Sexist biases and gender issues: Eliade's tunnel vision
Eliade’s right-wing tunnel vision for the discipline relegated to the background many important themes and topics, the most dramatically evident of which were perhaps tied to his sexism.
We can briefly tackle this point by approaching,first, a case study of local shamanic practices in classical Japanese myth and ritual (Strenski 2015: 161-3), and, second, the more general disciplinary reaction to such sexism.Arguing for a locative reinvestigation of the mythological ‘realm beyond ordinary experience that is also thought to be the abode of the kami’ (i.e. Shinto superhuman agents), and pushing for an analysis able to retrace socio-political intents in both religious and non-religious power networks and spatial hierarchies (Grapard 1991: 3; cf. Brown 1993: 9), Japanese historian Allan Grapard notes that male shamans are mostly absent while female shamans are the norm.4 The classical, phenomenological interpretation is simply that those women are more apt to channel certain spiritual powers which, in turn, allow them to contact spirits and access some otherwise inaccessible sacred worlds described in the local mythic topography. Thus, according to the standard interpretation, the scholarly exploration of the religious role of those female shamans would accept ipso facto the emic descriptions of the local worldview once filtered through the phenomenological strainer. What would be fatally lost in this scholarly analysis is the fact that the domain of religious, shamanic performance represents what has remained to those local women to express themselves in a way suitable to be accepted by the dominant, androcentric social order. Grapard, who studied the gendered mythologies and ritual performance related to female priesthood in Japan, writes that
ritual power is divided between the sexes: purification is essentially a male prerogative and [...] is directly related to the creation of cultural emblems and, therefore, of domains of knowledge.
The only field of speech-knowledge that is left to women is that of communication with the introverted negativities of the worlds beyond.Grapard 1991: 17
In a sense, those shamans made a virtue out of necessity, for this is the only way to ‘achieve ends which they cannot readily obtain more directly’ (Lewis 1978: 85) in androcentric and/or patriarchal social systems, that is (a) communities dominated by a set of masculine, and potentially sexist or misogynist, schemata which shape beliefs, customs, policies, institutions and individual expectations, in (b) societal settings whose power roles from family to politics are under the more or less exclusive control of men (see Ambasciano 2016c: 118). Therefore, female shamanic abilities in the aforementioned Japanese setting were located in a mythological setting which justified the limited role assigned to women: ‘males separated themselves from females, in those myths, whenever they treated them, not as human beings, but as objects of curiosity' (Grapard 1991: 17). The religious involvement of women as shamans, then, is the result of the androcentric social network which confines those women to this subordinate religious performance, while their alleged ability to travel to other supernatural worlds and communicate with imagined superhuman agents (such as spirits) is what has been left to reclaim a social space otherwise denied - but always under male strict supervision (Strenski 2015: 162). From this new perspective, the critical study of local religions reveals the existence of the underlying, constraining power dynamics, something almost unthinkable within classical HoR.5 One of the most striking features of shamanism, i.e. the spiritual voyage to other mythical dimensions during the seance, betrays such a gendered construction. As Grapard concludes, the ‘cosmology of [shamanic] travel chambers is the mental map of a social code, the genealogical ground of relations of power between the sexes' (Grapard 1991: 21; my emphasis).
All these themes are something which phenomenologists, for all their focus on emic religious grandeur, could never aspire to identify: it is fair to say that, blinded as they were by the recovery and the reinvention of prestigious spiritual, religious, social and national traditions, they were not interested in uncovering the network of power relationships behind whatever was their particular interest. Nor were they interested in understanding the social and religious roles generally reserved for subordinate groups and individuals. In the wake of the phenomenologically pretentious observance of historicist precision (heritage, as we have seen, of the HoR's constitutive paradigm), those scholars accepted as a fact the masculine exercise of power and moral prestige revealed by androcentric mythological complexes and, consequently, took for granted the top-down imposition of legitimacy on subordinates. In particular, they accepted the sociodicy about the female social role as narrated in ancient religious storytelling and practices, i.e. the mythological justification for social subordination as sanctioned, or provided, by the dominant system (Bourdieu 1971: 312). In so doing, past historians recognized as legitimate the dominant social order emblazoned in the foundational mythical charter of the societies they studied, conveniently immunized from change because they were naturalized as eternal (Bamberger 1974; Juschka 2005; C. Martin 2014: 49-69).
Why did those scholars approach their field with such a bias? Because most historians usually endorsed the very state of affairs behind androcentrism. As a consequence of both the androcentric history of the discipline itself, and Eliade's own chauvinistic, jingoistic, macho, sexist views (cf. Eco 1995; Casadio 2011), homo religiosus was etymologically restructured as vir religiosus: not the history of religious humankind, but a history of religions for men and by men. Women were not considered part of the religious equation, and most of the time they were considered a mere complement to men's own HoR, willing adjutants or companions who helped their men to achieve a higher spirituality alternatively through chaste marital love or extraordinary sexual techniques (e.g.
the Eliadean analysis of yoga techniques; Eliade 1958b). Women were academically studied as objects and not subjects because they were mostly considered unworthy of historiographical attention; indeed, their religious roles in certain societies were downright minimized and ‘effeminate’ behaviours labelled as degradation. For instance, with regard to shamanism and sex and gender issues, one can note the retrograde psychological framework that encompassed Eliade’s analysis of homosexuality in shamanism. In the index of Eliade’s Shamanism, under the voice ‘homosexuals’, the reader is referred to two other entries, ‘inverts’ [sic] and ‘pederasty’ (Eliade 1964: 587), thus harking back to ‘the appearance in 19th-century psychiatry, jurisprudence, and literature of a whole series of discourses on the species and subspecies of homosexuality, inversion, pederasty, and “psychic hermaphrodism” [which] made possible a strong advance of social controls into this area of “perversity” ’ (Foucault 1978: 101; cf. Taylor 2017: 39, and 106-7 on psychoanalytical interpretation). In line with this discursive system aimed at classifying perversions and creating an intellectual scaffolding further politically exploited to exercise institutional and normative power, Eliade used ‘inversion’ to conflate homosexuality, paraphilia, and aberrant or psychopathological development of sexual desire within a theory of sexual and religious degenerescence tainted by a bad company fallacy and a slippery slope argument. Eliade’s Shamanism posited homosexuality, ‘transvestitism’ and ‘pederasty’ as middle terms (or missing links) between normal, male shamanism and abnormal, female or ‘effeminate’ shamanism, indexing a regressive deviation or a minor survival from a Schmidtian ‘archaic matriarchy’ (Eliade 1964: 125 n. 36, 258).6 This obsolete and groundless reading is at odds with subsequent ethnographic studies that have gone beyond the record of ‘gossip and jest’ reserved for cross-gendered practitioners to assess the empowering social function of shamanism for ‘community members which avoid[s] binary oppositions that had become normative in Western notions of sexuality’ (DuBois 2009: 79; cf. DuBois 2011: 106).