Among Anthropologists, There Is A Fierce Controversy over the figure of the shaman, with some reserving the term for practitioners in hunter-gatherer societies in present-day Siberia (among whom the term originated), and others defining shaman more broadly to include any figure performing similar functions, from prehistory until today.1 Though the exact nature of these functions (and whether there is one, and only one, figure who performs them) is central to this controversy, the majority view is helpfully summarized by Russian anthropologist Anna Kuznetsova. She schematizes the Siberian shaman according to the following four attributes: (1) divine election involving dreams, (2) initiation through sickness and self-healing, (3) musical and dancing performances, and (4) responsibility for meeting the community's psychospiritual needs (Kuznetsoza 49). A proponent of the Siberian-only view, Kuznetsova argues that this specific religious figure has been improperly attributed to other cultures and civilizations, including her example of the mythical figure Orpheus in ancient Greece.The history of such importations is documented by religious studies scholar Kocku van Stuckrad, who writes of “neoshamanism” or “modern Western shamanism” as a nineteenth-century reaction to what Max Weber termed the “disenchanting” of contemporary society. “For quite a few European enlighteners,” van Stuckrad begins, “the shaman was a religious virtuoso, a reminder of those ancient ecstatics and artists who were able to transgress ordinary reality by means of music and poetry” (773). Then, after “Mircea Eliade in 1951 put forward his new conception of the shaman as trance specialist,” for thinkers inspired thereby, such as Jung and Joseph Campbell, the shaman “became an indication of a new understanding of humanity's relation to nature, of man's ability to access spiritual levels of reality, and of leading a respectful life toward the ‘sacred web of creation’” (773). Finally, after the “seminal work of Carlos Castaneda . . . major shamanic protagonists hold a degree in anthropology” and “try to combine this education with a spiritual practice outside the academy” (774). The relevance of this history to American philosophy can be seen in van Stuckrad's identification of Thoreau and Emerson as an intermediary link (between Schelling's nature philosophy and neo-Shamanism) (787).The present investigation concerns precisely this extension of the shaman concept to academic philosophers, particularly common in American philosophy and pragmatism, where it often takes the form of channeling Native American traditions. More recently, it has been identified and valorized in the work of the influential Chicana theorist Gloria Anzaldúa. Though increasingly appreciated by non-Indigenous philosophers, Anzaldúa has been criticized by scholars of Latin American Subaltern Studies for claiming to speak for Indigenous peoples without tribal authority, and for advocating the concept of mestizaje despite the latter's continuing prominent role in matrices of oppression for Indigenous peoples in Latin America.2More generally, as noted by contemporary neo-Shamanism advocate and anthropologist Robert J. Wallis, this tendency within “neo-Shamanisms” has been criticized as a form of “neo-colonialism” (xiii). This is especially true, Wallis notes, in the U.S., “where many Native Americans are extremely angry at what they see as ‘stealing’ of their traditions by ‘New Agers’, be it mythologies, sweat lodges, or monuments” (xiii). On this point, Wallis references P. J. Deloria, son of the influential Native American thinker Vine Deloria, Jr., on the harm done by early U.S. enthusiasts of shamanism. “In true colonial fashion,” Wallis relates, “inventing American identity required distancing real Indians, perceiving them to be already extinct or at least vanishing, to uphold an imperialist and romanticised idea of Indians past. The very real Native American struggle for social justice was ignored” (Wallis 25). More generally, Wallis summarizes four central objections to neo-shamanism: “1. Decontextualizing and universalizing 2. Psychologizing and individualising 3. Reproduction and reification of cultural primitivism. 4. Romanticizing of indigenous shamans” (49).Amplifying Wallis's and Deloria's critique is Geary Hobson, an American Studies scholar of Cherokee, Quapaw and Chickasaw descent. Hobson's original essay, “The Rise of the White Shaman as a New Version of Cultural Imperialism,” concerned white, spoken-word poets in the Bay Area who were dressing in pseudo-Indigenous garb, adopting pseudo-Indian names, and performing homages to white poet Gary Snyder's poem “Shaman Songs” (Hobson 1). Reflecting on his essay twenty-five years later (in 2002), Hobson turns to purveyors of “White-thought ‘Indian medicine,’” for whose efforts he blames “spiritual fakers” including Carlos Castaneda (3). By contrast, Hobson affirms that Native American “medicine people” (his preferred term, as opposed to “shamans”) have continued to practice, largely invisibly to non-Indigenous people, and in a way that is dispersed across various professions and social roles, including “throughout the university structure” (4–7).While fully supporting Hobson's analysis, I would add two caveats regarding the limitations of its applicability to the present investigation. First, as noted above with the example of Anzaldúa, not all proponents of philosophical shamanism today are white, and some are even Indigenous (so either the problem is bigger than just “White Shamanism,” or philosophical shamanism does not coincide exactly with Hobson's object of critique). In part for this reason, Native American theorist Ward Churchill's similar critique prefers the term “spiritual hucksterism,” and names multiple Indigenous practitioners thereof.3 Second, my previous work on Cherokee philosophy dovetails with Hobson's preference for the term “medicine” for Native American healing practices—reserving “shamanism” for the Indigenous Siberian communities who claim their word for themselves alone—so I do not claim any place for the present investigation within any Native American spiritual tradition.4It is nevertheless imperative, especially for those raised and working in a U.S. context and tradition, whatever their embodiment and position, to attend to Hobson here, not falling prey to similar malfeasance. The present investigation, in part, attempts to respond to these problems, by suggesting more contextualizing, community-centered, respectful, and responsible criteria for any future conception of philosophical shamanism. More precisely, any such conception, compared to its two predecessors, must emphasize the responsibility of the shaman to their concrete community—specifically an ability and willingness to respond to their community members.This responsiveness, in turn, implies a firm grounding in the existing practices and environments of the community, since to be able to respond one must speak the language of one's interlocutors, both comprehending and creating communication. Crucial in this context, and widely neglected in the history of philosophy, is nonverbal language, including body language, comportment, fashion, and dance.5 At this level, a shaman must be able to interpret the bodies and movements of their community, to move in the ways to which its people have become accustomed, while also improvizing new ways of moving to repair their existential injuries. A shaman must, in short, both dance the current dances of their community, and also teach how to dance in newer, healthier, more flourishing ways.6Perhaps the strongest argument in favor of this critique of philosophical shamanism is that its emphasis on community responsibility provides an opportunity to direct attention and energy to the ongoing struggle for social justice for Indigenous peoples worldwide, including for Native American tribes. Foremost in this program, according to Alice Kehoe, is “sovereignty, the right of nations to govern themselves”; while for Churchill, the most pressing issue is ecological justice (Kehoe 88; Churchill 30–31). To this I would add violence against Native American women. “More than 80% of Native women,” according to the National Institute of Justice, “will experience physical, sexual, or psychological violence in their lifetimes.”7 Clearly, these three problems are connected, since a people suffering colonialism, in an ecosystem under constant attack, are also rendered more vulnerable to various other forms of violence.The difficulties with the appropriation of the concept of shamanism in the non-Indigenous world, as summarized by contemporary Russian ethnologist Anna Kuznetsova, begin with Eliade's foundational work itself, Shamanism, originally published in 1951. Despite its influence and popularity, Eliade's study is also known for its many problems. For a few examples, Kehoe criticizes its lack of direct field research and trafficking in “cultural primitivism,” Barbara Tedlock decries his marginalizing and erasing of women shamans, and Robert Wallis identifies an unconscious Christian bias that demonizes the underworld dimensions of shamanic practice while romanticizing its celestial dimensions (Kehoe 42; Tedlock 64; Wallis 35–36).Most importantly for my purposes here, Kuznetsova argues Shamanism stretches the concept too far from its original meaning, based in the sociocultural context of ancient Siberian tribes. Eliade, Kuznetsova claims, “virtually ignores the crucial moment, to wit the social role the shaman plays in traditional society” (49). For this reason, she explains, among experts on Siberian shamanism Eliade's work is “notorious for its theoretical generalizations, but not exactness of ethnographic data interpreted” (49). The pump was already primed, therefore, for later Western theorists inspired by Eliade to further overgeneralize, rendering his already tenuous connections to flesh-and-blood Siberian shamans more tenuous still.On my own reading of Eliade, although I do find discussions of specific tribal practices, the latter are admittedly undermined by the abstract, comparative model that he outlines in the book's early chapters. In Eliade's defense, though, he does acknowledge, even in these early chapters, that “‘self-made’ shamans are considered less powerful than those who inherited the profession or who obeyed the ‘call’ of the gods and spirits” (13). Moreover, “a shaman is not recognized as such until after he has received two kinds of teaching,” including “traditional shamanic techniques, names and functions of the spirits, mythology and genealogy of the clan, secret language, etc.” (13). In such passages, Eliade clearly recognizes that participation in a specific sociohistorical community is necessary for shamanism, more specifically as a historical source for the shaman's pedagogy for (and recognition by) the tribe.All this richness is easily forgotten, however, in the light of Eliade's famous four-word definition of “shamanism” in chapter 1, namely “archaic techniques of ecstasy.” Ecstasy, in Eliade's sense, means the euphoric experience wherein the boundaries of the ego break down and one feels transcendentally connected to the rest of the cosmos. An important component in such experiences is the use of psychotropic substances, as emphasized by the writings of Castaneda, in the record of his alleged firsthand experiences with the Indigenous spiritual leader Don Juan (though Wallis observes that scholars have since “debunked” Castaneda's work). One could argue, however, that what is important in shamanism is not merely the ecstasy, or the “who” and “what” of the shaman's self (including the body associated with that self), but also the nature of the tribe (including in its past, present, and future), along with the tribe's surrounding cultural and geographic environment (including neighboring tribes, and the climatic and ecological features of its home). Put in terms of Eliade's definition, techniques vary along with various technicians, communities, histories, and environments.One of the first theorists to follow Eliade's generalizing lead, specifically by identifying the figure of the shaman with non-Indigenous thinkers, is Michael E. Holstein. Holstein not only echoes Eliade in privileging shamans’ ecstatic experiences over tribal religious practices, but goes even further, claiming that the historical shaman's imagination has “created” a “supernatural world,” “or rather, has given it its most current shape” (317). The problem here, from the perspectives of actual shamans and their tribes, is that the supernatural world (whether literal or figurative) pre-exists the shamans and shapes their imagination at least as much as the shamans’ imaginations shape their tribal worlds.8 In other words, Holstein here assumes a scientific materialist worldview, and deploys it in an ahistorical way, trying to identify an atomized entity in a society for which the relationship among humans and environments was much more complex. It is always possible, moreover, that this scientific materialist worldview is inaccurate, and that the powers to which the shaman appeals do indeed have reality independent of one person's imagination, though not necessarily the reality of a supernatural entity as normally conceived. This is not to say that one must simply adopt, as an alternative to the scientific materialist view, a particular tribal view or a purely subjective one, but rather that one should be open, in the spirit of William James, to alternate religious ways of being.Similarly problematic is Holstein's description of the shaman's productions as “his fictions” (318). Bracketing the prior issue (as to whether there is any literal basis to shamans’ supernatural claims), it is not obvious that the content of such claims “belongs” to the shaman (in either the sense of “owned by” or of “originating with”) as an individual. Put simply, a shaman does not individually own the content of the shamanic work on behalf of their tribe. That work is, on the contrary, part of a long tradition that pre-exists any given shaman and helps shape them as both practitioners and tribe members. In Eliade's words, “there is no question of anarchic hallucinations” with a shaman, nor “of a purely individual plot and dramatis personae; the hallucinations and mise en scéne follow traditional models that are perfectly consistent and possess an amazingly rich theoretical content” (14). This is not to say that shamans do not have creative agency (which agency Eliade affirms throughout his study), but rather that a shamanic creator is not an isolated, atomistic artist in a late capitalist society, making and branding artificial creations.Even more problematic, in this ethnocentric vein, is Holstein's concluding sentence, which attempts to buttress his shaman/non-Indigenous writer analogy by affirming “our” “continuing acts of healing ourselves and civilizing darkness” (320). This problematic sentence raises several immediate questions. Who is the “our” in that sentence, and what “their” does it imply? What is this “darkness,” and what is the implicitly contrasted light? Finally, what does it mean to “civilize” that darkness? Every part of this quote illustrates the cultural appropriation that has tarnished non-Indigenous appeals to shamanism from the beginning.Even more important for the present investigation is Holstein's attempt to support his shaman/non-Indigenous writer analogy with historical evidence. Basing his analysis on certain Romantic and modernist poets’ keen interest in ancient oral poetry, Holstein draws another loose analogy: Greco-Roman possession (including in Orpheus) and shamanic alliances with female spirits (319). Against this view, Kuznetsova goes into careful empirical detail to contrast Siberian shamans with the Greek figure of Orpheus. Additionally, Eliade's detailed account of shamanic feminine spirit alliances further illuminates the dis-analogy involved in Holstein's analysis (75). Even assuming both analogies to be sound, however, there is another core difficulty with them, derived from the very logic of analogy. To wit, similarity does not equal identity. Nor does attempting to emulate a tradition entail belonging to that tradition. For example, that Samuel Taylor Coleridge admired ancient shamans does not make him a shaman himself. At most, it makes him comparable to a shaman in certain ways, whereas Holstein's title asserts, more strongly, “The Philosopher as Shaman.” This structural difficulty, though admittedly more pronounced in Holstein than in the other defenders of this first conception of non-Indigenous philosophers as shamans, is also present to some degree in them all.For starters, James M. Glass's “The Philosopher and the Shaman: The Political Vision as Incantation” makes an argument from analogy similar to Holstein's. Though I cannot identify a clear thesis, the gist of Glass’ essay is that philosophers and shamans share several important traits. To his credit, Glass notes in his first paragraph that he is “not arguing that the philosopher and the shaman are functional equivalents.” More specifically, Glass claims that shamans and philosophers possess two similar characteristics: “their manipulation of images, the similarity in the way they each perceives his task as a healer” (181). Unfortunately, this historical nuance at the beginning of Glass's article gradually disappears. Claiming that “the shaman performs a psychological cure,” Glass describes this cure as one of “working on perception,” its purpose being “to devise an incantation that will reach the unconscious” (186). Granting that the psychological dimension of shamans’ work is important (including from their perspective), that work also involves several other crucial dimensions, notably including a bodily one. For Glass, however, the body is only indirectly present in shamanism, specifically by way of the shaman's unconscious, which Glass specifies as Carl Jung's conception thereof. The latter includes Jung's famous unconscious “archetypes,” among which Glass emphasizes the “archetype of rebirth” (187).By the end of Glass's article, explicit ethnocentrism appears. Attempting to acknowledge specific differences between shamans and philosophers, Glass claims that “the shaman's healing process employs idiosyncratic methods, bizarre gestures, and chants” (190). In addition to its problematic tone, this claim also overlooks that shamanic processes are not necessarily considered idiosyncratic or bizarre in their tribal contexts. In fact, Glass's description is arguably more accurate for non-Indigenous philosophers in their own cultural contexts than for Indigenous shamans in theirs. It is non-Indigenous philosophers, after all, whose processes are perceived as idiosyncratic, whose methods are interpreted as bizarre by most laypeople in non-Indigenous societies, and who engage in a seemingly endless series of meaningless linguistic gestures. Perhaps, therefore, Glass is unconsciously projecting present-day non-Indigenous philosophers’ traits onto the figure of the shaman, thus inadvertently mischaracterizing both. Interestingly, this is also the only place in Glass’ analysis that the body appears, namely in his claim that the philosopher per se is uninterested in the body (192). As I will relate in my next section, the exact opposite view of the body's importance is arguably the defining feature of the second conception of non-Indigenous philosophers as shamans.I now move forward in historical time to the second conception of philosophical shamanism, most advocates of which rely on Gloria Anzaldúa.9 In her texts, one finds an admirably frank acknowledgment of ethnocentrism and the cultural appropriation of Indigenous and tribal cultural productions. Anzaldúa makes almost no references to herself as shaman in her published works, except for a three-page essay collected in the Gloria Anzaldúa Reader, “Metaphors in the Tradition of the Shaman.”10 I will consider that text below, in the context of AnaLouise Keating's reading thereof, after relating a few brief references to shamanism in Anzaldúa's interviews.11“I felt a calling,” she says in one interview, “to be an artist in the sense of a shaman, healing through words, using words as a medium for expressing the flights of the soul, communing with the spirit, having access to other realities or worlds” (19). If this sounds supernatural, Anzaldúa also expresses a more reductively conventional version of the idea later, claiming that “artists practice a kind of shamanism through the imagination” (251). For example, she engages in what she terms a “shapeshifting” of identities—“intellectual, racial, sexual”—modeled on “a type of Mexican indigenous shamanism where a person becomes an animal, becomes a different person” (132). A similar tension can be found in Anzaldúa's dismissiveness of what she calls “pseudospirituality or New Age awareness,” immediately followed by the concession that, for some people, such practices constitute “a legitimate first step toward really becoming” shamans (160). The closest thing I can find to Anzaldúa naming herself as a shaman appears in her claim that “the world of the shaman, which is a parallel universe to this one we're living in,” has “bled into” her own life (225).Given this limited discussion of shamanism in Anzaldúa, along with her importance for the second historical conception of philosophical shamanism, I will now supplement my analysis with one place in her work that intersects closely with the work of shamans and the concept of shamanism, namely her account of soul and its healing. In brief, Anzaldúa conceives of soul as a construction from the materials of embodied materiality, the scene of which construction is a sociopolitical environment filled with destructive forces of racism, sexism, homophobia, etc.The central concept in Anzaldúa in connection to soul, hacienda caras (literally, “making faces”) contributes part of the title of her second edited anthology by feminists of color, Making Face, Making Soul/Haciendo Caras (her first anthology being This Bridge Called My Back). Anzaldúa first unpacks this concept in her editor's introduction, entitled “Haciendo caras, una entrada” [“Making faces, an introduction”] (xv–xxvii). As implied by the slash between the English and Spanish words in the anthology's title, Anzaldúa torsions the concept of soul away from the orthodox Christian/Cartesian immortal entity composed of spiritual substance. In Anzaldúa's case, the direction of this torsion is toward both (a) materialism and embodiment (through the “faces” half of hacienda caras), and (b) sociopolitical constructivism (through the “making” half of “making soul”). Anzaldúa begins the anthology's introduction with an initial unpacking of this titular phrase, as follows: Among Chicanas/mexicanas, hacienda caras, “making faces,” means to put on a face, express feelings by distorting the face—frowning, grimacing, looking sad, glum, or disapproving. For me, hacienda caras has the added connotation of making gestos subversivos, political subversive gestures, the piercing look that questions or challenges, the look that says, “Don't walk all over me,” the one that says, “Get out of my face” (xv).Note the two distinct layers that Anzaldúa is deploying here. First, a widely accepted meaning in Chicanx communities. Second, Anzaldúa's individual improvisation on that first meaning, thereby adding a dimension of politicized defiance. In short, Anzaldúa weaponizes her people's language, to empower them to greater freedom and racial justice.Justifying this linguistic weaponizing, Anzaldúa explains that her fellow mestizas “are ‘written’ all over, or should I say, carved and tattooed with the sharp needles of experience.” In this process, she continues, their faces are “the most naked, most vulnerable, exposed and significant topography of the body.” Disempowered persons, specifically Chicana lesbians, on Anzaldúa's account, have faces which do not match white patriarchy's ideals, and thus they “have had to ‘change’ faces,” to put on masks that “drive a wedge between our intersubjective personhood and the personas that we present to the world” (xv). The use of masks is also widespread in shamanic practices, often involving the invoking and channeling of oppressive forces by impersonating them via the mask. Digging even deeper into this metaphor, Anzaldúa then introduces a technical term from sewing, “interfacing,” which refers to sewing “two pieces of fabric to provide support and stability to collar, cuff, yoke.” It is this metaphorical interfacing between disempowered folks’ masks, she writes, which “provides the space from which we can thrust out and crack the masks” (xv).That is, if Chicana women were wearing only one mask, it might be possible for their oppressors to make that mask so large and seamless that their true skin would never show. But since the oppressors find it necessary to apply multiple masks (including masks for proper gender identity and expression, for proper sexual expression, and for racial expression), the places where those masks overlap inadvertently creates slippage, which can be utilized for defiant resistance. Anzaldúa summarizes and interprets this metaphor as follows: “‘Making faces’ is my metaphor for constructing one's identity. Usted es el modeador de su carne tanto como el de su alma. You are the shaper of your flesh as well as your soul” (xvi). Armed with metaphorical fabric, patterns, needles, scissors, and imagination, the possibilities for Anzaldúa's new souls seem as endless as those of shamans’ beneficiaries.Appropriately, then, the figure of the shaman is invoked explicitly in this introduction to Making Faces, Making Soul, when Anzaldúa reveals that her political improvisation on hacienda caras is not entirely new or purely individual. Instead, this meaning possesses cultural roots much deeper even than those of her contemporary Chicanx culture. Among Chicanx ancestors are the Aztec (or Mexica) people, and according to their sorcerers/shamans, “one was put on earth to create one's ‘face’ (body) and ‘heart’ (soul)” (xvi). Moreover, in these shamans’ conception, “the soul was a speaker of words and the body a doer of deeds” (xvi).Having considered this first appearance of “making soul” in Anzaldúa's work, I now turn to its further elaboration in Borderlands/La Frontera, which also clarifies the shamanic dimensions of her conception. In Borderlands’ first reference to “soul,” Anzaldúa claims that in Aztec/Mexican mythology, “the serpent symbolizes the soul (as the earth, the mother),” which also constitutes one half of “the struggle between the spiritual/celestial/male and the underworld/earth/feminine” (7). Thus, for Anzaldúa, soul is caught up with duality and vaguely spiritual forces, just as shamans, according to Eliade and others, are often androgynous, situated at the blurred intersecting lines of traditional gender identities and performances. This connection to duality and the supernatural is also true of the second reference to “soul” in Borderlands, in a section called “Enfrentamientos con el alma [clashes with the soul]” (64). There, Anzaldúa relates how, after her father's passing, her mother “put blankets over the mirrors.” “Perhaps a part of her knew,” Anzaldúa speculates, “that a mirror is a door through which the soul may ‘pass’ to the other side and she didn't want us to follow our father to the place where the souls of the dead live” (68). Anzaldúa then relates how ancient “Mexican Indians made mirrors of volcanic glass known as obsidian,” into which their shamans would stare, and fall into a trance in order to receive “a vision concerning the future of the tribe and the will of the gods” (68).Borderlands’ third reference to “soul,” which reintroduces “making soul,” concerns what Anzaldúa calls the “Coatlicue state.” The latter, she explains, is a kind of psychic hibernation, named after Coatlicue, the Aztec serpent goddess, “Earth Mother,” and “goddess of birth and death.” The Coatlicue state, partially synonymous for Anzaldúa to “addiction,” is a kind of possession by this snake goddess, who reconstructs your self as she deconstructs it, and who helps you do the same for yourself. That is, since the body is a finite space and set of resources, mythological and religious forces cannot recreate soul without first destroying at least some existing elements, since those are currently monopolizing that bodily space and set of resources. “The soul uses everything,” Anzaldúa writes of the Coatlicue state, “to further its own making.” In short, the soul's “work,” she claims, is to “make soul, increase consciousness of itself” (68).As to the exact nature of this soul-making work, one clue might be found in Anzaldúa's claim here that Coatlicue is a goddess not only of the snake, but also of the fusion of snake and eagle, condensed elsewhere in Borderlands as the “feathered serpent.” Coatlicue, Anzaldúa elaborates, “represents duality in life, a synthesis of duality, and a third perspective—something more than mere duality or a synthesis of duality” (68). It is in the latter phrase that I find Anzaldúa's greatest conceptual innovation regarding soul. To wit, if one rests with the goal of unifying opposites, one will never be able to erase the fault lines of the divisive past, like a figurine hastily glued back together, a zigzag monument to its history of destruction. The solution Anzaldúa develops, counterintuitively, involves even more destruction, but this time self-destruction, followed by creation. Not mere repair, but recreation. In this way, her innovation resonates with the frequent description of the shamanic path as a descent into individual destruction followed by an ascent into individual and community flouri