Anecdote of Shamans Responding to Star Trek

DI for documenting his journey to shamanism in the 1994 book Of Water and the Spirit: Ritual, Magic, and Initiation in the Life of African Shaman. He writes about the proverbial dive into the rabbit hole as he was studying with the elders of his community and balancing his newfound wisdom with his Western education. Some paints a picture of a different path to knowledge that contradicts the norms of Western conventions. According to him. the Dagara have no word for the supernatural. "For us, as for many indigenous cultures, the supernatural is part of our everyday lives," he writes. The Dagara also don't draw a line between reality and imagination either, he writes, but rather emphasize the power of thought to create reality.

And the Dagara don't have a word for fiction. Out of curiosity. Some decided to conduct an experiment. In the book, he recalls a day in 1996 when he showed the film Star Trek to his shaman elders. The elders watched the film, assuming that these were the day-today happenings of a group in another part of the world. He writes, 'My elders were comfortable with Star Trek, the West's vision of its own future. Because they believe in things like magical beings (Spock), traveling at the speed of light, and teleportation, the wonders that Westerners imagine being part of their future are very much a part of my elders' present. The irony is that the West sees the indigenous world as primitive or archaic. Wouldn't it be wonderful if the West could learn to be as 'archaic' as my elders are?