Criticism
Critics Daniel C. Noel and Robert J. Wallis see Harner's teachings as based on cultural appropriation and a misrepresentation of the various cultures he claims to have been inspired by (reference: "The Soul of Shamanism: Western Fantasies, Imaginal Realities"). Critics believe Harner's work laid the foundations for massive exploitation of Indigenous cultures by "plastic shamans" and other cultural appropriators (reference: "The Soul of Shamanism: Western Fantasies, Imaginal Realities", "Shamans and Religion: An Anthropological Exploration in Critical Thinking"). However, recent work by Peter N. Jones questions this criticism, as his work shows that the term shamanism has been used by a wide number of individuals, groups, and cultures across time and can not be linked to a specific group, culture, or ethnic identity (reference: "Shamans and Shamanism: A Comprehensive Bibliography of the Terms Use in North America").
Read more about this topic: Core Shamanism
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“I consider criticism merely a preliminary excitement, a statement of things a writer has to clear up in his own head sometime or other, probably antecedent to writing; of no value unless it come to fruit in the created work later.”
—Ezra Pound (1885–1972)
“However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but a spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you. When the play, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Unless criticism refuses to take itself quite so seriously or at least to permit its readers not to, it will inevitably continue to reflect the finicky canons of the genteel tradition and the depressing pieties of the Culture Religion of Modernism.”
—Leslie Fiedler (b. 1917)