 Your
unique personal myths, operating mostly as “strange attractors”
outside your awareness, are guiding your life’s path. This workshop is
a once in a lifetime opportunity to have one of the world’s foremost
experts help you find the myths you are living and show you how to
find the greatest opportunity for personal transformation precisely in
the dysfunctional parts, that which is no longer working.
Dr. Stanley Krippner is an internationally known and loved teacher,
co-author of both Personal Mythology and The Mythic Path, past
President of the Association for Humanistic Psychology, recipient of
numerous awards and the author of hundreds of articles. There are few
people alive today with such an understanding of how to help you find
these unconscious stories that are living through you.
--Student: John Anderson |
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Recent developments in qualitative research and the innovative use of
conventional investigative methods have provided the tools to bring
both rigor and creativity to the disciplined examination of shamans,
their behavior, and experiences. However, a review of Western
psychological perspectives on shamans reveals several conflicting
perspectives. This chapter focuses on these controversies. The term
shaman is a social construct, one that has been described, not
unfairly, as “a made-up, modern, Western category” (Taussig, 1989, p.
57). This term describes a particular type of practitioner who attends
to the psychological and spiritual needs of a community that has
granted that practitioner privileged status.
Shamans claim to engage in specialized activities that enable them to
access valuable information that is not ordinarily available to other
members of their community (Krippner, 2000). Hence, shamanism can be
described as a body of techniques and activities that supposedly
enable its practitioners to access information that is not ordinarily
attainable by members of the social group that gave them privileged
status. These practitioners use this information in attempts to meet
the needs of this group and its members. Contemporary shamanic
practitioners exist at the band, nomadic–pastoral,
horticultural–agricultural, and state levels of societies. There are
many types of shamans. For example, among the Cuna Indians of Panama,
the abisua shaman heals by singing, the inaduledi specializes in
herbal cures, and the nele focuses on diagnosis.
Link to download the remainder
of the article in this PDF File
©
Copyright Stanley Krippner Ph.D. 2002 Krippner, S. (2002). Shamans and
shamanism: Points and counterpoints. In R.-I. Heinze(Ed.), Proceedings
of the Nineteenth Annual Conference on the Study of Shamanism and
Alternate Modesof Healing (pp. 174-194). Berkeley, CA: Independent
Scholars of Asia. |
