Michael Winkelman is an anthropologist, retired from Arizona State University, who has spent his career studying shamanism across cultures and in the brain. His cross-cultural research found that shamans, people who enter altered states to deal with the spirits on behalf of their community, share the same core features around the world and belong mainly to foraging and pastoral peoples, whilst possession belongs to a different kind of practitioner, the medium, found mostly in farming societies. He explains the shaman’s altered states as a natural mode of the human brain, an idea science is still testing, whilst Therapeutic Shamanism draws on his possession finding and holds that people who journey usually come to accept the shamanic realms as real, inviting each person to find out for themselves.
Who is Michael Winkelman? #
An anthropologist with doctorate and public-health degrees who retired from the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at Arizona State University in 2009. He has been president of the Society for the Anthropology of Consciousness and was the founding president of the Anthropology of Religion Section of the American Anthropological Association.1 In retirement he has lived in Brazil.2
His books include Shamans, Priests and Witches: A Cross-Cultural Study of Magico-Religious Practitioners (1992), Shamanism: The Neural Ecology of Consciousness and Healing (2000), revised as Shamanism: A Biopsychosocial Paradigm of Consciousness and Healing (2010), and, with the psychologist Etzel Cardeña, the two-volume Altering Consciousness: Multidisciplinary Perspectives (2011). He has also written widely on psychedelic plants and the origins of religion. See What is ayahuasca, and what part do psychoactive plants and plant spirit medicine play in shamanism?
What did his cross-cultural research find? #
That shamans are real and recognisable the world over. Instead of generalising from reading, as Mircea Eliade had, Winkelman coded every recognised religious practitioner in a sample of forty-seven societies from around the world against more than a hundred features, and let statistics sort them. Practitioners from Eurasia, the Americas and Africa grouped more closely with one another than with other practitioners in their own regions, even in their own societies. “Like the nuclear family,” he concludes, “shamanism is something real”.3
The group he calls shamans matches Eliade’s core description, someone who enters ecstasy to interact with the spirit world on behalf of the community, and is found in societies marked by nomadism and by no political organisation above the local community; he would keep the word for healers of foraging and pastoral societies.3 Possession is a different matter. A possession state was linked not with shamans but with another kind of healer, the medium, found mostly in agricultural societies with political organisation above the local level.3 See What is the difference between a shaman, a priest, a medium and a medicine person?
What does he say happens in the brain? #
That the altered states shamans use reflect a basic feature of human biology. Very different methods, drumming, chanting, dancing, fasting and psychoactive plants among them, lead to a shared brain response he calls the integrative mode of consciousness, marked by slow, synchronised theta rhythms linking older parts of the brain with the frontal cortex, which he sees as the source of the insight and sense of unity these states bring.4 The brain studies that test this, and the questions raised about it, are set out in What happens in the brain during a journey?
He goes further and calls shamanism a starting point for neurotheology, the study of religion and the brain. In his account the shaman’s spirit world, animal allies, soul flight and the initiatory death and rebirth are found everywhere because they grow out of innate capacities of the evolved human mind: soul flight as a natural form of self-representation, death and rebirth as a natural response to overwhelming stress, and soul loss as trauma in which part of the self splits off, healed by being brought back with the community’s support.5
Is his work disputed? #
Yes, from two directions. Some anthropologists doubt that “shamanism” is a single cross-cultural thing at all. The anthropologist Alice Kehoe argued that the concept of the shaman is a fabrication of the Western imagination, and Kehoe, Roberte Hamayon and others held that spiritual healing practices vary with each local culture, so no universal shamanism exists.6 Winkelman replies that his statistical study tested exactly that question and found the shared pattern, and that Hamayon and others did not engage with that cross-cultural research.6 See Who was Mircea Eliade, and what do critics say is wrong with his idea of shamanism? and Why does Manvir Singh think shamanism is universal?
Others question his brain model. In a 2004 review forum on his book, Richard Castillo argued that its neural conclusions were not supported by the newest brain-imaging studies, the anthropologist Stewart Guthrie found it overly general, and the anthropologist Mary Douglas felt it took too little account of social and cultural factors.7 See Who was Mary Douglas, and what did Purity and Danger show? Winkelman answered that the newer imaging findings extend his model and do not overturn it, and that whilst each altered state has its own character, the core of shamanic healing is “a generic response of human neuropsychology”.7
If science explains the journey, does that make the spirits unreal? #
Not by itself, and Winkelman does not claim it does. He describes his approach as relating brain processes to lived experience, and accepts the extraordinary experiences of shamanism as “symbolically real, withholding judgment regarding their ultimate ontological reality”, that is, about whether they are finally real.8
Therapeutic Shamanism names the same two possibilities. The consistency of journeys across the world might come from the wiring of the human brain, all in the mind; or the shamanic realms might be real places, independent of us, and the journeyer really does travel there.9 Explanations that reduce the spirits to parts of the human psyche miss the true scope, validity and power of shamanic experience.10 The more people journey, the more they find it goes beyond any personal imagination, and usually they come to accept that shamanic reality is real; even so, shamanism rests on direct personal experience, not an act of faith, so each person is invited to find out for themselves.9 Brain science records what happens in the body of someone journeying; it does not by itself settle what the journey is. See Is shamanic journeying imagination, and how are journeys co-created?
How does his work sit beside Therapeutic Shamanism? #
Most directly on possession. Drawing on his Shamans, Priests and Witches, Therapeutic Shamanism teaches that hunter-gatherer societies generally did not experience possession, which, with the anthropologists Erika Bourguignon and Thomas Evascu’s finding that possession belongs mainly to farming and stratified societies, makes possession a product of our domesticationDomestication. The process by which, in domesticating other species, we domesticated ourselves. When dated precisely, Domestication begins with the Neolithic era, before the Fall proper, which begins with the first city-state cultures around 4000 BCE. What rewilding works to undo. More about this.11 It is one of the marks of Fallen shamanism. See What is possession, and what is de-possession? and What are pre-Fallen, Fallen and post-Fallen shamanism?
His view that shamanism grows out of innate human capacities also sits near the observation that shamanic practices are so consistent across very different cultures that they seem somehow innate, hard-wired into us, and near the books’ description of the journeying state as rich in theta brainwaves.1213 And his line between the shaman, who enters the altered state deliberately, and the possessed medium meets the teaching that healthy shamanism keeps one foot in this world and one in the other, moving between them at will.13 Where they part is on what the spirits are. Winkelman treats them as expressions of the evolved mind and leaves their final reality open; in Therapeutic Shamanism people who journey usually come to accept that shamanic reality is real, explanations that reduce it to the human mind miss the true scope of the experience, and each person is invited to find out for themselves.1415
