From “mind–matter” duality to “body–situation” mechanism —the phenomenology of the body on how shaman soul retrieval heals the sick
Philosophy Ethics and Humanities in Medicine October 6, 2025 Kan Feng, Mingyu Yang
Soul retrieval in modern Chinese shamanism is not a purely spiritual or purely material event but a bodily technique. Using phenomenology of the body, the paper examines three body states—soul loss, evocation, and return—in contemporary Chinese shamanic practices. The analysis shows that shamans adjust, configure, and reposition a patient's dislocated body state by temporarily sharing a body (Einleibung) with them. This body-centered turn, influenced by the body revitalization movement, moves beyond conventional mind-matter dualism. The work proposes an interpretive "body-situation" Einleibung mechanism to explain how shamans negotiate the semantics of illness and healing.