Joseph

“A shaman, according to Claude Lévi-Strauss, is a person who has a concrete relationship with language, because he uses it for healing, as a tool and as medicine. To the shaman, words aren’t just words, but a scalpel for slicing and reorganizing what’s in this world, for cutting and binding; a phenomenon with power over all other phenomena—something truly sacred. In his Structural Anthropology, Lévi-Strauss says that scientists’ problem with shamans is that they really do heal people.”
― Álvaro Enrigue, Now I Surrender: A Novel