Abstract The chapter begins by setting the background of European encounters with overseas magical traditions with regard to early modern Central and South America. The main theme of the chapter, though, is the interconnected development of anthropology and the colonial collecting impulse in the nineteenth century. Magical objects from collections such as those donated to the Pitt Rivers Museum will be used to discuss the reasons for the fascination with certain types of African, Caribbean, and Asian magical objects. What do the collections tell us about colonial attitudes towards the magical traditions of other cultures? The magical beliefs and practices of so-called ‘primitive’ peoples around the globe were used by anthropologists like James Frazer to build theories of the origins and development of human society and culture. In the twentieth century, historians of witchcraft turned to anthropological studies of African witchcraft and persecution of witches to try and better understand the dynamics and nature of the early modern trials. The chapter ends by considering recent work on magical consciousness in contemporary western traditions.
The Lower Pecos Canyonlands of southwest Texas and northern Mexico are home to one of the most sophisticated and compositionally intricate rock art traditions in the world—the Pecos River–style. This imagery contains finely painted, polychromatic figures woven together to form mythic narratives. Artists depicted and vivified the actors in these narratives by means of semantically charged attributes, such as color, paraphernalia, and body adornments. Also integral to image-making and equally charged with meaning is the materiality of the paint, the mural's placement on the landscape, and the order in which artists applied paint to the wall. Choices made by the artist in the production of the imagery reflect their cosmology and the framework of ideas and beliefs through which they interpreted and interacted with the world. Historical accounts and ethnographic observations of indigenous groups living in Mesoamerica provide useful insights into these choices and into the rich spiritual, social, and environmental content of the visual narratives. Images-in-the-Making applies this approach in an ontological analysis of Pecos River–style rock art and the mural known as the White Shaman.
The ‘scene in the shaft’ (la scene du puits) of the cave of Lascaux in the Dordogne region of France is one of the most enigmatic and well-known in the cave art corpus, located in perhaps the most iconic of caves. In this chapter I offer a sustained examination of the artwork following the ‘archaeology of art’ proposed by Jones and Cochrane who argue that ‘any approach to archaeological art must begin with the material from which the artwork is composed’ (2018, 21). I begin by a process of induction with a formal analysis, considering the use of pigment and paint, techniques of production, and the way in which artist and materials were involved in a process of ‘intra-action’ and ‘affect.’ I also take account of natural features of the rock surface and how the tangible relationships between image and surface indicate an active dialogue between them, and therefore between the maker, the artwork, and the process of making. Further attention to the location, morphology, and archaeology of the shaft enables discussion of the intra-action between artist, image, rock surface, objects, and the cave locale. This assemblage of visual and material elements presents a range of possible affects which I explore in terms of ethnographic data on hunter- gatherer communities, drawing upon Willerslev’s (2007) ethnography of the animist Siberian Yukaghir.
Art, shamanism and animism are mutable, contested terms which, when brought together, present a highly charged package [...]
A unique gold finger ring, dated stylistically toc.ad580–650, was discovered by metal-detecting in Essex in 2011. The ‘northwest Essex Anglo-Saxon ring’ is highly decorated with Style II art and shows a distinctive juxtaposition of ‘pagan’ and ‘Christian’ imagery including birds of prey and an anthropomorphic figure holding a long cross in the right hand, a raptor in the left. In this article, I consider the possibility that the object provides further evidence that falconry was practised in early Anglo-Saxon England. I begin by examining the finger ring itself and the imagery upon it, situating this within an Anglo-Saxon and broader Continental context. I then explore the possible social context of the ring, focusing on the ‘ideology of predation’ within which falconry, as a high-status hunting pursuit, may have been performed. Evaluating the hybrid ‘pagan’ and ‘Christian’ elements of the imagery, I suggest that falconry, and the ring itself as a high-status and possibly royal object, may have played important roles in the dynamics of pagan–Christian ‘discursive space’.
The Viking Way was first published in 2002, setting a new benchmark for work on Viking magic (seiðr) and religion. It quickly went out of print but not before prompting a burgeoning scholarship. Th...
The Viking Way was first published in 2002, setting a new benchmark for work on Viking magic (seiðr) and religion. It quickly went out of print but not before prompting a burgeoning scholarship. Th...
Stonehenge is an ‘icon of Britishness’ (Bender 1998) and as befits this most famous of national monuments, there has been a long history of archaeological investigation complemented by an extensive...
Art and shamanism are often represented as timeless, universal features of human experience, with an apparently immutable relationship. Shamanism is frequently held to represent the origin of religion and shamans are characterized as the first artists, leaving their infamous mark in the cave art of Upper Palaeolithic Europe. Despite a disconnect of several millennia, modern artists too, from Wassily Kandinsky and Vincent van Gogh, to Joseph Beuys and Marcus Coates, have been labelled as inspired visionaries who access the trance-like states of shamans, and these artists of the white cube' or gallery setting are cited as the inheritors of an enduring tradition of shamanic art. But critical engagement with the history of thinking on art and shamanism, drawing on discourse analysis, shows these concepts are not unchanging, timeless elective affinities'; they are constructed, historically situated and contentious. In this paper, I examine how art and shamanism have been conceived and their relationship entangled from the Renaissance to the present, focussing on the interpretation of Upper Palaeolithic cave art in the first half of the twentieth centurya key moment in this trajectoryto illustrate my case.
Trude Fonneland, Contemporary Shamanisms in Norway: Religion, Entrepreneurship, and Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 248pp., $99 (hardcover), $97.99 (ebook).
