“Shaman” is a word from the Tungus people of Siberia that has been generalized — often too loosely — to name a practice found in every continent: a trained individual who enters altered states to navigate an invisible landscape on behalf of others.
The work is usually practical: healing illness, locating game, guiding the dying, negotiating with spirits of place. The methods — drumming, dancing, fasting, plant medicines, ordeal — induce and then channel trance.
Shamanism is not a religion but a technology of relationship with the more-than-human world. Every lineage belongs to its own people and place; the attempt to extract it into a portable “neoshamanism” has been an ambivalent project.