GENERAL OPERATIONAL SHAMANIC PSYCHOLOGY. by Gian berra 2025 - 7

Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 2018

Singh conflates diverse religious statuses into a single category that includes practitioners with roles that differ significantly from empirical characteristics of shamans. The rejection of biological models of trance and conspicuous display models misses the evolutionary roots of shamanism involving the social functions of ritual in producing psychological and social integration and ritual healing.

2006

This paper was inspired by an invitation to participate in a seminar with an enigmatic title, "Shamanic Dilemmas of Modernity." When I sat down to write my presentation, I was forced to ask myself: are the shamans perplexed by modernity, or is it we, the anthropologists, who are perplexed by the plurality of shamanisms that are manifested today? Since my initiation in U.S. anthropology over forty years ago, the multiplicity of voices speaking about or claiming to be shamans has increased to such an extent that one could question the conceptual usefulness of the terms "shaman" and "shamanism" in the face of the process of globalization.

Biblical Theology Bulletin: A Journal of Bible and Theology, 2011

The purpose of this article is to introduce biblical interpreters to shamanism and the study of the shamanic complex. The shaman represents an identifiable pattern of religious entrepreneurs with shared practices and beliefs based on alternate states of consciousness experiences. Based on the bodily and neurological potential for alternate states of consciousness experiences, shamanism finds unique expression within different cultural settings. Shamanic studies also provide the potential for understanding and analyzing various aspects of the biblical tradition. In the final section visionary, ecstatic and prophetic stories as well as other alternate states of consciousness experiences associated with figures such as Paul and Jesus, are presented.

International Journal of Transpersonal Studies, 31(2), pp. 47-62., 2013

This article reviews the origins of the concept of the shaman and the principal sources of controversy regarding the existence and nature of shamanism. Confusion regarding the nature of shamanism is clarified with a review of research providing empirical support for a cross-cultural concept of shamans that distinguishes them from related shamanistic healers. The common shamanistic universals involving altered states of consciousness are examined from psychobiological perspectives to illustrate shamanism's relationships to human nature. Common biological aspects of altered states of consciousness help explain the origins of shamanism while social influences on this aspect of human nature help to explain the diverse manifestations of shamanistic phenomena involving an elicitation of endogenous healing responses.

This piece adopts a genealogical approach to the emergence of 'neo-Shamanism' as a 'spiritual' practice. It argues that the work of Freud and Durkheim collapsed the dichotomy between 'primitive' and 'civilized' which characterized nineteenth century evolutionist anthropology. Neither Freud nor Durkheim embraced the consequences of this collapse and while Bataille attempted to do so, his application of 'Shamanism' to modern self-governance was constrained by the terms of the Freudian/Durkheimian framework. Jung did embrace this collapse positing a universal equivalence between religious forms and psychological processes, and this epistemic shift permitted his interlocutors, Levi-Strauss and Eliade, to inaugurate the discursive frameworks which made 'neo-Shamanism' thinkable as an ethical practice for contemporary westerners. Analyses which suggest that 'neo-Shamanisms' are rediscoveries of a primal 'spirituality' write from within this framework, neglecting the contingency of historical change, the creativity of anthropological appropriations and the politics of knowledge.

2004

Spirit Possession and Trance : New Interdisciplinary Perspectives

American Psychologist, 2002

Shamans' communities grant them privileged status to attend to those groups' psychological and spiritual needs. Shamans claim to modify their attentional states and engage in activities that enable them to access information not ordinarily attainable by members of the social group that has granted them shamanic status. Western perspectives on shamanism have changed and clashed over the centuries; this paper presents points and counterpoints regarding what might be termed the demonic model, the charlatan model, the schizophrenia model, the soul flight model, the decadent and crude technology model, and the deconstructionist model. Western interpretations of shamanism often reveal more about the observer than they do about the observed. Conflicting Perspectives on Shamans 3