Shamans and Religion: An Anthropological Exploration in Critical Thinking

Alice Beck Kehoe's book is itself an argument, not a neutral survey: she contends that shamanism as popularly used is a modern academic category imposing false unity on very different cultural practices, and she traces how the term was assembled and then applied too broadly by later writers. That named, specific critique of a category other reference works use uncritically is the book's real evidentiary content, not a claim about its publisher. It has not been checked here against the subsequent scholarly response to her argument, a limit this record states rather than assumes away. Use it to document this critique of the shamanism category and its warning against generalized cross-cultural claims about spirit animals; it does not confirm any specific spirit-animal correspondence as authentic to a named tradition, which needs a source specific to that culture.