OP I have only just begun reading this article, but I wanted to mention a movie you would probably like:

> A family in emotional turmoil is taken by surprise in this quirky adventure where an eccentric 8-year-old American boy, Wes, has an existential epiphany - He believes that he is in fact a Mongolian goat herder.

has torrents for it, and I downloaded it off usenet.

Thanks for the article!

It is a bit of a scholarly article, I guess I was hoping the author was more into shamanism rather than anthropology. They dance around "shamanic trance" but don't really go into how shamans achieve non-ordinary states of consciousness.

The beginning of this paragraph made me recoil-

> A second prominent explanation is that shamans exploit human gullibility by taking advantage of psychological biases...

What a sad idea. I think this author might benefit from less psychology classes and more mushroom trips.

Never thought about the use of shamanism as a social organizer though. It is way more personal to me. I guess people that look for answers outside of themselves could see it being used like this.

New site for me, seems pretty cool. Thanks OP