Scholar and Shaman
A few months after Dr. Larry Peters had returned from the fieldwork on which this book is based, I paid a visit to his guru, the shaman Bhirendra, in Tin Chuli, the village where he lives. We talked about Larry's apprenticeship. During the conversation, I became aware that Bhirendra and I were speaking as two teachers who are addressing the progress of a doctoral candidate.
The image of the guru and the professor discussing the achievements and difficulties of their common disciple/student has remained with me. It perfectly epitomizes Larry Peters's endeavor to include the experience of a shaman's training within his scholarly research on Tamang shamanism.
Since then, Larry Peters has become a full-fledged colleague of his former Western teacher. He still has to complete the last stages of shamanistic training under his Eastern teacher. But he has been far enough up that road to gain the insider's perspective which makes this book a unique contribution to the psychology and anthropology of shamanism.
This book interprets the shaman's role in the Tamang segment of the Nepalese society as analogous to the psychotherapist's role in the contemporary Western world. This analogy has already been pointed out but it has rarely, if ever, been so convincingly demonstrated. In a detailed analysis of a few cases, Dr. Peters shows how Tamang shamans relieve the mental tensions of their patients, cure illnesses, and by doing so restore equilibrium in disturbed inter-personal relationships within a family or village community. It is sometimes by solving social conflicts that the shaman heals the afflicted. The shaman's training and the training of a Western psychotherapist offer some striking similarities: both are didactic (learning theories, procedures, and methods) and practical (the psychoanalyst's own training analysis, and the shaman apprentice's own mastered trance). The analogy extends to the treatments and procedures, and thereby accounts for the effectiveness of the shamanistic therapy.
For Dr. Peters, the shaman certainly remains a religious specialist but the socio-and psychotherapeutic dimensions of his role are given full recognition.
This book is important because it presents a thorough description of the hitherto little known Tamang shamanistic system, and because it proposes an interpretation of it which renews our understanding of shamanism in general. Also, methodologically, it is important because Peters skillfully explores the potentialities and limitations of the experiential approach. Let me point out some conclusions one may draw from Peters's practice of the experiential method in his Tamang research.
Peters did not become a Tamang, nor did he assume the social role of a shaman. He became an apprentice under a master sha-man, and in the course of his training he agreed to be put in situations generating ecstatic states. This made it possible for him to observe in himself mental states similar to those experienced by the other disciples of the guru. By extension, this gave him inside understanding of shamanic trances in general. It made it possible for him to discuss these matters with informants who had gone through similar psychic processes.
In order to remain research-relevant, the stimulus-situation (for instance, softly drumming in a 3-3 pattern) and the inner response (for instance, automatically shaking) have to be well defined, as they are here. The stimulus-situation should not be extended to the totality of the behavioral patterns characteristic of a particular culture (such as "to live as Tamang do") and the response should not be accordingly generalized (such as "to feel as Tamang do"). This is why practicing the experiential approach does not mean or imply "going native."
Essential to the validity of the method is the assumption that foreign observers and local practitioners have a similar inner response to the same situation. There are good theoretical reasons to believe that this is so, such as the physiological uniformity of humankind, and the universality of the human condition. Yet the experiential similarity should be checked in each case. This is what Peters did. Bhirendra's discursive teachings, discussions with the master and other shamans, and external observations of ecstatic behaviors confirmed that the observer's inner experiences were analogous to what the others experienced.
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