RELGST 1722 - HEALING, SHAMANISM, AND SPIRITUAL POSSESSION

Minimum Credits: 3
Maximum Credits: 3
Anthropological approaches to the study of religion have classically defined shamanism as a spiritual practice opposed to spirit possession. While shamanism is centered on the claims of individuals to exit their bodies and venture into other realms of consciousness and reality, spirit possession would chart the opposite movement, where other spiritual beings take over or are invited into a human host. Both of these activities however, involve fusing or blurring the normal states and boundaries of body, personhood and consciousness, in interaction with other supernatural beings. Both are also routine religious experiences and practices in many parts of the world, past and present. Notwithstanding, these phenomena have been mistakenly associated with mental disorder by sociocultural anthropologists and psychologists in the past. At this point, however, the argument that shamanism and spiritual possession are not a function of mental illness has prevailed. Today, there is no doubt that the impact of these practices in the social life of its practitioners is multiple and complex. Despite that fact, this course will focus on the therapeutic aspects of these traditions. Far from being “primitive” or purely “exotic” phenomena, we will explore how these living practices relate to great civilizations, as part of regional, national, and global ideologies of religion and culture. More precisely, we will examine the role of traditional medicine based on cross-cultural ethnographies. We will explore, for example, how indigenous groups throughout the Americas diagnose and treat folk illness and Western defined diseases with variety of methods. Culturally defined illness such as soul loss, evil eye, witchcraft and other psychosomatic afflictions will be explored through lecture, readings and films. We will examine the use of art, music and ritual as well as psychotropic plants as part of the very heart of many indigenous cultural traditions. That said, this course will also provide an opportunity to understand why these practices have been reawakened not only by modern anthropological inquiry, but also by multidisciplinary interest in states of consciousness and mechanisms of therapy, and by popular interest in alternative forms of spirituality.
Academic Career: Undergraduate
Course Component: Lecture
Grade Component: LG/SNC Elective Basis
Course Attributes: DSAS Cross-Cult. Awareness General Ed. Requirement, SCI Polymathic Contexts: Global&Cross Cul GE. Req.

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