Shamanic Seance

Research Paper # 51946

Anthropology > Scientific / Medical
Anthropology > South American

Shamanic Seance

An examination of the the construction of the category of the shaman in anthropological literature.

5,411 words () | 21 sources | MLA | 2004 United Kingdom

Paper Summary:

This paper examines two ethnographies relating to shamanic activity, Desjarlais? (1994) "Body and Emotions" and Taussig?s (1987), "Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man". It attempts to show through their review how the literature on shamanism often proves more instructive in understanding the discourses of Otherness in anthropological and other writings. It also looks at what the physiological understandings of trance bring to our understandings of shamanism.

Outline
Shamans for Sale, a Dia(bolical?)lectical Image
A Short History of Emotion
The Fracturing of the World
Magia Pinta

From the Paper:

"In the late 1980's, Desjarlais did fieldwork among the Yolmo Sherpa, a Tibetan people living in the Helambu region of north central Nepal. During the year he was in the region, he was apprenticed the veteran healer Meme. During this time, Desjarlais also underwent trance states. He does not claim these to be a photographic equivalent of the shaman's own trance state, rather, he emphasises the degree to which the healing process is grounded in the everyday physical movements of life, what one could term habitus . This is not directly accessible through discourse or exegesis - rather, it could be thought of as an unspoken archive, of sedimented, embodied history. Paralleling Desjarlais? analysis, this essay will first briefly examine the habitus from which Desjarlais analysis stems."