shamanism, science and thing-knowledge

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1 Thibault Lamadieu. Shamanism, science and thing-knowledge A comparative study between modern science and shamanism: their way of accessing or creating knowledge. Abstract: When talking about knowledge, precisely true, justified belief, we mainly think about epistemological considerations. I propose to apply these considerations to shamanism and shamanic knowledge in particular. I believe shamanism and science can not only be compared, but that there are many common points which make us wonder about their potential compatibility. Mircea Eliade, a Romanian historian of religion, defines shamanism as the practices in which: "a spiritual leader traveled to an upper or lower world through a controlled state of ecstasy (trance) and conversed with spirits in those other worlds for the benefit of the community (or individuals within the community)" The word shaman originates from the Turkic-Tungus word for healer, meaning literally he or she who knows. In Australia aboriginal shaman are called Kadji (which means clever man or clever woman). We could go on for hours and always see that in every shamanic society, the shaman is mainly associated with knowledge (and secondly healing). Many shaman in the Amazon use entheogens 1 to induce an Altered State of Consciousness (ASC), the most commonly used are Ayahuasca 2 and tobacco syrup. The drug-induced ASC allow shaman to gain knowledge by conversing with spirits; when asked about how they discovered about the use of plants 3 , they usually answer that Ayahuasca spoke to them and told them about the use and location of the plants. Other ASC, not necessarily induced by drugs, have equivalent results in the end: shaman are able to retrieve knowledge from their interaction with the spirit world. This retrieval is dual, it is active in the sense that shaman do not contemplate the world from their altered point of view 1 An entheogen is a psychoactive substance used in a religious or shamanic context. 2 Ayahuasca is a brew made of Banisteriopsis vine and psychotria viridis, the first contains the main active ingredient and the other contains an inhibitor preventing the breakdown of the active neurotransmitters thus allowing the brew to be effective. 3 Narby (1999)

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A comparative study between modern science and shamanism: their way of accessing or creating knowledge. I wrote this in 2008 for an "introduction to epistemology" class during my first year of college.

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Page 1: Shamanism, science and thing-knowledge

1

Thibault Lamadieu.

Shamanism, science and thing-knowledge

A comparative study between modern science and shamanism: their way of accessing or

creating knowledge.

Abstract: When talking about knowledge, precisely true, justified belief, we mainly think about

epistemological considerations. I propose to apply these considerations to shamanism and

shamanic knowledge in particular. I believe shamanism and science can not only be

compared, but that there are many common points which make us wonder about their

potential compatibility.

Mircea Eliade, a Romanian historian of religion, defines shamanism as the practices in which:

"a spiritual leader traveled to an upper or lower world through a controlled state of ecstasy

(trance) and conversed with spirits in those other worlds for the benefit of the community (or

individuals within the community)"

The word shaman originates from the Turkic-Tungus word for healer, meaning literally “he or she

who knows”. In Australia aboriginal shaman are called Kadji (which means clever man or clever

woman). We could go on for hours and always see that in every shamanic society, the shaman

is mainly associated with knowledge (and secondly healing).

Many shaman in the Amazon use entheogens1 to induce an Altered State of Consciousness

(ASC), the most commonly used are Ayahuasca2 and tobacco syrup. The drug-induced ASC

allow shaman to gain knowledge by conversing with spirits; when asked about how they

discovered about the use of plants3, they usually answer that Ayahuasca spoke to them and

told them about the use and location of the plants.

Other ASC, not necessarily induced by drugs, have equivalent results in the end: shaman are

able to retrieve knowledge from their interaction with the spirit world. This retrieval is dual, it is

active in the sense that shaman do not contemplate the world from their altered point of view

1 An entheogen is a psychoactive substance used in a religious or shamanic context. 2 Ayahuasca is a brew made of Banisteriopsis vine and psychotria viridis, the first contains the main active ingredient and the

other contains an inhibitor preventing the breakdown of the active neurotransmitters thus allowing the brew to be effective. 3 Narby (1999)

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but undertake a spiritual journey to gain knowledge. It is passive in the sense that shaman do not

create knowledge by an intellectual process but accept like true what they retrieve.

It is commonly believed that shamanic knowledge is closest to religion because it does not, like

modern science, put the world in question.

In order to clarify the way shamanism is seen in regard to science, we will try to establish some

common points between shamanism’s and science’s quest for knowledge, to be able to see, at

the end, if there can be any possible interaction between those two types of knowledge.

To do this we will first ask ourselves about what shamans and scientist need to do to create

Knowledge.

Secondly we will wonder about the nature of these two types of knowledge.

In a third part we will show the importance of the social context when talking about knowledge

and will bring about the concept of socially true and justified belief.

Finally, we will wonder about the possibility of transferring shamanic knowledge to science.

Let’s start off postulating that shaman and scientists must use a form of conceptual abstraction

in order to gain access to knowledge.

Michael Winkelman has an interesting theory about cave drawings made by shaman,

saying they represented “shamanic activities and altered states of consciousness”4. Nicholas

Humphrey5 contributes to this thesis, comparing those cave drawings to drawings made by

Nadia, a 3 year-old autistic girl6 and concluding that cave drawings could very well be a sign of

mental limits shown by shaman. Specifically the incapacity to use conceptual language, thus

conceptual thought. As he points out, Nadia loses her extraordinary talent after being taught

how to speak. Winkelman interprets it as a concrete example that shaman were seemingly able

to separate themselves from conceptual thought, thus showing a strange ability to see things

“as they truly are”. He adds that shaman would probably be consciously limiting themselves,

attaining an ASC where they do not see a horse but this horse. Thus allowing them to represent

essentially what they saw without any conceptual bias.

Another modern similarity we could find would be Picasso’s famous work “The Bull”7 where he

dissects (in the artistic sense) a drawing of a bull to discover its essential presence. He

4 Winkelman (2002) 5 Humphrey (1998) 6 See appendix for Illustration 7 See appendix for Illustration

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consciously regressed intellectually to feel “la presence des choses”8. It is important to note the

effort made by Pablo Picasso to show the propinquity of Essence and Concept. According to

Bergson, the Concept, as an intellectual creation, comes from a desire to share ideas, feelings

and information without having to undertake an extensive description, so the essence is distilled

into a concept thus making it universal and also infinitely personal.

To seize the essence of things is also to have the capacity to separate oneself from concepts,

this is the ability shaman seemingly developed as we saw with the cave art example, it is an

ability that requires tremendous intellectual effort if not innate (if the shaman are not born

autistic).

Shamanism implies deconstruction; I strangely found the best and most adequate description of

this deconstruction in a letter that the French poet Arthur Rimbaud wrote (when he was fifteen

years old) this is an extract from the letter9:

“Je dis qu'il faut être voyant, se faire voyant.

Le Poète se fait voyant par un long, immense et raisonné dérèglement de tous les sens.

Toutes les formes d'amour, de souffrance, de folie ; il cherche lui-même, il épuise en lui tous les

poisons, pour n'en garder que les quintessences. Ineffable torture où il a besoin de toute la foi,

de toute la force surhumaine, où il devient entre tous le grand malade, le grand criminel, le

grand maudit, − et le suprême Savant ! − Car il arrive à l'inconnu ! »

Rimbaud expresses the objective of this deconstruction as being access to knowledge.

So basically shaman need deconstruction (or abstraction from certain concepts) to gain

knowledge.

This is similar, in a sense, to the way science evolves. By postulating new theories, demonstrating

them and having them accepted by the scientific community, scientists can create new

models, which have each time a better explanatory capacity. But to be able to postulate new

theories requires being aware of the current paradigms in place, their limits, and to extract

oneself from them and their implications. In order to shed a new look upon the field of study. So

it is a form of abstraction, much more limited and partial than the deconstruction operated by

shaman, but an abstraction nevertheless.

As Kuhn says:

8 French poet Yves Bonnefoy defines in « Les Planches courbes » a type of unstained, non-thought, pure reality

with this expression. 9 I could not find any appropriate translation of this text, and am not in any way bold enough to attempt a

translation.

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“Almost always the men who achieve these fundamental inventions of a new paradigm have

been either very young or very new to the field whose paradigm they change.”10

To conclude our first part we can say that both shamanic and scientific approaches have to

proceed to a form of abstraction to gain knowledge, yet this abstraction is obtained through a

conscious deconstruction that leads to an altered state of consciousness in the case of

shamanism, and through a methodological reconsideration in the case of science.

In this second part we find a fundamental difference between both approaches:

When we speak of abstraction from concepts we actually mean abstraction from a set of

concepts or beliefs, we could say abstraction from a paradigm but then it could only be

applied to science and not shamanism: the fundament of shamanistic knowledge is it’s

cosmogony (as theory of creation). Eliade explains that it is a more or less rigid set of belief

completely integrated by shaman and their community. He adds that this cosmogony has

holistic pretentions (in the sense that those fundamental beliefs pretend to explain completely

the world’s creation).

Those beliefs are vital to the shaman, he needs to know what he’s communicating with, what he

is hearing and what he is learning. By knowing that the gods created ayahuasca as a teacher

and spiritual guide, the Shipibo shaman can interpret (some shaman prefer the term translate)

the enormous amount of information he gains during his journeys. Many shaman say that spirits

speak a specific language that any shaman has to learn before being able to perform11. Their

cosmogony provides a common model that acts as a link between both spiritual and material

world.

The characteristic of this type of knowledge is precisely that it is a translation or an interpretation,

and is closely linked with the group’s cosmogony. If a Shipibo shaman of Peru says that tobacco

is what the spirits crave, an Aboriginal Kadji (a shaman from Australia) will answer that it is the

heat and fire the spirits wish to embrace, and a Haitian Ougan (voodoo priest) will say that Lwas

(spirits) like tobacco smoke because it allows them to have a material form and interact with the

material world. All three end up calling forth spirits by using tobacco smoke, but their way of

interpreting the phenomenon is different. These different beliefs are all carefully codified in

rituals; Mihály Hoppál, the director of the Ethnological institute of Budapest defines a shaman as:

10 Kuhn (1962) 11 Narby (1999)

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“a person who is an expert in keeping together the multiple codes through which this complex

belief system appears, and has a comprehensive view of them in their mind with certainty of

knowledge. ”12

Eliade and Lévy-Strauss13 point out that the content of this set of belief (cosmogony) is not as

important as its explanatory capacity which prevents the shaman and eventually his patient

from suffering from what psychoanalysts call “suffering from unintelligibility”. In Freudian

psychoanalysis a patient’s understanding of his suffering is essential to “cure”.

Quoting Jerome Neu14, a philosopher who analyzed Lévy-Strauss’s work on shaman:

“What is essential to the effectiveness of shamanism is the provision of a theory or conceptual

scheme that enables the patient to reintegrate an otherwise alien experience”

Science, on the other hand, has a different approach to knowledge; it is in a sense blind, and

fumbles trying to separate true knowledge from false. It is then much more thorough and

effective if it is demonstrated. By fumbling in a methodic way science avoids getting lost.

Furthermore, scientific knowledge must follow a codified scientific method in order to have the

approval of the scientific community, so to be considered as true.

As there are many sciences, there are many fundamental paradigms, however, as Kuhn says,

they do not pretend to explain it all:

“… the puzzles that constitute normal science exist only because no paradigm that provides a

basis for scientific research ever completely resolves all its problems.” 7

So to conclude our second point, we may say that both shamanism and science use a set of

codified practices to create knowledge. Those codes reveal the presence of an underlying

complex belief system. A model that can codify their interactions with the world. Yet, we see

that shamanic knowledge is not meant to be universally applied and closely relies on the

society’s cosmogony. It is entirely subjective, and only evolves by accumulating knowledge or

by an external influence. Whereas scientific knowledge seems to tend towards objectivity, or at

least has codified its practices to avoid subjectivity as much as possible. Science evolves by

renewing its paradigms and by accumulation of knowledge.

12 Hoppál (2005) 13 Lévy-Strauss (1963) 14 Neu (1975)

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In this part we will try to show that both shamanism and science end up creating a similar

true justified belief. Yet we will not use the classical conception of true justified belief as it was

never meant to be applied to something else than scientific knowledge. Instead we will prefer a

sociologic point of view that implies a premise we will now explain and justify.

This premise is that scientific knowledge and shamanic knowledge can only be qualified as true

and justified belief when surrounded by a social context. In fact if we try to extract shamanic

knowledge from its context (exempli gratia shamanic knowledge is commonly seen in the

scientific community as a fraud) it loses its true and justified aspect. We consider that the true

and justified aspects of knowledge are granted by the social community, and that they can be

different depending on the nature of the community. If shamanic knowledge was to be

presented to a scientific society (our western society) it would be judged with our socially

accepted scientific criterions and then be discarded or accepted. So this knowledge’s validity

in its original context is not guaranteed to remain after being confronted to another.

We will now try to define what makes knowledge socially considered as justified and true in both

shamanic and scientific societies.

Mircea Eliade defines three ways of becoming a shaman; there is heredity, vocation and

choice. He adds that those who choose to become shaman are a minority. He explains it saying

that shamanism is a one way path to self-destruction.

As Rimbaud says it is a complete and permanent poisoning of the body, the shaman becomes

his own social role, by undertaking the initiation, by poisoning his body with lethal doses of drugs,

by fasting during months, by abstinence and by limiting all types of social interaction. He then

becomes unable to perform any other type of duty than his. He is trapped in his role. We

interpret Eliade’s observation as a social, self-preservation mechanism. As he points out,

knowledge is considered in all shamanic societies, to be a double edged sword. As shaman can

heal they can also wound. To prevent this, the path to shamanism was made to be a one way

trip. So that if the shaman were to harm rather than heal, they would lose their social status, thus

their sole purpose in life.

In the end the shaman’s purpose is to be immediately helpful to society. “Fundamental

research” is undertaken only during the initiation phase, the rest of his life being dedicated to

use this fundamental knowledge to serve his community. And his knowledge is socially justified

by its usefulness. So if the knowledge gained by shaman through their journey can be turned into

something useful, like thing-knowledge, then this knowledge is socially justified. The true aspect

of shamanic knowledge cannot be separated from its justified aspect, as both directly depend

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on the community’s belief: Truth originates from the belief in the whole cosmogony and

Justification originates from the shaman’s legitimacy.

I believe this idea of socially justified knowledge can be applied to science: if scientific

knowledge can be applied to reality and in the end produce a socially useful knowledge then it

is justified.

A good example would be to look at the funds granted to fundamental research and compare

them to the funds granted to applied research. The second receives much more money than

the first. The image common people have of science is through electronics, medicine; basically

science is judged by its productivity. This shows that knowledge gained by science is socially

justified if it can be applied to serve a purpose. And if this knowledge is considered valid by the

scientific community, then it is also socially considered as true (in the classical sense of truth) until

another paradigm or theory proves it wrong.

Bringing an end to our third part, we can now say that both shamanic and scientific knowledge

are socially true and justified belief.

If those types of knowledge depend on their social context, could there be a way of

transferring knowledge between shaman and scientists?

In this fourth part we will try to answer this question using Davis Baird’s concept/definition of thing

knowledge15, and then try to apply it as faithfully as possible to curare, a complex preparation

discovered in Venezuela, that acts as a paralyzing muscle relaxant, and is only effective when

applied parenterally (by intravenous or by direct application on a wound). It was and still is

commonly used by hunter-gatherer tribes to kill animals by asphyxia without poisoning the meat.

Basically Baird says that knowledge can be embedded in an artifact if this artifact can

accomplish a function, and by function he means a crafted and controlled phenomenon.

It must be added that while Baird explains his theory, he abandons a few classical

epistemological ideas like the fact that knowledge is a true justified belief. Baird tries to expand

this definition of knowledge by removing the “belief”, as he finds there is knowledge that does

not contain or imply any belief. In the case of curare, it does not matter whether the creator (or

15 Baird (2002)

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finders) believes it was a gift from god, a spirit in liquid form, or a really useful combination of

toxins, the important thing is that curare accomplishes its function.

He also expands the sense of the word true to comprise the idea of “working” truth: he uses the

example of a “true” wheel, which is simply a perfectly useful wheel. He adds:

“A public, regular, reliable phenomenon over which we have material mastery bears a kind of

working knowledge of the world and runs true in this material sense of truth.” 11

Baird formulates five criterions he believes to be the essential features of scientific truth:

First of all detachment: A scientific truth can be applied, used and depended upon even if

extracted from its initial context of discovery. Curare fulfills this criterion as it has been used in

surgery (amongst other fields) as an anesthetic.

The second and third feature are Efficacy and Longevity: A scientific truth has to be reliable (at

least during a predetermined period of time) to fulfill an objective.

Curare as prepared by shaman and then scientists has had many different applications, from

hunting to healing. The fact that curare works remains true throughout experimentation and

time.

The fourth feature is connection: Scientific knowledge has to link human though with the world

(we detail this feature later on).

As used by shaman, curare connected them with the world because it was concrete evidence

that they were in touch with the spirit world. As re-appropriated by doctors, it shows that their

beliefs on how the body works are connected with how curare actually works.

The fifth feature is objectivity: It is not enough to wish for the artifact to work, it has to be actually

working. Well curare’s effectiveness has already been demonstrated, and the fact that it is used

to lower one’s consciousness to anesthesia would be enough to show that as Baird says “The

world’s voice has priority on the relationship between the world and us”.

We could now qualify curare as thing-knowledge but we have yet to specify a little more this

concept of function: Baird defines two conceptions of function: thick function which he ties to a

subjective concept of knowledge (linked with intention-driven knowledge) and thin function,

tied with an objective concept of knowledge which he related to Popper’s minimal criterion of

knowledge, in very few words: “being capable of being grasped by somebody”.

As he points out, the idea of intention is problematic: he gives out the example of photo-

multiplier tube which were originally developed as part of a research program but ended up

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being used in direct-reading spectrometers. They were detached from their original context and

thus abide by the first criteria yet the intention that led to their creation was not to be used as

reliable tool. This is why it does not carry out a clear connection between human thought and

the world: “Function connects how an artifact behaves with how we want it to behave”. So in a

sense they do not clearly fulfill the fourth feature. In the thick sense of function, this would imply

that photo-multiplier tubes are not true. We now understand why Baird chooses to stick to the

thin conception of function.

However, this choice underlines a few problems in this theory:

In the photo-multiplier tube example, Baird says that the tubes were not engineered to be

reliable as they were not meant to be used as a tool, and had to be manually and individually

tested to confirm their reliability of use in spectrometers. So in the end when extracted from their

context the tubes did not always respond to the second and third feature of thing knowledge.

And so were not, strictly speaking, proper thing-knowledge. So Baird’s both concept of function

are problematic in a sense. We could try to accommodate his wish to ignore intention by

emphasizing on the necessity to provide the technique used to create an artifact. This

technique would carry within, some implicit information about the artifact’s intended use

without raising all the epistemological problems that are inherent to the notion of intention.

However it seems very hard to embed an artifact’s crafting method inside the artifact itself.

So I decided to see as problematic Baird’s choice to ignore intention in his definition of thing-

knowledge. This is because in our case, curare has absolutely no worth if the method used to

create it is not provided with it.

We cannot separate the artifact from the technique used to craft it: curare’s effectiveness

depends on its method of preparation, thus on one’s intention: if it is for hunting it will be boiled

during two to four days depending on the strength and some snake venom or poisonous ants

will be added, if it is for warfare a more potent plant than the one used for hunting will be boiled,

if it is for traditional healing only the stem will be crushed and added to the pre heated but not

boiled brew (so that curare would be orally effective when normally it is not).

Finally, if intended for anesthesia (as it was used by doctors in the 1940’s) a calculated dose was

injected and an artificial lung was used to avoid the patient’s death by choking.

In order to create an anesthetic or a muscle relaxant from curare, doctors had to know it’s

different properties, this could be achieved by experimentation but in this case curare would not

be thing-knowledge in the strict sense of the word, but it could also have been done by simply

learning from the shaman or hunters who made curare about it’s different ways of use.

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If we consider thing knowledge as the end result of an intellectual effort, we can see that there

are ways in which shamanic knowledge can be passed on to science.

-“Translating” the end thing-knowledge created by shaman into concepts understandable by

scientists. A poison for hunting becomes a non-depolarizing muscle relaxant. A gift of the gods

becomes an alkaloid blocking neuromuscular signals. This method of knowledge transfer may

seem obvious but it deserved to be mentioned as this knowledge remains socially considered as

true and justified thanks to this “Re-appropriation of knowledge”.

-The other way would be to “translate” completely the whole shamanic belief system, thus

allowing scientists to reproduce the progression that led to the creation of curare. Or to express

in scientific terms what shaman see during their trances and altered states of consciousness.

However there are still many blanks in the way science sees shamanism, and it still cannot

explain why shaman are able to retrieve useful knowledge from what an exterior observer would

call introspection.

To end our fourth part we could say that shamanism and science have few ways of transferring

their knowledge, the only point where they are comparable is concerning thing-knowledge.

And even there, we still note some discrepancies between a shamanic vision of thing

knowledge and a scientific one.

Today there are very few shamanic societies remain, and all are meant to disappear or to be

kept artificially alive. Among these remaining societies all have had some sort of contact with

our western society, sometimes this contact ended up in an exchange of knowledge, more

often knowledge was stolen and the creators never rewarded (the indigenous people of the

Amazon let their position be known on the subject by holding a conference a week before the

“Earth Summit” in Rio in 1992), or imposed (e.g. Christianization of north and south America and

Africa).

In this essay, I have made reference to many fields of knowledge: I believe epistemology

understood as theory of knowledge should not in any way be limited regarding its field of

application, therefore I have invoked disciplines as various as archeology, cognitive evolution,

psychology anthropology, poetry and painting… I have tried to avoid overuse of random

examples and to give this essay a structure. However, I am aware that I leave many questions

unanswered. The main goal behind this hubbub is to show that there are many paths to

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knowledge, intertwined, and intersecting at certain key moments; modern science and

shamanism being only two examples among many others.

What conclusions can we establish?

Well, first of all that there are many similarities between scientific and shamanic knowledge and

it is epistemologically very hard to justify that shamanism is a fraud.

Secondly that one is not better than another, each of them accomplishes the function it has

given itself.

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Appendix.

Above is a picture was drawn by Nadia when she was 3 years old.

Underneath is a detail of horses drawn in the Chauvet cave in Ardèche (France).

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Here is a reproduction of Picasso’s work “The Bull” done between December 1945 and January 1946.

A description of this work can be found here.

The bulls are represented in chronological order, from left to right and top to bottom.

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References:

- Baird, Davis «Thing Knowledge – Function and Truth », Techné Vol.6, 2002, p.13-27.

- Eliade, Mircea «Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy», Princeton University Press, Princeton,

2004.

- Humphrey, Nicholas «Commentary on Michael Winkelman, ‘Shamanism and cognitive evolution’»,

Cambridge Archeological Journal, Vol. 12, 2002, p.91-93.

- Humphrey, Nicholas « Cave Art, Autism, and the Evolution of the Human Mind», Cambridge

Archeological Journal, Vol. 8, 1998, p.165-176.

- Hoppál, Mihály « Sámánok Eurázsiában », Academic press, Budapest, 2005.

- Kuhn, Thomas «The Structure of Scientific Revolutions », University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1962.

-Laporte, Paul and Einstein Albert « Cubism and Relativity with a Letter of Albert Einstein », Art Journal,

Vol. 25, 1966, p. 246-248.

- Lévy-Strauss, Claude « The effectiveness of symbols », Structural Anthropology Vol.1, 1963, p.186-205.

- Narby, Jeremy « The Cosmic Serpent », Penguin/Putnam editions, New-York, 1999.

- Neu, Jerome « Lévy-Strauss on Shamanism », Man - New Series, Vol.10, June 1975 p.285-292.

- Winkelman, Michael « Shamanism and cognitive evolution », Cambridge Archeological Journal, Vol. 12,

2002, p.71-101.