Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft

In his “reader” on the subject, published in 2003, Graham Harvey defined shamanism not so much as a technical term as a “semantic field.”¹ Applied only to activities in contemporary British society, it has already become attached to five different phenomena; its application to practices and practitioners in traditional societies are correspondingly even more diverse. Graham’s own response was to celebrate this diversity as something exciting in itself, telling us valuable things about the contrasting ways in which scholars approach the study of indigenous peoples. His argument has certain obvious truths, and attractions, but both are more appealing for a scholar of religious studies (such as he is) than to a historian or an anthropologist concerned with traditional cultures. Whatever the difficulties that the last two disciplines encounter in their work—and these are immense—they are supposed to be studying something more than themselves.

What is very clear is that the only common factor in the study of shamanism consists of Western scholarship. It is this that created the term, produced the studies that embody its different meanings, and transmitted enthusiasm for it to audiences within its own homelands. It has, in the process, made the term into a label with absolutely no agreed-on meaning; in this regard, the ivory tower has become a Tower of Babel. At present, anybody wishing to write of shamanism in a scholarly context has a series of choices. The first is whether to apply the word “shaman” to any person in a traditional society who communicates with a spirit world and uses this expertise on behalf of others, or else to confine it to a particular kind of practitioner within that broad category. Many scholars have made the former, loose, usage, and it has been adopted, explicitly or not, by people who call themselves shamans [End Page 209] within modern Western society. The problem with this is that it is so broad and universal that it says nothing of very much interest about any particular time and place. Every traditional society has experts in dealing with spirit worlds, and many urbanized, literate, and state-regulated cultures have had them, too. Most have divided such experts up into different categories, all of which are subsumed under the blanket term “shaman” in this loose usage. Most people who have written about shamanism have therefore preferred to make a more restrictive and precise definition of it; the trouble, of course, is that there is no general agreement over what that should be.

The solution to the problem proposed here is to go back to basics, and ask what it was that first made Europeans take up the word “shaman,” invent the word “shamanism,” and find them interesting. The first word, of course, comes from Siberia, and it is that region which constitutes, in the phrase of Mircea Eliade, the “locus classicus” of shamanism. European travelers reported what was later termed shamanism in Mongolia from the thirteenth century and in Siberia from the sixteenth; in each case, their first contact with the region concerned. Until the end of the seventeenth century, the Europeans themselves came from a world of traditional spirituality, in which most people dwelt in small rural communities, were overawed by the forces of nature, feared and negotiated with entities embodying those natural forces, and had local specialists for that work of negotiation. They were also familiar with trance states and ecstatic visions. Yet what they encountered in Siberia and Mongolia still seemed new and startling to them, and usually inspired them to anxiety and repulsion.

So what was it that struck Europeans as so remarkable, and so alien, about what they came to term shamanism? The straight answer is that it consisted of what Anna-Leena Siikala has termed a “rite technique.”² In other words, the people who practiced it entered trance, and appeared to communicate with spirits, in a dramatic public performance. This commonly included music, song, chant, or dance, or a combination of these, holding the attention and engaging the senses and imagination of an audience. It was of a piece with this that, all over northern Asia, shamans were expected to...