The Archaeology of Shamanism

Neil Price

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134527694
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

In this timely collection, Neil Price provides a general introduction to the archaeology of shamanism by bringing together recent archaeological thought on the subject. Blending theoretical discussion with detailed case studies, the issues addressed include shamanic material culture, responses to dying and the dead, shamanic soundscapes, the use of ritual architecture and shamanism in the context of other belief systems such as totemism. Following an intial orientation reviewing shamanism as an anthropological construct, the volume focuses on the Northern hemisphere with case studies from Greenland to Nepal, Siberia to Kazakhstan. The papers span a chronological range from Upper Palaeolithic to the present and explore such cross-cutting themes as gender and the body, identity, landscape, architecture, as well as shamanic interpretations of rock art and shamanism in the heritage and cultural identity of indigenous peoples. The volume also addresses the interpretation of shamanic beliefs in terms of cognitive neuroscience and the modern public perception of prehistoric shamanism.

Part One
The Archaeology of Shamanism
Cognition, Cosmology and World-View

Chapter One
An archaeology of altered states: Shamanism and material culture studies

Neil S. Price

INTRODUCTION: ŠAMAN/SAMA:N/SHAMAN

When a dissident priest called Avvakum arrived in the lands of the nomadic, reindeer-herding Evenki in the early 1650s, having been exiled to central Siberia by the patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, no outsider had ever heard of a s ŝaman, let alone written the word down or explored the cosmological understandings that underpinned its meaning. By the time of his execution for heresy in 1682, Avvakum’s descriptions communicated during his sojourn among the Evenki had already laid the foundations for what anthropologists would later term the study of shamanism.

Over the following 150 years, as Siberia was traversed by missionaries, political exiles (often highly educated intellectuals), Tsarist agents and European travellers, more and more stories were recorded of the intriguing beliefs and practices to be found among the tribal peoples there: from the Nenets, Mansi, Khanty, Ngansan and Enets of the Uralic group around the Yamal peninsula, the Ob and Yenisei river basins and the north Siberian coast; the Turkic-speaking Yakut and Dolgan on the lower Lena; the Tungusic–Mandchurian peoples of central Siberia, including the Even and the Evenki themselves; and the Yukaghir, Chukchi, Koryak and Itelmen of eastern Siberia and the Pacific coast, amongst many others.

The tales told by these early voyagers were startling, and aroused intense interest in Russia and Europe. A fragmentary picture emerged of an ‘ensouled world’ in which everything was alive, and filled with spirits – animals, natural features, even what to Western eyes were inanimate objects. To such beings could be linked almost every aspect of material life: sickness and health, the provision of food and shelter, success in hunting, and the well-being of the community. The maintenance of good relationships with these spirits was thus of crucial importance, and the most striking of the travellers’ stories concerned the special individuals who attained states of trance and ecstasy in order to send out their souls to communicate with these beings, to enlist their aid or bind them to their will, sometimes even to engage them in combat. The operative sphere of these people, whom the Evenki called sŝaman, was revealed as a world of mediation, of negotiation between the realm of human beings and the adjacent, occasionally coincident, planes of existence in which dwelt the gods, the spirits of nature, and the souls of the dead. The complex variety of equipment used in these ceremonies was also described: the strange headgear and jackets hung with jingling amulets, the fur and feathers of animals, metal images; the masks and veils; the effigies and figurines; and above all, the drums.

Some of this data was published and widely discussed in scholarly circles, and during the eighteenth century the Evenk concept of the sŝaman was taken up in Russian as a useful collective for the similar figures that were encountered from one tribe to another across the region. From the phonetic constructions used to record these concepts (the indigenous Siberians had no written language), s ŝaman or sama:n was soon normalised via Russian to the western European languages, creating the more conventional ‘shaman’ (the Evenki pronounced the word with the accent on the second syllable, ‘sha-márn’, but the alternative forms of ‘shár-man’ or ‘sháy-man’ are now more common). At first, there were few that associated these individuals, and the role that they played within their communities, with ‘religion’ in the sense of an organised system of worship. The notion of a collective pattern of belief – shamanism – arose first when the Christian missions began to seriously target the Siberian peoples for conversion, and thus sought to identify a pagan religion towards the overthrow of which they could concentrate their efforts (see Thomas and Humphrey 1994, and Znamenski 1999, for recent studies of church/state perceptions of indigenous belief).

SHAMANIC RESEARCH IN RUSSIA AND BEYOND

This interpretation of exactly what shamanism was/is has been central to shamanic studies from the very beginning. Already in 1853, the Finnish scholar Castrén challenged the idea that shamanism could be described as a religion rather than as a pattern of behaviour, and this debate continued throughout the late 1800s when the first major Russian works on the subject appeared. By the beginning of the twentieth century, this social, psychological and (arguably) religious phenomenon was already the subject of an established body of literature (see, for example, Shashkov 1864; Potanin 1881–3; Agapitov and Khangalov 1883; Radloff 1884; Pripuzov 1885; Mikhailovski 1895; Shimkevich 1896; Sieroszewski 1993 [1896], 1902; this period of early research is summarised in Hultkrantz 1998).

Similar practices had earlier been described from other parts of the northern hemisphere, for example in Schefferus’ influential book Lapponia (1673) on the Sámi of Fenno-Scandia, but it was not until the early 1900s when the American Museum in New York launched the Jesup North Pacific Expedition that the beliefs of other circumpolar arctic and sub-arctic cultures began to be specifically – though tentatively – described in terms of shamanism. The link to Siberia was eased by the widespread accessibility of English-language publications such as Bogoras’ (1911) and Jochelson’s (1908) reports from the Jesup Expedition, Czaplicka’s 1914 survey of the region, and Shirokogorov’s classic Psychomental Complex of the Tungus (1935). Through the early twentieth century the notion of shamanism spread slowly in North America, being applied to the ‘medicine-men’ of First Nations peoples, but even here the definitions common in Siberia were being adapted to local circumstances (e.g. Dixon 1908).

Although shamanism was widely adopted as a psychological and psychiatric concept in the years between the world wars, as Hultkrantz has noted, ‘it is difficult to find surveys of [non-Russian] shamanism before 1950’ (1998: 61). There were, however, many foreigners working on the Siberian material. Finnish researchers were particularly active (e.g. Holmberg [Harva] 1915, 1922, 1927, 1938; Granö 1919–21; Donner 1922; Lehtisalo 1924, 1937; other significant Western works include Stadling 1912 and Nioradze 1925), and post-Revolutionary Russian research continued within the strict ideological frameworks of Marxist interpretations (see Hultkrantz 1998: 65–7 and Balzer 1990). Until the fall of the Soviet Union, or at least the late 1980s, the division between Western and Eastern studies of shamanism was almost total.

Soviet writers such as Zelenin (1936, 1937, 1952) and Anisimov (1963) sought to explain shamanism in terms of a particular concentration of power and shifting control of production, with an additional emphasis on medical interpretations often based on notions of mental illness. The explanation of shamanism as due to a kind of ‘arctic hysteria’ induced by cold and deprivation was raised by Ohlmarks in 1939 – significantly in the political climate of Nazi Germany – and together with the idea of the shaman as mentally unbalanced psychopath this was adopted with enthusiasm in Soviet Russia, where it became fundamental in the policies of suppressing this perceived threat of independent thought and spiritual allegiance. Ethnocentric ‘explanations’ were also given prominence, while other Russian scholars sought refuge in collecting raw data which did not need to be forced into an ideologically inspired interpretative straitjacket (the research from this period is summarised in Popov’s bibliography from 1932, listing some 650 Russian works on shamanism; a German-language version appeared in 1990). The scholars who maintained a most strictly empirical line, and thus avoided the regime’s appropriation of their work, are now bearers of the tradition of Russian research in the post-Soviet era (e.g. Vajnstein and Basilov – see Hultkrantz, 1998: 66, for an assessment of these writers’ significance).

At the socio-political ‘border’ of Russian scholarship, another major block of work developed, again building on research from the late 1800s and focusing on shamanism among the Nordic and Sámi populations of Scandinavia. More than 300 publications have appeared on the shamanic complex of seidr and related rituals in Old Norse belief (collected and discussed in Price in press, with further treatment in Price 2000a and b, 2001b; see also DuBois 1999 for a recent cross-cultural study of Scandinavian religion). An even greater number of publications, over 800, deal with Sámi religion (collected in Rydving 1993b; the works of Bäckman, Hultkrantz, Manker, Mebius, Pentikäinen, and Rydving himself are especially central). Case studies of the Norse and Sámi demonstrate particularly clearly the use of specialised shamanic practices for aggressive ends, and also the prominence of sexual elements in shamanic rituals; importantly, both of these traits are relatively common among the arctic and sub-arctic peoples, a fact that belies the common association of shamanism almost exclusively with healing that has characterised Western perceptions in the wake of Eliade’s classic work from 1964.

The research history of shamanism in Western anthropology, comparative theology and related disciplines has been charted many times, and this is not the place for yet another introductory essay on the ‘meaning’ of this phenomenon (useful texts in this regard include Eliade 1964, into the orbit of which most subsequent works have been drawn; Lessa and Vogt 1965; Wallace 1966; Edsman 1967; Motzki 1971; Furst 1974; Hultkrantz 1973, 1979, 1993, 1998; Humphrey 1980; Lewis 1981, 1989; Atkinson 1992; Ripinsky-Naxon 1993; Vitebsky 1995; Pentikäinen 1998; Pentikäinen et al. 1998; Bowie 2000: 190–218; Larsson 2000). We may, however, note the importance of two key themes of relevance to the archaeological interpretations of the present book. The first of these concerns the relationship of shamanic belief systems to their environmental setting (e.g. Hultkrantz 1965; Pentikäinen 1996; Bowie 2000: 118–50), explored further below in a landscape context. The second focuses on the links that are sometimes postulated between shamanism and another, equally hotly debated anthropological construct: totemism (the classic introduction can be found in Lévi-Strauss 1962; see Layton 2000 for a recent review of this discussion). As the study of northern shamanism has ebbed and flowed in popularity during the last century, three main forms of interpretation have predominated. The Nivkh ethnographer Chuner Taksami, himself an ethnic Siberian and acquainted with several shamans, has perhaps stated it best (1998: 14):

Shamanism is an historical phenomenon within a system of traditional faiths distinctive of nearly all Siberian peoples. Some people consider shamanism as a variety of primitive religion; others tend to think of it as a set of beliefs and customs centred on the shaman’s personality; and others still associate shamanism with witchcraft and magical spells.

Retrospective reviews of these changing fashions of interpretation, and more recent responses to them, can be found in the international journal of shamanic research, Shaman, and in a series of influential conference publications from the last three decades (e.g. Diószegi and Hóppal 1978; Hóppal 1984; Hóppal and von Sadovszky 1989; Hóppal and Pentikäinen 1992; Siikala and Hóppal 1992; Hóppal and Howard 1993).

One major trend however continues to polarise shamanic studies: the question of geographic frames of reference. Even now, echoing the debates of the early twentieth century, some historians of religion strongly resist the use of the term ‘shamanism’ beyond certain regions of central Siberia. In one sense these objections seem baffling, given that – as we have seen – the concept of shamanism has always been an externally imposed construction, and does not exist anywhere at all other than in the minds of its students. Not even the Evenki have an overall word for what the s ŝaman does, though like several other Siberian peoples they have a broad vocabulary for the different components of the shamanic complex. As both a term and a notion, shamanism is entirely an academic creation, and as such it is certainly a useful tool serving to describe a pattern of ritual behaviour and belief found in strikingly similar form across much of the arctic and sub-arctic regions of the world. Even within this broad understanding, the meaning of shamanism is entirely a matter of consensus, discussion and continuing redefinition; this extends to terminology, many scholars now prefering to write of ‘shamanhood’ or ‘shamanship’. The essential question is to whether we can truly speak of shamanism beyond the circumpolar sphere.

It is here that we enter a broader framework of interpretation, which moves outward from Siberia and the circumpolar region on a sliding scale of inclusion to embrace shamanistic traits in the ritual practices of South America, Oceania, Africa (particularly controversially), and ultimately the globe – an approach recently typified by the work of Piers Vitebsky (1995). In many cases this is still rooted in scholarly discussion, but in the broadest and most popular understanding ‘shamanism’ has latterly come to cover virtually any kind of belief in ‘spirits’ and the existence of other worlds, states of being or planes of consciousness – a definition that of course encompasses the majority of the world’s religions, organised or otherwise, ancient and modern. In this context the term ‘shaman’ has similarly been used to refer to almost any kind of mediator, in any kind of medium, between one perception of the world and another. As a result, those popularly described as shamans have included an astonishing variety of individuals ranging from Jesus to Jim Morrison.

These are not the shamanisms of this book. Instead we follow the general direction taken by related academic disciplines, as summarised by Mathias Guenther: ‘the view held generally by scholars in the anthropology of religion and in comparative religion . . . [is] . . . that shamanism is a religious phenomenon that can be formally delineated and differentiated from other, more complex religions’ (1999: 426). Considering Taksami’s identification of shamanism as an historical phenomenon (1998: 14), how far is it reasonable to talk of shamanism in the prehistoric past? The answer, of course, can only be sought in studies of material culture, and thus archaeology.

SHAMANISM AND MATERIAL CULTURE STUDIES

The inclusion of shamanism in archaeological interpretations has in general run parallel with its adoption in anthropological and comparative theological circles, as discussed a...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• The Archaeology of Shamanism
• Figures
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Part One: The archaeology of shamanism cognition, cosmology and world-view
• Part Two: Siberia and central asia the ‘cradle of shamanism’
• Part Three: North america and the north atlantic
• Part Four: Northern europe