Manvir Singh is an anthropologist who says that shamanism appears again and again around the world, and among nearly all known hunter-gatherers, because it fits the way human minds work. People everywhere want some control over illness, weather and luck, and practices that convince them a specialist can reach the hidden forces behind these things keep being reinvented. Therapeutic Shamanism agrees that shamanism seems to be part of being human, but sees its spirits and realms as real, where Singh, as a scientist, remains unconvinced.
Who is Manvir Singh? #
An anthropologist at the University of California, Davis, who trained at Harvard under the anthropologist Joe Henrich. He has studied the use of psychedelics in the Colombian Amazon and done fieldwork with communities in Indonesia, and he writes for The New Yorker as well as for academic journals.1 He is best known for a long paper, “The cultural evolution of shamanism”, published in 2018 in the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences together with replies from many other writers, and for his book Shamanism: The Timeless Religion.2
He has taken part as well as observed: “I have soul journeyed with neo-shamans and stood on the brink of spirit possession during all-night dances”.3
Why does he think shamanism keeps appearing? #
Because it answers something deep in us. Singh uses the word shaman broadly, for practitioners “who enter trance to provide services”, and he notes that shamanism “existed among nearly all documented hunter-gatherers”. His explanation is cultural evolution. Human beings face things that matter hugely to them but which they cannot control, such as sickness, hunting luck or the weather. People seek out the practitioners who seem to get results, and practitioners compete to offer them, so that over many generations shamanism “adapts to people’s intuitions to convince observers that a practitioner can influence otherwise unpredictable, significant events.”4
Central to this is transformation. To be believed, the shaman must seem to become something more than an ordinary person, through initiation, trance, costume and contact with spirits: “these practitioners must ostensibly transform into entities distinct from normal humans.” In his book he calls this being “xenised”, made other. In his summary, “Shamanism is an ancient human institution that recurs because of the capacity of cultural evolution to produce practices adapted to innate psychological tendencies.”5
Is shamanism really universal? #
Almost, Singh says. Some writers have called it universal, but, he replies, “Technically, it’s not, but the recurrence of shamanism suggests that it develops from shared human psychological capacities, generalizable cultural evolutionary processes, and convergent social dynamics.”6 Ethnographers reported no shamans among a few hunter-gatherer peoples. Singh notes that three of them, the Tiwi, the Hadza and the Sirionó, “had populations around or under a thousand when anthropologists studied them”, and very small, isolated populations, he explains, tend to lose parts of their culture.7
In his book he puts it this way: “Shamanism is near universal. It was observed in the vast majority of nonindustrial societies, including among nearly all hunter-gatherers.” He accepts that shamanic practices also spread from people to people, but thinks shamanism mainly arises afresh in many places, and in his view it is “neither primeval wisdom nor superstitious savagery. Rather, it is a near inevitability of human societies”.8
Does he think the spirits are real? #
He finds it unlikely, though he keeps the door open. “I am trained as an empiricist and, as you will see, do not think we can conclude that shamans heal, divine, or change the weather by interacting with gods, ghosts, ancestors, or any other non-ordinary beings.” At the same time, he writes, “To be clear, I am open to the idea that invisible agents exist.”9
Nor does he dismiss shamans. “Shamans aren’t scammers, and their clients aren’t suckers.” He thinks the secret of shamanism’s success “is psychological resonance”, and he counts modern shamanism as real shamanism, concluding that “despite accusations of inauthenticity, varieties of neo-shamanism are as shamanic as anything else covered in this book.”10
What did other scholars say? #
The 2018 paper was published with replies from many others in the field, some supportive and some critical. The anthropologist Michael Winkelman, who has spent many years comparing shamans across cultures, objected that Singh had lumped many different kinds of practitioner together as shamans, and that his real subject was “people who are good at deceiving others into thinking they can control uncontrollable events”. He asked: “Why should people prefer ‘successful-appearing practices’ (sect 3.4, para. 2) rather than actually successful practices?” In reply, Singh agreed that he had combined many kinds of practitioner, explaining, “I prefer a broader definition because it captures a puzzling assemblage of traits that co-occur across time and space.”11
Others objected that Singh’s broad definition blurs real differences. The psychologists Etzel Cardeña and Stanley Krippner pointed to research “which place classical shamanism (or ecstasy) within hunting/gathering societies, and mediumship/possession within more sedentary, hierarchical societies.” Singh kept his broad definition, but granted that “using more restrictive criteria is valuable for carving up cultural variation”. Replying to other commentators, he also accepted that possession is more common in complex, hierarchical societies, though the explanation he discusses, that “the repressive environment of these hierarchical societies pushes people (and women in particular) to perform intrusive possession”, is that of the anthropologist Ioan Lewis, which he sets out without testing.12
How does this connect with Therapeutic Shamanism? #
In more ways than might be expected. Therapeutic Shamanism also sees shamanism as something deeply human. Shamanic practice is strikingly consistent across very different cultures: “It is almost as if these beliefs and practices must be somehow innate; hard-wired into us.” For them to be so widespread, “people must find that (a) they work, and (b) they are worth practising and pursuing.” Therapeutic Shamanism states the universal claim more strongly than Singh, who reports a few exceptions: “as far as we know there has not been a single hunter-gatherer tribe in the history of the human race that did not practise shamanism (in the broad sense of the word)”.13 See Where does shamanism come from?
Both also count modern shamanism as real shamanism. Paul Francis’s test of whether a practice is authentic is “quite simply, ‘does it work?’. If it works, then that is good enough for me.”14
And on possession, Therapeutic Shamanism stands with the research Cardeña and Krippner report, a pattern Singh accepts but explains differently. Building on Winkelman’s earlier research, this approach holds that “hunter-gatherer societies generally do not experience possession”, but in farming and hierarchical societies it is widespread: “In other words, possession is a product of our domesticationDomestication. The process by which, in domesticating other species, we domesticated ourselves. When dated precisely, Domestication begins with the Neolithic era, before the Fall proper, which begins with the first city-state cultures around 4000 BCE. What rewilding works to undo. More about this.”15 See What is the Fall?
Where does Therapeutic Shamanism see things differently? #
Most of all on the spirits. For Singh, shamanism works through the human mind; whether anything else is involved remains unproven. Therapeutic Shamanism starts from the experience of the shamanic realms as real. A journey’s world “actually exists as an objective place, independent of us”, and “Saying that shamanic journeys are just imagination and subjective runs contrary to, and denies, shamans’ actual experiences.”16 As both a psychotherapist and a shamanic practitioner, Paul knows that his spirit guides are real, alive, independent beings.17 See Is shamanic journeying imagination, and how are journeys co-created?
They also differ on the soul journey. Singh writes that “the emphasis on soul journeying, which began with Eliade, reflects a historical misrepresentation of Siberian practices”, since Siberian specialists used different techniques: “In the northwest, soul journeying was popular. In central and eastern Siberia, specialists favoured spirit possession.”18 Therapeutic Shamanism, by contrast, places the shamanic journey at the centre of its practice, and sees possession as a product of domestication. See Who was Mircea Eliade, and what do critics say is wrong with his idea of shamanism?
Singh has also challenged what he calls the idea of “primitive communism”, that early hunter-gatherers had no private property,19 a debate set out in What did Richard Lee learn from the !Kung about sharing?
