Mastering the Body: From Experience to Discourse. Shamanic Healing in Urban Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This research is an ethnographic study of Jeannette McCullough’s shamanic circles in Toronto, Canada. This thesis situates her practice within the field of shamanic studies and investigates four aspects of the therapeutic process: the experience and intentions of the healer; the ritual action and therapeutic imageries of practitioners; the personal trajectories and therapeutic choices of participants; and the broader social concerns and politics that this form of healing reveals. The examination of the ritual’s efficacy exposes the ways in which technology addresses identity issues and challenges techniques of the body. More specifically, animal and ancestor embodiment, dismemberment, and transmutation are shamanic techniques that initiate participants to a range of perceptions that take place within a flexible ritual structure, and shelters the person from external sources of meaning. These experiences allow individuals to take distance from affliction by inducing healing as an autogenous process of transformation. Moreover, self-reflexive testimonies reveal how Toronto participants construct spirituality as a mode of resistance to a more conventional lifestyle, situated halfway between religion and atheism. These observations show participants’ desire to maintain positive social engagements while remaining in the fringe of society. In this sense, healing is a process that addresses tensions between private and public dimensions of daily life. In other words, during the ritual, participants learn to experience their bodies differently and to cultivate alternative identities, something that manifests outside of the ritual context where individuals perceive themselves as socially marginal. The analysis of the ritual’s efficacy and of participants’ testimonies suggest that Jeannette McCullough’s shamanic techniques efficaciously collapses the opposition between right and wrong bodies, revealing its power as a counter-discourse to heteronormativity — not by addressing gender issues per se — but by initiating the person to a mastery of the body: by broadening notions of kinship, and by teaching ways to resist the public, collective, and social aspects of the ritual. Finally, understanding urban Canadian shamanism as a counter-discourse to heteronormativity allows one to elaborate future research questions, concerning the various ways in which healing practices relate to forms of resistance to broader social issues produced by institutionalized sources of ideological control.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".