2017-18 Academic Catalog

How did the shamanism, or a "transcendental worldview," influence the making of ancient American artworks? How did ancient American artists solve the visual problem of representing the ambiguity, paradox, and flux central to shamanic experience? Are some media and techniques better suited to expressing an other-worldly perspective? This course explores those questions and interrogates the use of a shamanic lens in the study of ancient American visual culture. We will also engage with artwork by indigenous shamans and ethnographic accounts of shamanic practice to guide our definition of shamanism, criticisms of shamanic analyses, and examinations of global contemporary “shamanisms.”