El ritual chamánico de la ayahuasca ha sido adoptado, adaptado y reinventado en contextos urbanos y cosmopolitas de diferentes países del mundo, un proceso que ha estado fuertemente permeado por prácticas y creencias de tipo new age. Una de las versiones locales de este fenómeno se conoce en Colombia como “tomas de yajé”, donde participan citadinos no indígenas de clase media y alta en busca de alteridad tradicional e inspiración espiritual. La investigación que dio origen a este artículo se basa principalmente en observaciones etnográficas y entrevistas, gracias a las cuales se analizaron las maneras en que se interpreta esta forma de chamanismo, indagando particularmente sobre los usos y sentidos del concepto de espiritualidad en las narrativas de los adeptos a las tomas. Los resultados son discutidos a la luz de teorías sobre las subjetividades y las religiosidades en la modernidad, lo cual permite comprender mejor los fundamentos socioculturales y las implicaciones de esta espiritualización del chamanismo. Se concluye que el giro subjetivo de la modernidad tardía es un factor clave para entender la reciente valoración del ritual, el cual se ha convertido, paradójicamente, en un vehículo para la difusión de valores individualistas.

Religious leaders refrain from sex and food across human societies. Researchers argue that this avoidance influences people's perceptions of leaders’ underlying traits, but few, if any, quantitative data exist testing these claims. Here we show that shamans in a small-scale society observe costly prohibitions and that observers infer cooperativeness, religious belief, difference from normal humans and supernatural power from shamans’ adherence to special taboos. We investigated costly prohibitions on shamanic healers, known as sikerei, among the rainforest horticulturalist Mentawai people of Siberut Island. We found that shamans must observe permanent taboos on various animals, as well as prohibitions on sex and food during initiation and ceremonial healing. Using vignettes, we evaluated Mentawai participants’ inferences about taboo adherence, testing three different but not mutually exclusive hypotheses: cooperative costly signalling, credibility-enhancing displays and supernatural otherness. We found support for all three: Mentawai participants infer self-denying shamans to be (a) cooperative, (b) sincere believers in the religious rules and (c) dissimilar from normal humans and with greater supernatural powers. People's inferences about religious self-denial are multidimensional and consistent with several functional accounts.

Armand Tagoona (1926–1991) was born in Naujaat (Repulse Bay, Northwest Territories) in 1926, from an Inuk mother and a German father. Born as a Roman Catholic, he converted to Anglicanism. In 1969, he founded a new independent religious group affiliated to the Anglican Church in Qamani’tuaq (Baker Lake, Northwest Territories): the Arctic Christian Fellowship (ACF). In this paper, we examine his life briefly as well as this very first “Inuit church” he created. We argue that Tagoona played the role of a mediator encompassing various religious traditions and various cultures at a time when solid boundaries separated all these institutions. In bridging them, Tagoona’s church turned to be very innovative and aimed at more religious autonomy, while being fundamentally guided by the words of God. Tagoona’s church carries conversionist, reformist and utopian aspects at the same time.

Shamans, including medicine men, mediums, and the prophets of religious movements, recur across human societies. Shamanism also existed among nearly all documented hunter-gatherers, likely characterized the religious lives of many ancestral humans, and is often proposed by anthropologists to be the “first profession,” representing the first institutionalized division of labor beyond age and sex. In this article, I propose a cultural evolutionary theory to explain why shamanism consistently develops and, in particular, (1) why shamanic traditions exhibit recurrent features around the world; (2) why shamanism professionalizes early, often in the absence of other specialization; and (3) how shifting social conditions affect the form or existence of shamanism. According to this theory, shamanism is a set of traditions developed through cultural evolution that adapts to people's intuitions to convince observers that a practitioner can influence otherwise unpredictable, significant events. The shaman does this by ostensibly transforming during initiation and trance, violating folk intuitions of humanness to assure group members that he or she can interact with the invisible forces that control uncertain outcomes. Entry requirements for becoming a shaman persist because the practitioner's credibility depends on his or her “transforming.” This contrasts with dealing with problems that have identifiable solutions (such as building a canoe), in which credibility hinges on showing results and outsiders can invade the jurisdiction by producing the outcome. Shamanism is an ancient human institution that recurs because of the capacity of cultural evolution to produce practices adapted to innate psychological tendencies.

This paper explores one aspect of the way in which cult-iconography of the later Iron Age and Roman periods in non-Classical Europe broke the rules of mimetic (life-copying) representation, with, reference to a particular motif: the triple horn. The presence of three-horned images within the iconographic repertoire of western Europe during this period clearly illustrates two aspects of such rule-breaking. On the one hand, the image of the triple-horned bull – well-known in the archaeological record, particularly of Roman Gaul – exemplifies a recurrent Gallo-Roman and Romano-British tradition in which realism was suppressed in favour of emphasis to the power of three. On the other hand, the triple-horned emblem is not confined to the adornment of bulls but may, on occasion, be transferred to ‘inappropriate’ images, both of animals which are naturally hornless and of humans. Such emblematic transference, with its consequence of dissonance and contradiction in the visual message, on the one hand, and the presence of symbolism associated with boundaries and transition, on the other, suggests the manipulation of motifs in order to endow certain images with a particular symbolic energy, born of paradox, the deliberate introduction of disorder or chaos and the expression of liminality. The precise meaning conveyed by such iconographic ‘anarchy’ is impossible to grasp fully but – at the least – appears to convey an expression of ‘otherness’ in which order imposed by empirical observation of earthly ‘reality’ is deemed irrelevant to other states of being and to the supernatural world.

The repertoire of cult-iconography produced in Gaul and Britain during the Iron Age and Roman periods contains a group of images that are a blend of human and animal forms. Such pieces are generally interpreted as depictions of divinities, but while it remains probable that they are expressive of cult perceptions, there is a need to re-evaluate their function and identity. The hybridity of the images suggests meanings associated with boundary-crossing, risk and the challenge to ‘normative’ concepts. It is argued here that such contradictive and liminal representations might be identified with transgression between earthworld and spiritworld, and that monstrous images perhaps express the identity of individuals who, within the context of ritual practice, habitually ‘moved’ between worlds, by means of trance and altered states of consciousness. It may be that, in the context of Gallo-British cosmologies, images with antler-head-dresses, horns or other animal attributes should be identified as shamans rather than as gods.

The argument that shamanism is the key that unlocks the hidden meaning of rock art continues to provoke debate over three decades after it was first proposed. In a recent article in Antiquity (86: 696–706), David Lewis-Williams and David Pearce defend the argument that nineteenth-century ethnographies provide evidence for a trance dance and shamanic healing that are vital to understanding southern African rock art. In this reply, Anne Solomon challenges the claim that the ethnographic evidence describes shamanism and trance healing and argues that elision of southern San (/Xam) and Kalahari San practices in a single narrative has obscured important differences. The author suggests that there is no evidence that dances or trance states were connected with healing in /Xam society. These confusions, it is argued, undermine key aspects of the shamanistic interpretation of rock art.

Cave paintings and first-hand ethnographic accounts from living peoples have led to the notion that southern African spiritual experts routinely mediated with the other world through energetic dances leading to the trance state. The evidence for this idea has been challenged in recent years, and the importance of the trance dance diminished accordingly. The authors confront these criticisms and place the shamanistic dance back on centre stage—with important consequences not only for the study of San peoples, but for wider prehistoric interpretations.

The author shows how houses in the northern Baltic were constructed using two realities: the reality of timber and the equally potent reality of spirits supporting and controlling the fate of structures. Excavations in seventeenth-century Tornio (now in modern-day Finland) showed that houses were furnished with special offerings when founded and refurbished, while evidence from living folklore suggested that the houses themselves were originally given spiritual personalities and were treated as members of the family. As more modern thinking took hold, this spirituality was transferred to the more mobile and skittish household sprites.

At a hill-top site in the Korrannaberg, where there is a water source and a sandy arena embraced by a rocky ridge, the author persuasively evokes a lively prehistoric ritual centre, with rock gongs, reverberating echoes, dancing and trance.