peristasis547's review

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3.25

Quality of thought strongly depends on the researcher... 
While many papers gave a great overview others already seem to struggle to keep shamanism, religion, cult and culture apart. 
I was actually looking for a paper with a critical standpoints about the question why the term "shamanism" is so eagerly applied to things that don't even have a need to be "cultish" or such (no, I didn't find it in here) 

brynhammond's review

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4.0

Illustrations are poor (and crucial to interpretations) but you can search for what you need on the internet. Archaeology has often been reluctant to see shamanist experiences in art and iconography. These papers are from archaeologists with knowledge of early religions. Neil Price places the book within an 'archaeology of the mind' that searches for cognitive experience, 'these elusive mentalities' from the archaeological record.

It's an open-minded book and includes a piece on the troubled relations between archaeologists, indigenous peoples and neo-pagans or neo-shamans.

I'll follow Neil Price into other work -- I think I liked his introduction the most.


Here's the contents:

Part One -- The archaeology of shamanism: Cognition, cosmology and world-view

1. An archaeology of altered states: Shamanism and material culture studies
Neil S. Price

2. Southern African shamanistic rock art in its social and cognitive contexts
J.D. Lewis-Williams

Part Two -- Siberia and Central Asia: The 'cradle of shamanism'

3. Rock art and the material culture of Siberian and Central Asian shamanism
Ekaterina Devlet

4. Shamans, heroes and ancestors in the bronze castings of western Siberia
Natalia Fedorova

5. Sun Gods or shamans? Interpreting the 'solar-headed' petroglyphs of Central Asia
Andrzej Rozwadowski

6. The materiality of shamanism as a 'world-view': Praxis, artefacts and landscape
Peter Jordan

7. The medium of the message: Shamanism as localised practice in the Nepal Himalayas
Damian Walter

Part Three -- North America and North Atlantic

8. The gendered peopling of North America: Addressing the antiquity of systems of multiple gender
Sandra E. Hollimon

9. Shamanism and the iconography of Palaeo-Eskimo art
Patricia D. Sutherland

10. Social bonding and shamanism among late Dorset groups in High Arctic Greenland
Hans Christian Gullov and Martin Appelt

Part Four -- Northern Europe

11. Special objects -- special creatures: Shamanistic imagery and the Aurignacian art of south-west Germany
Thomas A. Dowson and Martin Porr

12. The sounds of transformation: Accoustics, monuments and ritual in the British Neolithic
Aaron Watson

13. An ideology of transformation: Cremation rites and animal sacrifice in early Anglo-Saxon England
Howard Williams

14. Waking ancestor spirits: Neo-shamanic engagements with archaeology
Robert J. Wallis
More...