anthropology assignment

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A shaman is a healer. He/She heals the people of their community by using their powers to communicate with the supernatural world. Shamans have a destiny. They are destined to become a shaman and sometimes even before they are born. There are some people in which an extreme or tragic event happens to them and then their journey to become a shaman happens. For example, Jesusita started at a young age helping out her grandma. Over the years she learned from experience about how to be a midwife. She learned since she was small with her grandma teaching what she needed to learn. She even learned which herbal remedies she should use. She explains that the reasoning for being such a good midwife is having deep faith and for God giving her this incredible gift of being a midwife. Shamans hold knowledge. They hold knowledge that has been passed on from generation to generation. They know what they can do in order to heal the people in their communities. They have so much information on what they can do in order to heal people by using herbs/plants. It is vital for the young people of those communities to have interest in becoming a shaman because they may one day be able to be know all this information. Without the information being passed on it is like a book being thrown away and never knowing what information was held inside. Some of this information has been passed for thousands and thousands of years. A good way that this information can be persevered was when Plotkin discussed the Shaman’s Apprentice Program. The community seeks the Shaman to heal them just as we in the United States go to our general practice doctor. People will seek their shaman for advice and answers on their sicknesses or the unbalance in their lives. Just as in the film “Eduardo the Healer” a woman went to him to be cleansed and to see what was wrong with her. People want to feel safe and want to confide in their healers. I believe there should be a role for shamanism in our contemporary world. Sometimes doctors can’t give us answers to what may be wrong with us. With shamans, they can use their spiritual powers to communicate as to what may be wrong with us. If people don’t like medications they can use this as an alternative medicine by using herbs/plants just as the people from the video on the mystery of chi, they had the option of going to a regular doctor or going to a doctor where alternative medicine was used. I think shamans should be part of our medical system because they hold so much knowledge that they may even be able to team up with doctors to find cure for many diseases still needing cures. From reading the Plotkin book, I learned that the shamans hold so much knowledge about the plants and the tropical forest that they could be our source for finding out about many cures.