Michael James Harner was an anthropologist, educator and author. He founded the Foundation for Shamanic Studies and the New Age practice of "Core Shamanism." His 1980 book, The Way of the Shaman: a Guide to Power and Healing, has been foundational in the development and popularization of "core shamanism" as a path of personal development for new age adherents of neoshamanism.
Career
Harner was born in Washington, D.C. in 1929. He initially worked in the field of archaeology, including studying the Lower Colorado River area. As a graduate student in 1956-57 he undertook field research on the culture of the Jívaro people of the Ecuadorian Amazon and began to pursue a career as an ethnologist. His doctoral dissertation, "Machetes, Shotguns, and Society: An Inquiry into the Social Impact of Technological Change among the Jivaro Indians", became the basis for his book, The Jívaro: People of the Sacred Waterfalls. In 1960-61 he experimented with the Amazonian plant medicine ayahuasca, which he wrote about in the articles "The Sound of Rushing Water" and "The Role of Hallucinogenic Plants in European Witchcraft". In 1966, having taught at UC-Berkeley and served as associate director of the Lowie Museum of Anthropology, Harner became a visiting professor at Yale and Columbia University. In 1969, he did fieldwork among a neighboring Jivaroan-speaking tribe, the Achuara, and the following year joined the graduate faculty of The New School for Social Research in New York City. He co-chaired the Anthropology Section of the New York Academy of Sciences. In 1987 Harner left academia to devote himself full-time to his new project, The Foundation for Shamanic Studies. Walsh and Grob note in their book, Higher Wisdom: Eminent Elders Explore the Continuing Impact of Psychedelics, "Michael Harner is widely acknowledged as the world's foremost authority on shamanism and has had an enormous influence on both the academic and lay worlds.... What Yogananda did for Hinduism and D. T. Suzuki did for Zen, Michael Harner has done for shamanism, namely bring the tradition and its richness to Western awareness." He died on February 3, 2018 at the age of 88.
After traveling to the Amazon where he ingested the hallucinogen ayahuasca, Harner began experimenting with monotonous drumming. In the early 1970s he started giving training workshops to small groups in Connecticut. In 1979 he founded the Center for Shamanic Studies in Norwalk, Connecticut. In 1980, Harner published The Way of the Shaman: a Guide to Power and Healing.Students in the United States and Europe began to take his classes in what he was now calling "core shamanism". Anthropologist Joan Townsend has distinguished Harner's core shamanism from neoshamanism. However, most authors in the field, especially Harner's critics, consider Harner's core shamanism to be the primary influence on, and foundation of, the Neoshamanic movement. Harner later integrated his Center for Shamanic Studies into the nonprofit Foundation for Shamanic Studies. The Foundation received financial support primarily from the Core Shamanism courses and workshops he taught, supplemented by private donations. From the early 1980s onward, he invited a few of his students to join an international faculty to reach an ever-wider market. In 1987, Harner resigned his professorship to devote himself full-time to the work of the foundation. He largely ceased publishing, except for occasional articles in the publication, "Shamanism."
