Cultural appropriation in a spiritual context means taking practices, symbols or titles from a culture you do not belong to, usually one that has been colonised, and using them without permission, understanding or reciprocity. In shamanism the question comes up constantly, and the honest answer is this: practising shamanic techniques is not automatically appropriation, but a great deal of what is sold as shamanism in the West does cross the line. The difference lies in what you take, what you call it, who you credit and what flows back.
This is an uncomfortable subject, and it is meant to be. If you have felt drawn to shamanic practice and then felt a knot in your stomach about whether you have any right to it, that knot is worth listening to rather than talking yourself out of. What follows is my attempt to sort the question into parts that can actually be answered.
Is practising shamanism cultural appropriation?
Not inherently. The core techniques, rhythmic drumming, trance, journeying and working with helping spirits, appear independently in almost every part of the world, including Europe, and they are not the property of any one people. What is appropriation is lifting a specific closed ceremony, a sacred object, a title or a lineage from a living culture that has not given it to you.
Two things get tangled here and they are worth separating. The first is the technique: a drumbeat at four to seven beats per second will alter consciousness in any human nervous system, regardless of ancestry. The second is the cultural container: a Lakota inipi, a Shipibo icaro, a Sámi joik, a Yoruba orisha rite. These are not techniques. They belong to specific peoples, they are held by specific initiated practitioners, and they come with obligations.
The word shaman itself is borrowed. It comes from saman in the Evenki language of Siberia, and it was carried into European languages by Russian travellers in the seventeenth century. Mircea Eliade then used it as a global category in Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, and the label stuck to practices that had a hundred different names of their own. Even the vocabulary we use is a borrowed thing, which is a good reason to hold it lightly.
What is the difference between appreciation, exchange and appropriation?
Appreciation is learning about a tradition and honouring it from where you stand. Exchange is being taught something by someone who has the standing to teach it, with their consent. Appropriation is taking it anyway, usually stripping out the context, and often selling it.
| Question | Appreciation | Exchange | Appropriation |
|---|---|---|---|
| Consent | Not needed, you are learning about it | Given by a teacher with standing | Absent or assumed |
| Context | Named and respected | Taught alongside the practice | Stripped out |
| Credit | Source is named | Lineage is named | Blurred or claimed as your own |
| Money | Usually none | Flows partly back to the community | Flows away from the source |
| Title | You call yourself a student | You use the title you were given | You call yourself a shaman |
| Accountability | To your own honesty | To your teacher and their community | To nobody |
The last row is the one that decides most cases. Appropriation is almost always marked by an absence of anyone who can tell you that you got it wrong.
Which shamanic practices are closed, and which are open?
Closed practices are those that require initiation, community standing or permission from a specific people. Open practices are the broad human techniques that no single culture owns. When you are unsure, treat a practice as closed until someone with standing tells you otherwise.
- Generally open. Drumming and rattling for trance, journeying to meet helping spirits, working with the land where you actually live, ancestor work within your own lineage, meditation, breath, ceremony you build yourself from your own materials.
- Generally closed. The Lakota sweat lodge and Sun Dance, the Native American Church peyote ceremony, Amazonian ayahuasca ceremony led by someone without training in that tradition, Sámi drum symbols, specific orisha and vodou rites, and any ceremony that requires an initiation you have not received.
- Depends entirely on who taught you. Smudging with white sage, medicine wheels, feather work, particular songs, particular plant medicines. These have specific homes, and whether you may work with them depends on whether someone from that home handed them to you.
The most cited statement on this is the Declaration of War Against Exploiters of Lakota Spirituality, passed at the Lakota Summit in 1993, which named the selling of Lakota ceremony by outsiders as theft rather than homage. Whatever you think of the language, it was a clear message from a specific people about their own practices, and it is still worth reading in full before you decide what is yours to use.
Where does core shamanism stand in this debate?
Core shamanism is the framework developed by anthropologist Michael Harner, who stripped the practice back to the elements he found repeating across cultures and taught those without the cultural specifics attached. It exists precisely to avoid appropriation, and it is also criticised for creating a rootless practice that borrows the authority of Indigenous traditions while dropping their obligations.
Both criticisms and defences deserve a fair hearing, so here they are side by side.
- The case for core shamanism. It teaches technique without claiming anyone’s ceremony. It asks students to work with their own land and lineage. It keeps a genuinely universal human practice available to people whose own traditions were destroyed centuries ago, which is the situation of most Europeans.
- The case against. It still uses a borrowed Siberian word. It generalises very different cosmologies into one model, which flattens them. And it produces practitioners who trade on the mystique of Indigenous spirituality while having no relationship with any Indigenous community.
I teach within the core framework and I think both sides are partly right. If you want the longer version of that argument, I have written a full comparison of core shamanism and traditional shamanism that lays out what each one can and cannot offer.
What do Indigenous practitioners actually say about this?
There is no single Indigenous position, and anyone who tells you there is has usually found one voice that agrees with them. The range of views is wide, and it is more useful to know the range than to pick a quote.
Broadly, you will hear four positions, sometimes from people in the same community:
- This is theft. Ceremony was criminalised for generations, our elders were punished for practising it, and now outsiders sell it at retreats. The harm is ongoing and the answer is to stop.
- This is dilution. The problem is less ownership than distortion: half-learned ceremony taught by people who cannot answer basic questions about it, which then becomes what the world believes the tradition is.
- Teach it, but properly. Some elders have deliberately trained outsiders, on the condition that lineage is named, protocol is kept and reciprocity flows back. They see transmission as survival.
- Go home and find your own. Perhaps the most common message, and the kindest one: every people on earth had these practices. Stop shopping and go looking for yours.
That fourth response changed my practice more than any of the others. It is not a rejection. It is a redirection, and it points somewhere genuinely rich. Europe has bone-throwing, seiðr, herb-wives, Alpine and Baltic and Celtic material, most of it fragmentary but a great deal of it still recoverable. I sketched some of that terrain in a piece on the world’s living shamanic traditions.
How do you practise shamanism respectfully?
Practise respectfully by naming your sources, staying inside what you were actually taught, refusing titles you were not given, and making sure something real flows back to the traditions you have learned from. None of this requires you to stop. It requires you to be traceable.
- Name where it came from. Say who taught you and what tradition it sits in. If the honest answer is a book and a drum track, say that too. Vagueness is where appropriation hides.
- Do not call yourself a shaman. In most traditions that word is conferred by a community, not adopted. Practitioner, journeyer, student, drum carrier. Any of those are honest.
- Work with the land you are on. Your local river, your local trees, the dead buried in your local ground. This is available to everyone and it is where the relationship actually forms.
- Go looking for your own ancestors. Ancestral practice is never appropriation. It is the one lineage nobody can tell you is not yours.
- Leave closed ceremony alone unless you were invited. Not invited by a workshop that sold you a place. Invited by people who hold it.
- Let money flow back. If you earn from this work, support Indigenous-led land, language and legal organisations. Reciprocity that costs you nothing is a feeling, not a practice.
- Stay correctable. Have people around you who can tell you that you have got something wrong, and mean it when you thank them.
These are the same principles I build our shamanic practitioner training around. We teach technique, we name what we do not teach, and we are explicit about which doors are not ours to open.
What I got wrong, and what I still sit with
In my first years I used white sage without a second thought, because everyone around me did. Nobody had told me it was overharvested to the point of scarcity in southern California, or that it sits inside living ceremony for peoples there. When I finally learned that, I felt defensive before I felt anything else, which taught me something about how this conversation usually goes. I burn mugwort and juniper now, both of which grow near me and both of which my own ancestors used.
I also used the word shaman about myself, on a website, for about a year. It brought clients. That is precisely why it was the wrong word, and I took it down.
What I still sit with is harder and I do not have it resolved. I make my living teaching a practice named with a Siberian word, built into a framework by an American anthropologist, drawing on a human inheritance that no living tradition handed to me personally. I have decided that the honest response is not to stop but to stay visible about it: to name the borrowing, keep to what I know, refuse the titles, and send money where it is owed. Someone reading this will think that is not enough. They may be right, and I would rather hear that argument than avoid it. If you want the related question of who gets to use the title at all, I have written about who has the right to call themselves a shaman.
Frequently asked questions about shamanism and cultural appropriation
Can white people practise shamanism?
Yes, if they practise the open techniques rather than closed ceremony, and are honest about their sources. Trance, drumming and spirit work existed across pre-Christian Europe as much as anywhere else, and reclaiming that is not appropriation. What is not available to anyone outside those communities, of any background, is Lakota, Shipibo, Sámi or other specific ceremony that requires initiation and standing.
Is burning white sage cultural appropriation?
It is contested, and there is a straightforward alternative. White sage is a ceremonial plant for several Native American peoples and commercial demand has damaged wild populations. Many Native voices ask outsiders not to use it. Since almost every culture has its own cleansing herbs, mugwort, juniper, rosemary, cedar, pine, switching costs you nothing and removes the problem entirely.
Is it appropriation to say I have a spirit animal?
The relationship is not, the vocabulary sometimes is. Working with animal helpers appears in shamanic traditions worldwide, including European ones. The specific term totem comes from the Ojibwe word doodem and carries a precise clan meaning that a personal animal guide does not. Power animal or animal ally are more accurate and avoid borrowing a word that means something else.
Can I attend an ayahuasca ceremony without appropriating?
Attending a ceremony led by a trained practitioner from that tradition, in a way that supports their community, is participation rather than appropriation. Leading one yourself without that training is not. The larger concerns with ayahuasca tourism are about safety, consent and the pressure it puts on Amazonian communities, and those are worth researching separately before you book anything.
What should I call myself if not a shaman?
Shamanic practitioner is the standard term and it is accurate: it describes what you do without claiming a status a community would have to confer. Other honest options are journeyer, student of shamanism, drum carrier, or simply a plain description of your work such as someone who works with drum and spirit. Precision here reads as confidence, not modesty.
Does worrying about appropriation mean I should give up shamanic practice?
No, and paralysis helps nobody. The people most likely to appropriate carelessly are rarely the ones losing sleep over it. Turn the worry into practice instead: find out where each thing you do came from, drop what is not yours, go deeper into what is, and build a relationship with the land and ancestors you actually have. That is a better practice than the one you started with.
About the author. Carolin Mallmann is a shamanic practitioner, NLP trainer and the founder of One Shamanism. She trained in core shamanism, teaches online and in Portugal, and writes about this path the way she teaches it: gently, honestly, and without mystifying what can be said plainly. You can see how these principles shape her teaching on the shamanic practitioner training page.
