Tribal peoples believe that the shaman experiences, absorbs, and communicates a special mode of power, sustaining and healing. This book discusses American Indian shamanic traditions, particularly those of the Woodland Ojibway, in terms drawn from the classical shamanism of Siberian peoples. Using a cultural-historical method, John A. Grim describes the spiritual formation of shamans, male and female, and elucidates the special religious experience that they transmit to their tribes. Writing as a historian of religion well acquainted with ethnological materials, Grim identifies four patterns in the shamanic experience: cosmology, tribal sanction, ritual reenactment, and trance experience. Relating those concepts to the Siberian and Ojibway experiences, he draws on mythology, sociology, anthropology, and psychology to paint a picture of shamanism that is both particularized and interpretative. As religious personalities, shamans are important today because of their singular ability to express symbolically the forces that animate the tribal cosmology. Often identifying themselves with primordial earth processes, shamans develop symbol systems drawn from the archetypal earth images that are vital to their psychic healing technique. This particular ability to resonate with the natural world is felt as an important need in our time. Those readers who identify with American Indians as they confront modern technological society will value this introduction to our native shamanic traditions and to the religious experience itself. The author's discussion of Ojibway practices is the most comprehensive short treatment available, written with a fine poetic feeling that reflects the literary expressiveness inherent in American Indian religion and thought.

The Shaman: Patterns of Religious Healing Among the Ojibway Indians (Volume 165) (The Civilization of the American Indian Series)

Grim, John A.

Teen & Young Adult

University of Oklahoma Press

This issue of Bucknell Review provides an overview of the various traditional and contemporary worldviews as resources for thinking about ecology. It is increasingly clear that the environmental crisis is one of vast scale and complexity. It is also evident that the urgency of the problem is being raised by many individuals in a variety of disciplines. It is the thesis of this volume (and of J. Baird Callicott's essay) that a new global environmental ethics will be needed to solve some of the critical issues that face us in the late twentieth century: as many have noted, "we will not preserve what we do not respect." It is the editors' contention that various religious and cultural worldviews have helped shape traditional attitudes toward nature. Indeed, as Larry Rasmussen observes, from a worldview there emerges a method for action, from a cosmology there arises an ethic. These are inextricably linked. By presenting various worldviews, the editors hope that a broadened context for a new ecological ethics will be created. Without such a comprehensive context of restraint and respect, the exploitation of nature and its resources will continue unchecked.The first part of this volume begins to fulfill the charge of Tu Wei-ming that we must examine the resources of the world's great spiritual traditions in finding our way beyond the Enlightenment mentality. The religions of Native American, Asian, and Mediterranean peoples are explored for the textual, ritual, and experiential evidence they offer for an understanding of human-earth relationships. A range of positions is evident: from the biocentric position of Native Americans, to the anthropocentric positions of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Baha'i, to the more ecocentric positions of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Janism, as well as the anthropocosmic position of Taoism and Confucianism. In each case, the role of the human in relation to the cosmos is reexamined from the lens of traditional religions.In the second part of the volume, a range of contemporary ecological perspectives is discussed. The comparative survey by Ralph Metzner sets the tone for this section: Metzner describes the paradigm shift in perceptions and values that is taking place in many areas in the transition from the industrial to the ecozoic age. The essays by Charlene Spretnak on ecofeminism, David Ray Griffin on process philosophy, and George Sessions on deep ecology testify to this paradigm shift already occurring. The last two pieces by Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry point toward the need for a radical rethinking of the story of the universe - its emergence and evolution - and toward a new understanding of our role in this dynamic, unfolding process.Worldviews and Ecology, then, is but a beginning in charting the territory of traditional and contemporary worldviews that are being rediscovered or articulated for the first time in response to the current environmental crisis. It is an invitation for further creative commentaries and worldviews to emerge.

Worldviews and Ecology (Bucknell Review)

Science & Math

Tucker, Mary Evelyn

Biological Sciences

UNKNO

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