With the caution above in place, recurring features can be described across much of the region.
The world is commonly conceived in layers (an upper world, this middle world, and a lower one), populated by spirits with authority over animals, rivers, mountains, weather, disease and the dead. Human trouble is understood relationally: illness, failed hunting, bad weather and misfortune result from a spirit offended, a soul lost or stolen, or an obligation unmet. The specialist's job is to find out which and to negotiate a settlement.
Recruitment is typically involuntary. The characteristic account is an initiatory sickness in adolescence or early adulthood (illness, fits, disturbing dreams, withdrawal), understood as spirits selecting the person, and resolved either by accepting the role or by dying. Refusal is widely believed to be fatal. In some peoples the calling also runs in families and is confirmed by inherited spirits. Training follows under an established practitioner and can take years.
The working session usually involves drumming, sometimes singing and dance, sometimes fasting or cold, producing a state in which the specialist is understood either to travel to the spirits or to be entered by them. Which of the two is emphasised varies by people, and Eliade's preference for the journey over possession is one of the places his model has been criticised for tidying the evidence.
Costume and drum are equipment rather than decoration: iron pendants, animal parts and figures represent helping spirits and the structure of the worlds, and a drum is often understood as a mount. Both are made to specification, consecrated, and in many traditions destroyed or set aside at the owner's death.
Work is generally practical and paid: curing, finding lost animals or people, securing a hunt, divining, cleansing a household, and escorting the dead. Blacksmiths, singers and diviners carry related but distinct kinds of authority in several of these societies, and lumping them together is one of the errors the general category encourages.