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 …
Tag Archives: Shamanism
Morten Axel Pedersen’s Not Quite Shamans
Not Quite Shamans: Spirit Worlds and Political Lives in Northern Mongolia
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 …
Psychoanalytic metaphors and mythical medical realities in Claude Lévi-Strauss’s contribution to medical anthropology
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 …