Parole chiave
Come citare
Abstract
In order for relations between today’s industrialized cultures and Siberian and Finno-Ugric shamanic cultures to produce fruitful results in a poetic dimension, it is first of all necessary to eliminate long-standing Eurocentric prejudices. Unfortunately, the identity paradigms of Western thought, which have been imposed for a very long time, masking their reductive intentions towards “other”-thoughts, continue to hinder transcultural processes. An impediment to the development of these processes are also those interpretations of shamanism, which, even with the aim of conferring dignity on it, propose an inadequate interpretation: this is the case of shamanism considered as a religion by Mircea Eliade or of the ontological perspectives applied to the shamanic concept of person. Even today, modern societies, in their relations with “other”-cultures, are unable to reach the “agreement of differences”, fundamental for the “poetics of relationship” which was proposed by Ėdouard Glissant. In this way, they lose the opportunity for growth and development offered by cross-cultural contamination, which proceeds from the bottom up and on different levels in relation to each other, without internal hierarchies. In the ecosystem of inclusion, shamans, experts in metamorphosis, who know how to activate it in themselves and in others, can offer very useful suggestions to modern societies. This study aims to identify, from a poetic perspective, some of the elements of shamanism which represent a constructive source of inspiration for globalized societies, grappling with very serious problems, from social to environmental and existential. The survival of Siberian shamanism’s values, featured in Finno-Ugric cultures, shows that this system of thought constitutes a deep philosophy of life, functional in every age, up to today. This type of shamanism maximizes the importance of the relationships between the various beings of the cosmos, each conceived as an individual belonging to a specific species, in the same vein as men. Since every person is potentially ambivalent, the fight against evil is fundamental for the affirmation of good. Not surprisingly, the shaman is a master of struggle who knows how to overcome the conflicting forces which threaten the need for mutual respect between the different people of the cosmos. In particular, he knows the laws of nature, its capacity for renovatio and its destructive force, and he is concerned with keeping it safeguarded by his community. He reminds everyone that the resources of nature are living cultural assets. This conception draws from ancestors’ myths that attribute a sentient soul to every element of the world, regardless of their species. The shaman is a professional who works for the good of his community, of which he represents the “historical memory”: his knowledge allows him to build the future on the basis of the past and the present without interruption, activating a renewing metamorphic process. The shaman interprets the mistakes of the past as a way to improving the present, in accordance with the conception of the complementarity of good and evil. He knows how to heal diseases with traditional methods of treatment no less effective than those of official medicine: knowing better, even from a genealogical point of view, each member of his community, he can make use of individualized therapies and, after healing, help his patients to solve any problem triggered by the disease, be it psychic or social, avoiding the feeling of abandonment. The current mentality of industrialized societies, which has economic progress at its core, calls for a change informed by ancient cultural wisdom: Siberian shamanism, which has been forgotten or misunderstood, constitutes a precious model for cultural and environmental sustainability.