From Hunting Magic to Shamanism: Interpretations of Native American Rock Art and the Contemporary Crisis in Masculinity

This essay examines two prominent models for the interpretation of Native American rock art, highlighting projections of Euro-American gender ideologies and tensions over masculinity onto (pre)historic cultures. Specifically, the figure of the Native American shaman models masculine power as symbolic and spiritual, not physical, yet linked to a virile heterosexuality. By identifying discursive homologies, this centering of a primitive, spiritual masculinity is understood as a response to the Euro-American “crisis of masculinity.”