High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Michael Harner (born 1929) is the founder of the Foundation for Shamanic Studies and the formulator of "core shamanism." Harner is known for bringing shamanism and shamanic healing to the contemporary Western world. Walsh and Grob note in their book, Higher Wisdom, "Michael Harner is widely acknowledged as the world`s foremost authority on shamanism and has had an enormous influence on both the academic and lay worlds…. What Yogananda did for Hinduism and D. T. Suzuki did for Zen, Michael Harner has done for shamanism, namely bring the tradition and its richness to Western awareness." Harner received a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of California at Berkeley in 1963. He taught there and at Columbia University, Yale University, and the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research, where he chaired the anthropology department. He also co-chaired the Anthropology Section of the New York Academy of Sciences. In 1987 Harner left academic anthropology to devote himself full-time to the preservation, study, and teaching of shamanism as president of the non-profit Foundation for Shamanic Studies. In 2003 he received an honorary doctorate for his work from the California Institute of Integral Studies. In 2009 two sessions on shamanism were given in his honor at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association. He received the 2009 Pioneer in Integrative Medicine Award, Institute of Health and Healing.