Search Results (22)

Humans are well known to have made paintings and engravings on rock surfaces, both geometric motifs with an unclear representation, and representative motifs that refer to their activities and aspects of their environment. This kind of art is widespread across time and space and has throughout history been subjected to various kinds of approaches. Typically, rock art research focuses on its role in the development of the hominin brain and the capability of abstract thinking, as well as on interpreting representative and non-representative motifs. Ethnography and cognitive research have often stressed that rock art is the result of ritual practises and the expression of a shamanic belief system. However, representative motifs may also shed light on a region’s ecological and human prehistory. Here, we give an overview of the general development of rock art study: we highlight the development of artistic behaviour in humans by discussing aesthetic preferences, and the creation of simple geometric motifs and eventually representative motifs, before describing the theories that developed from the earliest study of rock art. These have largely focused on classification and interpretation of the motifs, and often centred on Palaeolithic material from Europe. We then move on to discuss how ethnography among rock art creating communities often suggests important relationships between specific animals in both the realms of spiritual belief systems and within the local environment. Lastly, we highlight how rock art reflects the local penecontemporaneous environment when it comes to depictions of animals, plants, technologies, humans and their activities. We argue that animal depictions are a useful subject to study on a large scale, as it is the most widespread representative motif, and the most appropriate subject to study when the goal is to draw conclusions on environmental changes. Rock art can fill gaps in the local archaeological record and generate new questions of it, but also offer new insights into the history of local human–animal interaction: animal species depicted and/or referred to in rock art are likely to have been a selection of spiritually important animals and a comparison to known information on human interactions with local species may reveal patterns among which animals are selected for local rock art depictions and which are not. Interregional comparison can in turn shed light on whether humans in general tend to ascribe meaning to the same types of animals. We end the review with suggestions for future study, with a special role for computational methods, which are suitable for the analysis of large databases of visual imagery. Full article

Alleged practices of magical assault and vampirism are a recurrent feature of popular explanations of misfortune in Tuva, South Siberia. Based on a field study of healing practices in an “Association of Shamans”, this article analyses rituals of redressing curse afflictions in the context of Russian political domination. A central purpose of this discussion is to foreground the centrality of kinds of parasitical worship and occult threat to structures of political power in—and beyond—the territory of Tuva. Focusing on a “cursescape”, which develops from the combative practices of shamans, occult specialists, and office-holders, the article probes a repertoire of shamanic healing symbols. It is argued that healing efficacy is constructed in the process of engaging with hunting symbols and animal spirits, which appear in Indigenous Siberian cosmologies. The analysis shows that ideas of ritual risk underpin the process of symbolic resolution. Whereas shamanic practices provide refuge to spirits evicted from their natural landscapes, Tibetan Buddhism—the unifying religion of Tuva—offers an alternative path of healing the effects of the shamans’ propagation of spirits. The article highlights indigenous perceptions of a “cursed” landscape as a space where the agencies of “darkness” and their political sponsors are confronted with an emancipating religious modality emerging from local Buddhist rituals. The analysis displays the unsolved drama of itinerant spirits and shamanic ancestral souls, whose agency is revealed through successive—yet inauspicious—forms of reincarnation. Full article

There are tens of thousands of painted rock art motifs in the Serranía de la Lindosa in the Colombian Amazon, including humans, animals, therianthropes, geometrics, and flora. For most of the last 100 years, inaccessibility and political unrest has limited research activities in the region. In this paper, we discuss findings from six years of field research and consider the role of rock art as a manifestation of Indigenous ontologies. By employing intertwining strands of evidence—a range of ethnographic sources, local Indigenous testimonies from 2021–2023, and the motifs themselves—we argue that the rock art here is connected to ritual specialists negotiating spiritual realms, somatic transformation, and the interdigitation of human and non-human worlds. Full article

Medio Period (AD 1200 to 1450) Casas Grandes shamans used tobacco and possibly other entheogens to initiate trance states that allowed their spirits to travel across the cosmos. These trance experiences involved a sense of vertigo and soul flight that is cross-culturally common and occurs with tobacco-based nicotine intoxication. The Medio Period shamans also relied on and interacted with other-than-human persons during their travels, including macaw- and serpent-linked deities, as well as animated objects designed to participate in their shamanic journeys. The animated objects included Playas Red and Chihuahuan Polychrome pottery effigies of humans, macaws, and snakes with shamanic themes that represented the spirit world. I propose these pots were animate “pot-people” created for shamanic rituals. They were created with unusual designs including painted images and incised patterns that emphasized the spinning/vertigo that was central to the shamans’ soul flight experience. In some cases, the pots were literally spun, as evidenced by the distinctive wear patterns on their bases. The shamanic designs on the pots that reflected the upper and lower worlds, the depiction of spinning in the pottery decorations, and the literal spinning of some pots reflected the sympathetic and mimetic magic that linked them to the spirit world. They were imbued with the liminal nature of the creatures they depicted, and the symbolic and occasional literal emphasis on spinning would allow them to enter into a shamanic trance in a manner similar to their human counterparts. They, thus, were designed to enter into ASC in a manner that paralleled their human counterparts. Full article

In the Jeju shamanic religion, chickens have been sacrificed for aekmagi, a ritual to prevent aek, a looming misfortune that may cause death. Whereas ordinary participants are thought to be at risk of harm when possessing or eating chickens or other offerings made to prevent aek, the simbang, Jeju shamans, are thought to be immune to it. Simbang are believed to be permanently on the threshold between the human and the divine realms. They help remove aek but are not harmed by it, because it only harms humans in the human realm, not the person on the boundary. While the other participants are temporarily placed in the liminal state during aekmagi and come back to the ordinary living human realm after the ritual, simbang remain in the perpetual liminal state. Chicken sacrifice has been omitted from aekmagi since around 2010 in most places in Jeju-do. Though ritual killing is no longer practiced, adherents still think that aek is prevented by aekmagi. The Jeju people believe that gods are the main agents of preventing aek and that they can persuade the gods to do the work without receiving chickens’ lives. In addition, due to the change in people’s view on killing animals, aekmagi without chicken sacrifice has become a more efficient ritual system for nourishing social sustenance by following the new social prescription. Full article

The religious nature of Joseph Beuys’ works was ignored or intentionally avoided by mainstream criticism since his artistic practice was ridiculed for its potential spirituality. It is argued that Beuys’ works are work meditations on the issues of potential ego in totemic art, which are frequent topics of theological concern. For example, what is the nature of our consciousness after death, and how does it relate to the consciousness of others? Beuys’ conceptual artworks reveal his engagement with the “witchcraft etiquette” of totemic art and his exploration of theological questions such as the relation between human consciousness and divinity, the role of sacrifice and resurrection, and the meaning of self-awareness. In other words, we can draw inspiration from the theological theories of Alfred North Whitehead and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel to examine Beuys’ choice of conceptual art through the lens of his deep self-consciousness of totem worship. In general, Beuys’ works pose an important question: how can we awaken our chaotic consciousness to new or forgotten sprouts which may rejuvenate our existence in the world? Full article

In northern China, four animals—the fox, weasel, hedgehog, and snake—are commonly believed to have the magical power of immortality, and they are referred to as the Four Animal Spirits (四大门, sidamen). Researchers have regarded these spirits as part of a form of shamanism, but what I learned from my fieldwork in Beijing suggests a different understanding. From the 19th century to the present day, many inhabitants of Beijing have consistently believed that the Four Animal Spirits have their own personalities, intentionalities, and social organisation. They can change their status through self-cultivation, and they share the city with humans, who are their neighbours. As humans can understand animals, these animals can understand humans and respond rationally to changes happening in the world. These beliefs are not unique to Beijing’s residents; indeed, similar ideas can be found in classical Chinese literature before the Han Dynasty (202–220 BCE); moreover, these beliefs differ significantly from the widely accepted theory of shamanism. Knowing about the Four Animal Spirits does not constitute a window into or a way of organising human societies; the Four Animal Spirits do not represent a cultural structure or deep unconsciousness. They provide knowledge about the relationship between humans and animals and entice people to learn about these animals, live with them, and, ultimately, construct a world in which humans and animals can coexist. Full article

Animist cultures around the world are based on interactions among humans and other-than-human beings. Humans are active agents in this process and often establish alliances with other-than-human beings to accomplish a variety of goals. The means of establishing these alliances is an emerging area of interest in studies of animist ontologies. We demonstrate here that these allies are often object-persons specifically made or modified by humans to have desired spiritual and physical properties. Examples of common object-persons range from domestic residences to shamanic drums to sacred bundles used for ritual activities. We further establish that object-persons go through a life cycle typically starting with a process that activates and modifies latent agency. We demonstrate this process using case studies from the North American Southwest, especially during the Medio period (AD 1200 to 1450) occupation of the Casas Grandes region of northwestern Mexico and the southwestern United States. Our primary examples are the creation of three Mesoamerican-style ballcourts and a water reservoir at Paquimé, which is the ceremonial and political center of the Medio period world. These examples reflect the underlying animistic ontology of this culture and provide a case study of the relationship between material religion and ritual practice that frames animistic religious practices. Full article

Birds of prey appear frequently in contemporary forms of shamanism. For example, Michael Harner’s Core Shamanism references the ‘power animal,’ or the authentic self, which sometimes takes the form of a strong and benevolent eagle. However, precisely how meaning and belief concerning these birds may have been lost, challenged or (re)invented remains to be explored. In this contribution, we have used the methods and vision of netnography to explore the relationships between contemporary western-based, self-defined shamans and birds of prey: real, imagined or represented. Full article

The polarized initial reception of Philip Pullman as a “new atheist” has gradually yielded to more nuanced scholarly positionings of his work as inspired by a heterodox, even “heretical,” Christianity. But in his new series, Pullman responds decisively to both “new atheist” and “heterodox Christian” interpretations, while widening the scope of his critical representations beyond Christian—indeed, beyond Abrahamic—religion. What emerges in the completed books of the incomplete new series, The Book of Dust, is a “secret commonwealth” of supernatural beings inhabiting multiple universes. These are all manifestations of Dust, the spiritual sentience of matter itself, which provides the basis for mystical visions and shamanistic beliefs, as well as religious orthodoxies. Rejecting the latter for the former, the second book in particular, The Secret Commonwealth, suggests an endorsement of spiritual quest. To motivate acceptance of this interpretation, we begin by reviewing the critical reception of His Dark Materials, especially in relation to its theological implications. After that, we turn to the representation of reductionist positions in The Book of Dust, especially the authors presented in The Secret Commonwealth, Gottfried Brande and Simon Talbot. Then, we investigate the representation of the Abrahamic religions in that work, intrigued less by the obvious parallels between Pullman’s imaginary religions and Christianity and Islam, than by his positive representation of mysticism. Finally, we examine his representations of shamanism and animism, soul belief and hermetic doctrines, and his allusions to Zoroastrianism, before summing up. Pullman is an a-theist in the sense of being without a god, not in the post-Enlightenment sense of a rejection of the supernatural/spiritual. His imaginary universe celebrates spiritual quest and ontological multiplicity, against all forms of speculative closure. Full article

With earlier origins and a rebirth in the late 1990s, the New Animisms and the precipitate ‘ontological turn’ have now been in full swing since the mid-2000s. They make a valuable contribution to the interpretation of the rock arts of numerous societies, particularly in their finding that in animist societies, there is little distinction between nature and culture, religious belief and practicality, the sacred and the profane. In the process, a problem of perspective arises: the perspectives of such societies, and the analogical sources that illuminate them, diverge in more foundational terms from Western perspectives than is often accounted for. This is why archaeologists of religion need to be anthropologists of the wider world, to recognise where animistic and shamanistic ontologies are represented, and perhaps where there is reason to look closely at how religious systems are used to imply Cartesian separations of nature and culture, religious and mundane, human/person and animal/non-person, and where these dichotomies may obscure other forms of being-in-the-world. Inspired by Bird-David, Descola, Hallowell, Ingold, Vieiros de Castro, and Willerslev, and acting through the lens of navigation in a populated, enculturated, and multinatural world, this contribution locates southern African shamanic expressions of rock art within broader contexts of shamanisms that are animist. Full article

This article focuses on how shamanism and animism, two important features of Altaic ontology, can be expressed in art. This is discussed by exploring the art of Sergei Dykov, a contemporary Altaic (south Siberian) visual artist, whose art is part of a wider trend in modern Siberian art of rediscovering the conceptual potentials of indigenous Siberian values. Dykov is one of those artists whose fascination with Siberian culture is not limited to formal inspirations but who also seeks how to express these indigenous values in contemporary art forms. Drawing on Altaic folklore, its myths and beliefs, including shamanism, as well as ancient Siberian art forms, Dykov searches for a new visual language capable of expressing the Altaic perception of the world. For him, therefore, painting is significantly an intellectual project involving an attempt to understand the indigenous ontology of being in the world. The key concepts around which his art revolves are thus human-animal transformations, human and non-human beings’ relations, and the interconnectedness of the visible and nonvisible. The study was based on an analysis of a sample of his unpublished artworks. Full article

Shamanism and animism have proven to be useful cross-cultural analytical tools for anthropology, particularly in religious studies. However, both concepts root in reductionist, social evolutionary theory and have been criticized for their vague and homogenizing rubric, an overly romanticized idealism, and the tendency to ‘other’ nonwestern peoples as ahistorical, apolitical, and irrational. The alternative has been a largely secular view of religion, favoring materialist processes of rationalization and “disenchantment.” Like any cross-cultural frame of reference, such terms are only informative when explicitly defined in local contexts using specific case studies. Here, we consider shamanism and animism in terms of ethnographic and archaeological evidence from Mesoamerica. We trace the intellectual history of these concepts and reassess shamanism and animism from a relational or ontological perspective, concluding that these terms are best understood as distinct ways of knowing the world and acquiring knowledge. We examine specific archaeological examples of masked spirit impersonations, as well as mirrors and other reflective materials used in divination. We consider not only the productive and affective energies of these enchanted materials, but also the potentially dangerous, negative, or contested aspects of vital matter wielded in divinatory practices. Full article

There is a mounting body of evidence for somatic exchange in burial practices within later British prehistory. The title of the present paper was sparked by a recent article in The Times (Tuesday 1 September 2020), which contained a description of human bone curation and body mingling clearly present in certain Bronze Age funerary depositional rituals. The practice of mixing up bodies has been identified at several broadly coeval sites, a prime example being Cladh Hallan in the Scottish Hebrides, where body parts from different individuals were deliberately mingled, not just somatically but also chronologically. This paper’s arguments rest upon the premise that somatic boundary crossing is reflected in Iron Age and later art, especially in the blending of human and animal imagery and of one animal species with another. Such themes are endemic in La Tène decorative metalwork and in western Roman provincial sacred imagery. It is possible, indeed likely, that such fluidity is associated with deliberate subversion of nature and with the presentation of ‘shamanism’ in its broadest sense. Breaking ‘natural’ rules and orders introduces edge blurring between material and spiritual worlds, representing, perhaps, the ability of certain individuals (shamans) to break free from human-scapes and to wander within the realms of the divine. Full article