Yangqi Zheng

Csordas

ANSC 129

15 January 2020

Their Shamanism

The accounts of shamanism in this week’s readings seem more supernatural, perhaps

more unbelievable than the accounts of unconventional healing in general from the previous

readings. Perhaps this is due only to their specificity though, and this might be indicative of a

general difficulty in generalizing from specific and special experiences to some system of more

universal knowledge. Indeed, it makes sense that the practices of a culture far away from our

own would appear paranormal to us, being distant from and unfamiliar to the systems which

govern our normal everydays.

But questions are also raised about human potentiality. How should we interpret accounts

of shamanic foresight, of previsitation in the forms of animals, of knowing things which should

not be knowable? There are multiple directions of approach, simultaneous—we fit these exotic

accounts into our existing frameworks of knowing, we go experience the exotic phenomena for

ourselves, making them our own, we adapt our frameworks to better suit the new us, expanded

by experience. Yet we must start from ourselves because we are us and not them.

It’s difficult to speak much about a phenomena one has not experienced for oneself. How

literally are the accounts to be taken? And even in that, the construct of the “literal,” suggesting

so many things, among which several layers of seperation between the real and the symbolic—

engaging with the exotic, we put everything to the question, but still in our own words.
 In the shamanic stories, we see the animal recurring. The shaman controls the animal,

uses the animal, gains the powers of the animal, becomes the anaimal, produces the sounds of the

animal, visits in the form of the animal. I do not even know the sounds of the animal; often I do

not recognize the animal. My world is quite sterile from the animal, and from the stories and

meanings it bears. In such a world, it is probably much more difficult to obtain or to experience

the special powers of the animal.

And then, what do we make of today’s return to shamanism? The neoshaman is presented

in “Táltos Healers, Neoshamans and Multiple Medical Realities in Postsocialist Hungary” as a

counter-culture, a reaction against the dominant mainstream. Is this a reaction against the sterile,

against the unnatural and perhaps uninspiring environments of contemporary medical systems?

The predominant symbol of the animal surely speaks differently to today’s people, in which the

animal is so much less common. Neoshamanism is not a recreation of the shamanism of the past,

but a new production from the special contexts of today. Perhaps then, its source of power differs

also from past shamanic traditions.

The exotic may be far off in space, in time, or in concept. Engaging with it, we do so

from here and now. We are creating and experiencing, never touching the exotic as exotic, but

always in the process of making it familiar. And after we have been there, how do we describe

the experience? In their language? In ours? As we consider that, even that act of description is

part of our experience; our expression evolves as our experiences do, bending, expanding, but

ever our own.