PROLOGUE

When I was a student-novitiate in anthropology in the 1970s, shamanism was something of an unknown and esoteric subject among the general public. Even among anthropologists the topic of shamanism was disparaged. That doyen of postmodern anthropologists, Clifford Geertz, famously declared that shamanism was one of those ‘dessicated types’ or ‘insipid categories’ by means of which ethnographers of religion ‘devitalize their data’ (1975, 122). A cultural transformation has taken place over the past two decades, and there has been a renaissance in studies of shamanism. For not only has shamanism – as a social phenomenon – become an important topic of research in the fields of anthropology and religious studies, but it is also now widely practised as a mode of spiritual or self-enlightenment among New Age adherents.

In recent years, however, postmodern anthropologists have been telling us that as shamanism is a ‘made-up, modern, western category’ (in case you didn't know!) and as it does not exist as a ‘unitary and homogeneous’ phenomenon, we should stop talking about ‘shamanism’ and instead write only of ‘shamanisms’ or ‘shamanry’ or ‘shamanizing’. By these criteria they themselves should stop writing about ‘anthropology’, ‘western’, ‘time’, and the ‘Evenki’! Such semantic quibbles and banal nominalism seem to be unnecessary and stultifying and cannot be sustained even by their advocates. Indeed, far from being an ‘outmoded western category’ as postmodern anthropologists suppose, shamanism has become an important research topic as well as showing a surprising capacity to adapt to new urban contexts (Saladin D'Anglure 1996, 507).