Shamanism, Week 2

I wish that I would have read Walsh's text prior to reading that of Hughes. I learned some things from Walsh that helped me to better understand what was in Hughes's text, but I guess that's okay!

I find the whole idea of shamanism interesting, and hard to grasp. Hughes cites work by Eliade, who shows that shamanism is basically as old as time, and is widespread throughout all of humanity. Walsh says that while shamanism is practiced far and wide, it is most prevalent amongst hunter-gatherers, with little formal social or political organization. It seems that they agree on this, and that makes sense to me. In societies where there is little security in day-to-day life, people don't have time to devote to much else aside from survival. It's the perfect environment for a sort of "jack of all trades" to spring up. No matter what ails you, he's got the cure! Few would question his methods or the results, I would assume. As socity progressed, though, and civilizations developed, people had leisure time, and could themselves investigate such things. As Walsh said, "Though shamans as such largely disappear from complex societies, most of their roles and skills are retained by various speciailists. However, there is one exception: journeying." (p.19) We now have doctors, priests, mediums and yes, even witches (to an extent). Journeying, though..........that is one that no one could figure out, I'd say, which is why (perhaps) it died out. Until the prominence of hallucinogens, in the more recent centuries. Now people can trip and "journey" to another state. They can go places and experience things in a hallucinogenic state. I'm not saying this is new, but that it is much more popular. I don't think that we can necessarily calls people doing this "shamans". I also don't know that I would ever place such a label on John Lennon, Bob Dylan or any other rock star. Just because they achieved some level of creativity, doesn't grant them such a title, in my book. At the same time, I think that the idea of going to a workshop for 4 or 8 hours isn't going to allow one to be a shaman. That seems like a total slap in the face to the "true" shamans of old. They're turning in their grave for sure!!! One of them should appear to one of the workshop goers in one of their "trances" and tell them what's what!!!

All of that aside, there were a few really interesting things within both texts that I found myself highlighting:

1. A quote by Joseph Beuys (Hughes, p 22): "The concept of sculpting can be extended to the invisible materials used by everyone: thinking forms....spoken forms....social sculpture.....Sculpture is an evolutionary process, everyone is an artist."

How cool is that? I'm a sculptor. hehehe

2. The comparison by Hughes of the shaman to the circus.

3. Hughes states that, "A degree of possession is implicit in the creative act, however reasonable....To become creative, the human mind needs to be touched by a certin Otherness...." This definitely is an interesting point, one which I will have to visit in my definition paper, I think.