[Lasa] Call for Papers: "Cosmological Agency and Embodied Dependency: Struggle and Collaboration in Latin American Shamanism"

[michael cepek]

Hi folks,

Luiz Costa and I are putting together a panel for the meetings of the American Anthropological Association this fall in Vancouver, BC, Canada. Right now we're looking for a few extra papers. The scope is "Latin America." If you're interested in participating, please reply privately to me at this email or to my institutional account--michael.cepek at utsa.edu--with a general idea for a paper, which I'll then forward to Luiz. We'll need the final abstracts together by April 10th, when the panel has to be formally submitted. At the time of formal submission, you do have to be an AAA member and register for the conference, but if my memory serves me correctly, the AAA will reimburse you for the conference registration fee if our panel is not accepted.

See the abstract below--and thanks.

Mike


Cosmological Agency and Embodied Dependency:

Struggle and Collaboration in Latin American Shamanism


Early scholarship on shamanism identified its volitional character as its primary quality. In the works of Mircea Eliade and others, shamans appear as masters of voluntary soul flight, by which they traverse the universe to acquire healing powers, battle supernatural enemies, and retrieve lost souls. More recently, scholars of shamanism in many global contexts—especially in Latin America—have argued that shamans inhabit a cosmos defined by forms of power that shamans can never completely control. In these accounts, shamans engage the productive and destructive consequences of colonial and postcolonial violence, and they both struggle against and collaborate with the historically emergent beings that trouble Indigenous communities and the health of their inhabitants. Accordingly, shamans appear as actors who never have total power over themselves or the contexts in which they operate. Rather, their actions depend upon possession by and collaboration with a transforming assemblage of beings, and their bodies become the homes of agentive objects that continuously threaten to act according to their own desires and proclivities.


In this panel, we offer ethnographically rich accounts of Latin American shamans who negotiate historically shifting climates defined by contradictory possibilities for empowerment and dependency. We demonstrate that shamanic agency is never a settled, stable, or unitary affair. Rather, we attest to the many ways in which violence and oppression both limit and expand shamanic power at different historical moments. Through ethnographic accounts of shamanic practice in _____, we flesh out the question of shifting shamanic control by exploring shamans’ participation in the complex forms of struggle that arise within the social, political, economic, and environmental contexts framing Indigenous Latin American life. Our papers offer a vision of shamans as sophisticated actors embedded within constellations of power that both constrain and enable their abilities to defend the people who depend upon their contingent, embodied, and socio-cosmologically distributed powers.




Sent from Outlook<http://aka.ms/weboutlook>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.ecuatorianistas.org/pipermail/lasa-ecuatorianistas.org/attachments/20190403/68820ae8/attachment.html>