Wayward Shamans
The Prehistory of an Idea
(University of California Press, 2013)
LIB 317
Wayward Shamans tells the story of an idea that humanity’s first expression of art, religion and creativity found form in the figure of a proto-priest known as a shaman. Tracing this classic category of the history of anthropology back to the emergence of the term in Siberia, the work follows the trajectory of European knowledge about the continent’s eastern frontier. The ethnographic record left by German natural historians engaged in the Russian colonial expansion project in the 18th century includes a range of shamanic practitioners, varied by gender and age. Later accounts by exiled Russian revolutionaries noted transgendered shamans. This variation vanished, however, in the translation of shamanism into archaeology theory, where a male sorcerer emerged as the key agent of prehistoric art. More recent efforts to provide a universal shamanic explanation for rock art via South Africa and neurobiology likewise gloss over historical evidence of diversity. By contrast this book argues for recognizing indeterminacy in the categories we use, and reopening them by recalling their complex history.
(Description Source: University of California Press)
Author
Silvia Tomášková is the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at UBC Okanagan. A native of a country no longer in existence – Czechoslovakia, Dr. Tomášková came to Canada as a political refugee in the 1980’s. She found her new home in academia, in the discipline of Anthropology. Dr. Tomášková taught at Deep Springs College in California, the University of Texas, Austin, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A feminist anthropologist/archaeologist with field and historical research in Eastern & Central Europe, Siberia, South Africa, Dr. Tomášková is interested in knowledge production, particularly about places and spaces in the deep past, as alternatives to modernity. She received her BA from McGill University, MA from Yale University, and her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley.
UBC Library Holdings
How to Purchase this Book
From the Publisher – University of California Press
From Used-book Sellers – ABE, Amazon, Antiqbook, Biblio, Vialibri
Paper ISBN: 9780520275324
eBook ISBN: 9780520955318
UBC Okanagan Classroom Artwork Project
The University of British Columbia Okanagan Classroom Artwork Project aims to display academically inspiring artwork in classrooms and other teaching areas of the university.
Artwork displayed as part of this project – including the covers of books and journals containing work written or edited by UBCO scholars and researchers – is intended to help enliven university teaching spaces, educate classroom users about the connections between research and teaching, and introduce members of the broader public to some of the research and scholarship carried out at UBCO.
How to Submit Artwork
If you know of other book or journal covers, or other academically inspiring artwork that is connected to work carried out by UBCO artists, scholars or researchers and that is consistent with UBCO’s educational mission, please email your suggestions to classroom.artwork@ubc.ca.
The UBC Okanagan Classroom Artwork Project began in 2019 with support from the Irving K. Barber School of Arts and Sciences. It is now a joint project of UBCO’s Faculties and the Office of the Provost.
Artwork and other images that are a part of this project are displayed solely for educational purposes.