a practical definition of shamanism

To think in terms of shamanism, it helps to think of what your identity might be if there was no category to describe it. It has been said that even the very haibtuation to the use of language causes us to think in terms of abstracted conceptual categories which do not, in actual fact, exist. Thus Lacan states that by virtue of learning to use language in a conventional fashion we accept ‘castration’. Shamanism, however, is a reversal of castration in this Lacanian sense – although never quite to the degree that we can fully escape society’s limitations and conventional interpretations of us. Think of an identity – your own – without a category or name to describe it, and you might conjure up the image of a dark flame, forever producing your subjectivity without a name. As it flickers and changes – so does your identity. But there is no word or concept that can fully and adequately name it.