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Anthropology · Chapter 10

Shaman or Priest?

Anthropology's two great types of religious specialist are not two boxes — they are the two ends of one line. Tap a specialist to plot them and read their profile across nine dials. Then switch to Contrasts and re-plot everyone by a single dimension: you will watch the same person land at the shaman end of one axis and the priest end of another. Wallace, Weber, Eliade and Turner set the terms.

The specialist continuum

Wallace's scale of society
← shaman polepriest pole →
Two ideal types, one linetap a specialist to plot them
Ideal types, not boxes. Shaman and priest are poles drawn to make comparison possible. Almost every real specialist sits somewhere between them — and can be thoroughly priestly on one axis while remaining thoroughly shamanic on another.
A word about the word. Shaman is Evenki. Outsiders borrowed it and stretched it to cover practitioners across the world who have their own names for what they do — mudang, shapori, hataałii, oungan. It is an analytic category, not a translation, and many practitioners do not use it of themselves.