Routledge International Handbook of Charisma

José Pedro Zúquete, José Pedro Zúquete

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429558276
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Personality in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The Routledge International Handbook of Charisma provides an unprecedented multidimensional and multidisciplinary comparative analysis of the phenomenon of charisma – first defined by Max Weber as the irrational bond between deified leader and submissive follower. It includes broad overviews of foundational theories and experiences of charisma and of associated key issues and themes. Contributors include 45 influential international scholars who approach the topic from different disciplinary perspectives and utilize examples from an array of historical and cultural settings. The Handbook presents up-to-date, concise, thought-provoking, innovative, and informative perspectives on charisma as it has been expressed in the past and as it continues to be manifested in the contemporary world by leaders ranging from shamans to presidents. It is designed to be essential reading for all students, researchers, and general readers interested in achieving a comprehensive understanding of the power and potential of charismatic authority in all its varieties, subtleties, dynamics, and current and potential directions.

Section III

Religion

11
Charisma and shamanism

Eric Michael Kelley

Origins

“Charisma” and “shamanism” are contested categories that social analysts use to imagine origin stories in diverse fields, including anthropology, sociology, religion, politics, psychology, medicine, and the arts. Conceptualizations of both categories have been inspired by Greek metaphysics and Christianity (cf., Reddekop, 2010), as well as historical Western imaginaries of the “Other,” frequently mirroring analysts’ own distorted images that are further refracted in their analyses (cf., Bastra, 1994; Kuper, 2019; Ramos, 1998). Max Weber wedded the concepts “charisma” and “shamanism,” casting “the shaman” as prototype of his category, “primary charisma,” in which charismatic leaders form powerful emotional bonds with followers that are sustained so long as the relationship is nurtured. Weber created this “ideal type” based on limited reliable ethnographic data (Kelley, 2013), imagining “the shaman” dramatically erupting on the social scene, attracting followers through the intensity of inspired performances, demonstrating direct connection to the spirits, thus legitimating divinely inspired authority as the “original sacred experience” (Lindholm, 2013).

Weber’s concept of charisma inherits a Lutheran metaphysics of the will, in which shamans are called, receive divine gifts of body and spirit, and then successfully grapple with conflicting value positions, thereby demonstrating the genuineness of the inspired charismatic leader’s cause through the recognition of followers (Reddekop, 2010:351–352). This concept is, of course, firmly rooted in the Pauline conceptualization of charisma, through a revision of Sohm, in a secularization of the embodied divisions of charisma that Paul strategically distributed throughout the congregation in order to strengthen the emotional bonds of charismatic group members (Falco, 2010:7–9; cf. Petaros et al., 2015). In willfully resolving the torturous contradictions in the value positions, the shaman is a natural leader, having overcome the struggle in the wilderness, as it were, born again through divine gifts. Healed, Weber’s prototypical charismatic leader bestows these healing gifts on the community (Reddekop, 2010:352). Some read Weber as overemphasizing the individual over the collective, while most argue charisma is inherently a group experience (cf., Falco, 2010:9; Lindholm, 2013). Building upon Weber’s concept of charisma, ideal types have been critiqued as teleological and evolutionary by ethnographers of charismatic healers who follow Csordas in attempting to find the particular locus of charisma within an individual blessed with some quality of alterity that confers legitimacy upon them (Lindquist, 2001:3–4).

Combined with his secularization of Pauline conceptions of charisma as supernatural gift bestowed upon the shaman, Weber built upon Herder’s ideas that Flaherty (1992) traces to Herodotus. Herder opined that Orpheus was a shaman in one of the earliest German uses of the borrowed Tungus ethnonym, portraying shamans as the originators of the various disciplines that led to the development of all civilizations (Flaherty, 1992:138–153). The emphasis here was also on the shaman as willful self, performing a “self-induced cure for a self-induced fit,” that captured the Western imagination (ibid.:12). Others have similarly associated Asclepius, the “wounded healer” with shamans, who are masters of the imagination themselves, healing through a variety of altered states of consciousness (Achterberg, 1988:122–123; cf., Hockley and Gardner, 2011; Petaros et al., 2015; Peterson, 2017). Weber imagined the charismatic shaman as a way to cope with the disenchantment of modernity and stultifying bureaucracy (cf., Reddekop, 2010), following Nietzsche, who influenced the “shamanic-Orphic discourse of modernity” (von Stuckrad, 2010:87), later inherited by Eliade.

Like Weber, Eliade privileged the altered state of consciousness, or “ecstasy,” performed by shamans as the essential feature of “shamanism” in his ethnological volume (1974 [1964]). Like Weber, Eliade emphasized the uniqueness of shamans, defining them as those who have willfully mastered the spirits, demonstrated through their control of soul flight, in contrast to those who are possessed by spirits (ibid.:5–6). Like Weber, Eliade inherited the same history of thought and shared a similar discontent with modernity’s ills, exemplified by his desire to “escape from history” (von Stuckrad, 2010:94–98) through the crafting of his aspirational model. Eliade, therefore, privileged the ascent to the sky in his writing, as well as soul flight over possession, though the primary ethnographic source on Tungus shamanism (Shirokogoroff, 1935) documents all of these (cf., Humphrey, 1996; Lewis, 1996 [1986]; Siikala, 1978). Despite privileging ascent, Eliade considers Orpheus to display various characteristics of a “Great Shaman” (Op.cit.:391), in keeping with inherited thought.

Eliade’s definition and ethnology continue to serve as an entry into the scholarly literature on shamanisms. Although many have critiqued his model, it remains influential on subsequent conceptualizations, enjoying few adherents among contemporary ethnographers who emphasize the diversity of shamanisms in time and space, focusing on particular cases in their historical contexts (Atkinson, 1992). The following section briefly discusses the diversity of shamanisms, both in terms of actual sociocultural phenomena and conceptualizations that seek to either explain these or use them as resources for personal growth. Eliade’s conceptualization continues to influence practices that have been dubbed “neoshamanisms” (cf., Christensen, 2015; Kraft et al., 2015; Langdon and Santana de Rose, 2012; Lewis, 2015; Townsend, 2005; von Stuckrad, 2002), “Western” shamanisms (Crockford, 2010; von Stuckrad, 2002), and less favorably by some scholars, “New Age Medicine Men” (Lewis, 2015), “White Shamans” or “Plastic Medicine Men” (cf., Green, 1988; Kehoe, 2000, 2001), and more recently, “Pretendians” (Nephin, 2019), guilty of cultural appropriation, ethnocentrism, erasure of Indigenous people’s lived experiences, and racism. Also briefly discussed in the following section are major contemporary scholarly conceptualizations of shamanisms that consider the diversity of practices as phenomena worthy of serious ethnographic study, despite inherited biases, contested categories, and contemporary identity politics.

Shamanisms

Eliade’s work influenced several ethnographically informed conceptualizations of shamanisms that have maintained his influence both within and beyond academia. Despite Eliade privileging shamans possessing willful mastery of ecstasy, arguing that “real shamans” did not use drugs to enter trance states – again at odds with Shirokogoroff’s prototypical Tungus ethnographic data (cf., Basilov, 1997 for more Siberian examples) – his work influenced the growing interest in hallucinogens connected to the historical moment.

Carlos Castaneda helped birth psychedelic anthropology, controversial due to the questionable validity of his ethnographic “data” that was the likely product of his imagination, a hoax that both forced him out of the academy and influenced followers that he attracted through the cultivation of his own charismatic leadership (Boekhoven, 2011:206–211). His colleague, Barbara Myerhoff, was also searching for shamanic utopias through a shared interest in consuming hallucinogens within the context of ethnographic fieldwork as was Peter Furst (Op. cit., 212–217), each presenting authentic ethnographic cases that fed growing public interest in psychedelics within mainstream culture, especially in connection with the efflorescence of esoteric interests frequently lumped under the broad New Age umbrella, thus providing shelter from disenchantment associated with mainstream modernity. Here the emphasis is on individual consumers engaged in idiosyncratic bricolage, who combine elements from disparate religions and appropriated Indigenous cultural traditions in search of spiritual healing, authentic religious experience, or willful self-actualization, whereas Indigenous shamanisms frame the shaman as mediator between the spirit world, including ancestors, and the living community (cf., Boekhoven, 2011, 2013; Green, 1988; Townsend, 2005). It was Michael Harner’s ethnographic research into hallucinogens in connection with shamanisms, however, followed by his subsequent theorizing about “core shamanism,” which ironically eschews the use of drugs to enter and maintain trance states (after Eliade), that became arguably the most influential conceptualization of shamans to this day.

Like other psychedelic anthropologists, Harner, a US anthropologist, stressed the importance of firsthand experience with hallucinogens in the context of ethnographic field research, arguing this permitted a privileged understanding of the shamanic experiences studied (Boekhoven, 2011:217–221). Some scholars refer to Indigenous varieties as “traditional” shamanism (Townsend, 2005), or in the case of Siberian cases like the Tungus discussed by Shirokogoroff, as “classical shamanism” (Siikala, 1978), while other scholars prefer local ethnonyms associated with particular cases rather than the term “shamanism,” (Kehoe, 2000) which Taussig (1989:59) characterized as an invented, modern Western analytical category.

Harner developed the School for Shamanic Studies in conjunction with his Foundation for Shamanic Studies. The Foundation is dedicated to preserving and teaching about Indigenous shamanisms, while the School has a curriculum teaching what Harner, due to his privileged experiences, views as the underlying “Core Shamanism” he discerned that is universal to all humans, conveniently making it appeal to Western individuals (Boekhoven, 2011; Fotiou, 2016; Townsend, 2005) seeking do-it-yourself transcendence (cf., Boekhoven, 2013; Crockford, 2010). Harner transformed from an academic anthropologist studying Indigenous shamanisms to a charismatic leader of sorts, taking care to avoid guru status (Townsend, 2005:3) while teaching the techniques he learned and reframed for a Western audience. His numerous schools continue to train and certify people in his techniques worldwide posthumously.

Harner’s influence has waned among contemporary ethnographers, though they frequently write against his work, and sometimes cite his ethnography. His work is more influential with scholars pursuing ethnological research that seeks to develop evolutionary typological models based on Eliade and Harner’s imaginings of universal human phenomena (e.g., Winkelman, 2000). Many of the attributes primarily associated with the so-called “classical” cases that Eliade privileged leading to Harner’s model were discussed above. Based on his observations of Tungus shamans’ practices, however, Shirokogoroff had reservations that they could be accurately considered to represent a static tradition. He therefore concluded that the word “shaman” did not necessarily apply to earlier practitioners, nor to all types of Tungus religious practitioners that he observed. Even in these prototypical cases used for much model-building, there was diversity at the time the data was collected, suggesting further changes to come (Shirokogoroff, 1935; Siikala, 1978). There was, in other words, a routinization of improvisation associated with Weber’s “primary charisma” (Kelley, 2013). The historically particular “traditional” or “classical” cases were encountered in the context of social upheaval due to contact with new peoples creating novel crises associated with colonialism, begging the same question Codere asked regarding the potlatch, paraphrased here as, “why do scholars assume that what was observed was unaffected by the sociopolitical context undergoing rapid disruption?” (Codere, 1950). Contemporary shamanisms are similarly diverse and inconstant, whether Indigenous or Western, eluding simplified essentialist categorizations. If “shamanisms” are inherently improvisational (Kelley, 2013) and frequently syncretic as shamans combine elements from other religions that may be accepted by followers through a process of collaborative improvisation and acceptance (or rejection) of novel alterity, all exemplars might be argued to be “new,” thus deserving of membership in the category, “neoshamanisms,” at least while in their formative stages.

The category “neoshamanisms” most commonly indicates contemporary Western varieties. As with most analytical categories, a diversity of opinions exists, in this case regarding how to best differentiate between kinds of “shamans” (cf., Hoppál, 1993), adding “terminological confusion to an already compromised situation” (Townsend, 2005:2; cf., Balzer, 1993). Terminological confusion is the logical conclusion of scholarly struggles for authority in the academic field of shamanisms (cf., Boekhoven, 2011). Given the ubiquity of the idea of the “shaman” throughout Western society, it is unlikely that the term will be discarded as some advocate (Kehoe, 2000, 2001; Taussig, 1989). Many contemporary ethnographers acknowledge that a single universal definition may be elusive, but continue using the term due, in part, to its familiarity (cf., Thomas and Humphrey, 1996:3; Whitehead, 2002:202).

Modern Western neoshamans not only tend to draw from courses that are often based in Harner’s core shamanism but also draw from diverse religious traditions, as well as from r...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: the study of charisma
• Section I Concepts and theories
• Section II Historical cases
• Section III Religion
• Section IV Politics
• Section V Extremism
• Section VI Management and business
• Section VII Culture, media, entertainment
• Section VIII Rising topics
• Index