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  1. The cultural evolution of shamanism.Manvir Singh - 2018 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 41:e66.
    Shamans, including medicine men, mediums, and the prophets of religious movements, recur across human societies. Shamanism also existed among nearly all documented hunter-gatherers, likely characterized the religious lives of many ancestral humans, and is often proposed by anthropologists to be the “first profession,” representing the first institutionalized division of labor beyond age and sex. In this article, I propose a cultural evolutionary theory to explain why shamanism consistently develops and, in particular, (1) why shamanic traditions exhibit recurrent features around the (...)
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  • Hunter-Gatherers and the Origins of Religion.Hervey C. Peoples, Pavel Duda & Frank W. Marlowe - 2016 - Human Nature 27 (3):261-282.
    Recent studies of the evolution of religion have revealed the cognitive underpinnings of belief in supernatural agents, the role of ritual in promoting cooperation, and the contribution of morally punishing high gods to the growth and stabilization of human society. The universality of religion across human society points to a deep evolutionary past. However, specific traits of nascent religiosity, and the sequence in which they emerged, have remained unknown. Here we reconstruct the evolution of religious beliefs and behaviors in early (...)
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  • The Visionary Psyche: Jung's Analytical Psychology and Its Impact on Theories of Shamanic Imagery.Emma Scott - 2014 - Anthropology of Consciousness 25 (1):91-115.
    This article considers the shaman's visionary encounters with spirit beings from the critical viewpoint of several innovative theories of shamanism: Richard Noll's cognitive approach and Michael Winkelman's neurophenomenological perspective. These distinct approaches are analyzed in light of Jung's central concepts of the archetypes, the collective unconscious, and the individuation process, which have had a huge formative influence upon the academic investigation of visions and spiritual experiences. The centrality of Jung's theoretical reasoning within these recent studies of shamanism strongly demonstrates the (...)
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  • Shamanism as the Original Neurotheology.Michael Winkelman - 2004 - Zygon 39 (1):193-217.
    Neurotheological approaches provide an important bridge between scientific and religious perspectives. These approaches have, however, generally neglected the implications of a primordial form of spiritual healing—shamanism. Cross‐cultural studies establish the universality of shamanic practices in hunter‐gatherer societies around the world and across time. These universal principles of shamanism reflect underlying neurological processes and provide a basis for an evolutionary theology. The shamanic paradigm involves basic brain processes, neurognostic structures, and innate brain modules. This approach reveals that universals of shamanism such (...)
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  • How Our Ancestors Raised Children to Think as Modern Humans.Matt J. Rossano - 2010 - Biological Theory 5 (2):142-153.
    This article argues that social selection pressures in recent human evolution were primarily responsible for the emergence of modern cognition. These selection pressures took three specific forms: Increased security and stability, which reduced allostatic load on developing children, facilitating expanded working memory development; increased opportunities for mother-infant joint engagement, which created positive selection for more sophisticated forms of cognition; and increased pressure on ritualized behavior associated with both mother-infant joint engagement and the construction and maintenance of an unprecedentedly complex adult (...)
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  • Supernaturalizing Social Life.Matt J. Rossano - 2007 - Human Nature 18 (3):272-294.
    This paper examines three ancient traits of religion whose origins likely date back to the Upper Paleolithic: ancestor worship, shamanism, and the belief in natural and animal spirits. Evidence for the emergence of these traits coincides with evidence for a dramatic advance in human social cooperation. It is argued that these traits played a role in the evolution of human cooperation through the mechanism of social scrutiny. Social scrutiny is an effective means of reducing individualism and enhancing prosocial behavior. Religion’s (...)
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  • Ethnomedical Specialists and their Supernatural Theories of Disease.Aaron D. Lightner, Cynthiann Heckelsmiller & Edward H. Hagen - 2023 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 14 (2):611-646.
    Religious healing specialists such as shamans often use magic. Evolutionary theories that seek to explain why laypersons find these specialists convincing focus on the origins of magical cognition and belief in the supernatural. In two studies, we reframe the problem by investigating relationships among ethnomedical specialists, who possess extensive theories of disease that can often appear “supernatural,” and religious healing specialists. In study 1, we coded and analyzed cross-cultural descriptions of ethnomedical specialists in 47 cultures, finding 24% were also religious (...)
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  • Piaroa Sorcery and the Navigation of Negative Affect: To Be Aware, To Turn Away.Robin Rodd - 2006 - Anthropology of Consciousness 17 (1):35-64.
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  • Consciousness in Biogenetic Structural Theory.Charles D. Laughlin - 1992 - Anthropology of Consciousness 3 (1-2):17-22.
    Biogenetic structural theory takes an entrainment view of the nature of consciousness. Human consciousness is a function of the brain and is mediated by networks of living neural cells that develop from initial, neurognostic models of self and world. Models interact or "entrain" as a constantly changing field of experience. The entire population of neural models that may potentially entrain within the field of consciousness is called the "cognized environment.” The organization of the network of cells (the "conscious network") mediating (...)
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  • Therapeutic Effects of Hallucinogens.Michael Winkelman - 1991 - Anthropology of Consciousness 2 (3-4):15-19.
    This paper reviews some of the evidence indicating that hallucinogens or psychedelic substances have therapeutic effects. The general character hallucinogen use in non- Western societies is briefly reviewed to present data about the characteristic beliefs and uses associated with these substances. Evidence for therapeutic effectiveness is addressed from several perspectives: the findings from clinical medicine on effects of LSD; a general model of altered states of consciousness, their physiological characteristics, and therapeutic effects; and laboratory studies of physiological, sensory, emotional, behavioral, (...)
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  • Children attribute higher social status to people who have extraordinary capabilities.Xianwei Meng, Tatsunori Ishii, Kairi Sugimoto, Yo Nakawake, Yusuke Moriguchi, Yasuhiro Kanakogi & Katsumi Watanabe - 2023 - Cognition 239 (C):105576.
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  • The Agential View of Misfortune.Ronald J. Planer & Kim Sterelny - 2024 - Human Nature 35 (1):63-88.
    In many traditional, small-scale societies, death and other misfortunes are commonly explained as a result of others’ malign occult agency. Here, we call this family of epistemic tendencies “the agential view of misfortune.” After reviewing several ethnographic case studies that illustrate this view, we argue that its origins and stability are puzzling from an evolutionary perspective. Not only is the agential view of misfortune false; it imposes costs on individuals and social groups that seem to far outweigh whatever benefits the (...)
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  • Identifying the nature of shamanism.Michael James Winkelman - 2018 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 41:e90.
    Singh conflates diverse religious statuses into a single category that includes practitioners with roles that differ significantly from empirical characteristics of shamans. The rejection of biological models of trance and conspicuous display models misses the evolutionary roots of shamanism involving the social functions of ritual in producing psychological and social integration and ritual healing.
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  • Medical Anthropolgy: A New Field of Research in Slovakia.Tatiana Bužeková - 2015 - Human Affairs 25 (3):276-287.
    The paper offers a brief review of ethnological studies conducted in Slovakia in relation to the main theoretical directions in medical anthropology. This sub-discipline of social/cultural anthropology has not yet been established in Slovakia owing to local scientific traditions. The author covers ethnographic studies conducted in Slovakia that might be considered relevant to this field and places them in the context of developments in anthropology in central and eastern Europe. Ethnological work and empirical findings obtained in related social disciplines may (...)
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  • (1 other version)Art and Spirit: The Artistic Brain, the Navajo Concept of Hozho, and Kandinsky’s “Inner Necessity ”.Charles D. Laughlin - 2004 - International Journal of Transpersonal Studies 23 (1):1-20.
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  • Shamanism in Cross-Cultural Perspective.Michael Winkelman - 2012 - International Journal of Transpersonal Studies 31 (2):47-62.
    This article reviews the origins of the concept of the shaman and the principal sources of controversy regarding the existence and nature of shamanism. Confusion regarding the nature of shamanism is clarified with a review of research providing empirical support for a cross-cultural concept of shamans that distinguishes them from related shamanistic healers. The common shamanistic universals involving altered states of consciousness are examined from psychobiological perspectives to illustrate shamanism’s relationships to human nature. Common biological aspects of altered states of (...)
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  • Deriving Features of Religions in the Wild.Pascal Boyer - 2021 - Human Nature 32 (3):557-581.
    Religions “in the wild” are the varied set of religious activities that occurred before the emergence of organized religions with doctrines, or that persist at the margins of those organized traditions. These religious activities mostly focus on misfortune; on how to remedy specific cases of illness, accidents, failures; and on how to prevent them. I present a general model to account for the cross-cultural recurrence of these particular themes. The model is based on features of human psychology—namely, epistemic vigilance, the (...)
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  • Ritual States of Consciousness: A Way of Accounting for Anomalies in the Observation and Explanation of Spirit Possession.Wallace W. Zane - 1995 - Anthropology of Consciousness 6 (4):18-30.
    Confusion prevails in the anthropological literature concerning the nature of spirit possession belief and its effects. In large, this is due to the difficulty in differentiating between culture‐specific categories of altered states of consciousness and reconciling these to analytical categories. Theories of spirit possession tend either toward description of the culture context without reference to outside theories, thus lacking comparability, or toward application of externally derived categories to the possession behavior, which often lack on‐the‐ground relevance. Since comparison is the aim (...)
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  • (1 other version)‘I get high with a little help from my friends’ - how raves can invoke identity fusion and lasting co-operation via transformative experiences.Martha Newson, Ragini Khurana, Freya Cazorla & Valerie van Mulukom - forthcoming - Frontiers in Psychology.
    Psychoactive drugs have been central to many human group rituals throughout modern human evolution. Despite such experiences often being inherently social, bonding and associated prosocial behaviors have rarely been empirically tested as an outcome. Here we investigate a novel measure of the mechanisms that generate altered states of consciousness during group rituals, the 4Ds: dance, drums, sleep deprivation, and drugs. We conducted a retrospective online survey examining experiences at a highly ritualized cultural phenomenon where drug use is relatively uninhibited- raves (...)
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  • Trance types and amnesia revisited: Using detailed interviews to fill in the gaps.Sarasvati Buhrman - 1997 - Anthropology of Consciousness 8 (1):10-21.
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