Nothing that can be called thinking is formalized or formalizable; nor can it be likened to a mechanical process (Church's hypothesis). Rather, thinking sets into motion human imagination and passion.

Having already written extensively on the imagination,' I will limit myself here to outlining its basic structure. At the two opposite poles of knowledge, as well as in its center, lies the creative power of the human being, that is, radical imagination. It is thanks to the imagination that the world is presented in this form and not in some other: it is imagination that creates axioms, postulates, and the fundamental patterns that subtend the structures of knowledge; finally, it is imagination that both furnishes the hypothetical models and idea-images of knowledge, and makes possible their potential development and/or insight into them. This imagination, however, both in itself and in its essential operations – which include its social forms, experienced on this level as the creation of an anonymous collective force – is neither formalized nor formalizable. Obviously, the imagination contains – just as does everything else that exists – a totalizing, identity-bearing dimension (which for brevity's sake we have elsewhere called ensidiqt,ce)2; but this dimension of the imagination is not the essential one, neither in its operations nor its results, no more than the arithmetic relations between tones are the essential element of a Bach fugue.

When the Spaniards arrived in Mexico they were astonished and stupiti ed by the strangeness of this new world, in which beauty and horror merged. It was not by accident that Hernán Cortés spoke of “its grandeur, the strange and marvelous things of this land,” and resigned himself to the impossibility of adequately describing these things: “Even badly expressed, I know very well that they will be so amazing that they will not be believed, because even those of us who have seen these things with our own eyes are unable to comprehend them.” Travelling the land, Bernal Díaz del Castillo was overwhelmed as he beheld an “enchanted” land that reminded him of Amadis de Gaul. “Some of us asked ourselves whether what we were seeing was a dream.” Everything was strange and “never seen before.” Both men praised the great cities, such as Tlaxcala, “so grand and deserving of such admiration that even though much of what I could say about it must be left unsaid, what little I will say is almost incredible …”; or Tenochtitlán, “the most beautiful thing in the world,” with its structures and gardens “so marvelous, that it seemed to me almost impossible to describe their perfection and grandeur.” The native works of gold and silver, and of stone and feathers, seemed so extraordinary to the Spaniards “that it is simply impossible to understand how these objects, and with what instruments, were made so perfect.” Cortés as much as Bernal Díaz praised the capabilities of the Indians; their wisdom in peace, their courage in war. But most amazing of all was their religion. Its external aspects provoked horror and repugnance: the menacing ugliness of their “idols,” their bloody sacrifices, and the anthropophagy - according to the Spaniards, one could imagine nothing more “horrible and abominable.” Despite all this, the Spaniards could not help but marvel at their religious zeal, their devotion and diligence: “If they truly serve God with such faith, fervor, and diligence, they must be able to work many miracles.” Emerging from the ocean like a mirage or a dream, the new world was at once incomprehensible and fascinating, refined and abominable, beautiful and terrible. To the eyes of Western man, it was foreign, strangeness itself, the quintessential “other.”

“Larvatus prodeo,” “I go forth masked”: with these words does the young René Descartes - the year is 1619 and he is twenty-three years old - mark his entrance into philosophy. In an early text found among his papers and published under the title Praeambula, he writes the following: “Before going on stage, an actor dons a mask (persona) so as not to reveal the redness of his face. Likewise, as I make my appearance in the theater of the world, where I have so far been only a spectator, I also go forth masked.”

Here Descartes describes a practice that is far from his alone. When a philosopher appears upon the stage – whether in speech or in writing – he alters his tone and projects his voice. He no longer merely speaks; he declaims, and sometimes even takes an oracular stance. He uses the mask to hide his face and body and above all to transform his voice. What we hear is the voice of René Descartes, but it is transformed, amplified, deformed by the mask behind which he hides, by the persona of the philosopher he wants to be. These few lines of the Praeambula may be considered as a beginning, a very personal preface to his philosophical oeuvre as a whole, as the moment when he leaves behind his person to become a persona. Until now, Descartes has been a private person, answerable to no one, able to express himself just as he is, just as he thinks he is, without having to use a mask. Once he openly, officially chooses the life of the mind, a new “I'” is expressed through his mouth; from now on what he says will no longer be private but public. His role now is to speak the truth, even if it turns out in the end to be his truth alone.

This paper will describe the rite for the exorcism of toch'aebi and examine its symbolic significance in the wider social reality of Cheju shamanism. Toch'aebi is a stranger deity who visits Cheju randomly and tries to get on good terms with the people. However, this deity afflicts people, particularly women, wearing down their vitality and causing a kind of “madness” (turida). The exorcism ritual of toch'aebi requires a sacrificial feast of roast pig and several days of dancing by the possessed. For this reason, the exorcism ritual is called a dancing rite, or ch'unun kut. It is supposedly toch'aebi himself who has the desire to dance. Shaman's songs (seouje sori) are used to induce the toch'aebi, who is hiding in the patient's body, to dance and reveal his identity. The trance dance and singing are directed toward a dialogical construction of the demonic reality, which entails a romantic entanglement of toch'aebi and the possessed. By translating a history of personal suffering into the idiom of love, the shaman's songs develop a particular cultural logic of cure. Through an analysis of curing song texts, along with various modes of performance such as dance and comic play, this paper explores the transformative process in which a particular cultural logic of illness and cure are produced and enacted to reintegrate the patient into the social world. In practice, the analysis addresses the articulation of a personal case of madness that afflicted Sunho, a twenty-one year old female factory worker, whose social values and understanding are reflective of contemporary Korea.

“Adam was hurled into Hindustan. In this land there is a mountain called Serandib, and it is reported that there is no higher mountain in all the universe. Adam landed on this mountain.” The subject of Serendib plays an important role in both the geographical and travel literature of the Arabs. Serendib, or Sarandib, is the transcription of the Singhalese name Sinhaladîpa, which means “island of the descendants of lions” (singha, “lions,” in Singhaly). Already, in the Middle Ages, in the year 949, Arab merchants, who were well acquainted with the island of Ceylon, set up a branch in Colombo. The natural beauty and wealth of the island so touched the imagination of Arab voyagers that it appeared in the sixth voyage of Sinbad the Sailor, and it was also believed that Adam lived on the island after having been driven from Paradise: “The island of Serendib is located directly under the equinoctial line…. Men fish for pearls along its banks and at the mouths of its rivers, and some of its valleys are rich in diamonds. As an act of faith I myself took a trip to the mountain, to the very spot where Adam was banished after being exiled from Paradise. I even climbed to its summit.”

This excerpt, from The Thousand and One Nights, well summarizes the feelings of those Arab merchants whose accounts of their travels, in large measure, contributed to the spread of myths and legends about Ceylon.

Most of the images evoked by the term shamanism are derived from the soul's field of experience. These images run the gamut of possibilities, from a disconcerting exoticism to the most intimate familiarity. Sometimes the shaman's role is limited to that of pathetic hero, struggling in solitude against hostile nature; sometimes he becomes the rudimentary model of the mystic or even of the psychiatrist of contemporary societies. These images, however, without being completely false, wrongly reduce the shamanic phenomenon to the shaman's personality and limit his field of action to the individual psyche. This limitation hardly does justice to the realities of shamanistic societies. What is missing in the shaman-centered view is the collective's slumbering velleity of itself entering into shamanic experience. Each cure becomes an occasion for collective renewal and joy. The shaman's activities in séance, it is believed, are an expression of the direct contact he has established with the spirits and of his power over them; his duties are the realization of a ritual act carried out at the behest of the community.

A multiplicity of circumstances - including geographic and political isolation, and differences of social organization and customs - has led different groups of people to develop mathematical knowledge independently of each other. Yet history has shown us again and again that by some necessity these separate groups often encounter the same problems. The solutions they propose, however, are often different. This suggests a series of questions. First of all: what is the relationship between the solutions? Is one solution an alternative to the other, and if so, how to account for their differences? Or, on the contrary, are the solutions complementary? Both of these configurations can be found in the history of mathematics: in the following article we will investigate two elementary examples of these phenomena and trace the historical circumstances under which different solutions have come into contact.

I do not propose to compare the esthetics of Kant and Wittgenstein or to show the sometimes very Kantian basis of some of Wittgenstein's reflections. I do not intend to take up the history of philosophy here (I will not, therefore, attempt to expound upon the relationship in Kant of the esthetic to the teleological or the moral, for example, or the relationship of art to ordinary language in Wittgenstein). That would not be without interest; quite the contrary, but I would prefer to compare the remarks of the one to those of the other in order to respond to a specific question: why is it said that there can be no rules for art, or more precisely, that the only rule is that there must be no rules? What authorizes art to play with the rules?

Consecutive waves of paleolithic migrants crossing the Bering land bridge from Siberia to North America between 80,000 and 7,000 b.c. brought with them the shamanic way of harnessing supernatural powers. This way prevailed until the White intrusion 400 years ago, into the living space of the aboriginal peoples of North America. Wherever European political, religious, and economic dominance was established, shamanic institutions became the focus of negative attention. The shamanic practitioner was variously depicted by governmental and ecclesiastic authorities as a charlatan and imposter or a purveyor of evil influence. Some well-known ethnological and medico-psychological experts have until very recently portrayed the shaman as a mentally deranged person whose “primitive” culture permits the acting-out of psychopathology in a prestigious role, a eurocentric and positivistic fallacy rooted in Western misinterpretations of learned behavior manifested during shamanic rituals involving altered states of consciousness. Legal measures to suppress shamanic ceremonials were taken in the United States, especially in the aftermath of the Ghost Dance. This shaman-inspired movement, originating in the Prophet Dance of the Pacific Northwest (Spier 1935), sent waves of hectic sacro-nativistic ceremonial activity through many Amerindian tribes, and finally culminated in the Sioux uprising of 1890 which ended in the tragedy of Wounded Knee (cf. Mooney 1896).

To commemorate the fortieth anniversary of Diogenes is, above all, to honor Roger Caillois. From 1952 until his death in 1978, this periodical was the heart of his working life. In July 1948 Caillois had become an international public servant, working for a brand new institution, UNESCO, as a member of its “ideas office” responsible for program planning. UNESCO and the nongovernmental organizations clustered around it adopted a grand and magnificent objective: to promote peace through education and culture. One avenue to pursue this goal was the publication of books and periodicals. Diogenes was therefore the fruit of the interaction between the plans of UNESCO and the International Council for Philosophy and Humanistic Studies and the life experience of Roger Caillois.

All scientific disciplines go through periods of self-analysis. However, this analysis often takes place as if inside a closed arena, from which it is difficult to gain a long view. Instead, in hopes of identifying the properties that define it, each discipline examines its own features in a mirror that it holds up to itself.

Yet there are other times, perhaps less frequent, when these self-evaluations are accompanied by an inquiry into the extent to which the discipline's intellectual characteristics are shaped by its relationship to other disciplines.

The penetration of the Amazon region by the great religious movements of Europe and Africa began with the first phases of colonial domination, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The initial influence to be felt was Iberian Catholicism (the religion of the conquerors), which spread along the rivers as missions sprang up here and there. This period of missionary activity continued for over a century, bringing with it a host of consequences, most notably waves of epidemics that killed millions of natives. Nevertheless, an initial “syncretic alliance” was forged in the missions between shamanism and Catholicism.

From another quarter came legions of black slaves, exiled to the New World during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to replace the decimated native workforce; with them they brought their own religions and religious practices, which they transplanted, in a more or less transformed state, to all corners of the South American continent. The resulting Afro-American religions were practiced secretly by broad masses and in this way were fused with Amerindian religions (the case of pagelano in Brazil) and with “official” forms of Catholicism (tcmbanda and candomblé, among others).

This article is the result of collaboration between a linguist and an anthropologist. In La Troisième planète. Structures familiales et systèmes idéologiques (The Third Planet: Family Structures and Ideologies) (Todd, 1983), anthropologist Emmanuel Todd provided a world map of family types, which he used to explain the distribution of major political philosophies around the world. However, this did not explain the distribution of the family types themselves. Indeed, a concluding chapter entitled “Le Hazard” (The Effects of Chance) stated that the distribution of family types did not seem to be the result of any particular economic or ecological factor and was therefore a prime example of the uncertainty principle at work. However, Laurent Sagart, a linguist specializing in Chinese dialects, noticed that this map of family types exhibited a structure well known to experts in historical linguistics and dialectology, contrasting a large, continuous zone in the center with a number of small, independent zones located around the periphery of the central zone or in isolated enclaves within it. When such maps appear in linguistic atlases, dialectologists usually conclude that the central zone was the innovative area while the peripheral and isolated zones conserved the original features. The same analysis, if applied to the map of family types, would lead to the conclusion that the communal family system in the center of the map represented a more recent innovation than the systems around the periphery.

Does Seoul, a city of eight million inhabitants, one of the planet's ten megalopolises, still have shamans? Can there be a place for shamanism in a country like South Korea, which is striving to be modern? Can shamanism survive at all in a country where the successes of Christianity have been celebrated by Westerners? Can it adapt itself to religious pluralism? What is shamanism's role in the urban setting? How does the fast pace of urban life affect its rituals? How is shamanism presented in the mass media? Is it beginning to emerge from the centuries-long ostracism imposed on it by official ideologies?

These questions will be explored in this article on the basis of data gathered on-site in the city of Seoul between the years 1982 and 1991. We will attempt not only to highlight several important facts but to grasp the overall process of transformation that the city is imposing on shamans and shamanism.

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.

The meaning of the word shaman (of Tungus origin) has become obscured by numerous, increasingly different interpretations. The term has also been applied to practitioners who live outside Siberia, and are actually called by different names in their respective countries: bomoh in Malaysia, ma khi in Thailand, and tany-di in Singapore.

Because I did not want to rely on secondary sources, I went to Southeast Asia to find contemporary shamans. Having started my research in 1960 I was able to witness, over a thirty-one year period (during visits lasting from several months to a year), the continuation of shamanic traditions among different groups living in multiethnic and multi-religious societies. What struck me most was the emergence of new shamans in urban centers like Singapore and Bangkok.

As Kennedy has shown (1973: 1149), the question of whether the shaman is a disturbed individual (neurotic, psychotic, or schizophrenic) or is on the contrary a gifted, balanced and perfectly well-adjusted person, constitutes one of the oldest of all anthropological debates. Indeed R. Hamayon and L. Delaby (1977: 8) have pointed out that “the tendency to attribute a pathological source to shamanism, and to reduce its manifestations to the manipulation of epileptic and psychotic episodes” appeared simultaneously with the publication of the first studies on the subject, in the second half of the nineteenth century. Slavic authors in particular, most notably Bogoras (1910) and Czaplicka (1914), were anxious to establish a connection between shamanism and “Arctic hysteria.” Ohlmarks (1939), developing this theory, distinguished between Arctic and sub-Arctic shamanism in order to identify the degree of psychopathology in each shaman. Struck by the frequency of these types of phenomena in the Arctic regions, the authors believed that they had discovered their cause in race, heredity, and climate.

By posing the question of whether it is more relevant to investigate the psychopathology of the shaman or the effects of shamanism on its followers, Philippe Mitrani's article has the merit of going to the heart of a controversy that has divided analysts of shamanism.

There are as many authors as there are forms of shamanism, and as many points of view on the subject as there are authors. The fact that there is no consensus on the definition of the term shamanism is probably neither accidental nor much of a disadvantage. Is not a certain amount of vagueness appropriate to a phenomenon marked by so much diversity and vitality? For that reason, would it not be more profitable to focus the investigation of the term on the ultimate limits of its applicability? Primitive, shamanism continues to be reborn. Rooted in nature, it has blossomed in great industrial cities. Animistic, it has enriched the popular foundation of the great religions without modeling its own practices on them. Instead, shamanism has sometimes manifested itself in grand recurring rituals that celebrate ethnic identity; at other times, it has been an instrument used by private individuals to channel the course of events in a direction favorable to them or, more often, to make sure that their course is not unfavorable. To someone suffering from a psychic burden, shamanism can represent a priceless instrument that will offer relief, or help in being reassimilated into the community. For the expert practitioner, shamanism can be a means to personal advancement. Even when scorned by all and, in some cases, combated, shamanism has found a way to adapt itself everywhere.