Cultic Studies Review, Vol. 7, No. 2, 2008,
pp. 182-187
Shamans and Religion: An Anthropological Exploration in Critical Thinking
Alice Beck Kehoe
Waveland Press, Inc., 4180 IL Route 83, Suite 101, Long Grove, IL 60047-9580,
2000. ISBN-10: 1-57766-162-1; ISBN-13: 978-1-57766-162-7 (paperback). $13.50.
125 pages.
Dream Catchers: How Mainstream America Discovered Native Spirituality
Philip Jenkins
New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2005. ISBN-10: 0195189108; ISBN-13:
978-0195189100. $16.95
Reviewed by Joseph P. Szimhart
Some books are necessary antidotes to other, incredibly
popular books that distort public perception. One such remedy is Shamans and
Religion by Alice Beck Kehoe. Another is Dream Catchers by Philip
Jenkins. Both authors address popular (if surreptitious) New Age appropriations
of Native American religion and misappropriation of traditional shamanism. More
than twenty-five years ago when I was searching for a way out of an intellectual
morass regarding religious ideas, I turned to Mircea Eliade (1907–1986), whose
autobiographies were great reading for errant seekers like me. His densely
written studies titled Yoga (1969) and Shamanism (1964, English
ed.) popularized two approaches to experiential religion. Eliade was the
intellectual seeker’s scholar. He was the head of the Religious Studies
department at the University of Chicago. When he gave academic thumbs-up to
Carlos Castaneda’s fantastic first novel about an apprenticeship under a Yaqui
Indian, we felt justified in believing in Castaneda (1925–1998). Castaneda was
one of the most successful New Age hoaxers in the twentieth century. Castaneda’s
books, along with Eliade’s Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of
Ecstasy, helped to usher in a New Age industry of neo-shamans such as
Michael Harner and don Jose Luis Ruiz, with their lucrative transformational
workshops. Eliade has had his critics (Robert Ellwood lists some of them and the
criticisms in Politics of Myth). However, Kehoe’s small book drives
criticism of Eliade and the neoshaman movement into a compelling if provocative
conclusion: Neoshamanism is “racism.” By this Kehoe means an intellectual or
ivory-tower racism that looks down on and dismisses the achievements of a living
ancient culture as if shamanism represents a lesser evolved human being who
needs a more advanced culture to properly interpret it. Thus the neo-shaman is
one that feels justified in appropriating techniques of shamanism and marketing
them for personal benefit. Furthermore, the neo-shaman mixes or “syncretes”
occult notions from various religions and spiritual philosophies as if shamanism
shares a common perennial basis with all religious ideas.
Alice Beck Kehoe (b. 1934) specializes in fieldwork among
cultures with ancient roots, especially the traditional healers and seers of
North American Plains Indians. She has been a professor of anthropology and
archeology at the University of Wisconsin and Marquette University. As her
book’s subtitle indicates, Shamans and Religion is an “exploration in
critical thinking.” Kehoe begins by establishing the actual setting of a shaman
culture in Northern hemisphere areas, especially Siberia and North America. She
argues that, since the late 19th century, scholars and novelists have
misapplied the term shaman to healers and seers of cultures worldwide
that bear no relation either to the Siberian Tungus people who produced the term
or to their peculiar rituals and philosophy.
Kehoe examines how her predecessors tagged shamans as
living “fossils” in the progressive evolution of religious behavior that has
culminated in modern European religions. Early anthropologists surmised that
shaman culture was a “childish” stage, one in which “primitive” or savage men
believed in magic, much as preschool White children might. Kehoe’s intent is to
distinguish proper anthropology from both the “armchair” scholarship approach of
Eliade and the New Age misappropriation of shamanistic technique for individual
embellishment. Shamans proper were servants of their communities, not the
psychotherapy seekers that populate neo-shaman workshops in America. Now, I do
not disparage the healing or emotional boost any person might experience while
“journeying” at a Michael Harner Way of the Shaman workshop, but I
applaud Kehoe, who chose Harner’s New Age approach to shamanism as a prime
example of misappropriation and racism.
Kehoe’s effort reasserts the science in anthropology. She
would ask that we at least respect indigenous religion for what it means to the
culture that formed it. She takes Harner to task when he in 1990 wrote “with
respect” that “shamanism” survives in “primitive peoples” and “low technology
cultures” worldwide. Thus Harner homogenizes what he sees as primitive mysticism
and tribal ritual into one word—shamanism. He claims to have distilled
the essence of that shamanism, and then he recycles it for eager customers who
want a piece of authentic “Indian” experience.
Kehoe’s last chapter, titled “Deafening Silence,” considers
what Professor Yolanda Moses (president of the American Anthropological
Association) said: “The silence is deafening.” Moses herself has some African
ancestry and is labeled a black American. “No one seems to see themselves as
racist,” says Kehoe on page 91. Professor Moses noticed that no one was saying
anything about this form of academic prejudice against cultures that had no
written language, thus could hardly compete in the academy with representatives.
There persists a nineteenth-century notion among anthropologists, “a kind of
generalized model of Primitive Man. It is an unintended legacy of
Progressivism.” Kehoe was quoting William Adams who stated that in The
Philosophical Roots of Anthropology. By Progressivism, Adams refers to
assumptions that modern man is more evolved; therefore, we have a right to
pigeonhole less-evolved cultures in our image as if they were “other” and
non-Western.
To clarify Kehoe’s notion of racism further, I worked with
a television news reporter in New Mexico in 1987 to produce a series called
New Age: Faith, Fad, or Fiction? The reporter was Conroy Chino, a
full-blooded Acoma Indian whose culture still resided on a mesa-top Pueblo
outside of Albuquerque. Chino’s family males were “medicine men” who still
practiced the old ways while also living as modern Americans. He told me that
his people were often puzzled by white seekers who wanted to join in their
rituals. “We are not doing anything special or better than their religions
offer,” he said. Of course, his uncles would politely turn away these errant
white folks.
Less strident but more thorough than Kehoe, Philip Jenkins
offers a clearly written, impressively researched historical survey of the same
early conflict with Native religion and controversial modern assimilations of
Indian spirituality in white or non-Indian society. Beyond the history, he
offers useful sociological insight and criticism. Kehoe’s book covers a mere 125
pages, while Jenkins fills more than 300 with nearly 500 endnotes that contain
an average of 5 to 10 references per note! Jenkins’ companion book to Dream
Catchers is Mystic and Messiahs: Cults and New Religions in American
History, published in 2000. Indeed, he covers much of the same territory in
Dream Catchers but with his eye keenly on Native American or Indian
culture throughout.
Jenkins begins Dream Catchers at the point of early
contact between primarily a Protestant Christian culture and American Indians in
the east. These Christian missionaries saw proto-Christian tendencies among most
Indians, but they also noted superstitions and “diabolical” practices. In their
view, Indians worshiped a Great Spirit, but they needed to know who God really
was. By the late 19th century, evolutionary theory among American
intellectuals implied that Indians were merely “children” in their spiritual
awareness and not diabolical. Further developments by the 1920s, inspired by
insights from psychology, interest in Asian religions, and the occult renewal
ennobled a number of activists to flip the equation: Indian spirituality might
be superior and closer to primordial truth than anything the Western religions
had to offer. Some would claim that Turtle Island (America) was populated
originally by people from “Red” Atlantis.
Jenkins covers this latter period through his focus on the
lives and activism of Mabel Dodge Luhan, Alice Corbin Henderson, D. H. Lawrence,
and others who settled in the Southwest, especially in New Mexico. Indians did
benefit politically from all this positive attention, but the syncretism
non-American Indians applied to their religions muddled popular understanding
and appreciation. The work and commentaries of Frank Waters, Carl Jung, and Jack
Kerouac, for example, helped Westerners to absorb Indian ideas as if they were
part of a primal mystical pool shared by all ancient religions. According to
Jenkins, it was Frank Waters with his immensely popular The Book of the Hopi
(1963) “above all who made the Ganges flow into the Rio Grande.” Waters’
syncretism included his reverence for the pseudo-Sufi teachings of the
controversial Gurdjieff, which Mabel Dodge had introduced to him.
Jenkins examines pseudo-Indians such as Sun Bear and
neoshamans such as Michael Harner as examples of the next wave of popularization
of Indian spirituality, from 1960 to 1980. These New Age entrepreneurs
established a workshop industry mainly attended by middle- and upper-class
whites seeking the Indian experience. By the late 1960s, red power arose along
with black power and the Hippie movement, which combined American and Asian
Indian spiritual ideas and costumes into their loose spiritual style. Jenkins
notes that while New Age Whites scrambled to claim any drop of Indian blood that
flowed through their ancestry and any past life as an Indian, few if any sought
black blood or black African lives. Indians were somehow more “spiritual” by
nature. I noted this same prejudice in 1976 when I worked as an art instructor
at a large penitentiary in New Mexico. Although racial tension existed between
Whites, Blacks, and Hispanics, they all seemed to leave the Indian prisoners
alone. One Hispanic prisoner told me that inmates shared a special reverence for
the Indians and their suffering under the dominant society. He noted that
Indians have “spiritual power.”
Jenkins addresses the current status of Native spirituality
in his last two chapters. He writes that Indians have both absorbed New Age
notions that define their culture and reacted against the same, referring to the
New Age use of sweat lodges and peyote as “cultural theft.” Some Indians go so
far as to call it cultural genocide. In light of such reactions, Jenkins asks
how, then, do we define “authentic” religion? What standard prevents a syncretic
cult in the New Age movement from claiming authenticity? “They make certain bold
assumptions about the nature of religion; about the role of authenticity and
historicity, and the potential for change and development over time” (p. 243).
He asks whether we are arguing about olives or onions. Do we peel away the
surface to find the nugget of truth, or is the truth in the peels themselves,
without a solid core?
Jenkins refers to a landmark decision in the US verses
Ballard case of 1944 and the statement by Supreme Court Judge Robert
Jackson. Ruling on the outcome of the fraud case against the Mighty I AM,
Jackson said that the “bogus and deceptive cult” that taught “nothing but
humbug, untainted by any trace of truth” offered a “blatant case of deception.”
Jackson acknowledged the potential for harm to “over-credulous people,” yet “the
price of freedom or of religion or of speech or of the press is that we must put
up with, and even pay for, a good deal of rubbish. . . . By that standard,”
writes Jenkins, “the neo-Native religion of the New Age groups is as valid as
any other, and deserves as much respect” (p. 249). He sums up this view on page
254 by noting that the encounter, despite the exploitation, has been
overwhelmingly positive, sincere, and respectful for both Indians and Whites.
The interaction has drawn Native religion into the mainstream. Jenkins concludes
that “there is no sign that this process of influence and adaptation will
cease.”
I thoroughly enjoyed reading both books and learned a lot
from both authors. Inasmuch as some neo-Indian groups and leaders harm and
mislead, neither author offers redress. But that might be another topic
altogether.
Reference
Ellwood, Robert S. 1999. The Politics of
Myth: A Study of C. G. Jung, Mircea Eliade, and Joseph Campbell. Albany: State
University of New York Press.
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