Åke Hultkrantz

Åke Hultkrantz (born April 1, 1920 in Kalmar ; † October 3, 2006 ) was a Swedish religious scholar who researched the rituals and practices surrounding the shamans of different peoples (→ shamanism , shaman drum ). He taught at Stockholm University , where he was professor and prefect at the Institute for the History of Religions from 1958 to 1986. He wrote his doctoral thesis, presented in 1953, on the ideas of the North American Indians about the soul.

In the book series The Religions of Mankind , he wrote articles on the religion of the Sami and the American Arctic . He also published on the Orpheus tradition of the North American Indians.

life and work

Born in 1920 in Kalmar, Sweden, Hultkrantz began studying comparative religion, ethnology and history at Stockholm University in 1939. Graduated in 1943, he continued his ethnology studies and received his doctorate in 1946. In 1953 he obtained a second doctorate in religious studies; in addition, he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Helsinki in 1997 . He taught at Stockholm University all his life. There he began as a senior lecturer , then as a professor of comparative religion, and finally became director of this institute. In 1986 he retired.

As early as 1944 and 1946 he visited groups of the Saami, but his focus was the Indians of North America , especially the Shoshone in Wyoming and Idaho , the Arapaho of the northern plains and the tribes of California.

In 1958 he began his stays as a visiting professor, for example at Brandeis University in Boston , the University of California in Santa Barbara (1973 to 1990), the University of Montana in the late 1970s, followed by stays in Budapest (1970), Vienna ( 1973), Aberdeen (1976) and at other universities in England, Germany, Sweden and Finland. 1981–1982 he held the Gifford Lectures in Aberdeen. He has also attended numerous Americanist congresses since 1956 and the Association of the History of Religion since 1970. In 1993 he was President of the Shamanism Congress in Budapest.

Hultkrantz did not approach Indian cultures with the widespread notion that they were doomed, nor did he take the standpoint of the governments of Canada and the USA that they were inferior and should therefore be replaced by the dominant, European-inspired culture. On the contrary, he showed them so much respect that he was adopted by the Shoshone medicine man John Trehero in 1948.

However, his concept, according to which the Indian beliefs are not a religion but a "configuration" in a religious system, was recently contradicted.

He published 25 monographs and around 400 articles and was co-editor of numerous professional journals. He was supported by his wife Geraldine Hultkrantz.

Publications (selection)

• The North American Indians Orpheus Tradition. 2 volumes. Stockholm 1957.
• Bachofen an the Mother Goddess: An Appraisal after one Hundred Years. In: Ethnos. Volume 26, 1961, pp. 75-85.
• Ivar Paulson , Åke Hultkrantz, Karl Jettmar : The Religions of Northern Europe and the American Arctic. The religions of Northern Europe and the American Arctic ( The Religions of Mankind , Volume 3), Stuttgart: Kohlhammer 1962, ISBN 3-17-071051-6 .
• The Religions of the American Indians , 1981 (Swedish edition 1967), ISBN 0-520-04239-5 .
• The Drum in Shamanism. Some reflections. In: Tore Ahlbäck, Jan Bergmann (Ed.): The Saami Shaman Drum. Based on papers read at the Symposium on the Saami Shaman Drum held at Åbo, Finland on the 19th – 20th of August 1988. Donner Institute for Research in Religious and Cultural History, Åbo 1991.
• Shamanic healing and ritual drama , New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company 1992.
  • German edition: Shamanic healing art and ritual drama. Translated from American English by Konrad Dietzelbinger, 1st edition 1994, 2nd edition Diederichs, Munich 1996, ISBN 3-424-01166-5 ( Diederichs yellow series , volume 112).
• Soul and Native Americans. Edited with a forword by Robert Holland. Spring Publications, Woodstock, CT 1997, ISBN 0-88214-223-2 (= new edition of the work Conceptions of the soul among North American Indians . Swedish Ethnographic Museum 1953).
• The book of the shamans. Volume 2: North and South America . Translated from English by Barbara Röhl. Ullstein, Munich 2002, ISBN 3-550-07558-8 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Åke Hultkrantz in the Karlsruhe catalog
• Obituary on the portal of the Gifford Lectures of the University of Aberdeen (in English).

Remarks

1. ↑ Dödsfall Åke Hultkrantz. (No longer available online.) Helsingborgs Dagblad, October 12, 2006, archived from the original on September 30, 2007 ; Retrieved April 24, 2013 (Swedish). 
2. ↑ Lars Kirkhusmo Pharo: A Methodology for a Deconstruction and Reconstruction of the Concepts “Shaman” and “Shamanism” , in: Numen 58.1 (2011) 6-70.