ABSTRACT
The conflicts between forms of shamanism and bureaucratically integrated religious practice seem to be almost a constant of historical encounters. Controlling beliefs and practices of a population over which empires and nation states expand was, and still is, considered a crucial part of state-building processes and a feature of modernization, where regimes of signs have to be checked and sanitized for the smooth functioning of the state machinery. Shamanic beliefs and practices were often considered signs of superstition and backwardness and shamans nothing more than demonic worshippers or charlatans. In the framework of this seemingly recurring pattern, we also find important differentiations in the scale and degree of these dynamical encounters. While the full spectrum of possibilities and outcomes may include almost everything from total eradication to full incorporation, the results invariably offer us a clear view of the resilience of shamanic configurations. More often than not, we may argue, shamanic religious specialists managed to survive and to adapt, albeit in a marginal position, within various and diversified regimes of economies of the sacred (Torri 2014). While this basic notion may well constitute the backbone of this book, we also want to incorporate an additional layer to it: the issue of gender as a fundamental element of these dynamics.
