Lindquist, Galina

   Swedish anthropologist whose important fieldwork on neo-shamanisms in Sweden (1992–95) resulted in a doctoral thesis published as Shamanic Performance on the Urban Scene: Neo-Shamanism in Contemporary Sweden (1997). Lindquist examines the group Yggdrasil in particular, and the way that indigenous and ancient shamanisms are relocalized in contemporary contexts, with such practices as seidr reenchanting practitioners’ lives, promoting “fuzzy community,” and resulting in a “new internal tradition.” From a practitioner perspective, Lindquist’s understanding of neo-shamanic ritual as a form of imaginative “play” and performance might seem to demean neo-shamanic experience (as suggested by Jonathan Horwitz and others), yet Lindquist’s work was formative in the emerging study of neo-shamanism, and this sort of approach usefully moves analysis away from the myopic focus on definition and what a shaman is to the complexity of what shamans do.