Shamanism and the Eighteenth Century (review)

REVIEWS 181 fact. Her presentation of the history of sexuality needs to be informed by the work of historians—Randolph Trumbach, Thomas Laqueur, and others—and her definition of the family similarly calls for historical grounding by reference to such works as Lenore Davidoff and Catherine Hall's Family Fortunes. Her best chapters are the ones on single novels which reflect generic modes—Lennox's Female Quixote and Radcliffe's Italian (in its comparison to Burney's Cecilia). When she tries to cover an author's entire career, as with Bumey and Austen, her organization impedes her. The final chapter, for instance, audaciously entitled "Jane Austen's Novels, the Romantic Dénouement," deviates from its romantic-realistic purpose into a discussion of Austen's Christian allegory, a discussion that is weakly linked to the general argument. The Excellence of Falsehood is a rich and thoughtful book, spilling over with insights that its generic definitions frustratingly diminish and confine. Janice Farrar Thaddeus Harvard University Gloria Flaherty. Shamanism and the Eighteenth Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992. xv + 320pp. US$35.00. ISBN 0-691-06923-9. Just before I received this review copy, an article on a contemporary Siberian shaman appeared in Natural History (July 1992: 35-41). Obviously both the traditions of tribal healers and our fascination with them continue. As Akira Kurasawa's moving film Dersu Uzala (1975) suggests, those who are caught up in modernity are nonetheless attracted by the mystery and the alterity of cultures open to shamanism. A basic challenge posed by shamans to European hegemony is their implicit denial of the project of Enlightenment, understood as the triumph of reason. Gloria Flaherty relates in lucid prose how it was that the eighteenth century became involved in a double-bind of attraction and rejection with the non-European blend of religion, medicine, and superstition gathered under the rubric of shamanism. There are now various strategies available for including the histories and institutions of putative unreason in a global history. Flaherty relies upon different methods simultaneously . Much of the first part of the book is devoted to careful reporting of the history of the idea of shamanism as received and recorded in Europe. The wildness is constrained by the usual apparatus of positivistic scholarship: scrupulous attention to bibliographic completeness, accuracy in citation and translation, and objectivity in dealing with the sources. The bibliography includes almost fifteen pages ofprimary works in the major European languages, many of them rare travelogues and ethnographic surveys. The history of European encounters with shamanism, primarily in Siberia and in the Americas, is presented in chronological sequence. Every page is packed with information about what interested contemporaries could have known about shamanism. And the amount of knowledge readily available was considerable. Two dozen well-chosen plates showing shaman garb and ritual objects are reproduced, though these might have been enhanced by more detailed commentary, especially about the symbolism involved. Also apparent throughout is Flaherty's awareness of the radical critique directed by historians of science such as Kuhn, Habermas, and Feyerabend against the predominance of European science. It is now both possible and permissible to speak of alternative 182 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 5:2 paradigms, even in the presence of the rigorous positivism required when dealing with sources. Thus, Flaherty discerns changes in the theoretical stance of the European "explorers ," so that they are no longer representatives of a monolithic "progress" or "discovery." By the middle of the century, a generation of trained and organized observers were increasingly willing to take shamanism seriously: "Their very questions once in a while happened to transcend tiie limits of the Newtonian mechanical or quantitative approach to nature. Some even went so far as to probe the occult as a possible source of knowledge " (p. 68). While much of what the shaman did could be dismissed as charlatanism, enough evidence of cures remained to present puzzles. Chapter 4 focuses specifically on the reception of such observations by medical doctors and thinkers in Germany, including Johann Georg Zimmermann, Johann Peter Frank, and Christian Wilhelm Hufeland. This important material could have been, and ought still to be, the subject of a separate monograph, but at least our attention has...