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shamanism
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In her book Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety, Majorie Garber (1992:5) describes the third gender as "a mode of articulation" and "a space of possibility." I feel that this quote eloquently expresses the gender composition of the shamanic thirds. We are aware of research and ideologies that suggest a successful gender blend is useful in accessing the supernatural powers of healing. In shamanic cultures, these healing powers are harnessed by the shaman's mastery of a wide variety of ritual processions (Lang, 1998:14). As a supernatural intermediary and one who is more than a simple mix of male and female characteristics, the shaman may necessitate a gender category of its own. It is clear that the idea of a third "brand" of human beings is not common to Western thought. It severely challenges our binary ways of thinking, making us uncomfortable, and perhaps even a bit confused. At best, we may be vaguely aware of the little-known sexual populations that don't fit into the neat packages of male or female. In the U.S., these populations tend to be found in androgynous individuals, transsexuals and cross-dressers. It is my belief that all of these groups are seriously misunderstood and discriminated against due to our lack of understanding. In the course of this paper, I will discuss the way that manifestations of a separate third gender differ greatly depending on cultural context. Comparing examples of non-standard sexual roles and norms in contemporary society to various shamanic instances of third gender, I hope to raise awareness of the possibilities that exist in these alternate gender schemas. In my presentation, I talked about how the definitions and terms of alternative genders have the potential to impede understanding. Behavior and roles that lie outside the basic schemas of male and female exist, we just are not as familiar with these in the U.S., as we do not often see them in action. Because of this fact, we must bring an additional consciousness to the process of considering the cultural context, meanings, attitudes and beliefs that occur in frameworks very different from our own. We discussed this issue in class in reference to all anthropological research and missionary work. The third gender in shamanic societies is another example of the way we have a tendency to shove our mindset on top of someone else's reality. Some of the points we agreed on were how a skewing of the true picture can occur when this happens, with a number of malevolent effects. The one that makes me the most angry and sad is the potential for losing valuable intercultural communication due to our own misguided ideas and misconstrued meanings. We must make a concentrated effort to open our minds in the attempt to see things from another's perspective. We learn by looking at third genders in shamanic cultures how easy this is to know in theory and how difficult it can be to fully accomplish. An issue of particular importance (one that is hard to assess because of how ingrained our own viewpoints are) is how societal differences shape our interpretations and characterizations of mixed genders. It can be extremely trying to seek the goal of total objectivity when everything we know about what makes a male male and female female has been handed down for so many generations that we don't even realize it is only one way to look at the world. A more realistic goal is to go into the learning process aware of what we have been socialized to believe, and then add an additional willingness to reach deeper. This involves a conscious letting go of what we hold to be absolute truth and a genuine attempt to approach the unknown in all of its uncomfortable multiple risks and uncertainties. One place we can start doing this is from the theoretical perspective of symbolic interactionism. This point of view on social life emphasizes what Harre and Lamb (1986) described as "the meaningfulness of human life and action…the pluralistic and conflictual nature of society, the relative openness of social life, the interdeterminary of social structure…the cultural and social relativity of moral and social rules, and the socially constructed nature of the self (Ekins, 1997:36). Ekins shows how research into that which is unknown "must account for a social world that is subjective symbolic reality, one that changes and is in process, and one that emerges within interaction" (1997:39). This perspective reinforces how we must strain to understand the way individuals and groups define themselves and try to make sense of these definitions in terms of their culture. As we have discussed, this process of uncovering original meanings without dumping our own ideologies and assumptions on top of them can be extremely trying. One way we must stretch to do this in relating to third gender research is trying to get comfortable with those aspects of sexuality/other genders that we will never completely be able to understand. It means owning the ways in which we have been satisfied with pieces of the whole picture but not the whole. Whether we are hetero- or homosexual, or somewhat ambiguous in our sexuality, we must attempt to see that there are millions of other shades of grey on the continuum between the poles of black and white.
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Paper Information
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Title: shamanism
Words: 4288
Rating: None
Pages: 17.2
submitted by: mollyhg
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