Hutton, Ronald – Professor of history at Bristol University in England. Hutton has written a critical history of British paganism (The Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles: Their Nature and Legacy, 1991) and modern witchcraft (The Triumph of the Moon, 1999), both of which attend in part to alleged shamanistic aspects of these religions from prehistory to the present. Hutton has also written two books on shamanism, the latter of which (Shamans: Siberian Spirituality and the Western Imagination, 2002) offered discussion for an English-speaking audience of scholarly work on Siberian shamans that had previously been available only in Russian. Hutton’s contribution is to demonstrate the historical construction of “shamanism” while attending to consistent features of Siberian shamans and to contrast these with the recent engagements of neo-shamans with Siberian spirituality.
SOURCE:
Historical Dictionary of Shamanism by Graham Harvey and Robert J. Wallis 2007
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