ABSTRACT
Several anthropologists have even objected to the concept of shamanism itself. In 1966 †Clifford Geertz asserted that shamanism was a dry and insipid category with which ethnographers of religion had devitalized their data. A few years later Robert Spencer described it as a residual category of the discipline. Finally Michael Taussig has attempted more recently, from a *post-modernist perspective, to carry out a radical †deconstruction of it (as *Lévi-Strauss had done for totemism) in seeing it as a modern construct created in the West which brings together otherwise diverse practices (Atkinson 1992).
