Αποτελέσματα Αναζήτησης
30 Οκτ 2024 · The term shamanism comes from the Manchu-Tungus word šaman. The noun is formed from the verb ša-‘to know’; thus, a shaman is literally “one who knows.” The shamans recorded in historical ethnographies have included women, men, and transgender individuals of every age from middle childhood onward.
The shaman is a ritual specialist who is a healer and spiritual mediator. He or she entertains a close relationship with the larger spiritual universe, endowing him or her with powers to divine or to heal and act as a psychopomp—a guide of the souls of the deceased to their afterlife.
There is no single agreed-upon definition for the word "shamanism" among anthropologists. Thomas Downson suggests three shared elements of shamanism: practitioners consistently alter consciousness, the community regards altering consciousness as an important ritual practice, and the knowledge about the practice is controlled.
So a broad definition of shamanism would include any practi tioners who enter controlled altered states of consciousness no matter which particular states these may be.
Shamanism also existed among nearly all documented hunter-gatherers, likely characterized the religious lives of many ancestral humans, and is often proposed by anthropologists to be the “first profession,” representing the first institutionalized division of labor beyond age and sex.
18 Αυγ 2023 · Shamanism, often characterized as the earliest form of spirituality, offers unique insights into the human quest for meaning, health, and connection with the natural world. This primal belief system, prevalent among hunter-gatherer societies and indigenous cultures, focuses on the Shaman—a spiritual mediator with the ability to traverse the ...
This article contends that as anthropologists have cultivated a long and growing library of shamanic practice, many appear to have found, in a globally diverse range of spirit practitioners, translators across social worlds who are not unlike themselves, suggesting that in the shaman we find a remarkable history of anthropology.