Shamans

David Abram, Ph.D., is an ecologist, philosopher and magician. He has lived and traded magic with indigenous magicians in Indonesia, Nepal, and the Americas. Through his research he has mades some key discoveries that are of interest to us.

Abram discovers that, in contradiction to common western understanding, the primary role of indigenous shamans is in assisting ‘the relation between the human community and the natural landscape.’ This role ‘cannot be fulfilled without long and sustained exposure to wild nature, to its patterns and vicissitudes.’ 82 The Shaman, like us, is attuning himself to his environment through special encounters with it. The aim is for better relations between the human and more-than-human world.

He also concludes, that ‘research in Rural Indonesia & Nepal has shown me that nonhuman nature can be perceived & experienced with far more intensity and nuance than is generally acknowledged in the west.’83

Abram attempts to demystify shamanism by looking to Merleau-Ponty’s reciprocal phenomenology and ideas of the flesh, rather than animism. Rather than claiming that all nonhuman nature has souls and feelings, Abram asserts that ‘defining another being as an inert or passive object is to deny its ability to actively engage us and provoke our senses; we thus block our perceptual reciprocity with that being. ’84 Again, this the sort of framework of reasoning that we have been looking at behind our sensual-encounters with ordinary things.

Shamanism has been around for a long time. Whether communing in the physical presence of nature or virtually through trance, surely there are things we can learn from the actual processes and rituals of shamans? Marcus Coates brings the stark contrast of shamanistic ritual into the contemporary western world in his 2008 film The Plover’s Wing. 85 Coates arranges a meeting with the Mayor of the City of Holon, Israel. He performs a shamanistic ritual for the Mayor to gain insight into a question about the Israel-Palestinian Crisis.

82 David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous, p.21. 83 Ibid. p.27. 84 Ibid, p.27. 85 Marcus Coates in Marcus Coates / TateShots 23 Mar 2009 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BfBgWtAIbRc [accessed 12 June 2020].

Figure. 7 Marcus Coates, The Plover’s Wing, 2008

For me, the whole affect invites a sharing of mutual fictions. The protagonists (and vicariously the viewers) share the heightened experience of a different way of relating to the world. It’s funny, fantastical and fascinating. Nobody believes that Coates is going to solve the IsraelPalestinian Crisis by wearing a badger on his head and talking to an imaginary plover. However, this is not a put down or a stupid trick to show up the Mayor. This film asks what is possible? It raises questions about belief systems and how we relate to one another (human and well as more-than-human). It takes us on a journey from the sublime behaviour of an extreme conflict to the ridiculous badger-on-head performance. I feel there is something of this dichotomy in our journey of exploring sensual-encounters with ordinary things and ‘rethinking who and what we are’. 86

86 Mark Johnson, The Meaning of the Body (Chicago &London: The University of Chicago Press, 2007) p.1.