ABSTRACT
The question of how to define the category of “shaman”, and “shamanism”, has exercised many scholars. Either a broad or a narrow approach can be taken to this problem (for an excellent survey on the topic of Shamanism see Thomas DuBois’s 2009 An Introduction to Shamanism). Tn our treatment we look at the materials differently. We are interested in themes that link cases together rather than in absolute composite definitions. We will use information from a number of areas to show the potentialities for this use of themes, explored earlier in a different way in our book The Python’s Back (Strathern and Stewart 2000a). (See also our discussions in Strathern and Stewart 2008).
