Telos 2015 Conference Paper

Paper Title: “Archaic Revivals and Shamanism in the Liberal Global Imaginary”

A long-running undercurrent of Romanticism, imagining itselfas inheritor of the Greco-Roman civilization, merges ancient pastoral aestheticswith modern, alienated nostalgia for a return to nature or to the “pre-political.” With the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, postcolonialism, and postsecularism the concept of “rights” has taken an increasingly positive turn.Earlier conceptions of “freedom from” increasingly become “freedom to.” Liberal flourishing, especially since the 1960s, manifests in exorcising the right to transgress various borders and identities. The rhetorics of sustainability and ecocriticism, which often reflect Romantic engagements with “nature,” potentially mask their own entrenchment within the force of history by pining for awider conception of “the human.” This is enormously seductive in popular entertainment. Thus, thinkers like Terence McKenna have advocated an “Archaic Revival” and a return to shamanic culture as anodyne for the trials of globalization. Fusing with recent research on neuroscience and psychedelics, the figure of the shaman as border-crosserarises as a locus of desire for postsecular and transhuman subjectivities. This paper attempts to tease out what Lauren Berlant calls “cruel optimism” inherent in the variety of historical narratives – humanistic, Darwinian, and biopolitical – that accompany recent “Western” attempts (in a long line of them) to overcome history itself by focusing on the figure of the Shaman in popular and Anthropological discourses. Based on the work of Michael Taussig and Mina Cheon, my aim is to shed light on the Affective place of the Shaman as it relates to Agamben’s “Archaelology of Glory” in talk of globalization.

Presenter: Roger K. Greenrogerkgreen@gmail.com

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303-886-6021

Current position: English Professor, Metropolitan State University of DenverBlog: http://thoughtsandmusic.wordpress.com/

My doctoral dissertation, Beware of Mad John: Psychedelic Aesthetics, Political Theology and Literature is concerned with aspects of re-enchantment coded in artistic works that convey notions of expanded citizenship.   My research interests are in Aesthetics, Ethics, Political Theology and Composition across different mediums, with particular interest in questions about how composed forms in a broad sense narrate and perform the sacred.  My thesis for my Master's in Humanities deals with Emmanuel Levinas's philosophical work and avant-garde jazz in the 1960s.  I am interested in aesthetic performances of the “spiritual” or “sacred” as influential in political decision-making.

Archaic Revivals and Shamanism in the LiberalGlobal Imaginary

[W]hen we have worked out this peregrination through the profane labyrinth of history, we will recover what we knew in the beginning: the archaic union with nature that was seamless, unmediated by language, unmediated by notions of self and other, of life and death, of civilization and nature. These are all dualisms that are temporary and provisional within the labyrinth of history. The Archaic Revival means that all our religions were pale imitations of the Mystery itself. (18)

Terence McKenna, The Archaic Revival (1991)

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Introduction

The shaman has long been a rhetorical figure signaling

the manifestations of a Modern European imaginary

thematically dedicated to an “evolution” of human religion.

Often what is at stake in conversations about shamanism is

convoluted by the history of knowledge production in what

some now refer to in the past tense as “the West.” For some

anthropologists, shamanism is merely an artificial construct

of modernity entrenched in the assumptions of nineteenth-

century and therefore outdated. Yet discussions of

shamanism in twenty-first century scholarship and especially

in non-academic discourse continue to persist. Although

often conceptually flawed, shamanism(s) continue to deserve

serious academic commentary because the figure itself helps

locate where history copulates with myth, where

circumstances and events become narratives. My interest

here is in describing the discursive complexity of the

shaman and shamanism(s) rhetorically rather than not to vie

for any “authentic” practice or origin.

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The source fueling shamanic “other” belongs to a

tradition of the West, whether or not the West is another

outmoded concept. Many so-called shamanic practices precede

the modern conceptions of liberalism as it developed in the

midst of the great European debate between the ancients and

the moderns. Those who claim shamanism a modern construct

locate its discursive arrival enmeshed in colonial

expansion. Thus, while many anthropological studies have

observed wide ranges of human practices that appear to be

shamanic, such projects are refracted through a politics of

looking that itself is submerged in a politics of modern

subjectivity and globalization. Discussions about shamanism

are highly motivated in obscure ways, yet Peter Frederick

Laird writes in The Encyclopedia of Modern Asia, “The relation

between shamanism and other religions is highly variable,

but in almost all cases, shamanism is under the hegemonic

pressure of polities that subscribe to universal religions

or globalizing economic ideologies.” Shamanism as a subject

is the meeting ground for theory and practice at its most

ethically important position.

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The term ‘shaman’ term entered Western discourse

through the writings of Russian protopope Avvakum during the

mid seventeenth century, so the shaman figure has long

presented a particular political-theological invention of modernity

that signals pre-liberal and pre-political ways of life “in

the wild.” As it disseminated across Western Europe over

the next few centuries, the “shaman” figure further enabled

an already existing assemblage1 of affective tendencies

which invested moderns with the hubris of the “civilized”

man; later, the same assemblages fueled antimoderns with an

ongoing Romantic nostalgia for a Paleolithic Eden sometimes,

sometimes referred to as the Archaic Revival. In 2015, my

hope is not only to describe the rhetorical and affective

texture through the theme – shamanism as such – but also to

articulate a zone of proximity between the rhetorical

aspects of discourse on shamanism and postsecular porous

subjectivities. In order to do so, I want to critique a

theme in discussions about shamanism that encourages archaic

1 See Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter, and Kathleen Stewart’s Ordinary Affects for coverage of the term ‘assemblage.’

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revivals as solutions to liberal crises. For this analysis,

I will rely on Lauren Berlant’s affect theory and her term,

cruel optimism.

Put simply, “Cruel optimism is the condition of

maintaining an attachment to a significantly problematic

object” (Berlant 24). Berlant describes cruel optimism as

“a deictic – a phrase that points to a proximate location,”

saying that cruel optimism “attends to practices of self

interruption, self suspension, and self abeyance that

indicate people’s struggles to change, but not

traumatically, the terms of value in which their life-making

activity has been cast” (27). Cruel optimism aids in

attempts to understand historical presence outside a

sovereign subject. For Berlant, cruel optimism signals a

post neo-liberal historical present that she articulates as

a “happening” rather than an “event”: “One motive for this,”

she says, “is to describe the historical present as a back-

formation from practices that create a perceptible scene, an

atmosphere that can be returned to” (100). This historical

present acts as an environment for the ordinary: “In an

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ordinary environment, most of what we call events are not of

the scale of memorable impact but rather are episodes, that

is, occasions that frame experience while not changing much

of anything” (101). Berlant is after something alternative

to discourses of sovereignty because, for her, sovereignty

“masks in a discourse of ‘control’ the wide variety of

processes and procedures involved historically in the

administration of law and of bodies, even during periods

when sovereign rulers exerted their wills by fiat”(96).

Precisely because the “wildness” of the shaman figure hovers

at the edge of discourse on sovereignty, religion, and

citizenship, shamanism holds an allure for the call for

archaic revivals. This paper casts the idea of shamanic

practices and archaic revival as an object of cruel optimism

for liberal imaginaries in 2015, arguing that its cruelty

lies in its tendency to create a perception of change where

non has occurred. Shamanism, or what some anthropologists

call “neo-shamanism,” will be my way to theme a liberal

desire for an archaic revival because I think the affective

charge of shamanism may help to make the present more

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audible; and as Berlant says, “sounds and senses can change,

potentially, how we can understand what being historical

means” (36).

Shamanism as Rhetorical Figure

One common reaction to the figure of shamanism may be a

sneering bristle. The bristle may perhaps operate as a

moment of affective consensus among a variety of different

audiences. In other words, the gesture may look the same

but mean something radically different to each individual

who bristles. For some liberal academics, shamanism

inherits racist desires of primitivism disseminated into

what Giorgio Agamben calls the growing planetary petit

bourgeoisie. In this view, claims to shamanism align with an

uncritically neo-liberal attitude in an increasingly

globalized world while perpetuating cultural erasure with

the spread of capitalist market economy and privileged “New

Age” identities.2 Similarly, for open-minded religious

practitioners participating in public discourse, neo-2 An extreme example of this would be the organization, New Age Frauds and Plastic Shamans (NAFPS): http://www.newagefraud.org

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shamanism may signal the commodification of a “truer”

spirituality in a neo-liberal marketplace where religious

commitments can be adorned and cast-off like cheaply made

ready-to-wear clothing.3 For the strict scientific

positivist, it is New Age flimsiness and quackery

accompanying an increase in neo-shamanic practice that

signals an attack on Enlightenment rationality. For those

less skeptical, shamanism may signal an opening to

possibility for more porous subjectivity;4 and for many who

practice it as a profession shamanism is a vocational call

to a heal those in need and a legitimately ethical way to

earn a living. In this view, it is the unfolding process of

modernization combined with a secular shift from Christian

church authority in Europe that opens the possibility for

new ways of thinking. We might situate the Human Potential

Movement and neo-shamanic efforts like Michael Harner and

the journal, Shamanism here, and they may have just as much

a right to bristle at uncritical discussions of

3 See Carl Raschke’s The Interruption of Eternity for a dated yet sober version of this critique.4 For a discussion of porous verses buffered subjectivity, see Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age.

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shamanism(s). For my purposes, I only seek to highlight

that a significant amount of affective weight aggregates

around shamanism, and it only gets more complicated when

people defend shamanic practice as the resurgence of an

ancient human practice, especially one that is somehow

global.

Cruel optimisms can mask in hope – in consciousness-

raising, in perceptual shifts – ongoing cruelties. It is

not that individuals are simply duped into thinking they

have something that they actually lack, and it is not a

simple matter of symbolic displacement to cover up a trauma.

In a postsecular discussion, one that sees a continuity of

enchantment existing throughout modernity rather than a

steady Weberian disenchantment, avowing shamanism as a

continued practice does more than optimistically “preserve”

specific groups of ancient humans’ cultural practices; it

also invokes a counter-resonance to the hegemonic figures of

the “great” religions and appeals to those who claim to be

spiritual but not religious. These indeed appear to be good

things. Archaic revivals appeal to a unified and global

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religious consciousness among humans. But for the

contemporary liberal citizen, what else does it mean to

announce one’s beliefs as shamanistic or one’s self as a

shaman? How often is the appeal to an archaic technique of

ecstasy a re-constellating event, as in Alain Badiou’s

description of St. Paul’s “he is resurrected”? Berlant’s

emphasis on cruel optimism aims to move beyond a discourse

of trauma or event by presenting a “happening” instead.

Consider the enthusiasm of the ayahausca “tourist”5 or

psychedelic tripper and his or her claim to gnosis. The

expectation, the attention to set and setting in the classic

psychedelic experience already frames the longing for an

“experience.” Such enthusiasm for entheogens ought to

resound as more than mere experiential and identity-claiming

announcements. Historically speaking, would we not expect

that in areas culturally informed by Christianity the

logical post-Christian death-defying graceful saint might

occupy the ability to move between the living and the dead?

Would this not appear natural to the inheritance of a 5 For a defense and critique of ayahuasca tourism see Ross Heaven’s “What Exactly is Ayahuasca Tourism.” Psychedelic Press, UK, Vol. 3, 2014.

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humanized, secular, and Protestant Christ that we ought to

mimic?6 Do we not regularly encounter such enchantment in

popular media where shamanism is conflated with cyberspace

and CGIs? The liberal world of fabulism and magic also

risks being conflated with shamanism in uncritical

conceptions of archaic revivals.7 Turning to the

enchantment of stories and fables may help parse this

historical and cultural construction out.

Jack Zipes, in The Irresistible Fairytale, asserts that the

persistence of fairytale enchantment in Europe arises from

modern secularist desires, especially among aristocratic and

bourgeois women writers, to code a politics of resistance to

overly Christian agendas among French royalty (25). In his

narrative, based on Richard Dawkins’ “selfish gene,”

enchantment serves secular modernity.8 Fairytales and other

enchanted stories offer liberal audiences a social imaginary

to help solve crises, but rather than relying on the classic

6 Lopez makes a similar argument for the reception of Tibetan Buddhism in the West in Prisoners of Shangri-la.7 See Mina Cheon’s Shamanism + Cyberspace.8 For Zipes’ inclusion of the concept of shaman see pages, 5, 38, 200, and 223.

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psychological defense of fairytales in writers like Bruno

Bettelheim’s The Uses of Enchantment to argue that enchanted

tales give liberal children maps of the unconscious with

which to figure out their conflicts, Zipes employs the

evolutionary argument via Dawkins and the selfish gene.9 He

does so by focusing on memes. If we are to take his

argument seriously from a cultural point of view, how can

anyone expect that any existing human culture would have any

more or less access to a prehistoric past? It would simply

be a “biological” function, and the Archaic revival itself a

meme. There would be nothing particularly enchanted about a

turn toward shamanism among Westerners in the late twentieth

and early twentieth centuries to inform an interest in neo-

shamanism.

In The Beauty of the Primitive: Shamanism and the Western

Imagination, Andrei Znamenski locates the rise of neo-

shamanism with the antimodernist countercultural movements

during the 1960s, claiming that “[p]recisely because of its

9 For the classic liberal conception of letting kids figure their problems out on their own, see Jean Jacques Rousseau’s Emile and John Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education.

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antimodern associations which were now defined as virtuous,

the expression shamanism became endowed with positive

meaning. Thus, from the odd obscurantist, the shaman became

the symbol of wisdom and spiritual redemption” (364).

Terence McKenna, leading spokesman for psychedelic research

in the 1990s,10 claimed “the destruction of paganism was

probably the greatest disservice to the human psyche that

has ever been done” (17). Yet a shift in the affective

relationship to shamanism – from modernist ethnocentrism to

post 1960s exaltation – does not change enough to avoid a

cruel optimism that accompanies both scholars like Zipes and

outliers like McKenna. A committed secularist like Zipes

and an archaic revivalist like McKenna both rely on

evolutionary gratification for their arguments. Yet while

Zipes appears to be comforted by the secularism of Dawkins,

McKenna’s archaic revival attempts to re-enchant lost

spiritual connection for alienated modern liberals.

10 By spokesman I do not mean advocate. In contrast to later Timothy Leary’s calls to democratize mystical experience by ignoring the controlled set and setting expressed in The Psychedelic Experience, which radicalized Aldous Huxley’s optimism to give common people access to ecstatic experience, McKenna had a much more elitist view of who ought to be allowed to experiment with psychedelics.

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Clearly, sneering at the “new-agey” idea of the shaman

– even as its own historical construct – is

counterproductive for many reasons. A good one being that

linear, one-way conceptions of appropriations of indigenous

cultures by colonizers are insufficient for the complexities

surrounding the continuing domination of people by Western

ideological or cultural forces. The promise of archaic

return avoids responsibility for recent and present

inequities, perpetuating the liberal flourishing of those

with possessive investments in past domination while

pointing to the potential of a future imaginary that is

accessible only to a privileged few.

Among scholars of anthropology, there is a wide range

of positions concerning the concept of shamanism.

‘Shamanism’ is bound in narratives of secularization and the

Enlightenment as well as in pre-existing European

conceptions of otherness and ancient conceptions of

wildness. To briefly track some of the recent scholarly

discussion concerning shamanism, we can begin with Alice B.

Kehoe’s work, which during the 1990s excoriated the flawed

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academic legacies of Mircea Eliade and Ade Hultkrantz on

shamanism. Kehoe writes:

The European Enlightenment academic legacy that formed Eliade and Hultkrantz appropriated American Indians to roles already hoary in Herodotus’ time. Contemporary scholars [in the early 1990s] of comparative religion, as well as anthropologists, have generally moved past the Enlightenment myth and modus operandi. (388)

And yet, Kehoe’s rhetoric of “outdated” conceptions going

back to Herodotus relies on a progressively positivistic

notion, a carryover from nineteenth and early twentieth

century frames for anthropology as a scientific discipline

that informs the essentialist scholars she abhors. Twenty

years later, Thomas Dubois notes a professional explosion in

the study of ‘shamanisms’ in the plural as a way to resist

atemporal and culture-transcending notions:

Today, in the year 2010, one can see that the trends [in the study of shamanism] have only continued to growin importance, with valuable research ongoing within a number of different theoretical frameworks and a markedincrease in scholarly and popular publication venues, including new presses and journals and a bourgeoning internet presence for shamanic topics. (100)

Dubois’s Introduction to Shamanism, published by Cambridge

University Press in 2009, has two concluding chapters on

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“Shamanic Revitalizations” and “Neoshamanism.” Dubois is in

agreement with Neil Price’s essay collection, The Archaeology

of Shamanism (2001) in its assertion that any inquiry into

the history of shamanism, whether modern or premodern, must

necessarily be refracted through the lens of contemporary

groups’ interests in shamanisms.

The affective relationship in non-scholarly culture

makes the situation even more complex. By the end of the

1990s, popular thinkers like Terence McKenna were calling

for an “archaic revival” in tribute to Eliade’s description

of the “archaic techniques of ecstasy” common to many

shamans. And while a close reading of Eliade’s book does

not warrant the totalizing rejections produced by a

generation of anthropologists frustrated with armchair

intellectualism – no matter how flawed it is, Eliade has

plenty of qualifiers and does not seem nearly as hubristic

as his detractors claim – he is indeed, however, hell-bent

on carving out a syncretic and essentialized idea of

shamanism from a historically developmental perspective of

human civilization and religion. Part of Eliade’s

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conception relies on the shaman’s ability to leave the

current plain of existence, descend or ascend, and return,

hopefully recovering a lost soul in the process. And flawed

or not, many have bought into such flawed history to fuel

antimodern stances – cruel optimism indeed. As Znamenski

notes, “[a]lthough many scholars now believe that the

“ecstasy” (altered state) [described by Eliade] is not a

necessary attribute of shamanism, for many Western seekers,

this is one of the basic pillars of spiritual practice”

(viii). Indeed, Terence McKenna, while brilliant in many

ways, perpetuated such thinking in regularly in statements

such as, “These preliterate cultures have an unbroken

tradition of shamanic understanding and ethnomedicine that

reaches back to Paleolithic times and beyond” (29). McKenna

casts himself as an outlier writer to anthropological

discourse (67) while radicalizing Eliade’s thought toward a

holographic transcendence of materiality, echoing other

thinkers in the early 1990s like Francis Fukuyama who, with

completely different politics, claimed the end of history.

McKenna writes:

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All technological history is about producing prototypes of this situation with greater and greater closure toward the ideal, so that airplanes, automobiles, space-shuttles, starships of the nuts-and-bolts, speed-of-light type are, as Mircea Eliade said, “self-transforming images of flight that speak volumes about man’s aspiration to self-transcendence”

Our wish, our salvation, and our only hope is to end the historical crisis by becoming the alien, by ending alienation, by recognizing the alien as the Self…(93)

Neo-shamanism indeed appears to rest upon the opening of

liberal subjectivity, which may indeed account for the

continued Romantic nostalgia accompanying the overtly

political resonances of the etymology of the term,

‘liberal,’ in the early nineteenth century.

There is an ongoing scientific problem for shamanism

accompanying a simple lack of empirical evidence for all of

the features of shamanism in archaic societies. The late

twentieth century academic emphasis on historical

materiality attempted the kind of social critique a dying

political Left had employed into the late 1970s in the

United States. Such well-intentioned social critique among

largely cultural anthropologists to protect existing

indigenous cultures from succumbing to a growing globalized

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obliteration of culture while carrying over the Romantic

impulse to protect pre-political wards of the state. For

those anthropologists interested in maintaining that

shamanism was more than Eliade’s modernist essentialism, a

turn to Archaeology was necessary.

The ongoing problem for such anthropologist is in

archaeological evidence, which even when promising is

largely inconclusive in terms of cultural practice. As

Dubois notes, there has been plenty of recent research and

vibrant debate over ways to infer cultural practices from

artifacts. Neil Price’s Archaeology of Shamanism has loads of

examples and stresses that academic studies of shamanisms

cannot ignore the interests of (re)emergent pagan religions.

In other words, the vexed rhetorical use of shamanism is not

a mere matter of academics versus New Agers. More critical

attention to the connotative layers of the concept may help

relieve some of the cruel optimism.

Both in Znamenski’s characterization of Western seekers

as well as among anthropologists’ debates, ecstatic

experience is often one of the distinguishing features of

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shamanism. Use of psychedelics or entheogens for

consciousness alteration, while not the only consciousness-

altering technique, is often in close proximity to shamanism

and marks the liberal imaginary’s interest as an ultimately

biopolitical question. Advocates from different cultural

locations such as Michael Winkelman and Terence McKenna both

construct evolutionary arguments for the role of entheogens

in human civilization. In addition, John A. Rush’s recent

book, Entheogens and the Development of Culture (2013), continues to

track mythological criticism and the evidence for embedded

practices of entheogen use in Western classics.

The evolutionary argument plays an important role in

rhetorical enquiry into the place of shamanism in the

liberal imagination. Jan Irvin’s concluding essay in Rush’s

collection points to the association R. Gordon Wasson, the

mycologist and Vice president of J.P. Morgan, had with the

CIA during the 1950s while making magic mushrooms and

Mazatec shaman Maria Sabina famous among the United States’

counterculture during the 1960s. The cultural history of

entheogens, shamanism, and what legitimately counts as a

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binding religion are thus highly enmeshed with the

territorialized State while the cultural desire for a

transcendent shamanistic religion arguably pushes toward a

cosmopolitan or more crassly globalized citizenship. The

cruelly optimistic tendency here, I believe, is in this

contradiction between a sovereign body (or state) acting as

a transcendent cultural witness (or religion in the sense of

binding) to the liberal flourishing of the individual’s

ecstatic or even psychedelic experience; it relies on the

old privilege to imagine one’s self as other while

presenting its self as morally exceptional due to a

communion with the persistently difficult concept of nature,

which I believe is often dogmatically masked as a self-

congratulatory overcoming of Cartesian dualism by an

attention to body, mind, and spirit. Laudable as such

attempts may be, they tend to rest on an ignorance of

history rather than a solution to historical problem, and

closer historical analysis situates the problem of shamanism

as preceding Descartes’ cogito, something with which strong

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critics of shamanism like Alice Kehoe, who dates the problem

to Heraclitus, would likely agree.

The cruel optimism resonating around shamanism and

neoshamanism,11 is essentially nostalgic, homesick, and

deterritorialized. As Michael Taussig has shown in his

ethnographic and critical work on shamanism in South

America, the eruption of the shamanic vocation in the

colonies imported the European idea of the “wild man” to the

“new world.” Wildness, according to Taussig,

Raises the specter of the death of the symbolic function itself. It is the spirit of the unknown and the disorderly, loose in the forest encircling the cityand the sown land, disrupting the conventions upon which meaning and the shaping function of images rest. Wildness challenges the unity of the symbol, the transcendent totalization binding the image to that which it represents. Wildness pries open this unity and in its place creates slippage and a grinding articulation between signifier and signified. Wildnessmakes of these connections spaces of darkness and lightin which objects stare out in their mottled nakedness while signifiers float by. Wildness is the death space of signification. (219)

The violence of signification, of substitution, introduces

the construction of the abatement of wildness with the

arrival of narrative. History would be ancillary here and 11 See Dubois’s discussion of the variants of ‘neoshamism’

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need not be exclusively tied to narration, since myths may

also employ narration yet precede history. Taussig sees

something optimistic here.

To see the myth in the natural and the real in magic, to demythologize history and to reenchant its reified representation; that is a first step. To reproduce the natural and the real without this recognition may be tofasten ever more firmly the hold over the mythic. (10)

The poetics here inspire what will become Taussig’s ficto-

criticism in The Magic of the State, a fabulist breakthrough for

the writing of participant observation favored by the post-

Eliade generation of anthropologists. Is Taussig’s writing,

complete with beautiful analyses of magical-realist

literature, itself nostalgic? Is he, like Nietzsche, in his

second introduction to The Birth of Tragedy, embarrassed by his

own nostalgia? I don’t think so. But the method of a

rigorous approach to the historical influence of fictions as

producing present fantasies seems to me distinct from the

conveniently causal explanations produced by the old

evolutionary argument, with the possible exception of

Michael Winkelman’s work.

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Michael Winkelman’s evolutionary rhetoric is steeped in

historicizing the biological development of the brain,

implicitly suggesting that a biological history of human

life since the development of the neocortex might be a

better place marker for universal history. Because of this,

one can situate Winkelman’s sensibility along with advocates

of the wider sense of Anthropocene, dating it to late

Paleolithic era. Seductive for arguments about entheogens,

Winkelman sees the early use of psychedelics by shamans as

catalyzing the higher-order integrative brain processing

that distinguishes modern and archaic Homo sapiens. Part of

the rationale here is that the development of the human

brain benefited from the imaginary situations produced by

hallucinations, which built on the reptilian brains fight-

or-flight responses, explaining the common overlap between

psychedelics and paranoia – what Aldous Huxley called

“Heaven and Hell,” referencing Blake and Swedenborg.

Psychedelics, according to Winkelman, manifested imaginary

structures to map potential situations where humans might be

victims, producing the ability to think, reason and plan.

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He even cites studies where chimpanzees show aversion to

psychedelics while humans gravitate toward them. Shamanic

use of entheogens in this line of thinking indeed risks

becoming a kind of pithecanthropus erectus. Implicitly, the

argument asks its audience to remove encultured mistrust of

psychedelics, especially since the Nixon administration’s

declaration of the so-called “war on drugs,” and reopen

research into the health benefits of psychedelics, which may

just solve the long debate between enchanted religion and

science in a postsecular age.

While I am not at all opposed to the effects of such

implications to remove regulations on psychedelic research,

the nostalgic affect here masks the politically historical

situation while asserting the prevalence of positivistic

science. Here positivism does not hold argumentative sway

because it is epistemologically or logically superior but

because it serves an affectively moral optimism that is

ultimately cruel. The cruelty, again, comes as a license

for the liberal subject to be free to “not be me,” and here

is where liberal privilege continues to be a problem.

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Winkelman’s biological descriptions are convincing but

much of his analysis of shamanism, like Terence McKenna’s,

relies on Eliade’s work. I have already asserted that

Eliade does not deserve the totalized rejection some

scholars have made regarding his work, the lack of attention

to criticism of Eliade, from I. A. Lewis’s Ecstatic Religion to

Alice Kehoe’s Shamans and Religion, needs more attention.

While Winkelman addresses both of them, his claim that

“Although Eliade’s impressionistic and selective methods

deserve criticisms from modern [21st century] ethnological

research, his conclusions were, nonetheless, on target”

(59), which he then goes on to cite his own previous

research with, is unconvincing. His argument about the

integrative capacities of psychedelics to produce

religiosity in humans is, however, compelling. Indeed, it

appears to corroborate the recent ethnographic research of

Nicolas Langlitz, published in his book, Neuropsychedelia,

which documents the emergence of spiritual and religious

discussion in even the most positivistic labs in the United

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States and Switzerland that have been allowed to do

psychedelic research on human subjects.

The cruel optimism here is the idea that entheogens

offer access to universalism, that in using them, humans

recover ancient shamanic practices that re-invoke our

supposed original transcendence over nature by being, not

masters over nature, but stewards of it. Such optimism is

cruel not just in its perpetuation of modernity’s displaced

nostalgia, which Marx called alienation from labor – that

tautology where the recovery from alienation is fueled by

the desire for a return to a pre-alienated state, an

existence thriving on the amnesia for the trauma in which it

lives. By appealing to a “better” time as an escape from

current crises, such rhetoric seeks to build its own

dwelling in the utopic future of the fictional past.

Berlant suggests in her analysis of cruel optimism

that it exceeds the wheel-spinning discourse of trauma while

also avoiding the necessarily utopic functions of fiction

(the novel). Some of Neoshamanism’s uncritical adherence to

the idea that history can be overcome by appealing to the

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entheogens’ abilities to make us what we are today, while

well-intentioned in its projection toward a better future,

risks avoiding existing inequities. This is certainly no

claim against practicing shamans or the use of psychedelics

as entheogens. However, one must remain critically aware of

the potential flat-lining of risk that resonates with cruel

optimism. As Berlant writes:

A change of heart, a sensorial shift, intersubjectivity, or transference with a promising object cannot generate on its own the better good life:nor can the collaboration of a couple, brothers, or pedagogy. The vague futurities of normative optimism produce small self-interruptions as the utopias of structural inequality. (“Cruel Optimism” 37)

One could certainly ask whether or not the appeal of

psychedelics or shamanism currently exists as normative. I

would argue, however, that the convention in the United

States since the late 1960s has been to affirm liberal

flourishing in spite of government control. The affect has

been to establish a citizenship whose moral authority

transcends that of the nation state, which is why the rite

of illegal drug use becomes for many a rite of passage, a

passage into a conflicted realm of parochially protective

Green 29

liberalism that seeks to affirm one’s potential without ever

saying, “grow the fuck up.” The rhetoric of return to a

truly archaic life perpetuates ahistorical dogmatic slumber

and ought to be replaced with one critically attentive to

why shamanism as a concept is at times an appropriate

synecdoche for current global problems.

Conclusion

Archaic revivals are cruelly optimistic in their Romantic

appeal to a pre-political state of nature. The affective

and aesthetic appeal can seductively become conflated with a

more rigorous and scientifically informed historical

orientation based on evolution of the human brain. However,

such science, as Winkelman’s work on shamanism exemplifies

(in both good and bad ways) risks dogmatic positivism, a

rejection of aesthetics. Recent thinkers of the political

theological roots of liberalism, Victoria Kahn for example

have stressed Homo faber, man the maker. Winkelman’s work

has implicit affinity with the concept Homo ludens as put

Green 30

forth in Johan Huizinga’s 1938 book of that title, which

introduced concepts like the magic circle for Game Studies.

Winkelman’s integrated brain allows for a recovered sense of

Homo ludens in shamanism so long that we keep in mind works

like Mina Cheon’s Shamanism + Cyberspace, which in detailing

Korean shamanism in the last sixty years, acutely describe

the trouble of de-historicizing and de-contextualizing.

Even if one could truly claim, as promoted in the recent

film, Neurons to Nirvana, that psychedelic experiences

transcend culture, the Dalai Lama often points out that

one’s own culture remains essential to an understanding of

spirituality. Outside of religious contexts, westerners

ought to be more critical of the sway of Romanticism and

nationalism, and that even De Quincey at his most destitute

was a privileged man.

Works Cited

Green 31

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McKenna, Terence. The Archaic Revival. New York: HarperOne, 1991.

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