{"id":9017,"date":"2018-02-06T21:57:32","date_gmt":"2018-02-07T04:57:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=9017"},"modified":"2018-02-09T11:56:50","modified_gmt":"2018-02-09T18:56:50","slug":"on-michael-harner","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=9017","title":{"rendered":"On Michael Harner (1929\u20132018)"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Michael Harner (FSS).<\/p><\/div>\n

The news of Michael Harner’s<\/a> passing has been going around, and of course some magical practitioners have to react by disrespecting him.<\/p>\n

You might well have heard the usual string of insults: he is an academic poser, he’s a fake . . . a cultural imperialist . . . from the “wrong” background . . . caters to the\u00a0 “wrong” people . . . a wannabe.\u00a0 Et cetera.<\/p>\n

This is what you call “virtue-signaling,” in which the speaker tries to demonstrate that his or her virtues, practices, cultural connections, and so on are superior to those of the person being denigrated.<\/p>\n

And perhaps if all the people doing it were themselves shamans of lengthy lineages, it might have worked. But usually they were not. They were merely jealous that an academic anthropologist could reinvent himself as a shaman, form the Foundation for Shamanic Studies<\/a>, train other teachers, and try to re-inject shamanism into Western culture.((In a way, shamanism still existed in the Spiritualist churches, complete with pious fakery, but that is another story.))<\/p>\n

Not just Western culture either \u2014 this is something that his facile detractors do not know about or chose to ignore.<\/p>\n

Although shamanism is a cross-cultural practice, the word itself comes from peoples living in Siberia and Central Asia. And after the end of the Soviet Union, Harner’s Foundation for Shamanic Studies (FSS) had a presence in some of those former Soviet republics starting in the 1990s \u2014 teaching shamanism!<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Irgit Kalzan-ham’s arrest photo.<\/p><\/div>\n

Why was that necessary? Because the enlightened Marxists of the USSR approached shamanism this way:<\/p>\n

The photograph had been taken by the NKVD<\/a> [Soviet secret police] when they arrested [the Tuvan shaman] in 1938. Two years later he died in prison.((Anna Reid,\u00a0The Shaman’s Coat: A Native History of Siberia\u00a0<\/em>(London: Phoenix Books, 2003 [2002]), 108.))<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

<\/a>\"\"All shamans were criminals for ideological purposes!<\/p>\n

Setting out on her research, Anna Reid, author of The Shaman’s Coat: A Native History of Siberia<\/a>\"\" <\/em>encounters two elderly Soviet-era anthropologists who disparage the new post-Soviet native shamans as being just “performers.” And she hears Michael Harner speak at a conference in Moscow but mentions only the fact that the FSS charges for workshops in the USA and sells drums.<\/p>\n

But you have to start with where you are. With so many shamans executed in the 1930s \u2014 although some underground practice survived, the two anthropologists said)\u2014 who is left to remember “the right way”?<\/p>\n

I give the FSS credit for supporting some of the surviving shamans with recognition and with money as detailed on this FSS website page.\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n

(You can also see some revived Mongolian shamanism in the 2009 documentary The Horse Boy<\/em>.)<\/a><\/p>\n

What about those hotel workshops? <\/em>I went to two of them. One, indeed, was in a hotel, in Colorado Springs in the mid-1990s, the introductory workshop, taught by Sandra Ingerman,\u00a0<\/a>and another on “Shamanism and the Spirits of Nature<\/a>,” taught at some lodge on the Utah side of Bear Lake by an FSS teacher from Salt Lake City.<\/p>\n

I will admit that the first workshop seemed a little awkward \u2014 a group of strangers with all the teaching pitched for absolute beginners \u2014 and how else could it be?<\/p>\n

The “Spirits of Nature” workshop, however, lingers with me still. It was almost non-stop journeying, indoors and out, in a group and alone, and by the end of it, my consciousness was definitely altered. When it was time to go, I drove all afternoon on quiet two-lane roads in Wyoming and Utah, avoiding the interstate highway, the way people feel after immersion in a festival \u2014 wanting to postpone the return to mundane world.<\/p>\n

But back to Harner. While I dispute some of his ideas on European shamanism (and that will come out in the current writing project), he took a big important step. You can whimper that ours is not a shamanic culture, or you can claim that you learned shamanism from your grandmother, but for a lot of people, step one to learning about shamanism \u2014 whether you call yourself a shaman<\/em> or not \u2014 was Michael Harner. And that’s a Good Thing.<\/p>\n

UPDATE:<\/strong> A thoughtful and appreciative essay on Harner’s contributions \u2014 and the controversies \u2014 from Kocku von Stuckrad, University of Groningen (Netherlands).<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The news of Michael Harner’s passing has been going around, and of course some magical practitioners have to react by disrespecting him. You might well have heard the usual string of insults: he is an academic poser, he’s a fake . . . a cultural imperialist . . . from the “wrong” background . . […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[11,172],"class_list":["post-9017","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-shamanism","tag-utah"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6xQTg-2lr","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1065,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=1065","url_meta":{"origin":9017,"position":0},"title":"Shamanism and PTSD","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"September 23, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"A recent article in the weekly Colorado Springs Independent discusses using Michael Harner-style (I assume) shamanic techniques for veterans with PTSD.Haggins says alternative practices heal what regular therapy cannot. Through shamanic ritual, he says, he can literally return a part of a soul shed on the battlefield. This is the\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"shamanism\"","block_context":{"text":"shamanism","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=shamanism"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":928,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=928","url_meta":{"origin":9017,"position":1},"title":"The Occult Experience","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"September 7, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"In my office with the fast Ethernet connection, I downloaded the 1987 documentary The Occult Experience. It is available on various bittorent servers, such as here. (There was tie-in with Nevil Drury's 1987 book of the same name, I believe.)Lots of the film is actually older. Some footage goes back\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"movies\"","block_context":{"text":"movies","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=movies"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":4288,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=4288","url_meta":{"origin":9017,"position":2},"title":"Shamanism in Detroit","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"May 22, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"Michael Harner, cover your ears. Despite the new interest in shamanism since the 1970s, the real shamans on the American religious scene (and elsewhere) are certain Pentecostal Christian preachers. Contacting the unseen world while in an altered state of consciousness? Check. Faking when it they have to because the audience\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"shamanism\"","block_context":{"text":"shamanism","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=shamanism"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/metrotimes.com\/polopoly_fs\/1.1308857.1335905678%21\/image\/404902191.jpg_gen\/derivatives\/landscape_335\/404902191.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":398,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=398","url_meta":{"origin":9017,"position":3},"title":"Felicitas Goodman","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"April 1, 2005","format":false,"excerpt":"Word comes of the passing of Felicitas Goodman on 31 March. She was in her early nineties.Born to ethnic German parents in Hungary, she attended the University of Heidelburg. She came to the United States after World War II and worked as a scientific translator before entering graduate school as\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"New Mexico\"","block_context":{"text":"New Mexico","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=new-mexico"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":9037,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=9037","url_meta":{"origin":9017,"position":4},"title":"On Dale Pendell (1947\u20132018)","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"February 9, 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"Every plant is a teacher But as in every crowd There are always A few loudmouths \u2013Dale Pendell I went to town this morning and drinking my Americano at the coffee house while reading the comments on Kocku von Stuckrad's memorial to Michael Harner. But then the screen went all\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"ethnobotany\"","block_context":{"text":"ethnobotany","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=ethnobotany"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"\/\/ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com\/e\/ir?t=soutrocknatub-20&l=am2&o=1&a=1556438036","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":144,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=144","url_meta":{"origin":9017,"position":5},"title":"Heresies Yesterday by the photocopier,\u2026","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"March 17, 2004","format":false,"excerpt":"Heresies Yesterday by the photocopier, Colleague A (Political Science) cornered me. She and Colleague B (Psychology) had been at the local Barnes & Noble store and seen the B&N edition of The Encyclopedia of Heresies and Heretics, which I wrote in 1991 when a friend was acquisitions editor at ABC-Clio\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9017","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9017"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9017\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9036,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9017\/revisions\/9036"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9017"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9017"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9017"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}