Shamanism
A term for religious specialists who enter altered states to meet spirits on behalf of a community, from a Siberian Tungusic word.
Also: shaman, saman, šaman
Shaman comes from saman in the Evenki language of Siberia, reported by Russian and Dutch travellers in the seventeenth century. Scholars use it for a practitioner who is believed to travel, or to be visited by spirits, in order to heal, find game or guide the dead. Mircea Eliade made shamanism a global category in 1951, which others, such as Alice Kehoe, criticise as flattening different traditions into one. Communities from Mongolia to the Amazon use their own names for their specialists. The word is now also used for modern workshops and neoshamanism, a field raising concerns about appropriation.