Indigenous and Trans-cultural Shamanism in Italy

Shamanism is a growing religious movement in Italy and manifests itself in two main forms. The first is trans-cultural shamanism, a cross-cultural set of practices inspired by one or multiple indigenous traditions, which get ‘translated’ when imported into Western cultural discourse. Second, encountering on the field a web of underground yet widespread vernacular magic traditions prompted the inquiry on whether such practices might constitute an indigenous Italian shamanism, native of the land.
This thesis aims to fill an ethnographical gap on trans-cultural forms of shamanism in Italy and the relation between contemporary forms of folk magic and shamanism. The selection of participants for both trans-cultural shamanism and folk magic traditions was on the basis of networking derived from fieldwork and online engagement with practitioners.
The label ‘shaman’ has worked by superimposition over local identifiers and, being a Western etic category of the 19th Century, retains some degree of exoticism in its semantics. These traits are found in reference to the Italian context, too, as every region calls their vernacular healers with a term sourced from the local dialect or parlance. It is also easier for trans-cultural practitioners to identify foreign practices as shamanistic than to acknowledge that what the town healer does may fall under the same category. This, I argue, may be due to the absence of romantic exoticism embodied by the ‘next-door neighbour’. Even when the label ‘shamanism’ is employed spontaneously by Segnatori (folk magic practitioners), it is reportedly the result of the person leaving their native place (moving from regions in the South to the North of Italy), thus creating an ‘exoticising’ distance.