I have this instinct that a traditional shaman was someone who worked from a broader base than spirits who turned up while in altered states of consciousness and gave advice, or who did what we might call energetic work. Would any of you confine what you have to offer in this way? No, I'll bet you don't, and I'll bet it was no different for them, because we are all fundamentally the same. Indigenous cultures are not as 'other' as our projections might lead us to believe.
I have, furthermore, a hunch that this narrow description is a creation of western academics, caged within a one-sidedly rationalist framework, and enamoured by that which bust open the bars of that cage. What is so special about Siberian indigenous traditions that does not apply to the rest of the world? I don't believe it. Indigenous ways are fundamentally the same, wherever you look. That is what gives me faith in them: they all tell me the same story about what it is to be a human being.
Eliade's foundational book, 'Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy' gives the game away by its title. As any of us who have done this work know, the ecstasy is a side effect, it is incidental to what this work is really about, which involves healing and meaning in the lives of individual people. Ecstasy is exactly what tame academics do not experience, and it misses the point.
There are also linguistic/metaphysical differences. Our notion of the self emphasises autonomy - with its concomitant language of rights and freedoms - whereas an indigenous notion of the self is more relational, and would think more in terms of collective responsibilities. So where a shaman would speak the language of spirits telling them things, we might talk about the intuition. My personal preference is for the indigenous framework, but I won't let that stand in the way of standing up for what we call 'intuition'.
If the Shaman didn't know the stories, the wisdom traditions, the ceremonies, of his or her people, then who did? If you didn't go to them for advice, then who would you go to? When I am responding to people who come to me, I draw on my knowledge of our culture, I draw on my hard-earned experience, and I draw on that which presses on me to be said. Where this world ends and the Otherworld starts, I cannot say, and it does not interest me because I do not make that distinction.
Like the Two-Spirits in the Native American tradition, who are really One-Spirit like the rest of us, but call themselves Two-Spirits to help us muggles understand them, so are Shamans less of a separate, narrow category than they maybe describe themselves, or as the anthropologists would have us believe. They - we - function along the broad range of human experience, in which what we call the Otherworld is not so separate or remote or exotic as modern rationalism projects.
So let us be done with this tussle about the meaning of Shamanism, which sometimes vitiates our attempts to reignite indigenous ways of experiencing the world, in a culture that has forgotten its belonging to Mother Earth. Yes, Shamans, formally speaking, intercede on our behalf with the Spirit world for our benefit. But that is just part of who they are, and it is speaking a particular language. It is a definition and an emphasis created by a very narrow specialism, namely western academia, of which Michael Harner was a fully paid-up member. We are, and always were, something much broader than this.
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