Shamanism in the strict sense is preeminently a religious phenomenon of Siberia and Inner Asia. The word comes to us, through the Russian, from the Tunguz ṥaman. Throughout the immense area comprising the central and northern regions of Asia,...

Shamanism is a vocation, social role, and ritual cosmos recognizable over a vast geographical range from the Arctic and boreal forests, to the Central Asian steppes, East Asia, the Himalayas, South Asia, and the tropical rainforest cultures of...

The Ninth International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences (held in Chicago in 1973) reflected these new tendencies in a publication entitled Spirits, Shamans and Stars (Browman and Schwartz 1979). Its three sections provide a good...

If ethnography across East Asia has tended to stress local differences at the expense of regional continuities, it is not surprising. Fieldwork as a methodology directs attention to very profound local differences which can exist in the midst of...

The term ‘shaman’ was taken from Russian sources in the seventeenth century, the word itself coming from the language of the Evenks (Tungus), an eastern Siberian people. A century later the derivative term ‘shamanism’ was...

Person who uses magic to cure the sick, divine the unknown, or control events. Both men and women can be shamans. Shamanism is classically associated with certain Arctic and Central Asian peoples, but today the term is applied to analogous religious...

The cult, found in many parts of Buddhist Asia and elsewhere, which centres round an intermediary whose psychic powers are so developed that he can link the ordinary daily world with the world of spirits. It has affinities with Bön...

Shamanism refers to a range of traditional beliefs and practices concerned with communication with the spirit world. There are many variations of shamanism throughout the world, though there are some beliefs that are shared by all forms of...