Postshamanism (1999)

Abstract

An exploration of the author's experience of studying anthropology and shamanism in Buenos Aires.

Introduction

“…Our newer tendency to emphasize that what we have learned is always fragmentary and incomplete-and shadowed by what Juan Obarrio, channeling Derrida, terms an unknowable "remainder"-is itself an overdetermined product of chastened post-Writing Culture sensibilities with a dash of newer hightheory complaint about the supposed tyranny of order. 11 Our fieldwork is always caught somewhere in between all too predictable discoveries and mo-ments of something like genuine learning and sometimes even revelation. The trouble is that we're not always able to tell just which is which.…”