Hultkrantz A
Soc Sci Med. 1985;20(5):511-5. doi: 10.1016/0277-9536(85)90367-3.
The present article discusses the terms medicine-man and shaman as used by scholars and scientists, and tries to arrive at a possible distinction between them. It is obvious that the two terms not only overlap but also cause confusion, even among shamanologists. They have consequently been used interchangeably by many scholars. By recourse to the North American ethnographic material in particular (which once was the source of this confusion) the author reaches the conclusion that the only way of separating the terms from each other is to approach the whole problem structurally as a two-levelled issue. It is then possible to differentiate between the shaman as primarily the mediator between the supernatural powers and man, and the medicine-man as primarily the curer of diseases through traditional techniques. The shaman may also be medically active when his expert knowledge of the supernatural disease agents is called for. This means that some shamans are medicine-men. Conversely, some medicine-men are shamans.
本文讨论了学者和科学家使用的“巫医”和“萨满”这两个术语，并试图找出它们之间可能存在的区别。显然，这两个术语不仅有重叠，甚至在萨满学研究者中也会造成混淆。因此，许多学者将它们互换使用。特别是通过参考北美民族志资料（这曾是造成这种混淆的根源），作者得出结论，将这两个术语区分开来的唯一方法是从结构上把整个问题当作一个有两个层次的问题来处理。这样就有可能区分出，萨满主要是超自然力量与人类之间的媒介，而巫医主要是通过传统技术治疗疾病的人。当需要萨满对超自然致病因素的专业知识时，他也可能在医学方面发挥作用。这意味着有些萨满是巫医。反之，有些巫医也是萨满。
