Reviews
 |
| Mongolian ger in Ulaanbaatar |
Review (pdf) by Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer, Georgetwon University. Published in the American Anthropologist, Vol.108, No. 4, December 2006.
I've been interested in the female Shamanic tradition for years. The Shamanic arts of healing, divination, communing with the elements of nature - including animals, has been a natural profession held by women since the beginning of time. Barbara Tedlock, PH.D., a researcher and descendant of North American Shamans, has done a brilliant job of illustrating the women's role in these activities and mystical traditions. Wonderful explanations of selected origins of Goddess Spirituality. To feel even more empowered about your natural, creative, life-giving force, take some time to learn about what we used to do for the tribe, purchase Barbara's book!
The Goddess Network www.thegoddessnetwork.net
Alternative Medicine Phenomenon Combines Spirituality And Medicine: The Profound Effect Of Alternative Therapies
More
Americans are incorporating alternative therapies and medicines into their lives
than ever before. In fact, according to the National Institutes of Health, 36%
of adults in the U.S. are using some form of alternative medicine. When
megavitamin therapy and prayer specifically for health reasons are included,
that number rises to 62%.
"We’re in a major change moment," says Barbara Tedlock, Ph. D., a noted anthropologist and author of the new book The Woman in the Shaman’s Body: Reclaiming the Feminine in Religion and Medicine. "Beliefs and spirituality are coming back into medicine."
"Some doctors are prescribing patients yoga training and acupuncture," continues Tedlock, a distinguished University of Buffalo anthropology professor, who’s a fully initiated shaman. "I’m excited that we’re seeing a major shift of our regular Western paradigm. We’re in a moment where this whole thing is breaking into the mainstream. Americans are extremely pragmatic. If something works, we’ll do it. Well, guess what? It’s working."
While many people are still just beginning to explore and benefit from alternative healing practices, Tedlock has long known of their tremendous power. As a child in the late 1950’s, she was stricken with polio. The entire left side of her body was paralyzed. Doctors put the four-year-old Tedlock into a tank respirator, better known as an iron lung. She was confined to the immobilizing metal machine for a year-and-a-half.
It wasn’t until her grandmother, a shaman, herbalist and midwife, talked her parents into releasing her from the hospital that she got better. A still ailing Tedlock was brought home to a difficult regimen of daily swims and sweat baths that were intended to awaken the muscles. Her grandmother complemented that treatment by massaging her with ointments made from various healing herbs.
The alternative treatments sent "bolts of electricity" through Tedlock’s limbs. In just six months, she had regained enough strength and flexibility to return to school.
Tedlock says those alternative therapies -- and the amazing results -- have profoundly influenced her throughout her life. In The Woman in the Shaman’s Body, Tedlock explores the tremendous contributions women like her grandmother have historically made to shamanism, the world’s oldest spiritual and healing tradition.
By melding firsthand experience with exhaustive scholarly research that's taken her through Asia, Africa and the Americas, Tedlock provides proof that shamanism was originally the domain of the female.
"There’s very good evidence that women were shamans from the beginning, says the prolific author of four previous books and scores of academic journal articles. Unfortunately, the scholarly literature and pop literature only stressed the male dimension."
The Woman in the Shaman’s Body not only sheds new light on the female’s role in shamanism, it provides compelling information about the effectiveness of mystical practices and alternative healing.
But nothing is more compelling than these statements from Tedlock: "I’m normal today because of my grandmother," she says. "I walk and talk today because of alternative medicine."
News Target Network Covering Natural Health, Medicine and Technology. August 4, 2005
http://www.newstarget.com/009916.html
Barbara Tedlock’s new book The Woman in the Shaman’s Body: Reclaiming the Feminine in Religion and Medicine reclaims the female shamanic tradition with vigor and clarity, exposing the the antifeminine bias of the renowned Mircea Eliade. The earliest known shamanic burial, she points out, was that of a woman of the Upper Paleolithic (30,000 years ago). Tedlock argues that deliberate misreadings of data have been common, as when a shamanic couple is described as a "shaman and assistant" even when both acknowledged their shared role. She argues that women have been active practitioners and, in fact, the primary occupants of the shamanic role. Her book should become the classic on the controversial but now indisputable question of women's place in the shaman's world.
The Women's Well
http://www.womenswell.org/newsletter.html
Giving Women Their Due as Shamans
Addressing an obvious prejudicial disconnect in any cultural system is dangerous, so it is easy to imagine an explosive response to Barbara Tedlock's latest book, The Woman in the Shaman's Body: Reclaiming the Feminine in Religion and Medicine. As a prolific author and editor, distinguished professor of anthropology (SUNY-Buffalo), translator fluent in K'iche' Maya and Zuni, granddaughter of an Ojibwe herbalist and midwife and a fully initiated shaman herself for more than 30 years, Tedlock is uniquely positioned to illuminate willful scholarly oversight. And that is to present an unbroken line of women, from prehistoric times to the present, who practice traditional aspects of shamanic wisdom: soul-journeys, possession, herbalism, and also with the knowledge associated with women's blood, including midwifery.
How the academic study of shamanism came to revolve around men, until the word itself denoted a male occupation -- an all too familiar androcentric focus, certainly not confined to anthropologists -- is outlined in Chapt. 5, but the compelling narrative focuses on the hidden (ignored and/or dismissed) female roots of religious and healing practices. A network emerges, shining worldwide, from chapter after chapter of stories from her research, world travel and life experience. The immediacy of the feminine in every aspect of shamanism begins in current research into numerous Neolithic graves of women in Siberia buried with shamanic paraphernalia from around 1700 to 1300 B.C. Tedlock points out mildly that "as many as 80 percent of all skeletal remains were considered by Western archeologists to be male . . . an improbable finding that hints at the scale of the bias." A robust culture of women practicing the shamanism of their region thrives in Mongolia today ,surviving both totalitarian political regimes and anthropological myopia.
Similar linguistic jingoism prevailed in almost every contact with unfamiliar cultures. In the section "Nothing but Wives and Assistants," Tedlock outlines examples of how "translation and common assumptions about the roles of women has obscured the history of women shamans" -- disappearing women from the sacred in a scholarly blink. For example, a Quichua word, yacha (literally "one who knows") was translated "a powerful shaman" referring to a man and to a woman "master potter," effectively rendering a rich current of knowing invisible to maintain Eurocentric expectations. But translators were not alone. Arbitrarily dividing the work of shamans, anthropologist-star Mircea Eliade, influenced by the Freudian psychoanalyst, Géza Róheim, declared soul flight and possession mutually exclusive, gender-based tasks.
"Women shamans, my grandmother . . . among them would have been shocked by this remarkable dichotomy," Tedlock notes.
Tedlock's intelligence and wit make reading what could have been a tedious polemic, a fresh story told energetically with scholarly rigor supporting the text. Writing fluently, cogently and with great humanity is her gift to readers. Profuse illustration with photographs and drawings insures that there is an authentic visual component with the narrative. And with a life-long pleasure in "back matter," I spent much time savoring the notes, disappointed to find in my advance copy blank pages with a note that there would be 13 pages of indexed material to come. I can't wait.
Tedlock's confirmation that all over the globe, women continue to practice and teach ancient shamanic rituals -- inspiring their communities with laughter, healing and wisdom -- provides a vital model of whole-hearted courage. As all shamans use tools they have acquired over time, Tedlock, scholar, translator and writer, brings her shamanic healing skill and integrity to those of us for whom the shamanic is now in a form we can enter -- a book to read and cherish.
Barbara Riley
The New Mexican (F-7). Sunday, March 27, 2005
Scholarly and lay interest in shamanism continues to grow. Many pertinent books are still shadowed by the antifeminine bias of the renowned Mircea Eliade, whose mid-twentieth-century works applied shaman to a self-initiated, solitary male practicing "techniques of ecstasy." Eliade's towering influence has led to startling failures of scholarship, with facts twisted to fit his interpretative framework and biased language cloaking the truth. Tedlock reclaims the female shamanic tradition with vigor and clarity, arguing against depictions of shamans as male participants in "a sort of Flintstones private club in which manhood was celebrated and the transcendental achieved by worshiping, then negating, the feminine." The earliest known shamanic burial, she points out, was that of a woman of the Upper Paleolithic (30,000 years ago), whose dwelling included a potter's kiln in which she crafted thousands of tiny heads, feet, hands, and other talismans for healing. Tedlock argues that deliberate misreadings of data have been common, as when a shamanic couple is described as a "shaman and assistant" even when both acknowledged their shared role. She argues that women have been active practitioners and, in fact, the primary occupants of the shamanic role. Salted throughout with her own impressive memoir of initiation (with her husband, anthropologist, Dennis Tedlock) and practice of traditional shamans, Tedlock's book should become the classic on the controversial but now indisputable question of women's place in the shaman's world
Patricia Monoghan
Starred (highly recommended) review in Booklist March 15, 2005.
Bonnie Horrigan is Executive Director, Society for Shamanic Practitioners and
author of Red Moon Passage: The Power and Wisdom of Menopause (Random House),
and Voices of Integrative Medicine: Conversations and Encounters (Churchill
Livingstone).
Barbara Tedlock's book, A Woman in a Shaman's Body is a superbly written narrative that integrates her personal experience as a practicing shaman with serious scholarship.
Tedlock ranges through the most arcane reports of shamanism in Europe, Asia, North America, South America and Australia with stunning ease and a fascinating eye for detail. She melds this ability with her own personal experiences to dispel the myth that shamanism is a male calling. Some of the most powerful shamans are women whose bodies and psyches are in tune with the cosmos.
This book is the finest example of research that integrates solid scholarship with practical knowledge gained through participation and first hand experience. It will be a classic in the study of shamanism. Barbara Tedlock successfully destroys the andocentric view of shamanism. From her very first chapter where she examines a Neolithic shaman's grave she sets the record straight. Shamanism is a woman's way of living in the cosmos. Some of the most powerful shamans I have ever known have been women and midwives. The power of bringing forth new life from the dark reaches of the womb is an essential part of the miraculous and transformative powers of shamanic ecstasy. Not only can the female shaman manipulate the spirit powers of the upper and lower worlds, but she is capable of bringing new life into this world. The female body is attuned with the cycles of the cosmos in a way that the male body is not. This provides the female shaman with far greater power than her male counterpart. Shamanism is a female calling.
The book is a thoroughly readable, yet authoritative account of women's pivotal roles in shamanistic practices. It brings together the actual practice of female shamans in Asia, North America and Mesoamerica with a wealth of sources on the role women have always played in shamanism. This is the most comprehensive survey of the literature on shamanism since Mercea Eliade's pioneering work in the History of Religions and it sets the record straight about women's fundamental importance in shamanism.
Dr. Timothy Knab is an anthropologist and the author of A Scattering of Jades: Stories, Poems, and Prayers of the Aztecs (Simon & Schuster) and A War of Witches: A Journey into the Underworld of the Contemporary Aztecs (Harper San Francisco).
A cultural anthropologist with impeccable academic credentials, Barbara Tedlock brings to this work three unusual qualities: clarity of thought, an ability to explain complex ideas in ordinary language, and a wealth of personal experience. Drawing on decades of research with native healers and religious elders in Guatemala and the American Southwest, as well as lessons taught by her Ojibwe grandmother, 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.
Barbara Tedlock's study of female shamans offers rare gifts: luminous insight, exhaustive scholarly knowledge, and accessible language that pulses with quiet intensity. After Tedlock, no one will ever again be able to portray shamanism as a male enterprise.
Michael F. Brown is the Chair of the Dept. of Anthropology & Sociology at Williams College. He is the author of The Channeling Zone: American Spirituality in an Anxious Age and, more recently, Who Owns Native Culture?
Barbara Tedlock's The Beautiful and the Dangerous: Encounters with the Zuni Indians is a fascinating book. The author accompanied her anthropologist husband to the Southwest in the early 1970s. She became so intrigued by the wonder and the terror of Zuni sacred beliefs and practices that she switched her career path from art to ethnography.
Tedlock's friendship with a tribal elder and his wife enables her to explore their sacred songs and ceremonies. She witnesses the activities of Zuni sacred clowns, the making of pottery, the butchering of a deer, the preparation of special foods, and poignant prayer and healing rituals. Throughout these accounts, the author is sensitive to the poverty of most Zuni Indians and their susceptibility to alcoholism and debilitating diseases.
Tedlock concludes: "In today's rapidly changing multicultural world we are all becoming ethnographers, gathering, inscribing, and interpreting what others say and do in order to make sense of our own sayings and doings." The Beautiful and the Dangerous is a tribute to the spirituality of these survivors.
by Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat