Chapter 8. The Specter of Shamanism

The Sage of Burlington continues: “One of the Enlightenment’s great achievements was to provide a critical perspective on the past, denouncing the taboos and shamanistic trickery that made tribal peoples the victims of unthinking custom as well as the irrationalities that kept them in bondage to hierarchy and class rule, despite [?] its denunciations of Western cant and artificialities.”[374] Mopping up this mess will take me awhile. But briefly: primitive peoples don’t have class rule — according to Bookchin the Younger.[375]

Having credited, or rather discredited, the Enlightenment with inventing primitivism, the Director now credits it with refuting primitivism by denouncing the taboos and tricky shamans holding tribal peoples in bondage. But how would “a critical perspective on the past” bring about these insights? 18^th century Europeans had little interest in and less knowledge of the histories of any tribal peoples except those mentioned in the Bible and the classics.[376] They wouldn’t have been able to learn much even if they wanted to. They were barely beginning to learn how to understand their own histories. Anything resembling what we now call ethnohistory was impossible then. Bookchin implies that the Age of Reason was the first historicist period. In fact it was the last period which was not.

The Enlightened ones posited a universal, invariant human nature. People are always and everywhere the same: only their circumstances are different.[377] The philosophes proceeded much as Bookchin does: “The records of all peoples in all situations had to be ransacked empirically to verify those constant and universal principles of human nature that natural reason declared were self-evident.”[378] The same circumstances always determine the same behavior, according to Hume: “It is universally acknowledged that there is a great uniformity among the actions of men, in all nations and ages, and that human nature remains still the same, in its principles and operations. The same motives always produce the same actions.” A politician in 18^th century Britain or America, for instance, will act the same way as an Athenian or Roman or Florentine politician acted, as reported by Thucydides, Livy or Machiavelli (who, by the way, made this same observation[379]), in the same situation. One constantly comes upon statements like this one by Montesquieu: “Modern history furnishes us with an example of what happened at that time in Rome, and this is well worth noting. For the occasions which produce great changes are different, but since men have had the same passions at all times, the causes are always the same.”[380] So really there was nothing to learn from the primitives. They were merely contemporary confirmatory examples of a stage of society already familiar from Homer and Hesiod and Tacitus and the Old Testament. The Director Emeritus inexplicably denounces this view as “sociobiological [sic] nonsense.”[381]

Bookchin overdoes everything, but his philippic against shamanism attains a new plateau of epileptoid frenzy worthy of a Victorian missionary. Were it not for his demonstrable ignorance of all the literature on shamanism, I might suspect him of having heard of anthropologist George Foster’s characterization of magical healing systems as “personalistic.”[382] Clearly he has no idea that shamans are known in most cultures, or that shamanism obsessed his revered Enlightenment: Diderot, Herder, Mozart and Goethe “each, in his own way, absorbed material from the shamanic discussion that was raging and used what he took to give shape to his own special field of endeavor.”[383]

“Shamanistic trickery” is the crudest kind of soapbox freethought cliché. Some primitive peoples have no shamans to dupe them. Many are not in thrall to supernatural fears; some have an opportunistic, even casual attitude toward the spirit world. Shamans — healers through access to the supernatural — aren’t usually frauds (though there are quacks in any profession): they believe in what they do.[384] And what they do does help. Medical science is taking great interest in their medications.[385] Beyond that, shamans alleviate the suffering of victims of illness by providing an explanation for it. American physicians serve the same shamanistic function, as they are well aware. Indeed, until recently, that was almost all they did which benefited the patient, as pointed out by thinkers as disparate as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Ivan Illich. Psychoanalysis, after all, is secular shamanism.[386] By now, “many anthropological studies have documented the effectiveness of a range of medical systems of tribal, peasant, and other peoples.”[387]

To claim, as some shamans do, that they have flown through the air, experienced incarnation as an animal and so forth, they’d have to be crazy, right? Well, some of them are crazy — by our standards. In some of the many societies more humanistic than ours, psychotics aren’t mocked or feared or warehoused, they are cherished for their gift of altered states of consciousness — and recognized as shamans. Their mystical experiences, although they may be indistinguishable from schizophrenia, are socially valued.[388] The delusional are sincere. To believe the missionary caricature of shamanism — which is little more than disparaging the competition — requires imputing such a level of credulity to primitives that it is amazing they kept the human race going all by themselves for so long. As Robert H. Lowie explains, shamans have often used their magic for personal gain, but “the shaman’s security is often quite illusory,” because of the threat of vindictive relatives, “and in not a few regions the fees paid to a shaman are far from generous.” Bookchin himself has noted how hazardous the role can be,[389] but not how that undercuts his argument.

The Director Emeritus is so apoplectic about shamans that he even accuses David Watson of being one![390] He may suspect that Watson is to blame for his poor health. Or perhaps he is displacing his dissatisfaction with his own Western medical care onto shamans. So ranting, repetitious and rancorous is the ex-Dean’s diatribe, which is over the top even for him, that one suspects a personalistic motive. My research has disclosed a possibility. In 1983, a great Alaskan Eskimo shaman named Tikigaq claimed to have killed Joseph Stalin in March 1953 by malefic magic.[391] (Perhaps this was revenge for the savage persecution of Eskimo shamans in the Soviet Union[392] — anti-shamanism is another prejudice the Director Emeritus still shares with his Stalinist mentors.) At one time I might have attributed Bookchin’s attitude to envy. Now I think he’s worried he might be next.

Bookchin appears to derive his notions of primitive religion from the Tarzan movies. The benighted primitives, he believes, are the manipulated dupes of their shamans (“witch-doctors” would better convey Bookchin’s meaning). There is no indication that Bookchin even knows what a shaman is. A shaman heals by drawing on supernatural power. It is not obvious how such a skill is translatable into political power, in societies without power politics. In any event, some primitive societies have no full-time religious specialists. They are seldom found among foragers. Instead, there are part-time practitioners who derive their subsistence from the same activities as other adults. Many receive little remuneration and are hard put economically.[393]

Access to shamanic power may be widespread, even granting that where there are shamans the old are almost always among them. Among Australian Aborigines, “any adult member of the tribe (including women) can practice some forms of black magic, and this is true whether they are supposed to be sorcerers [ = shamans] or not.” Thus among the Walbiri, almost any man over 30 might be a medicine man.[394] Among one group of !Kung San, half the older adult men and one-third of the women “learn to !kia,” and the San themselves view this as a manifestation of their cherished egalitarianism.[395] Among other San studied in the 1950s, out of 45 men, 32 were practicing healers, 9 were old men retired from healing, and only 4 were without the gift: “It is rare to find a man among the !Kung who is not a medicine man.”[396] The healing power is traditionally shared, not sold, since its activation in one person stimulates its activation in others.[397] Among the Tikopia, in principle anyone can practice magic, and there are no specialists, although certain forms of magic are appropriate to certain social ranks. Among the Yanomamo, a tribal people practicing shifting cultivation, shamanism “is a status or role to which any man can aspire, and in some villages a large fraction of the men are shamans.”[398] In the Zambales province of the Philippines, most shamans are elderly women.[399] Among the Jívaro, most old men are “more or less initiated into the art.” About one in four of the Jívaro men (and a few of the women) are shamans.[400]

To speak of “shamanistic trickery” in such cases is absurd — who are the shamans fooling, each other? Yet the Director Emeritus maintains that, more often than not, shamans were frauds.[401] Nor is shamanism an easy alternative to working. Often would-be shamans, like would-be doctors in our society, undergo an arduous and protracted initiation.[402] And, as noted, often a shaman has to hold down a day job too. A classical anarchist of impeccable credentials, Elie Reclus, wrote in 1891 that the angorak, the Eskimo shaman, absents himself occasionally but usually “takes part in the hunting and fishing expeditions, [and] exercises some craft ... “[403] The shaman is not a priest. Shamanism is a function but not an occupation.

In our society, the fusion of religion with morality, institutionalized by a church, forms an oppressive ideology. Among primitives such as the San, as among the Homeric and even the Classical Greeks, their deities are not clearly associated with moral values of good and evil. As E.B. Tylor put it, they had “theology without morals.”[404] If Bookchin assumes that a major religious activity of primitives is the propitiation of spirits whom they regard with awe and dread, he has again mistaken the Tarzan movies for documentaries. Among the “simplest societies,” prayer — which expresses dependence — “is seldom prominent.”[405] Thus the San do not so much pray to their gods as berate them for any difficulties in their circumstances: “The !Kung say that they scold their gods.”[406] Much more important than prayer is magic, defined as people using words, objects and rituals to obtain supernatural power to further their own ends.[407] The magician does not ask for supernatural power: he takes it. As Paul Radin said with respect to the Winnebagos, although what they do could be called prayer, “there seems to be a purely mechanical relation of cause and effects between the offerings of men and their acceptance by the spirits. The latter are not free to reject them except in theory.”[408]

Bookchin so rarely cites relevant and respectable scholarship that when it looks like he does, strict scrutiny is in order. He cites Paul Radin’s The World of Primitive Man[409] (1953) in support of his notion of shamans as predatory terrorists. The Director Emeritus does not explain why he does not accept the same source, quoted below (Chapter 9),[410] when it rebuts his conception of unthinking, coercive custom. Radin only discusses shamanism in one society, the Yakuts of central California. He discusses the religion of one other people, the Eskimos, in that chapter, but without even mentioning their shamanism, which is curious, since Eskimo shamanism is possibly the most famous of all. Then again, Eskimo shamanism does not support the thesis that shamans intimidate and exploit their fellows. They exercise no authority by virtue of their shamanic roles.[411] Neither do Winnebago shamans, on which Radin was the expert.[412]

The small portion of Radin’s text relied on by Bookchin bases its generalizations on a single society, the Yokuts Indians of central California. This is what Bookchin got out of Radin:

Let me emphasize that Paul Radin (who[m] I used as a source in The Ecology of Freedom) held a very skeptical attitude toward shamans, regarding them as the earliest politicians of aboriginal societies, shysters who manipulated clients for self-serving purposes (which is not to say that a number of them may not have had good intentions [?]). He showed that the shamanic life, far from being a calling, was often well-organized and based on trickery handed down from father to son over generations. Shamans in consolidated tribes commonly formed a social elite, based on fear and reinforced by alliances with other elites, such as chiefs.[413]

Bookchin quotes Radin as saying that alliances between shamans and chiefs are “clearly a form of gangsterism.” And a final quotation: “The dread of the practical consequences of the shaman’s activities hangs over the ordinary individual.”[414] These are the only quotations, and there are no other source references. Except for the quotations, which are merely misleading, every attribution to Radin is false.

First: Radin does not say that shamans are politicians, much less the earliest politicians. Instead he discusses the alliance, in one tribe, between shamans and chiefs. He does not depict these particular shamans as exercising political power: it was for the lack of such power that they allied with chiefs. The fear inspired by the shamans “is not due to any unusual powers that these men possess by virtue of being shamans for, at bottom, they have little, but to the alliance between them and the chief of the tribe.”[415]

Second: Radin does not say that shamans were shysters manipulating their clients. By definition, all shamans cannot be shysters because a shyster is someone who acts unprofessionally. Shamanism is the world’s oldest profession.[416] The standard of practice of a profession is relative to the level of prevailing practice. Nor do shamans manipulate their clients (how? to what end?); at worst they overcharge them. Testimonials to the sincerity of most shamans abound.

Third: Radin does not say that shamanism is not a calling. Obviously it is, in both the religious and everyday senses of the word.[417] Individuals are “called” to shamanism by their dreams.

Fourth: Radin does not say that shamans are well-organized. On the contrary, he says that “all the organizational gifts they possessed went into the elaboration of the relations between them and the chief of the tribe.”[418] Shamanism is not necessarily well-organized: it’s usually not organized at all. Yakuts shamans were sole practitioners who were so far from being organized that they practiced their black magic on each other. In central California where the Yakuts live, according to A.L. Kroeber, “the body of initiated shamans do not form a definite society or association.”[419]

Fifth: Radin does not say that in consolidated tribes, shamans formed a social elite. Their mutual jealousies ruled that out. Radin always speaks of shamans as unconnected individuals. According to another source, “there was no formal organization of shamans.”[420] They linked up, not with each other, but with chiefs on a one-to-one basis. Also, Radin does not refer to “consolidated tribes” because the expression is unknown to anthropology. Only the ex-Director knows what it means.

Sixth: Radin does not even say that shamanic life was based on trickery! He must have thought so, but he did not say so. For purposes of his argument, not Bookchin’s, concerning the alliance of shamans and chiefs, the efficacy of shamanic magic is irrelevant. Had the spells actually worked, the chief/shaman alliance would have been even more fearsome.

Seventh: Radin does not say that shamanic status was hereditary in the agnatic line. He does not address the topic. It so happens that among the Yakuts, it was common for sons to follow their fathers into shamanism, but the call may come to any seeker or even come unsought: “Theoretically, any individual can obtain his gift.”[421] In other societies, such as the San, the Yanamamo and the Jívaro, the gift is widely distributed without regard to kinship.

What a tremendous amount of misinformation Bookchin packs into just three sentences! From his former hero Joseph Stalin, Bookchin learned, as part of what Hannah Arendt called “the totalitarian art of lying,” that a big lie is more likely to go over than a small one.[422] The larger the lie, the harder it is to believe that anybody could say such a thing unless it were true. And it is much more trouble to refute a big lie because there’s so much to it. In saying that he does not lie because of his “moral standards,”[423] Bookchin tops all his other deceits. His standards are set so low you could step on them. Or as Oscar Wilde put it, when a democrat wants to sling mud he doesn’t have to stoop.[424]

Even after correction of the ex-Director’s fabrications, there are a couple of things Radin really did say which call for correction themselves. He did say that “dread” of shamanism “hangs over the ordinary individual.” This should be understood in light of the topic of the chapter it appears in, “The Economic Utilizations of Magic and Religion.” Bookchin, as we saw, stressed the role played by “fear and terror” in aboriginal religion.[425] That is the portrait of “primitive tribes completely dominated, in fact, almost paralyzed by fear and terror,” that Radin’s examples are supposed to refute: “Every ethnologist with any field-experience knows, of course, that no such communities exist.”[426] In other words, the Yakuts are not such a community, contrary to the ex-Director’s presentation of them. Considering the point he was trying to make, Radin made a poor choice of an example. But the sources on which Radin relies do not sustain so dark a picture even of the Yakuts. More important, in more respects than Radin mentioned, Yakuts society is exceptional.

Radin chose the Yakuts as a typical hunter-gatherer society with only one peculiarity: “a fixed unit of exchange,” i.e., shell money.[427] A tribal society with a money economy is very peculiar. An even clearer indication that this was not a typical foraging society was the institution of chieftainship. Or rather, it is typical of one type: the sedentary type. The Yakuts lived in permanent villages, although they spent the summer in camps elsewhere. They stored food, which was abundant, for the winter. In some (not all) foraging societies, sedentariness is associated with incipient political authority and stratification.[428]

Whatever merit Radin’s argument might have for such societies, it has none as applied to the nonsedentary foragers like the San. The presence of a chief marks a decisive break from that way of life. It is such “varyingly developed chiefdoms, intermediate forms that seem clearly to have gradually grown out of egalitarian societies and to have preceded the founding of all of the best-known primitive states.”[429] Bookchin, oblivious to the consequences for his argument, agrees: “The chiefdom of a simple tribal society, for example, was a potential hierarchy, usually an emerging one.”[430]

But if the Yakuts are not typical foragers, they are typical California Indian foragers. Anthropologists have referred to “the exceptional nature of California hunters and gatherers,” and they are well aware of the contrast: “The data presented in such books as Man the Hunter [!] have served to underline the fact that most California societies bear a more striking resemblance to Melanesian chiefdoms than they do to Australian or African bands.”[431] And whether or not primitives are normally affluent, the California Indians were. According to a trapper who encountered them in 1827, they lived in “a country where the creator has scattered a more than ordinary Share of his bounties.”[432]

To be sure, Yakuts chieftainship is about as modest as chieftainship can be. One might say it was incipient. The position was hereditary, but if the community is dissatisfied with a chief, they depose him and choose another chief from his family.[433] “The respected elders of a village exercise a practical control over the chief’s decisions”[434]; he risks his position if he goes against their counsel. The chief’s powers, though real, are few. He decides when various ceremonies will be held (for which he is paid).[435] He is the first to leave for summer camp, although the others do not necessarily follow him right away.[436] He adjudicates disputes which are brought to him. Disputes do not have to be brought to him, but there is an advantage if they are: the loser is forbidden to take private vengeance, as he might otherwise do. The chief is the richest man in the village and he does not hunt.[437] Some of his income he redistributes to the very poor, [438] but on nothing like the scale that prevails in Polynesia.

The basis of the chief’s alliance with the shaman is his judicial power. People know that if a shaman who is under his protection kills someone, the chief will immunize him against retaliation or prosecution. In return, the shaman uses his magic to further the chief’s interests.[439] To take an extreme case, if a rich man refused to join in a fandango, thereby denying the chief his fee, the shaman might make the man sick. He would then drag out the cure in order to collect repeated fees for his housecalls. And then he would split the fee with the chief[440] — who would have thought that fee-splitting is not confined to civilized professionals! It was only this specific example — not shamanism in general, or even Yakuts shamanism in general — which Radin called gangsterism.[441] But to dwell on the worst possibilities distorts the picture of Yakuts shamanism, still more so of shamanism generally.

There were several factors which held all but the boldest and greediest Yakuts shamans in check.

An important one was other shamans. It was not unusual for shamans to kill each other.[442] Also, the alliance between chiefs and shamans, as between gangsters, was never easy. In some cases the chief would authorize or even order the execution of a shaman: “Such killings, however, were not infrequent; and the shaman who lives above suspicion was fortunate.”[443] The friends and family of a real or supposed victim were not necessarily paralyzed by fear and trembling and, as one informant related, they “didn’t always tell the chief” before killing the shaman.[444] According to A.L. Kroeber, for Yakuts shamans, murder was their normal end.[445] Yet even in this unusually, perhaps uniquely corrupt aboriginal situation, people believed that most shamans were not malicious. Withcraft was an ever-present threat, “but this does not mean that an individual lived in a perpetual state of anxiety and dread.”[446] Radin himself concluded that it was not shamanism per se, but politically connected shamanism which was the source of anxiety: “The belief in spirits or, for that matter, in magical rites and formulas becomes of secondary consequence ...” [447] Thus Radin, Bookchin’s sole reliance, refutes him.

We may therefore dismiss as malicious nonsense the ex-Director’s characterization of the shaman as “the incipient State personified.”[448] Bookchin’s position is entirely lacking in logical or empirical support. It is lacking in logic because the supposed ability to kill from afar cannot be a source of political power unless there exists a political authority to protect the shaman against retaliation — and if there is such an authority, he, not the shaman, is the incipient state personified. Nor is there any empirical support for this nightmare of reason. Bookchin’s grandiose speculations about the origins of hierarchy are in contradiction regarding the shaman’s role. In one scenario it is the chiefs and shamans who succeed the elders and precede the young warriors and “big men” on the long march toward statehood. In another the sequence is: big men, warriors, chiefs, nobles, then “incipient, quasi, or partial states” — but no shamans![449] It’s all delirious, pretentious fantasy, nothing more.

If even the Yakuts data utterly fail to depict shamans on the verge of founding a state, it’s highly unlikely there’s a better example lurking somewhere in the literature. There is no historical or ethnographic evidence of any transition to statehood in which shamans played any part. Priests have played such parts, but priests, as Bookchin confirms, are not shamans.[450] In the western United States, societies based on foraging, or mixed foraging and extractive pursuits had shamans; agricultural societies had priests.[451] As usual, increasing social complexity is associated (if not perfectly correlated) with increasing authoritarianism, in religion as in politics. The shamanism shuffle is just another example of Bookchin in all his vulgar viciousness defaming inoffensive people in a callous but clumsy attempt to score points in a petty political squabble, the kind he wasted his life on.