ABSTRACT
At the methodological level, one can point to the relative lack of mutual knowledge by textual and anthropological scholars. This has been particularly noticeable in the Englishspeaking world. The, by now very large and very valuable, body of work on Tibet by British and American scholars of religion students of religion and Buddhism has inc1uded little reference to anthropological research. At the same time, the smaller but also very useful body of work done by British and American anthropologists working within societies mostlyon
the Tibetan borderlands has tended to refer only tangentially to the work of textualist scholars. The separation is not total. A younger generation of Anglophone scholars is more ready to read and synthesise both kinds of approach, and elsewhere in the world, particularly in France, scholars have generally been more ready to constitute their object of enquiry as the practice of a Iiving religious tradition, including its textual and philosophical aspects. Nevertheless, it seemed to me in writing Civilized Shamans (Samuel 1993) that I was trying to reconstitute a complex object that had been only partially grasped by these various incomplete perspecti ves. U sing a familiar image, I was trying to sketch the elephant that a succession of blind people had variously described! Put like that, it was a rather quixotic undertaking, since I have no real claims to be less blind myself, only perhaps to have a wider view than some of the authors on whose shoulders I was clambering--to shift the metaphor a little.
