Horwitz, Jonathan

   Neo-shamanic practitioner who founded the Scandinavian Center for Shamanic Studies in 1986, and with Annette Høst offers such basic and advanced workshops as “The Shaman’s Journey,” “Shamanic Counselling Training,” and “Soul Retrieval Training.” Horwitz was a faculty member of the Foundation for Shamanic Studies for eight years, and the practices of Horwitz and Høst are very much influenced by core shamanism, including Høst’s work on Nordic (Northern European) seidr. As a practitioner, Horwitz has been critical of anthropological approaches to shamanic practice as performance, sensing a devaluing of genuine experience and the “reality” that shamans actually engage with spirits. This practitioner perspective is a fitting response to atheistic, empiricist, and skeptical scholars, but does neglect the important contribution the discourse of performance offers to studies on shamanism in moving analysis away from the veracity of belief to the nuances of what shamans do.