文章基本信息

标题：Queer Theory and The Shamanic Ideal: Towards an anthropology of ecstasy, affect, and sexual pluralism
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作者：Joel Bourland
期刊名称：University of Toronto Art Journal
出版年度：2018
卷号：7
语种：English
出版社：University of Toronto
摘要：Uniquely positioned outside of and apart from their communities by “the intensity of their own religious experience,” Mircea Eliade describes shamans as operating in a kind of perpetual, social and cognitive liminality; a detachment effectuated by intentional consciousness alteration and social deviancy through a variety of contextually-specific “archaic techniques of ecstasy,” including those involving ethnopharmacology, sexual nonconformity, physical ordeals, and linguistic contrariness. Just as the Deleuzo-Guattarian 'sorcier' functions as an ‘anomalous entity’ mediating becomings-other, the present engagement with Siberian shamanism offers an historical analog of life lived outside of and in between societally-prescribed identity categories: emphasizing the potential, exemplified by the shaman’s spiritual journeys, to engage with realms foreign to others while bringing forth conceptual insights and new vocabularies. Additionally, because these shamanic models of “queerness” precede the hieratic modes of social organization originating with agricultural city-state formation, it may be possible to isolate and interpret various dynamics of embodiment, affect, and sexual difference in contexts foreign to the obfuscating effects of hegemonic power. Significantly however, even with the relative autonomy and geophysical insularity retained by these Indigenous subjects, the ethnographies of shamanic practice sampled here suggest a social theatre fraught with the performance, suggestion, and ‘structures of feeling’ that have been emphasized by recent queer theorists within the context of post-industrial societies, yet largely unacknowledged or underrepresented within ethnographic literature. This anthropological approach has the potential to yield insights into the semiotic, socio-cultural contingencies of identity-formation and phenomenology while intimating a means for their potential reconfiguration.