Self, Spirits and Authority

Belief in spirits and in viruses are equatable because neither can be seen but the effects can be felt
- the local has inspired global movements
- Joseph Campbell was an American mythologist, writer and lecturer, best known for his work in comparative mythology and comparative religion; his novel The Hero With A Thousand Faces expounds the regular feature in many stories of a hero leading others to safety based on his subject areas
- visible tension between reductive, naturalising vs contextualising, and phenomenological approaches
- on this topic, Lambek says: 1. context is neceassary for contemporary experience to be mediated by past myth models and 2. individual intentions are externalised and given voice

Star Wars as a tale of shamanic journey
- Leia as the sould to be saved
- by the shaman apprentice that is Obi Wan
- who is aided by Chewbacca

A definition of spirit possession
from Boddy, J. (1994) "Spirit Posession Revisited: Beyond Instrumentality" in Annual Review of Anth. 23: 407-34
"..commonly refers to the hold exerted over a human being by external forces or entities more powerful than she. These forces may be ancestors or divinities, ghosts of foreign origin, or entities both ontotlogically and ethnically alien"
- this denial of agency does not fit with Western notions of self-control

A definition of shamanism
- origin: Tunguistic (Siberian) word; meaning a mediator between the human world and the world of the spirits, between the living and the dead, and between animals and human society (D'Anglure 1996)

Historical development
- particular interest towards Siberian Shamanism by early romantic intellectuals opposed to scientific rationality, such as Diderot, Herder, Goethe
- regarded as the intermediary stage between magic and religion (late 19th century)
- French sociological school saw shamanism as having derived from totemism

Techniques of ecstasy
- ethnographically led psychological approaches 
- Eliade (sociologist of myth) (1951) produced a comprehensive, historical account influenced by religious psychology

Contemporary literature
- mental states that shamonism constitutes
- ecstasy and !Kung dances release opium peptides which, when transferred to other people by sweat?, spreads/shares the experience
- psychologizing - mental illness, ASC, SSC
- neuropsychological - shamans and endorphins
- social psychological approaches: see Sikala
- shamanism as therapy - placebo, psychotherapeutic, metaphorical

Neo-shamanism
- from abnormal psychology to universal psychobiological capacities - 1960s popular understandings of consciousness
- oldest form of religion since hunter-gatherer subsistence method was predominant
- Harner (1990) The Way of the Shaman: Harner worked with the head-hunters in Ecuador and wanted to make their practise more acessible and better understood (see The Foundation for Shamanic Studies)

Persecution of shamans
- 17th century Swedish Lappland (Sami people), shaman's drums were confiscated
- Russian Orthodox Church had classified 'shamanic spirits' as maleficient daemons of lower rank
- then an enforced mass baptism was sanctioned by Peter the Great
- but this failed to eradicate the practice, esp as many people had traditionally turned to shamanic practitioners for advice, and choosing not to reject this custom kept the practices alive

Spirit Possession
- may be inherently pathological
- Lewis suggests that to declare being possessed may be instrumental, e.g. status-deprived individuals could use it as a guise for their (unconscious?) protests
- Crapanzano sees it as a creative idiom for articulatin a certain range of experiences..
- accroding to Obeyesekere cultural symbols inform individual exp/psychoanalytical processes
- Lambek puts forward the notion that each genre is coupled with its own interpretative conventions, e.g. spirit possession does not tend to be a welcomed activity in tales

Ethnography forces us to examine the descriptive power of spirit possession
- the declaration of interaction between a person and spirit(s) is contestable
- Tevolo (ritual of herbal medicine applied by a specialist) also describes/expounds inappropriate behaviour, but reality of spirits is not questioned

Lambek: from disease to discourse
- critique of naturalist paradigms; recolonising terrain for culture and cultural explanations
- trance vs possession
- violates our cultural distinctions
- possession as text that is the experience symbolically articulated
- ongoing, historically located process consituting self and objectivity
- we shouldn't try to theorise the events of spirit possession, but observe and analyalyse the context in which they occur

Amerindian shamanism as a critique of Western epistemology
- perspectivism - the ways humans, animals and spirits see both themselves and each other
- recognise the Amerindian profound cosmological inclusiveness of animals (ecosophic knowledge)
- constructivist viewpoint - the point of view creates the object
- Amerindian view - point of view creates the subject

from a clip of Medicine Men Go Wild
(medical anthropologist twins based at UCL)
- sure hallucinogens provoke creative thoughts and grand ideas, but these have never been shared/transmitted
- too fleeting to be properly explained or documented

Solopsism - philosophical idea that the self is all a person can be sure exists
- 'I think, therefore I am'
- Amerindian thought on the other hand - it exists, therefore it thinks

Shamanism and Episemology (see De Castro)
- 'Our traditional problem in the West is how to connect and universalize: individual substances are given, while relations have to be made. The Amerindian problem is how to separate and particularize: relations are given, while substances must be defined.'
- sluicing poisonous leaves into the river to asphyxiate the fish and make them easier to catch is a traditional fishing method of the Achuar
- fish poison is defined be cultural relativity, and is a substance that mixes nature and culture
- cultural relativity introduces culture into nature