The Shamanistic Journey and Anthropological Travels

Abstract

This paper offers two experienced instances of the anthropologist's engagement in local curing sequences as examples of the agreement of identities between anthropologist and shaman. This similitude of culturally disparate roles is rooted, we believe, in the power generally derived from the foreign and apart. It also comes from the nature of shamanism as the world's only universal "specialty", a congery of cures, techniques, packaged knowledge. We conclude that the identification of the anthropologist as shaman is not necessarily a misidentification. In their travels both define and cross boundaries wielding a power that is essentially relational and communicational: derived from a manipulation of otherness, and from the use of words as things.