Shaman

Saman is an Evenki word. It reached Russian through accounts of Siberia in the seventeenth century, entered German and French in the eighteenth, and by the twentieth had been applied to healers, mediums, diviners and ecstatic specialists on every inhabited continent.

The generalisation was not accidental. Mircea Eliade's Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, published in French in 1951, presented shamanism as a single archaic technique underlying religion everywhere, and the book's influence is the main reason the word means what it now means in English. Ronald Hutton and Andrei Znamenski have both traced how the picture was assembled, from a small number of early reports, read as though they described a universal type, by scholars who had not been to Siberia.

The cost of the generalisation is specific. It puts one people's word onto other peoples' offices, and it flattens offices that are structurally different. An Evenki shaman, an Inuit angakkuq, a K'iche' Maya ajq'ij, a Korean mudang, a Dine hataali and a Sakha oyuun are not variants of one thing. They differ in how the office is entered, what it is for, whether trance is involved at all, and what the practitioner is understood to be doing. Several of them do not travel to any other world, which is the feature the general definition is built on.

This atlas uses shaman for the Tungusic and Siberian context, and each tradition's own word elsewhere, wherever one is documented. Where a word is not documented, the entry says what is known and stops.

The practice sold in Europe and North America as shamanism is a further step removed. Its main modern source is Michael Harner's core shamanism, set out in 1980 and explicitly designed as a synthesis with the cultural specifics removed. Whatever it is, it is not the office this entry describes.

Formal recognition of these practitioners, where it exists, comes from individual states and communities rather than from any body representing shamanism as a whole, because no such single tradition exists to be recognised. South Korea has designated specific gut ceremonies performed by mudang as Important Intangible Cultural Properties, protecting and funding named practitioners as living culture bearers in a manner comparable to the country's recognition of master craftspeople, while Mongolia's post-socialist revival of Tengrist and shamanic practice since the 1990s has involved both genuine reconstruction by families with living memory of practice and a wave of newly self-declared shamans responding to popular demand, a distinction Mongolian scholars and practitioners themselves actively debate.

Across the specific traditions this entry declines to collapse into one, ethnographers have repeatedly documented a recurring pattern in the way individuals come to the role: an unsought illness or psychological crisis, interpreted within the tradition as a call to serve rather than as ordinary sickness, followed by a period of training under an established practitioner before the person is recognised as competent to serve their community. That pattern of a crisis-driven calling recurs across societies with no contact with one another, which is itself part of why comparative anthropologists have found the broad category difficult to abandon entirely even while agreeing that the details differ enormously and that the word imported from the Evenki language flattens them.