asemic net

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Shaman as Asemic Hero? / EZE, 2024

By way of an opening, many thanks to Cece Chapman for her research on the shaman and on shamanism, some of which is shared here.

And by way of introduction, a note: A shaman made to be an asemic hero distorts certain aspects of asemics and even of shamanism, but shaman as hero engages ... that operates (if so allowed) as a counter-statement.

Also, shamans have often been associated with evil of a certain kind, and this association tends to negate any heroic status for the shaman, but then too, such analysis is not necessarily related to the concept of shaman as asemic hero. Indeed, shamanistic violence often plays directly to asemics.

And note too that the shaman as asemic hero does a bit of a dis-service to the non-dialectical aspect of asemics.

But a counter-statement to what?

In part, shaman as hero either serves the tendency to hold that the meaning of our world is language or counters this tendency with its own doing. Indeed, this tendency to make language the basis for ... is often called the linguistic turn.

But why does the linguistic turn bring forth the possibility of an asemic hero?

As the linguistic turn has a tendency to make everything over into language, the shaman might be seen either as the ultimate world maker in this regard or as an asemic hero, finding power to communicate otherwise.

Thereby, academics love the concept of shamanism, even to the extent of over-appropriation: "Whether these scholars are anthropologists, archaeologists, art historians, or trained in Latin American studies or the history of religions, all have drawn heavily on social scientific literature in the form of ethnohistories and ethnographic reports. It is our position that many of these writers, regardless of their disciplinary base, are using shamanism to provide predictable, easy, and ultimately inadequate answers to what are often very complex questions about the relationship of art to religion, medicine, and politics in pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica.”

Shaman Art

River of Fundament

Marina Abramović

Joseph Beuys

Silence, and Vows of

Elie Wiesel

Practice

Vow

Problems with Shamans

Mayfair Yang

Xiaofei Kang