Paper short abstract:

Autoethnographic research, where researcher is also a shaman practitioner, has been seen almost as necessary in the variety of contemporary shamanism. I examine how the experience-based and knowledge could be described and interpreted verbally on my study on contemporary shamanism in Finland.

Paper long abstract:

Shamans bring help, advice, and healing from the spirit world into this world. The work of a shaman is based on the connection of all living things and the possibility of communicating with other beings. So, in shamanic ontology the community includes human and non-human persons, including animals but also other spirits of nature and spiritual beings. Not only shaman’s roles and performances, but also their everyday way of life and even their very ontologies, mediate between the diverse oppositions and possibilities of their culture. Therefore, the challenge of studying contemporary shaman­ism is in its high diversity, and the variety of the experiences of practitioners. In a situation like this, the importance of contextualization is emphasized.

Writing as such, interpreting experience in the field, and understanding it as a fun­damental medium of knowledge, has been at the heart of anthropology and ethno­graphic approaches for decades. In autoethnography, the researcher’s experiences become part of the research material. In contemporary shamanism, autoethnographic research, where the writer is both a researcher and a shaman practitioner, has been seen almost as necessary. Auto-ethnography allows us to iden­tify meanings shared among subjects and within the research community. The description of experiences of auto-ethnographers can highlight the contribution of different human and non-human actors in the meaning-making process in which they are involved. In the case of the generating experience-based and spiritual knowledge, it makes possible to verbalize interactions, for example during the shaman journey between the human and the non-human.

Therefore, auto-ethnographers could act as interpreters of the experience-based, spiritual, and usually tacit knowledge of the field and the spiritual world they convey. The question is how this knowledge is mediated verbally to one’s scientific, or possibly wider, public. In my presentation, I examine my way of making autoethnography on contemporary shamanism in Finland.