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Anthropology, Shamanism, and Alternate Ways of Knowing–Being in the World: One Anthropologist’S Anthropology, Shamanism, and Alternate Ways of Knowing–Being in the World: One Anthropologist’s Journey of Discovery and Transformationanhu_1067 204..217 BONNIE GLASS-COFFIN Department of Sociology, Social Work, and Anthropology Old Main Hill #0730 Utah State University Logan, UT 84322–0730 SUMMARY From over 20 years of working with shamans and their apprentices in northern Peru and the United States, this article describes my own journey from scientist and skeptic to humanist and adept. It tells of the fundamental shift in con- sciousness I experienced as a result of a specific instance in which the veil between the seen and unseen worlds temporarily lifted, allowing me to engage with Spirit in new ways. It presents, as a result of this shift, the struggles I have faced in redefining my own relationship to my work as an anthropologist. Finally, it suggests some of the advantages to our discipline that can come from thinking outside the paradigmatic box that has, for much too long, kept us disengaged from the world in which we live. [Keywords: shamanism, radical participation, anthropology, paradigm shift, consciousness] As an anthropologist who has written for more than twenty years about sha- manism in northern Peru, I have never shied away from stories about how my own life has been transformed by my research (Glass-Coffin 1998, 2000, 2003, 2009). In part, the tendency to weave my own experiences into my accounts has stemmed from the exhortations of my first informants. As I recounted in my first book, these female healers conceptualized shamanic illness and strategies for curing differently than did their male counterparts. The focus of this differ- ence, I argued, was in the way they encouraged their patients to awaken the healing potential in themselves through coming to accept their own life expe- riences as valid (Glass-Coffin 1998:171–203). Recounting stories of shamanic healing through the lens of personal experience became a way of honoring the perspective that these women shared with me (Glass-Coffin 1998:xi–xv). Throughout my career, I have found increasing theoretical justification for my decisions. In the late 1980s, feminist paradigms of spirituality were diverg- ing from more androcentric models. Instead of rejecting and turning away from the realities of this world to find the divine, feminist writers concerned with how women engage with spiritual transformation and healing were echoing this same engagement with “lived experience” that my shaman friends had advocated. Many of these scholars suggested that spiritual growth and devel- opment was, for women, more about “coming into a relationship with lived reality and embracing...theactual experience of living in this world” than about transcendence or rejection of either life’s pleasures or of suffering (Glass- Anthropology and Humanism, Vol. 35, Issue 2, pp 204–217, ISSN 1559-9167, online ISSN 1548-1409. © 2010 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1409.2010.01067.x. Glass-Coffin Alternate Ways of Knowing/Being 205 Coffin 1998:188). Thus, my insistence on writing myself into my own ethno- graphic stories of shamanism derived at least in part from my allegiance to feminist paradigms of spiritual transformation and healing (cf. Bynum 1986; Christ 1980; King 1995; Ochs 1983; Ruether 1987). Similarly, it was during this time period that feminist perspectives in anthro- pological method and theory were emerging and gaining acceptance in the discipline. Discussions of position and location, relationship and engagement between ethnographer and research subject, were beginning to supplant omni- scient and objective narratives among cultural feminists and poststructuralists alike. The “postmodern turn” in anthropology that contextualized and “com- plexified” ethnographic research as a product of relationship more than an observation of a fact was gaining credence during the very years that I was defining myself as anthropologist and scholar (cf. Abu-Lughod 1991; Alcoff 1994; Behar 1993; DiLeonardo 1991; Ortner 1984, 1996). The appearance of works like Stoller and Olkes (1989), Jackson (1989), and especially the collected essays of Young and Goulet (1994) also provided me with the courage to write myself into my fieldwork. This turn toward “experi- ential ethnography” began to challenge more traditional ethnographic methods by asserting that the interactions between informant and ethnographer that often resulted in the ethnographer “being changed” by the process should not be purged from ethnographic accounts. Instead, experiential ethnographers were asserting that the recounting of experiences gained while “in the field” were fundamental to good reporting, and that these experiences were even “a condition of ethnographic knowledge” (Goulet and Miller 2007:2). “In the field,” here, has a double meaning: as “both the home environment of our hosts and...the discipline that defines our intellectual horizon in our pursuit of knowledge” (Goulet and Miller 2007:2). In the last 20 years, this validation of the researcher’s experience as part and parcel of what is lived and what is communicated back to reading audiences after the ethnographer returns home has only continued to expand. This is especially true of the kind of research I have conducted with practitioners who regularly interact with “unseen worlds” on behalf of their human communities. In this kind of work, as the contributors to Goulet and Miller’s excellent col- lection on “extraordinary anthropology” attest, the types of experiences that are very likely to transform the ethnographer are those lived experiences or encounters that challenge the spiritual and cognitive maps she brings with her to the field. Whether considering encounters with “spirits” in Zambia, like the one Edith Turner recounted in Young and Goulet’s 1994 collection (Turner 1994), or the awakening of abilities to “see” in unexplainable new ways (Gardner 2007), it seems that a willingness to really engage with cognitive and spiritual maps that fundamentally challenge how knowledge is produced, and even how reality is shaped, may be a prerequisite to the experience of really “being changed” by our encounters. As Barbara Wilkes describes it: Cycles. Circles. Ages. Stages. Relations. Interdependence. Balance. Harmony. Flux. Change. Growth. Knowledge. Concentric circles and interrelations. These are the preconditions of knowledge production among the Kainai. Although I understood that at an intellectual level before the Sundance, only having lived these principles ...madethem real, a part of who I am and, thus, made them available to me as tools 206 Anthropology and Humanism Volume 35, Number 2 in the production of knowledge and ethnography...[Thewillingness to step outside of oneself in this way is not] unscientific, or non-objective....Nordoes it signify that one has “gone native.” Instead it is an opportunity to glimpse the moral, emotional, physical, intuitive, and spiritual realities and experiences of others firsthand as we take part in the transformations our hosts experience. Thereafter, we have an obliga- tion to determine what such experiences may add to our perceptual and conceptual understanding, not only of our fieldwork cultures, but of all human phenomena including ourselves. [Wilkes 2007:75–76] In short, because ethnographers have begun embracing the value of stepping outside themselves and of being changed by the process, the tired assertions that anthropology cannot be good science unless the participant-observers remain “detached” from the cognitive and spiritual worldviews of their infor- mants can no longer be accepted at face value. Johannes Fabian’s works have been key to this shift in perspective. In Fabian’s view, stepping outside of oneself (which he calls “ecstatic anthro- pology”) to truly enter the life world of the Other should be considered a “prerequisite for, rather than an impediment to, the production of ethnographic knowledge” (Fabian 2000:8). As reported by Goulet and Miller, Fabian further suggests that the theoretical artifices that are built on the ground of objectivity and detached reporting are better understood as institutionalized senselessness than as science (Goulet and Miller 2007:11).A methodological starting point of radical participation (rather than participant-observation) has the advantage of obviating the theoretical conundrum that arises when experience is repre- sented. Instead of “freezing” experience through the act of writing about it, “one advantage of radical participation as a method is that it allows us to fashion representations of other cultures that do not erase their immediacy and pres- ence” (Fabian 2000:120). Finally, a methodological perspective that emphasizes intersubjectivity, engagement, vulnerability, willingness to lose control, and the ethnographer’s willingness to be transformed by spiritual and cognitive maps different than her own is more ethically defensible and decolonizing than the detachment typical of participant observation (Wilkes 2007). An experiential anthropology builds on local ideas, revealing “the beautiful, powerful, and engaging features of local cultures” (Miller 2007:206). It challenges “one of the central myths of the modern period in the West [which] is the idea that the opposition between religion-superstition-revelation and logic-science-rationality divides the world into then and now, them and us” (Goulet 2007:210–211). It can begin to trans- form academic life on campuses and make universities less hostile to students
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