Abstract
So far I have dealt with the representation of shamanism and the encounters between the shaman and the outsider. During my examination of the cases of both Black Elk and María Sabina, we have been presented with a range of interdisciplinary representations of the religious phenomenon, which outsiders have named shamanism. We get to know these figures through the account of the white, literate other but also through their own narrative “autobiographies,” albeit written by someone else. We are dealing here with texts that do not quite fit any traditional representational form. In fact, we are still to find out what these strange texts really are and how we should read them due to their cross-disciplinary nature, which brings about a narrative that has both scientific and literary characteristics. After all, these texts represent dialogues between the subjective voice of the author and that of the native Other, but they eventually appear to us as subjective monologues wherein the voice of the Other, despite its underlying presence, is ultimately submerged into the voice of the author—although, as I have stated elsewhere, it could be seen as being precisely the other way round.
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Notes
In 1973, Castaneda received a PhD at UCLA for his Sorcery: A Description of the World as well as a good deal of subsequent criticism for never producing the field notes required for such a degree in anthropology. Michael Harner, who has been one of the few anthropologists never to disbelieve Castaneda’s accounts as purely ethnographic, was not surprisingly one of the members of Castaneda’s defense board. In fact, Castaneda’s work, which is virtually identical to his third book Journey to Ixtlan, was based on interviews with an old Yaqui Indian called Juan Matus (the very Don Juan from the books), which were “documented at great length in three volumes of field reports, the third of which was accepted as his dissertation at the University of California.” In Richard de Mille, The Don Juan Papers: Further Castaneda Controversies (New York: Ross Erikson, 1980), 2.
Nagual is the word chosen by Castaneda—that is, the one he learns from Don Juan—to refer to the leader of the group of sorcerers. He also uses the word as a conceptual reference to the indescribable, the second attention, the separate reality, or the spirit. The word nagual comes from the Aztec language, also known as Mexicano or Nahuatl, used in the documents collected or redacted in the sixteenth century by the Spanish conquistadors. Deriving from the Nahuatl term nau-alli, it means sorcerer, witch, or wizard, according to Rémi Siméon, Diccionario de la Lengua Nahuatl (México: Siglo Veintiuno, 1994), 304. It is still used today by many groups in Mexico and Central America, and its current meaning is mostly that of nagualismo—that is, the metamorphosis of the shaman into animal. See Chapter 1’s discussion of “nagualismo” based on Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán, Medicina y Magia (México: Instituto Nacional Indigenista, 1973), 104. For more on the Nahuatl language, see the following:
Angel María Garibay K., Llave del Nahuatl (México: Ed. Porrúa, 1994); and
Marcos Matías Alonso, Vocabulario Nahuatl-Español (México: Plaza y Valdes, 1996).
Two of Castaneda’s women companions have published their own books about their experiences. See Taisha Abelar, The Sorcerers’ Crossing (New York: Arkana, 1992); and
Florinda Donner, Being-in-Dreaming: An Initiation into the Sorcerers’ World (New York: Harper Collins, 1991). Despite their alleged connection to Castaneda, who in fact wrote a preface to Abelar’s book, these writings do not seem to possess the literary quality of their master.
James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 25.
See Robert Hughes, Sandra Burton, Tomás Loayza, et al., “Don Juan and the Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” in Time Magazine [5 March 1973] 36–45;
Max Allen, “Review: 32 Castanedas,” in Journal of Altered States of Consciousness [1 (1): 1973] 109–22;
Daniel C. Noel, Seeing Castaneda: Reactions to the ‘Don Juan’ Writings of Carlos Castaneda (New York: Putnam, 1976).
Among those academics who praised Castaneda’s writings as ethnographic accounts are the following: Edward H. Spicer, “Early Praise from an Authority on Yaqui Culture,” in Noel, Seeing Castaneda, 30–33; Barbara Meyerhoff, “Conversations with Yoawima,” in Richard de Mille, The Don Juan Papers, 346; Ralph L. Beals, “Sonoran Fantasy or Coming of Age?” in American Anthropologist [80 (2): 1978] 355–62; Clement Meighan, Time Magazine [5 March 1973] 45; and John Kennedy, in
David E. Young and Jean-Guy Goulet, Being Changed by Cross-Cultural Encounters: The Anthropology of Extraordinary Experience (Peterborough, Canada: Broadview Press, 1994), 284. For distrust of Castaneda’s ethnography, see the following:
Ward Churchill, “Castaneda,” in Fantasies of the Master Race: Literature, Cinema and the Colonization of American Indians (Monroe, ME: Common Courage, 1992), 43–64, 291;
Wendy Rose, “The Great Pretenders,” in M. Anette Jaimes (ed.), The State of Native America (Boston: South End, 1992), 403–21; and Weston La Barre, “Stinging Criticism from the Author of The Peyote Cult,” in Noel, Seeing Castaneda, 40–42, even though it is worth mentioning that La Barre seems to have changed his mind as I show in the second part of my chapter. 35. Richard DeMille, son of the movie mogul Cecil B. DeMille was the first author to present a serious study of Castaneda as a hoax: Cas-taneda’s Journey: The Power and the Allegory (Santa Barbara: Capra Press, 1976). Nevertheless, he does not discard Castaneda’s value as a writer. On the contrary, de Mille actually praises Don Juan’s apprentice to such a high degree that sometimes one is left wondering whether his idea was in fact to debunk him. He also published one more book on the subject, which is a more in-depth work about Castaneda’s writing and could be seen as the definitive blow to Castaneda-as-true-ethnography defenders: The Don Juan Papers: Further Castaneda Controversies (New York: Ross Erikson, 1980).
For the discussion of Castaneda’s relevance to the social sciences, see the following: David Silverman, Reading Castaneda: A Prologue to the Social Sciences (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975); to mythology, see
Nevill Drury, Don Juan, Mescalito and Modern Magic: The Mythology of Inner Space (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978); to psychology, see
Donald Lee Williams, Border Crossings: A Psychological Perspective on Carlos Castaneda’s Path of Knowledge (Toronto: Inner City Books, 1981); to Western philosophy, see
Dennis Timm, Reality and the Man of Knowledge: An Essay on Carlos Castaneda (Bottrop, Germany: Literarisches, 1978); to Hindu philosophy, see
Mark MacDowell, A Comparative Study of Don Juan and Madhyamaka Buddhism: Knowledge and Transformation (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1986); to ethnography, see
Jay Courtney Fikes, Carlos Castaneda: Academic Opportunism and the Psychedelic Sixties (Victoria, Canada: Millenia Press, 1993); to New Age, see Tomas (a pseudonym), The Promise of Power: Reflections on the Toltec Warriors’ Dialogue from the Collected Works of Carlos Castaneda (Charlottesville: Hampton Roads, 1995).
Carlos Castaneda, Las Enseñanzas de Don Juan (México: FCE, 1974). The original text here—that is, the preface by Paz, titled “La Mirada Anterior”—is written in Spanish, and the translation is my own.
Paz, “La Mirada Anterior,” in Carlos Castaneda, Las Enseñanzas de Don Juan (México: FCE, 1974), 11.
Paul Stoller, The Taste of Ethnographic Things: The Senses in Anthropology (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania University Press, 1989), 39.
Larry Peters, Ecstasy and Healing in Nepal (Malibu: Undena, 1981), 37. For an epistemological outline of the concept of experiential approach, see the following authors: Robin Ridington, “The Anthropology of Experience” (unpublished paper, American Anthropological Association, 1969);
Charles T. Tart, “States of Consciousness and State-Specific Sciences,” in Science [176: 1972] 1203–10;
Jacques Maquet, “Meditation in Contemporary Sri Lanka,” in Journal of Transpersonal Psychology [7:1975] 181–85;
Frits Staal, Exploring Mysticism: A Methodological Essay (Los Angeles: California University Press, 1975);
Paul Riesman, Freedom in Fulani Social Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977);
Benetta Jules-Rosette, “The Veil of Objectivity: Prophecy, Divination, and Social Inquiry,” in American Anthropologist [80: 1978] 549–70.
As Marton indicates, some of the evidence of these other anthropologists who had undergone similar experiences in their field work but chose not to report them can be found in Sir Edward B. Tylor, in George W. Stocking Jr., “Animism in Theory and in Practice: E. B. Tylor’s Unpublished Notes on ‘Spiritualism,’” in Man [6 (1): 1971] 88–104; Ralph Linton, “The Witches of Andilamena,” in The Atlantic Monthly [89: 1927] 191–96;
Robert Lowie, “Supernormal Experiences of American Indians,” in Tomorrow [4 (3): 1955] 9–16;
Alfred Irving Hallowell, The Role of Conjuring in Salteaux Society (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania University Press, 1942);
E. Evans-Pritchard, “A Séance among the Azande,” in Tomorrow [5 (4): 1957] 11–26;
Ioan M. Lewis, “The Anthropologist’s Encounter with the Supernatural,” in A. Angoff and D. Barth (eds.), Parapsychology and Anthropology (New York: Parapsychology Foundation, 1974), 22–31.
See Bruce T. Grindal, “Into the Heart of Sisala Experience: Witnessing Death Divination,” in Journal of Anthropological Research [39 (1): 1983] 60–80, and “In Defense of Animism,” in Dreamworks [5 (1): 1986] 37–45; and
Paul Stoller, “Eye, Mind, and Word in Anthropology,” in L’Homme [24 (3–4): 1984] 91–114, and Fusion of Worlds: An Ethnography of Possession among the Songhay of Niger (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1987).
James M. Edie, “Notes on the Philosophical Anthropology of William James,” in James Edie (ed.), An Invitation to Phenomenology: Studies in the Philosophy of Experience (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1965), 116.
Michael Jackson, Paths toward a Clearing: Radical Empiricism and Ethnographic Inquiry (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 4.
Paul Stoller, The Taste of Ethnographic Things: The Senses in Anthropology (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania University Press, 1989), 68.
Charles Laughlin, “Psychic Energy & Transpersonal Experience: A Biogenetic Structural Account of the Tibetan Dumo Yoga Practice,” in Young and Goulet (eds.), Being Changed, 102. For some of the methodological issues involved in transpersonal approach, see also Laughlin, “Transpersonal Anthropology: Some Methodological Issues,” in Western Canadian Anthropology [5: 1988] 29–60.
Gilles Deleuze, “On the Superiority of Anglo-American Literature,” in Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues (London: Athlone Press, 1987), 48.
Daniel C. Noel, The Soul of Shamanism: Western Fantasies, Imaginal Realities (New York: Continuum, 1999).
Rodney Needham, “An Ally for Castaneda,” in Exemplars (Berkeley: California University Press, 1985), 209.
Needham uses the following publications on Zen Buddhism to support his argument: Eugen Herrigel, Zen in the Art of Archery (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1953), and The Method of Zen (New York: Pantheon Books, 1960); and
Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki, What Is Zen? (New York: Harper & Row, 1972).
David Murray, “Anthropology, Fiction, and the Occult: The Case of Carlos Castaneda,” in Peter Messent (ed.), The Occult: A Collection of Critical Essays (New York: Prentice Hall, 1981), 182. As examples of writing based on master-pupil relationships that became best sellers in the same period Murray uses, see the following:
Doug Boyd, Rolling Thunder (New York: Dell, 1974);
John G. Neihardt, Black Elk Speaks (Lincoln: Nebraska University Press, 1988); and
John Lame Deer, Lame Deer: Seeker of Visions (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972).
Murray is quoting from Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic (Cleveland: Case Western Reserve University Press, 1973), 82.
Relevant publications from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which could be seen as the first representations of what would eventually be called ethnobotany, can be found in the writings of authors whose works leave little doubt of their practical knowledge on the subject. Perhaps the earliest of all is The Seven Sisters of Sleep (1860), by the famous English mycologist Mordecai Cooke. This book, to which Cooke strangely enough never referred in his later mycological studies, deals with the discussion of seven varieties (at the time, probably the only ones known to science) of psychoactive substances; another book, by John Uri Lloyd—a nineteenth-century sage, pharmacist, occultist, and author—worth mentioning is Etidorhpa (Cincinnati: Author’s limited edition, 1895), in which Lloyd describes an encounter with mother-goddess Etidorhpa (Aphrodite spelled backward) in a time clearly beyond any chronological pattern—that is, a clearly mushroom-induced hallucination. Other accounts bearing a similar approach are the following: A. E. Merrill, “The Narrative of Mr. W,” in Science [40 (1029): 1914]; and H. M. Pim, “Monsieur among the Mushrooms,” in Unknown Immortals—In the Northern City of Success (Dublin: Talbot Press, 1917).
It is also significant to point out another emergent discipline of the time whose aims are indeed very similar to those of ethnobotany: eth-nopoetics. For the relevance of ethnopoetics in relation to shamanism, refer to my discussion in Chapter 2. See also Jerome Rothenberg, Technicians of the Sacred (New York: Doubleday, 1968); and Pre-Faces and Other Writings (New York: New Directions, 1981).
Thomas J. Riedlinger (ed.), The Mushroom Seeker (Rochester: Park Street Press, 1997), 78.
Carlos Castaneda, The Active Side of Infinity (London: Thorsons, 1999), 188.
Ronald K. Siegel Jr., Intoxication: Life in Pursuit of Artificial Paradise (New York: Dutton, 1989), 10. (This book was published after Furst’s use of Siegel described here.)
Wade Davis, One River: Science, Adventure and Hallucinogenics in the Amazon Basin (London: Touchstone, 1998), ix.
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© 2014 Marcel de Lima Santos
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de Lima, M. (2014). The Case of Carlos Castaneda. In: The Ethnopoetics of Shamanism. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137436405_6
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