Touching the Divine: Recent Research on Neo-Paganism and Neo-Shamanism

Why do religions that are in some sense invented out of the western scholarship on shamanism and paganism have such a hold on the western imagination? This article reviews four recent contributions to the literature on neo-paganism and neo-shamanism. As exemplified in the books under review, these religions have three basic characteristics—magical realism, playfulness, and experientalism—which are not unique to them, but shared by many modern faiths. The article argues that these are not primitive throw-backs but ways of responding to the doubt and skepticism of a modern pluralistic age.     

“The Place of Solemne Prayer”: Intrasettlement Post-and-Trench Mortuary-Ritual Structures in the Precontact Era of Northern Ohio

ABSTRACT

Most traditional archaeological interpretations of life within late precontact period village sites in the Eastern Woodlands focus primarily on the domestic sphere or ritual activities associated solely with burial features. Yet, ethnohistorical studies reveal that both the domestic and ritual-ceremonial realms were tightly entangled in the lives of indigenous actors during the contact period. A recent reanalysis of a small enclosure and burial precinct at the White Fort site in northern Ohio presents new evidence of ceremonial use and reuse within a large habitation site during the late precontact period (ca. AD 1250–1400). Excavation data reveal how human interment, artifact caching, and layering of colored soils were incorporated in six pit burials arranged around a C-shaped post-and-ditch enclosure. The sequencing of interments and enclosure construction that composed this distinct area show that it served as a hub for burial and ritual behavior over multiple generations of seasonal village occupation.     

Keep on Changing: Recent Trends in Amazonian Anthropology

In this article I review several recent books to consider how anthropologists have approached questions of cosmology, history, and social transformation in Amazonia. Several of these engage a now well-established tradition in presenting indigenous ontologies as radical alternatives to Western concepts of agency and history. In contrast to the discontinuities described in the “New History” of Amazonia, anthropologists tend to approach social transformation as the extension of an enduring symbolic economy of alterity. I argue that the “New Amazonian Ethnography” would benefit from an openness to understanding radical social change beyond questions of continuity.     

Shamanic Eroticism in the Jiu ge (Nine Songs) of Early China

This article presents an analysis of certain erotic strategies employed by shamans of the early Chinese state of Chu that were intended to attract and seduce an array of spirits thought to inhabit the world of nature. These strategies are analyzed from a collection of songs gathered together under the title of the Jiu ge from the Chuci anthology, and they provide some of the clearest evidences for a tradition of early Chinese southern Chu shamanism. After setting forth certain elements of the religious, historical, and theoretical background of this shamanism, this article approaches and analyzes it in terms of the eroticized gender relations between humans and spirits upon which this shamanism is centrally based. Because the present author understands shamanism in terms of face to face communication between human beings and bodiless beings in a séance event, and because these communications are represented as taking place by way of either the shaman journeying to the spirit or the spirit coming to take possession of the shaman, the final sections of this article analyze each type of séance event separately.     

Humans,Birds and Burial Practices at Ipiutak,Alaska: Perspectivism in the Western Arctic

ABSTRACT

Archaeological and ethnohistoric evidence from the coast of western Alaska and St. Lawrence Island indicate that human inhabitants over the past 1500–2000 years incorporated birds into their diets, cosmologies, material culture, and daily activities. Following a brief discussion of the archaeological and ethnohistoric evidence for human–bird relations, this article explores the evidence for birds as both an economic and cosmological resource at the Ipiutak site on the northwest coast of Alaska. Several lines of evidence indicate that hunters and shamans have consistently attempted to mimic or acquire the abilities and physical attributes of select bird taxa, reflecting a sophisticated knowledge of bird behaviours and life histories. A specific concern with vision – shamanic, predatory, and post-mortem – is inferred from an unusual Ipiutak burial assemblage that contained a loon skull with ivory eyes. Considered in light of the broader cemetery assemblage, which includes artefacts with bird imagery, the Ipiutak material is interpreted as evidence of perspectivism in western arctic prehistory.