The politics of wisdom

I think there is a tendency of the academic literature to focus on the low end of shamanism.  This is the shamanism adapted to circumstances where the individual or the group is under threat of being annihilated.  Obviously academics are keen to romanticize this low end, a bit, since it seems so extreme and so far removed from their own experiences, that it seems almost inviting.  And to talk about the plight of people who suffer oppression is going to endear you, rather than invite censure from other academics.

 

But there is also the high end of shamanism, where a group’s spiritual thrust is consolidated by actual power and riches.   Here there is also magical participation, and in such a way that it may bypass the use of language when it comes to trying to communicate the experience to people of other cultures.

 

So there is a high end and low end of shamanism.

 

And in any case there is no escaping reality.  Those who live in the present as if they were living in the past are also participating in material reality.  Only spiritual reality has a commanding power.  Material reality has none (despite the fact that ideologues of all sorts and health professionals demand of people that they begin immediately living in the present).  Paradoxically, whatever any of us does, whether right or wrong, or half-assed or intelligently considered, involves participating in the material present and in reality (even if our heads are elsewhere).

 

There just simply isn’t a materialist purism that can demand that we draw all of the bits of ourselves together – all the parts that are scattered into the future or the past – and combine them all to live in the here and now.  Someone with an ideological agenda can demand this, but wisdom itself never can.

 

Even in the study of shamanism, there are too many distortions.