The Hunzakutz, a high people in the western Karakoram Mountains of northern Pakistan, possess a shamanistic tradition centered around religious specialists known as bitan. These practitioners inhale the smile of burning juniper branches, dance to a special music, drink blood from a freshly severed goat’s head, enter into ecstatic trances, and converse with supernatural beings. An ethnographic and historical analysis of this little-known shamanistic tradition is ...
