Working paper
Shamanism in Europe? Part 2. An Essay in Collective Memory and Cognition: Bears and Badgers, Basque and Celtic
Iowa Research Online
2017
DOI: 10.17077/pp.005751
Abstract
The purpose of this study is two-fold. First, it provides an opportunity to explore the way that the theoretical and methodological concerns of Cultural Linguistics can be applied to a specific ethnographic and linguistic data set to show the way that cultural conceptualizations function and how they can be transmitted across time and space. Because the chapter has a strong diachronic dimension, this approach will allow us to investigate the mechanisms by which a particular complex of cultural conceptualizations can be extracted from the treatment and ritual practices associated with several concrete material objects. Second, it will be shown that the material artefacts in question and their associated cultural conceptualizations are intimately connected to beliefs and social practices emanating from what is a pre-Indo-European ethnocultural substrate, an archaic cosmovision that has survived into the 21st century, albeit in a fragmented but indelible fashion, embedded in both linguistic and cultural artefacts. Linked to these beliefs and social practices we find a specific set of cultural conceptualizations, some more robustly preserved than others. When the beliefs and social practices are brought together and viewed collectively, they begin to form a patchwork of evidence for a series of highly entrenched, although heterogeneously instantiated, cultural conceptualizations, conceptualizations that have helped to maintain earlier patterns of belief, still visible beneath the surface. The ethnocultural substrate itself is grounded in the old and highly entrenched pan-European belief that humans descended from bears. That animist cosmovision left its imprint in traditional beliefs about bear paws as well as badger paws, the latter animals apparently considered to be ‘little bears’. These two material artefacts were viewed as having special powers which led them being used as protective amulets and good-luck charms well into the 20th century in many parts of Europe, a topic that is discussed in depth in this study.
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- Shamanism in Europe? Part 2. An Essay in Collective Memory and Cognition: Bears and Badgers, Basque and Celtic
- Creators
- Roslyn M Frank - University of Iowa, Spanish and Portuguese
- Resource Type
- Working paper
- DOI
- 10.17077/pp.005751
- Publisher
- Iowa Research Online; Iowa City, Iowa, USA
- Number of pages
- 116 pages
- Copyright
- Copyright © 2016 by Roslyn M Frank
- Language
- English
- Date copyrighted
- 2017
- Academic Unit
- Spanish and Portuguese
- Record Identifier
- 9984105066702771
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