(Tina)Theresa Hannah-Munns
Book Review
Leona Anderson
July 20, 2006

Kehoe, Alice Beck. (2000). Shamans and Religion: An Anthropological Exploration in Critical Thinking. Prospect Heights, Illinois: Waveland.

In Shamans and Religion, Alice Beck Kehoe explores the use and misuse of the term “shaman” and the contemporary label “shamanism” that designates a new age religious movement and category of religious experience. She sufficiently argues that this Siberian word is not only inappropriate to use outside of the Siberian cultures, but also inappropriate in its application to the various spiritual practitioners within Siberian cultures. Using a variety of printed sources as well as references to her abundant field work assignments among indigenous cultures, along with reference to ecstatic and mystical experiences found within Christian and Jewish traditions, she concludes that information concerning the richness and diversity of spiritual practitioners and practices is hidden behind these naïve “blanket” terms and only allows for superficial entry into crosscultural understanding and should therefore not be used within academic settings.

Not only does Kehoe address the issues around these specific classification labels, but also addresses the inherent embedded racial biases that these labels support, clarifying the hidden assumptions that work behind the use of these labels that construct an “us versus them” sense of otherness on the shamanistic-designated material. The evolutionary assumption of “cultural primitivism,” where “civilized” American and European societies have progressed from the simple social organizations and conceptual frameworks that hinder the evolvement of more localized, indigenous peoples. Supported by the valued Eurocentric notion of “possessive individualism,” where the ultimate right and responsibility of a person is to obtain self-fulfillment, cultural primitivism is an active ingredient within academic scholarship today and within the cultural appropriation of both academic and new age material. It is to these types of notions that Kehoe adequately problematizes and forwards a call for scholars to utilize more critical thought and action within their own research process in order to surpass the barriers produced by the overgeneralizations of past trope systems and founding theorist’s biases.

While Kehoe addresses some of the problems behind the process of imposing culturally-specific designations onto crosscultural data and some of the hidden racial assumptions that support this practice, some of the theoretical interpretations constructed and/or adopted by her anthropological discipline still utilize these designations and their frameworks of assumptions in which she supports. While she challenges contending arguments concerning the interpretation of indigenous rock art, she forwards the predominant land bridge theory without revision as to how the problematized assumptions work within this specific theory. For example, in discussing how cultural transference was probable in extending patterns of behaviour into the Americas from Russia due to the Russian American trading company’s use of Siberian, Canadian Inuit, and Native American employees, she does not forward the possibility that Russian and European may have picked up some of the elements of ritual from the Americas. These elements could be items such as tying up the fingers and/or hands, darkness of the environment, the use of the center pole, and the like. A contemporary situation that supports this conclusion can be found in Germanic lineages of borrowed Cree and Lakota lifestyles within constructed “tribal societies” in Germany.

Nor does she forward a reconceptualization that similar patterns could have existed prior to contact that contained many nuanced differences that were synthesized and neutralized from the extended influence of contact with other cultures. Another contemporary example in support of this type of reinterpretation is where some nēhiyawak (Cree) Elders have created more secularized prayers for business meetings conducted within the frameworks of Eurocultural institutional settings that are shorter and exclude ritual components such as the burning of sweetgrass or the lighting of tobacco. These same Elders would not alter the more traditional extended form of prayer in a lodge that are always forwarded through smoke of one form or another.

This short book not only forwards the need for disciplinary fields to readdress the nature and terminology of their classification structures and theoretical assumptions, but also to begin looking at the embedded racism within any components of crosscultural analysis or application of their research onto non-Eurocultural peoples. The arguments forwarded are well constructed and do not simply stop at the deconstruction process but extend reinterpretation ideas and possibilities for future research.