Barbara Tedlock - The Woman in the Shamans Body: Reclaiming the Feminine in Religion and Medicine

I thank my grandmother, Nokomis, who quietly but firmly showed me the feminine shamanic path of Ojibwe healing. With her encouragement and that of other powerful women shamansEssie Parrish (Pomo, Northern California), Bayar Odun (Darhat, Mongolia), Nadia Stepanova (Buryat, Russia), and Taln Peruch (Mayan, Guatemala)I have been privileged to participate in a number of feminine shamanic traditions. I would also like to thank my husband, Dennis Tedlock, who has accompanied me during my field research and encouraged me to sharpen my arguments about the primacy of women in shamanism. Without his support this work would never have been completed.

Thanks also to my graduate-school mentor Peter Furst, who introduced me to the anthropological study of shamanism. His own exemplary work, centering on Huichol shamanism and hallucinogens, is considered classic in the field. Many thanks also to the Hungarian scholar of shamanism, Mihly Hoppl, who invited me to participate in several conferences sponsored by The International Society for Shamanistic Research. To Lawrence Sullivan, Director of the Center for the Study of World Religions, who actively encouraged my research in healing and religion during my Senior Fellowship at the Harvard Divinity School, I say thanks so much for your insightful questions and strong support.

For encouragement, information, and suggestions I am most grateful to David Antin, Mariella Bacigalupo, Marjorie Balzer, Warren Barbour, Charles Bernstein, gnes Birtalan, Shelley Bogen, Jamie Borowicz, Erika Bourguignon, Ivan Brady, Michael Brown, Melvin Kimura Bucholtz, Toni Burbank, Allen Christenson, Robbie Davis-Floyd, Lydia Nakashima Degarrod, Sandra Dijkstra, Mary-Charlotte Domandi, Duncan Earle, David Freidel, Eva Fridman, Bonnie Glass-Coffin, Gary Gossen, Alma Gottlieb, Gilbert Herdt, Harry Hunt, Laurel Kendall, Timothy Knab, Gbor Ksa, Carol Laderman, Catherine McCoid, Sally Mennen, Sarunas Milisauskas, Peggy Nelson, Donald Pollock, Marla Powers, Marina Rose-man, Jerome Rothenberg, Beth Savage, Stacey Schaefer, Douglas Sharon, Joan Tapper, Edith Turner, Anne Waldman, and David Young together with my late colleagues, Eva Hunt and Linda Schele.

The work of researching and writing this book was supported by the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, the School of American Research in Santa Fe, New Mexico, the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Buffalo, the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, and the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard University.

PART ONE
Reclaiming History

H ALF A CENTURY ago, as archaeologists worked in the wooded Pavlov Hills of the Czech Republic, they made a remarkable discovery. During the excavation of the Upper Paleolithic site known as Doln Vstonice, they found a pair of shoulder blades from a mammoth. The bones had been placed so as to form the two sides of a pitched roof, one of them leaning against the other. Beneath them was a human skeleton, and in the earth that covered it and on the bones themselves were traces of red ocher. The body had been painted red before it was laid to rest.

If nothing more had been found in this grave, it would have added little to what was already known about Ice Age peoples and their customs. During the Upper Paleolithic, corresponding to the final years of the Ice Age, about sixty thousand years ago, people already had the same anatomy as modern human beings. In Eurasia, most of them lived not in caves but in the dark coniferous forests and wide-open steppes that lay beyond the reach of the glaciers.