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Shamanisms in motion : Introduction.


Pages: 7 - 18

Abstract

The ethnographs convened by the authors of this file validate the relevance of analysing these ritual practices as belonging to the same Shamanic set. Thus, recent transformations of practices and representations in a shamanic field that has now been transcontinental networks paradoxically highlight a kind of hard core that remains unchanged despite the multiplication of scales of the phenomenon and the diversity of the actors concerned: the introduction of the shaman between inside and outside, its role as a passer of ritual and discursive elements between different social and cultural universes. But these ethnographs also show discontinuities, divergences and conflicts of interpretation within the ritual and discursive field labelled as “shamanic”. The set of medical-religious forms that travel, which are travelling and which this file envisages as “moving shamanism” challenges the canonic sharing of traditional and neo-Shamanism, local forms and globalized forms. Therefore, Shamanism is a category of all-terrain, generating and mentoring continuous processes of ritual and discursive chilling, which organises the mobility and circulation of actors, practices and speeches at both regional and transcontinental levels. It appears that the circulation of these practices and speeches establishes therapeutic-religious geography that redesign national and continental borders, and repositioning landscapes and territories previously considered as peripheral and backward in the hierarchy of peoples and places according to the logic of progress. This phenomenon illustrates the driving role of religious and therapeutic in the questioning of political and social hierarchies, both nationally and internationally, resulting from colonization.