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 indication of contemporary preoccupations: the magico-religious use of psychotropic drugs, shamanic therapies and the analysis of religious structures and shamanic symbols. These three directions of research continued to develop throughout the following two decades, with a marked increase at the beginning of the 1980s. Contrary to the pessimistic prognosis of the preceding period, shamanism was not dead. It has even gone through a revival in numerous regions of the world, such as Siberia and Amazonia, where it had been considered doomed as a result of persecution and major socioeconomic changes. In these regions an urban form of shamanism is even emerging.
Certain traditionally shamanic groups, which have long been dominated by imported ideologies and religions, have also rediscovered their roots. This phenomenon is discernible in countries as dissimilar as South Korea, Finland and Hungary. These countries have actively participated in the promotion of research on shamanism, notably by hosting scientific conferences on this theme. Research is generally on the increase. The relaxing of political constraints in the Soviet Union has allowed ethnologists to study shamanism among Siberian peoples once again (Basilov 1984). In Scandinavia, on the instigation of Äke Hultkrantz, a young generation of historians of religion has re-examined shamanism. In France and in anglo-phone countries Lévi-Straussian *structuralism has led to the detailed holistic study of several Asian (Hamayon 1990) and American (Crocker 1985) shamanic systems. This research has brought out their collective and symbolic dimensions and the ways in which they relate to representations, practices, rites, myths, and political and social organization.
Conferences on shamanism are on the increase in Eastern Europe (on Eurasia with M.Hoppal and V.N.Basilov, 1981), in France (with R. Hamayon, 1981), in Britain (on *Lowland South America, with J.Kaplan, 1982), in the United States (with R.I.Heinz, from 1984); from which many important publications have been produced. Finally, during the International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences which took place at Zagreb in 1988, there was a very successful session on ‘Shamanism: Past and Present’. The participants even decided to form an International Society for Shamanic Studies in order to promote and coordinate research. Its first congress was held in Seoul in 1991, and a second in Budapest in 1993, at which was launched the first issue of the journal Shaman which brings together theoretical debates, ethnographic documents and thematic studies of shamanism.
New areas of research are emerging such as the political dimensions of shamanic power (Thomas and Humphrey 1994), and *gender relations as expressed in transgression and in the sexual distribution of shamanic roles (Saladin d’Anglure 1994). There is also new interest in dream activities (B.Tedlock 1991), and shamanic texts and performances (Atkinson 1992).
Far from being being an outdated Western category, as certain postmodern anthropologists would have it, shamanism—both as a system of thought, rites and relations with the world, and as an object of study—is not, at the end of the twentieth century, situated before postmodernism but rather beyond it. It shows an astonishing capacity to adapt to new urban contexts, to be able to exist side by side with major religions, and to resist all attempts at institutionalization and reduction to one or other of its aspects.
The meaning of shamanism as a total social phenomenon and as the point of articulation of the three levels—psychological, sociological and religious—in which it is expressed, is undoubtedly best revealed by a symbolic anthropological approach. The shaman appears, from this perspective, as a mediator who transcends these levels in a complex and dynamic fusion. The shaman is able to overcome the contradictions between binary oppositions (man/woman, humans/animals, humans/spirits, living/dead) through playing with ambiguity, paradox and transgression, in order to manage crises, disorder and change. Shamanic time and space, as that of myths, dreams and spirits, holds out against rationalism, as those early Romantics understood well. It has affinities with pre-Socratic thought, irrationalism, esotericism and the great systems of nonWestern thought such as Daoism. Is it not rooted in an immemorial prehistory which, by way of the ideology of hunting, was directly attuned to nature and the cosmos?
Atkinson, J.M. (1992) ‘Shamanism Today’, Annual Review of Anthropology 21:307–30
Basilov, V.N. (1984) ‘The Study of Shamanism in Soviet Ethnography’, in M.Hoppal (ed.) Shamanism in Eurasia, Göttingen: Herodot
Browman, D. and R.Schwartz (eds) (1979) Spirits, Shamans and Stars, The Hague: Mouton
Crocker, J.C. (1985) Vital Souls: Bororo Cosmology, Natural Symbolism and Shamanism, Tucson: University of Arizona Press
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Flaherty, G. (1992) Shamanism and the Eighteenth Century, Princeton: Princeton University Press
Hamayon, R. (1990) La Chasse à l’âme: Esquisse d’une Théorie du Chamanisme Sibérien, Nanterre: Société d’Ethnologie
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Saladin d’Anglure, B. (1994) ‘From Foetus to Shaman: The Construction of an Inuit Third Sex’, in A.Mills and R.Slobodin (eds), Amerindian Rebirth, Toronto: University of Toronto Press
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Tedlock, B. (1991) ‘The New Anthropology of Dreaming’ Dreaming 1:161–78
Thomas, N. and C.Humphrey (eds) (1994) Shamanism, History and the State, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press
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