Shamanism

Shamanism is a western concept to research (and learn from) cultures which have not lost their ‘gate to re-enter animal paradise’. It is mostly used to denote and ‘ethnograph’ indigenous peoples who are still deeply embedded, in synchrony, in nature’s cycles and transitions.

Seen from western perspective…’dangerously close to how animals live’.

So these peoples are more ‘non-human’ than we ‘civilized/modern/develped’ peoples. This persistent racistic premisse was/is deeply rooted in (European) anthropological theories.

After 150 years anthropologist and sociologists are still somehow. more or less, tangled up in categories like: primitive/tribal and modern/civilized, Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft societies (Tönnies 1887), mechanical and organic societies (Durkheim 1893), closed and open societies (Popper 1945).

Gregory Bateson is one of few western social scientists who consequently compared communication in biological (animal/forest/plant) systems with information exchange (communication) within and between human communities. His entrance in thinking is about open and closed system theory.

He believed that we, by getting into states of grace, can return to (animal) paradise when we learn to think (and then act carefully) how nature works (An Ecology of Mind 2010).

Most shamanic cultures (Van Bekkum abstract First and Second Nations 2015) have rituals in which they regularly, in synchrony with nature (daily, moonly & seasonal) cycles, ‘become animals’ again.

All human moral, ethical, normative dilemmas and paradoxes do not exist in animal paradise.

There is an easy gate to paradise.

If we take humanity as ‘A Glorious Accident’ (Kayzer 1997) and Dagara wisdom seriously we need to ‘eat humble pie’ now and then to get in line with principles of nature. (Enlivement, Weber 2013).

Is this kind of shamanism possible in modern urban times?

I, in this site, try to show it does on the basis of three decades of clinical/educational fieldwork and secular talmudic craving (researching ideas/literature).