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| The term '''medicine man''' is a word invented and used by people whose mother tongue is English. It has serious problems of both denotation and connotation. There are very many Native American languages, and they use different words to describe the individuals that people of the majority culture call "medicine men." | |||
| A '''medicine man''' is a person recognized as a local physician knowledgeable in the healing arts who serves at the will of the people in the community. The communities for which this positioon exists are often hunter-gatherer or | |||
| The primary function of these individuals is to secure the help of the spirit world, including the Great Spirit, for the benefit of the community. They go into what Carlos Castanada evocatively called "a separate reality" to communicate with the denizens of this spirit world and to secure thereby the aid and/or information needed by the community when it faces some critical challenge that goes beyond its own natural resources. | |||
| agrarian. | |||
| Sometimes the help sought can be for the sake of healing disease, sometimes it can be for the sake of healing the psyche, sometimes the goal is to promote harmony between human groups or between humans and nature. So the term "medicine man" is not entirely inappropriate, but it greatly oversimplifies and also skews the depiction of the people whose role in society complements that of the chief. These people are not the Native American equivalent of the Chinese "barefoot doctors" or of the emergency medical technicians who ride our rescue vehicles. | |||
| The medicine man is an artist who applies with skill the ] about healing arts to the local ]. He is not unlike the modern day ] whose practice is measured in court against the norm of practice within the local community. | |||
| To be recognized as the one who performs this function of bridging between the natural world and the spiritual world for the benefit of the community, an individual <b>must</b> be validated in his role by that community. The Native American tradition has much in common with the world-wide religious practice called ], and many students of this phenomenon believe that Native American cultures share this cultural feature as well as other cultural features with the people living on the other side of the Bering Strait. There are many indications from both archaeology and anthropology that the shamanic form of religious experience dates all the way back to the paleolithic hunter-gather societies. | |||
| One of the best sources of information on this subject is the story of a Lakota (Sioux) <i>wiccasa wakan</i> ("medicine man") recorded in a book produced with his cooperation called <i>Lame Deer, Seeker of Visions</i>, by John Fire Lame Deer. On a broader scale, Mircea Eliade's <i>Shamanism</i> puts the whole area of religious experience and practice into a broad historical and ethnographic context. | |||
Revision as of 06:39, 22 August 2003
The term medicine man is a word invented and used by people whose mother tongue is English. It has serious problems of both denotation and connotation. There are very many Native American languages, and they use different words to describe the individuals that people of the majority culture call "medicine men." The primary function of these individuals is to secure the help of the spirit world, including the Great Spirit, for the benefit of the community. They go into what Carlos Castanada evocatively called "a separate reality" to communicate with the denizens of this spirit world and to secure thereby the aid and/or information needed by the community when it faces some critical challenge that goes beyond its own natural resources.
Sometimes the help sought can be for the sake of healing disease, sometimes it can be for the sake of healing the psyche, sometimes the goal is to promote harmony between human groups or between humans and nature. So the term "medicine man" is not entirely inappropriate, but it greatly oversimplifies and also skews the depiction of the people whose role in society complements that of the chief. These people are not the Native American equivalent of the Chinese "barefoot doctors" or of the emergency medical technicians who ride our rescue vehicles.
To be recognized as the one who performs this function of bridging between the natural world and the spiritual world for the benefit of the community, an individual must be validated in his role by that community. The Native American tradition has much in common with the world-wide religious practice called shamanism, and many students of this phenomenon believe that Native American cultures share this cultural feature as well as other cultural features with the people living on the other side of the Bering Strait. There are many indications from both archaeology and anthropology that the shamanic form of religious experience dates all the way back to the paleolithic hunter-gather societies.
One of the best sources of information on this subject is the story of a Lakota (Sioux) wiccasa wakan ("medicine man") recorded in a book produced with his cooperation called Lame Deer, Seeker of Visions, by John Fire Lame Deer. On a broader scale, Mircea Eliade's Shamanism puts the whole area of religious experience and practice into a broad historical and ethnographic context.