Shamanic Technologies of the Imagination
By Charles Stépanoff
With a Foreword by Philippe Descola
Translated by Matthew H. Evans
Journeys into the Invisible is a lively exploration of the traditions of shamanism in the Far North of Eurasia and North America. Charles Stépanoff draws on ethnographic literature and his fieldwork in Siberia to reveal the immense contribution to the scope of human imagination made by shamans and the cognitive techniques they developed over the centuries.
Northern Shamans travel in mind in ways that appear mysterious to Westerners, but which rely on the human capacity of imagination. They perceive themselves simultaneously in two types of space—one visible, the other invisible—putting them in contact and establishing links with non-human beings in their surroundings. Shamans share their experience of mind travel with their patients, families, or the wider community, allowing them to participate in their odyssey through the invisible. Stépanoff offers an anthropological reflection on the relationships between our uses of the imagination, our relationships with the environment, and the emergence of social hierarchies.
This work will appeal to anthropologists as well as to anyone interested in learning about the power of imagination from the masters of the invisible, the shamans of the Far North.
“The ambition of the present work is formidable: to present and make intelligible to a non-specialist audience the immense contribution to the human imagination made by the cognitive techniques of the boreal shamanic journey. Starting from the principle that, for most of their existence, Homo sapiens felt no need to store the virtual worlds they create in stabilized physical signs—writing systems, pictographs, or images—the author takes the shamanic practices of northern Asia as a striking testimony to the complementary and competitive relationship that exists between techniques of the imaginary that do without externalized images—mental visualization and analogies suggested by certain behaviors and situations—and those that use concrete artifacts to give a material presence to the representations mobilized by ritual specialists. There is nothing anodyne about this relationship, and we can follow Stépanoff when he suggests that entrusting the work of the imagination to specialists in some kind of singular technique for exploring it, making it visible, and accumulating the fruits of this labor in durable signs—an initial bifurcation which did not occur everywhere in the world—might constitute the first form of the social division of labor.”
— Philippe Descola, author of Beyond Nature and Culture
Charles Stépanoff is an anthropologist, director of studies at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, and member of the Laboratoire d’Anthropologie Sociale of the Collège de France (Paris). He is currently studying domestication and attachment.
Philippe Descola, emeritus professor at the Collège de France (Paris), has become one of the most important anthropologists working today and has had a major influence in European intellectual life since the publication of Beyond Nature and Culture (2005).
Matthew H. Evans is a writer and educator living in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.
Initially published as Voyager dans l’Invisible. Techniques chamaniques de l’imagination © 2019 Les Éditions La Découverte
© HAU Books 2025
ISBN: 9781912808908 [paperback]
ISBN: 9781914363337 [PDF]
ISBN: 9781914363344 [e-book]
6″ x 9″, 400 pp.
58 halftones, 47 line drawings, 4 maps
$35
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