Part 2 of 'The Concept of Shamanism'

Just realised that there's some stuff from Hamayon's essay that I missed last time due to it being in the endnotes:

p.24- the definition of shamanism in the work of Mircea Eliade (an influential writer who had a somewhat Golden Bough-ish approach to comparative mythology) was basically phenomenological. Cards on the table: I really don't get what phenomenology IS, as a philosophical movement. Wikipedia seems to be saying it's basically about trying to describe how people experience stuff like consciousness in a way that's anti-reductionist and based on philosophical intuitions (i.e., phenomenologists aren't happy to settle for approach which attempts to teach us something about consciousness by focusing on description of how human neural impulses work- they would prefer to go for an approach which involves philosophers discussing the issue from first principles without relying on empirical research).

Unless I'm misreading the summary, it sounds like there isn't much that phenomenologists could possibly do to make me disagree with them more (at least, not unless they started arguing that our aperception of the subjectivity within another lived-body can only be fully intuited once we radically come to terms with the noema of our lifeworld by killing kittens with flamethrowers). So I wouldn't be massively surprised if you could see a similar line of thought in Eliade, because I'm not a big fan of Eliade either.

Hamayon argues that Eliade's definition of shamanism is "composed of a mere addition of features from which no operative definition can be made". Eliade apparently also wrote in his diary that he hoped his writings on shamanism would be "read by poets, playwrights, literary critics, painters. Would they not better benefit from this reading than orientalists and historians of religions?" (I wouldn't have a problem with this, if only we could just agree to call him a poet or a metaphysical philosopher or something, instead of pushing his writings as stuff which is meant to provide an etic description of what different cultures actually say about shamanism in practice). Hamayon reckons that Eliade only became popular by influencing non-specialists whose ideas then trickled back into academia (rather than by directly convincing researchers that he was onto something). Don't know if that's true.

p.25 Hamayon notes that shamanism is often symbolically linked to hunting (even in cases where the individuals or cultures who practice shamanism don't actually hunt very much these days). Hamayon argues that this is because both shamanism and hunting are linked to a specific type of "relation to the world" (by which I think she means a particular kind of social organisation based on a particular kind of subsistence strategy). I'm leaning towards the idea that subsistence strategies might have more impact on Westerners' views of a culture than they have on the culture itself, but I don't yet know enough about the topic to be confident about making a definitive statement to that effect.

Also, useful quote:
"The contributors of the present book rightly criticise any trance-based understanding of shamanism. I have also done so, on the ground [sic] of the following arguments: "Trance" is used to cover a full range of modes of behaviour that go from convulsions to lethargy, as well as a full range of states of mind that go from loss of consciousness to focused awareness. In native languages the shaman's behaviour is defined as a rule by reference to his meeting spirits, i.e. in terms of symbolic representations. In the multifarious uses of 'trance', a link is implicitly made between physical behaviour, a state of mind and a cultural attitude. This link presupposes a determinist standpoint that is unacceptable as such to most scholars. In addition, the idea that a a given pattern of behaviour implies a given state of mind and vice versa would make social life impossible!"

Hamayon is also dubious about the idea (which I've seen in several places) that people in many cultures share the idea of a tripartite universe- that is, a world where living humans live on one plane, in between a heaven/overworld and a hell/underworld (where the different levels may or may not be assumed to imply a moral hierarchy. Sometimes there's also some sort of World Tree or Axis Mundi or something connecting the different levels). Hamayon thinks this sort of mental image is less universal than some argue. For example, in the Tungus culture that gave rise to the word 'shaman', they apparently haven't traditionally believed in any sort of vertical organisation of planes. According to Hamayon's book La chass a l'âme, when Siberian shamans talk about visiting different "floors" or "levels" of the world, they're usually just talking about nomadic journeys to different bits of the steppe. She reckons that any Siberian shamans who DO talk in terms of an underworld and overworld do so because they're trying to reconcile their indigenous belief systems with Russian Christianity and/or Chinese Buddhism (in a way which other people in their societies often don't find very convincing). I obviously haven't read the original source here, due to having abysmal French, but I'd be interested to see if anyone else backs this up.

p.29- Also she uses the word 'experiential', which is useful because I was trying to think of what the word for something like this yesterday and failed to come up with anything. " 'Experiential' is neither empirical (the fruit of observation) nor experimental (the results of laboratory experiment'. 'Experiential' refers strictly to what the individual feels at the moment and sometimes reports afterwards."

Video of the Day: Korean mudang (shamans) being possessed by changun (warrior-general spirits)

Interesting thing about this one: the mudang being interviewed about how they stand on the edges of chaktu (a type of knife) describe how doing this makes them feel "very good". They don't seem to be talking about what I would normally think of as a stereotypical sort of 'ecstasy' state. They just look cheerful, which is unexpected (by which I mean, unexpected for me, someone who has extremely limited experience when it comes to standing on knives. At least if we're talking about doing it intentionally.)

Also: damn, that armour's pretty.

Review of 'The Concept of Shamanism: uses and abuses' (part 1)

(edited by Henri-Paul Francfort and Roberte N. Hamayon in collaboration with Paul G. Bahn, 2001, Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó)

So I'm currently reading two different books on shamanism. They take different approaches- Piers Vitebsky's Shamanism is an image-heavy book which feels like it probably works better as an intro book for someone without a social science background (in that it's interesting and well-written and very very pretty, but not as thoroughly referenced as I'd like). The Concept of Shamanism, on the other hand, is an essay collection with a very analytical approach. So far I'm enjoying the latter one more.

If you take a Popperian view of science (which I do), the vast majority of ethnographies are non-scientific studies. Ethnographic data is usually presented in a way that makes it impossible for anyone else to try to test or replicate it. There are many reasons for this. Obviously there's a major issue in that ethnographers tend to work alone and focus very much on local variation (so if someone else feels your ethnography doesn't sound plausible, then even if they have considerable knowledge of the culture in question it's often possible to just say "well, my understanding is very specific to the individuals I spoke to and the time period when I was there. If the study had been done in a slightly different place, at a different time, or with a different researcher, then differences in interpretation would be inevitable."

This sort of attitude would seem to make the idea of reliable replication of results pretty problematic (although it is sometimes possible to go back and re-interview the specific people who acted as informants for an earlier anthropologist, and see if their statements still seem to support the original researcher's conclusions. Derek Freeman's research with Margaret Mead's informants would be an obvious example, although I'm not massively familiar with his work and I'm aware that some people feel he ends up resorting to ad hominems against Mead- I'll have to go read it properly sometime).

However, I think that even if we accept the methodological limitations of research on human belief systems, there are ways in which it's possible to pursue scientific research by phrasing your theories in terms of testable predictions. Not many people actually seem interested in doing this- which is fair enough, and if researchers are interested in a pursuing a humanities approach rather than a scientific one then it makes total sense. What REALLY annoys me, though, is when someone advances a theory which seems to involve testable hypotheses, but then when you actually engage with their research it often turns out that their hypotheses aren't really testable. Or worse, they're testable as initially phrased, but any apparently contradictory evidence is met by attempts by researchers to redefine terms or otherwise move the goalposts in order to save the theory from falsification. That just seems to render the entire debate completely pointless.

Caveat: I'm not totally up to date on the theory that's under question in this book. I read Clottes and Lewis-Williams' The Shamans of Prehistory (1998) about three years ago, but I certainly wouldn't claim to be an expert on that book and I haven't read more recent stuff like Lewis-Williams and David Pearce's Inside the Neolithic Mind (2005). So I'm basically going on the reviews presented by the various essay authors in The Concept of Shamanism (who were published in 2001, so theoretically Lewis-Williams & co. could have penned a devastating rebuttal by now for all I know). So that aside: here's a summary of what I understand to be the core theory that's being proposed:

• 'Shamanism' is a word which applies to customs practiced in a very broad range of cultures throughout human history. 'Shamanism' here seems to mean localised belief systems inspired by certain kinds of altered states of consciousness (ASCs) experienced on a regular basis by individual ritual practitioners.
• These ASCs are often induced by drugs, but they can also be caused by other things such as sensory deprivation.
• There are certain types of vision/hallucination which frequently arise from shamanic ASCs, regardless of the cultural context. This is because all humans share the same sort of brain structure and visual system, and these can internally generate certain kinds of images (e.g. entoptic phenomena).
• Shamanic ASCs often inspire certain types of artwork (thus leading to certain patterns of images which can be found in art from a broad range of cultures).
• Therefore, if we find art which fits these patterns, we can infer that the culture which produced it practiced shamanism.
• European Paleolithic cave art and San rock art show these patterns. Therefore the (long-dead) people who created these works were shamans.
  

The contributors to this volume are archaeologists and anthropologists who are sceptical of this theory.

The anthology kicks off with 'Shamanism: symbolic system, human capability and Western ideology' by Roberte Nicole Hamayon (p.1-27). Hamayon instantly earns my love by starting off with a quote from Unended Quest (I am a Popper fangirl). The quote in question goes:

"Never let yourself be goaded into taking seriously problems about words and their meanings. What must be taken seriously are questions of facts and assertions about facts: theories and hypotheses, the problems they solve and the problems they raise." (cited p.1).

This is an especially important point in discussions on 'shamanism', where there's rarely a clear consensus over exactly what the word means, and so you tend to wind up with a series of overlapping but non-equivalent definitions plus a substantial number of researchers who don't really care whether the word has a precise definition as long as it can be used in a sort of broad, common-sense, "but at least everyone knows roughly what I mean by this" sort of way (see p.5, 8).

Hamayon is concerned that popular interest in shamanism (from Western subcultures like the New Age and Pagan movements, or people interested in experimenting with drugs) is in danger of distorting research on shamanism in other cultures (by providing an incentive for people to attach the shamanism-label to a very wide range of practices, and then only emphasise the elements of those practices which accord with the vague mental image which non-specialists have of 'shamanism').

A couple of key quotes here:

"At the risk of oversimplifying the debate, we may put it in the straightforward manner it was initially put no matter how obsolete this may appear today: Is shamanism basically and ultimately the expression of a type of religion or worldview or of a type of personality or inner innate disposition? If the former, is it characteristic of certain types of societies and cultures or an elementary constituent of religious systems in general? If the latter, is it specific to a certain type of individuals or inherent in human beings?" (p.4)

"On the basis of this [Korean shamanism] and other similar examples, it has come to be largely admitted that shamanism is inherently oral, not as a reflection of illiteracy and backwardness but as a condition for its specific practice. According to tradition, shamanic efficacy comes from being in 'direct contact' with spirits and acting under their inspiration. It is precisely for this reason that shamanic practice is claimed to be an object of personalised performance exclusively, basically incompatible with the very idea of doctrine and, more broadly, with the idea of fixed ways of expression." (although written songs have been used to train beginner Korean shamans, established Korean shamans argue these songs lack efficacy and so an experienced shaman should only sing songs they have learned directly from their spirits). (p.10)

Hamayon thinks 'shamanism' appeals to some modern Westerners for the following reasons:

• it sounds 'exotic' and 'primitive', and therefore represents a rebellion against Western culture
• people feel it's connected with 'nature' and therefore environmentalism
• it sounds relatively vague and non-culturally specific. Therefore a commitment to 'shamanism' does not not necessarily imply a commitment to any particular culture or way of life (which is good from a memetic transmission perspective, because a definition of 'shamanism' which implied that to be a 'shaman' one must be a hunter-gatherer, for example, would make it much harder for Westerners to participate).
• shamanism is conceptualised as a phenomenon which encompasses a wide range of cultural variation but has some universal features (such as a specific type of ASC which humans from any culture can learn to induce). This implies that if you want to become a shaman, it's not strictly necessary to learn about specific types of non-Western cultures, or be initiated into an existing non-Western tradition. You can theoretically tap into the universal features of the shamanic experience from the comfort of your own home and culture.
• sometimes these universal features of shamanism are speculated as being connected to universal features of the human brain. This relatively vague reference to neurology helps reassure some people that 'shamanism's efficacy has scientific backing.
• 'shamans' are conceived as individuals, working outside of any institutional structure, who are capable of 'mastering' spirits. This means that, compared to some other religious options on offer to Westerners, 'shamanism' seems to make fewer demands which might conflict with individual's existing desires or moral beliefs (p.12-13)

Hamayon then goes on to argue that members of the Western counter-culture are using the concept of 'shamanism' as a tool to reshape Western culture into a form which they find more compatible with their own interests. In some areas, they have been remarkably successful in doing so- for example, concern for the environment and for individual health and well-being are values which began mainly as features of the counter-culture, but have since become widely accepted by mainstream Western society. Hamayon states quotes Bernard Dupuy: "mysticism is the form taken by a religion when new tendencies refuse to break out of the shell of the old religious system to create a new one but instead remain confined within its limits." (cited p.13).

Hamayon believes that the type of shamanism practiced in the West is more individualistic than non-Western 'shamanisms', more internalised within individuals (due to Western conceptualisations of 'ASC' and 'trance' rather than an emphasis on ritual performance), and less focused on spirits (especially spirits with specific roles, such as embodiments of discrete aspects of the natural environment, or of individual ancestors) (p.14). I agree that the Western shamanic movement seems a lot more individualistic than non-Western shamanisms- I can't really comment on the other two points, since I don't know enough about Western shamanism to say what would count as 'typical'.

This leads to my one major area of concern with Hamayon's very intriguing essay: she doesn't make it very clear how much direct experience she's had with the Western shamanism movement. Has she done any textual research, interviews, or participant observation? If not, then does she have a good reason why we should take her arguments on trust? Her description of Western shamanism feels relatively plausible to me, but I'm definitely not an expert and so I'm not convinced that 'plausible to me' is good enough.

For example, she cites Weber's comment that ecstatic states, spirit possession, and ASCs caused by drugs or dancing play the same role for 'peasants' that 'mysticism' plays for intellectuals (see p.14). Setting aside the fact that my level of respect for many of Weber's generalisations is not terribly high, I'm not convinced that this statement really applies to much of the Western shamanism movement. It sounds like it might be a reasonable argument in relation to most of Western history (although I'm not a historian so I don't really know), but it seems to me that most of the people who are drawn to the Western shamanic movement are attracted by the idea that it involves ASCs and/or drugs and/or dancing and physical ritual- this is something which serves to distinguish it from most of the other options on offer. I also don't understand what Weber's supposed to be implying by the word 'mysticism' in this context- earlier we had a quote from Dupuy which seemed to be saying that 'mysticism' is basically just any attempt to radically reform a religious tradition from the inside, rather than starting a whole new tradition in order to achieve the sort of religious framework that you want. Where does that imply 'intellectualism' or a lack of emphasis on ASCs and dancing? Possibly Weber has a narrower definition of 'mysticism' that addresses these questions, but if so it would have been helpful for Hamayon to mention it.

All in all, though, it's an interesting essay- definitely food for thought.

Reading 'Shamanisms Today', part 2

Picking up from where we left off...

Researchers may feel that ASCs are the thing that sets shamans apart from their clients- but presence of ASCs is not necessarily an important defining feature of shamans from an emic perspective. (p.313)

Some people argue that shamanism gives people access to a type of revelatory information which mainstream Western society lacks (from the context given, I'm uncertain exactly what sort of information we're talking about, but I'm guessing it's information about how to handle individuals' transitions between different social roles, like from childhood to adulthood). R. Ridington argues that actually, it's not that the modern West lacks this information, but that the distribution of this information is centralised. This means that our society de-emphasises the importance of individual transformations (since we've got institutions that are designed to make them routine), and focuses instead societal or political transformations (since these affect institutions, and thus millions of individual people) (p.312). Or, I think that's what he's saying. I'll have to chase up the original article.

A. Siikala argues that a shaman communicating with spirit is basically a person taking on different roles, using techniques which in the West are referred to as 'hypnosis' (p.312). Noll apparently argues that the defining feature of shamans is not that they see visions, per se, but the fact that they go into a controlled visionary state and then actively engage with the visions they encounter (presumably in contrast to, say, possessed people) (p.313). Dreams may be very important in shamanic practice, but their role hasn't really been emphasised by most social scientists (at least, not since Tylor) (p.313). Atkinson argues that Western social scientists have a tendency to stress the idea of shamanism as a kind of alternative medicine because this makes it easier for us to understand (whereas if you stress the idea of shamanism as a religious practice, then more social scientists are likely to see it as weird and scary).

Additionally, comparing shamans to doctors or psychotherapists can sometimes be a way of mocking the latter professions, by suggesting they're not as 'scientific' as they think they are (to be fair, some psychotherapists, notably Jungians, have responded by trying to apply shamanic insights to their own theories) (p.313-4). Various people have offered explanations for why shamanic healing works- the usual ones involve psychotherapy and/or the placebo effect, although Kulcsar has apparently suggested that !Kung trancers might treat people by way of sweating out opiates and then rubbing them into their patients' skin (p.313). An increasing number of researchers are reacting against the tendency to portray shamans as ethereal and otherworldly, by looking at how they have reacted to political movements like colonialism and ethnic conflict (p.315-7).

Some people define 'shamans' as people who adopt a relatively commanding attitude towards the spirits they communicate with; giving them instructions in an authoritative way rather than adopting a supplicatory attitude towards them. This is supposed to be what distinguishes them from other kinds of people who communicate with supernatural beings, like priests or possession mediums. Eliade went so far as to say that shamanism never involves possession and always includes some sort of out-of-body experience or belief in magical flight. The difficulty with this is that Lewis' research suggests that the archetypal shamans (the Tungus ritualists from whom we get the name) do actually engage in all the stuff Eliade said we needed to exclude from the definition of 'shamanism' (p.317).

Still, it's possible to argue that shamanism involves more of a commanding attitude towards spirits than possession cults* do. However, it sounds like a possible upshot of this approach is that women who communicate with spirits are less likely to be labelled 'shamans', at least when researchers are working in cultures where women are expected to adopt a relatively meek and placatory attitude in public (whether they are talking to mortal men or to spirits). It seems to me like the same might hold for cultures where men are generally expected to adopt a concilliatory sort of attitude towards others (I don't know enough about Japan to state this with confidence, but maybe this would be one example- perhaps this is why Shinto ritualists are referred to as 'priests' rather than 'shamans'?) (p.317).

Another implication of this line of thought is that it may undermine the argument that possession cults represent a unique opportunity for marginal people to seize some power for themselves (by claiming to be possessed by a very powerful and authoritative spirit). This argument seems to be largely based on the idea that a disproportionate number of possessed people are female, poor, transgendered or in some other way disqualified for most routes to power. If the only difference between possession cults and shamanism is the degree to which a researcher sees their leaders as acting in an authoritative way, then there may be a tendency to label cults made up of women and poor people as 'possession cults', while cults composed of men and local political leaders are referred to as 'shamanism'. That could imply that the whole thing is a definitional tautology, not a causation issue- that is, rather than it being the case that possession cults attract marginal people, or that marginalised cults place a greater emphasis on possession, it could just be that marginal cults get labelled as 'possession cults' rather than 'shamanism' at the point where researchers get involved.

Having said this, I need to get around to reading Lewis' Ecstatic Religion, so maybe I'm overstating the critique- for example, if it turned out that there's some sort of well-defined difference between 'possession' and 'shamanic trance', then the basic argument would still hold. The argument would also hold up if it turned out that in most cultures low-status people can get away with speaking authoritatively to spirits, whether or not they're considered to be 'possessed' at the time (cf p.317, although I'm not sure to what extent Atkinson would agree with what I'm saying here).

There's also the complicating factor that women in many cultures HAVE been labelled as 'shamans' by researchers (e.g. see Koreans, Inuit, Taiwanese shamans, p.317-8). I'd be interested in knowing whether these researchers are also using the 'person who speaks authoritatively to spirits' definition of 'shaman'. It might be that different regional specialists have gotten into the habit of using the word in different ways- or, alternatively, I could just be talking rubbish.

One person who apparently DOES use a definition of 'shamanism' at odds with the 'authoritative spirit-communicator' model is Taussig, who apparently emphasises the idea of 'shamans' being people whose main role involves disrupting and decentering power structures (it's not clear from this whether he thinks this is shamanism's emic raison d'etre, either from the perspective of shamans or their clients; or if he thinks that this is just the EFFECT which shamanism has on a culture, regardless of whether shamans intend it). Atkinson argues that this needs to be balanced against shamans' efforts to maintain order, whether this is at an individual, household or community level (p.319).

So, to sum up, the definitions of 'shaman' identified by this article would seem to be:

-a specific kind of ritualist found in certain cultures in Siberia and perhaps also Central Asia.
-an outdated and potentially ethnocentric term for ritualists from any culture who strike Westerners as 'exotic'
-someone who has a mental illness but lives in a culture which does not recognise it as such (this definition seems to have fallen out of favour)
-any ritualist who experiences ASCs.
-a ritualist who experiences a specific kind of ASC called an SSC (which may be objectively identifiable via brain scanning)
-someone who uses hypnosis to take on different roles or alter egos as part of their religious practice
-someone who goes into a controlled trance and actively engages with the spirits they encounter
-someone who adopts a commanding attitude when communicating with spirits
-the above, plus also must have out-of-body experiences and/or the sensation of magical flight. Does not usually experience spirit possession
-a ritualist who disrupts and decentres power structures



*Just to reiterate: 'cult' here isn't meant in the pejorative sense, just in the sense of a subset of a wider religious tradition.

Reading 'Shamanisms Today' by Jane Monnig Atkinson (Part 1)

(1992, Annual Review of Anthropology, 21, pp.307-30)

I'm in a pedantic mood, so this summary may drag on quite a bit. Also, the review article is very good, but it's almost 20 years old now. I'm going to stick with the present tense when discussing the current state of play, but obviously it's possible that the debate has shifted since then.

Geertz and Taussig felt shamanism was a dead category. Various people have tried deconstructing it, pointing out that there's a lot of variation between different kinds of shaman in Siberia (where the word comes from), let alone in the world as a whole. People have also argued that it's probably better to analyse ritualists in the context of their own culture and the people who attend their rituals, rather than comparing them to fellow 'shamans' who might have lived a century ago and on a different continent). As an upshot, D.H. Holmberg argues that 'shamanism' should no longer be considered worth discussing as a global phenomenon, in the same way that 'totemism' no longer is. This kind of sentiment means that people who are still interested in doing comparative studies on shamanism often struggle to find the kind of case studies they need- not because people aren't researching the kind of rituals they're interested in, but because this research doesn't use the word 'shaman' and so mostly ends up getting read by regional specialists (p.307-9).

However, Atkinson reckons that since the 80's we've seen a resurgence of interest in 'shamanism' from various disciplines, especially psychology. Crucially, psychologists have argued that it doesn't matter how much cultural variation there is within 'shamanism', because the phenomenon is unified on a neurological level. That is, 'shamans' can be defined as people who pursue a particular kind of ASC (altered state of consciousness)- it doesn't matter if they pursue it in different ways, or construct different kinds of religious model to explain it. Similar views are held by many of the Westerners who are interested in exploring ASCs themselves (e.g. people in the Pagan and New Age movements) (p.308).

Meanwhile, those ethnographers who continue use the term 'shamanism' apparently often do so simply because they find it a convenient gloss for some specific local practice. These ethnographers aren't necessarily going to be interested in asking questions like "to what extent do the people I call 'shamans' resemble the people who other researchers have labelled 'shamans'?" (p.309)

There's a debate that went on for several decades over whether shamans in other cultures are experiencing what our culture normally calls 'symptoms of a mental disorder', such as schizophrenic delusions. It looks like that debate has now petered out, with the general consensus being 'no'- or at least, it's not as straightforward as saying shamanism is a symptom of mental illness in and of itself (although in some cultures the rate of mental disorders may be higher among shamans than among the community at large, e.g. because people with chronic health problems like mental illness are more likely to study shamanic techniques in order to treat the problem) (p.310).

So these days, 'shamanism' is still seen as being defined by abnormal mental states, but they're referred to as 'ASCs' or 'trance' rather than 'symptoms of mental illness' (Atkinson thinks these terms were chosen because they sound more academic than Eliade's term, 'ecstasy'). Some researchers go so far as to say that all shamans experience a specific kind of ASC, which Harner refers to as an SSC ('shamanic state of consciousness'), while other researchers argue this same ASC is characteristic of all religious experiences, not just shamanic ones. Others treat the words 'shamanism' and 'ASC' as being basically synonymous. Meanwhile, R. Walsh has attempted to to categorise ASCs involved in shamanism and compare them to those involved in yoga or Buddhist meditation. There is relatively little consensus between these researchers over whether ASCs associated with 'shamanism' should be considered distinct from those associated with 'possession' (p.310).

There's been some speculation that shamanism might be associated with a specific type of unusual brain state (P.A. Wright goes so far as to claim that he can identify a specific brain state associated with SSC and distinct from those associated with possession, although it sounds like at the time of Atkinson's articles, it remained to be seen whether this result would be replicated). In general, it sounds like the amount of actual experimental research on the brains of practicing shamans is relatively low in comparison to the amount of speculation about what might be going on, but maybe that's been corrected by now (p.311).

Obviously all this focus on individual mental states, especially individual brain states, is going to trigger the anti-reductionism response in anthropologists, who are going to want to read the behaviour in terms of the sociocultural context. Atkinson herself argues that "to analyze shamanism primarily as a trance phenomenon is akin to analyzing marriage solely as a
function of reproductive biology" (p.311).

Weber's 'Sociology of Religion' part 2: magicians, prophets and priests

The main reason I wanted to read this book (apart from wanting the opportunity to bitch about it on the internet) is Weber's description of a framework for categorising different kinds of religious specialist.

Systems of etic categorisation are always going to be a bit problematic in the social sciences. It doesn't take a genius to see that even in the best taxonomies there are going to be intermediate cases that don't quite fit into any category. This means that some people are inevitably going to start questioning the point of categorising the thing at all.

Every now and again you get arguments to the effect that human social constructs are inherently unclassifiable. This position generally seems to be adopted after someone has the startling revelation that People Are Complicated (this is a scientific fact). Maybe this is just me being anal-retentive and Teacherite at things, but I say suck it up, social sciences. Biologists seem able to cope with the level of complexity that comes with bog-standard taxonomy (God help them if the issue in question involves asexual species or anything at all to do with conservation). As long as people make an effort to flag up the fact that there are going to be ambiguous cases, a flawed typology is often going to be more useful than no typology at all, at least when it comes to the initial job of getting our heads around the problem.

Notice that I said 'often'.

I'm in two minds about Weber's framework. His main dichotomy is between priests and magicians, and as such is basically similar to the priest vs shaman distinction which you see in a bunch of other people's work*. There's also the 'prophet' category, which doesn't seem to have received much attention in anthropology (maybe because they seem to be world-changing figures who only come along every once in a while, and ethnography tends to be better suited to studying more routine aspects of religion).

This is Weber's framework, as I understand it:

Priests: people who are permanently employed by a large stable organisation which they are expected to support. They have professional qualifications which are earned by studying to become an expert on specialist knowledge (e.g. formal theology). They are also supposed to be experts on "the practical problems involved in the cure of souls" (p.30), which means general pastoral care and also whatever rituals are deemed necessary for salvation (e.g. confession, baptism, etc). In addition, priests worship gods (i.e. they adopt a relatively humble attitude towards supernatural beings which are seen as being worthy of respect). Oh, Weber also labels their training as "rational" (p.29)- as I said in last post, I have no idea what we're meant to assume that word means in this context.


Magicians: are generally "self-employed" (p.29), and tend to act alone in rituals which are not held according to any fixed schedule. Their qualifications are based entirely on personal charisma, which is made manifest through the ability to perform various types of magic. They're emically deemed to gain this charisma via a ritual rebirth plus training in "purely empirical lore" (p.29). Weber doesn't mention if he thinks they do pastoral/salvation work. They focus not on worshipping gods, but on coercing and charming demons. And yes, Weber has decided that the way they operate is in some sense "irrational" (p.29).


Prophets: a person who makes it their personal mission to spearhead a campaign for religious change (whether this is subsequently viewed as an attempt to start a new religion, or just to revitalise an old one). They may focus on preaching and giving advice on how people can live better lives (in which case Weber calls them 'ethical prophets'), or on just making themselves a paragon who others can try to emulate (in which case he calls them 'exemplary prophets'). They generally don't have steady jobs or live in a stable household; they may travel around a lot, beg or do a series of temporary jobs.


'Magicians' seem to be the least exclusive category in Weber's eyes. Priests may do magic (p.28)- e.g., given what Weber has to say about magicians and demon-coercion, I'd guess that Catholic exorcisms would count as 'magic' under this system. Successful prophets almost always do magic, or at least have magic attributed to them: they have so much charisma that people would tend to present them as BEST MAGICIAN EVER even if they tried to deny the title. I suspect Weber felt that Christ's resurrection may fall into this category (p.78).

I'm sure that there are going to be at least some things that don't fit into any of these categories, and the specific words 'priest' and 'magician' are probably unhelpful here (especially since, as is often the case with these issues, we start running into serious theoretical difficulties when we try to work the modern-day Pagan movement into the model). The question is, does this describe any sort of general tendency? For example, do people who have fulltime jobs as religious specialists have a greater tendency to present their supernatural patrons as uncoercable?

It would be interesting to see if anyone's tried to systematically test that idea- sadly, since Weber isn't phrasing his ideas in terms of testable hypotheses, it sounds like it would be quite a lot of work.



*For those who care, I've so far seen a binary priest/shaman typology come up in: W.A. Lessa and E.Z. Zogt's Reader in Comparative Religion (1958)

Victor Turner's essay 'Religious Specialists' (originally 1972, but republished in Magic, Witchcraft and Religion: an anthropological study of the supernatural: fourth edition, 1997)

Morton Klass' Ordered Universes (1995)

A somewhat similar typology is proposed in Fredrik Barth's 'The Guru and the Conjurer' (1990, Man, 25, 4, pp.640-653). This article went on to inspire Harvey Whitehouse to write extensively on the same topic; I think his most persuasive article on the issue is still 'Memorable Religion' (1992, Man, 27, 3, pp.777-797), but if you don't have access to that journal then Arguments and Icons is probably the next best bet.