Piers Vitebsky is a social anthropologist who was Head of Anthropology and Russian Northern Studies at the Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge, from 1986 to 2016. He has lived and worked with the Sora, shifting cultivators of eastern India, and with the Even, reindeer herders of Siberia, and his illustrated book The Shaman (1995) is one of the most widely read general introductions to shamanism. In it he defines the shaman as someone in control of their own trance, usually making a soul journey, and insists that “there can be no shaman without a surrounding society and culture”.
Who is Piers Vitebsky? #
A Cambridge anthropologist of shamanism, death and the Arctic. He studied Classics and modern and medieval languages at King’s College, Cambridge, graduating in 1971, then took a diploma in social anthropology at Oxford, spent time at the Delhi School of Economics in the late 1970s, and gained his doctorate from the School of Oriental and African Studies in London in 1982. From 1986 to 2016 he was Head of Anthropology and Russian Northern Studies at the Scott Polar Research Institute, and he has also held posts at the University of Tromsø in Norway and in the Sakha Republic of Siberia.1
His books include Dialogues with the Dead (1993), on the Sora of eastern India; The Shaman (1995), later reissued as Shamanism; Reindeer People: Living with Animals and Spirits in Siberia (2005), which won the Kiriyama Prize; and Living Without the Dead: Loss and Redemption in a Jungle Cosmos (2017).1
Who are the peoples he has lived with? #
Two very different peoples, neither of them hunter-gatherers. The Sora of Odisha in eastern India are shifting cultivators, farmers who clear and plant forest plots in turn, and his Dialogues with the Dead is about how they discuss death and mortality; much of the Sora material in The Shaman comes from that fieldwork.2 The Even of Siberia are reindeer herders, a pastoral people. He arrived in Yakutsk in 1988 and is described as the first Westerner since the Russian Revolution to live long-term with an indigenous community in the Russian Arctic.2
What does The Shaman say a shaman is? #
He starts with the word. “Shaman” comes from the Evenk, a small Tungus-speaking people of Siberian hunters and reindeer herders, and was first used only for a religious specialist of that region.3 In its narrow, Siberian sense, the shaman is someone whose soul leaves the body to travel to a world above, in the sky, and a world below, underground. More broadly, the word covers anyone who is in control of their own trance, even without a soul journey. Either way, shamans differ from spirit mediums, who are possessed by spirits as and when the spirits choose.3
Shamanism, for Vitebsky, is “not a single, unified religion but a cross-cultural form of religious sensibility and practice”, with no doctrine, church or holy book, always one strand among the other beliefs and powers of a society. Shamans cannot work alone; they depend on their helping spirits, so that their feats are “not so much superhuman as super-assisted”.34 And the shaman exists only within a community: “There can be no shaman without a surrounding society and culture.”3
Why does he call shamanism a hunter’s religion? #
Because he thinks today’s stress on healing narrows it. In hunting societies, the bond between human and animal souls rests on the need to kill animals in order to live, and the shaman deals with the spirits who own the game.5 As hunting gives way to herding, farming and the state, the picture changes. The single shaman is joined or replaced by a range of other specialists, the shamanic element becomes harder to pin down, and people’s worries shift from the hunt to floods, crop failure, passports and exams. Shamanism, he suggests, may be particularly suited to a classless hunting society, though shamans also work under the most diverse social and political systems.5
What does he say about shamans and madness? #
That shamans are not mentally ill. The difference he draws is control: “The shaman lives on the brink of the abyss but has the means to avoid falling in.” One becomes a hero, the other a hospital patient.6 He also compares shamanic healing, which works through dialogue, story and symbol, with the Western “talking cures”, a Sora patient talking things through with the dead,7 and he ends the book on the shaman as a figure who unites religion, psychology and medicine, areas that Western life has separated, someone whose means “are psychological but the ends are sociological”.8 See Were traditional shamans mentally ill?
What does he say about neo-shamanism? #
That it raises problems not easy to resolve. Neo-shamanic movements in Europe and North America treat the shamanic state as a universal human potential and speak of each person becoming their own shaman. Michael Harner’s core shamanism, Vitebsky notes, is abstracted from several cultures, and he quotes Harner’s reason: that many traditions carry elements that are not really shamanic but belong to their cultural setting, so Harner tries to find “the basic universals of shamanism” and teach those bare bones for people to use in their own lives.9
Vitebsky’s concern is that traditional cultures form almost the whole history of shamanism, yet contain elements that clash with modern values such as vegetarianism, feminism or the wish to separate healing completely from sorcery, so there is a risk that new shamanists create their own ideal image of shamanism and then judge traditional societies for failing to live up to it.9 Harner’s answer is the search for universals; Vitebsky’s is the caution about the image. See Who was Michael Harner, and what is core shamanism? and What is neo-shamanism, and how does it differ from traditional shamanism?
How does his work sit beside Therapeutic Shamanism? #
On the shaman’s place in a community, closely. The word shaman came from the Evenki people of the Siberian and Mongolian region, where it described their own spiritual practices.10 In Therapeutic Shamanism the title of shaman is usually not one people claim for themselves but one bestowed by their tribe or community, and the training is long and arduous, which is why modern Westerners are better described as shamanic practitioners.11 Vitebsky’s “no shaman without a surrounding society” comes at the same point as an anthropologist. See What is the difference between a shaman, a priest, a medium and a medicine person?
On history, too. Vitebsky’s hunter’s religion, changing as herding, farming and the state arrive, sits near the Therapeutic Shamanism account of pre-Fallen and Fallen shamanism, in which virtually all existing shamanic societies are agricultural, and so to some degree shaped by 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, whilst still owed an incalculable debt as wisdom-keepers.12 See What are pre-Fallen, Fallen and post-Fallen shamanism?
His caution about neo-shamanism meets Therapeutic Shamanism at a point where the two can be set side by side. Therapeutic Shamanism grew partly out of core shamanism, is not drawn from any particular indigenous culture, and does compare present-day shamanisms with how hunter-gatherers lived.1312 Vitebsky warns against judging traditional societies by an ideal image; Therapeutic Shamanism’s measure is how a people live, hunting and gathering or farming and herding, and it stresses that this is no criticism of present-day animist societies. Both are stated here as they stand.
