The forms of Central Asian shamanism owe their relative homogeneity both to a commonly shared tradition and the influence of Islam. It is, however, possible to distinguish two distinct tendencies, which correspond to the two ethnic groups that inhabit this region, one Iranian-speaking and the other Turkish-speaking. At the same time, the process of Islamization does not in itself prevent the preservation of certain elements of shamanism pertaining both to the thought and practice of these Muslim peoples, nor to their secondary, non-official religious activities. In addition, certain customs that were developed within Islam itself, such as Sufism and transvestism, are believed by some investigators to have points of contact with shamanism.

In the Himalayan region, and even beyond it, odd behavior, illnesses, and especially sudden or accidental deaths, are attributed to the actions of the dead who have come back to torment the living.

Among the Limbu tribesmen of eastern Nepal, these attacks take many different forms. The symptoms have very little in common from illness to illness. The eyes of infants roll back into their heads; they refuse to take the breast and die after only several months of life (they are called sa-sik). Women – as well as men – remain infertile, and are subject to bouts of confusion and temporary madness. Pregnancies often come to bad endings: there are spontaneous abortions, death in childbirth (sugup), an inability to produce milk. Men complain of stomach aches, tremendous headaches, vertigo, and various other troubles: they too are stricken with temporary madness, with loss of consciousness, and with inexplicable terrors that lead to fatal accidents or that even drive the victim, in a fit of rage, to murder or suicide (sogha). People of both sexes and all ages are affected. At home the family chickens often die suddenly and pigs choke to death.

The characteristic features of Siberia - its vast, sparsely settled expanses, its small population and harsh climate - apply particularly to the region inhabited by the Nganasan people, the most northerly of Eurasia. Their language belongs to the Samoyed branch of the Uralian linguistic group. They live in isolation and in precarious living conditions on the Taimyr archipelago, dispersed over an immense territory (200,000 square kilometers) that they have settled extremely sparsely (the entire population seems to have hardly ever exceeded one thousand). This circumstance, which explains their relative social and economic stagnation, has also marked Nganasan culture, favoring the retention of specifically Siberian elements, notably the role of shamanism.

This paper will describe the rite for the exorcism of toch'aebi and examine its symbolic significance in the wider social reality of Cheju shamanism. Toch'aebi is a stranger deity who visits Cheju randomly and tries to get on good terms with the people. However, this deity afflicts people, particularly women, wearing down their vitality and causing a kind of “madness” (turida). The exorcism ritual of toch'aebi requires a sacrificial feast of roast pig and several days of dancing by the possessed. For this reason, the exorcism ritual is called a dancing rite, or ch'unun kut. It is supposedly toch'aebi himself who has the desire to dance. Shaman's songs (seouje sori) are used to induce the toch'aebi, who is hiding in the patient's body, to dance and reveal his identity. The trance dance and singing are directed toward a dialogical construction of the demonic reality, which entails a romantic entanglement of toch'aebi and the possessed. By translating a history of personal suffering into the idiom of love, the shaman's songs develop a particular cultural logic of cure. Through an analysis of curing song texts, along with various modes of performance such as dance and comic play, this paper explores the transformative process in which a particular cultural logic of illness and cure are produced and enacted to reintegrate the patient into the social world. In practice, the analysis addresses the articulation of a personal case of madness that afflicted Sunho, a twenty-one year old female factory worker, whose social values and understanding are reflective of contemporary Korea.

Most of the images evoked by the term shamanism are derived from the soul's field of experience. These images run the gamut of possibilities, from a disconcerting exoticism to the most intimate familiarity. Sometimes the shaman's role is limited to that of pathetic hero, struggling in solitude against hostile nature; sometimes he becomes the rudimentary model of the mystic or even of the psychiatrist of contemporary societies. These images, however, without being completely false, wrongly reduce the shamanic phenomenon to the shaman's personality and limit his field of action to the individual psyche. This limitation hardly does justice to the realities of shamanistic societies. What is missing in the shaman-centered view is the collective's slumbering velleity of itself entering into shamanic experience. Each cure becomes an occasion for collective renewal and joy. The shaman's activities in séance, it is believed, are an expression of the direct contact he has established with the spirits and of his power over them; his duties are the realization of a ritual act carried out at the behest of the community.

Consecutive waves of paleolithic migrants crossing the Bering land bridge from Siberia to North America between 80,000 and 7,000 b.c. brought with them the shamanic way of harnessing supernatural powers. This way prevailed until the White intrusion 400 years ago, into the living space of the aboriginal peoples of North America. Wherever European political, religious, and economic dominance was established, shamanic institutions became the focus of negative attention. The shamanic practitioner was variously depicted by governmental and ecclesiastic authorities as a charlatan and imposter or a purveyor of evil influence. Some well-known ethnological and medico-psychological experts have until very recently portrayed the shaman as a mentally deranged person whose “primitive” culture permits the acting-out of psychopathology in a prestigious role, a eurocentric and positivistic fallacy rooted in Western misinterpretations of learned behavior manifested during shamanic rituals involving altered states of consciousness. Legal measures to suppress shamanic ceremonials were taken in the United States, especially in the aftermath of the Ghost Dance. This shaman-inspired movement, originating in the Prophet Dance of the Pacific Northwest (Spier 1935), sent waves of hectic sacro-nativistic ceremonial activity through many Amerindian tribes, and finally culminated in the Sioux uprising of 1890 which ended in the tragedy of Wounded Knee (cf. Mooney 1896).

The penetration of the Amazon region by the great religious movements of Europe and Africa began with the first phases of colonial domination, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The initial influence to be felt was Iberian Catholicism (the religion of the conquerors), which spread along the rivers as missions sprang up here and there. This period of missionary activity continued for over a century, bringing with it a host of consequences, most notably waves of epidemics that killed millions of natives. Nevertheless, an initial “syncretic alliance” was forged in the missions between shamanism and Catholicism.

From another quarter came legions of black slaves, exiled to the New World during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to replace the decimated native workforce; with them they brought their own religions and religious practices, which they transplanted, in a more or less transformed state, to all corners of the South American continent. The resulting Afro-American religions were practiced secretly by broad masses and in this way were fused with Amerindian religions (the case of pagelano in Brazil) and with “official” forms of Catholicism (tcmbanda and candomblé, among others).

Does Seoul, a city of eight million inhabitants, one of the planet's ten megalopolises, still have shamans? Can there be a place for shamanism in a country like South Korea, which is striving to be modern? Can shamanism survive at all in a country where the successes of Christianity have been celebrated by Westerners? Can it adapt itself to religious pluralism? What is shamanism's role in the urban setting? How does the fast pace of urban life affect its rituals? How is shamanism presented in the mass media? Is it beginning to emerge from the centuries-long ostracism imposed on it by official ideologies?

These questions will be explored in this article on the basis of data gathered on-site in the city of Seoul between the years 1982 and 1991. We will attempt not only to highlight several important facts but to grasp the overall process of transformation that the city is imposing on shamans and shamanism.

In our time “spirits” have been reduced to mythical beings often objectified in the form of masks.

The mask-figure of Toornarsuk, this cunning and mischievous Eskimo shamanistic spirit-figure’, seems to offer us both a mirror image of the various ways shamanism has been observed and a reflection of the complex picture shamanism presents to contemporary researchers. Shamanism, like Toornarsuk, seems both to mimic and to make sport of people and their moral and social orders. This is why shamanism, for a long period of time now, has constituted a kind of counterculture for minority communities.

The meaning of the word shaman (of Tungus origin) has become obscured by numerous, increasingly different interpretations. The term has also been applied to practitioners who live outside Siberia, and are actually called by different names in their respective countries: bomoh in Malaysia, ma khi in Thailand, and tany-di in Singapore.

Because I did not want to rely on secondary sources, I went to Southeast Asia to find contemporary shamans. Having started my research in 1960 I was able to witness, over a thirty-one year period (during visits lasting from several months to a year), the continuation of shamanic traditions among different groups living in multiethnic and multi-religious societies. What struck me most was the emergence of new shamans in urban centers like Singapore and Bangkok.

As Kennedy has shown (1973: 1149), the question of whether the shaman is a disturbed individual (neurotic, psychotic, or schizophrenic) or is on the contrary a gifted, balanced and perfectly well-adjusted person, constitutes one of the oldest of all anthropological debates. Indeed R. Hamayon and L. Delaby (1977: 8) have pointed out that “the tendency to attribute a pathological source to shamanism, and to reduce its manifestations to the manipulation of epileptic and psychotic episodes” appeared simultaneously with the publication of the first studies on the subject, in the second half of the nineteenth century. Slavic authors in particular, most notably Bogoras (1910) and Czaplicka (1914), were anxious to establish a connection between shamanism and “Arctic hysteria.” Ohlmarks (1939), developing this theory, distinguished between Arctic and sub-Arctic shamanism in order to identify the degree of psychopathology in each shaman. Struck by the frequency of these types of phenomena in the Arctic regions, the authors believed that they had discovered their cause in race, heredity, and climate.

By posing the question of whether it is more relevant to investigate the psychopathology of the shaman or the effects of shamanism on its followers, Philippe Mitrani's article has the merit of going to the heart of a controversy that has divided analysts of shamanism.

There are as many authors as there are forms of shamanism, and as many points of view on the subject as there are authors. The fact that there is no consensus on the definition of the term shamanism is probably neither accidental nor much of a disadvantage. Is not a certain amount of vagueness appropriate to a phenomenon marked by so much diversity and vitality? For that reason, would it not be more profitable to focus the investigation of the term on the ultimate limits of its applicability? Primitive, shamanism continues to be reborn. Rooted in nature, it has blossomed in great industrial cities. Animistic, it has enriched the popular foundation of the great religions without modeling its own practices on them. Instead, shamanism has sometimes manifested itself in grand recurring rituals that celebrate ethnic identity; at other times, it has been an instrument used by private individuals to channel the course of events in a direction favorable to them or, more often, to make sure that their course is not unfavorable. To someone suffering from a psychic burden, shamanism can represent a priceless instrument that will offer relief, or help in being reassimilated into the community. For the expert practitioner, shamanism can be a means to personal advancement. Even when scorned by all and, in some cases, combated, shamanism has found a way to adapt itself everywhere.