Lectures - Autumn 2009

Global religious change and the death of the shaman

Speaker: Dr Piers Vitebsky
24th October

Today thousands of the remaining ‘tribal’ religions are rapidly succumbing to a few ‘world’ religions. We hear of the threat of extinction facing plants, animals and ecosystems, yet few consider the annihilation of the flexible, pluralistic gods and metaphysical systems which have formed most of human history – an extinction taking place in the ecosystems of the spirit. Drawing on decades of fieldwork among indigenous communities currently abandoning their shamanic heritage, Dr Vitebsky will show how painful such religious conversion can be and suggest that we are living through an era in which humanity is losing an archive of possibilities, a vital spiritual gene bank as we follow the world’s dominant religions of the moment.

PIERS VITEBSKY is Head of Anthropology and Russian Northern Studies at the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge. He studied ancient languages before becoming a social anthropologist and carrying out extensive fieldwork among shifting cultivators in tribal India and nomadic reindeer herders in the Siberian Arctic. In Siberia, he was the first westerner since the revolution to live long-term with an indigenous community. His books include Dialogues with the dead: the discussion of mortality among the Sora of eastern India and Reindeer people: living with animals and spirits in Siberia, which won the Kiriyama Prize for non-fiction.

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