Resolving ‘The problem of shamanism': An unwarranted answer to a non-existent question

Eliade's works on shamanism tried to resolve a non-existent question by advancing an unwarranted answer: ‘the problem of shamanism', from the Eliadean viewpoint, concerns the supernatural origin of religion tout court, which should be reframed in an emic way in order to extrapolate the necessary general features common to homo religiosus.

As Homayun Sidky has remarked, Eliade's works on shamanism were destined to great success, both for the discipline and for the scholar himself: Eliade modernized the field by providing the first overarching synthesis, ‘situating the problem “in the context of the history of religions”, as Eliade (1981: 117) explained', and re-establishing ‘a new sense of significance, legitimacy, and relevance' for this field of study (Sidky 2010: 73; cf. Znamenski 2003: 34; DuBois 2009: 24). In the end, ‘Eliade's efforts were enormously successful and propelled him to the category of an academic superstar in his field of expertise and beyond' (Sidky 2010: 73). Even though Eliade's justifications fall outside the scientific paradigm to such an extent that archaeologist Paul G. Bahn labelled his synthesis as a ‘fraud' (Bahn 2010: 80-2), Eliade's Shamanism and his prehistorico-ecstatic model are still used or recalled as a pivotal reference in many contemporary analyses (e.g.

Two additional reasons that need to be factored in when considering the spread of the Eliadean paradigm from the 1960s onwards were the explosion of the New Age and counterculture youth movements and the fact that many former students and colleagues of Eliade became affiliated to other US academic institutions, spreading further Eliade’s ideas and granting academic citizenship and popular stardom to Eliadean shamanism - notwithstanding the insufficient evidence for such a reconstruction (the cultural milieu also prompted Eliade to change his attitude with regard to drugs, as we have seen above). As Sidky concluded, in the second half of the twentieth century, both the US cultural environment and Eliade’s works were tied in a loop which led to the ‘uncritical acceptance of the fantasy that Eliade and his followers have built upon this historical/ethnographic complex’ (Sidky 2010: 86).

In a sense, Eliade brought to a close the metamorphosis of the HoR from incipient science to fully fledged pseudoscience. Although his ideas can be collocated and studied in their original Interwar context, the remarkable fact is that they sustained and supported well into the incipient twenty-first century and inside academia what philosopher of science Imre Lakatos (1922-1974) called a degenerating research programme, that is, an ever-expanding complex of ad hoc explanations influenced by extra-epistemic factors (e.g. socio-political) intended to immunize the hard core (here, the homo religiosus and myth as true story) and bypass criticism and falsification, creating a prosperous and thriving ‘Eliadological’ niche within the HoR faithful to the authoritative ipse dixit of Eliade (Ambasciano 2018b). As recalled in the opening epigraph, the fear of Eliade’s frenemy, Franco-Romanian playwright Eugene Ionesco (1909-1994), did eventually materialize: Western academics let the Trojan horse of pseudoscience in (Vianu and Alexandrescu 1994: 233; cf. Lakatos 1989: 34, and Dubuisson 2005). To be sure, as soon as Eliade’s works became best-sellers in Europe and in the USA, some scholars began to react against the explosion of irrational, emic and fideistic trends within the HoR. And yet, there was no sudden overthrow, no immediate rejection of the status quo. What followed was a revolutionary schism in slow motion, punctuated by localized outburts of guerrilla warfare.