Fluid thresholds: anthropological reflection on the Beyond in modern shamanisms.

WRIGHT, PABLO

San Antonio de Areco

Otro; Colloquium The Beyond as Challenge of Life; 2016

UNSAM, FOVOG y Technische Universitat Dresden

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 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), different forms of New Ager shamanic practices in Brazil, and current schools of European Neopaganism. The main idea is to compare social and cultural contexts within which these forms of shamanism appear, and to what extent they propose philosophical frameworks to redescribe the human condition in historical and culturally meaningful ways.