The Neurophenomenology of Shamanism An Essay Review

Michael Winkelman, who is a senior lecturer in the department of anthropology, Arizona State University, and director of its ethnographic field school, has provided a rich overview of the neurophenomenology of shamanism in his book, Shamanism: The Neural Ecology of Consciousness. Written in the tradition of Laughlin, McManus, and d’Aquili’s 1992 classic, Brain, Symbol, and Experience: Toward a Neurophenomenology of Consciousness, Winkelman considers shamanism in many of its facets. He explores shamanism’s social and symbolic content, and the implications of its neurological underpinnings both for shamanic practitioners and for their clients. Winkelman asserts that shamanism played a fundamental role in both cultural and personal human evolution, especially in cognitive integration, healing practice, and self-transformation. In particular, the ‘hardwired’ basis of hallucinatory experiences and their perceptual constants provides an iconographic system extended metaphorically in rock art representations (p. 5). To Winkelman, rock painting represents neuropsychologically-based metaphors for visionary experience (e.g., death/rebirth, descent/ascent, light, flight, sex, drowning). At the core of shamanic practice is the belief in a cosmos populated by spirit entities that affect all aspects of nature and human life in particular (p. 58). This worldview is said to be based on the operation of neurognostic structures. Following Laughlin et al. (1992), Winkelman uses the term ‘neurognostic structures’, i.e., ‘innate knowledge modules of consciousness’ (p. 27), that also can be thought of as reflecting what Jung called ‘archetypes’ (p. 28). Shamans are described as ‘technicians of consciousness’ who utilize these ‘neurognostic’ potentials for individual and community healing and for personal and social