Inuit Angakkuq Spirit-Mediation Traditions

Record summary

Angakkuq traditions concern ritual specialists, healing, divination, spirit relations and negotiation with nonhuman powers in diverse Inuit societies. Ethnographies by writers including Knud Rasmussen and Franz Boas offer identifiable comparative material for altered states, dream authority, illness interpretation and culturally organized extraordinary experience. These traditions should be treated as living and historically varied religious systems, not as evidence of paranormal mechanisms. Researchers must distinguish community concepts from categories imposed by early anthropologists and from later popular “shamanism” summaries.