Mr Thomas Alberts
Overview
- Name:
- Mr Thomas Alberts
- Email address:
- Thomas.alberts100@gmail.com
- Thesis title:
- Indigenous Modernity: Shamanism, Discourse and the Study of Religions
- Year of Study:
- 4
- Website:
- http://www.linkedin.com/pub/thomas-alberts/9/81/641
Internal Supervisors
PhD Research
This research considers the emergence in history of a discourse about shamans. Beginning with the prevalent claim that shamans exist throughout human society and history, the initial question is: how did a kind of ritual specialist first reported in north Asia in the 17th century become an eponymous category of a universal religiosity? This research is anchored in the argument that the simultaneity of epistemological practice that tends to produce universal structures and ontological practice that tends to deconstruct universals into embodied contingencies, form a double-hinge on which pivots modern subjectivity. Drawing on Foucault’s reading of Kant, this double-hinged subjectivity is instantiated in a practical limit attitude, the articulation of which establishes a self-perpetuating dynamic, a perpetual motion dynamo that animates and innervates modern history. This thesis argues that the particularizing and universalizing tendencies of statements about shamans are part and parcel of modernity’s practical limit attitude, and can be seen in the proliferations and intensifications of shamanism discourse since the seventeenth century. Chapter One considers this question from a genealogical perspective, with reference to 18th and 19th century Russia, while Chapter Two considers this question with reference to the past quarter century of shamanism scholarship. Subsequent chapters consider shamanism’s imbrications with other discursive fields. With reference to the indigenist movement for human rights (Chapter Three), environmentalist critiques of anthropocentrism (Chapter Four), and neoliberal statecraft (Chapter Five), this thesis argues that structural transformations in these respective fields have variously sustained and stimulated new proliferations, intensifications and circulations of shamanism discourse, and have been important factors contributing to the reported revival of shamanic religiosity since the 1990s. This thesis, that shamanism is a metonym for modern subjectivity, takes seriously Arjun Apparudai’s recommendation to pay attention to the ‘mundane discourses’ of global cultural flows, and is conceived as a contribution towards both the sociology of religion and critical theoretical approaches to studying religion. Regarding the former, this research demonstrates shamanism is a highly adaptive and productive discourse for a diverse assemblage of actors with interests in tapping the significatory capital of indigenous religiosities. Regarding the latter, shamanism is demonstrated to be a highly productive subject for reflexive studies of contemporary religiosity, including strategies for circumscribing interests, authorizing representations, and legitimating practices.
PhD Affiliations
- American Academy of Religion
- British Association for the Study of Religions
- Postcolonial Studies Association
