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Shamans and Religion: An Anthropological Exploration in Critical Thinking. Alice Beck Kehoe. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 2000. 125 pp.
Shamans and Religion is a thoughtful, lively, sometimes charming, and ultimately thoroughly exasperating book. Kehoe uses her deconstruction of the term shaman in both anthropological writing and New Age popular culture to expose what she sees as latent racism implicit in the romanticization of "primitive Others." Her critique embraces a wide range of phenomena from published ethnography to grammar school Thanksgiving pageants portraying "Indians."
This project began in the classroom where Kehoe attempts to teach "critical thinking" to her anthropology students, and the writing suggests a prior incarnation as lively lectures for undergraduates. Kehoe gracefully mingles the big names of anthropological theory with juicy snippets of ethnography and anecdotes drawn from her own fieldwork. As a concise and inexpensive Waveland Press monograph, Shamans and Religion is clearly intended for classroom use. As an essay on popular culture, there is much of merit in these pages, but in her breezy and arch indictment of the profession, Kehoe sometimes plays fast and loose with the data, committing the very sin, overgeneralization, that she imputes to her colleagues.
Mircea Eliade, the Romanian religious historian, is Kehoe's primary bete noir, and well he might be. While anthropologists have used the term shaman as a broadly comparative category since the early 20th century, the publication of Eliade's Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (1964) brought new interest to the topic and undoubtedly encouraged many anthropologists to use the term loosely for a wide range of local ritual specialists, sometimes obscuring local distinctions...