Shamanizing Matter: Whiteness and the Materiality of Belief

Abstract

Shamanism is as much a cultural technology as a material hermeneutics. In its westward transmission, the legend of an Asiatic shaman who rode a horse into the sky and foretold the Mongol imperium transformed into a dream vision of a knight in white armor on a white horse who uttered the prophecy to Genghis Khan. Yet the divide between the Oriental shaman and the European knight is illusory, as whiteness indexes the figural modulations of race and belief, both of which operate through a politics of affective perception. The permutational “white knighting” of the shaman suggests that race-making not a nonce act of categorical naming but a serial resignification of the material inclusive of skin tone but extending beyond it to the non-human and the inanimate. In the entanglement of premodern race and faith, semiotic mediation is indistinguishable from information embodiment. That is, the whitened shaman-knight is a biomediated body open to the flux of informational traffic; race-making is biomediation. An articulation of the felt materiality of belief, shamanism is periodizing, colonializing, and racializing.