The shamaness’ new clothes

For a long time, scholars dealing with shamanism focused mainly on its male declinations. Shamanism was typically analyzed as a “neutral category”, which inherently blinded ethnographers and their audiences to the gendered implications of such a view. A certain degree of attention has been certainly paid to the phenomena of transvestitism, “sexual inversion”, feminization of the shamans among various groups, but the scholarly gaze was focusing mainly on its ritual implications and rarely involved reflections on gender. Moreover, despite the presence of female shamans in many contexts, the descriptions and interpretations of their activities were simplistically seen as being one with their male counterparts. Yet there were notable exceptions, and, if looking attentively, ethnographies dealing with female shamans offered us glimpses of differences and facets of long-dismissed or overlooked realities. From the Nishan shamaness of Manchuria to Maria Chona, the Papago Woman, to Yongsu’s Mother, to name only a few examples, the intricacies and subtleties of the views of female shamans on their own societies could open our eyes to issues and questions extending well beyond the mere enunciation of practices and beliefs. They offer us, instead, glimpses of conflictual dimensions stretching directly from the sphere of the sacred to the realms of politics and social life

Archaeology · Clothing · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Geographies of human-animal interactions · History · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies

• The Mapuche man who became a woman shaman

  Open Access•Ana Mariella Bacigalupo•American Ethnologist•2004

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