Ontological thresholds in contemporary shamanisms

WRIGHT, PABLO

Experiencing the Beyond Intercultural Approaches,

De Gruyter Oldenbourg

Lugar: Heidelberg; Año: 2018; p. 243 - 255

In this paper I analyze current dilemmas anthropology of religion faces when dealing with the multiple versions of shamanism that emerge crossculturally. Each and every expression of it, either in its ?purest? forms or in renewed neoshamanic adaptations, manifests quite remarkable challenges to standard conceptions of reality, science and religion. As practical ontologies dialectically produced in contemporary modern world, these shamanic phenomena propose creative, fluid links that connect the human with the numinous, bridging otherwise unsurmountable existential gaps. To exemplify this line of inquiry, I show ethnographic cases of the Argentine Chaco Qom (or Tobas) indigenous shamanism, and different forms of neoshamanisms, one from Brazilian Santo Daime church, the other from Lithuanian Neopaganism. The main idea is to compare social and cultural contexts within which these forms of shamanisms appear, and to what extent they propose philosophical frameworks to redescribe the human condition in historical and culturally meaningful ways.