PART SEVEN

Global Knowledge and Indigenous Knowledge Come Together and Remain Apart

In 1901, Franz Boas wrote:

One of the chief aims of anthropology is the study of the mind of man under the varying conditions of race and of environment. The activities of the mind manifest themselves in thoughts and actions, and exhibit an infinite variety of form among the peoples of the world. In order to understand these clearly, the student must endeavor to divest himself entirely of opinions and emotions based upon the peculiar social environment into which he is born. He must adapt his own mind, so far as feasible, to that of the people whom he is studying. The more successful he is freeing himself from the bias based on the group of ideas that constitute the civilization in which he lives, the more successful he will be in interpreting the beliefs and actions of man.

 

When it came to the study of shamans, it took anthropologists and other researchers close to a century to put Boas’s wise advice into practice.

Claude Lévi-Strauss set the stage in 1962 with his book The Savage Mind. He showed that magic and science require the same mental operations and complement each other. He made it theoretically acceptable to take shamanism seriously.

It would take researchers two more decades to find common ground between the practices of science and shamanism.

By then, the world had become a more complicated place. A global culture was emerging. Shamanism increasingly appeared in the marketplace. The New Age movement had become fascinated with shamanism. And anthropologists found a “force field” that kept them from understanding shamans. They also found ways of overcoming it.