Paper Short Abstract:

This paper tracks changes in the visual representation of northern shamans during periods of political and religious transformation. Conflict and spiritual power are revealed in images of shamans' drums, indigenous painting and sculpture, museum life-groups, ethnographic photography, and films from Siberia, Sápmi, Greenland and North America.

Paper Abstract:

This paper tracks changes in the visual representation of northern shamans during periods of political and religious transformation. Conflict and spiritual power are revealed in images of shamans' drums, indigenous painting and sculpture, museum life-groups, ethnographic photography, and films from Siberia, Sápmi, Greenland and North America. During times of repression, popular depictions have often shown shamans as evil madmen committing acts of symbolic violence; at other times they have been portrayed as peaceful, benevolent mystics bestowing blessings upon the people. Sacred objects, including anthropomorphic masks and zoomorphic rattling pendants, were usually concealed but were always already intended for visual display within a ritual context where invisible spirits play a central role in experience. The interplay between visibility and invisibility mirrors that of performance and secrecy in ceremonial actions. Staged ethnographic photographs employ artifacts for public viewing in a collaborative construction between the subject and the documenter; in the case of shamans, they spectacularize unique individual objects of power into widely reproduced synecdochic visual icons representing shamanism as a general system. Contemporary indigenous artists work within both frameworks, combining elements of insider and outsider perspectives in imagery which looks simultaneously to the past and the future.