Shamanism and the Eighteenth Century (review)

Goethe Yearbook 299 presentation. Once again the romantic mentality is forced into a tame interrelationship with the surrounding world. That romanticism, especially early romanticism, is predominanüy a movement of disorientation, disbelief in totality, fragmentation, and "world-historical" irony is ignored in this book as well as the research of the last decades which has upheld this view of romanticism. We encounter mis attitude for instance in the early Schlegel's unyielding critique of institutions of his time such as the family, morality, the university, and academic disciplines, as well as almanacs representing the Zeitgeist, or in Novalis, who meticulously fulfilled his duties toward institutions but questioned them perhaps even more profoundly than Schlegel through his poetic and philosophical work: Ich lebe bei Tage Voll Glauben und Mut Und sterbe die Nächte In heiliger Glut. Similar observations could be made with regard to Hoffmann, Eichendorff, Chamisso, and other authors discussed in this book. This is not simply an additional dimension in the romantic attitude toward institutions but perhaps the most important legacy they have left us concerning institutions. Using a fragment by F. Schlegel and exchanging in one's mind the term "system" for "institution," we could perhaps describe the romantic attitude toward institutions by the dictum: "Es ist gleich tödlich für den Geist, ein System zu haben, und keins zu haben. Er wird sich also wohl entschließen müssen, beides zu verbinden." University of Washington Ernst Behler Flaherty, Gloria, Shamanism and the Eighteenth Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991. The word "shaman" has become so much a part of modern discourse (popular as well as learned) that we sometimes need to be reminded that the term has a notable connection with the European Enlightenment, albeit with the Enlightenment's "other" side. Its precise origins and history are obscure , but we know that "shaman," which has Sanskrit analogs, comes from the Siberian (Tungus) via the Russian and appears to have entered the vocabulary of the Western European languages as a German word, "Schaman." As Gloria Flaherty points out in the opening section of this fascinating book, it was in this form that the word first gained currency and acceptance in the European world of ideas in the eighteenth century. The German connection, moreover, was not at all coincidental: as Flaherty reminds us, many of the eighteenth-century explorers who measured, mapped and described the less-travelled regions of the world either were 300 Book Reviews themselves German, or had been trained in Germany, or saw German as "the up-and-coming-language of scientific discourse" (6-7). Nor is it unimportant that the word "Schaman" gained acceptance as a generic term (for a kind of wizard, sorcerer, magician, or medicine man, usually—though not necessarily—associated with primitive or remote societies) in the Enlightenment , for the concept of the shaman gave the eighteenth century a way of connecting its pervasive but unofficial preoccupation with the occult (a subject Gloria Flaherty had explored in her previous work) and its equally powerful attraction to the geographically and anthropologically exotic. Had there not been such a word as "shaman," in short, the Enlightenment might have had to invent one. Gloria Flaherty's book is an attempt to provide another kind of connection: one between the world of discoveries being made by the emerging human sciences and the world of the eighteenthcentury European imagination. According to its author, Shamanism in the Eighteenth Century has a dual purpose: to take stock of the state of western European knowledge of and interest in Shamanism as actually practiced in the distant reaches of the globe and, second, to investigate the degree to which this interest and knowledge may have found its way—may have been "assimilated," as Flaherty puts it—into the work of such major eighteenth-century figures as Diderot, Herder, Mozart and Goethe. Because these are to some extent two different kinds of inquiry (the former essentially historical in nature and the latter essentially critical) invoking different kinds of "evidence" and calling for different kinds of presentation, the two parts of Flaherty's book are perhaps best considered as complementary rather than coextensive. The first part, subtitled "The European Reception of...