Shamans and Traditions (review)

Mihály Hoppál is one of the world's greatest scholars of Eurasian shamanism, and the foremost in his native Hungary. He is the director of the Institute of Ethnology in Hungary's Academy of Sciences, one of the founders and leaders of the International Society for Shamanistic Research, and has been a prolific author and speaker for four decades. Any further publication from him is therefore welcome, but this must count among one of the lesser: crumbs from the master's table rather than a main course. It consists of fifteen short pieces he has published since 1984 in journals or collections, a few of which have been rewritten before being reissued. The translation into English is shaky and occasionally loses sense, and because groups of the papers address similar subjects, a large amount of information gets repeated. There is no attempt to rationalize the papers into a coherent set of arguments, and they are frustratingly allusive, making constant reference to ideas and positions set forth in other works by the same author and many colleagues without any attempt to explain or defend them properly. Hoppál is, moreover, a loosely discursive writer, picking up and abandoning lines of thought rather than following them consistently. Nonetheless, nothing that he produces is going to be without importance, and this book retains a great deal of value.

This is so because it displays both of his traditional strengths: depth of experience and generosity of heart. He has a splendid record as an ethnographer, having repeatedly collected data in various different parts of Siberia and neighboring regions, and this volume has brand-new accounts of shamanic practices observed recently in Buryatia and northeast China. He finds praise for almost all his recent fellow authors on shamanism in an opening survey of literature, and extends this not only to the native peoples in northern Asia who are attempting to revive their indigenous shamanic traditions but to Westerners, following Michael Harner, who have transplanted such traditions to a modern, urban setting. This breadth of sympathy is joined to one of vision. Among the finest essays in the volume is that in which he discusses the role of pain in shamanic practice, using cultural studies to acknowledge that pain thresholds are established by social expectation rather than mere bodily response, and neuroscience to discuss the nature and role of the chemicals involved in sensation. Another chapter uses a case study of a shamanic performance he observed in Hailar, China, to argue for the reestablishment of an acknowledgment that trance is a central component of shamanic working. Here his opponent is his distinguished French colleague Roberte Hamayon, who has condemned that concept as too woolly for scholarly analysis and suggested instead that Eurasian shamanism should be viewed essentially as a hunting rite. To my mind, Hoppál makes his case well, though it depends on the assumption that what he saw in China is indeed normative. The structure and style of the collection means that it is one to be mined rather than traveled, but it is still full of gems.

My problems with the volume are twofold. One set of them arises straightforwardly from the allusive nature of the writing and the lack of coherence. It is all very well repeatedly to refer readers for evidence and arguments to works already published, but many of them are not easily physically accessible to Western readers and are in languages, such as Magyar, that are closed to many Anglophones. As a result, many readers will simply be left unable to assess the nature of what is being said, let alone the value. At different points Hoppál condemns the term "shamanism" itself as too vague and overused, which is fair enough, and directs readers to adopt "shamanhood" or "shaman belief" instead. Nowhere, however, is there an explanation of why either term is superior, and in practice neither is much used, "shamanism" continuing to be employed throughout most of the work as normative and without discussion. The same internal...