About the problematic usability of a nonoperational term for describing deviant prehistoric burials
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 2019-04-29

Full title: Words Come Easy: About the problematic usability of a nonoperational term for describing deviant prehistoric burials

‘The most dangerous of these vague words is shamanism.’ As the famous Arnold van Gennep wrote these words 1903, the term shamanism was already known for nearly 200 years in the western science – although the phenomenon wasn’t as old as many researchers would have guessed at the time. Having been translated from an exiled Russian priest and being used as Terminus Technicus for religious specialists all over Siberia shortly thereafter, the word very quickly became a stereotype rather than a description of reality. For this reason, van Gennep warned scientists that using the term could be problematic. Now, more than one hundred years after his words, shamanism is still a term often used to identify deviant burials in archaeology, commonly used synonymous to other terms like ‘priest’, ‘wise man/woman’, ‘healer’, ‘medicine man’ and most often handled as phenomenon with a very wide definition. In the planned paper, which is a summary of a PhD about the same theme published in 2015 in Germany, the problems of this tradition will be shown, referring to two exemplary cases, the well-known German ‘Shaman from Bad Durrenberg’ and ‘Kyss’, the jakutian grave of a young woman. 

Andy Reyman (Goethe-University Frankfurt)