Tag Archives: Shamanism

FeaturesTeaching Resources

A reader’s guide to the “ontological turn” – Part 3

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This article is part of the series:

Editor’s note: In the wake of all the discussion about the ‘ontological turn’ at this year’s American Anthropological Association conference, we asked four scholars, “which texts or resources would you recommend to a student or colleague interested in the uses of ‘ontology’ as an analytical category in recent work in anthropology and science and technology studies?”  This was the reading …

Books

Morten Axel Pedersen’s Not Quite Shamans

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Not Quite Shamans: Spirit Worlds and Political Lives in Northern Mongolia

by Morten Axel Pedersen

Cornell University Press, 2011. 272 pages, US$28.95, paperback.

 

The intersection between the collapse of the Soviet state and the resurgence of religious practices has by now acquired a substantial body of scholarship both in anthropology and in other disciplines. A number of recent accounts …

Features

Psychoanalytic metaphors and mythical medical realities in Claude Lévi-Strauss’s contribution to medical anthropology

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There are few subject areas in anthropology untouched by the seminal thought of the late Professor Claude Lévi-Strauss. Though he published only two or three essays concerned expressly with medical subject matter, his theorization in those places of the role of myth and shamanistic authority in symbolic/magical healing opened up questions with lasting significance. I would like to briefly review …