anthropology assignment

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The shaman is an individual that is at the center of the community. Shamans are people with a wealth of knowledge that community members use as a resource for many things. They are more than just healers. The shaman contributes to the health of their community by being a healer of illnesses, the keeper of traditions, and a source to communicate between the natural and the spiritual world.

As a healer, the shaman is sought out to diagnose and treat illness. The shaman is trained for an extended length of time to understand how to find out the source of a person’s illness. They also must know how to heal the person’s illness once it has been diagnosed. The shaman recognizes many plants and herbs for their medicinal properties. The shaman knows what plants are good to treat certain illnesses and they understand how to correctly prepare and use the plants in order for them to have the proper effect on the individual he or she is trying to treat.

As a keeper of tradition, the shaman is often sought for ceremonies of all kinds. The shaman has an extensive knowledge of the traditions of their tribe. They are often the center of the tribe’s ceremonies because they know how it is done correctly. By holding this knowledge, the shaman allows the tribe’s traditions to be passed down for years to come. In this way, they help keep the culture of the tribe alive and active.

As a source of communication between the natural and the spiritual world, the shaman is seen as the center of religion. In the four readings for this week, each of the healers had one major thing in common. They all believe that a higher power is what gave them the authority to become a shaman. Each of these healers believes that a higher power chose them to be healers and gave them the ability to heal others. In each of their stories you find that an individual cannot just decide to become a shaman. They had to pass certain tests, show they had certain abilities, and sometimes had to come from a family of healers in order to be selected to be trained as a shaman. Shamans also connect to the spiritual world during healing ceremonies. Plotkin pointed out that many shamans use rhythmic dancing and the use of snuff to enter a trance that will bring them into the spiritual world during a healing ceremony. In this trance, the spirits will tell the shaman what the patient’s diagnosis is and how to treat it. Due to this members of the community, see them as a center of religion because they are the only ones that have direct contact with the spirit world.

I believe there is a role for shamans in our contemporary world and that they should be included in the medical system. I think many times in our contemporary world, we do not always have an answer to why a person is sick. This may be because we do not have a scientific way to explain or diagnose what is wrong with the individual. Unfortunately, when this happens we have to tell the individual that we do not know what is wrong and so we do not know how to fix it. This makes the individual feel lost and they lose faith in the system because they are going to the person that should know what is wrong with them and they leave with no answer. This may be where a shaman can step in. They do not use the same methods to diagnose as our medical system does and they believe illness can come from more than the physiological stand point. While their diagnoses and treatments may differ greatly from the conventional medical system, they may be able to give the person some sort of answer and treatment option for their problem that could significantly help the person.

I believe shamanism could definitely find a place in our medical system. I hear more and more lately about complementary and alternative medicine being used. I think there is a way to use modern medicine in combination with these other methods to give individuals the best care possible. I do not think either the modern medical system or shamanism has all the answer, so by using both we can have a larger body of knowledge that could change the way we treat people greatly.

I think shamans could bring about a new way for us to look at things in the medical system. Shamanism seems to have the individual at the center of care. I think we need more of that in the medical system. The contemporary world likes to use science as the center of care. They use research and statistics to decide what treatment options work best and do not always take into consideration that each individual is different and may not respond to therapy the same as would another patient. So in this way, I think shaman can show how to respond to the patient as an individual and build their treatment around that. Some people need more than medicine to help them and I think shamanism may be able to provide them with the care they need.