Limit search to available items
Book Cover
E-book
Author Tomášková, Silvia

Title Wayward shamans : the prehistory of an idea / Silvia Tomášková
Published Berkeley : University of California Press, [2013]

Copies

Description 1 online resource (xiv, 271 pages) : illustrations
Contents Discoveries of an imaginary place -- Strange landscapes, familiar magic -- People in a land before time -- The invention of Siberian ethnology -- Sex, gender, and encounters with spirits -- Changed men and changed women -- French connections and the spirits of prehistory -- Conclusion
Summary This book 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.--description provided by publisher
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index
Notes Print version record
Subject Shamans -- Russia (Federation) -- Siberia
Shamanism -- Russia (Federation) -- Siberia
BODY, MIND & SPIRIT -- Spirituality -- Shamanism.
SOCIAL SCIENCE -- Anthropology -- General.
Civilization
Colonization
Shamanism
Shamans
Schamanismus
Anthropology.
Social Sciences.
Social & Cultural Anthropology.
SUBJECT Siberia (Russia) -- Religious life and customs
Siberia (Russia) -- Civilization
Siberia (Russia) -- Colonization
Subject Russia (Federation) -- Siberia
Sibirien
Form Electronic book
LC no. 2012047119
ISBN 0520955315
9780520955318
1299533116
9781299533110