Shamanism: The Key to Religion

Abstract

The article lays out in schematic fashion a composite of socio-intellectual processes, arguably evident in respect of all cosmologies, which might appropriately be labelled 'religious'. It does so by applying deductive reasoning to shamanism, the prevalent religion in societies whose social structures are simple and in whose cosmologies religious process is conspicuous; here the Canadian Inuit (Eskimo) provide the ethnographic focus. The article assumes that religious process finds its basis in fundamental contradictions concerning the conditions ofsocial eNistence, namely in the antithesis between social structure and communitas. Cosmology is generated as this contradiction is contemplated by, respectively, laypeople and specialists, both with their own interests in view. The argument also considers such central cultural and analytical issues as the existence ofdistinctive notions of the human person, and the pertinence for the study of religion of, variously, 'secondary elaborations', systems of classification, and religious edicts; and it joins with Barth in emphasizing the salience of the specialist in 'cosmology-making'.