trance, initiation, and psychotherapy in Tamang shamanism

Abstract

The “calling” that inflicts the neophyte Tamang shaman is a “creative illness” reflecting an endogenous process that has the structure and function of a rite of passage. Shamanic apprenticeship includes the deliberate induction and mastery of trance states that originally afflicted the shaman. Mastery is equivalent to a psychotherapy, and Tamang initiation involves techniques that are also found in its Western and Eastern (yoga) counterparts. However, it is distinct from both in its social and psychological goals. [shamanism, altered states of consciousness, psychotherapy, religious experience, symbolism]

An Excess of Meaning: Conceptual Over-Interpretation in Confabulation and Schizophrenia

“…Yet its implications are also cultural, for I have suggested throughout that the activity of the embodied brain is not separable from its cultural milieu. Much work has already been done on the ways different understandings of psychosis in pre-industrial societies affect integration and recovery (e.g., Peters 1982). But the more interesting questions, to my mind, arise from the fragmenting shared meta-narrative of our post-industrial society, and particularly the increasing influence of conspiracy theories in the digital age (which themselves spread through the dopamine-stimulating networks of the web and social media).…”

Art and Shamanism: From Cave Painting to the White Cube

“…There is a long history of reading shamans as either psychotics (Czaplicka 1914;Layard 1930;Kroeber 1940;Devereux 1961;Silverman 1967) or psychotherapists (e.g., Murphy 1964;Jilek 1971;Calestro 1972;Peters 1982;Downton 1989;Groesbeck 1989) in medical anthropology, and these too have been absorbed into thinking on artists as shamans, for example Michael Levy's proposal in Shamanism and the Modern Artist: Technicians of Ecstasy that 'the shaman gets relief from his neurotic condition . .…”

Art and Spirit: The Artistic Brain, the Navajo Concept of Hozho, and Kandinsky’s “Inner Necessity ”

“…For examples of ideational cultures, see Tonkinson (1978) and Poirier (1990) on the Australian Aborigines, Guedon (1984) on the Tsimshian in northwestern Canada, Laderman (1991) on Malay shamanism, and Peters (1982) on Tamang shamanism.…”