Stolen Power: Gender, Shamanism, and the Making of Ritual Authority

Many of the world’s most influential scholars of religion and archaeologists have suggested that shamanism should be considered the world’s “oldest religion.” This paper challenges that claim, arguing instead that shamanism is a historically situated, gendered, and individualised appropriation of ritual efficacy once collectively shared between men and women. Archaeological evidence, alongside evolutionary theory, suggests that early human societies were broadly gender-egalitarian. These observations sit uneasily with the claim that shamanism represents the world’s earliest form of religion.
Drawing on ethnographic case studies of African gender-egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies, I show how fluid, oscillatory shifts between male and female collective rituals—during which gender roles may be reversed—prevent any group or individual from monopolising ritual power. Furthermore, female solidarity, women’s rituals and ritualised behaviour documented among these groups offer clear ways in which any attempts by individual males to gain prestige and power is quickly curbed by women, thus preventing the crystallisation of gendered inequalities.
By contrast, in Amazonian societies ritual power and authority are largely monopolised by male shamans. Yet the efficacy of Amazonian shamanism and male initiation rituals rests on the careful mimicry of female generative powers—closely associated with blood, lunar cycles, skin-changing, and the rainbow serpent. Shamans here claim exclusive access to spirit worlds, ritual knowledge, and ritual violence, exercising authority embedded within male-dominated kinship and political structures. I argue that this marks a clear shift from oscillatory gender relations to hierarchical ritual authority captured by male specialists—a shift echoed in widespread myths describing a male appropriation of ritual power from women in the distant past.
Ethnographic data from the Batek of Malaysia offer an intermediate case: although male shamans hold concentrated ritual power, their efficacy depends on female chorists whose participation in trance and soul journeys both enables shamanic practice and constrains the complete monopolisation of ritual authority.