Reading: 'The Poison in the Ink Bottle' by Cherry Leonardi

Leonardi, Cherry, 2007, 'The Poison in the Ink Bottle: poison cases and the moral economy of knowledge in 1930s Equatoria, Sudan', Journal of Eastern African Studies, 1:1, pp.34-56


This is a really interesting article, but it's a lot to assimilate at once (I think this is probably because it's from the Journal of Eastern African Studies, and so makes the reasonable assumption that people reading it already have a decent grasp of Eastern African history- that probably makes it easier to chunk the rest of the argument).

The article's a response to the body of work surrounding the idea that colonised peoples will often attempt to use magic as a means of political resistance. This is an interesting way to look at the issue, and Leonardi gets a lot of mileage out of it- but she also notes limitations in the way the idea is typically applied, and suggests a new angle we could consider.

Let's start off with Evans-Pritchard's witchcraft vs sorcery framework. Evans-Pritchard (also working in Sudan, though with different ethnic groups and time periods than Leonardi) argued that some cultures draw an important distinction between two kind of magic, which for convenience he labelled 'witchcraft' and 'sorcery'. He defined 'witchcraft' as being basically psychic-style powers which come from within the witch (e.g. the Azande, one of the ethnic groups he studied, held that certain people are born with a special organ inside them, and this gives them the ability to curse people). Conversely, he defined 'sorcery' as magical techniques which involve using tools or substances external to the individual (as with traditions like alchemy and herbalism). These definitions are an endless source of frustration to those of us sad people who grew up on stuff like Pratchett and Dungeons and Dragons (which define 'sorcery' as something very much internal to the individual and 'witchcraft' as something which usually benefits from external tools); but as academic terms they're a useful starting point.

Obviously, as with any other binary dichotomy in the social sciences, it's going to be more complicated than that in practice. For example, in Kajo Kaji (the part of Sudan Leonardi studied), people don't seem to have been very worried about Azande-style witchcraft (i.e., the idea that if someone feels resentful enough towards you, they can somehow cause you to suffer from bad luck even if they don't consciously choose to hurt you). Instead, they were concerned about poisoners: people who take some dangerous external substance and apply it to someone else's food or skin in order to kill them.

So, on the face of things, this seems to be a pretty straightforward case of 'sorcery'. But the waters are muddied by the fact that the local Kuku people apparently believed that the propensity to poison is to some extent inborn or fixed- that is, certain individuals or families just have a sort of inbuilt tendency to try to poison people. Such people were thought to be mostly women- so, while men were sometimes also accused of poisoning, it was believed "that certain women have, and pass on to their daughters, a propensity to poison which is inborn, involuntary and indiscriminate". Such women, however, were believed to require access to means and opportunity in order to satisfy this inbuilt tendency- one British DC reports that Kuku women learned to poison after hearing "tales about the Relli, a tribe away to the south,notorious for their poisonous sorceries" (p.37). Other reports state that knowledge of the art of nyanya poisoning was passed from mother to daughter, "with the threat that if a daughter refused to practise she would become infertile" (p.45).

This is interesting, and I'm wondering how this set of beliefs was perceived by the British (given that we're concerned with the 1930s, and so the idea that certain families or ethnic groups just had an inborn tendency towards malice was kind of a hot topic at the time). Leonardi reports that reports written by the colonisers "largely accepted that women at least intended to poison", even if they were sceptical that local poisoning techniques really worked (p.37). Leonardi goes on to say that this attitude "is unsurprising in the context of the belief among officials that native women were ‘whores at heart’ [...] Female poisoners were reported to poison only the ‘menfolk’, using this threat in the ‘battle of the sexes’. Officials puzzled by their apparent willingness to confess to poisoning recognised that, ‘the power wielded by a reputed poisoner is a bait she cannot resist’." (p.42)

Kuku poisoning cases are an ambiguous category in another way too- while they seem to fill pretty similar social niches as 'sorcery' (and to some extent 'witchcraft' as well), they're not always an overtly 'magical' thing. This made it difficult for the colonial legal system to work out how to deal with them. In the West, we're used to drawing the distinction between 'real' poisons (which can be recognised via forensic analysis) and 'magical' substances (which are said to harm people by means outside any known scientific principle). The legal system is very interested in accusations involving the former, not interested at all in accusations involving the latter. This distinction doesn't seem to have existed in traditional Kuku cultures. This created ambiguity over the role of the colonial courts.

Lots more stuff going on here, so I think I'll shunt responsibility onto my future self. Tune in for part 2!

Reading: 'Mao: the Unknown Story'

So I've managed to snag a copy of Mao: the Unknown Story (Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, 2005, London: Random House) from some very nice people who are allegedly trying to downsize their library. It's an 800-page monster, so I'm chipping away at it quite slowly right now. First impressions of Part 1: pretty good. Most of it feels meticulously researched, drawing on a really wide range of sources (it did take a decade to write, so that seems reasonable). It does a good job of highlighting areas where the evidence they've uncovered seems to deviate significantly from the official Chinese Communist Party version. Given that there do seem to be a significant number of Maoists around in the world today, I'd like to think that this book would give some of them food for thought (although in practice, I doubt that many of the pro-Communist people in South Asia or Peru are likely to have access to a copy in a relevant language).

One concern I have at the moment is that whenever the author's are analysing Mao's own opinions on anything, they always seem to leap to the interpretation which shows him in the worst possible light (I realise that this may sound like a bit of a weird statement given that we're talking about the guy who may have broken the record for "greatest number of own citizens dead during peacetime"). My take on this is that if we're going to properly engage with Mao's regime then it makes sense to consider the possibility that he had some positive traits (I'm not going to say 'redeeming traits' here, because I don't think that 'killed millions of people' is something one can really consider a personality trait on the same scale as 'was nice to his secretary and liked dogs a lot'. But I do think that it makes sense for a biography of Hitler to consider both of these things- I think the film 'Downfall'/'Der Untergang' does this quite well).

An example of this in the first few chapters is Mao's attitude towards violence. From what Chang and Halliday say, Mao was initially a relatively moderate political activist (as in, when fellow members of the nascent Chinese Communist Party (CCP) suggested that they should try to spark open conflict between peasants and landlords, Mao argued against this. He's quoted here (p.37) as saying that when this approach had been tried in other parts of China, the landlords had quickly re-established control and banned the local Communist organisations, leading the local peasantry to conclude that Communism was good for nothing but stirring up pointless trouble. He's also reported to have argued that "there is nothing to be done among the poor peasants and it is necessary to establish ties with landowners and gentry" (this is a paraphrase of Mao's views, as quoted from a primary source written by another Communist). This attitude got him into a certain amount of trouble with the CCP's Russian financial backers, since it was counter to Soviet policy (p.39).

However, Mao's position seems to have suddenly shifted in early 1927, when he went on a brief trip to the Hunan countryside, where he met grassroots peasant activists who had begun publically assaulting and humiliating local landowners and gentry (sometimes going as far as beating them to death). At this point (as Mao himself later acknowledged), his attitude changed dramatically- he said that witnessing the violence made him feel "a kind of ecstasy never experienced before... It is wonderful!" When he was asked what should be done over the fact that people had been killed, his response was "one or two beaten to death, no big deal." (p.41) When he returned from the countryside, he was active in encouraging rural agitators to adopt violent tactics (the teaching text he used, which he may well have written himself, suggested slicing people's ankle tendons or cutting their ears off if they were "stubborn"). This pleased the Soviets but angered some of the leading Chinese Communists (p.43).

Chang and Halliday's interpretation of this is as follows:

"What really happened was that Mao discovered in himself a love for bloodthirsty thuggery. This gut enjoyment, which verged on sadism, meshed with, but preceded, his affinity for Leninist violence. Mao did not come to violence via theory. The propensity sprang from his character, and was to have a profound impact on his future methods of rule." (p.41)

There's a similar implication in Chang and Halliday's explanation for why Mao chose to stick with the CCP when the violent crackdown against Chinese Communism began in earnest. They note that Mao himself was on the list of wanted criminals, but also point out that Mao had close contacts in the Nationalist party, who were at that point rising in power and distancing themselves from Communism- he could theoretically have jumped ship. So what explanation do they offer for this risky choice?

"Quite apart from all this, to stay with Wang [Nationalist leader and Mao's mentor]would mean having to become a moderate, and respect social order. Mao was not prepared to do this, not after he had discovered his fondness for brutality in rural Hunan." (p.47)

I should start by saying that the authors know vastly more about Mao than I do, so maybe they're onto something here. There's also a chance that I'm just acting on an interpretive tic peculiar to anthropologists ('if someone attributes something to an individual personality quirk, twitch violently and immediately insist that it must actually be a product of their cultural context'). But I'm not terribly happy with the automatic assumption that if someone expresses approval for political violence, then this is likely to be an expression of their inherent sadism, rather than anything to do with their sociopolitical context.

I think Chang and Halliday would argue that Mao's support for violence was definitely not motivated by any desire to improve the lot of the peasantry or Chinese society in general. They repeatedly argue that Mao was indifferent to the position of Chinese peasants. However, at least some of the stuff that they cite in support of this seems to be equally easy to read as saying that Mao wasn't very good at mimicking the style of peasant-related propaganda which was then popular in the USSR (e.g. see p.39, 43). Some of the other stuff they cite to support this involves the argument that Mao later fabricated a story about meeting the leader of a local peasant rebellion, and that as a young man he doesn't seem to have expressed any particular sympathy for the peasant situation (instead arguing that it was relatively easy for peasants to become well-off, and so intellectuals had it harder). In addition, there doesn't seem to be any evidence that he dwelled on or thought about any of the tragedies affecting his local peasantry (e.g. the severe famine which hit Changsha when he was living there in 1921) (p.9). He also doesn't seem to have shown any particular enthusiasm for his early roles in the CCP (running a Communist bookshop and organising labour unions- he was apparently so incompetent at the latter that he failed to get invited to the Second Party Congress) (p.20, 29, 31).

This certainly doesn't sound like my normal mental image of someone so driven by their hardcore commitment to a specific ideology. But I'm not sure that I'm convinced by the argument that Mao stayed committed to the CCP because his experience in Hunan had awakened a kind of latent sadism in him. This is partly because 'sadism' is a bit of a vague word which seems like it might be descriptive rather than predictive. By which I mean: if they're just saying "Mao enjoyed watching people getting beaten up in Hunan because he was a sadist", then does this mean anything more than just: "Mao enjoyed watching others' pain because he's the sort of person who enjoys watching others' pain"?

Chang and Halliday make the interesting point (p.42) that the incident where Mao reassured the Hunan rebels that a few deaths were "no big deal" was probably the first time when Mao had literally held someone else's life in his hands. This is one of the areas where I wish the book had a bit more sociohistorical context (yes, I know it's already 800 pages long and I should probably come back and be picky after *I've* finished a ten-year research project- but I think it would have been more convenient for me personally if they'd split Mao's life into two or more parts and then published a series of books with more fleshed-out context). Specifically, I'm now wondering: what sort of general attitude did this part of China have towards violence at this point? E.g. did Mao grow up in the sort of place where it was relatively normal for people to beat or execute criminals in a public place? I have no idea. But that seems like a relevant bit of information if we're trying to think of what sorts of jobs a hypothetical latent sadist would be attracted to (and whether 'CCP member' would be likely to be at the top of the list).

Another thing which I'm still uncertain about: from what Chang and Halliday say, both the CCP and the Nationalists had member bases with mixed opinions about the role of violence in politics. Chang and Halliday seem to be arguing that when the anti-Communist crackdown started, Mao weighed up the options and decided that although the CCP was currently on the losing side, it was the longterm better option for someone who wanted the power to order beatings and executions. But at this point the Nationalists were increasing in power, and even if Wang was relatively moderate as far as executions and beatings went, they were still attempting a military uprising. It feels to me as though that sort of thing would be quite attractive to a hypothetical sadist. Or at least, more attractive than the idea of being a wanted man tied to a party which was tiny in relation to the Nationalists, doesn't seem to have had any immediate prospects of victory at this point, and also seems to have contained a significant number of influential people who were opposed to the idea of political violence.

Probably I'm making some sort of really basic mistake in my armchair analysis of the situation- but it would have been interesting to see Chang and Halliday go into more detail over this sort of stuff. I'll have to report back if it comes up later in the book.

Another random interesting thing:

"Anyone could be arrested, and killed, simply on the charge of being a Communist. Many died proclaiming their faith, some shouting slogans, others singing the 'Internationale'." (p.47)

For some reason, this image feels very similar to the idea of Christian martyrdom (and martyrdom in some other creedal faiths, no doubt). I wonder whether anyone has looked at the old doctrine vs praxis debate in the context of supposedly secular ideologies? Especially in relation to the idea that doctrinal religion tends to be associated with exposure to one of a relatively small number of cultural centres (the West being one of them).

Reading: 'The Material Roots of Rastafarian Marijuana Symbolism'

(by Akeia A. Benard, 2007, History and Anthropology, 18:1, pp.89-99)

Short but interesting article on Jamaican history, tracing the beginnings of cannabis use. Apparently hemp was first introduced to Jamaica by Europeans who wanted to use it as a source of fibre (presumably for stuff like rope), but that idea fell through and it became an invasive weed. During the period where black Jamaicans were slaves, there's no evidence of anyone smoking it (it's possible that the type of hemp growing in Jamaica at this point didn't even contain high enough THC levels for it to be worth smoking anyway). (p.95)

Then slavery ended and black Jamaicans became officially free people. Understandably, they refused to go back to work for their former masters. From 1845 onwards, the white landowners responded by replacing them by shipping in indentured labourers from India.

Cannabis-smoking has a long history in India. The Rig-Veda (written earlier than 1000 BCE) describes 'ganja' or 'gaja' as a gift to humanity from the god Indra, who wanted humanity to “attain elevated states of consciousness, delight in worldly joy, and freedom from fear”. It was also used as a treatment for a very wide range of health problems. The Indian arrivals may have recognised the wild hemp, and probably brought their own varieties of marijuana with them too. Benard reckons that Rastafarian ideas about vegetarianism, each nation having its own God-King and the relationship between caste/class and colour may also have been heavily influenced by this contact with Hinduism (even though there were presumably also tensions between the black population and the Indian labourers who'd been brought in to take their jobs) (p.95).

However, when the practice of cannabis-smoking was transmitted from Hinduism to black Jamaicans, religious meanings were not immediately transmitted along with it. Initially, black Jamaicans used cannabis as a 'drug-food' (that is, as something that doesn't actually have any nutritional value, but is almost like a food because people need it in order to make it through the day. Nicotine and caffeine are common examples. Drug-foods are often good news for business-owners, because it means their employees can keep doing exhausting work for longer) (p.95-6).

Then in the 1930s, shifting economic conditions led to many black Jamaicans migrating to Kingston looking for work. However, when they got there they often found it very hard to find decent jobs. Many ended up squatting on government-owned property ('yards') and living off stuff they'd found in rubbish heaps. Some Kingston yards ended up forming 'camps': places where people (usually men) could buy, sell and smoke cannabis. These camps were also often places where people could hold 'sessions': meetings to discuss politics and religion (collectively referred to as 'reasoning'). It was out of these sessions that central tenets of Rastafarianism emerged (e.g. devotion to the contemporary Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie, aka Ras Tafari, and the idea that European society was the 'Babylon' described in Revelations) (p.92).

People who accepted this philosophy started making commitments to oppose Babylon (e.g. by refusing to take jobs in white-owned factories). The adoption of dreadlocks was a symbol of this commitment- since whites felt dreads looked disreputable, they were effectively a statement saying that you didn't care if you couldn't get hired for a factory job. This was also backed up by reference to the story of how Sampson lost his strength after Delilah tricked him and cut off his hair (p.93-4).

However, although cannabis was used during sessions, it was not initially seen as a religious object in and of itself. Benard argues that "when marijuana was criminalized in Jamaica in 1954 at the urging of the United States, it became necessary to make it a sacred form of resistance" (p.97, emphasis hers). She has a citation for this (Rastafari and other Afro-Carribbean worldviews, ed. B. Chevannes, p.84), so maybe she's onto something, but I would have liked to see her flesh out this idea a bit more- what does she mean by 'necessary'? As in, politically necessary, in the sense that calling it a 'religious' practice makes it harder to prosecute? (cf something like the debates over whether peyote should be illegal for secular use but legal for people who belong to specific religious organisations like the Native American Church). I have no idea if the act of calling cannabis a religious sacrament had any effect at all on how willing the Jamaican government was to prosecute users, though. Wikipedia says that the US and UK governments don't consider religious use of cannabis to be legal.

(Incidentally, from the same Wikipedia link, here's an interesting bit of legal logic:

"On January 2, 1991, at an international airport in his homeland of Guam, a US territory, Ras Iyah Ben Makahna (Benny Guerrero) was arrested for possession and importation of marijuana and seeds. He was charged with importation of a controlled substance. The case was heard by the US 9th Circuit Court November 2001, and in May 2002 the court had decided that the practice of Rastafari sanctions the smoking of marijuana, but nowhere does the religion sanction the importation of marijuana. Guerrero's lawyer Graham Boyd pointed out the court's ruling was "equivalent to saying wine is a necessary sacrament for some Christians but you have to grow your own grapes."")

Part 3 of 'The Concept of Shamanism'

Interesting blog post from someone who's a Western shamanic practitioner:

http://therioshamanism.com/2007/12/05/this-may-be-blasphemous-to-some/#comment-813

I'm not an expert on Michael Harner's work, but I think I agree with pretty much all of the issues Lupa raises regarding core shamanism (at least, from a theoretical perspective- I have no idea how the two compare from the perspective of people who are actually interested in practicing shamanism and are trying to decide which approach would work best for them).


I've had a look at Henri-Paul Francfort's Introduction to the Prehistoric Section in The Concept of Shamanism (p.31-49). Francfort kicks things off (p.31-2) with a really useful summary:

"Fundamental to the theory of universal shamanism are four assumptions or claims:

1. A universal spirit present in the brain and neuropsychological system of Homo sapiens sapiens is demonstrated by his/her ability to attain "altered states of consciousness" (trance);
2. A universal primitive original religion of Mankind is based upon this universal capacity for trance and upon the subsequent concept of a universal "entoptic" visionary sequence, leading from simple geometric forms to reversible transformations human <=> animal;
3. A universal internal capacity to express the above-mentioned "entoptic" visionary sequence directly and immediately in art forms is displayed.
4. The special function of "shamans" as creators of art.

The papers presented here strongly question the validity of such an idea of shamanism and artistic creation. They argue by demonstrating:

-contingency and current fashion: this "shamanism" is a product of a contemporary trend (new-age, postmodernism, post-processual archaeology) originating in Western societies;

-the inconsistencies in the definitions and uses of this "shamanism", in spite of the more or less explicit claims for its cross-cultural nature and for the universality of the human spirit;

-the problematic character of the supposed psychologically universal entoptic vision sequence and of the subsequent spontaneous, direct, immediate materialisation into works of art;

-the diversity of cultural activities that can lie at the origin of the creation of art;

-the very limited number of prehistoric images and artefacts that can be related to "shamanism" and their questionable interpretation;

-the variety of rock art expressions and artistic motivations;

-the variability of meanings in rock art;

-the historicity of "shamanism" and its variability through space and time in various cultures;

-the diversity of the individuals and functions subsumed under the general term of "shaman";

-finally the vacuity of a general, shallow, blanket concept of "shamanism for prehistory."

Other things:

p.35- Francfort argues that theories which connect shamanism and rock art are often tautological- "prehistoric shamanism is deduced from cave art only, and the shamanic interpretation of art is inferred from the previous conclusion." For example, in The shamans of prehistory, Clottes and Lewis-Williams argue that "although the art of the San is very different to that of the Upper Paleolithic, it is analogous to it because it too is associated with a form of shamanism." (p.188-9 of French edition, Francfort's translation).


p.36- Francfort notes that the identifying evidence for shamanism in prehistoric rock art is dodgy, since most of these theories are unfalsifiable. Clottes and Lewis-Williams argue that art doesn't need to be unified either stylistically or thematically for it to count as evidence for shamanism, because Christian art is a recognisable genre despite the fact that it occurs in multiple cultural contexts, with a wide range of art styles and a large variety of images depicted. But Christian art is unified by the fact that it all ultimately references stories which art historians can study separately from the art (e.g. by reading the scriptures). We don't have these supporting references when it comes to prehistoric shamanism, so any arguments based on their belief systems are going to have to be much more tentative.

p.37- Francfort remarks offhandedly that Australia, PNG and the Andaman islands have no indigenous shamanic traditions. What does that actually mean, given how massively vague the normal use of the word is?

p.38- Francfort also remarks offhandedly that "it is well-known, for instance, that the concept of god appeared sometimes after the Neolithic." What? Well-known by who? He does cite a source, however (J. Cauvin's The Birth of the Gods and the Origins of Agriculture), so I may have to go and check that out.

He notes that we've rejected the Marxist idea that art style is linked to a society's economic mode in any sort of way that's obvious to the observer (except in the sense that the content's going to differ in some cases, I guess- non-farmers are much less likely to draw people ploughing, or whatever).

p.41- He notes that anthropologists have rejected the art theory idea that non-Western cultures have a tendency to produce art which is in some way more spontaneous or childlike than traditional Western art. Most non-Western art is produced according to relatively strict schemas or mental plans- it only looks rules-free or spontaneous if you're not familiar with the rules system being used. This includes art which is produced with the aid of drugs or other sorts of ASC.

p.42- even if we look specifically at art produced by Westerners, there probably isn't any way to reliably tell the difference between art inspired by ASCs (whether induced by drugs, mental illness or shaman-style vision quests) and art that's just produced by people who have active imaginations.

Clottes and Lewis-Williams suggest that in prehistory, children who showed artistic talent were directed towards training in shamanism. This seems to imply that they don't think 'art' and 'shamanism' are intrinsically linked (i.e. they'll only be linked within a culture if people are specifically socialised to see a connection). If this is the case, then why assume that a random culture which we know very little about really DID link shamanism and art in this way?

p.44- we also need to recognise that the idea of self-expression in art is not a concept which is necessarily found in non-Western cultures.

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.