Copyright 1995 by Grolier Electronic Publishing, Inc.
shaman

{shay'-muhn} 

A shaman is a religious or ritual specialist, man or woman, believed capable of communicating directly with spirit powers, often while in ecstatic states.  Shamans and shamanistic religion were first identified among the peoples of Siberia and continue to be associated mainly with Siberian and American Indian peoples, although closely related phenomena exist in other parts of Asia and in Oceania;  the word shaman is derived from a TUNGUS word meaning "he who knows." The term medicine man is frequently used as a synonym for shaman with reference to American Indian cultures.  ESKIMO shamans are called angakoks. 

Russian accounts of Siberian shamanism date back to the 17th and 18th centuries, but the German-Russian scholar Wilhelm Radloff (Vasily Radlov, 1837-1918), who was one of the pioneers of Siberian ethnology, was the first to treat shamanism seriously as a subject for scholarly research in his book Aus Sibirien (1884).  The earliest widely known monograph on shamanism as such was published by V. M. Mikhailovsky in 1895. 

The shaman may be grouped with the healer or diviner but is distinguished from that general class by the specific nature of his or her religious experience and practices.  Shamanic power is said to come directly from a supernatural force:  a spirit (sometimes associated with a particular animal) takes possession of the shaman during an ecstasy or trance and gives the shaman powers of healing and knowing, often after transporting him or her to a spirit world.  Sometimes the ecstatic state may be induced by hallucinogens. 

It is the shaman's function to regulate relations between the spirits and the community in order to ensure the community's well-being.  Shamans concern themselves with such matters as locating and attracting game or fish, controlling the weather, detecting broken taboos that bring misfortune, expelling harmful spirits, and especially with curing the sick and guiding the souls of the dead to the spirit world.  Because of their special powers, shamans may gain considerable political influence in their communities, as, for example, among the COLORADO people of Ecuador. 

A shaman is said to be chosen by the spirits, selected from among persons of an excitable temperament who are given to daydreaming and visionary experience.  Sometimes a shaman is marked for the vocation by repeated illnesses or mental disturbance.  The person believed chosen for this calling must undergo an initiatory ordeal, which includes an ecstatic temporary loss of consciousness that symbolizes death and resurrection.  Among the most common characteristics of the initiatory ordeal are the supposed dismemberment of the subject's body, the removal of his or her flesh, and the substitution of new flesh.  In many cultures the candidate is believed to receive during this ordeal a mystical light that enables him or her to discover the secret places to which lost souls have been taken.  The recovery of souls whose loss or theft has caused misfortune is a major method of shamanic curing. 

Shamanism as practiced among the Ona, Yaghan, and Alacaluf peoples of Tierra del Fuego, at the southern tip of South America, exhibits the same features as exist among the Buryat, Yakut, Khant-Mansi, Samoyed, and other peoples of Siberia. This evidence links even these remote peoples of the Western Hemisphere to what scholars believe was their prehistoric origin in northern Asia. 

Charles H. Long 

Bibliography:  Achterberg, J., Imagery in Healing (1985);  Dow, J., Shamanism (1990);  Eliade, Mircea, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, trans. by Willard Trask, rev. ed. (1964;  repr. 1989);  Taussig, M., Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man (1987);  Walsh, R. N., Spirit of Shamanism (1990). 

See also:  PRIMITIVE RELIGION.