Religious specialists: shamanism

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Religious specialists shamanism

• 14.4.2005

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Readings

• Lewis, I. 1986. Shaman's Career (Chapter 6). In
  Religion in Context Cults and Charisma.
• Turner, V.  2001 1989. Religious Specialists.
  (In Lehmann and Myers)

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Discussion topics

• Society and religious specialization
• Typology of religious specialists
• Weber, Lessa Vogt, Firth
• Charisma
• Weber, Worsley
• Ideal types of religious specialists
• Priest, prophet, shaman, medium, witch/sorcerer
• Study of shamanism
• Historical overview
• Study of spirit possession
• Lewis

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Society and religious specialization

• Increased complexity of society
• -gt increase of the degree of religious
  specialization
• -gt contraction in the domain of religion in
  social life
• gt Different modes of religious specialization
  (Turner)
• Simple societies
• Complex societies
• Medium-scale societies

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Society and religious specialization

• Simple societies
• every adult has some religious functions
• Elders/men have most
• Women more than in developed societies
• Religious specialization
• knowledge of herbs
• skill in witchcraft
• capacity to enter a state of trance
• Still part-time / spare-time specialization

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Society and religious specialization

• Complex societies
• religion no longer all-pervasive
• acquires a contractual and associational
  character
• Believers
• may choose the form and extent of their religious
  participation
• Religious specialists
• specialization on the organizational level
• routinization of tasks
• a hierarchy of authority and function
• gt numerous types and ranks of religious
  specialists

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Typology of religious specialists

• A wide variety
• shamans, gurus, priests, prophets, diviners,
  seers, mediums, witches, sorcerers, and magicians
  
• Most general analytical distinction
• spontaneous religious specialists
• institutional religious specialists
• Weber
• Prophet vs priest
• Lessa Vogt
• Shaman vs priest
• Raymond Firth
• inspirational functionaries vs institutional
  functionaries

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Weber

• Prophet vs priest
• The Sociology of Religion (part of Economy and
  Society)
• The essence of the role
• Prophet
• personal call
• Priest
• office
• Basis for the authority
• Prophet
• revelation and personal charisma
• charismatic authority
• Priest
• service in a sacred tradition
• traditional or legal-rational authority

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Weber

• Prophet
• Renewer or founder of religion
• "a force for dynamic social change."
• Priest
• upholds the status quo
• preaches "an older revelation"
• associated with
• religious institution (regular and permanent)
• religious doctrine as a rational system of
  religious concepts

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Lessa Vogt

• Shaman vs priest
• Type of society
• Shamanism
• food-gathering societies
• Priestly cult organizations
• food-producing (agricultural) societies
• Religious powers
• Shaman
• powers by a divine stroke
• Priest
• powers inherited
• derived from the body of standardized ritual
  knowledge

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Lessa Vogt

• Religious practice
• Shaman
• personal communication with a supernatural being
• Priest
• no necessary face-to-face relationship with the
  spirit world
• required competence in conducting ritual
• The nature of rituals
• Shamanistic rites
• Personal, non-calendrical
• contingent upon occasions of mishap and illness
• Priestly rites
• public, calendrical
• performed for the benefit of a whole village or
  community

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Raymond Firth

• Inspirational vs institutional functionaries
• Inspirational functionaries
• Mediums, shamans and prophets
• subtypes of a single type
• I-thou relationship with deities or spirits.
• communicate in a person-to-person manner
• conduct a séance
• Institutional functionaries
• priests
• I-it relationship with the transhuman
• institution between the priest and the deity
• preside over rite

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Charisma

• Greek charis gift
• Sociological / anthropological usage
• Personal
• Emphasis on individual qualities and attributes
  (Weber)
• Relational
• Emphasis on interaction between leaders and
  followers (Worsley)

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Weber on charisma

• Personal quality
• 'a certain quality of an individual personality
  by virtue of which he is set apart from ordinary
  men and treated as endowed with supernatural,
  superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional
  powers or qualities.
• Ascribed vs achieved charisma
• Ascribed charisma ("primary charisma")
• inherent faculty
• Achieved charisma
• "produced artificially in an object or person
  through some extraordinary means"
• Charismatic authority
• vs. traditional or legal-rational authority
• based on display of personal gifts, extraordinary
  appeal
• routinization of charisma

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Worsley on charisma

• The Trumpet Shall Sound (1968)
• Emphasis on the personality of the leader is
  problematic
• Charismatic leadership
• primarily relational and symbolic
• only secondarily personal
• Charisma
• born of social interaction
• a relationship between leader and followers
• an attributed not ascribed quality
• a recognition of a group

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Worsley on charisma

• Leader
• a symbolizer, catalyst, and message-bearer
• embodies values in which the followers have an
  interest
• Relevant message
• strikes responsive chords in his/her audience
  (eg. Hitler)
• plays upon some intellectual or emotional
  predispositions
• speaks to the unsatisfied wants in the hearers
• offers some promise of eventual fulfillment (eg.
  cargo)
• presents concrete and visible ways of achievement
• Signs and proofs

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Religious specialists ideal types

• Ideal types
• Priest
• Prophet
• Shaman
• Medium
• Witch/sorcerer
• In reality
• Coexistent
• Overlapping

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Priest

• Cover term
• rabbis, ministers, mullahs, imams etc
• A formal role in a formal system
• conservative force
• part of a religious organization
• does not have supernatural powers
• performs religious rituals
• keeper of the sacred law and tradition
• "part of a carefully scripted drama, he cannot be
  an innovator" (Allison 1987)
• Mostly in large-scale societies

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Prophet

• Non-institutional, informal religious leader
• motivated by a calling of a higher power
• authority from the divine call and personal
  charisma
• Set outside traditional or legal religious
  structures
• upsets the status quo
• advocating change (religion, and/or society)
• renovator, improviser, initiator, revitalizer,
  revolutionary
• Common during times of deep cultural stress and
  anxiety

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Shaman

• a religious entrepreneur
• acts for human clients
• control spirits
• To diagnose, heal, divine, and bewitch
• in direct contact with the spirit world
• gt special powers
• usually through a trance state
• not part of an organized religion
• common in small-scale societies
• "medicine man" "witchdoctor"

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Shaman

• Shweder
• study of the Zinacanteco Indians of Chiapas,
  Mexico (1972)
• shamans
• practitioners who refuse to say "I don't know,"
  
• when confronted by events that baffle the common
  man
• create order from chaos
• the role of shaman in society
• both "interpretive and constructive"

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Medium

• a human oracle
• possessed by the spiritual being (eg. ancestral
  spirit)
• that communicates directly with the living
• unlike shaman
• possessed permanently
• unlike a prophet
• does "not recount a revelation"
• speaks "publicly with the very voice of the god
  himself"
• eg.
• Delphi oracle
• Tibetan oracles
• Spiritist Mediums of Brazil
• New Age Channelers

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Witch/sorcerer

• Witches and sorcerers
• in many languages
• no distinction between sorcery and witchcraft
  (eg. Estonian)
• both use spiritual power to inflict harm on
  others
• Evans-Pritchard
• first made the conceptual distinction
• witch
• the power is internal
• unintentional
• sorcerer
• use of external power of magical rites and
  paraphernalia
• conscious

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Religious specialists reality

• Coexistence in a community
• eg. priests, shamans, mediums in many societies
• all is well priest
• misfortune - shaman or medium
• Combination of functions
• eg. the Saora of India (von Furer-Haimendorf,
  1989)
• priests - maintain the local shrines
• shamans or mediums - ordain new priests

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Shaman/Shamanism

• shaman
• Originally Evenki (Tungus) term
• Sanskrit origin?
• 'shramanism'
• Pali samana gt sanskrit shramana
• samanas ascetics
• Russian sources
• First used in the 17th century
• shamanism
• a derivative term of the 18th century

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Shaman/Shamanism

• More general usage
• 19th century
• Replaced many earlier terms
• curandero, wizard, medicine man, jongleur,
  Gaulker etc
• shaman/shamanism
• Etic categories, too general (also witch
  doctor)
• Great variety of methods and local terms
• Eg. sangoma
• in Zulu, Xhosa, and Swazi societies of Southern
  Africa

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Shaman/shamanism

• Objection to the concept (esp. shamanism)
• Clifford Geertz
• dry and insipid category
• Robert Spencer
• residual category
• Michael Taussig
• Post-modernist perspective
• radical deconstruction of shamanism
• modern construct created in the West
• brings together otherwise diverse practices

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Shaman/shamanism

• Taussig
• Shamanism is is a made up, modern, Western
  category, an artful reification of disparate
  practices, snatches of folklore and overaching
  folklorizations, residues of long established
  myths intermingled with the politics of academic
  departments, curricula, conferences, journal
  juries and articles and funding agencies.
• Atkinson
• shamanisms
• Shamanisms Today (Annual Review of
  Anthropology, 1993)

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Studies of shamanism

• 18th and early 19th centuries
• Earliest interest by Enlightenment and Romantic
  intellectuals
• Diderot, Herder and Goethe
• an expression of irrationalism
• the source of art, esotericism, religion and
  medicine
• opposed to the scientific rationality
• Evolutionism
• Shamanism as a collective phenomenon
• socio-religious system
• an intermediary stage between magic and religion

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Studies of shamanism

• First half of the 20th century
• Increase in ethnographic research in the field
• Loss of conceptual clarity
• Psychologism
• focus on personality of the shaman
• Esp. Russian/Soviet and American anthropology
• Shirokogoroff Psychomental Complex of the Tungus
  (1935)
• In all the Tungu languages this refers to
  persons of both sexes who have mastered the
  spirits, who at will can introduce these spirits
  into themselves and use their power over the
  spirits in their own interests, and particularly
  in helping other people, who suffer from
  spirits.

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Studies of shamanism

• Ethnocentric and pejorative accounts
• Levy-Bruhl (1910, 1922) and Radin (1937)
• non-Westerners "pre-logical," "neurotic," and
  "psychotic."
• Christian scholars and missiologists
• Nida Smalley Introducing Animism (1959)
• shamans, sorcerers, and mediums
• "the lunatic fringe of society."
• "psychotic, mentally deranged, emotionally
  unstable"

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Studies of shamanism

• Mircea Eliade Shamanism Archaic Techniques of
  Ecstasy (1951)
• Revival of comparative analysis
• Pulling together research on shamanism from all
  over the world
• Still the best introduction to shamanism
• Emphasis on
• trance / ecstasy
• The specific element of shamanism is not the
  incorporation of spirits by the shamans, but the
  ecstasy provoked by the ascension to the sky or
  the descent into the hell
• gt Criticism
• reduction of a symbolic system to psychological
  state
• too selective in his choice of sources

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Studies of shamanism

• 1960s and 1970s
• Interest in shamanism outside academic circles
• return to alternative medicines
• development of religious sects
• psychedelic experiences associated with drugs
• Psychological anthropology
• Study of altered states of consciousness (ASC)
• Ethnopsychiatry
• Study of shamanism as a therapeutic cure
• gt neo-shamanism and schools of shamanic training
  
• Eg. Castañeda
• Ethnobotany and medical anthropology
• Study of hallucinogens
• Eg. M. Harner Hallucinogens and Shamanism (1973)

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Religious use of drugs

• Lewis Lewin (19 c. German toxicologist)
• Scientific categorization of drugs
• 1) Hypnotica (eg. chlorals, sulphonol)
• sedatives or sleep producers
• 2) Excitania (all plants containing caffeine,
  nicotine)
• mental stimulants
• 3) Euphoria (eg. morphine and cocaine)
• induce mental and physical comfort
• 4) Phantastica (eg. mescal buttons, hashish)
• Hallucinogens, bringing on visions and
  illusions
• 5) Inebrientia (eg. alcohol, ether)
• cerebral excitation followed by a state of
  depression

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Religious use of drugs

• Reasons for religious drug use
• Divining, gaining supernatural knowledge,
  contacting spirits
• Relationship with accusation in witchcraft
• Salem witch trials in Massachusetts (1692)
• 200 accused of witchcraft, 20 executed
• yeast spores on wheat -gt bread
• contain LSD-like drug
• Anthropologists and drugs
• Michael Harner The Way of the Shaman (1980)
• ayahuasca session among the Conibo Indians of
  Peru
• Napoleon Chagnon Yanomamö The Fierce People
  (1977)
• use of ebene snuff

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Studies of shamanism

• 1980s
• BrowmanSchwartz Spirits, Shamans, and Stars
  (1979)
• three sections preoccupations of the 1980s
• magico-religious use of psychotropic drugs
• shamanic therapies
• analysis of shamanic symbols
• 1990s
• revival in numerous regions of the world (eg.
  Siberia)
• urban forms of shamanism

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Spirit possession

• Characteristics
• humans temporarily inhabited by particular
  spirits
• voice and agency are attributed to the sprit
  rather than the host
• Speaking in tongues (glossolalia)
• The host
• not held accountable for what occurs
• may claim subsequently to have no knowledge of it
• The spirits
• 'riders' of human beings
• generally discrete persons
• ancestors, foreigners, historical figures, gods,
  other species

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Spirit possession

• Geographical occurrence
• Africa, the African diaspora
• Middle East, Pacific, South and Southeast Asia
• Common cultural forms
• Zar (Northeast Africa)
• Bori (Hausa)
• Vodou (Haiti)
• Umbanda and Candomblé (Brazil)

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Spirit possession

• Erika Bourguignon Possession (1976)
• study of 488 different societies from all over
  the world
• 74 - some kind of possession belief
• 52 - had possession trance ceremonies
• Non-trance possession
• change in character
• Trance possession
• momentary change in consciousness

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Spirit possession

• Societies with non-trance possession
• small nomadic hunter-gather societies
• decisions are made locally
• no class structure
• Societies with trance possession
• larger sedentary agricultural societies
• hierarchy beyond local level
• class structure
• Greenbaum (1973)
• correlation between
• trance possession and social stratification in
  subsaharan Africa
• rigid social structure
• gt gives impetus to trance
• an expression of conflict and stress.

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Ioan Lewis

• Ecstatic Religion An Anthopological Study of
  Spirit Possession and Shamanism (1971)
• Religion in Context Cults and Charisma (1986)
• Studies of shamanism and spirit possession
• Functionalist approach (influenced by Durkheim)
• link between religion and the social
  environment
• Certain social conditions gt ecstatic emphasis in
  religion
• Critique of various other approaches
• Eg. Lévi-Straussian structuralism
• ignores the social context

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Ioan Lewis

• spirit possession vs spirit mediumship vs
  shamanism
• Spirit possession
• abnormal behavior interpreted by a spirit in the
  body
• Mediumship
• communication with spirits through a channel
• Shamanism
• control of the spirits

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Ioan Lewis

• Possession gt shamanism
• categorical distinction does not appear to be
  useful
• some type of ecstatic experience
• prerequisite to becoming a shaman
• eg. Zinacanteco Indians
• appearance of gods and ancestors through dreams
  and visions
• Eg. Brazilian spiritism
• being possessed by various orixas (lesser gods)
• Eg. Korean spiritism
• sinbyong ("possession sickness")

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Lewis

• spirit-possession
• religion of the oppressed
• protest cults
• For subordinate individuals who lack political
  influence
• Eg. women
• two broad types spirit-possesion
• peripheral possession cults
• endanger prevailing political, moral, and
  religious beliefs
• evil, undesirable, immoral, and dangerous spirits
  (demons)
• central possession cults
• support prevailing political, moral, and
  religious order
• sympathetic spirits (gods)

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Lewis

• The ecstatic tendency related to external
  pressure
• Social stability gt Ritualistic religion
• Social instability gt ecstatic religions
• Criticism of Mary Douglas
• Douglas
• lack of structure gt ecstatic religion
• Lewis
• oppressive excess of structure gt ecstatic
  religion

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Lewis

• Somali culture
• rigid norms
• permits no hope of social change.
• gt spirit possession
• a refuge for the weak and injured
• Enables
• to vent the feelings of dissatisfaction
• to gain some kind of compensation

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Lewis

• Women
• controlled by their husbands
• no hope of divorce
• gt victims of spirit possession
• husband has to present gifts and luxury items
• Young men
• care for camels
• isolated from the group
• forced to hunger and loneliness
• gt victims of spirit possession
• possession ceremony
• puts them at the center of the community's
  attention
• reintegration with their social group