"It is safe to bet that Journeys into the Invisible will be a landmark work. First of all, because it manages to be both a scholarly and an accessible account of the various kinds of shamanism to have developed in that part of the world where Westerners first discovered the practice. It is a work that happily combines the analysis of what shamans say with that of the conditions in which they speak, the analysis of their actions with that of the social circumstances in which they act, the analysis of the material devices they employ with that of the pragmatic modalities of their effectiveness. But also because, in the best tradition of ethnography, this book draws on a body of extremely specific and meticulously described facts in order to propose theoretical reflections of a much more general scope on problems as central to human experience as the relationship between physical and mental images, the complementarity of linguistic and iconic signs, and the use of the human body in action as a support for conjectures."
