Paranthropology [Resources]

Vine Deloria Jr.: The late giant of North American Indian anthropology....  a full believer in the practical (ie. 'paranormal') power of his people's spirituality. He did have a bias against Christianity, but this is surely forgivable given his perspective.



An Interview:
http://www.derrickjensen.org/2000/07/whe...e-deloria/

An astoundingly good book:

The World We Used to Live In: Remembering the Powers of the Medicine Men 

Review:

The World We Used to Live In: Remembering the Powers of the Medicine Men. By Vine Deloria Jr. Golden, co: Fulcrum Publishing, 2006. 

This potent volume was Deloria's final gift to his readers. He completed the final editing during a stay in the hospital a few days before his passing into the spirit world of his ancestors. He had made a career out of demonstrating the greater plausibility of Indian traditions and historical memories over against the usually dismissive explanations offered by colonial white academics, missionaries, and government officials. This volume carries on that work with aplomb. Here Deloria has collecled stories from a wide variety of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century ethnographies, stories of the wonderful accomplishments of Indian medicine men from a great variety of tribes, from Kiowa and Comanche to Dakota and Omaha. There are early descriptions of Ojibwe tent shaking ceremonies, Lakota lowanpi ceremonies, and all sorts of other occasions. These are stories of power used to change the weather, to bring success in battle, to impress white observers, or stories that were simply a natural part of some tribal ceremony. They involve dramatic interactions between humans and other animals or the fantastic healing of someone badly wounded or those deathly ill. The white writers (anthropologists and amateurs working for the U.S. government) who recorded these stories included them not as useful illustrations of the religious traditions they were documenting but rather as illustrations of the lack of sophistication of Indian cultures. Persistently dismissed as "conjuring" by white observers, these stories have a consistency, Deloria demonstrates, that demands they be taken much more seriously than the dominant white society has dared. By grouping them in coherent sets, he presents a convincing argument that the stories are not merely the trickery and deception of "witch doctoring." The dreams experienced by these Indian ancestors follow a regular pattern that suddenly forces the reader to hear them as quite plausible narratives rather than as incredible fantasies. The exploits of these old men of great spiritual power are lined up next to one another in such a way as to make their stories compellingly credible. Indeed, Deloria's collection demonstrates such a consistent display of power in American Indian ceremonial and healing traditions that we are required to consider them with greater gravity than their original collectors ever dreamed. To paraphrase the Australian magistrate in Werner Herzog's Where the Green Ants Dream commenting on Aboriginal stories, these American Indian stories occur with such frequency and consistency that they cohere into a palpable truth. Deloria pairs each story he records with his own commentary on the text, a commentary always executed with insight and the cutting edge we long ago came to expect from him. The collection of these texts alone makes this
volume an important addition to any library on American Indian concerns; Deloria's commentaries throughout make it indispensable.

TINK TINKER (WAZHAZHE)
Professor of American Indian
Cultures and Religious Traditions
Iliff School of Theology

Talking Animism and the Anomalous | Dr Jack Hunter

This week, Dr Jack Hunter makes his return to the show.

Jack is the author and/or editor of Talking With The Spirits, Strange Dimensions, Why People Believe in Spirits, Gods and Magic, Damned Facts and the recently published Engaging The Anomalous.

He joins us for a fascinating chat about spirits, anthropology, ecology, animism, the limits of our modern frames in coming to terms with all these notions and a surprising detour into the state of permaculture. Download the episode directly here or listen along on YouTube [above]. Enjoy.

Show Notes

• Jack's latest book, Engaging the Anomalous. US. UK.
  
• Jack's website.
  
• One School, One Planet.
  
• Paranthropology Journal.
  

Old school, 1990 style:

Shamans and Other "Magico-Religious" Healers: A Cross-Cultural Study of Their Origins, Nature, and Social Transformations

http://www2.ups.edu/faculty/bdasher/Chem...alers-.pdf

More anthro than para, but still interesting. [Edit: Actually, this last statement is unfair, the author does cite PSI research to validate the use of altered states.]

Jack Hunter is also the guest in the latest Skeptiko podcast, "Anthropology, Animism, Panpsychism and What’s Next":
http://www.skeptiko-forum.com/threads/dr...-383.4169/

Courtesy of the SPR Facebook page - Jack Hunter has been awarded a research fellowship by the Parapsychology Foundation. The announcement, together with a fairly detailed description of his research by Dr Hunter, is here:
https://parapsychology.org/jack-hunter-p...ch-fellow/

Apparently the PF's fellowships are ongoing, and Hunter is joining four existing fellows appointed in 2015 - Carlos Alvarado, Nancy Zingrone, Kathy Dalton and James Matlock. (I hadn't realised Kathy Dalton was still active in the field.)

I wondered if anyone here had read Ronald Hutton's book, "Shamans: Siberian Spirituality and the Western Imagination" (2001). 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamans_(Hutton_book)

Apparently the main focus of the book is on revising beliefs about shamanism that "we think we know". I'm not sure what Hutton's conclusion is, but this is the view of one reviewer:
"Hutton's approach to his subject is sympathetic. In fact, like many of those who have written on this subject, he seems to be something of a cultural relativist. He finds that rationalist interpretations of the shamans' spiritual explorations and their own explanation of what they are doing are functionally equivalent, and from one or two hints, especially in his closing pages, I get the impression that he is prepared to accept shamanic claims that the shamanic world is in some sense real."
http://www.acampbell.org.uk/bookreviews/r/hutton.html

I have finally bought a copy of this and I'm reading it now, and enjoying it so far.

It's interesting that in the 13th century shamanic-sounding activities were described by Marco Polo (in China), and a Franciscan friar, William of Rubruck (in Mongolia). The earliest detailed eyewitness account, from 1557, is available online, and makes fascinating reading:
https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.../page/n373

Courtesy of the SPR Facebook page, here's a post on Robert Moss's blog (an extract from his book "The Secret History of Dreaming") about the 19th-century "dream liberator" of American slaves, Harriet Tubman - who was later rumoured to be of Ashanti descent - and about shamanic practices among the Ashantis:
https://mossdreams.blogspot.com/2019/03/...r-and.html