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“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 Tomášková 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, Tomášková offers us a sharp rendering of the long tangled relationships between religion, science, and art.” —Bruce Grant, Professor of Anthropology at New York University
List of contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1 Discoveries of an Imaginary Place
Chapter 2 Strange Landscapes, Familiar Magic
Chapter 3 People in a Land Before Time
Chapter 4 The Invention of Siberian Ethnology
Chapter 5 Sex, Gender, and Encounters with Spirits
Chapter 6 Changed Men and Changed Women
Chapter 7: French Connections and the Spirits of Prehistory
Chapter 8: Conclusion
Notes
Bibliographic Note
References
About the author
Silvia Tomášková is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Women’s and Gender Studies at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
Summary
Tells the story of an idea that humanity's 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, this title follows the trajectory of European knowledge about continent's eastern frontier.
Additional text
"The author finely demonstrates how shamans lost their ‘historical diversity’ and ‘gender variability’; Wayward shamans is a highly interesting and rigorous study that should definitely captivate the attention of those interested in the history of religions, of art, and of Western ideas of otherness and their crucial gender dimensions."
