Michael Harner

Michael Harner was born in 1929 and trained as an anthropologist at the University of California, Berkeley, conducting doctoral fieldwork among the Conibo people of the Peruvian Amazon and, more extensively, the Shuar, historically called the Jivaro, known in anthropological literature for their practice of shrinking the heads of enemies, a people among whom Harner lived and studied their shamanic tradition directly across repeated visits from the late 1950s onward. During this fieldwork he participated personally in ayahuasca ceremonies and other shamanic practices rather than observing only from the outside, an immersive method that shaped both his anthropological writing and, eventually, a very different second career.

By the 1970s Harner had concluded that the shamanic techniques he had studied across the Americas and, in his broader comparative reading, across shamanic cultures worldwide, shared a recognizable technical core, above all sustained rhythmic percussion used to induce a trance state in which the practitioner experiences a journey to non-ordinary reality to retrieve information or healing power, that could be taught and practiced independent of any single culture's specific cosmology or religious framework. He called this distilled technique core shamanism and set out its practice in his 1980 book The Way of the Shaman, a text that became the most widely read introduction to shamanic practice for a general Western readership and remains in print more than four decades later.

In 1985 Harner founded the Foundation for Shamanic Studies to formalize the teaching of core shamanism through structured workshops, initially aimed at introducing Western students to journeying and other techniques stripped of any requirement to adopt a specific indigenous religious identity, a design choice that made the method widely accessible but also drew sustained criticism from some indigenous practitioners and scholars, who argued that core shamanism's deliberate separation of technique from the cultural and religious context that gives shamanic practice its meaning amounted to an appropriation of sacred material rather than a neutral distillation of it.

The Foundation also positioned itself as a preservation effort, funding and supporting indigenous shamanic communities and their own traditional knowledge alongside its Western teaching program, a dual mission Harner maintained was complementary rather than contradictory: that a simplified, widely taught core technique could coexist with, and even help fund the preservation of, the far richer and culturally specific traditions his own anthropological fieldwork had first introduced him to. Harner continued teaching and directing the Foundation until shortly before his death in 2018, by which point core shamanism, whatever the continuing debate over its relationship to the traditions it draws from, had become the default entry point through which most Western practitioners of shamanic technique, inside and outside any specific religious tradition, first encountered the practice.