We are all, in a sens, idolaters of this recent western cultural artifact called "shamanism"; we love, we cherish, we dedicate our self to it, but as much as we get involve, so little we have something to do with the original, indigenous shamanism; we've created a lie, an illusion and we keep doing it just because this is how our culture works... you don't practice shamanism to sell it and to achieve personal transformation, shamanism it happens to be practiced because the world has unmanageable situations and because life is precarious and unforeseeable , because some people (the shamans) are forced to talk to the spirits and to heal the sick people... they are not doing it for fun or for them, they are doing it because there are some forces beyond them that affects them. I'm not speaking about the "real" shamans, it does not matter this point of view, it only matters our illusion, our lie, our self-limitation. This is what I want to know about and I want to fight against.
My point is that the only accurate perspective or maybe the only "right" place of shamanism in our culture, can be found in the scholarly literature of ethnology, sociology, anthropology, psychology and history of religion, but not as a proclamation of scientific objectivity of our powerful western culture, but because this is the only really "fair" usage of this cultural artifact called "shamanism", meaning - the only aspect of our shamanic intelligibility that is not intentionally mixing indigenous culture with western culture, that is just acquiring information. I'm interested in scholarly literature at its most psychological or subjective (read it "weak") level, as a culture who tries not to conquer, to engulf another culture but just to understand it.
Note: this is an important shift of my search. Perhaps this blog will die or will become something else.
03.02.2009
I'm returning to this blog and leave it as it is, it's ok as it is...
I'll add some more links at the bottom.
30.12.2009
I saw yesterday on youtube the performance of 2 or 3 romanian artists on OTV about 2012. I don't care what was the real purpos of this project, but dispite some important week spots, I noticed a merely quasishamanic atitude at some point.
At the beginig of the show, one of them presented himself as a contemporary shaman and tried to induce a spiritual and magic context using this name. At the same time the nature of OTV, a really infamous television channel (in the sens of Deleuze saying: "L'homme infame est le Dasein") put some pressure on their acting in being infamous. And so, in this schizophrenic state some intimate ideas (ideas that the two men believed in and spoke about, perhaps, only privately) became the moment of truth. In all this you can not say for sure what was acting and what was disparate cry. But the fact that I think there was some (quasi-schzoid) cry about the change in the world, and that the name "shaman" appeared (also quasi-schizoidic) it took me back to Flavio's cry and my first post and the idea about quasi-shaman.
All this pushed me to redefine the term "quasishaman":
Definitely, you can not be shaman. But you always can be near, close to the SHAMAN. This is what quasi-shaman means, in the proximity of , in "the neighboring zones" ("les zones des voisinage", see Deleuze-Guattari "Mille Plateaux") of the SHAMAN. The SHAMAN is a human-life complex model, a spiritual, a social, a practical model that some of us find it being a good remedy to the crisis of our extremely toxic civilization.
And that's why a quasi-shaman will cry out loud...
About
This is the log of a
work in progress. I'm tryning to keep here acount of all my quasi-shamanic inspiration -
the medium - so, please, do keep in mind that
these posts are in fact the actual WORK that some day will be presented as a finished work -
the message - (I hope it will be a book, but I certanly see this only as a last "bagage" that I have to throw away to free myself).
You can email me at -mariustoica_at_gmail_ dot_ com- for any question or opinion that you might have regarding my work.
Some info about myself: My name is Marius Stoica, I live in Timisoara (Romania), I'm 27 years old. Next week I'll get merried and my wife is pregnant in 4 months :) I've studied philosophy with an emphasis on contemporary french philosphy and some on phenomenology. In fact, I'm pretty influenced by authors like Battaille, Deleuze, Husserl or Marc Richir. I also don't like corporatism and imperialism and I try to resist to all the crap that the world is more and more filled in.
8 September 2007----------------
Trecem la modul freestyle
7 Octombrie 2008
