LAUSR

I have always been convinced that an anthropologist should be able to read and understand the works of any other colleague, independently of the part of the world in which he or she has specialized and done fieldwork. Were it not so—I have told myself and insisted with colleagues for a long time—anthropology would be only a collection of individual experiences, not what we all would like it to be: a common space where we might share knowledge; look together at general problems, relatively independent of local questions; and even, when possible, wonder what a comparison between different cultures might look like. This time, I have found it particularly challenging to put that theoretical (and optimistic) principle into practice. Of course, the main reason for this difficulty lies in my profound ignorance of the part of the world Erik Mueggler’s book speaks about. But this is not the only reason. Beyond personal concerns, there is a theoretical question. “Is comparison between what I have seen in Central America and what Mueggler has seen in China at all imaginable?” has been one of the more compelling questions that I have asked myself while reading this book—and I confess that I have repeatedly been tempted to declare myself unable to go any further. The fact that I have been working on Kuna shamanistic chants (in Central America), translating long parallel series of words, just as Mueggler did in Southwestern China, is not necessarily a good reason for me to understand this work better than anyone else. The definition of “shamanism” that we use in our discipline is notoriously so vague