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.

For the past forty years shamanism has drawn increasing attention among the general public and academics. There is an enormous literature on shamanism, but no one has tried to understand why and how Western intellectual and popular culture became so fascinated with the topic. Behind fictional and non-fictional works on shamanism, Andrei A. Znamenski uncovers an exciting story that mirrors changing Western attitudes toward the primitive. The Beauty of the Primitive explores how shamanism, an obscure word introduced by the eighteenth-century German explorers of Siberia, entered Western humanities and social sciences, and has now become a powerful idiom used by nature and pagan communities to situate their spiritual quests and anti-modernity sentiments. The major characters of The Beauty of the Primitive are past and present Western scholars, writers, explorers, and spiritual seekers with a variety of views on shamanism. Moving from Enlightenment and Romantic writers and Russian exile ethnographers to the anthropology of Franz Boas to Mircea Eliade and Carlos Castaneda, Znamenski details how the shamanism idiom was gradually transplanted from Siberia to the Native American scene and beyond. He also looks into the circumstances that prompted scholars and writers at first to marginalize shamanism as a mental disorder and then to recast it as high spiritual wisdom in the 1960s and the 1970s. Linking the growing interest in shamanism to the rise of anti-modernism in Western culture and intellectual life, Znamenski examines the role that anthropology, psychology, environmentalism, and Native Americana have played in the emergence of neo-shamanism. He discusses the sources that inspire Westernneo-shamans and seeks to explain why lately many of these spiritual seekers have increasingly moved away from non-Western tradition to European folklore. A work of intellectual discovery, The Beauty of the Primitive shows how scholars, writers, and spiritual seekers shape their writings and experiences to suit contemporary cultural, ideological, and spiritual needs. With its interdisciplinary approach and engaging style, it promises to be the definitive account of this neglected strand of intellectual history.