Shamanism

• 1. Introduction

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  Shamanism rests on a single, audacious claim: that a person can leave the ordinary world behind, slip into a trance, and bargain directly with spirits on behalf of the living. The practitioner, called a shaman, enters an altered state of consciousness to pull spiritual energies into the physical world. The purpose is practical. Healing the sick. Reading the future. Guiding souls. For something so widespread, the word at its center turns out to be slippery. There is no single agreed-upon definition among anthropologists. Some scholars argue the term should be abandoned entirely as a scientific illusion. Where did this word come from, and why does it travel so far from where it began? Who decides whether a shaman is real? And how does a practice tied to remote Siberian forests end up drawing paying tourists to the Peruvian Amazon? Hundreds of books and academic papers have chased these questions, and a peer-reviewed journal is devoted entirely to the study of shamanism.

• 2. A Word On The Move

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  The Russian word шаман carried shamanism into the English language, and it in turn came from a Tungusic language, possibly the southwestern dialect of Evenki spoken by the Sym Evenki peoples, or from Manchu. Some link it to the Tungus root meaning "to know," but the Finnish ethnolinguist Juha Janhunen resists that tidy story. He notes the derivation is phonologically irregular and warns it should not be accepted without reservation.

  Mircea Eliade traced a different possible root entirely. He pointed to the Sanskrit word śramaṇa, meaning a wandering monastic or holy figure, which spread across Central Asian languages alongside Buddhism. The word surfaces in Gandhari as ṣamana, in Tocharian and in Chinese as 沙門. The trail of the term winds through trade and translation more than through any single homeland.

  The exiled Russian churchman Avvakum left the word in his memoirs, an early written trace of Russians meeting the Indigenous peoples of Siberia. Two decades later the Dutch statesman Nicolaes Witsen carried it to Western Europe in his 1692 book about his travels among Tungusic- and Samoyedic-speaking peoples. The merchant Adam Brand of Lübeck published an account of a Russian embassy to China in 1698, and a translation that same year introduced the word shaman to English speakers.

  Anthropologist Silvia Tomášková offered a darker origin. By the mid-1600s many Europeans were applying the Arabic word shaitan, meaning "devil," to the non-Christian practices they found beyond the Ural Mountains. She suggests shaman may have entered Tungus dialects as a corruption of that term, passed along to missionaries, soldiers, and colonial administrators over centuries of contact.

• 3. The Definition Problem

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  Ronald Hutton, the English historian, counted four separate definitions of the term in use by the dawn of the 21st century. One treats any person who contacts a spirit world in an altered state as a shaman. Another narrows it to those who do so at the request of others. A third tries to single out a particular technique that separates shamans from mediums, witch doctors, and prophets, though scholars holding this view never agreed on what that technique should be. A fourth reserves the word for the Indigenous religions of Siberia and neighboring parts of Asia.

  Anthropologist Manvir Singh argues the most defensible definition rests on three features: entering non-ordinary states, engaging with unseen realities, and providing services like healing and divination. The Oxford English Dictionary frames the shaman as someone with access to and influence in a world of benevolent and malevolent spirits, who enters a trance during ritual and practices divination and healing.

  The term began as a label applied from the outside. Western anthropologists used it to describe the religion of indigenous Siberians and Mongols, then stretched it across Asia, Africa, Australasia, and the Americas wherever they spotted something that looked similar. Critics insist the words shaman and shamanism cannot capture the variety and complexity of Indigenous spirituality. Each nation and tribe has its own way of life and uses terms in its own language. The word reached the west after Russian forces conquered the shamanistic Khanate of Kazan in 1552.

• 4. Scholars Against The Term

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  Alice Kehoe, in her book Shamans and Religion: An Anthropological Exploration in Critical Thinking, attacks the word as a vehicle for cultural appropriation. She argues that New Age and modern Western forms of shamanism misrepresent or dilute Indigenous practices, and that the term reinforces racist ideas like the noble savage. She is especially hard on Mircea Eliade, calling his work a synthesis invented from scattered sources rather than direct research.

  Kehoe points out that drumming, trance, chanting, and the use of entheogens are not unique to anything that could be called shamanism. Chanting, she notes, plays a role in the Abrahamic religions too. She rejects the idea that shamanism is an ancient, unchanged religion surviving from the Paleolithic.

  Other scholars want to soften or replace the word. One recommends "shamanhood" or "shamanship," terms used in old Russian and German ethnographic reports, to stress that this is not a religion of sacred dogmas but something woven into everyday practical life. Piers Vitebsky observes that despite astonishing similarities across cultures, there is no real unity in shamanism, and no record of a purely shamanistic society. The Norwegian social anthropologist Hakan Rydving likewise called for abandoning shaman and shamanism as scientific illusions.

  Dulam Bumochir documented how Mongols themselves rebuilt shamanism after 1990, in what he describes as a partnership of scholars and shamans in post-communist Mongolia. Historian Karena Kollmar-Polenz argues the construction of shamanism as a religious "other" actually began with 18th-century writings by Tibetan Buddhist monks in Mongolia, which later shaped European discourse.

• 5. Soul, Sickness, And Spirit

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  Shamanism is built on the premise that the visible world is pervaded by invisible forces that affect the lives of the living. Even when the cause of a disease lies in the spiritual realm, stirred up by malicious spirits, both spiritual and physical methods are used to heal. A shaman may "enter the body" of a patient to confront the infirmity directly and banish the infectious spirit.

  The soul concept explains much that seems unrelated. Healing may take the form of retrieving the lost soul of an ill person. Scarcity of hunted game can be answered by releasing the souls of animals from their hidden abodes. Taboos prescribe how people should treat game, so the animals' souls do not feel angry or hurt, and so a pleased soul of already-killed prey can tell still-living animals it is safe to be caught.

  Spirits are invisible entities only shamans can see, able to take human or animal form. The eagle, snake, jaguar, and rat appear among them. Many shamans hold expert knowledge of medicinal plants and prescribe herbal treatments, sometimes learning directly from the plants after gaining permission from their patron spirits. In the Peruvian Amazon Basin, shamans and curanderos use medicine songs called icaros to summon spirits, and a spirit must first teach the shaman its song before it can be called.

  Power in this world cuts both ways. Belief in witchcraft and sorcery, known as brujería in Latin America, is widespread, and some societies hold that every shaman can both cure and kill. Those with shamanic knowledge enjoy great power and prestige, yet may also be regarded with suspicion or fear as potentially harmful.

• 6. The Wounded Healer

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  Shamans often say they were called through dreams or signs, while others claim their powers are inherited. Training in traditional societies varies but generally takes years. Researchers describe a "shamanistic initiatory crisis," a rite of passage that commonly involves physical illness or psychological breakdown. This pattern appears in the case history of Chuonnasuan, one of the last shamans among the Tungus peoples in Northeast China.

  The wounded healer is the archetype behind this trial. A young shaman undergoes a sickness that pushes them to the brink of death, and the source gives two reasons. The shaman crosses into the underworld to bring back vital information for the sick and for the tribe. And the shaman must become sick in order to understand sickness, believing that by overcoming their own affliction they will hold the cure for all who suffer.

  The drum carries the shaman across that threshold. Among several peoples of Siberia, the beating of the drum allows a shaman to reach an altered state or to travel between physical and spiritual worlds. Shaman drums are generally built from animal skin stretched over a bent wooden hoop, with a handle across the hoop. Much fascination surrounds the role the drum's acoustics play.

• 7. Keepers Of The Code

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  Shamans act as mediators, communicating with spirits on behalf of the community, including the spirits of the deceased. They speak to both living and dead to settle unrest and deliver gifts to the spirits. A single shaman may heal, lead a sacrifice, preserve traditions through storytelling and song, tell fortunes, and act as a psychopomp, a guide of souls.

  Specialized roles divide this work. Among the Nanai people, a distinct kind of shaman serves as a psychopomp, while roles vary among the Nenets, Enets, and Selkup. The assistant of an Oroqen shaman, called jardalanin or "second spirit," interprets the shaman's behavior during rituals, yet is not a shaman, and for this assistant falling into a trance would be unwelcome.

  A debated etymology reads the word shaman as "one who knows," implying a master who keeps the multiple codes of a society together. By this view the shaman expresses meaning verbally, musically, artistically, and in dance, and through objects such as amulets. If the shaman knows the culture well and acts accordingly, the audience recognizes the symbols and trusts the work. Siberian lore even sets a "white" shaman who contacts sky spirits for good by day against a "black" shaman who contacts evil spirits by night. Juha Pentikäinen calls this a "grammar of mind."

• 8. Decline And Return

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  Sagloq, the last angakkuq believed able to travel to the sky and under the sea, died, and with him went capacities like ventriloquism and sleight of hand once tied to Inuit shamanism. Whalers who frequently interacted with Inuit groups are named as one source of decline in that region. Elsewhere former shamans simply stopped, feeling mocked by their own communities or unwilling to speak of a past they had come to regard as deprecated.

  Folklore itself records the sense of loss. A Buryat epic celebrates the ancient first shaman Kara-Gürgän, who could compete with God, create life, and steal back the soul of the sick. A later text laments that shamans of older times were stronger, capable of omnividence and of foretelling decades into the future. When an authentic shaman dies, personal experiences rooted in their family life die with them, and in many cultures the entire belief system is endangered alongside a language shift.

  Isolation has been the great preserver. The Nganasan people kept shamanism a living phenomenon into the early 20th century, and the last notable Nganasan shaman's ceremonies were filmed in the 1970s. The nomadic Tuvan, with an estimated population of 3000, preserved the art through their isolated existence, free from the influence of major religions. Revitalization efforts now follow, led by former shamans among the Sakha people and the Tuvans.

  Not all return is welcome. Richard L. Allen, a research and policy analyst for the Cherokee Nation, says his office is overwhelmed by inquiries about fraudulent shamans, the so-called "plastic medicine people." Anyone claiming to be a Cherokee shaman, he warns, is equivalent to a modern-day snake-oil vendor. Meanwhile, since the early 2000s, ayahuasca tourism has grown into an economic niche around Iquitos, Peru, where retreat centers cater to foreign visitors and many practitioners now sustain themselves by leading ceremonies for paying participants.