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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Sepulchrave II" data-source="post: 8451247" data-attributes="member: 4303">It's really not that simple.There is no universally recognized definition of the term "shamanism" in either academia or popular usage, whether you focus primarily on a Tungus-Evenk locus, or expand and/or relax your lens and criteria as you seen fit. See, for example, Mihály Hoppál or Volodymyr Yatchenko. Or the definitional problems presented by Pieter Jolly or Stefanie von Schnurbein. See especially The Rite Technique of the Siberian Shaman by Siikala as she begins what became a vigorous academic critique of Eliade's construction of Shamanism, but confines it to the Siberian heartland.Animism is an entirely invented category, the product of 19th-century anthropological speculation - i.e. "these things kind of look the same, so we'll invent a category for them and call them this." We're long overdue in tossing it out altogether. And there is no "just" or "overall;" you are demonstrating a casual, ill-informed arrogance about a subject. So far, you've asserted [this thing for which there is no agreed definition] is a just a subcategory of [this thing invented by Victorian academics].That's fine, and you'll find lots of academics who agree with you. And plenty who don't. And many who understand that the stable door has been open for a very long time and there's little point in trying to close it now. It is regrettable that the term "Shamanism" was ever coined but it is nonsensical to defer to an even more dubious category - i.e. animism.Okay.It is very hard to reach back into an archaic Norse or Germanic consciousness and it is rather presumptuous to assert this categorically as fact. What we do know are that there are many indicators in Norse myth suggestive of a "shamanistic" substrate, upon which later stories were built. Whether these indicators are indigenous to Nordic people or incorporated via cultural exchange with Sami peoples is up for debate. You are free to dismiss the Sami practice as non-Evenk and therefore non-Shamanistic, but, again, many scholars would disagree, regarding Sami culture as part of a Siberian hinterland.Scholars have noted therianthropy in San rock art and at Les Trois Frères and connected it with ecstatic practices. See, for example, Pieter Jolly, Przemysław Bryk, Ivar Lissner. Your certitude that an archaic stratum of human religious practice is entirely absent from Celtic and Greek myth is ... puzzling. I'm not necessarily averse to constricting the lens of Shamanism such that it only encapsulates the Tungus-Evenk complex, but you're then left with the problem of what do we call this other stuff and simply lumping it as animism is very 19th-century.You have a point. But like I say, the cat's out of the bag and we don't have anything better.</blockquote>

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