The term "Shaman" in common usage...

[plz]

This is a really bad comparison, but it has recently occured to me that the word "shaman" is now an accepted generic term, just as "kleenix" is the common word for a tissue, no matter brand name.

We read to excess here in our home... paperback 'novels' of ALL sorts.  Not one genre over another.  Yet, I have just this past month or so read at least three books using the term "Shaman" for a NDN medicine person or spititual leader.

These books ranged in age from current to 20+yrs old, different authors, differnt subjects....

When something isn't questioned but allowed to be repeated incorrectly it takes on it's own new life I guess.

just etc...

[Kaylee]

I heard somewhere that the term shaman actually refers to a healer/wise person who is native to Siberia.  That Europeans started labeling Native American healers with the word because it was the closest thing they could think of and it just stuck.

If this is true, the using the term shaman to refer to a Native American is also a generic-alization. 

[earthw7]

we do not use the term in my part of the country
in fact when the terms is used it tells us they
are fakes.

[TrishaRoseJacobs]

I just got history text book from the states to use in a class on American History here in waffleland and it's all shaman this or shaman that. Kinda annoying actually. I guess shaman has moved out of anthropology into history departments.

[debbieredbear]

Around here, if someone asks for a shaman, and I don't know them real well, I send them to the local fraud. If they ask for a medicne person, healer or Indian doctor, I tell them who I think could help them. One white friend said I shouldn't be that way. I told her if they ask for a shaman they have most likely been associating with nuage people and wouildn't like the people I know. Most of the nuage types like egotistical braggy types. Most of the good people I know are very quiet and humble,

[frederica]

I think it is now nuage and if you hear it you should run.  It like a lot of words it has become all encompassing. It may now be in all the books, but it means they still do not know the difference.

[plz]

I think it's possible that after reading the term "shaman" in a book to describe any NDN that the reader could then repeat the word, (yes incorrectly), but not mean to be disrespectful.  Just ignorant.

And I think there are far more 'regular' people in the world than there are nuagers.  (Even though it seems otherwise!!!)  Regular meaning:  not having a clue to any of the problems that talk about here or try to correct, living their lives.  Therefore, as the word shaman is misused by those people, too, it becomes more 'commonly acceptable.  Though wrong wrong wrong...... 

I never meant to infer that it's "ok" to do so.  Only offering an observation.
pattyz

[frederica]

I agree, all these new phrases that are now acceptable start somewhere and catch on, some end up in the dictionary, some in books, some die out. That's not a new word, but just another example of how there are accepted.

[outershell]

there was a book called "shamanism: techniques of ecstacy" by mircea Eliade
where he defines the term shaman coming from sibera- area... but then goes and tacks the word "shaman" onto any and all shaman-like persons in any and all cultures.
The book lumps various stories and north american tribes calling them shamen instead of by the actual tribal names.
This book is rapidly becoming the "expert source" by anyone who has anytype of interest for better or for worst.
the newagers defend their positions of calling themselves hopi shamen by citing this book.

[Barnaby_McEwan]

Eliade was a prominent intellectual cheerleader for Romania's homegrown fascist movement, the Legion of the Archangel Michael. He shared in its responsibility for the murder of hundreds of thousands of Jews, Roma and Sinti people.

Here are a couple of articles dealing with Eliade's fascism:

Thinkers and Liars

The Stone-Age Goddess and the Storm Trooper

Fascism's mythologist Mircea Eliade and the politics of myth

Over the last fifteen years his reputation amongst academics has been diminishing, not that newagers care what's going on in academia unless it appears to confirm what they already "intuitively" know, or a newager needs some kind of respectable status for a grant-harvesting operation. Just now I'm about a quarter of the way through Ronald Hutton's

Shamans: Siberian Spirituality and the Western Imagination

and it's very interesting so far.

[Leonard]

I am wondering about the 'appeal' of 'shamanism' also and feel that the term is so broad and generalized that it could mean almost everything and nothing. Some would suggest that it has to do with a feeling of alienation of modern western culture and an attempt to re-connect at some fundamental level with the world.

http://www.hedweb.com/bgcharlton/animism.html

http://www.angelfire.com/journal/cathbodua/Shamanism.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criteria_of_truth

Leonard.

[Barnaby_McEwan]

Lots of Western people feel they have no power over their own lives, that they're insignificant, etc. I think they're going down a dead end if they try to escape those feelings by enacting their fantasies of non-Western people.

The author of that page is expressing a Western idea that is thousands of years old - primitivism. It can be summed up as the dissatisfaction of the civilised with civilisation.

Cultural primitivism maintains that whatever addi-
tions have been made to what is called the “natural???
condition of mankind have been deleterious.

[Ganieda]

I do use the word Shaman, but only as an (over) simplified method of communicating an idea and never as a word of definition.  I don't know about other countries, including the US, but here, in Canada, many healers and medicine people are referred to as Shamans and it is not considered dis-respectful.  It can, in fact, be a term of respect.  I was given a Cree name "Omisimaw Awiyak Kamamahtawisit" which loosely, very loosely, translates to "Sister Shaman" in English.  This, BTW, was not a "spiritual or sacred" naming, it was given as a term of endearment, so it is not disrespectful for me to use it if I wish. 

[Defend the Sacred]

I do use the word Shaman, but only as an (over) simplified method of communicating an idea and never as a word of definition.

http://blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-BIVw1xc1erMo2S9YeNs8nnVh58s158MYhRg-?cq=1&p=136

Warrior, Shaman and Teacher I am.
© *Ganieda*

[outershell]

Eliade was a prominent intellectual cheerleader for Romania's homegrown fascist movement, the Legion of the Archangel Michael. He shared in its responsibility for the murder of hundreds of thousands of Jews, Roma and Sinti people.

Here are a couple of articles dealing with Eliade's fascism:

Thinkers and Liars

The Stone-Age Goddess and the Storm Trooper

Fascism's mythologist Mircea Eliade and the politics of myth

Over the last fifteen years his reputation amongst academics has been diminishing, not that newagers care what's going on in academia unless it appears to confirm what they already "intuitively" know, or a newager needs some kind of respectable status for a grant-harvesting operation. Just now I'm about a quarter of the way through Ronald Hutton's

Shamans: Siberian Spirituality and the Western Imagination

and it's very interesting so far.

yeah, thanks for the links.
I didn't know that about Eliade, i just figured he was a crackpot.