Hey readers—apologies for my lack of comment responses and somewhat erratic content recently. I had a battery of nasty side effects from a new medication that laid me flat on my back and forced me to just put old material out the door. Today's post will be a little different than usual—it's a journal article I recently submitted. My apologies if the academic style is distasteful. Do keep commenting! I am no longer puking, so I will now be able to respond, and will proceed with writing less stolid pieces than what follows. Nonetheless, if you enjoy my habitual subject matter, you will likely get a kick out of this.
“It Certainly Feels Like an Initiation”
Modernization, Mental Illness, the Artistic Temperament and the Shaman’s Career
Specialization
is the sire of efficiency, and in an age where GDP growth is the reigning
metric of national success and breakneck industrialization the surest guarantee
of national survival, specialization becomes the most imperative of social
processes. In the West, most people are introduced to the concept of social specialization
in a high school or undergraduate history course claiming to recite the
cosmogony of Western Civilization. These recitations make specialization a key
player in the foundation genealogy of settled urban-agricultural societies.
According to its most popular pedigree, Specialization, the child of Sedentism and
Agriculture, leveraged the new caloric surplus to provide a growing number of
people with the leisure to refine their skills in crafts that did not contribute
directly to the food supply: metallurgy, architecture, and writing—what the earliest
modernizers referred to as the “arts and sciences”.
Empirically
speaking, this pedigree is dubious, since non-sedentary and non-agricultural
societies—in their religious practice, their manufacturing, and every other
form of expertise—are as likely to be characterized by a high degree of
specialization as are their sedentary and agricultural counterparts. Urban and
agricultural civilization does not possess any monopoly on the “arts and
sciences”, nor on “cultural achievement” in the sense in which that term is
commonly deployed by museums—which privilege the textual and monumental deposits
of urban sedentism at the expense of the oral and portable media characteristic
of less settled peoples. Moreover, contrary to the impression that Western Civ
classes frequently leave, the history of urban-agricultural sedentism itself has
not been marked by an uninterrupted movement towards greater and greater
specialization; the gains that specialization offers in efficiency and
complexity come at a cost in reliability and adaptability, and specialization
has gone through periods of systole and diastole corresponding with the geopolitical
and economic cycles of expansion and contraction, unification and
fragmentation, that have marked all pre-modern agricultural societies.
Of course the empirical realities are largely
irrelevant, since the role that specialization has to play in the cosmogony of
Western Civilization is etiological, not empirical: it underpins the narrative
of societal modernization, economic and technological development, and
consequent moral progress that structures Western Modernity. According to this
narrative, the upward arc of history demands an eternal exponentialization in
societal specialization and social disaggregation in order to increase
efficiency and expand the stock of expertise; this beneficent vector in the
measure and means of prosperity is what constitutes Progress. Specialization is now part of the discourse
of Modernity, a discourse generated by the historical experience of five
hundred years of uninterrupted technological and economic expansion and
governed by the expectation that this expansion will remain uninterrupted.
The great
sociologist Herbert Spencer, in one of the foundational texts of the modern
discipline, First Principles of
Sociology—published in 1862—identified the process whereby social,
economic, and spiritual functions formerly concentrated in a single personality
or social role dis-aggregate into the domains of separate institutions and
specialists as the process of “differentiation”, and confidently identified it with
a benevolent teleology for biological evolution.
On passing to humanity, as
socially embodied, the general law is richly exemplified. The development of
literature, science, architecture, the drama and dress, all alike show that
from the remotest past an essential trait of evolution has been the
transformation of the homogenous into the heterogenous. Hence, as we now
understand it, evolution is definable as a change from an incoherent homogeneity
to a coherent heterogeneity…[1]
Within this framework, the
“incoherent homogeneity” that characterizes the early states of evolution is exemplified
in “savage” societies where omnicompetent political and religious specialists—“chiefs”
and “shamans”—perform functions that a more evolved and “coherent” society
would differentiate between executives, judges, lawyers, doctors, artists, scientists
etc.—a state of affairs leading to incoherence, inefficiency, and superstition.
Spencer’s theory was nicely suited to cradle the narrative of Britain’s
civilizing mission and the imperial policy that issued from it; its direct
descendants continue to cradle the American narrative of modernization and
development, and the Bretton Woods and Washington Consensus systems that have
issued from this narrative. Then and now, Modernity enshrines the passage from
“incoherent homogeneity” to “coherent heterogeneity” as a central plank of its “civilizing
mission”.
Thus
it is not surprising that many anti-modern and post-modern movements have
enshrined an inverse value as the central plank in their own agendas. In
academia this sentiment manifests either in a nostalgic call to rediscover the
liberal arts and resurrect the “well-rounded man” or in confident prophecies
that “interdisciplinarity” is the shape of things to come. However in this
paper I am more concerned to highlight a characteristic value present in the
loose aggregation of groups that has come to be known as the New Age movement.
Since its emergence in the counterculture ferment of the late sixties and early
seventies, the New Age movement has been characterized by a reverence for
“integration”, “gestalt”, and “holism”—a
popular historian of the movement identifies it with the generalized desire for
“a holistic worldview”[2].
This desire is usually
accompanied by a strong distaste for the analytic mania so characteristic of
Modernity. There is a vague but powerful conviction that the multiplication of
conceptual distinctions and professional specializations has produced
fragmentation and incoherence rather than efficiency and greater coherence. New
Age critiques of modern medicine often center on its “disaggregation” of
psychic and physical wellness into the domains of narrowly focused specialists,
who ignore the mind-body connection and favor complex invasive procedures and
synthetic drugs at the expense of lifestyle changes like dieting and spiritual
therapies. The New Age movement prides itself on its capacity to re-appreciate
connections and organic unities that no longer seem apparent, to “re-integrate”
things that have been subjected to “dis-integration” in the course of the
modernizing process. In pursuit of this goal, New Age groups generally look to
“indigenous”, “tribal”, or “pre-modern” societies for inspiration, a process
perfectly exemplified by the wild success of Michael Harner’s program of Core
Shamanism, which seeks to distil the “essence” of shamanism—as a global and
cross-cultural religious phenomenon—into a simple set of techniques available
to all Western users, a sort of shamanic egalitarianism.
I am not
concerned in this paper to comment on the validity of New Age appropriations of
indigenous religious techniques, nor on the “authenticity” of Core Shamanism
and its numerous cousins, descendants, and relatives by marriage. But I do
write from a perspective that, while holding the heterogeneous positive claims of the New Age movement in
suspension, is willing to admit sympathy with many of its negative criticisms. In light of this sympathy, my
aim is to provide a case study in the sociological analysis of differentiation
in hopes of providing a springboard to a more careful reflection on the merits
and demerits of this characteristic process of Modernity. Whether one
sympathizes with Herbert Spencer or with Michael Harner, we can all benefit
from a more careful evaluation of the phenomenon they contrastingly valorize.
The case study
for my analysis is the shaman. I will employ the global and inclusive understanding
of shamanism initially advanced by I.M. Lewis and more recently defended by James
Cox. According to this sociological
definition of shamanism, any recognized specialist who consciously channels or
masters the beings of a spirit world in the interests of a community may be
regarded as a shaman. The body of my argument deploys I.M. Lewis’ episodic
theory of the shaman’s career as a means to demonstrate how states that are
dynamic and processive in the shaman’s career have, in the modern West, been
disaggregated into static social roles: the therapist, the mental patient, and
the artist. Ultimately, I hope to demonstrate that the phenomena a pre-modern
shaman’s community is likely to regard as temporary states will be regarded in
the modern West as distinct categories circumscribing permanent social roles.
The
theory of the shaman’s career I am employing here was initially advanced by the
British sociologist I.M. Lewis in his 1986 work Religion in Context. Lewis was reacting to a set of hypotheses on
spirit possession that emanated from the structural functionalist tradition of
British social anthropology. These theories purported to link elaborate typologies
of voluntary and involuntary possession with the structural conditions of
particular peoples. Lewis highlights an attempt by Mary Douglas to map the
attitudes of a set of Nilotic tribes towards spirit possession on the basis of
a rather vaguely defined set of structural criteria centering around the
relative influence of “group and grid” and the “hold” they exercise on various
societies—apparently a looser “hold” is to be associated with more relaxed
attitudes towards spirit possession[3].
Lewis regarded any
attempt to taxonomize entire societies on the basis of their supposedly monolithic
attitudes towards spirit possession as a misguided exercise, a Gordian knot he
proceeded to slash with his theory of the shaman’s career. According to Lewis, the full spectrum of
positive and negative attitudes towards spirit possession may be found in
almost any society where spirit possession occurs. The only clear
generalization that can be drawn is
one that applies to all cultures in which the “shamanic” phenomenon
occurs: uncontrolled and involuntary
possession is always to be feared, but voluntary and controlled possession/active
mastery over the spirits may be applied to serve the interests of the community,
and is thus regarded in a positive light. Most significantly, the shaman or
medium must proceed through all of
these states in the course of his or her career.
“…an
initial traumatic experience or illness interpreted as possession is typically
the passport which, through progressive involvement with spirits, leads to the
assumption of the role that Raymond Firth and others have identified as that of
the medium, and which in its turn may lead to the more active and managerial
role of the shaman—master (or mistress) of spirits."[4]
Bracketing the variety present in
the societies where shamanism is practiced, Lewis’ heuristic typology of the
shaman’s career is a threefold progression from the role of patient to the role
of healer: first, involuntary and uncontrolled possession marks a candidate for
initiation; second, personal confrontations with the afflicting spirits and the
tutelage of a shaman render the initiate capable of a semi-controlled “domesticated”
or “accommodated” possession; third, the initiate achieves the ability to
undergo controlled and voluntary possession—or achieves full mastery over the inhabitants
of the spirit world—and actively deploys this ability in the interests of the
community in the context of a public séance. Lewis also makes the key point
that at any stage in this progression, the shamanic candidate may choose to
undergo exorcism—usually conducted by a master shaman—and once her affliction
has passed, return to normality without any crippling or permanent effects to
her social identity[5].
This simple but
elegant theory defends an etic and global use of the term “shamanism” by
evaluating the phenomenon sociologically, in terms of the shaman’s social category
and community function, thereby bypassing the tangled web of symbolic,
spiritual, and phenomenological concerns that have entangled such eminent
theorists as Mircea Eliade.[6]
This sociological definition has recently been defended by James L. Cox on the
basis of his study of African ancestor possession cults. The conclusion of his
article “Possession as an African Form of Shamanism” maintains Lewis’ emphasis
on the shaman’s community function.
Seen in the larger light of a
‘career’ or a process, the spirit medium, as an indispensable functionary in
community settings, surely qualifies as a shaman in the strict sense of the
word. From the initial stages, which indeed are characterized by involuntary
possession, the medium develops into an expert who employs possession reliably
and predictably on behalf of the community. In this sense, shamanism, even when
defined narrowly as ‘mastery of spirits’, can be considered rightly as a
universal category applicable equally in Africa as in Siberia and other
northern regions. [7]
Cox’s sociological definition of
shamanism is what allows me to speak of the shaman as a spiritual functionary
common to an enormous range of pre-modern societies. Lewis’ heuristic for
understanding a cross-cultural “shaman’s career” is what allows me to highlight
the phenomenon of differentiation that has taken place in the course of the
modernizing process by identifying the three processive states of the shaman’s
career with three reified social categories in the modern West: the therapist,
the mental patient, and the artist.
In my analysis
of the Western social roles corresponding to the states in the shaman’s career,
I have found it useful to employ another sociological construct, one utilized by
Alisdair MacIntyre in his work After
Virtue. This is the concept of the “character”. MacIntyre defines the
“character” as:
… an object of regard by the
members of the culture generally or by some significant segment of them. He
furnishes them with a cultural and moral ideal. Hence the demand is that in
this type of case role and personality be fused. Social type and psychological
type are required to coincide. The character morally legitimates a mode of
social existence.[8]
The “character” is thus a figure
who bears the burden of re-affirming—through her community function and through her personality—some of the
central assumptions of a society. The relevance for the shaman’s community
function is obvious: the shaman demonstrates her suitability for this social
role by virtue of an “abnormal” manifestation of personality: an initial and
involuntary possession by the spirits. Intriguingly, the token that MacIntyre
selects to exemplify his type is the modern character whose primary function is
the exorcism of spirits and the normalization of abnormal personalities: the
therapist.[9]
But
how are we meant to compare the therapist or psychologist, whose role is to
master and mediate intra-mental states, with the shaman, whose characteristic
functions also include healing, divination, and the control of natural
phenomena, efforts that aim to achieve balance in physical, extra-mental states?[10]
Our problem lies in another effect of the process of differentiation—the modern
boundary between intra-mental and extra-mental reality. Charles Taylor provides
a brilliant articulation of the distinction between an “enchanted” pre-modern
world, where extra-mental objects are imbued with causal power as well as
psychic influence over human mental states by virtue of the meanings inherent
in them, and our “disenchanted” modern world, where meanings are purely
intra-mental. In his recent book A
Secular Age Taylor explains the understanding that prevailed in medieval
Europe, a Europe where:
Charged objects have causal power
in virtue of their intrinsic meanings. Indeed, the absence of boundary can be
put in a more thoroughgoing way; for even the distinction that I as a typical
modern have been using as an expository device, that between the two powers of
charged objects, influence and causal power; even this falls afoul of the
enchanted world. Not that the distinction could not be made in that world for
it was, as we shall see; but that it didn’t necessarily correspond to two types
of event which were really, as against analytically, distinct. That is, the
same force that healed you could also make you a better, ore more holy person;
and that in one act, so to speak. For the two disabilities were often seen as
not really distinct.[11]
The characteristically shamanic
diagnosis of psychological and physical
ailment as “soul-loss” illustrates the accuracy of this description in the
pre-modern context where the shaman operates. The Western distinction between
intra-mental and extra-mental reality does not hold here. As an African sangoma replied when his interviewer
remarked that attributing mental disturbance to spirits sounded rather like an
invalid “externalization”:
In traditional cultures, that
distinction is not there. Everything is a part of me. Everything is both
internal and external… A therapist may take you back into childhood and ask you
to put your inner child of two years old on a chair and go into a process of
talking to the inner child. So there is also a process of ‘externalization’ taking
place in that we need to ‘objectify’ things in order to interact with an issue.[12]
Thus the shaman may be said to
operate as both a psychologist and as a natural scientist, bringing balance to
intra-mental and extra-mental reality simultaneously on behalf of the
community.
In
the modern West however, it is the therapist, not the natural scientist, who
has most directly assumed the mantle attained in the final stage of the
shaman’s career. The therapist is the “master of spirits”, the mediator between
the human community and the mysterious, volatile, forces of the unconscious.
Nature may have been disenchanted—regularized and bound by predictable
mathematical constants—but the human subject has developed chaotic and morally
ambiguous psychic depths, depths that mirror the dangerous spirit world a
shaman is expected to master. Therapists, psychologists and psychiatrists are
expected to bring order to an invisible and explosive realm in their dealings
with these “abnormal personalities” diagnosed with depression, bipolar disorder
or schizophrenia. Armed with the mysterious and privileged gnosis provided by
university education and professional certification, the therapist applies a
diagnosis to the chaotic behavioral eruptions of the mentally ill
patient—prescribing a combination of psychotropic drugs to bring the mind back
into chemical “balance”. One is reminded of Mircea Eliade’s famous
characterization of the shaman as “the great specialist in the human soul; he
alone ‘sees’ it, for he knows its ‘form’ and its destiny.”[13]
The
character of the therapist can easily be mapped onto the five part definition
of the Tungus shaman found in the work of the great Russian ethnographer
Shirokogoroff: “1. The shaman [therapist], is the master of spirits [human
psyche], 2. He has a group of mastered spirits [specialized knowledge of a
particular set of mental diseases and disorders], 3. There is a complex of
methods and paraphernalia recognized and transmitted [psychological theories, therapeutic
techniques, psychotropic drugs], 4. There is a theoretical justification of the
practice [the existence of dangerous chemical imbalances that lead to mental
disease and disorder], 5. The shamans assume a special social position [no
translation necessary].”[14]
Thus
we can recognize in the character of the therapist the sociological equivalent
of the final stage of the shaman’s career: mastery over the spirits for the
benefit of the human community. There is of course, one key difference. The
therapist, unlike the shaman, has never endured a state of involuntary
possession, nor has he passed through an initiatory struggle to attain mastery
over his spirits. That is to say, the therapist has not himself (for the most
part) experienced mental illness. He has not, through a process of struggle,
turned the powerful forces unleashed by that illness to the benefit of the
human community, nor does he remain potentially vulnerable to those forces. His
position in relation to his patients, and the community he serves, is static.
Likewise
for his counterpart “character” in modern society: the mental patient. Just as
the shamanic candidate is afflicted by spirits that may cause her to transgress
social boundaries and violate behavioral norms, the mental patient is afflicted
by chemical imbalances that bring her into conflict with societal expectations.
But unlike the shamanic candidate, the modern patient’s affliction is seen
exclusively as a disability, with no positive value: it is simply a crippling
deviation from normality. Above all, the modern patient is no longer seen as a useful,
“productive” or “functioning” member of society, a social attitude vividly
demonstrated by our obsessive attempts to tally the net losses in economic
productivity caused by mental illness ($193.2 billion in America, according to
the most recent study).[15]
But
whereas the shamanic candidate has the option, at any stage in their career, of
either exorcism and a cure, or further progress towards the socially validated
vocation of the “master of spirits”, the modern mental patient remains locked
into a static social role. The shamanic candidate is in a temporary state of
liminality, the mental patient is in a permanent state of marginality. The
effects of this distinction have been vividly illustrated by a series of recent
studies, admirably summarized by the American journalist Ethan Watters in his
exploration of the “Americanization of Mental Illness.” Watters points out that
even as Western mental health professionals have been busily disseminating the
bio-medical model of mental illness in the belief that it will promote an
enlightened attitude towards the mentally ill and reduce social stigma, study
after study has demonstrated that the bio-medical narrative of disorders like
schizophrenia actually leads to greater stigma and an increased desire for social
distance.[16]
In
fact, in traditional societies where spirit-possession beliefs still hold sway,
those who would be diagnosed as schizophrenics in the West display a recovery
rate up to two thirds higher than their Western counterparts. Citing anthropological
fieldwork from Zanzibar, Watters highlights the key difference: “Since the
illness was seen as the work of outside forces, it was understood as an
affliction for the sufferer but not as an identity.”[17]
The essential contrast is between temporary liminality and permanent
marginality. The shamanic candidate is necessarily separated from the community,
but only for a time. The shamanic initiate may suffer intensely, but this
suffering occurs in the context of either exorcism or further progress towards
a socially validated role. But the modern mental patient, who bears the burden
of a diagnosis, is a permanently marginal figure. Modernization,
differentiation, and the consequent crystallization of processive states in the
shaman’s career into the fixed and static “characters” of the therapist and the
mental patient, would seem to have their costs.
A concept that
arose in the discussion above may help to demonstrate that the therapist and
the patient are not the only modern “characters” that can be assimilated to
episodic states in the shaman’s career. The concept of “liminality”—commonly
employed in ritual studies to denote a situation or an individual whose social
status is held in suspension, pending the realization of an as yet unrealized
potentiality—draws our attention to a third “character” in the modern West, the
artist. The ritual theorist Victor Turner, in his article “Variations on a
Theme of Liminality,” has analyzed how formerly “liminal” events and phenomena
in tribal society have migrated into the realm of leisure and entertainment in
the modern West, a realm that Turner names the “liminoid”.
We may say that liminal phenomena tend to be collective,
concerned with calendrical, meteorological, biological, or social-structural
cycles and rhythms, or with crises in social processes whether these result
from internal adjustments, external adaptations, or unexpected disasters… Thus
they appear at what may perhaps be called natural breaks in the flow of natural
or sociocultural processes. Liminoid phenomena
on the other hand, may be collective… and when they are so, often directly
derived from tribal liminal antecedents, but are characteristically produced
and consumed by known named individuals.[18]
This “known named individual” who
provides society with “liminoid occasions,” in which society is allowed to “play”
with cultural norms and forms—to reflect, re-evaluate, rejuvenate—is embodied
in the modern “character” of the artist. The artist, through paintings
displayed in museums, movie performances, or public concerts, allows the
community to explore the “psychic depths” that have their analogue in the
pre-modern spirit world. Intriguingly, the artist, in the process of
assimilating some of these shamanic functions, has come to be identified with
the middle stage of the shamanic career.
The
late Gregor T. Goethals, in her work The
Electronic Golden Calf, has tracked the development in the 20th century
of a conception of the artist as a heroic seer or visionary, who suffers
mightily while confronting mankind’s psychic or spiritual depths. She quotes
the abstract expressionist Mark Rothko’s declaration: “To us art is an
adventure into an unknown world which can be explored only by those willing to
take risks.”[19]
It would be inappropriate to identify the Artist with the “mastery” of spirits
characteristic of the culmination of the shaman’s career. Rather, the artist
seems to occupy in perpetua the state
of the shamanic initiate, struggling mightily with the forces of the spirit world:
domesticated, accommodated, but never mastered. The oft-repeated cliché of the
“tortured artist” perfectly expresses this permanently liminal (or liminoid)
state.
Moreover,
this has become a cultural expectation of
the “character” of the artist. The American band Cursive passed sardonic
comment on this expectation in their song “Art is Hard”, expressing the dilemma
of perpetually maintaining a “tortured” state:
First you
don’t, you don’t succeed/
You gotta
recreate your misery/
Cause we
all know art is hard/
Young
artists have gotta starve/
Try and
fail and try again/
The
comforts of repetition/
Keep
churnin out those hits/
Till its
all the same old shit[20]
They express the same
dissatisfaction with the fixed, static state required of their “character” once
voiced by a schizophrenic involved with alternative approaches to mental
illness: “It certainly feels more like an initiation of some kind… For all the
pain it has brought me, I wouldn’t be me without it, as it has made me so much
more aware of a lot of things.”[21]
It
is difficult to conclude that the West has not lost something in the process of
modernization. One cannot help but wonder if the episodic, holistic, integrated
understanding of the shaman’s career that characterizes pre-modern societies does
not have its advantages when compared with the differentiated modern roles of
the therapist, the mental patient, and the artist. Perhaps this case study can
shed light on why Modernity has so frequently been characterized by the feeling
that social roles have become unbearably restrictive. This is the very
sentiment that produced the counterculture eruptions of the late 1960s and gave
the New Age movement its birth. Contra Spencer, heterogeneity seems as likely
to create incoherence as homogeneity: by calcifying a set of dynamic states
into static social roles, it robs us of our ability to appreciate diverse
phenomena as part of an organic unity—contributing to the sense of
fragmentation that so many experience as the most pernicious feature of Modernity.
So it is
encouraging to see the project of re-appreciating and re-integrating these
organic unities taking place outside the confines of the New Age movement, in
new academic disciplines like ecology and new theoretical approaches like
systems theory. For personalities that might expect to benefit from a
reclamation of the shaman’s career, the work of the American psychologist Kay
Redfield Jamison provides a hopeful note. Herself diagnosed with bipolar
disorder, Jamison has written an excellent analysis of the association between
manic-depression and artistic creativity, Touched
with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament. One hopes
that works like this proliferate, as we learn to re-appreciation pre-modern
connections and be more careful in our use of modern distinctions.
[1]
Spencer, Herbert. 1937. “Evolution Scientifically Defined—from First Principles of Sociology” in Outline of Great Books, edited by Sir
John Alexander Hammerton. (New York: Wise & Company), p. 247
[2]
Drury, Nevill. 2004. The New Age:
Searching for the Spiritual Self. (London: Thames and Hudson, 2004), p.11
[3]
Lewis, I.M. 1996. Religion in Context:
Cults and Charisma. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 110-111.
[4] Ibid,
p. 116.
[5]
Ibid, p. 118-119.
[6]
Lewis, I.M. 1971. Ecstatic Religion: An
Anthropological Study of Spirit Possession and Shamanism. (Baltimore:
Penguin Books Ltd.), p. 36.
[7]
Cox, James L. 2008. “Community Mastery of the spirits as an African Form of
Shamanism,” in DISKUS vol. 9. (http://www.basr.ac.uk/diskus/diskus9/cox.htm)
Accessed May 29, 2013.
[8] MacIntyre,
Alasdair Chalmers. 2007. After Virtue: a
Study in Moral Theory. (London: Duckworth), p. 29.
[9]
Ibid, 30.
[10] Hutton, Ronald. 2001. Shamans: Siberian Spirituality and the Western Imagination. (New
York: Hambledon and London), p. 58.
[11] Taylor,
Charles. 2007. A Secular Age. (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press), p. 39.
[12]
Evers, Niyati. 2008. “Shamanic Perspectives on Mental Illness” in The Icarus Project: http://theicarusproject.net/%5Bcatpath%5D/shamanic-perspectives-on-mental-illness.
Accessed May 29, 2013.
[13] Eliade,
Mircea. 1989. Shamanism: Archaic
Techniques of Ecstasy. (New York:
Arkana), p. 8.
[14]
Jakobsen, Merete Demant. 1999. Shamanism:
Traditional and Contemporary Approaches to the Mastery of Spirits and Healing. (New
York: Berghahn Books), p. 5.
[15] Kingsbury,
Kathleen. May 9, 2008. “Tallying Mental Illness’ Costs,” in Time. (http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1738804,00.html).
Accessed May 29, 2013.
[16] Watters,
Ethan. January 8, 2010 “The Americanization of Mental Illness” in The New York Times. (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/magazine/10psyche-t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0),
p. 4. Accessed May 29, 2013.
[17]
Ibid, 5.
[18] Turner,
Victor. 1977. “Variations on a Theme of Liminality” in Secular Ritual, edited by Sally F. Moore and Barbara G. Myerhoff.
(Amsteram: Van Gorcum), p. 44.
[19]
Goethals, Gregor T. 1990. The Electronic
Golden Calf: Images, Religion, and the Making of Meaning. (Cambridge:
Cowley Publications), p. 93.
[20]
“Art is Hard”. (http://www.plyrics.com/lyrics/cursive/artishard.html).
Accessed May 29, 2013.
[21] Evers, Niyati. 2008. “Shamanic Perspectives
on Mental Illness” in The Icarus Project:
http://theicarusproject.net/%5Bcatpath%5D/shamanic-perspectives-on-mental-illness.
Accessed May 29, 2013.
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