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Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning.
Hey everybody, this is Razib with the Unsupervised Learning podcast, and I am here today with Manvir Singh, Dr. Manvir Singh, who is a professor of anthropology at University of California, Davis, where I actually went to graduate school a while ago. Now I guess it's been a decade, but in any case, I know your haunts, and I feel last time we talked to you, you were still in a postdoctoral fellowship, right?
Yes,
And now, since that last time, you've actually written a book "Shamanism: The Timeless Religion" and also you write for the New Yorker pretty regularly now, right?
I do.
Which is, that's cool. Yeah, you got some good stuff in there. And, I mean, I've had multiple people who don't know that, I know you send me your articles or pointers to them, and say, Wow, this guy is, like, really cool. And I think you you would enjoy his writing. And I was like, Yeah, it's true. People know that I would beinto your stuff, so they said that because they don't that I know you. So you have a new book out, and we want to talk about that. So it's about shamanism, which is, I don't want to say it's in vogue today, but you did bring up ayahuasca and psychedelics, and we'll talk a little bit about that. But I hear a lot about shamanism in my circles, even in tech. You know, ayahuasca and all these spiritual experiences and psychedelics are actually, like, a big deal right now, so it's out there. But like, let's start more at the beginning. Define shamanism for the listener.
Yeah. I mean, so if you talk to anthropologists, they will give you many, many definitions. This is like a long debated topic. The way that I define shamanism, and what I think is the most justifiable is on the basis of three traits, there are specialists who 1) enter non ordinary states, altered states, trance 2) In those states are understood to engage with some kind of unseen reality, or unseen agents, gods, ghosts, ancestors, whatever. And then 3) they provide services, most often healing and divination, but more generally, any kind of services. So those I consider to be the defining features of shamanism. Like define it wherever you go, but then you have many traits that are reliably associated with those that shamans also very often exhibit.
So you define it as, or in the subheading, as 'a timeless religion' and you addressed a little bit of this in the book. A lot of people would say it's not a religion, it's a superstition. And religion is fundamentally different than shamanism. And can you unpack that a little bit in terms of that position and why you might disagree with it?
Yeah, so it raises this question of, like, what is religion? What are the defining features of religion? And so the title, if I want to be very, very precise - I wouldn't say it's necessarily like a religion, in the way that Christianity is a religion or Islam is a religion, but I do think it's justifiable to call it a religious practice. And the reason for that is that at its core, many people will argue that religion involves two things. It involves a belief in supernatural agents and appeals or attempts to engage with those supernatural agents to avoid misfortune and to enjoy blessings or boons. And those two defining features, although they are kind of ever present in prayer and in you know, the kinds of services that priests might provide, those are also essentially what shamans are doing, they are engaging with supernatural agents to provide services that are overwhelmingly centered around managing misfortune. Now, I think some people might push back, and they might say, Well, no, in addition to that, like a religion needs to be institutionalized. It needs to have some kind of central doctrine or dogma, and so in those ways, like some shamanic traditions, might not qualify as as religion, but I do think shamanism does exhibit the two defining features that, like someone like Martin Riesebrodt, a very well known Religious Studies scholar, will argueare at the court of religion.
Yeah I guess I'm framing it this way because shamanism and shamanic practices, you know, the stylized fact, I guess, is in the modern world, or the early modern world, or maybe the medieval world - but definitely the early modern world, they were set up as a counterpoint to, you know, quote, unquote, organized religion. And you know, the higher religions, the organized religions, whatever word you want to use it, you know, it's a fraught term, but you I think people know what I'm talking about. They actually aim to stamp out shamanism. And so the idea, I think in many people's minds is, there they are, you know, I don't know two very distinct aspects of understanding the supernatural, even if they're pointing at the same thing. And you would definitely disagree with that, right?
Well, I mean, I would agree that that there is a deep tension between centralized doctrinal religion and the kind of ecstatic religious practice that shamanism provides or represents. And I would agree that there has long been a conflict, a tension, a tug of war, between them. So like so many religious traditions, maybe perhaps every religious tradition that one looks at, you will find this kind of dynamic. You find it in early Christianity. You find it actually through the history of Christianity, where there is constantly more ecstatic practices that splinter off and then an attempt to control them. You find this in early Mormonism. I mean, you even find this in Sikhism. You have these more - like a more ecstatic movement that many people within more mainstream Sikhism think is not legitimate. So I agree that there is a tension between centralized doctrinal power and the more kind of egalitarian or like charismatic power that is that is associated with shamanism. I would just push back on the sense that, like, shamanism is magic and superstition and it is not religious, which I think has long been this view of shamanism, because it does exhibit the core features of many religious practice.
Yeah, I think what you said about services, I think a lot of people in, I don't know, the developed world, in the Western world, that hits the mark for how they perceive shamanism. So shamans, they exist to provide these services to people, but, you know, they think of them more like tarot card readers, or something like that, or astrologers, you know, as opposed to, I think, a priest or a minister or a guru or, you know, who would provide - an Imam or rabbi, you name it - but they would give you ethical guidance. And soI think one of the main differentiators in Western society at least at least of the more sophisticated elements between shamanism and religion is religion has a strong ethical orientation or compass. What do you think about that sort of assertion?
Well, I mean it seems to link to this larger question of, to what extent have religions or religious practices or magical religious traditions had an ethical or a moral bent to them. And I think there's again, this long standing view in anthropology that the moralistic dimension of religion is a relatively recent phenomenon. So you see, you know, some of the biggest early writers on anthropology, someone like Edward Tyler, making making that claim, and you find it regularly invoked today. Now I have been part of a strand of research, so with people like Joe Henrich, Leo Fitouchi, where both through my field work with the Mentawai, but also comparatively, we are at least pushing back on this general, more general statement. So to give you an example, I do field work with the Mentawai, west coast of Indonesia. They live in an archipelago there. And in the Mentawai spiritual Pantheon, there's a being called Sikaoinan, the crocodile spirit. And Sikaoinan will cause illness, will attack you if you don't share meat with clan members. And so it's this kind of moralistic dimension that we're often finding where they're, unlike the Abrahamic God, Sikaoinan cares about a very specific moral domain. Its powers are relatively limited. It can watch you, it can be mistaken, but it can be tricked, or it can be mistaken. And it cares about a pretty small, like moral circle, just sharing with with clan members. And so what Joe Henrich and I and other people are increasingly arguing and appreciating is that there is, there has probably been, like a moral dimension to religion, or whatever we want to call this religious practice, religious belief throughout history. But as you move into, say, Abrahamic religions, supernatural agents and religion more generally, care about a much broader swath of morality, the supernatural agents become more powerful and they care that you cooperate with a broader circle of people, which is to say that I think there's always been a moral dimension, but I agree with the general sentiment that a person like a priest cares much more about your moral behavior probably than many shamans.
Yeah. I mean, so you already brought up the Mentawai and you do field work there, and as I said, you're an anthropologist. So, different social sciences, or, you know, evolutionary anthropological, these sorts of human sciences, let's put that way. They have different methodologies. Psychologists are in the laboratory. Sociologists, I don't know, like they go into office and stuff, you know, like whatever. There's things that people do. You're an anthropologist. You go and hang out with a tribe and like, that's kind of saying, and jokingly, because some anthropologists will go to cities in some other country or something, right? But still, you went to island off the coast of Sumatra. And your book, it's not, I don't know how to describe it, because it's not a it's not a dry monograph with just like tables and plots and regressions and stuff like that. I mean, there's plenty in there that's technical, but there's also a lot of ethnography and interactions and discussions that you have with people so tell me about the Mentawai and tell me, like, what insights Did they give you about shamanism specifically?
Yeah, for sure. So the Mentawai live on this archipelago off the west coast of Sumatra. It's called The Mentawai archipelago, or the Mentawai islands. Some of your listeners might know these islands, if they're surfers, these are, like some of the best places in the world to surf. They call them The Mentawais. I call them Mentawai, which is more similar to how the inhabitants call the islands. But yeah, so it's this chain of islands, rainforested , the west coast of Sumatra, almost on the equator. Directly, I have worked almost exclusively on one island there, Siberut. The Mentawai are mostly Sago horticulturalists. So Sago was a big palm tree. They cut it down. They turn the pith of the tree into flower, into a kind of flower. They also keep pigs. They forage, etc. I first visited the Mentawai in 2014 so it was the first summer after the first summer of my PhD. And I was interested in a place where there was, like a strong indigenous religion, but also I was interested in indigenous systems of justice. So conflict management. What do you do when there's transgression. And as I read about it in the book, I get there, it was, it was a bit of a mess. I just went with a backpack and like instructions. And, of course, I had all of the hijinks ensued, but pretty soon after I got to the community, I saw the the shamans, the sikerei, that's what they're called over there. And I had been intrigued by shamans before. I had a very loose understanding of what shamanism was, but being in this context where they are very they look very different from everyone else. They're often tattooed. They will often just wear loincloths. So the Mentawai, more generally, have adopted clothes but it's really you're regarded as a much more authentic or legitimate sikerei, shaman, if you have rejected clothes. You wear a loin cloth. They grow out their long hair, and then they have healing ceremonies where they often will put turmeric all over their bodies. And so I noticed these individuals. They're incredibly, incredibly striking, and they kind of had a social gravity to them. You know, they walk in and everyone pays attention to them. You know, you can kind of feel the social world bend towards them and I was intrigued. And over the course of that summer, I started to get glimpses of what the sikerei institution was. I would hear healing ceremonies where they're clanging bells, or people are singing, or people are dancing. I saw some very brief healing ceremonies while traveling. I was in a village, and a kid woke up understanding himself to be paralyzed and then there was a healing ceremony. But again, I saw it from from afar. I recorded some songs. So it was this very like, compared to now, at least superficial exposure to the institution. But it was, honestly, it just seems so rich, so fascinating and so experientially powerful, like the songs I write about the experience of hearing one of these shaman songs for the first time, and it's like an eerie song. I can try to imitate it. I do a terrible job. But they shift between this, like kind of ghostly falsetto and this more kind of gravelly mid tone, I don't know a great way to describe it, but the entire institution was just so fascinating, and these individuals were so socially salient. And so then I came back, I went back to Harvard to continue my PhD and I became much more interested in shamanism and then sort of to read much more about it. I read Eliade, I read Winkelman, all of these quintessential authors who have written about shamanism, and it was then that I started to appreciate that what I had seen in Mentawai has all of these really, really striking echoes around the world. And I'm the kind of researcher who is interested both in deep particularities but also cultural patterns. A lot of my research is about patterns. And I was really attracted to the way in which - what I found so strange and peculiar and stirring in Mentawai was actually there were different forms of it around the world that, like other people enter trance. Other people have strange initiations. Music features in in in these other traditions, and the exact manifestations are pretty varied or diverse, but there is this really interesting resonance, and that is what really inspired me to study shamanism, really in depth in Mentawai but cross culturally in terms of us. Like, what are the lessons that I had? I think there are many like I think so much of my understanding of shamanism is related to my field work there. But I think one of the most salient was really appreciating that the Mentawai see the sikerie as a different kind of human. So they talk about us normal people as simatta, a word that also refers to uncooked food or unripe fruit, and then the sikerie. There's a verb, ukerie, to kind of become a shaman, but the implication is that these people are matured, they're ripened, they're developed, and during that process of becoming sikerie, their eyes are believed to fundamentally change. There is some implicit understanding that their physiology is different. They can't eat certain kinds of foods, or different things will happen. And it was all of this, like messaging or reinforcement, that these were fundamentally different kinds of humans that I think has really impacted how I understand shamanism across across societies, that so much of it is about perceptions of fundamental transformation.
Yeah, I mean, some of the things you're talking about, obviously, they're kind of universal. And so I guess, I want to talk about the origins of shamanism, like, where does it come from? And you kind of have a little bit of a dichotomy in terms of schools and one school is diffusionist, and one school is more cultural evolutionist, evolutionary psychological. And can you talk about the difference between the two? Because I guess a lot of people today associate shamanism with particular peoples. A lot of times what they would call indigenous peoples. It's almost like a Marxist modes of production, stages of civilization. Understanding shamanism is the stage. Whereas, I think reading your book, it's pretty clear that you think that I mean, it's in the subtitle, The Timeless Religion. It's with us. It was always with us and it's everywhere/
For Sure, exactly. Yeah. I mean, that is a great characterization of the thesis, which is that shamanism isn't this practice that is confined to so called primitive or remote or archaic societies, but that it instead, um, is hyper compelling, that it's in the world around us, and honestly, I think it will forever reemerge, that we regularly recreate it. But yeah, so -
So talk about, just what brought you to Eliade's ideas and Siberian shamanism and all that. I don't know the history of that stuff at all. Can you talk a little bit about that? And why people thought that shamanism was from Siberia?
Yeah, for sure. So, in fact the word shaman comes from Siberian peoples. It comes from Tungusic speaking peoples. You know, there's debate. Maybe it actually comes from Sanskrit, maybe, like it moved with Pali or Buddhism, into into Central Asia, and then entered some of these Siberian languages. But yeah, the word comes from Siberia. And people's conception, like European's conception of shamans, was was deeply linked to Siberia for a very long time. And then in the late 19th century, early 20th century, there's sort of to be this recognition or appreciation that this practice that has really been associated with Siberia seems to actually exist - very similar forms of it are in places around the world that you see similar practices in the Americas and indigenous American communities that you find something similar. There was someone who wrote about - one of the early Westerners to go visit and study the Mentawai. Had noted the intriguing ways in which the Mentawai sikeria institution reflects this - you know Australians seem to have a similar set of traditions. And so anyway, there was this growing appreciation that actually it seems that all around the world there is this institution or this compulsion to engage with spirits and Gods through trance states and then use that for healing. And so then there was a Romanian historian, historian of religion, Mircea Eliade, who wrote a book first in French, it was translated into English. The English title is "Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy" And this became the book on shamanism. And Mircea Eliade, his view was that a paradigmatic quintessential form of shamanism is the Siberian form. He's kind of like influenced by this historical trajectory over here that really associates shamanism with Siberia. So he says the quintessential form is in Siberia, but there are fragments of it, or echoes of it, or reflections of it in these other places. Now he had a very particular model in mind. He said shamanism was soul journeying. So it's not only trance or ecstasy, but it's specifically trance that is understood as your soul leaving your body. He believed that there were that shamans exist in societies that have a particular cosmology where there's an upper world, an infernal lower world, and then, like the central world or the middle world that we live in. He had, he had a big, complicated schema. But his thought was, like, this had the quintessential form of this was in Siberia, and then we find it in other places. And if you look through Eliade, it's actually kind of hard to get a sense of what his model of these similarities was. But at least some writers interpret it to have been a diffusionist model, the idea being that like some kind of institution, this shamanic package, emerged in some kind of place, and then the reason you find similar practices around The world are because it diffused over the landscape. It been culturally passed on. So that that is one model that shamanism exists in many places, because it has diffused around the world from a common you can think of like Edenic source, an original, primordial origin, point from which it from which it diffused. The argument that I'm putting forward is instead that humans regularly redevelop reconstruct this tradition that it's universal, or at least ubiquitous, not because we have all adopted it from a single source, but because it is so hyper compelling that we just regularly recreate it. And so I have a whole cognitive account, like, what it is exactly about our minds that makes shamanism so, so compelling. But that is, that is the central distinction, where many people will think it's a diffusionist model I'm arguing and said that it's kind of convergent cultural evolution that then raises the question of, like, how you actually test between those accounts. And a historical account, or just reconstructing the history is quite difficult. And so there are many ways that I argue this, but one of them is like, if you look across at least non industrial societies, and you find those that do not have shamanism, they're very frequently, very small communities. So the Siriono, the Aceh, the Hadza, the Tiwi, all of these are hunter gatherers that did not have shamanism, and they all have under 1000 people. And you can, actually, if you do cultural phylogenetics, you can if you kind of reconstruct what these societies look like using a cultural family tree, you can actually tell that many of these had shamanism but then lost it. So the Aceh and the Siriano are both Tupi speaking peoples, and we are pretty sure now that the proto Tupi, the early Tupi, had shamanism, and that the Siriono and the Aceh lost it when their populations got very small. And so what I was looking for was like, Is there a place in the world where a population became so small that we would expect them to have lost shamanism, but then it rebounded and and we would expect it to get shamanism again. And so, do you follow? Do you see what I was trying to look for?
Yeah. I mean, I read some of this stuff about the loss of cultural characteristics and whatnot, and it looks like, you know, shamans are specialists, right? When you're a specialist, you kind of need the broader society to maybe, like, sequester a little bit of surplus, I don't know, but you know, when you have, like, a bottleneck, a cultural bottleneck, you could have a situation where all these, like specialized skills, one the skills could disappear, and they might not, like, just have the surplus, or everyone has to be a jack of all trades, right? Right?
Exactly. And the northern Aceh. So we just had a paper on the northern Aceh in Current Bio last week, the northern ache are fascinating. They have lost a lot of behaviors that we have otherwise thought are universals. They lost it seems, dancing, they lost lullabies, they lost fire, but they also lost shamanism.
Whoa, whoa. They lost dancing.
Yeah, yeah. So that was our paper last week that Kim Hill has lived with the ache for 43 years, not continuously. He's probably spent around 10 years with them of 43 years, and has never once observed dancing among the northern Aceh and nor has he observed any infant directed song. And I guess where this is a bit of a decression, but before Kim had reached out, I had assumed that both of those were human universals, and had published a lot of work suggesting those were human universals, or at least providing evidence. And then he totally blew my mind and we put that together for publication, but, but coming back to shamanism, so what I was looking for is like, is there a place in the world where a population would have gotten so small that we would expect it to lose shamanism, kind of like the Aceh or the Hadza population. That small. But then it rebounded. And I asked a lot of people, asked Nick Patterson, among others, because it's actually really hard to find a place, any place in the world where a population got very, very small and then got big, but did not establish connections again. And the place that people kept pointing me to was the Andaman Islands, where it seems, and maybe you disagree, I'd be curious what you think. But it seems that populations were quite small when it was established, and then there seemed to be no signatures of genetic introgression since the founding population got there. But nevertheless, the Andaman islanders exhibit a very complicated, sophisticated shamanism, shamanic tradition. They also exhibit a lot of the other like complex cultural practices that societies seem to lose when they get very small, which is all to say, I think that is one example or one line of evidence. I mean, the book is, of course, many, many lines of evidence, that that societies reconstruct, or convergently develop shamanism, where, you know, this is a place where we'd expected it, we would have expected it to disappear, but then it re emerges.
You know, this is not feasible yet, but I do wonder, if - the Indian government wouldn't let anyone do this, but with the advances in drone technology, if someone could use drones to communicate with the Sentinelese, I mean, the problem trying to destroy the drones, but at least it's just drones, and they wouldn't, like transmit disease, which is one of the major concern. But just for the listeners out there, the Sentinel islands. Sentinel Island is one of the Andaman Islands. It's actually, like, very, very isolated compared to the others. And it has, I think it's got, like, about 100 people, and they've been isolated for a while. They haven't been isolated for, like, 10,000s of years. They used to actually be in contact with the other Andaman Islanders, but there aren't that many other Andaman islanders left anymore. So I think, like, they must have understood that it's probably not a good idea to engage with the outside. I mean, with the Andaman Islanders, Andaman Islands, they're very unique, as you were saying, like, genetically, they're very distinct as, like a Southeast Asian Negrito peoples, but they're actually, like, pretty distinct from, say, the Negritos of the Philippines, and somewhat distinct from the ones in Malaysia and south of over the Nicobar Islands, which are inhabited by Austro Asiatic people. Then further south, obviously, the austronesians, the Mentawai, that area. And so, why weren't they settled by outside people? But then, when you read the historical records, like the Arabs had wrote about the Andaman Islanders, basically like they would kill and eat people. You know, they did. They were very hostile. Well, that kept people out. Probably, I mean, almost certainly there are people on Nicobar Islands and these other places that were genetically related, culturally similar, to the Andaman Islanders, and maybe they're a little bit more welcoming, and that was the end of them, right? So, it's a very, very unique part of the world. I think it's the only Asian culture that never did agriculture and has stayed continuously forager, right? So the other examples are usually actually populations that went back and forth multiple times, which, which can happen. But yeah, so I thought that was interesting.
They're the only. Asian continuous foraging population,
Yeah, cuz there are foraging populations. They're like hunter gatherer foraging populations in mainland Southeast Asia. But almost all of them, clearly, are descended from people that used to do some sort of agriculture at some point,
Or have these, like, trade relationships. Longstanding trade relationships
I mean, like one of them, I think one of the classic ones I read anthropology was, like, somewhere in Myanmar, Burma, I don't know which one is politically correct one to say now, and it was some, like, foraging population. But like, you know, when you they talked to them, the anthropologist talked to them. And it was they had, like, a story of, like, you know, they were defeated in war. They flooded to the forest, and a bunch of them died. But basically, they eventually figured out how to live in the forest, not as agriculturalists, but as foragers. And obviously they would do like, you know, trade for particular things, as you would expect. So that's just what seems to be has happened on the mainland and pretty much everywhere else. The Austronesians, I mean, just like in their language, as, you know, it's clear that they came with rice. It's like - so they're expanding as rice farmers. When they went to Polynesia, they lost rice, but
They also lost rice when they got to Mientawai
Okay, yeah, I mean, they didn't lose rice when they went to Madagascar. But, you know, stuff gets lost. But you know, it's interesting. Yeah, they're the only single lineage of that. Okay, so, you know, I pretty much agree with you about, like, you know, the primal psychological, like, tendencies of shamanism, right? And so, you talk about, like, various shamanic traditions, and the Mentawai are interesting, theAndaman Islanders, there's all these groups that are, like, interesting. But the weird thing, the weird thing that I don't think people think about is- Okay, you were pointing out the shamanic aspects of, like, say, Christianity, like, so if you read a Is it the Book of Acts, you know, you know, the laying on the hands, and the spiritualism and all that stuff, and the Pentecostals, I think there's a lot of stuff that's similar to, to shamanism, right? And then, of course, there's prosperity theology and prosperity gospel, where it's like they , do provide a service, you know? And then faith healing. And I want to talk about faith healing a little bit, because that, I think, is an interesting part of your book. But there's also kind of like religions that are like around today, that people don't think of as shamanic, like, I think Shinto would be shamanic, and shamanism is very, very important in Korea. Do you have, I mean, I have it in notes. Like, I want to ask you, why are the Koreans? I mean, because Korea has Hyundai and Samsung. Korea is a very technological society. It's got massive internet penetration. We also know its fertility is extremely low, all of these issues. But Korea has, like, shamans, like, everywhere, even though it's, you know, a lot of got a lot of Christians and a lot of Buddhists, but it's like, we it's last couple of presidents have gotten in trouble for giving shamans too much power. Like, even the last president, who I think, was officially Catholic, apparently some connection with a shaman came came to light. Like, do you know anything about what's going on in Korea? Like, why Koreans are so into shamans?
Yeah, interesting question. So I think there are two ways of asking that question. One is like, why are Koreans so into shamans? But the other is like, well, in fact, much of East Asia has been very shamanic. Like, Japan has had its Mikos, China has had the Wu. So. So another way of framing that question is like, Well, why have other parts of East Asia lost shamanism? And I think it's really a story of what has been the power of centralized authorities during the modernizing process. So until the Meiji Restoration, Japan was super shamanic. And even until, like throughout the mid 20th century, there's a great book, "The Catalpa Bow" , on shamanism in Japan. I mean, so there was still some persistence of it. But yeah, I think in Japan there have been campaigns against shamans that go back many centuries, like Buddhism has long had a very complicated relationship with the Miko, with the Japanese shaman mediums, and it's tried to destroy them, and then it had failed so it tried to domesticate them, kind of like pull them into its shrine. But then the Meiji Restoration, I think the power of the state was just used -There was a decree that I'm forgetting right now. It was something. It had the word Miko in it, but the government had made the Miko illegal and turned its power towards suppressing the practice. China, similarly, the Cultural Revolution, really, really attacked shamanic practices in a very, very brutal way. And in some Chinese diasporic populations, there is still shamanism. So I remember when I was writing this book, or maybe before I was working on the book, during COVID lockdown, I had found on. Uh, the internet. There was a a streaming shaman for, like, people in Singapore, so, like, Chinese Singaporeans could go visit this shaman online. Um, but so then I think the interesting question is, Well, why were China and Japan able to quash up shamanism, but Korea wasn't, and my understanding is that there are I think, two things that have led Korea to maintain shamanism. The first is that so in a place like Japan, you had Buddhism, like I said, it had centuries combating shamanism in Korea, the the Joseon Dynasty, I believe, tried to suppress shamanism, but it never tried to vanquish it. It always permitted it. So shamans were taxed, but they were never it was never, like it's illegal to be a shaman. So I think, like until the late 19th or early 20th century, it was, it was allowed to exist in a way that it wasn't in a place like Japan, for example. But then in the 20th century, where Japan and China had very strong modernizing forces that branded shamanism as superstition, Korea had that similarly, but it lasted a much shorter period of time. So I think maybe, like a couple decades, whereas in the 1970s with the pro democracy movement in South Korea, you also had a reclamation of Korean heritage and Korean shamanism, I think, was really viewed as, Like, strongly overlapping with Korean cultural identity. And so just the amount of suppression ended up being less, and it was lifted, and it was able to flourish again to the point that now I think, like I think something like 50% 40% 60% somewhere around there of Koreans have no formal religious affiliation. And I think that's a big proportion of that is understood to be people who practice folk religion and visit shamans. I think it's something like, you know, I should check to confirm, but I think something like 200,000 shamans are practicing today in Korea. So, yeah, most basically, I think it's less about like, how modern are they and what is their worldview, but more How successful have been authorities who have tried to suppress these practices, if that's clear
So there's a basic sounds like, and I think this is kind of true, there's a basic baseline amount of shamanism that was extent across East Asia. And then some of these, I mean, I think we all know about Maoism, the Cultural Revolution, what that did. And obviously, Japan went through various like bouts of centralization, modernization. And Korea was a somewhat different situation. And so, you know, we see this difference. And it's interesting, we were talking earlier about the timeless religion and the universalities. But also if you read about religion or watch YouTube, or whatever, whatever the kids do today. East Asian religion, like indigenous East Asian religion, is actually quite interesting. And in terms ofancestor worship and all these other things, including shamanism, I mean the cult of heaven, and the role of the emperor in Chinese, kind of like statecraft, political philosophy, religious philosophy, metaphysics, whatever. It's, I don't know, in other societies we would say it's kind of primitive, actually, you know, like ancestral worship and stuff like that. And then religion, organized religion, actually comes from the outside, in the form of the Western religion, which is Buddhism, actually. And then you have, like, religious Taoism that kind of emerges, I don't want to say via mimicry, but definitely stimulated by the example of Buddhism and whatnot, right? So that's like showing you how you can have variation across different cultures, which is obviously important to cultural evolutionists as well. It's not straight up evolutionary psychology, we usually involve the similarities, but I want to talk about what shamans are doing. And one specific thing that I'm interested in is, you know, the shamans in a lot of societies are basically their form of, you know, they're the physicians, they're the doctors, they're the healers. Talk about that and their efficacy,
Right. So, when I started, so I've been studying shamans for shamanism for a long time, and when I started, in my writing, I would say I was agnostic about whether there were therapeutic benefits of shamanism, but I was also honestly a bit skeptical. And the reason I was skeptical is I think a lot of the writing about shamanism is done by people who romanticize it, who want it to be this emblem of lost, primeval valuable knowledge, and I felt like that romanticism was really clouding the literature, and so a lot of the insistence about it having therapeutic effects, I just found very hard to like seriously engage with. Now however, I do think shamanism, like shamanic healing ceremonies, probably do provide therapeutic benefits. I also want to say that, you know, like a general thesis or an idea throughout the book, is that shamanism is not like singularly good or singularly bad. It's a technology. It's like a cognitive technology, and it can be used for positive ends and negative ends, and negative ends, and it can have positive effects and negative effects. So, you know, we can talk about the therapeutic effects. But I would say just as often, I think shamanic healing can, for example, spawn paranoia and super suspicion. If, you know, if you come to me and you say, hey, Manvir, can you heal me? And I say, Yes, it was your sister who cast a spell on you at night. Yeah, maybe the ceremony is therapeutic in some ways, but I think it can also, depending on whichever narrative we converge on, you know, lead to social discord. Anyway. So yeah, I think all of that being said, I do think shamanic healing ceremonies are probably therapeutic and and there are three main mechanisms that I've come to think are probably the most important. So the first is, very simply, the placebo effect. So insofar as you trust findings in the clinical literature that engaging in the ritual of medicine, you know, taking a sugar pill, having fake surgery, whatever, putting on a topical ointment. Insofar as you buy all of that literature with which I think is strong and reliable, then we should expect the same effects with shamanic healing ceremonies, and we should, in fact, inspect, expect them to be quite strong. Because I think two general findings from that literature are, first that the more empathic the practitioner, the stronger effect. So the more they engage with you as an individual, the more they seem to care about you, the stronger the therapeutic outcome. So for example, the lower your pain that's reported afterwards. But then also the extent to which the intervention is immersive and sensory. So sham surgery produces a stronger therapeutic effect than topical ointments, which in turn produce stronger therapeutic effects than sugar pills. And so shamanism is both of these. It's like someone who is fighting for you, who you probably know, it's also your whole community coming out. So there is this strong empathic dimension, but then it is also, of course, very sensory and very immersive. You are often massaged. There's music. But then also, there's someone who is potentially based on your understanding, like engaging with unseen realities, gods, spirits, fighting witches, it can be a very, very sensorially rich experience. So yeah, I think the placebo effect, we have strong reason to suspect. The second is one that I came to appreciate really through, like talking to psychiatrists and therapists at Johns Hopkins, where my wife and I were based, before UC Davis for a bit. And what I came to really appreciate over there is that a big paradigm for how psychotherapists and psychiatrists understand healing to occur is through the change of narratives. So you come into a session, you have some story about yourself. I'm, you know, I'm a bad person, I'm lazy. And the healing encounter changes your story about yourself. This is strongest in something like psychedelic assisted psychotherapy, where you come in with a narrative, and then you have this very profound experience, and you come away thinking something else. Come away with a different story about yourself. I'm empowered. I can change my life, whatever. And so one of my like long standing colleagues and friends, is Sandeep Nayak, who is a psychiatrist and psychedelics researcher at Hopkins, and we went to Columbia together to explore different shamanic traditions around there, and the use of drugs in them. And he was really noting that he thought a very similar mechanism was often at play over here, where patients go to these shamans with particular narratives about themselves, a witch is haunting me. You know, the crocodile spirit is punishing me. Ghosts are coming at night and and sitting on me. I lost my soul, and the shaman creates a very powerful experience to reshape that narrative. You know, the shaman battles with the witches, or they call your soul back, or they sweep away the crocodile spirit, and you come away with a different narrative about yourself, which would apparently be therapeutic or empowering. So that's what I think is probably the second mechanism. And then the third is just the fact that, like I think the most striking thing for me going to Mentawai and watching shamanic healing ceremonies has been just how festive they are, how celebratory. Or they feel like, in many instances, they feel like parties. It can be like an old person whose foot seems like it's going to fall off. And I'm actually thinking of a specific example right now. And then he just calls up all of his family, a bunch of very close friends, and shamans. And then the shamans heal him. They dance. Animals are sacrificed. Everyone is staying up all night. After the shamans dance, other people come out dancing. He's on the drum. Everyone's feasting. Everyone's trying to drink coffee, to stay up all night. It's just so festive and so incredibly social. And so insofar as just like, social assurance is an important thing, or feeling like people care about you, feeling like you're surrounded by a community, I can I think it can be therapeutic. So these are the three mechanisms I talk about in the book. I will say I tried, in my in during my field work, to conduct experiments or studies investigating whether shamanic healing ceremonies have therapeutic benefits. I've looked through the literature. It's hard to test that, and there aren't actually really, really reliable studies showing this. So all of this is just on the basis of mechanisms that have been described and on the basis of my field observations, but I think there is actually very good empirical field research that still needs to be done investigating this question.
Yeah, that's really fascinating. I mean, some of this stuff, like the therapist aspect, or talk therapy, the psychological reorientation of people, you know, it continues with priests and ministers as well. So it's like, it's kind of a through line, um, you know, you're talking about services earlier. And, the late Rodney Stark, rational choice theorist, he would talk about that in the same way with, with no modern religions, and people found it really strange, you know, whereas, I think, wit superstition, shamanism, it's like, oh, well, you know, it's much more transactional, right? But, these customs practices, they've been around for a long time, and it's, it's pretty interesting how they have such deep roots now. Jumping into the present. I want to ask you about psychedelics. So, you know, shamans, you know, traditionally have, you know, kind of gone into altered states of consciousness. I guess, the way you can think about it, you know, they're accessing the spirit world, a different type of world that makes sense. And now we have these, like, really strong, like, you know, psychedelic drugs. And you know, people are going to Ayahuasca retreats, like, every two months or something. Some people who are crazy, I mean, some people, just like, can only do it once. Or like, you know, I had a friend and she did it. She left in the middle the first time, and, you know, could never imagine going back because she's going crazy. Can you talk about the intersection between, you know, psychedelics, historically, and shamanism, and also today, how it's kind of triggering an interest in shamanism, I feel.
For sure. So one thing that I found striking was how often in the popular discourse you find these claims, like shamans have been using psychedelics around the world for millennia. It seems to pop up in like every article on psychedelics. And although like it's true in some ways, I think those are huge misrepresentations of how psychedelics have featured in shamanic traditions. Now, like, if we're talking about hallucinogens more generally, or psychoactive substances more generally, tobacco, datura yeah, it is the case probably that a sizable proportion, maybe 40 to 50% of shamanic traditions have involved some psychoactive substance in general. But then again, like a lot have not included any psychoactive substances. So with the Mentawai, for example, they smoke tobacco in the same way that everyone smokes tobacco, but the way they enter trance is through dancing and drumming. But yeah, there are often these claims about psychedelics. And so if we're talking about classic psychedelics, serotonergic psychedelics, things like DMT, psilocybin, bufotenin, 5MEO, DMT, LSD, you know, serotonergic psychedelics, a point that I make in the book is that these have been used very, very, very rarely in history, or at least, we have very little reliable evidence of their use. There is no reliable evidence of the use of serotonergic psychedelics for hallucinogenic purposes outside of the Americas, and particularly outside of the Rio Grande area. So like the essentially the the border between Mexico and the United States, where you have peyote and southwards. Um,you will find claims mushroom madness in New Guinea. You will find this, these claims about like a Moroccan or an Algerian shaman, rather, from rock art. Uh, but these are super, super tenuous. It's very hard to find reliable evidence of um, indigenous or pre colonial, =psychedelic use outside of the Americas, maybe. And my grad student is going investigating this this summer, maybe Basotho healers in South Africa. You know, there have been claims he's going to go investigate that. But even if that's the case, the point is that that psychedelic use has been very, very rare, and some of the most popular examples so Ayahuasca in the Peruvian Amazon, there are good reasons to think that Ayahuasca and the Peruvian Amazon is a post colonial phenomenon, that it moved into the Peruvian Amazon as missionaries and rubber traders, or rubber people were creating new networks. So that's like one side of the story that I sometimes push against. I will say still that, you know, there is evidence that in some places in the Americas, psychedelics have been used for a long time. I mean, there was a paper in PNAS, like five days ago showing the use of Bufotenin snuffs in the Andes, I think, at like 1000 BC, something like that. And so these snuffs, andenatheran snuffs, that use Bufotenin and maybe a little bit of DMT have very old usage, probably peyote. You know, I could believe that peyote has been used for a long time, and then it's certainly the case that psilocybin mushrooms were used in parts of Mexico before, before the colonial period. But those are, those are, like the three best examples, the snuffs, peyote and and psilocybin mushrooms in Mexico, maybe also San Pedro and in the Andes
So, so, you know, some people associate psychedelics and shamanism very, very tightly. I mean, some people, as in, I don't know, probably like urban, upper middle class people who have been introduced to too much LSD at parties. I don't know, but you know from from what you're saying, it's actually like quite a tenuous connection, or it's not very tight.
For sure. Yeah, yeah, it's it's only a very, very small minority of human societies that have that have used serotonergic psychedelics, and the way they have used them is very, very different than what you see in recreational use or retreats. The central point being like in these ones, it's like the patient who is taking the psychedelic. You know, if I go to a clinical trial, if I do psychedelic assisted psychotherapy, if I go to a retreat, it is me, the client, the patient who's taking the psychedelic historically and cross culturally. In the few like pre colonial examples that that I've enumerated, or in these other examples that you can find in the Americas, it seems to have overwhelmingly been the specialist. It's, it's the shaman who takes the psychedelic and in many cases, they're, they're taking the psychedelic to access special powers, to spot witches, to identify illness in your body, but also to do things like sorcery, to find enemies and attack them. So I think there's also been like a whitewashing of what it what psychedelics are actually used for in these contexts, where people want to reconfigure that to be this very like rosy use that that justifies or legitimizes or like makes more palatable the more modern applications.
Well okay, so we're talking about the modern period. And you mentioned offhand, you know, you mentioned in your book, there's been a decline of religion in the United States organized religion over the last 25 years. But you know, in your in your model, in your framework, probably that is going to not lead to the emergence of, I mean, I think we know this empirically now, Richard Dawkins style, materialist atheism, but you know, some sort of more diffuse spirituality. And so what you see around us, do you see the re-emergence of shamanism in the modern United States,
For sure. I mean, and you see this in the data, like the decline of people who identify as being religious is partly compensated, not totally compensated, but partly compensated by people who describe themselves as spiritual but not religious, sbnr. And these are people who are into things like paganism, astrology, tarot cards, different brands of non institutionalized spiritual religious practice. And you can see in other contexts like a pretty good indication that this decline is leading to a greater interest in shamanism. So the best example being the UK between, I think, 2011 and 2021 the number of people who honestly, literally rate their religion to be shamanism on the sense. This went from 800 to 8000 people. 8000 people isn't a lot of people, but it's a lot of people to write their religion as shamanism. I think the number of people who identified as pagans was nearly 80,000 so yeah. I mean, according to my model, shamanism will continue to have a very, very strong pull the the use of altered states, or non ordinary states, to engage with unseen realities, is it is incredibly psychologically compelling and attractive. And you even see this within Christianity, where the I mean, the best example just being the explosion of Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity over the last century, where once you open up a marketplace for religion and you limit the capacity for centralized authorities to quash it, you Have a resurgence of essentially ecstatic practice. And I think often in these kinds of Pentecostal communities, if it were any, any other community, an anthropologist would much more easily say that is shamanism. You know, it's a it's a specialist who's entering an altered state. They're speaking in tongues, they're channeling a sky god, and they're healing someone. It's like quintessential shamanism, yeah? So, yeah, both, both within doctrinal religion and outside of it. I think we are seeing, we're seeing a return.
Yeah. I mean, it's almost like our innate psychologies, our innate instincts, our own innate intuitions about the universe around us are creeping back in. And you know, you're talking about Pentecostals. And I think Pentecostalism started the Azusa Street Revival. And like early 20th century in LA, I mean modern Pentecostalism. Obviously, some aspects of Pentecostalism were there in Christianity. From the beginning. You were talking about Primitive Christianity in the book. But, what I will say is, you know, there's different types of denominations in the United States, and some of them are more shamanic than others. The easiest way you can say it like, you can do a shamanism index. So, likeif you do have Protestants, like reformed Calvinists, are not very shamanic, you know. I mean, they're all about reading the book, arguing whether they're like, three point Calvinist or five point Calvin is the abstruse aspects of, like theology, metaphysics, you know. Then you have, obviously have the Pentecostals, but you have a lot of evangelical churches, like Baptists and whatnot. But I think they're kind of in the middle, little lesson to book learning the Calvinist. But for sure, they don't get, they don't go full, like - all that sort of stuff. You know, it's fake. You never go full Shaman. I don't know. It's just like, I just like, make my Christian friends like, you know, they, they will joke about that sort of thing. Because, you know, they have their own views about whether that's licit or not. I think some parts of Pentecostalism, you know,some Pentecostal practice, is viewed negatively by other Christians, because they think that there's, there's something a little bit unChristian about the way they're behaving,
For sure, for sure. And, I mean, that is a that is a tension that has characterized Christianity from its earliest days. I mean, by, by 100 ad, you have tensions within the Christian church about stamping out prophetic and ecstatic behavior. You have reinterpretations of the Hebrew Bible that say that what might look like charismatic or prophetic behavior or ecstatic behavior is actually something else. I mean, this is the tension that any organized religion is always dealing with.
Well, I mean, okay, so last question I'm gonna ask you, I mean, obviously you did a lot of reading, research, field work, all these things like your life, your life was, you know, shamanically oriented for a while. What was the most surprising thing you find out?
What's the most surprising thing?
That means, either there's a lot of them or there's not that many. Just the pause,
Well, yeah, I mean, so I would say that the experience, I would say more, more than, like, having a couple surprising things, or, although some come to mind, it's more just like a reorientation of how I think about, like, history and cultural evolution, I think, like before the project, I probably thought some version of this, like march of progress, where you have primordial shamanism, then becomes the, you know, Local like healer chief or the witch doctor, then becomes a priest and then becomes a bishop or whatever. And instead, I came to appreciate much more that every religion has this deep tension within itself between what everyone finds very, very appealing, these more ecstatic process practices, and then what's useful and easier to control, which is a more sober, institutionalized vibe. I mean, so that that is a whole orientation to, just like religious evolution that I think changed over the course of the project, something else. I mean, it's hard to sort of. Efficiently communicate this. But I remember being in Mentawai and being at these healing ceremonies and really coming in with this sense that they would that healing needs to be something that's somber and kind of clinical and sad and careful, and instead being like, Can you, can you actually have, like, healing a person who's about to die feel like a party that feels so bizarre, and yet that was often, often what the vibe was. And I think that also really changed how I understood the possibilities of healing. If that makes sense,
Yeah, no, that's how we have, I guess, you know, you know, we have particular cultural scripts, as they would say. And not all, all societies have the same cultural scripts in like, the same context. You know, a funeral is supposedly somber, but in some cultures, including in, say, like Irish culture, then they do it's more celebratory, and that's just how it is. So I think that actually makes sense. I think that actually makes sense. So that's why you do the field work. That's why you you you go out and do the anthropology, because otherwise you wouldn't be as, like, viscerally aware of these sorts of differences. So yeah, it was great catching up with you, man. You know, always love your pieces in the New Yorker. I was, I was singing their praises before we started recording. So you got got stuff out there. You've got a new book, "Shamanism: The Timeless Religion" which there's a lot in here. As I want to make clear, it's not like a monograph. You know, there's a lot of, I don't wanna say anecdote, but you know what I'm saying, that there's a lot of personal personality in here, and a lot of stuff going on. So, you know, it's great, great read if you're interested in this sort of topic. And as you can talk about the conversation, you know, it spans how to get abstract, to the ancient, down to like, stuff that's going on the modern period. It's quite relevant. So I thought that was like, you know, that was definitely true. It's definitely relevant to our times, even though it is an ancient, ancient practice.
Yeah, thank you, Razib, thanks for having me. It's always so fun. Yeah,
