Ronald Hutton's Shamans
Historian Professor Ronald Hutton’s Shamans: Siberian Spirituality and the Western Imagination [1] [2001] must surely be the starting point for any serious present-day exploration of shamanism from a British perspective.

Here I summarise the book. My approach is to outline Hutton’s argument while being highly selective with his wealth of supporting examples, except where these are of particular interest for this website or for the original site, www.bytrent.demon.co.uk.

Hopefully, present readers will be encouraged to go on and read Shamans for themselves.

In my usual fashion, I shall be adding comments separately on an ongoing basis. Click on the red links to get to the various parts of the summary and to the comments page.

Shamans
Introduction and Part 1:
Introduction
Ch 1: Siberia
Ch 2: The Siberians
Ch 3: The Religious Impact of Russian Rule
Ch 4: The Evidence on Shamanism
Part 2:
Ch 5: Shamanism: a Confused Concept
Ch 6: Cosmological Considerations
Ch 7: Becoming a Shaman
Ch 8: Shamans as Performers
Ch 9: Further Considerations
Part 3:
Ch 10: How Shamanism Developed
Ch 11: Shamanism in Europe
Ch 12: Neoshamanism
Comments and Notes

NOTE
1 Siberian Spirituality and the Western Imagination
Siberian Shamanism and Western Scholarship would have been a far more appropriate subtitle. 'Spirituality' suggests an enriching personal relationship with God or some near equivalent, whereas the shamanism described in the book was about performance rather than relationship: about enlisting spirit-helpers, principally to cure illness. 'Imagination' suggests artistic inspiration, whereas the the book is about what academics have made of shamanism.     [Back to the main text]