Abstract
Since the earliest encounters, Europeans dismissed the epistemologies of shamans and described their experiences as delusions induced by inebriating substances. In a similar vein, some symbolic anthropologists have reduced shamanic beings into sophisticated metaphoric constructs, representing human society. The interpretations of the anthropology of religion and symbolic anthropology about shamanism have had a complementary naturalistic explanation, which, like missionaries, focuses on the ‘altered’ states of brain function caused by some of the substances employed by some Amerindian shamanic traditions. This chapter examines neuropsychological explanations of shamanic phenomena. First, we review the neurochemistry of some of the hallucinogenic substances employed in Amerindian shamanism. Then we examine neuropsychological explanations of hallucinations, entoptic vision, and phosphenes, and how those explanations have been adopted by anthropologists seeking to explain shamanic vision.
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Giraldo Herrera, C.E. (2018). Neuropsychological Naturalistic Explanations of Shamanic Visions. In: Microbes and Other Shamanic Beings. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71318-2_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71318-2_6
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