"In Shamans of the 20th Century, anthropologist Ruth-Inge Heinze takes a critical look at the global re-emergence of the shaman in the late twentieth century, redefiing the role of the shama at a time when we in the West are questioning both our ways of knowing and medical practice. A pioneering work, hers is a much needed synthesis between third-world and primal people's holistic understanding of healing as embracing the total human condition-social, emotional, psychological as well as physical, and the radically innovative stance of Western New Age healers. Elinor W. Gadon" -- Back cover.

The Arakmbut are an indigenous people who live in the Madre de Dios region of the southeastern Peruvian rain forest. Since their first encounters with missionaries in the 1950s, they have shown resilience and a determination to affirm their identity in the face of many difficulties. During the last fifteen years, Arakmbut survival has been under threat from a goldrush that has attracted hundreds of colonists onto their territories. This trilogy of books traces the ways in which the Arakmbut overcome the dangers that surround them: their mythology and cultural strength; their social flexibility; and their capacity to incorporate non-indigenous concepts and activities into their defence strategies. Each area is punctuated by the constant presence of the invisible spirit, which provides a seamless theme connecting the books to each other. The death of a shaman in 1980 had an enormous spiritual and political consequences for one of the Arakmbut communities, resulting in a shift in its social organization from comparative hierarchy to a more egalitarian system. The author uses this case as an illustration to challenge the idea that indigenous peoples live in fossilized, static worlds. He shows that political activities in conjunction with shamanic communication with the spirit world provide the impetus and context for change. Buy all three volumes for 20% discount

Thirty years ago, anthropologist Laurel Kendall did intensive fieldwork among South Korea’s (mostly female) shamans and their clients as a reflection of village women’s lives. In the intervening decades, South Korea experienced an unprecedented economic, social, political, and material transformation and Korean villages all but disappeared. And the shamans? Kendall attests that they not only persist but are very much a part of South Korean modernity. This enlightening and entertaining study of contemporary Korean shamanism makes the case for the dynamism of popular religious practice, the creativity of those we call shamans, and the necessity of writing about them in the present tense. Shamans thrive in South Korea’s high-rise cities, working with clients who are largely middle class and technologically sophisticated. Emphasizing the shaman’s work as open and mutable, Kendall describes how gods and ancestors articulate the changing concerns of clients and how the ritual fame of these transactions has itself been transformed by urban sprawl, private cars, and zealous Christian proselytizing. For most of the last century Korean shamans were reviled as practitioners of antimodern superstition; today they are nostalgically celebrated icons of a vanished rural world. Such superstition and tradition occupy flip sides of modernity’s coin—the one by confuting, the other by obscuring, the beating heart of shamanic practice. Kendall offers a lively account of shamans, who once ministered to the domestic crises of farmers, as they address the anxieties of entrepreneurs whose dreams of wealth are matched by their omnipresent fears of ruin. Money and access to foreign goods provoke moral dilemmas about getting and spending; shamanic rituals express these through the longings of the dead and the playful antics of greedy gods, some of whom have acquired a taste for imported whiskey. No other book-length study captures the tension between contemporary South Korean life and the contemporary South Korean shamans’ work. Kendall’s familiarity with the country and long association with her subjects permit nuanced comparisons between a 1970s "then" and recent encounters—some with the same shamans and clients—as South Korea moved through the 1990s, endured the Asian Financial Crisis, and entered the new millennium. She approaches her subject through multiple anthropological lenses such that readers interested in religion, ritual performance, healing, gender, landscape, material culture, modernity, and consumption will find much of interest here.

The Other Side of the Shamans, an adult-oriented novel, is divided into two parts: the first, set at the begnning of the eighteeeenth century, follows the historically-based life of Walking Horse,a young spiritual Native American in the Ho-Chunk tribe. A prodigy with remarkable physical and mental powers, Walking Horse encounters ecstatic love and abject evil, with varying degrees of success. The second part, set in the late twentieth century, chronicles the lives of two very different clerics: a priest with positive values and lifestyle, and an evil prelate motivated by power, avarice, and illicit lust. Both individuals have differing levels of shamanistic capabilities. The tome concludes with a melding of the two sections. This book is the first fiction publication by the author.

Articles from ethnographers, a linguist, and Native Americans, all addressed to the topic of Native California shamanism in traditional times and in the present. A feast for the scholar or layman interested in the cross-cultural study of religion; in California Indians; or in the beginnings of art, music, and literature. Ken Hedges of the San Diego Museum of Man, for example, discusses the shamanistic aspects of California’s remarkable rock art; Craig Bates of the museum on Yosemite National Park writes of Sierra Miwok shamans in the 20th century; Dorothea Theodoratus and Wintu scholar and artist Frank LaPena present examples of shamanic art and poetry as it persists to the present day; Floyd Buckskin, an Ajumawi, discusses the conflict between New Age shamanism and traditional shamanism; and Jack Norton, a Hupa, discusses the shamanic tradition in northwestern California as it appears to a Native Californian. Seven of the papers presented at the 1990 Conference on Shamanism at California State University, Hayward.

Shamanism has always been of great interest to anthropologists. More recently it has been discovered by westerners, especially New Age followers. This book breaks new ground byexamining pristine shamanism in Greenland, among people contacted late by Western missionaries and settlers. On the basis of material only available in Danish, and presented herein English for the first time, the author questions Mircea Eliade's well-known definition of the shaman as the master of ecstasy and suggests that his role has to be seen as that of a master of spirits. The ambivalent nature of the shaman and the spirit world in the tough Arctic environment is then contrasted with the more benign attitude to shamanism in the New Age movement. After presenting descriptions of their organizations and accounts by participants, the author critically analyses the role of neo-shamanic courses and concludes that it is doubtful to consider what isoffered as shamanism.

With their ability to enter trances, to change into the bodies of other creatures, and to fly through the northern skies, shamans are the subject of both popular and scholarly fascination. In Shamans: Siberian Spirituality and the Western Imagination Ronald Hutton looks at what is really known about both the shamans of Siberia and about others spread throughout the world. He traces the growth of knowledge of shamans in Imperial and Stalinist Russia, descibes local variations and different types of shamanism, and explores more recent western influences on its history and modern practice. This is a challenging book by one of the world's leading authorities on Paganism.