Shaman

As early as the 19th century, the originally Tungusic-Siberian term was applied to similar spiritual experts of other cultures. Many authors who published on concepts of shamanism expanded the term even further. This development has led to ignoring cultural differences in favor of a generalizing account, suggesting that there are shamans worldwide in a unified sense. This is a fallacy that is also denounced by members of different ethnic groups.

For example, the Navajo medicine man called Hataalii is more of a priest and artist: an expert in religion, music, some (not all) ceremonies, and the art of sand paintings. The Sioux peoples also did not and do not have shamans in the strict sense. Since the commercialization of their spiritual traditions by neo-shamanism, they vehemently distance themselves against this designation and the abuse by "white shamans".

The fact that among some North American tribes all people went on vision quests and there was no separate expert for it, or that certain hallucinogenic drugs (called entheogens) in South America make almost anyone a shaman, was also ignored in many concepts.

On closer examination, there are numerous examples of so-called shamans who should in fact rather be called priests, healers, sorcerers, wizards, and so on. Some anthropologists have therefore proposed to use only the indigenous designations for the respective persons in order to end the egalitarianism.

The distinction between shamans and priests, as proposed by the missiologist Paul Hiebert in his "Typology of Religious Practitioners", is a suitable way of illustrating the problem. On the basis of such schemes it can then be determined to which category a concrete specialist is actually to be assigned. However, the transitions are fluid and therefore even such a determination remains model-like. The following table should be preceded by the fact that traditional spirit conjurers had other secular functions depending on their cultural affiliation, since traditional ethnic groups often had no separation between everyday life and religion.

The German word "Schamane" - which can be traced in Germany since the end of the 17th century - as well as the corresponding words in many other European languages (English, Dutch, Danish, Swedish and Norwegian: Shaman, Finnish: Shamaani, French: Chaman, Italian: Sciamano, Latvian: Šamanis, Polish: Szaman, Portuguese: Xamã, Russian: Šamán, Spanish: Chamán or Hungarian: Sámán) are mostly regarded as loan words from the Tungusic languages, which, with the Evenkian "Šaman", corresponds most closely phonetically to the derived European forms. The word is present in all Tungusic idioms in the meaning of "one who is excited, moved, uplifted" or also "lashing out", "mad" or "burning". All these translations refer to the bodily movements and gestures performed by Siberian shamans during ecstasy. However, a connection with the verb sa, which means "to know, to think, to comprehend," is also possible. Accordingly, Šamán could be interpreted as "knower".

More rarely, "shaman" is etymologically traced back to the Indian Pali word "śamana", which means "mendicant monk" or "ascetic". In this context, some authors suspect an older Indian Buddhist root, which would in turn make the Tungusic word a loanword adopted by Buddhist Tungus as a term for "pagan sorcerer-priests". Friedrich Schlegel was the first to include Sanskrit in the etymology.

Finally, some authors trace the word to the Chinese sha-men for witch.

In the Turkic-speaking regions of Tuva, Khakassia and Altai, shamans refer to themselves as kham (khami, gam, cham). The shamanic songs are called kham-naar. In the course of the Islamization of the Central Asian south, bakshi (from Sanskr. bhikshu) replaced the native term kham among many Turkic peoples as a generic term for pre-Islamic religious specialists. Numerous other terms for the person of the shaman were regional. (The word kham may be related to the concept of kami-spirits or -gods, central to Japanese - still strongly shamanic - Shintoism). Instead of the Tungusic Šaman, Mongolian uses the expressions böö (masculine or gender-neutral) and zairan (masculine, or title for "great" shamans) and udagan for shamaness.

With regard to the Indians of North America, the term medicine is used divergently for the "mysterious, transcendent power behind all visible phenomena" (→ medicine bag or medicine wheel). The term medicine man here is in fact a literal translation of corresponding terms from various indigenous languages (such as Pejuta Wicaša in Lakota).