Mircea Eliade descibed shamanism as the primal religion of humanity, the 'archaic technique of ecstasy'. The books of best-selling author Carlos Castaneda made it part of popular culture. Since the 1960s shamanism has continued to attract the attention of scholars, artists, writers and the general public. The most intriguing aspect of this religion is the ability of shamans to enter into contact with spirits on behalf of their communities. The first eighteenth-century explorers of Siberia dubbed shamanism a blatant fraud. Later, academic observers stamped it as 'neurotic delusion'. In the 1960s shamans were recast as 'wounded healers', who sacrifice their lives for the spiritual well being of their communities. Many current writers and scholars treat shamanism as ancient wisdom that has much to teach us about true spirituality. This anthology tells the story of shamanism in Eurasia, North and South America, Africa and Australia. It brings together for the first time fifty-six articles and book excerpts by anthropologists, psychologists, religious scholars and historians, illustrating the variety of views on this subject.

The interaction of 19th-century Russian missionaries with three indigenous groups, the Chukchi and Altaians in Siberia and the Dena'ina Indians in Alaska, resulted in widely different outcomes. The Chukchi disregarded the missionary message, the Dena'ina embraced Christianity, and the Altaians responded by selectively borrowing from Orthodox religion. Znamenski--in the first work of its kind in English--argues that the relationships between indigenous shamanism and Orthodox missionaries in Siberia and Alaska were essentially a dialogue about spiritual, political, and ideological power, and challenges both the widespread conviction that Christian missionaries always acted as agents of colonial oppression among tribal peoples and the notion that native peoples maintained their "pristine" traditional cultures despite years of interaction with Western society. Znamenski asserts that Russian missionary policy toward indigenous peoples was, at best, ambivalent and cannot be described as either Russification or a broad tolerance of native cultures. After two broad introductory chapters, he deals with each indigenous people in a separate section, illustrating the ways in which native Siberians and Alaskans acted as active players, welcoming, adopting, rejecting, or reinterpreting elements of Christianity depending upon surrounding circumstances and individual cultural stances.

Through Orthodox Eyes brings into English an important collection of translations of Russian missionary writings that shed new light on the spread of Orthodox Christianity among the Athabaskan-speaking peoples of the Cook Inlet, Iliamna, Lake Clark, Stony River, and Copper River areas. These records provide unique insights into Russian perceptions of Native societies in Alaska, and include new ethnographic information on Athabaskan seasonal hunting and fishing cycles, settlement patters, migration, demography, shamanism, marriage practices, relationships between Natives and miners, and alcohol abuse. Andrei Znamenski, who translated this collection, also offers a new and substantial interpretive chapter that is itself a major contribution to the literature. Placing these events into a historical perspective, he describes nineteenth-century Athabaskan society and interactions between Native peoples and the Russian and American settlers. His sociocultural and religious discussions are multifaceted, showing the complex process of religious development through which the Athabaskans turned Russian Orthodoxy into their Native church. In addition to his analysis of their writing, Znamenski looks into the biographies and intellectual backgrounds of individual Orthodox missionaries and Native lay leaders, expanding the ability of readers to interpret their texts, actions, opinions, and lives. The importance of the translations, together with Znamenski's historical work, make this volume invaluable to scholars of Russian American, Alaska Native, and religious history, as well as intriguing for readers interested in first-hand accounts of this formative period in Alaska history.