Wikipedia: Shamanism

These scholars argue that treating "shamanism" as one coherent, comparable global religion is a Western scholarly construct rather than a fact about the practices themselves. Kehoe holds that the diverse practices grouped under the label cannot be generalized easily, accurately or usefully into one category; Rydving has argued for abandoning the terms "shaman" and "shamanism" outright as scientific illusions; Piers Vitebsky notes there is no record of a genuinely pure, unified shamanistic society despite real similarities across cases. The dissent is about the CATEGORY, not about whether any individual documented practice occurred.