Flaherty, Gloria – Flaherty’s volume Shamanism and the Eighteenth Century (1992) has made a major contribution to the historiography of the term shaman. Immediately upon “discovery,” shamans were molded to the preferred stereotypes of Westerners, from “juggler” and charlatan to mentally ill and socially estranged. Flaherty is particularly interested in the reception of the term in Europe and the metamorphosis of the “artist” into the “shaman of higher civilization.”
SOURCE:
Historical Dictionary of Shamanism by Graham Harvey and Robert J. Wallis 2007