Articles

Mayan divination

Since the publication of her book, "The Woman in the Shaman's Body: Reclaiming the Feminine in Religion and Medicine," life for Barbara Tedlock, a distinguished teaching professor at UB, has been one wild ride.

Her book, which is in the process of being translated into Danish, German, French, Spanish and Turkish, has garnered worldwide attention as a text on the practice of Shamanism, the world's oldest form of religion and medicine that is still widely used today.

Tedlock spent part of the summer months traveling back to Guatemala, where she filmed additional footage for a six-hour documentary titled "Breaking the Maya Code," that will air on PBS in November.

Night Fire Film, a small production company based in LA, approached Tedlock seven years ago at the inception of the project. She aided the owners of the company from across the country as they checked facts and began to conceptualize the theme of the film.

"They wanted to make a film different from all other Mayan films," Tedlock said.

UB professor Barbara Tedlock has earned international attention for her book and documentary on Shamanism.

Funding for the company was unavailable at the time, and Tedlock did not hear back from them until a year ago. David Lebrun, director of Night Fire Film had received backing from both the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

In January and February of 2005, Tedlock, along with her husband, Professor Dennis Tedlock and academic Michael Coe, spent six weeks serving as the documentary's anchors, utilizing their respective areas of expertise. They led the crew through ancient sites in Guatemala that had never been filmed in traditional documentaries, and that are, for the most part, still used today.

The documentary aimed to provide an accurate depiction of living Maya and their connection with Shamanism and the modern world, opposing documentaries that depict a dead culture.

They lead the crew to Utatlan, where there are four connected, manmade tunnels built underneath volcanic tuft, which lead to a living shrine. They also traveled to the town of Rabinal, where they recorded the performance of traditional costume dance dramas.

Also featured in the documentaries is the town of Momostenango, where new Shamans are trained and then initiated with approximately 20,000 people in attendance, another facet of Maya life never before recorded.

"It's one of those things American culture has never seen before, and that the Maya culture is thrilled to share," Tedlock said.

Tedlock said the crew was surprised at the enormity of the event.

"I don't think that's what they expected, it to be such a big deal," she said.

During filming, the crew stayed at a variety of accommodations. Sometimes it was a fancy hotel complete with a three-course meal, and others it was a crude straw mattress on the floor with black beans for dinner.

When they got wind of "Breaking the Maya Code," the History Channel approached Tedlock and her husband for another television opportunity. During the second week of her stay in Guatemala in August, they filmed two segments of a film recording traditional Maya sites. At the end of September they will fly to Burbank, CA to finish recording, and the piece will air in January.

Tedlock will not be slowing down anytime soon.

In March 2006, she will be leading a nine-day tour through Guatemala, consisting of 20 to 30 people along with her husband, through an experienced tour group.

It will be a new experience for the couple, whose touring guide experience consists of lecturing on cruises.

After traveling to Mongolia this summer for research purposes, she met Mongolians interested in traveling to Buffalo to meet Native Americans.

"They believe that they're connected," Tedlock said.

She hopes to plan a trip for them in January and February, when the climate in Buffalo is similar to that in Mongolia.

"You would think we would be the most hated nations, but there are some countries that are very positive towards the US, Mongolia being one of them," she said.

According to Tedlock, Shamanism may be an ancient tradition, but 27 medical schools and hospitals in the United States are teaching alternative healing practices, including Stanford. It is called integrative medicine and is being used in such lofty fields as cancer treatment.

In between juggling the semester's class schedule, Tedlock will continue appearing on radio programs across the country, as well as lectures and book signings.

This past summer she appeared on Danish public radio stations in Copenhagen, and she will appear on the television program "Shaman's Den," Sept. 5, 8 and 10 on Berkeley Public Television, Channel 28.

Additional information can be accessed at www.barbaratedlock.com 

In the meantime, Tedlock is enjoying the worldwide interest in her novel.

"This is like a dream come true," she said.

The Buffalo News
April 20, 2005

WOMEN CAN BE SPIRITUAL HEALERS, TOO, AUTHOR SAYS
Author: Michelle Kearns - NEWS STAFF REPORTER

It wasn't until she thought intellectuals claimed shamanism as a "male thing" that she wrote about it in a book. She says the mysterious craft belongs to women, too.

For now, the University at Buffalo professor has put her argument and details of the mystical practices in her book published last month. She will sign copies of "The Woman in the Shaman's Body. Reclaiming the Feminine in Religion and Medicine," (Bantam, $24) from 5 to 7 p.m. Friday in Talking Leaves Books, 3158 Main St.

Her story of shamans worldwide can even serve as a message in metaphor for modern, non-shaman American women.

She says a shaman's work can vary to include using medicinal plants, setting broken bones, massage, midwifery and looking into the future. Their purpose is "the maintenance or restoration of equilibrium in individuals," as she once did listening to a student torn between mountain climbing and Harvard Law.

She details her own shaman training, which began in 1975 as she did graduate anthropology work in Guatemala. While she was studying, a shaman couple offered to teach her and her husband.

Thirty years later the professor, who was officially introduced as a shaman before a crowd of Mayans, still pays attention to her sleep messages. She often dreams she is a dolphin, a signal she's interpreted to urge boldness akin to a dolphin's jumps out of the water.

"They're using your body at night and you're not getting anything. There's a whole part of your life that's being wasted."

"Eventually if you do that and you make it clear that you want to capture a dream, you will," she said.

"The Woman in the Shaman's Body" Provides Myth-Shattering Exploration of the Female Roots of Shamanism

Book points to empirical studies validating effectiveness of shamanic practices

Release date: Friday, March 18, 2005
Contact: Patricia Donovan, pdonovan@buffalo.edu
Phone: 716-645-5000 ext 1414
Fax: 716-645-3765

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Shamanism, humankind's oldest spiritual and healing tradition, is in many cultures dominated by men, and Western skeptics often debunk its effectiveness.

In a groundbreaking new book published this month by Random House, however, Barbara Tedlock, Ph.D., professor of anthropology at the University at Buffalo, challenges the historical hegemony of the male shamanic tradition, restores women to their essential place in the history of spirituality and celebrates their continuing role in the worldwide resurgence of shamanism.

Tedlock's book, "The Woman in a Shaman's Body," also presents empirical studies that find common shamanic practices to be very effective in medical terms and discusses why this is the case.

A shaman is one who has been initiated into the ancient tradition of walking "between" this and other worlds while in a state of ecstatic trance known as "shamanic ecstasy" or "shamanic flight." In this state, the shaman acts as a bridge between worlds and uses knowledge gained there to work with communities or individuals.

Skills attributed to shamans include various forms of divination; shape-changing; control over the elements; healing; soul retrieval or accompaniment; the ability to see, hear or send messages over great distances, and obtaining the cooperation of animal and nature spirits.

The granddaughter of an Ojibwe shaman and herself an initiate in Mayan shamanism, Tedlock brings to bear an abundance of evidence to support her contention that shamanism originally was the domain of women and that there still is a vital tradition of female shamanism in many parts of the world.

Tedlock writes that the active pursuit of knowledge is at the heart of shamanic practice. She describes her own experiences as a shamanic trainee among the Maya of Guatemala and her experience with dreams, prophecy and healing.

She also takes her readers from the wooded hills of the Czech Republic to the Kutenai people of Washington State; from the Amazon basin to northern Mongolia in search of the rich historical record of women warriors and hunters, spiritual guides and prophets from many cultures and times.

Tedlock describes shamans as sharing the belief that all entities, animate and inanimate, are imbued with a holistic life force and claim an ability to harness "extraordinary forces, entities or beings whose behavior in an alternative reality effects individuals and events in our ordinary world."

Although healing is only one aspect of the shaman's work, it is the one most often challenged by Western science. Tedlock says, however, "I have seen firsthand the effectiveness of shamanic healing, which relies on a deep knowledge of the operation of herbs and plants and the power of the patient's faith in the healer and the healing process."

She describes how healers ritually enact their local system of myth and symbols to interpret the patient's condition within that system, and how they employ hope, suggestion, expectation and rituals that elicit a powerful placebo effect.

"This effect, which has been called 'the doctor who resides within,' arises from a direct connection between positive emotions and the biochemistry of the body," Tedlock says, "and by reestablishing emotional and spiritual equilibrium, a shaman strengthens the self-healing abilities of a patient."

Tedlock notes that shamans also use metaphors to help the patient manipulate sensory, emotional and cognitive information that alters his or her perception of illness and increases the endorphins and other endogenous chemicals generated in the human brain that control pain and anxiety.

She describes how shamanic patients are helped to release unconscious feelings and transfer negative emotions to the healer and says confession and forgiveness also are central activities in shamanic healing, and frequently elicit conflict resolution.

Research on the emotional effects of songs, chants, prayers, spells and music, says the author, indicate they can influence the way the immune system responds to illness.

"In some traditions," Tedlock says, "the use of drums, gongs, bamboo tubes or rattles help to restore a physical sense of order that replaces the experience of chaos produced by the illness."

Probing the practices that distinguish female shamanism from the much-better-known male traditions, Tedlock reveals the key role of "body wisdom" and women's eroticism in shamanic trance and ecstasy. She explores female forms of "dream witnessing" and vision questing and the use of hallucinogenic plants and drugs.

The book explains shamanic midwifery and the spiritual powers released in childbirth and female cycles; shamanic symbolism in weaving and other feminine arts, and "gender-shifting" and male-female partnership in shamanic practice.

Women shamans, she says, have often practiced in the fields of healing, birthing children, gathering and growing food, keeping communities in balance, presiding over ceremonies and rites of passage, maintaining relations with the dead, teaching, ministering to those in need, communing with nature to learn her secrets, preserving the wisdom traditions, divining the future, and dancing with gods and goddesses.

"These are shamanic arts," she says, "and they are the arts of women."

The book had drawn praise from other anthropologists, including Michael F. Brown, chair of the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at Williams College, for its clarity of thought, explanation of complex ideas in ordinary language, and the wealth of personal experience Tedlock brings to her task. Brown says, "Tedlock turns a century of scholarship on its head by showing that women's mastery of shamanic arts is the norm rather than the exception."

Tedlock is the author of "The Beautiful and the Dangerous: Zuni Indian Encounters" (New York: Viking, 1992), "Dreaming: Anthropological and Psychological Interpretations, School of American Research Advanced Seminar Volume" (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1987) and "Time and the Highland Maya" (Albuquerque, N.M.: University of New Mexico Press, 1982). With her husband, ethnopoeticist Dennis Tedlock, she edited "Teachings from the Earth: Indian Religion and Philosophy" (Liverright, 1975). Her work is widely published in major anthropological journals.

Tedlock's research is in the fields of psychological, symbolic and cognitive anthropology, cognitive modeling within cultural anthropology; cultural organization of time and space; cognitive structure of traditional healing systems, anthropology of art and aesthetics, ethnomedicine and the American Southwest and Mesoamerica.