Barbara Tedlock
The Woman
in the Shaman's Body: Reclaiming the Feminine in Religion and Medicine.
Barbara Tedlock
Random House, March 1, 2005, 400 pages, $24.00.
Reviews
Healing, birthing children, gathering and growing food, keeping communities in balance, presiding over ceremonies and rites of passage, maintaining relations with the dead, teaching, ministering to those in need, communing with nature to learn her secrets, preserving the wisdom traditions, divining the future, and dancing with gods and goddesses-these are shamanic arts. And these are the arts of women. In a thoughtful way, Barbara Tedlock traces the true history of shamanism, a history in which women have always been an integral and creative part. The Woman in the Shaman's Body illuminates the oftentimes hidden, and sometimes openly suppressed, feminine spirit that is shamanism, that is healing, that is life.
Bonnie Horrigan is Executive Director, Society for Shamanic Practitioners
and author of Red Moon Passage: The Power and Wisdom of Menopause (Random
House), and Voices of Integrative Medicine: Conversations and Encounters
(Churchill Livingstone).
Barbara Tedlock's book, A Woman in a Shaman's Body is a superbly written narrative that integrates her personal experience as a practicing shaman with serious scholarship.
Tedlock ranges through the most arcane reports of shamanism in Europe, Asia, North America, South America and Australia with stunning ease and a fascinating eye for detail. She melds this ability with her own personal experiences to dispel the myth that shamanism is a male calling. Some of the most powerful shamans are women whose bodies and psyches are in tune with the cosmos.
This book is the finest example of research that integrates solid scholarship with practical knowledge gained through participation and first hand experience. It will be a classic in the study of shamanism. Barbara Tedlock successfully destroys the andocentric view of shamanism. From her very first chapter where she examines a Neolithic shaman's grave she sets the record straight. Shamanism is a woman's way of living in the cosmos. Some of the most powerful shamans I have ever known have been women and midwives. The power of bringing forth new life from the dark reaches of the womb is an essential part of the miraculous and transformative powers of shamanic ecstasy. Not only can the female shaman manipulate the spirit powers of the upper and lower worlds, but she is capable of bringing new life into this world. The female body is attuned with the cycles of the cosmos in a way that the male body is not. This provides the female shaman with far greater power than her male counterpart. Shamanism is a female calling.
The book is a thoroughly readable, yet authoritative account of women's pivotal roles in shamanistic practices. It brings together the actual practice of female shamans in Asia, North America and Mesoamerica with a wealth of sources on the role women have always played in shamanism. This is the most comprehensive survey of the literature on shamanism since Mercea Eliade's pioneering work in the History of Religions and it sets the record straight about women's fundamental importance in shamanism.
Dr. Timothy Knab is an anthropologist and the author of A Scattering of Jades: Stories, Poems, and Prayers of the Aztecs (Simon & Schuster) and A War of Witches: A Journey into the Underworld of the Contemporary Aztecs (Harper San Francisco).
A cultural anthropologist with impeccable academic credentials, Barbara
Tedlock brings to this work three unusual qualities: clarity of thought,
an ability to explain complex ideas in ordinary language, and a wealth
of personal experience. Drawing on decades of research with native healers
and religious elders in Guatemala and the American Southwest, as well
as lessons taught by her Ojibwe grandmother, Tedlock turns a century of
scholarship on its head by showing that women's mastery of shamanic arts
is the norm rather than the exception.
Barbara Tedlock's study of female shamans offers rare gifts: luminous insight, exhaustive scholarly knowledge, and accessible language that pulses with quiet intensity. After Tedlock, no one will ever again be able to portray shamanism as a male enterprise.
Michael F. Brown is the Chair of the Dept. of Anthropology & Sociology
at Williams College. He is the author of The Channeling Zone: American
Spirituality in an Anxious Age and, more recently, Who Owns
Native Culture?