Abstract. – Academic interpretations of shamanism in the West have oscillated between the sociological and the cultural. Anchored in an anecdotal case study of a Senegalese marabout, a less equivocally ethnocentric approach is here proposed in terms of cultures as Projects (or Wholes) which, on account of their irreducibly particular projects (or peculiar parts), appear sometimes marginally convergent but (on the whole) are often radically divergent. A nominalist onto-epistemology could thus suit the anthropological cause more than any other. [Senegal, marabout, shaman, Projects/projects, generalization, nominalism]