Reviews for Shamans: Siberian Spirituality and the Western Imagination

The average rating for Shamans: Siberian Spirituality and the Western Imagination based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-05-28 00:00:00 Sandra Howard This book came highly recommended to me, as I was looking for something that would get at the history of the word "shaman" and how it was used in Siberian Shamanism. I found it to be a well researched and well written book about precisely what is known about the shamanic experience in Siberia. Hutton certainly dug out all of the relevant sources and put them into a cogent and easily read narrative. It is well documented with extensive notes and sources. In the last three chapters of the book, Hutton overlays what I will characterize as his perspective on famous writers in the field of contemporary shamanism, most prominently, Mircea Eliade and Michael Harner, although he certainly covers a great many more. He wishes to see what use has been made of the Siberian tradition by historians and anthropologists, and in this he is both critical and skeptical. He sees much that is speculative in the writing, and sees no real consensus. Much of his criticism seems to be aimed directly at the contemporary notions of what shamanism was and how it is put to use in contemporary society. He does acknowledge evidence of Finnish shamanism, and proceeds to debunk much of the rest of it, including notions of druid shamanic traditions and even that of the Norse other than the Saami (Finland). He then proceeds on to investigate what he terms "neoshamanism" or "urban shamanism", which he describes as ". . .an application to modern needs of techniques derived to some extent from traditional peoples, of the sort which scholars have dubbed shamanic." He highlights 4 components of this, starting with the connection to the writings of Michael Harner and Carlos Castaneda. My sense is that he is somehow critical of the fact that both left a strict academic environment in order to carry teachings to the "lay" population. It seems to me that he finds that the complexity of the indigenous methodology has been distilled (dumbed down?)for the contemporary western market. He next focuses on Eliade's vision of shamanism as a world-wide and ancient phenomena, an assertion which he believes is by no means proven, though he does not cite extensive sources for his perspective. He discusses two other points which he deems relevant. At the end of the day, while the first part of the book is well-researched, I remain in the dark as to what Hutton's points and assertions are regard the contemporary applications.

Review # 2 was written on 2009-10-31 00:00:00 Shaun Coleman This book is highly informative, critical and important to read if one wants to find out what we really do (and do not) know about a practice first encountered by Europeans in Siberia (and Mongolia) and termed shamanism by western scholars, the problems regarding the definition of this term, where Mircea Eliade was wrong, the influence of neoshamanism and more...