A Review of Charles Stépanoff, Voyager dans l’invisible: Techniques chamaniques de l’imagination. Paris: La Découverte, 2019. 464 p. [Charles Stépanoff, Journeys into the Invisible: Shamanic Technologies of the Imagination, trans. by Matthew E. Evans. Chicago, IL: HAU Books, 2025. 343 p.]

Abstract

The book under review, by the French anthropologist Charles Stépanoff, could be described as a panorama of shamanism. On the basis of old ethnographic material collected over a hundred years, the author rethinks the problems of the ethnographic tradition that seem to have become established in new terms: of the control of the imagination and of interspecies communication. In this way, he brings the problem of shamanic ritual practices and the attributes of shamans to a new level of understanding of the culture of the peoples of Siberia, in line with the ideas of the anthropology of multiple ontologies. At the same time, the ethnographic panorama he creates is static. It is encapsulated in the ethnographic narrative of the colonial period and does not correspond to the historical realities of the time. Moreover, Stépanoff’s work exoticises the indigenous peoples of Siberia, using the image of the “other” dictated to us by Enlightenment rationalism, romanticism, and other ideologies of the past.