Wayward Shamans: The Prehistory of an Idea - Paperback

by Silvia Tomásková (Author)

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.

Front Jacket

Wayward Shamans is a 'must read' for all those working with shamanic ethnographies in the interpretation of ancient rock art and archaeology. Through an exploration of the vibrant, contextual, changing nature of 'shamanism' in actual case studies, it exposes the constructed and flawed nature of many modern understandings of 'shamanism'. It provides a vital caution to any reading of the global past that purports to be 'shamanic'. --Benjamin Smith, Rock Art Research Institute, South Africa

"'Archaeologists regularly cast shamans as the stars of their scenarios, ' Silvia Tomásková writes in this wonderfully erudite study. But how did shamans come to figure so prominently in a European world of wonder, and how have they managed to endure so long as archetypes of the exotic? Taking us from Siberia to South Africa, through prehistory and primitive art, Tomásková offers us a sharp rendering of the long tangled relationships between religion, science, and art." --Bruce Grant, Professor of Anthropology at New York University

Author Biography

Silvia Tomásková is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Women's and Gender Studies at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.