“Just a Hobo”

Comparative Religion
Heuristics and Historical Ethnography
By Tom Sjöblom
English

The purpose of ethnography is to produce a holistic description of the culture under scrutiny. Although ethnographic writing is often described as objective, every ethnographic description is always biased by an underlying theory. Through a discussion of how the phenomenon of shamanism has been treated by ethnographers the author shows that better ethnographies could be obtained by making theoretical presuppositions explicit and visible.

Keywords

  • shamanism
  • cognition
  • heuristics
  • Finland
Go to the article on Cairn-int.info