Åke Hultkrantz

The North American Berdache [and Comments and Reply]

The status of berdache among North American Indians was filled by persons, usually male, who remained members of their biological gender but assumed important social characteristics of the other gender. Concentrated in western and midwestern North America, berdaches were few. The status tended to disappear after Indian societies came under outside political control. Male berdaches, particularly, combined the social roles assigned to both genders. They could dress like women, combine male and female dress, or alternate modes of dress. Their occupational role permitted a combination of male and female work to achieve exceptional productivity. Gender mixing also characterized their sexual behavior; often homosexual, they showed strong tendencies toward a bisexual orientation. Their transformation often required supernatural validation. The ritual roles of male berdaches, like other features of their status, rested on their definition as nonwomen. Traditional explanations of the berdache status seem based upon misunderstanding of its features. It was not a status instituted for homosexuals; homosexuality was a reflex of assuming the status rather than a factor promoting its assumption, and much homosexuality occurred outside it. Nor was it designed for males who feared the warrior role or the male role in general. We suggest that while women could engage in high-prestige male activities, such as warfare, without changing their gender status, they insisted that males who entered the female occupational sphere assume an intermediate gender status.

Magic: A Theoretical Reassessment [and Comments and Replies]

Comparison of aspects of magical belief and practice with elements identified in experimental parapsychology suggests that some magical phenomena may have their basis in what parapsychology in call psi. Similarities are found between magic and parapsychology in (1) conditions that facilitate the manifestation of magical and psi phenomena, (2) the mental processes implicated as effective in producing magical and psi phenomena, (3) the basic principles underlying the phenomena of magic and psi, (4) the characteristics of the phenomena likely affected by magical action and psi, and (5) the characteristics of the origin of magic suggested by Malinowski and the characteristics of the basis of psi. These congruences are used to distinguish which aspects of magic are likely to be psi-related. Previous theories of magic are integrated in a perspective that places psi and other universal psychological processes at the basis of magic and explains the integration of many types of magical, social, cosmological, and religious phenomena as a product of metaphoric predication and analogical modeling.

The shaman and the medicine-man

The present article discusses the terms medicine-man and shaman as used by scholars and scientists, and tries to arrive at a possible distinction between them. It is obvious that the two terms not only overlap but also cause confusion, even among shamanologists. They have consequently been used interchangeably by many scholars. By recourse to the North American ethnographic material in particular (which once was the source of this confusion) the author reaches the conclusion that the only way of separating the terms from each other is to approach the whole problem structurally as a two-levelled issue. It is then possible to differentiate between the shaman as primarily the mediator between the supernatural powers and man, and the medicine-man as primarily the curer of diseases through traditional techniques. The shaman may also be medically active when his expert knowledge of the supernatural disease agents is called for. This means that some shamans are medicine-men. Conversely, some medicine-men are shamans.

The Cult of the Serpent in the Americas: Its Asian Background [and Comments and Reply]

The origins of ophiolatry in the Western Hemisphere are obscure. It may be part of an extremely ancient, worldwide pattern of veneration of cult animals; it may have arisen independently among the Northeast Asian immigrants to the New World only after they had crossed the Bering-Chukchi land bridge between at least 15,000 and 25,000 to 45,000 years ago; or it may have been affected, if not imported, by serpent- (or dragon-) venerating societies of the Old World in relatively very recent times. Such influences could have come in the early pre- or post-Christian centuries from Indianized Asia or from China if these regions had had contacts with civilized pre-Columbian Meso- and South America as has been postulated by some diffusionists. The latter alternative is here rejected on the basis of examples which show the fundamental unity of certain features of ophidian cults among both civilized aboriginal societies and the most backward and isolated indigenes throughout the Americas. Their myths and artistic creations involving the serpent in relation to other cult animals, the sun, human and agricultural fertility, and numerology are too sharply dissimilar to Hindu-Buddhist traditions to have been influenced by them. In addition, incongruities in blood-group distribution patterns exclude the possibility of such late influences. On the other hand, these same criteria have been used with examples from archaeology and ethnography to suggest that ophiolatry is one of the very earliest of cultural imports into the Americas and that its strongest links are with northeastern Asia, particularly Siberia.

The Migration of Folktales: Four Channels to the Americas [and Comments and Reply]

This paper attempts to draw together some of the evidences of borrowing in folktales from the Old World to the New. It abstracts in four channels, from Europe across the North Atlantic, from Africa across the South Atlantic, from Northeast Asia via the Bering Strait, and from Southeast Asia across the South Pacific. Considering both pre- and post-Columbian borrowing, it calls on both physical and cultural anthropology as witnesses to the route and relates this testimony to the recorded folktales in the Western Hemisphere, many of which still show signs of stratified borrowing as well as indigenous creativity. The theoretical frame, like the data, is pluralistic rather than monolithic or megalithic. The conclusions are not meant to be final, but merely conducive to a better perspective of the world picture and preliminary to more systematic work with new and old data and new theory.

Native North American Spirituality of the Eastern Woodlands

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The Religions of the American Indians

This book presents a comprehensive survey of the complex indigenous religions of the Americas, both North and South, as they were in the past and as they still exist in some societies.