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In Darkness and Secrecy: The Anthropology of Assault Sorcery and Witchcraft in Amazonia. Neil L. Whitehead and Robin Wright, eds., Durham: Duke University Press, 2004. 327 pp.
This book is a timely study of a rarely discussed aspect of Amazonian social life. Dark shamanism has remained relatively untouched as a research topic for a number of reasons. First of all, anthropology's original emphasis on social order prompted researchers to emphasize the cohesive function of religious life. Therefore, shamanism, like other religious related practices, tended to be considered as the way to give order to the cosmological world. Shamans were considered mainly healers, helping the individual and communal body to be harmonious. It was only at the end of the 19708 and beginning of the 1980$ that anthropology began to pay attention to social contradiction. Nevertheless, this recognition spread slowly and unevenly in the discipline. This book gives us access to the other side of the coin, the role of shamanism in social conflict and historically rooted changes.
Another important factor for this delay was the current anthropological concern about the politics of representation. The crisis of representation brought to anthropology by the post-structuralist and postmodern movement and the widespread reading of Edward Said's "Orientalism," raised concern about western-centric depictions of "violent savages." Today, in the aftermath of the Yanomami controversy, it seems also dangerous to come across discussions of violence (both symbolic and physical) regarding...