Review: Shamanism and Vulnerability on the North and South American Great Plains, by Kathleen Bolling Lowrey

Abstract

The anthropology of shamanism is vast and has a long-storied history. It is a robust literature that is deeply entangled in colonialism and the inception of anthropology as a discipline. What makes Shamanism and Vulnerability such a refreshing and remarkable contribution is not only Kathleen Bolling Lowrey’s use of disability theory and feminist scholarship, but her critical and candid examination of parallel historiographies within the North and South American heartlands.By using disability theory, Lowrey both interprets field data and reads North and South American literature through the framework of Eva Feder Kittay’s “dependency work,” referencing debility and vulnerability as a “paradigmatic moral relation,” a universal claim that in the context of shamanism illuminates indigenous revitalization movements and ethnogenesis. Lowrey also counters a previous emphasis on masculinity in shamanism studies with that of feminist allyship, “in which shamans commit to long-term solidarity with fellow community members in difficulty, relationships in which their wives and families also play a key role” (7). This “masculinist misunderstanding of shamanism” or recurring trope of shamans in the literature as being enigmatic and solitary, yet also central to community and healing, Lowrey states, is what led to the tragic failure of the shamanic laboratory she investigates.In addition, Lowrey employs Henry Sumner Maine’s distinction between “contract” and “status” societies and argues that claims about disability and indigeneity are status claims, which in contract societies are predicated on independence and autonomy. “Disabled people and indigenous people are temporary special exceptions at best; eventually, they ought to disappear: disabilities will be cured, indigenous peoples will become modern” (16). This juxtaposition between types of societies and the proliferation of indigenous vulnerability, identity, and social dependency is an ongoing theme in the text.In chapters 1 and 2 the reader is introduced to Isoso, a community of fifteen thousand Guarani-speaking people in the Bolivian Chaco, as well as the Chaco prophetic movement-turned-massacre at Kuruyuki in 1892. Lowrey closely examines a popular and problematic account of that movement by Hernando Sanabria Fernandez (1972), which she argues, “created certain kinds of opportunities for Guarani revitalization in the 1980s and 1990s but foreclosed others in ways that have unfortunate consequences for Guarani political mobilization” (6). This misrepresentation of the historical record, or “humbug,” is another key idea and coincides with chapter 3, wherein Lowrey uses disability theory to understand debility and vulnerability in North American literature—specifically, popular literature on the North American Plains Indians, the Old West, the Ghost Dance Movement, and the massacre at Wounded Knee.Chapter 4 “Shamans and Wives” focuses on Lowrey’s ethnographic fieldwork with two shamans—Don Miguel and Don Jorge Romero. The importance of allyship and inequality is analyzed, particularly the dynamics of everyday homelife and kinship relations. Lowrey argues that these subjects have been neglected in much of the shamanic literature, as opposed to topics such as hunting, violence, wildness, antisociality, and predation. Chapter 5, “Shamans and Spies,” critically examines the hagiography of the “father of ethnobotany” Richard Evans Schultes, and questions the oeuvre of his students Wade Davis and Mark Plotkin in an effort to make visible the “entire faux edifice of pseudoshamanism puffed up by Schultes and his devotees” (131). According to Lowrey, this narrative had a dramatic, and negative, “impact on lowland South American indigenous experience in the latter part of the twentieth century” (120). This chapter reiterates the claim that an earlier anthropological and literary emphasis on the shaman as healer was both harmful and dubious.In the next chapter Lowrey compares and contrasts two forms of fictional narrative about power, vulnerability, disability, and dependency within the Wizard of Oz series by L. Frank Baum and the Shuar stories by Anne-Christine Taylor. Lowrey’s application of Henry Maine’s typologies of status and contract societies proves useful in making the argument that, “the flight from contract is both inevitable—and inevitably disparaged—because it is a response to…inevitable presence of human dependency and debility in societies ever more ill organized to deal with those features of human existence” (9). The final chapter of the book provides valuable insight into this “flight from contract” as seen within the Mennonite diaspora in both the Bolivian Chaco and Paraguayan Chaco. It is here that modernity and identity intersect with debility and vulnerability, revealing that modern nation-states have no place for, nor tolerance of, dependent citizens, whether indigenous or not.Shamanism and Vulnerability is a unique and important text that will both challenge and appeal to scholars of anthropology and religious studies as well as sociology, disability studies, and history. Densely written, it would be more appropriate for graduate students than undergraduates. All readers, however, will welcome the application of disability theory and feminist studies to the investigation of shamanism.