SHAMANISM: A PSYCHOSOCIAL DEFINITION

Abstract

As a religious phenomenon that predates Christianity, shamanism is of special interest to persons concerned with the history and variety of world religions. For students of Native American religions, the anthropologist Ruth Underhill found that, In some form or other, the shaman existed in almost every Native American tribe (104). But despite the importance of the term, no definition of it takes full account of the impact of shamans on the social and psychological lives of their people. Reigning definitions focus on otherworldly or transcendental aspects and thus avoid analyzing shamanism as a psychosocial production that both reflects and shapes the world of the shaman's patrons. Moreover, by depicting shamanism as an ideal form of religious expression, most definitions celebrate its liberating and therapeutic effects but overlook its destructive capacities and its role as an enforcer of social conformity. The concern to defend the sacred and to protect human response to the sacred from thoroughgoing investigation blocks analysis of an important phenomenon in religion. Mircea Eliade advanced the definition of shamanism that is most commanding in present scholarship, especially among writers in religion studies. Eliade defined shamanism as a technique for attaining ecstasy that enabled persons to come into contact with the sacred order of the cosmos.' He celebrated the shaman as the truly religious man and interpreted the shaman's ecstatic experiences of ascension and flight, dismemberment, and identification with the axis mundi as a paragon of religious knowledge. This obvious idealization grounds Eliade's well-known theory of religious devolution. The theory holds that shamanism enabled members of the primitive cultures of Europe, Asia, and North America to live attuned to the timeless, sacred order of the cosmos. With the rise of historical religions devoted to temporal Amanda Porterfield is Associate Professor of Religion at Syracuse University, Syracuse,