No. Most indigenous cultures today are not hunter-gatherers but farmers or herders, and every culture now, indigenous ones included, carries some of the hierarchical thinking that came with farming and the FallThe Fall. The catastrophe at the root of the whole diagnosis: the shift from animist, egalitarian hunter-gatherer life to owning, agricultural Taker culture. In domesticating other species we domesticated ourselves, cutting ourselves off from Mother Earth (Power-loss) and from parts of our own nature (soul-loss). When dated precisely, the Fall begins with the first city-state cultures, around 4000 BCE (Domestication begins earlier, with the Neolithic). A sickness, not our true nature. ‘Fallen culture’ is used interchangeably with Taker culture; the Great Rupture is a looser alternate name. Read the full answer. Original animist cultures were the hunter-gatherer cultures of most of human history, before 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 began around 11,000 BC. Present-day indigenous peoples have kept a lot of animist and shamanic wisdom alive and are owed an immense debt of gratitude; and what they carry has come down through thousands of years of change.
What does ‘indigenous’ mean? #
It is a broad, political category, not a description of a way of life. The anthropologists Richard Lee and Richard Daly note that hunting and gathering peoples now appear on the world stage as ‘Indigenous Peoples’ alongside very different, non-foraging peoples such as the Maya, the Maasai and the Maori, and that former foragers have made common cause with pastoral nomads, reindeer herders, fishers and shifting cultivators.1 (By how they live, the Maya and the Maori are farmers and the Maasai herders.) The term is also contested. The anthropologist Adam Kuper has said that ‘indigenous’ is an empty category whose real markers are poverty and marginality, whilst others see the claims of dispossessed peoples to be indigenous as acts of restitution, and warn that treating them like ethnic nationalism erases the difference between oppressor and oppressed.1
So ‘indigenous’ and ‘hunter-gatherer’ are not the same thing. Virtually all existing shamanic societies are agricultural; genuine hunter-gatherer shamanic cultures have all but gone, and the few nomadic animist societies left are usually herders, practising animal husbandry rather than hunting and gathering.2 See What is the difference between a hunter-gatherer and an agricultural society?
Who were the original animist cultures? #
Hunter-gatherers. Humans are at least 200,000 years old as a species, and spent around 190,000 of those years living as hunter-gatherers.3 All of our hunter-gatherer ancestors were animists, all over the world, because perceiving and experiencing the world that way is our true and natural state.4
The break from animism began with domestication: the Neolithic era, from around 11,000 BC, when people began to abandon hunting and gathering and take up farming. It then accelerated with the Fall, from around 4,000 BC, with the rise of city-based cultures, kingdoms, nations and empires.3 So when Therapeutic Shamanism speaks of original or pre-Fallen animism, it means the way of life of hunter-gatherers before farming, not the beliefs of any people living today. See What is the Fall?
Why aren’t today’s indigenous cultures the same? #
Because farming and herding change a people’s whole relationship with animals, plants and land, and because no culture now stands outside a global, hierarchical mindset. If a culture is agricultural then, shamanic or not, it is still affected by the hierarchical thinking of the Fall and domestication.5 How much depends on how long ago a people took up farming or herding. In North America and Australia colonisation came comparatively recently, so it is not long since people there lived as hunter-gatherers, and older knowledge and ways of thinking can still be relatively intact. In Mongolia, by contrast, herding was adopted several thousand years ago, and herding, though still nomadic, rests on a very different relationship with animals and the earth.6
So a present-day animist people inevitably practises a different kind of shamanism from that of its hunter-gatherer ancestors.2 The signs of the change, such as animal sacrifice and voluntary spirit possession, are set out in What are pre-Fallen, Fallen and post-Fallen shamanism?
What about the Celts, the Druids, the Norse, the Aztecs and the Inca? #
They are often taken to be the old ways to return to, and they were Fallen cultures. The Celts, with their Druids, were farming peoples of Iron Age Europe; the Norse were farmers and seafarers; the Aztec, Inca and Toltec were city-based states built on farming. All of them came long after farming began, and all belong to the era of kingdoms and cities that began around 4,000 BC. Celtic or Norse mythology and Druidry may have their own good points and values, but they are still products of agricultural, domesticated and Fallen societies, and show the hallmarks of that way of seeing the world.2 The Inca, Aztec and Toltec empires may be called shamanic, depending on how shamanism is defined, but they were undeniably Fallen: largely city-based, massively unequal, extremely hierarchical, patriarchal, violent and militaristic.6
Going back to the original ways therefore means going much further back than any of these, to hunter-gatherer times. See Isn’t Therapeutic Shamanism just paganism?
How can we tell what original animism was like? #
By learning from hunter-gatherer cultures that survived into recent times, and by sifting. Studying such cultures, from many parts of the world and very different from each other, shows what they had in common, for example that none of them saw human beings as inherently bad.7 The sifting means separating indigenous cultures that now farm or herd from actual hunter-gatherer cultures, and looking at the anthropological record for the second group on its own.
A simple test helps with any practice found in contemporary shamanism: when did it begin? Is it something pre-Fallen, hunter-gatherer cultures would have done, or did it emerge much more recently, with farming, hierarchy and the Fall? The answers then become templates: asking “What would the ancestors do?” or “How would this have worked in a hunter-gatherer tribe?”, and working out how to apply the answer to modern life.8 See What was hunter-gatherer life really like?
Doesn’t this treat hunter-gatherers as living fossils? #
Anthropologists debate this. A school of thought the editors call ‘revisionist’, whose principal authors include the anthropologists Edwin Wilmsen and Carmel Schrire, holds that the peoples known as hunter-gatherers are mainly remnants of past ways of life, transformed by centuries of domination by stronger neighbours and by modernity; in this view their simple technology, nomadism and food-sharing reflect poverty imposed from outside rather than the demands of foraging life. The long argument over this is known as the Kalahari Debate.9 The anthropologist Manvir Singh warns, too, against portraying non-Western peoples as inheriting unchanging traditions, when shamanic practices everywhere change and adapt.10
On the other side, Lee and Daly hold that the evidence in their encyclopedia challenges the revisionist thesis at a fundamental level, whilst accepting that history matters and that older studies too often treated foragers as unmediated visions of the past. They point to the archaeological and historical evidence, and to the peoples’ own voices, describing themselves as historically rooted peoples with a tradition and identity as hunters and gatherers.9 Therapeutic Shamanism does not claim any present-day people is untouched, which is why it sifts, and why its test is when a practice began. See Aren’t you romanticising hunter-gatherers? and Isn’t the Fall just ‘noble savage’ romanticism?
Is this a criticism of indigenous peoples? #
No. The criticism is of Taker thinking, in all its forms and wherever it is found, not of existing shamanic societies. Whilst showing some signs of that thinking, present-day animist societies still have a much healthier relationship with the Earth and with the more-than-human than the societies that abandoned animism and shamanism altogether, and they have been the wisdom-keepers through the dark times of domestication and the Fall. We owe them a truly incalculable debt for keeping animist and shamanic knowledge alive,2 often through deliberate persecution. They have acted as refugia, places where life holds on through hard times until it can spread again. See What are refugia, and how can we become one? and Why have shamans been persecuted, and what happened to shamanism under states and world religions?
And, not but, there is a limit to what any present culture can give. There is a lot to learn from them and the wisdom they preserved, yet basing a recovery from the Fall solely on such cultures can only go so far, because healing our broken relationship with the Earth means healing its root cause, hierarchical thinking.5 See Is Western shamanism cultural appropriation?
