Shamanism Book

Margaret Stutley is a scholar of comparative religions interested in, among other things, the religious practices of northern Europe (the Saami people) and Central Asia-Siberia (Turkic-, Mongolic- and Tungusic-speaking peoples) that share many features and have come to be labelled under "shamanism". This 2002 work aims to present an overview of these traditions to people without prior knowledge of the field. Unfortunately, it is one of the most confused and misleading books I have ever seen published by an academic press.

The first thing the reader will notice is that this is not a coherent, flowing text at all. Stutley has simply thrown a series of factual assertions onto the page without linking it all together. From one paragraph to the next -- or even within paragraphs -- she suddenly jumps from one subject to another, or from one people in one area to another people many thousands of kilometres away.

Another appalling tendency is for Stutley to bring up a particular tradition (for example, the koori bird) without even mentioning what people it is from. Failing to link specific trends with specific peoples feels like dishonest scholarship, reducing all these individual traditions, each with its own distinctions, to a generic oversimplification. Where, oh where, was Routledge's editor in this sorry production?

As a linguist specializing in a language family (Uralic) many of whose speakers have historically pursued shamanism, I know that many aspects of texts gathered from these peoples in the 19th century and later are debated. Stutley never grapples with these contentious accounts. Furthermore, some of her citations, at least to judge by the Uralistics ones I am familiar with, are to dodgy, second-rate scholarship. My jaw hit the floor in one passage where she unquestionally passes along a claim by some Soviet ethnographers that Siberian shamans are capable of true ESP-level telepathy between each other over long distances.

Stay far away from this book. If you want to read accounts of shamanism based on both rigorous firsthand fieldwork and grappling with the philological issues of collected texts, then Anna-Leena Siikala's bibliography is worth looking through, though her works are not quite as accessible as the "An Introduction" which Stutley's book was meant to serve as.