The Review: Anthropology, Shamanism, and 'The Northman'

Plus: Fired for inviting Peter Singer? ADVERTISEMENT [The Review Logo]( Did someone forward you this newsletter? [Sign up free]( to receive your own copy. Last week I went to see [The Northman]( the Viking epic starring Alexander Skarsgård, Nicole Kidman, and Anya Taylor-Joy and directed by Robert Eggers. I loved Eggers’s first film, The Witch (2015), which drew on 17th-century sermons and dream diaries to evoke the vivid terrors of witchcraft in Puritan New England. The Witch’s reliance on early modern language transmitted a sense of the past with what felt like uncanny integrity. The Northman, conversely, relies on a hokey faux-archaic English that puts the viewer in mind less of 10th-century Scandinavia than of an ineptly superintended Dungeons & Dragons session. But when the dialogue drops out, the movie is spectacular. Like The Witch, The Northman is driven by Eggers’s interest in pre-modern experiences of magic. Its best passages involve its heroes’ encounters with two shaman figures (one a man and one a woman, played by Willem Dafoe and Björk, respectively) and with the magical or supernatural transformations the shamans enact. Eggers has a scholarly bent — “I sometimes wonder whether he needs advisers,” as one of his consultants on Viking ritual, Neil Price, [told]( Time — and the earnest intensity with which The Northman brings anthropological speculations about the Vikings to the screen is spellbinding. Price is an archeologist at Uppsala University, in Sweden, and his books and articles are the place to go if, after seeing the movie, you find yourself needing to know more about Viking religion. Actually, the word “religion” is contested here, as is the word “shaman” itself. As Price explains in the preface to The Archaeology of Shamanism (Routledge, 2001), the word derives from the practices of the Evenki people of Siberia first described in the second half of the 17th century by an Eastern Orthodox priest, Avvakum, who had been exiled for heresy to the hinterlands. The Evenki used the word šaman to refer to priest-like mediators between the natural and spirit realms, the living and the dead, and so on. Avvakum’s writings began a long period of interest in the ritual practices of the peoples of Siberia. “Over the following 150 years,” Price writes, a “fragmentary picture emerged of an ‘ensouled world’ in which everything was alive, and filled with spirits — animals, natural features, even what to Western eyes were inanimate objects.” Gradually, “shamanism” came to serve as an interpretive lens for a large repertoire of practices anthropologically or archeologically attested to in Northern Europe, Central Asia, and elsewhere. “As both a term and a notion,” Price writes, “shamanism is entirely an academic creation,” but “it is certainly a useful tool serving to describe a pattern of ritual behavior and belief found in strikingly similar form across much of the arctic and sub-arctic regions of the world.” And indeed far beyond them: Shamanism has proved a fertile, if controversial, frame for thinking about practices in South Africa, Polynesia, and elsewhere. Analogies between the Vikings and the Māori in particular have a long history, including the Māori anthropologist Peter H. Buck (Te Rangi Hīroa)'s evocatively titled study Vikings of the Sunrise (1938). As Price and a co-author, John Ljungkvist, point out in an article on “precedents, potentials, and pitfalls in Oceanic analogies of the Vikings,” “a prominent role” is “clearly played by traditional, non-systemic ritual discourse both in Oceania and in the Viking-Age North.” (I take this to refer to relatively mutable oral ritual, as opposed to textually fixed forms like the Catholic Mass.) Eggers runs with such analogies: a battle song and dance in The Northman seems clearly modeled on the Māori haka. Read an interview with Eggers at Slate, [here](. For Price and Ljungkvist on Oceania/Viking analogies, see [here](. And for The Guardian‘s review of Price’s recent history of the Vikings, Children of Ash and Elm, see [here](. Peter Singer, Dangerous to Know At Inside Higher Ed, Colleen Flaherty [reports]( that St. Olaf College’s Edmund Santurri, a professor of religion and philosophy and the director of the college’s Institute for Freedom and Community, has been told by the administration that he will need to step down from his directorship a year early. Why? In a [conversation]( with Amna Khalid, a professor of history at Carleton College and host of the podcast “Banished,” he says that “this has something to do with the fact” that he had invited Peter Singer, the Princeton bioethicist, to participate in an event at the institute. (Singer holds controversial views about euthanasia and disability.) “Would you read out to me,” Khalid asks Santurri, “the mission statement of the institute?” He does: “The purpose of the institute is to shape America’s future by educating students with a passion for public affairs and a commitment to free inquiry and the search for truth. Exploring diverse ideas about politics, markets, and society, the institute seeks to challenge presuppositions, question easy answers, and foster constructive dialogue.” “So, to put it very bluntly, you are being let go from the institute for doing your job?” Khalid asks. “I would say,” Santurri responds, “that’s a reasonable interpretation of what’s happened.” Listen to the whole conversation [here](. ADVERTISEMENT UPCOMING EVENT [Join us June 7-24]( for a virtual professional development program on overcoming the challenges of the department chair role and creating a strategic vision for individual and departmental growth. [Reserve your spot now](. Space is limited. The Latest THE REVIEW | ESSAY [The Unbearable Whiteness of Ken Burns]( By Timothy Messer-Kruse [STORY IMAGE]( The filmmaker’s new documentary on Benjamin Franklin tells an old and misleading story. ADVERTISEMENT THE REVIEW | OPINION [Scholars and Journalists, Stop Fighting!]( By Maggie Doherty [STORY IMAGE]( These related endeavors need cooperation, not competition. THE REVIEW | ESSAY [How Much Does College Really Cost?]( By Phillip Levine [STORY IMAGE]( The opacity of pricing hurts students — and institutions. THE REVIEW | ESSAY [A Philosopher Laughs at Death — and the Public Listens]( By Mark Dery [STORY IMAGE]( Can Simon Critchley make Heidegger, the Nazi philosopher, palatable? Recommended - “One can argue that the EU has had pacifying effects (though I would argue other factors are more important), but national identities remain an enduring part of Europe’s political landscape and continue to confound elite expectations.” At Foreign Policy, Stephen M. Walt [on what leaders have forgotten]( about nationalism. - “I’m a big believer in speech and in reasoned exchange and having a multiplicity of viewpoints in conversation, and I don’t think that we should be excluding viewpoints from a university.” That’s the California Democratic congressman Ro Khanna, [in conversation]( with Jon Baskin and Paul Franz at The Point. - “Most of the time these men appeared to dislike each other intensely and enjoyed saying so.” The men are I.A. Richards, T.S. Eliot, William Empson, F.R. Leavis and Raymond Williams, the subject of a new book by Terry Eagleton, [wittily reviewed by Kathryn Hughes]( in The Guardian. Write to me at len.gutkin@chronicle.com. Yours, Len Gutkin FROM THE CHRONICLE STORE [What Community Colleges Need to Thrive]( [What Community Colleges Need to Thrive]( Community colleges and the students they serve were disproportionately hit during the pandemic. Learn how steep enrollment declines and the pandemic's economic fallout complicated these institutions' road to recovery, and what strategies leaders can use to reset and rebuild. [Order your copy today.]( NEWSLETTER FEEDBACK What did you think of today’s newsletter? [Strongly disliked]( | [It was ok]( | [Loved it]( This newsletter was sent to {EMAIL}. [Read this newsletter on the web](. [Manage]( your newsletter preferences, [stop receiving]( this email, or [view]( our privacy policy. © 2022 [The Chronicle of Higher Education]( 1255 23rd Street, N.W. Washington, D.C. 20037