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Paper short abstract:

Contemporary shamans (in harnerian, non-entheogenic specialization) often enlist the help of other-than-human actors to heal their clients. This paper aims to theorize shamanic healing from the perspective of the reconstruction and restructuring of the client’s Self that this encounter may provoke.

Paper long abstract:

Contemporary shamans often engage in private one-on-one healing. The most common healing techniques involve seeking out and summoning “allies” from the Other Worlds and returning lost parts of the patient’s soul back into the patient’s body. Both techniques subsequently affect the patient’s self-perception, albeit in different ways.

Based on long-term field research and in-depth interviews with participants in shamanic healing sessions, this paper focuses on how the client’s Self can be transformed and perceived via encounters with the two aforementioned types of non-human actors. The ritually found ally and the lost part of the soul play an important role in creating new opportunities for social interaction. Even after the healing ritual is over, the client has to keep communicating with these newly found helpers, using various techniques to remind themselves of their presence and attend to them.

The encounter with these actors is thus a chance for the integration of new significant others into the client’s self-understanding, where the Self is understood as fluid, relational, and permanently negotiated as an interface between the social Me and personal I. This newly established self-perception, on the one hand, starts the healing process; however, on the one hand, the very experience with these actors is often perceived as strong, but dubious by the clients themselves, and the once-established contact is not at all easy for clients to maintain. These other-than-human actors can thus break, challenge, and change the usual self-perception, yet their power and existence remain uncertain.