A distinguished anthropologist-who is also an initiated shaman-reveals the long-hidden female roots of the world's oldest form of religion and medicine. Here is a fascinating expedition into this ancient tradition, from its prehistoric beginnings to the work of women shamans across the globe today.
Shamanism was not only humankind's first spiritual and healing practice, it was originally the domain of women. This is the claim of Barbara Tedlock's provocative and myth-shattering book. Reinterpreting generations of scholarship, Tedlock-herself an expert in dreamwork, divination, and...

Described as a landmark in the ethnographic study of the Maya, this study of ritual and cosmology among the contemporary Quich Indians of highland Guatemala has now been updated to address changes that have occurred in the last decade. The Classic Mayan obsession with time has never been better known. Here, Barbara Tedlock redirects our attention to the present-day keepers of the ancient calendar. Combining anthropology with formal apprenticeship to a diviner, she refutes long-held ethnographic assumptions and opens a door to the order of the Mayan cosmos and its daily ritual. Unable to visit...

Based on over twenty years' research at Zuni Pueblo in New Mexico, this honest and respectful book takes us into the heart of one Zuni family and allows us to witness the world through its members' eyes. We see the joys of love, marriage, and childbirth and the tragedies of illness, alcoholism, and death. We rediscover the South-western landscape, its plants and wildlife, in light of traditional Zuni teachings. 'The Beautiful and the Dangerous' was originally published in 1992.

This collection of writings is from authors who are either Indians who have tried to make themselves heard, or whites who have tried to hear Indians. The first part of the book emphasizes the practical and includes Isaac Tens's "Career of the Medicine Man." The second section concentrates on the theoretical and contains Benjamin Lee Whorf's "American Indian Model of the Universe" and chapters on Indian metaphysics, among other things. In addition to an introductory essay on the Indian's stance towards reality, the editors have contributed chapters entitled "The Clown's Way" and "An American...