On Shamanism

Dear Manvir, I really enjoyed your dissertation defense! I thought of a potential hole in your argument but didn’t want to embarrass you in front of your mom. The hole is as follows: what about the possibility of the existence of magic? That the shamans are indeed affected by nether spirits? Best, Josh

Manvir Singh’s Shamanism is an achievement. He comes at the subject as an anthropologist but shapes his argument with enough detail and tact to stay approachable to the non-academic. In brief, he argues that convergent cultural evolution is a better framework for understanding shamanism than historical diffusionism. Diffusionism is the idea that something originated in one place at one time and spread outward — Christianity and Islam are better understood that way, though “monotheism” as a category is less clear. Convergent cultural evolution, by contrast, asks us to see a tradition not as spreading from a source but as arising from many sources, with cultures developing toward one another over time without needing to be in contact. So where Mircea Eliade, a diffusionist, held that shamanism began in Siberia and spread across the world, Singh sees it as a kind of spiritual practice shared by many different societies. Like Eliade, he sets out a few core features that define it:

• Shamans enter non-ordinary states — trance, ecstasy, other altered states of consciousness; psychedelics get a lot of attention, but they’re far from the only route.
• Shamans engage with unseen realities.
• Shamans provide a service, like healing and divination.

Singh pushes back on the idea that these unseen realities are literally true (hence his friend Josh’s email at the top of this review), but he rightly notes that the kind of storytelling shamans offer works to immense therapeutic benefit. Just as central is his concept of “xenization.” Where the rest of us can help others through what psychotherapists like Viktor Frankl call “logotherapy” — weaving together the threads that give meaning to past experience — there’s also immense benefit in what shamans do to themselves: they become divine, they make themselves suffer, they take on taboos the rest of us avoid. The concept makes sense in light of how people in general make themselves seem “abnormal,” and therefore greater. In the second half of the book Singh gives many examples of people, past and present, who can be understood as shamans, including a chapter on hedge fund managers and CEOs, who go through their own xenization — though, as he rightly points out, they wouldn’t meet his own criteria for a shaman. Money managers stumble into unimaginable wealth largely because people believe in them, when in truth random chance raises more revenue than trusting finance bros does.

There’s also an interesting chapter on Neo-Shamanism, which fuses shamanic belief systems (homogenized and packaged for Western consumption) with psychotherapeutic talk of the mind and feelings. Acknowledging that it’s sometimes dismissed as whitewashing indigenous practice, Singh insists it’s still shamanism: traditional shamans mostly emphasize physical healing, but the modern preoccupation with mental health matters to us moderns (and not only Westerners), and people do benefit from it — it’s a repackaging of a universal human practice. His afterword was especially illuminating, taking up the bind anthropologists face when they do comparative, universalist work. Wasn’t it people claiming to be universalist who carried out atrocities like colonialism? “Yes, it was,” Singh answers, “but these were groups who believed themselves to be the global norm, while the ‘other’ fell outside of it.” True — but who decides what the norm is? Might “universal” just reflect how we ourselves see the world? There are no easy answers here, perhaps none at all, but Singh mounts a defense of universalism that I found reasonable enough, and certainly stronger than the nativism or xenophobia that anti-universalism so often devolves into. Altogether, Shamanism is a learned and insightful examination of the practice as a global, and timeless, religious phenomenon. There’s plenty here to argue with, but Singh’s arguments convinced me well enough, and it’s a fine starting point for the general reader who wants something more rigorous than the New Age Spirituality shelf.