This thesis presents a cartography—a moving map created as psychosocial landscapes are dismantled and reassembled—of shamanic practices that have become more visible through growing interactions between indigenous and non-indigenous people. The work explores how these practices emerge and transform within urban and sociocultural dynamics, drawing on perspectives from geography, sociology, and aesthetics. It examines the shifting visibility of indigenous knowledge and the relational processes that shape contemporary shamanic expressions, particularly in Latin American contexts.
An anthropologist describes a dilemma faced while participating in shamanic ceremonies: how to give anthropological meaning to extraordinary experiences like the vision of death. Rather than answering colleagues who asked whether the vision was real, the author problematizes the question itself, avoiding the false opposition of the anthropologist's belief versus the native's belief. Drawing on phenomenology and the affective turn, the argument is that what matters is not whether one believes in the vision, but how it affected the participant and how that affect can be set in motion.