Gender, Marriage, and Descent in Shaman/Spirit Relations among the Shipibo-Conibo
This article describes a 20-year-long scientific collaboration by two anthropologists with a common interest in shamanism: Françoise Morin and Bernard Saladin d’Anglure. Through this partnership, they have made theoretical and methodological advances by combining their research issues, by cross-tabulating their data, and by conducting fieldwork together (northeastern Siberia, Canadian Arctic, and Peruvian Amazonia). They have thus shed light on the subtle relationships between shamanism and certain areas of social life, such as politics, kinship, sexuality, gender, and rites of passage, both in human relations and in relations between shamans and human-looking entities who can make themselves invisible and are considered in the ethnographic literature to be a category of spirits. These relations have seldom been perceived and studied by classical ethnography, which has more often been confined to a monograph approach with one researcher, one group, one fieldwork location, and one predetermined conceptual framework.