PART FOUR

The Understanding Deepens

In the first half of the twentieth century, anthropologists began listening closely to shamans and recording what they said about themselves. This is when their understanding deepened.

Throughout this period, anthropologists and ethnopsychiatrists debated whether shamans were mentally deranged. Claude Lévi-Strauss appeared to settle the issue by twisting it around and saying that shamans were more like psychoanalysts than psychotics. But the debate raged on.

Mircea Eliade had another ax to grind in his grand synthesis Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. He wanted the shaman to go to heaven. Eliade defined shamanism as “techniques of ecstasy” or soul-flight (in Greek, the word ekstasis means “standing outside oneself”). Eliade emphasized “celestial” flights over “infernal” ones.

“Descents to the underworld, the struggle against evil spirits, but also the increasingly familiar relations with ‘spirits’ that result from their ‘embodiment’ or in the shaman’s being ‘possessed’ by ‘spirits,’ are innovations, most of them recent,” Eliade wrote. “The specific element of shamanism is not the incorporation of spirits by the shaman, but the ecstasy provoked by the ascension to the sky or by the descent to Hell: the incorporation of spirits and possession by them are universally distributed phenomena, but they do not belong necessarily to shamanism in the strict sense.”

But Eliade’s distinctions ultimately appear to have more to do with his own religious beliefs than with the facts. When one goes back to the primary accounts of Arctic shamanism that Eliade used to fashion his soaring overview, one finds that shamanism and spirit possession regularly occur together.

It turns out that acting as a medium for spirits, spirit possession, and shamanism occur on a continuum. They all involve trance states and contact with spirits, but each one has its specific character. Mediums rarely operate with music, while shamans and possession cults almost always do. Similarly, while acting as a medium for spirits does not necessarily involve the conception of a cosmos, shamanism and possession cults usually do. Finally, a shamanic session differs from a possession cult, such as the vodoun ceremony in Haiti, in that the shaman’s audience usually remains passive; participants may go into trance, but it is the shaman, rather than the audience, who performs in the ceremony.

These distinctions explain why there are surprisingly few accounts of shamanism in Africa, which is thought to be the cradle of humanity. Most cases of trance states and spirit communication in Africa involve possession rather than shamanism. But some cases defy easy classification. Lorna Marshall, for example, describes medicine men among the !Kung Bushmen of South-West Africa who seem to operate as shamans: They go into trance while singing and treat the sick by drawing out illness and casting it back to the spirits. But contrary to the “classical” shamans of Asia and the Americas, who tend to operate alone, half of all male Bushmen are medicine men; shamanism among them is more a collective affair than an individual one. And the !Kung women, who are not shamans, sing and clap ardently while the medicine men go into deep trance; they play an active role, which is uncharacteristic of most shamanic audiences.

Further illustrating the confusion about shamanism in Africa, Marshall did not call the !Kung medicine men “shamans” when they appear to do the work of shamans. Anthropologist Siegfried Nadel, on the other hand, described “shamans” among the Nyima of Sudan who seemed in fact to be mediums. They went into trances in seances to contact spirits for clients without performing music of any kind. Although Nadel stated that the activities he observed among these people corresponded “in all the essentials to the classical shamanism of Central Asia and North West America,” he seemed to be describing mediums rather than shamans. So while Marshall’s report is included here, Nadel’s is not.

Even though African people appear to enter into contact with spirits by being possessed by them, rather than by calling them and controlling them, as in shamanism, it is possible that shamanic practices may be more widespread in Africa than is generally acknowledged. Furthermore, finding clear-cut limits between mediums, possession cults, and shamanism is ultimately somewhat arbitrary. In Haitian vodoun, for example, those who participate in loa ceremonies, and whom the spirits possess, often do not remember what happened to them during the possession; if they do, it it is generally considered that they have not gone into deep enough trances. But the loa priest or priestess eventually learns to see in trance, a process called la prise des yeux. This enables them essentially to become shamans in that they can control their own trances. As Gilbert Rouget points out in his book Music and Trance: A Theory of the Relations between Music and Possession: “Shamanic trance and possession trance . . . can thus alternate in one and the same person. Or, if one prefers, one and the same person can undergo in succession these two forms of trance. It seems that no one can experience them simultaneously.”

There are clear shamanic elements in Haitian vodoun, such as commerce with spirits through trance states involving music, and healing conducted by the vodoun priest or priestess. Yet, vodoun has been considered by most authorities as separate from shamanism and is classified under “possession.” We have hewed to this classical classification and have not included reports on vodoun or other possession cults in this volume.

In 1944, Alfred Métraux defined the shaman as “any individual who maintains by profession and in the interest of the community an intermittent commerce with spirits, or who is possessed by them.” While Métraux’s definition is appealing in its simplicity and even-handedness, it is perhaps ultimately too broad, as it also fits African and Haitian possession cults. So we would add to Métraux’s definition: Shamanism involves a kind of theater in which the shaman performs and the audience remains an audience.

In possession cults, such as vodoun, the audience is encouraged to become actively engaged in the drama of spirit possession. In shamanism it is the shaman who is on stage and is the dramatic actor.