This Article  • Full text PDF  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Similar articles in JAMA  Social Bookmarking   What's this?

Aldona Jonaitis, PhD
State University of New York at Stony Brook Stony Brook, NY

JAMA. 1978;240(8):736.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

To the Editor.—

As one of the few individuals in the United States who holds a doctorate in American Indian art history, I feel that I must respond to the article by Klaus F. Wellmann, MD, "North American Indian Rock Art and Hallucinogenic Drugs" (239:1524, 1978). While Dr Wellmann admits that his conclusions relating Indian rock art to altered states of consciousness are tentative, he seems unaware that his premise is not only unverifiable, but also that a substantial amount of data suggests that it is wrong. This premise is that certain "wierd," "mysterious" images illustrate a drug-induced, shamanic trance.

Although scattered reports of such drug-induced creative activities exist, a careful study of the available literature on shamanism and art demonstrates that rarely does an individual express his visionary experience in an artwork. Ethnographic art, which contains many images that may be strange to Western eyes, is made for a . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

Footnotes
Edited by John D. Archer, MD, Senior Editor.

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter     What's this?