The story of the word shaman's journey from Siberia to the West begins in Europe during the late 19th century; Caught up in excitement over Darwin's new ideas about evolution, scholars began to attempt to apply his ideas to modern-day people. Among these scholars were the first anthropologists, or researchers specializing in the study of human culture.

19th century anthropologists (most famously Edward Burnett Tylor) used Darwin's theory of evolution to explain differences in the traditions, lifestyles, and behaviors of human beings from all over the world. Basically, they proposed that the human species was evolving at different rates; Cultures like theirs built cities and practiced intensive agriculture and organized religion--things which many Europeans saw as advanced and sophisticated--because their people had progressed into the later stages of human evolution; Cultures that practiced nomadic, hunter-gatherer lifestyles or did not use plows for farming behaved this way because their people remained in the earliest stages of human evolution. Other cultures fell in between the European ideal of progress and the "primitive."

These "arm-chair" scholars (so called because they never met the people that they studied in person as later anthropologists would, but did their research from the comfort of their own studies and libraries) were particularly intrigued by cultures that they believed to be relics of the earliest stages of human evolution. They pored over accounts written by European travelers of people from many cultures which they believed to be primitive, searching for similarities in behaviors and traditions. They believed that such similarities might represent a key part of their theory of human evolution: basic universal elements of primitive human culture. Shamans would quickly become one of these elements.

Sources:

Kehoe, Alice Beck. Shamans and Religion: An Anthropological Exploration in Critical Thinking. Illinois: Waveland Press, 2000.

Tylor, Edward Burnett. Primitive culture: researches into the development of mythology, philosophy, religion, art, and custom. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1920.

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This work is licensed by Margaret Jones under a Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY 3.0), and is an Open Educational Resource.

Last edited by Margaret Jones on May 2, 2012 10:20 am -0500.