Shamanistic references in the contemporary performative arts

The aim of this thesis is to determine the relation between contemporary performative arts and the concept "Shamanism", a belief system that is still present since prehistoric ages in a vast geographical area—to a big extend, in Asia. Since the middle of the 20th-century, the concept of Shamanism started to be more actual in arts; especially with the opportunities the Performance Theory offers, it has become more appealing in the performative fields. As a consequence of this phenomenon, new idioms among art critics have emerged: "shaman" for identifying an artist and "shamanic" for describing a particular artwork, for instance. In this study, the immediacy and contextuality of the Shamanistic references in the works of contemporary performative arts, which have been described with these terms, are questioned. In this regard, some representative works of a group of contemporary artists from different disciplines, such as of Joseph Beuys, Nam June Paik, Ahn Eun Me, Nil Yalter, John Cage, Nick Cave, a.o. are analyzed. In this research, Victor W. Turner's approach and terminology of "symbolic and interpretive anthropology", an important field in the cultural anthropology, and the concepts of "Performance Theory" by Richard Schechner, which was influenced by Turner's theory, predominate as main tools of this analysis. Keywords: "Shamanism", "Contemporary Performative Arts", "Performance Theory", "Symbolic and Interpretive Anthropology