Category: Shamanism

Dayak – Indigenous people of Borneo, Indonesia, and Malaysia. Their animist religious culture necessitates the employment of shamans as healers and intermediaries with other-than-human persons…

Datura – The use of hallucinogens is not universal to shamanisms, but many shamans, especially in South America, engage with culturally recognized plants as other-than-human…

Darts – In many cultures, it is thought that illnesses may be the result of assault by sorcerers, witches, enemy shamans, or even aggrieved “friendly”…

Dark shamans – A distinction is commonly drawn in Amazonia between “curing shamans” and “dark shamans.” This should not be interpreted, however, as “our shamans”…

Dance of the Deer Center for Shamanic Studies – Established in 1979 by Brant Secunda, grandson of the Mexican Huichol (Wixáritari) shaman Don José Matsuwa,…

Czaplicka, Maria Antonina – (1886–1921) Polish-born cultural anthropologist best known for her fieldwork among indigenous Siberian communities, published as Aboriginal Siberia (1914). Czaplicka documents Siberian…

Cyberia – Drawing conceptually on the vast tundra of Siberia, “Cyberia” (see Rushkoff’s 1994 volume of the same title, for instance) refers to the virtually…

Cunning folk – Scholars such as Owen Davies and Emma Wilby have distinguished between beneficent “cunning folk” and maleficent “witches” in early modern Britain. While…

Leonard Crow Dog (1942–2021 ) Sicangu (Brûlé) Lakota medicine man, “road man” in the Native American Church, and coauthor with Richard Erdoes of Four Generations…

Crow – Native American nation, also known as Absaroke and Apsáalooke. Their reservation in Montana is a small fraction of territory recognized as theirs by…