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Toornarsuk, or Shamanism Upside Down
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2024
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In our time “spirits” have been reduced to mythical beings often objectified in the form of masks.
The mask-figure of Toornarsuk, this cunning and mischievous Eskimo shamanistic spirit-figure’, seems to offer us both a mirror image of the various ways shamanism has been observed and a reflection of the complex picture shamanism presents to contemporary researchers. Shamanism, like Toornarsuk, seems both to mimic and to make sport of people and their moral and social orders. This is why shamanism, for a long period of time now, has constituted a kind of counterculture for minority communities.
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- Copyright © 1992 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)
References
1. On Toornarsuk, cf. Sonne, B., “Toornarsuk, an Historical Proteus,” in Arctic Anthropology, vol. 23, no. 1 and 2, E.U. 1986.
2. Paroles Données, Paris, Plon 1984, p. 141 sq.: “Cannibalisme et travestissements rituels.”
3. On their shamanic traits, cf. Czaplika, A., Aboriginal Siberia - A Study in Social Anthropology, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1914.
4. The reader will by now have clearly understood that the mask of Toornarsuk is used here in a strictly allegorical sense.
5. Malinowski, B., “Baloma, the Spirits of the Dead in the Trobriand Islands,” in Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, no. 46, 1916, pp. 353-430. This text was reprinted in French as part of Trois Essais sur la vie sociale des primitifs, Paris, Payot 1933(1980).
6. It is clear that both within and beyond the problem of predictability lies the problem of decision. It is therefore essential to distinguish between “known uni verses,” corresponding to modes of prediction that are equally known, and univers es that are “not yet known,” resulting from “structures of disorder” and corre sponding to “logics of the possible,” not of the probable - or to the theory of chaos.“ - Cf. Luck, J-M., ed. Systèmes désordonnés unidimensionels, Alea-Saclay, France 1992; Gleick, James, Théorie du chaos, Paris, Albin Michel 1989.
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