Wayward Shamans : The Prehistory of an Idea / Silvia Tomášková.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Tomášková, Silvia, Author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Shamans--Siberia--Russia (Federation).

Shamans.

Shamanism--Russia (Federation)--Siberia.

Shamanism.

Siberia (Russia)--Religious life and customs.

Siberia (Russia).

Siberia (Russia)--Civilization.

Siberia (Russia)--Colonization.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (289 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Berkeley, CA : University of California Press, [2013]

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Wayward Shamans tells the story of an idea that humanity's first expression of art, religion and creativity found form in the figure of a proto-priest known as a shaman. Tracing this classic category of the history of anthropology back to the emergence of the term in Siberia, the work follows the trajectory of European knowledge about the continent's eastern frontier. The ethnographic record left by German natural historians engaged in the Russian colonial expansion project in the 18th century includes a range of shamanic practitioners, varied by gender and age. Later accounts by exiled Russian revolutionaries noted transgendered shamans. This variation vanished, however, in the translation of shamanism into archaeology theory, where a male sorcerer emerged as the key agent of prehistoric art. More recent efforts to provide a universal shamanic explanation for rock art via South Africa and neurobiology likewise gloss over historical evidence of diversity. By contrast this book argues for recognizing indeterminacy in the categories we use, and reopening them by recalling their complex history.

Contents:

Front matter

Contents

List Of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Discoveries Of An Imaginary Place

2. Strange Landscapes, Familiar Magic

3. People In A Land Before Time

4. The Invention Of Siberian Ethnology

5. Sex, Gender, And Encounters With Spirits

6. Changed Men And Changed Women

7. French Connections And The Spirits Of Prehistory

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliographic Note

References

Index

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 24. Apr 2020)

ISBN:

9780520955318

0520955315

OCLC:

841206482