Shamanism is a spiritual practice that involves a practitioner shaman interacting with the spirit world through altered states of consciousness , such as trance. Beliefs and practices categorized as "shamanic" have attracted the interest of scholars from a variety of disciplines, including anthropologists, archeologists, historians, religious studies scholars, philosophers, and psychologists. Hundreds of books and academic papers on the subject have been produced, with a peer-reviewed academic journal being devoted to the study of shamanism.
The term was adopted by Russians interacting with the indigenous peoples in Siberia. It is found in the memoirs of the exiled Russian churchman Avvakum. Anthropologist and archeologist Silvia Tomaskova argued that by the mids, many Europeans applied the Arabic term shaitan meaning "devil" to the non-Christian practices and beliefs of Indigenous peoples beyond the Ural Mountains. A female shaman is sometimes called a shamanka , which is not an actual Tungus term but simply shaman plus the Russian suffix -ka for feminine nouns.
There is no single agreed-upon definition for the word "shamanism" among anthropologists. Thomas Downson suggests three shared elements of shamanism: practitioners consistently alter consciousness, the community regards altering consciousness as an important ritual practice, and the knowledge about the practice is controlled.
The English historian Ronald Hutton noted that by the dawn of the 21st century, there were four separate definitions of the term which appeared to be in use:. The term "shamanism" was first applied by Western anthropologists as outside observers of the ancient religion of the Turks and Mongols , as well as those of the neighbouring Tungusic- and Samoyedic -speaking peoples.
Upon observing more religious traditions around the world, some Western anthropologists began to also use the term in a very broad sense. The term was used to describe unrelated magicoreligious practices found within the ethnic religions of other parts of Asia, Africa, Australasia and even completely unrelated parts of the Americas, as they believed these practices to be similar to one another.
