsky 2003: 295). New Age ideology, operating in the Western context, holds the post-modernist (and arguably capitalist) belief 100 “that individuals are responsible for social ills so that social change is effected by individual action and personal development” (Vitebsky 1995 in Wallis 2003: 57). Some neo-shamans do “engage directly with the communities he [or she] works with, rather than just working alone, supporting a Greenpeace sticker or speculating an environmental apocalypse. In this sense I agree with Harvey [1997] that neo-shamans move toward ‘being properly shamanic…the world is paid extra: it is honored as a force of change…an important part of the postmodern critique of society’” (Wallis 2003: 76). In this way the neo-shaman serves as an agent for social change by beginning within, through deep exploration of the SSC only if they carry out their responsibility through social action. 101 Chapter 5—Time and Re-membering Core shamanism relies on certain outdated ideas of anthropological time that hold the “primitive” separate from the “modern,” often in a rather idealized and romanticizing way. Beyond this rather surface level critique however, core shamanism goes on to fundamentally question the ultimate nature of linear time. Practitioners may dip back into their own time streams, visiting their pasts and dabbling in prophesy. When many neoshamanic practitioners report meeting a slew of historical figures such as Benjamin Franklin, Gandhi, Merlin, Czar Nicolaus, Shakespeare, and Mother Teresa, alongside their own deceased relatives—all ideas of linearity are tangled beyond recognition. Beyond questioning the linearity of time, they also fundamentally challenge the telos of disenchantment. While some may be nostalgic for the simple days, the “primitive” days of humanity when we were all in touch with the spirit world and had yet to forget how to talk to the animals, this nostalgia may yet serve as a reservoir of inspiration practitioners may draw on to conceptualize a new future. As long as core shamanists do not forsake the very real suffering of people in ordinary reality—or overlook the lives of the indigenous peoples they are inspired by—their shamanic technologies may serve as a powerful tool of creating new ways to meet the identity challenges of a rapidly changing world. In this chapter I first examine accusations of cultural primitivism leveled at core shamanism and then go on to investigate the ways core shamanism subvert standard notions of time in ways that allow them to reconfigure their memory in innovative ways. Nostalgia for the Primitive The third critique of Harnerism accuses Western neo-shamans of reifying cultural primitivism (Wallis 2003: 49). Such a claim evokes bad memories of the genesis of 102 anthropology as a discipline in the days of high colonialism. In Johannes Fabian’s landmark book Time and the Other, he describes how Enlightenment thought enabled anthropologists to distance indigenous peoples, not only spatially, but temporally as well, and so construct their ‘object’ of study. This line of logic went: “1) Time is immanent to, hence coextensive with, the world (or nature, or the universe, depending on the argument); 2) relationships between parts of the world (in the widest sense of both natural and sociocultural entities) can be understood as temporal relations. Dispersal in space reflects directly…sequence in time” (Fabian 1983: 11-12). In other words, traveling through space was also travelling temporally to societies who lived in the past. In this sense, “all living societies were irrevocably placed on a temporal slope, a stream of Time – some upstream, some downstream” (Fabian 1983: 17). This foundation laid by anthropologists became an epistemological justification for colonialism and imperialism, where those at the summit of civilization could lend a hand to the “savages” who weren’t even allowed to occupy the same time. As Vitebsky notes, “linear time is so obviously a metaphor of domination because it moves on only one direction, so that some people will inevitably be found to be more backwards than others” (Vitebsky 2003: 277). If anything, Harner seems to be revising and inverting this position, holding indigenous knowledge above the Western, despite our so-called ‘advanced’ stage of development. Far from linear then, time seems to follow a sacred temporality, with an Edenic fall at one end and a global shift in spirituality at the other. Indeed core shamanists do seem to fixate on the idea of ancient wisdom and mysteries. Rather that Eliade’s idea that shamanism represents an ur-Christianity, core shamanists latch on to shamanism as the fundamental ur-spirituality of human kind. For 103 example in a workshop, Sandra Ingerman instructed the group; “Shamanism is the oldest spiritual practice known to human kind. And basically what we know about shamanism is that it dates back probably about 100,000 years if not more. It was a spiritual practice that was practiced by all peoples around the world” (Sounds True 0:35-0:50). The date for the beginning of shamanism given by different Harnerists seem to be bottomless, pushed further and further back. Like their slogan “Be on the cutting edge of a 40,000 year old technology” (FSS). Many ardently believe this despite the extreme difficulty of deducing a spirituality from limited archeological remains, let alone then trying to see the internal logic of the practice matches up with someone’s particular definition of ‘shamanism.’ Wallis affirms that while many “neo-shamans frequently fall foul of mistaken nostalgia for ‘primal shaman wisdom’ and reduce shamanism to its lowest common denominators,” he cautions: “it is impossible to make generalizations about neo-shamanisms…Continuity of cultural imperialism is too harsh a charge in these instances” (Wallis 2003: 67). To level these charges would be to ‘universalize and decontextualize’ right back at them. While critics of core shamanists’ use of outdated anthropological knowledge (after all Harner retired from anthropology at the beginning of the 1980’s) would find their ‘romanticizing’ nostalgia problematic, nostalgia for the primitive rather acts as a radical critique of our present. Bissell takes an interesting approach to nostalgia in his article about engaging colonial Nostalgia in urban Zanzibar. He claims nostalgia requires several factors in order to take root; mainly a linear historical time, an irretrievable sense of loss, a present moment marked as a period of decline when compared to the past, and an “object world” to seize on to (Bissell 2005: 221). He also argues that that nostalgia is a distinctive issue of modernity. Something “without which it is difficult to imagine an 104 entire critical tradition” of social theorists such as Benjamin and Weber (Bissell 2005: 223). Most poignantly, he asks: why a postcolonial state can be nostalgic for the colonial days? Similarly I would ask the question: why can technologically-advanced middle class Americans with particular standards of living, be nostalgic for the ‘primitive’ days? The conclusions Bissell reaches also pertain to my question as well. He finds that nostalgia can serve as a valuable critique of the present and provides an imaginative and critical resource for those struggling in the present to reimagine a future (Bissell 2005: 240). Core shamanism offers many practitioners an opportunity to refashion themselves. Soul Retrieval, Dismemberment and Re-memory Time plays a central role in personal transformation, as one must grapple with the past and reorient towards the future. Harner’s core shamanism offers practitioners the opportunity to escape the dominating narrative of linear time in way that allows shamanic practitioners to refashion themselves as well as help their clients reinterpret their past in therapeutic ways. Harner considers journeys to take place ‘outside of time’ (Harner 2013: 174). As mentioned before, the main reasons for journeying outside of time are for knowledge, divination, health and healing. Using Harner’s three times of transcending time: simple, simultaneous, and ecstatic cosmic union. I will look at core shamanist narratives of soul retrieval and dismemberment to see how practitioners and clients reinterpret and re-member themselves, their pasts and their futures. In a lecture given at the 2011 Science and Nonduality conference, facilitating “cutting edge dialogue between Science and Spirituality,” Michal Harner spoke on The Transcendence of Time in Shamanic Practice (scienceandnonduality). In his lecture, he outlines three types of time experienced in shamanic journeys. Type one, or “simple” 105 experiences can take three forms: an out of synch experience, where a journey may only take fifteen minutes of ordinary reality time, but the shaman may experience days, weeks or months; traveling back in to the past, up to several centuries; or the more difficult practice of journeying into the future, where an experienced shaman may see their “destiny after dying.” Type two, or “simultaneous” experiences are exemplified by the famous Australian aboriginal dreamtime where practitioners are simultaneously aware of ordinary time as well as ‘dreamtime’ or as Harner calls it “the origin of all things.” Merging also falls under type two, where a shaman merges with one of his or her helping spirits for the purposes of healing or knowledge8. Harner’s third type of time “ecstatic cosmic union” entails a deep feeling of oneness with the universe and a loss of selfindividuation. “Once you know it deeply”, Michael tells us, “you can get there at will.” While shamanic techniques can lead practitioners to attain “ecstatic cosmic union,” they also give them the tools to retrieve clients lost soul fragments. Soul loss, the affliction and soul retrieval, the remedy, relies on the understanding that all human beings have souls. That is, “a nonordinary essence within the ordinary body, whose wholeness determines the state of the individual’s physical and psychic health (in this sense, the soul acts on the body)” (Lindquist 2004:159). In Lindquist’s interpretation of the ritual of core shamanic soul retrieval: “part of the soul leaves also when we try to be what we are not, when, in neo-shamanic thinking, we abandon our authentic selves” (2004: 160). Her understanding of ‘authentic’ leads her to argue that these lost soul fragments have greater moral authority, a position I am wary of. The more common reasons for soul loss are after a traumatic physical or emotional experience, even as one practitioner told me, 8 Merging is distinct from channeling in that the shamans maintains control over the spirits in this process, and may merge at will, whereas channels are simply mediums for the spirit to communicate through. 106 waking up suddenly may cause a fragment of soul to be scared out of your body. The fragment of the soul may flee to anywhere in the three shamanic worlds, and the job shamanic practitioner must track down the fragment. Once found, “the shaman has to convince it that the situation has changed and that it is safe for the soul part to rejoin its soul. When the shaman has succeeded, he takes the soul part back to ordinary reality and blows it into the patient's chest and into the top of her head” (Lindquist 2004: 161). Experienced in this technique, Sandra Ingerman writes about it in “Tracking Lost Souls”. In order to get a sense of what soul retrieval entails from the perspective of the shamanic practitioner, I will quote at length a narration of one of her many successful journeys. This one illustrates particularly well many of the ideas embedded in this practice. In this narrative Susan is the client. She is a drug and alcohol abuse counselor, and like many counselors has enrolled in therapy herself. For some time her therapy had been stagnant, Susan was having difficulty with the metaphor of getting in touch with her ‘inner-child.’ Ingerman describes her journey: After singing my power song, I lie down next to her holding in my mind’s eye the intention of my journey. As the drumming begins, I see myself floating up through many cloud layers until, after a few moments, I am catapulted into outer space, where I tumble about in slow motion, feeling lost in a peaceful limbo of gentle, rocking sensations. Surrounded by darkness and soft sounds, I am easily lulled into an unconscious state. Suddenly I remember my mission and break out of this state by calling to Susan. I look around, and as my eyes focus, I see that the darkness is filled with many planets and shining stars. Expanding my vision, I see a child’s head peak out from what looks like a mass of rock floating in space. Drifting up to her as if in zero gravity, I relax and approach in a nonthreatening way. ‘Are you Susan?’ I ask. As the child nods, I glimpse the silver ring on the right hand [the same ring Susan wears in ordinary reality]. She looks about seven years old. ‘Susan,’ I say. ‘I am a friend who wants to go home.’ ‘No,’ she replies, ‘I don’t want to go back there.’ She looks as though she might throw a full-blown tantrum. At this point, my power animal appears beside me and shows me a scene of Susan’s life in ordinary reality at the age of seven. I see these images 107 as if I were watching an inner movie. Susan is sitting in her living room playing with dolls. Her father walks in looking bleary-eyes after a long workday. Is he just tired, or has he been drinking? I can’t tell. Unfortunately, he trips over one of Susan’s many toys. ‘How many times do I have to tell you not to leave your toys all over the living room?’ he yells. As her father came in, Susan had stood up with her hands behind her back to greet him. Now, in frustration, he slaps her. My power animal looks at me and communicates to me telepathically, ‘This is not the first time, nor will it be the last.’ Now I turn from this scene revealed to me by my guardian and look back at little Susan hiding behind the rock. Clearly she is afraid to return with me to ordinary reality. However, my guardian has a gift for speaking gently and speaking gently and reassuringly to frightened little ones. ‘Susan,’ he says, ‘remember how much you loved to walk in the woods singing to the trees? Remember how much you loved to jump rope and play ball?’ Hearing these words, Susan looks less frightened and gets a faraway look in her eyes. I join in and say, ‘You are much older now, and don’t live with your father anymore. You don’t have to worry about his hitting you again. It’s safe now Susan. Will you come home with me?’ At last she agrees to return. (Ingerman 2003: 357-8) Ingerman goes on to comment that Susan reported back that she “loves having her little girl back and that she is no longer depressed (2003: 358). The universe that Ingerman narrates, and acts upon, clearly invokes New Age imagery and the Western understanding of the known universe. As Lindquist comments, New Age phenomena blurs the lines between spirituality and psychotherapy, “perceiving the quest towards the divine as indistinguishable from that of self-development” (2004: 158). She argues that analysts must “suspend belief” of these narratives she calls “rituals of the mind.” “The neo-shamanic universe in which healing takes place comes into being through these accounts of the universe. We must take them as descriptions of phenomenological worlds that, by being narrated, performed, and acted upon, become subjectively and socially real” (Lindquist 2004: 159). However Wallis has taken offence of her use of performance. While agreeing that Western ontologies die hard, and contain totally different internal logic than Siberian soul retrieval, Wallis argues: “off-the-cuff 108 uses of ‘performance’, ‘play’ and ‘imagination’ is inappropriate when applied to shamanism and neo-shamanism because of the deep-rooted connotations they imply of theatrics, fantasy and make believe…Shamanic/neo-shamanic experiences are not makebelieve—shamans/neo-shamans believe in the ‘spirit world’ they interact with what is real, very real indeed” (Wallis 2003: 15-16). In both instances however, “what is at stake is a self” in a soul retrieval, but a self conceived in radically different terms (Lindquist 2004: 171). In any case, Ingerman’s narration illustrates one must go outside the boundaries of the self in order to recover one’s holism, a deeply intersubjective project (Lindquist 2004: 168). In relating a soul retrieval narrative to a client, the shamanic practitioner gives the client an opportunity to reweave their recollections of the past. Often the details of the shaman’s narrative become “meaningful by the patient through his [or her] traumatic childhood recollections.” (Lindquist 2004: 162). In this dovetailing of details, the client may choose to accept the shaman’s version of the past retrieved. “In this way, the patient enhances the ongoing intersubjective archaeology of memory that the shaman and the patient are exploring together” (Lindquist 2004: 163). In a sense then, Lindquist argues the shaman enlivens client’s memories, and in a way that gives them “a new past, from which their new self and a new future can be imagined” (2004: 164). Memory in this context becomes an “embodied self-process” (Lindquist 2004: 165). Lindquist compares the process of remembrance to a shamanic journey, where “the remembering self ‘visits’ the past just as the shamanic self visits nonordinary reality” the difference however lies in the shaman’s ability to dynamically change the ontological parameters of the memory, whereas the remembering self “is more like a visitor to a museum” and cannot change the 109 exposition (Lindquist 2004: 166). In life in today’s urban world, the opportunity to rewrite one’s personal history can make the world “more manageable and bearable” (Lindquist 2004: 171). Core shamanism not only gives practitioners the tools to reassemble lives, but also to take apart—dismember—themselves in order to be put back together. In one of the last chapters of Cave and Cosmos, Harner tackles the often luridly described indigenous reports of the dismemberment of the shaman’s body (2013: 173). To his surprise, when he began teaching shamanic workshops in the mid-1970s he “found that students who had never heard of shamanic dismemberment were having spontaneous dismemberment experiences,” and even reported “deep ecstasy” in these experiences. “The ‘ecstasy’ I speak of here is not just the theological term for an altered state of consciousness, but an ecstatic sense of merging with ‘everything’ and oneness with the universe” (Harner 2013: 174). This state corresponds to his third type of time. Harner records and compares Westerner’s narrations of dismemberment alongside Samoyed shaman’s experience of being boiled in a pot for three years, after which a blacksmith fished him out of the river again (2013: 174), or “Inuit shamans viewing their own bones as onlookers” (2013: 176). Core shamanic practitioners learn from their experience that they can exist without a body, and can do so at will (2013: 176). Dismemberment deconstructs the Western boundaries of the individuated self. In Judith Butler’s discussion of the ways grief expose our fundamental human vulnerability, she uses the concept of the ‘bounded being.” In Western politics, she explains, “we have to present ourselves as bounded beings—distinct, recognizable, delineated” (Butler 24). This boundedness is a part of the Western “I,” an individuation which is rather an 110 accomplishment rather than a pre-figured state (Butler 2001: 27). Grief, for her unravels boundaries of self; as she notes, “To be ec-static means, literally, to be outside oneself, and thus can have several meanings: to be transported beyond oneself by a passion, but also to be beside oneself with rage or grief” (Butler 2001: 24). In positioning dismemberment as ecstatic in the way Butler uses the term, I wish to comment on the ways the boundaries of the body are understood and transcended. In light of Butler’s statement that; “we cannot represent ourselves as merely bounded beings” as we are “periodically undone and open to be unbound” (2001: 28), it appears that core shamanic experience enforces the idea that the self is permeable, and spiritually vulnerable. Indeed, during dismemberment experiences Westerners often report a loss of individuation and have a perspective outside their bodies, as onlookers observing the spirits take apart and reassemble their bodies. According to one woman’s report: I am an amethyst skeleton with emerald eyes, a cut diamond in my forehead, and now I have a golden heart with arteries and veins of gold. There is a liver being formed for me somewhere. It is made of—it looks like ruby…I see hands putting it into place where my liver would be…I think I am being made of stones. It is strange. These stones are spirit helpers for my body. These stones are healing me. My body is being healed (2013: 182). These experiences are accompanied by feelings of power as the spirits reassemble the body. Another participant experienced her body freezing solid, dismembered on a cellular level by the heat of a supernova, followed by “melting into the universe like a Salvador Dali painting.” Later she reported, “all of a sudden, there was a pounding in my chest that was very real and very physical. They said they were giving me the heartbeat of the universe—and that I would no longer be separate in that sense.” (2013: 190). This 111 connection, “resided in me in a very present way now though this pounding in my chest (although it was always there); it is a re-awakening…a re-memberng” (2013: 191). This re-membering nuances ‘remembering’ as more than a simple exercise of memory. Re-membering includes, as Harner tells us, “the ‘remembering’ of organs, including the brain and the heart, is also an awakening from ego-centered preoccupations with one’s own personal history in ordinary reality and remembering or reconnecting with a very ancient and sacred memory” (2013: 186). “What is this remembering?” Harner goes on to ask. “It is the memory of the union with the universe that existed before we were each individualized through conception of birth into this ordinary reality. It is the memory of the cosmic consciousness from which we came and to which we will return” (2013: 186). Re-membering entails realizing sacrality and reconstructing ourselves as enchanted beings. Re-membering allows for the potential of radically transforming identities in the face of past trauma and future uncertainty. Conclusion: Re-enchanting “the Fabric of Reality” Science and spirituality have been head to head in a contest for knowledge since the Enlightenment. For over the past century, science has had the upper hand. In turn of the century England, one such contest emerged between the anthropologist E. B. Tylor and Alfred Russell Wallace over the Victorian Spiritualist movement. Wallace, the codiscoverer of natural selection converted to Spiritualism, and did not see science at all conflicting with Spiritualism. However, “according to Tylor’s theory of mental evolution, Spiritualism was a ‘survival’” that should only plague the lower classes (although the movement was mainly middle and upper class Victorians) (Pels 3003b: 257). Wallace impressively coaxed the infamous armchair anthropologist to attend a séance! Baffled, 112 Tylor’s arbitrary classification shoved ‘modern’ spiritualism into the shoes of ‘primitive’ animism. Forcing him to call it “‘a truly remarkable case of degeneration’, the possibility of which his monograph Primitive Culture was originally intended to argue out of existence (Pels 3003b: 258). This shameful admonition did little to stem Spiritualism’s rabid fashionability. Rather than a ‘degeneration’ of rational thought Spiritualism shows us that we have never been totally disenchanted in the first place. Peter Pels reveals the ways in which science and the occult both worked towards a common end. Wallace critiqued Tylor for his “account book epistemology” in which “item by item” ethnography reduced to statistics and easily condensed facts to slots in tabular space, “that allows one to see, in one glance, the extent of their serial equivalence” (Pels 2003b: 264). Spiritualism lost all its potential for experimental rupture for Wallace in “this world of statistical equivalences, a world of homogenous time-space” (2003b: 264). In their different forms of what Pels refers to as “super-vision,” both “were trying to undo the barrier that separates human knowledge from a direct knowledge of past or future. By clairvoyance or panoptic classification—by consulting the spirits of the deceased, or the spirit of reason, about the future—both Wallace and Tylor tried to abolish the invisibility of time” (Pels 3003b: 268). For Pels, science and spiritualism are two forms of distinctly modern divination. Michael Harner undoubtedly finds himself in a similar situation, ridiculed by the scientific and academic community for betraying the spirits of reason. Harner even evokes Wallis’ plight in his conclusion to Cave and Cosmos, citing his example and his exception to “the position of science that spirits do not exist [which] has quite unscientifically been a matter of faith, ironically resembling religious dogma” (2013: 113 198). Steve Summers echoes this line of thought. “Our culture is influenced by the age of Enlightenment of reason, beginning a condition where if one can’t reason then one is worthless.” In the age of reason, Steve explains, animals and the environment have no value besides utility. This rational led us to our perilous positing at the edge of the Anthropocene’s precipice. “Shamanism flies in the face of that idea,” said Steve. Indeed even Vitebsky admits that for many Westerners, shamanism becomes “part of their own radical-self critique”, and a sign of indigenous knowledge infiltrating and subverting the knowledge of industrial society (Vitebsky 2003: 277). Neo shamanism not only levels critiques, but also provides idioms for practitioners to refashion themselves in rapidly changing times. A shamanic worldview allows for an eristic understanding change, one filled with human effort and labor. “Crucially, a shamanic world-view acknowledges that the process of the world can be held only within partial control, and at the cost of continual struggle” (Vitebsky 2003: 290). In a talk titled “Changing times are awakening our Spirit and Light” given by Sandra Ingerman, she frames our current struggle in these terms: If you think about a weaving, our whole fabric of reality right now is unweaving. It’s dissolving right in front of our eves, and in all change, every change involves a death. But what scares people, and what people really need to remember is that death is not an end; it’s a beginning. It’s a transition. It’s a transition into something new, a healthier way of life. And so what has been unhealthy and disharmonious for the planet itself is starting to unweave. And then for us, it’s to be the new dreamers, to start to weave that new fabric of reality into being, that creates more of a harmonious life for ourselves on a personal level, but on a global and planetary level too. (Lilou Mace 2011: 1:30-2:26, emphasis mine) In this statement Sandra grasps the frightening and arduous nature of change, but also power of human mutability, flexibility and transformation in the face of calamity. In order to tap into the this powerful ability to re-weave or rather ‘re-member’ ourselves 114 Sandra, like many neo-shamans insist we much start acknowledging our ‘innate’ human spirituality. “I think that in the modern Western world, what happened is we became so focused on our bodies and our minds, the rational, you know, is what’s encouraged and is what’s validated. And we’ve forgotten that we’re body, mind and spirit” (2:35-2:57). Not to suggest however, that we must totally forgo the rational. A re-enchanted modernity would challenge given notions of linear progress that drives neoliberal economies to produce and consume more and more. Yet, transitioning is can be the hardest part. As Sandra elaborates: But the spiritual is an invisible part, it’s not tangible. And in a world that validates the rational, everybody goes, ‘well how do you validate that?’ you know, ‘what are the results? What’s the scientific proof?’ And on some levels, if we look at it, its science, science is wonderful and has brought beautiful things to the world, and modern technology we love it! But science really has created an unsustainable environment for us. So the time is calling for us to tap into that spiritual wisdom, those deep mysteries, to be able to be able to come up with the solutions of how to reweave that fabric into being” (Lilou Mace 2011, emphasis mine). In the Comaroff’s terms, core shamanism consists of an “experimental technology intended to affect the flow of power in the universe” (1993: xxx). It is a technology lodged in the moral discourse and social diagnosis of modernity. Is it not true that in the face of the crisis of sustainability, humans need a little magic and not an inconsiderably few miracles? But where are the shamans and the neo-shamans in all of this? This figure will likely continue in its elusive role, but has proven to be as adaptive and resilient as ever. Although “the many roles of the ancient shaman will never totally be acted out again,” Eleanor Ott tells us, as the world is too much altered and changed. Yet there are aspects of the ancient world that are still valid today because all people share basic 115 human needs for the nourishment and well-being of the body, mind, and spirit. So long as these aspects of life remain ephemeral and uncertain, there will always be a place for the person who can provide relief from the illnesses, pains and insecurities that humans suffer. The challenge for the new shamans today, if indeed there must be new shamans, its to maintain a strong personal ethical balance, free of self-delusion (1995: 285). I ultimately argue that the neo-shamanic community has many contributions to make, both to society and to the legacy of shamans world-wide and through time whose traditions they draw upon. Wallis uses the idea of ‘extra-pay’ to indicate the ways in which neo-shamanic communities make contributions to this legacy. Such numerous returning benefits to shamanisms include, “using the term sensitively, raising awareness of the injustices faced by indigenous communities, and undergoing experiences that are directly comparable with indigenous shamanisms” (Wallis 2003: 68) While not all shamanic practitioners who decide to take Harner’s beginning course go on to ‘pay shamanism extra’ I am hopeful that the deposits made by those who do can help counteract those who dawn the role in ignorance of the responsibility it comes with. The movement remains young, and has many challenges to face. They nonetheless represent a hopeful sign the tidewaters of modernity may tip toward reenchantment and sustainability. Not all are so positive however. Vitebsky staunchly believes their quest must be unsuccessful, since the elements they seek to revive— community, epistemological leanings toward animistic presuppositions about spirits, and historical continuity from ancient times—are absent in their society. Indeed the very “absence of these elements is a necessary condition for the existence of the movement which would aim to restore them” (Vitebsky 2003: 292). Some people are able to break through these Western conditions though, and live a holistic lifestyle. As Wallis reminds us, Harnerism does not represent the whole story of neo-shamanism, “where some neo116 shamans may universalize, romanticize or psychologies shamanisms, others use shamanic experience actively to transform their Western world-views towards shamanic modes of perception, understanding, and ways of interaction with their worlds” (2003: 77). In such cases it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish so called “neo” shamans from their non-“neo” counter parts. With their assistance we can re-member other ways of being for ourselves, and tirelessly to continue to “re-weave the fabric of reality” in evermore enchanting ways. 117 Bibliography: Atkinson, Jane Monnig 1992 Shamanisms Today. 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