Shamanism: The Timeless Religion by Manvir Singh; Knopf, 304 pp., $30
A shaman, according to Manvir Singh, “is a specialist who, through non-ordinary states, engages with unseen realities and provides services like healing and divination.” If the definition seems efficient but unimaginative, you’ve got the gist of Shamanism. Singh, an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of California, Davis and a frequent New Yorker contributor, seeks to understand shamanism from a global perspective. What are the attributes that link shamanic rituals across geographic, religious, cultural, and linguistic spheres? Is it possible, in a Lévi-Straussian approach, to draw broad conclusions about the entire human condition?
This ambition, frankly, is a distraction. Singh’s book is both exhaustive and exhausting. He stayed for prolonged periods with Mentawai communities on Indonesia’s Siberut Island and observed Indigenous ceremonies in Colombia’s rainforests. At every turn, he looks at similarities and differences. The terminology of shamanism, he acknowledges, is chaotic because the sacred practice “is as diverse as its practitioners.” Healing ceremonies often involve drums and music, as well as various plant-based hallucinogenic medicines, ranging from scopolamine (the “Devil’s Breath”) to ayahuasca. Depending on the context, the non-ordinary states these things induce might be called “trance, ecstasy, hysteria, inspiration, dissociation.” Since there isn’t a word to capture the transformative effects, Singh coins one: “xenize, from the Greek prefix xen-, meaning ‘foreign’ or ‘other.’ ”
Singh juxtaposes his autobiographical accounts of various shamanic ceremonies across a range of cultures with the academic explorations of other thinkers, from the polemical Romanian scholar, novelist, and erstwhile fascist Mircea Eliade, author of Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (1951), to accounts of popular phenomena like Burning Man. Yet one obvious limitation in Singh’s approach stems from the shortcomings of anthropology as a discipline. Equipped with a set of predetermined theories, he descends on an exotic, inaccessible landscape and seeks to ratify them by all means possible. Dispensing gifts to his Indigenous subjects, who are seen at once as mysterious and exotic, the anthropologist is invited to observe their sacred rites, after which he drafts a report on their bizarre behavior intended to make us, his readers, long for a facet of life that modernity has deprived us of experiencing for ourselves. It is a self-referential game: the observer, in the act of observing, seeks nothing but to be observed. Shamanism is peppered with laments from Singh about the discomfort of having to travel to distant realities, far from the comforts of home. He grows impatient with his interlocutors, knowing he needs them more than they need him.
Western culture is obsessed with healing, but its remedies are limited. Shamanism embraces a radical approach: a shakeup of the body in order to set the soul free. It requires not just trust in the shaman but also surrender. I have participated in an ayahuasca ceremony in the Amazon that subverted the foundation of my Weltanschauung, defying the ordinary. Beyond an onslaught of sequences of phantasmagorical images that culminated in an Auschwitz crematorium and the surrendering to a nahualli, a spirit animal, I understood, like never before and after, the depth of silence. Since then, my relationship with the world has been different, including my attitude toward teaching and the classroom. And I have spent time in Varanasi, on the banks of the Ganges River in Uttar Pradesh, one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world, known in Hinduism as a city of death, mourning, and pilgrimage. In the eighth century, it is where the worship of Shiva was established.
Like superheroes (Singh references Superman, Hellboy, and Spider-Man, among others), shamans claim supernatural powers. They might, among other things, communicate with the dead, predict the future, make an amputated limb grow again, stop breathing for an extended period, offer prophetic advice, walk on water, or speak an unknown language. The incredulous might paint them as charlatans—Singh stresses that “shamans are humans, and like humans everywhere, they take advantage of their position for self-serving ends”—but their followers, seeking control over the uncertain, are convinced of their abilities. Singh calls shamanism a “technology” that makes possible the extraordinary, alleviating pain and curing intractable illnesses. But his definition fails by restricting the practice to the dominion of the mind. Shamans—curanderos in Spanish—use catharsis to bring about what in a typical setting would be considered a miracle. That is, they function in the realm of faith.
The operative word in Shamanism is “universal.” Although all shamans communicate with the spirit world, the nature and method of these communications vary widely among spiritual communities all over the world, from the Babaylans in the Philippines, the Siberian Yupik, and the Ainu people of Japan to the Hmong in China and Southeast Asia, the Dogon sorcerers in Mali, the black shamans in Mongolia, and the Mapuche, Aymara, and Yanomami in South America. Singh, though, contends that shamanism isn’t only “a timeless religion” but one that reaches beyond regional borders. His generalist approach fails here, since the study of religious practice is a field devoted to unique behaviors. Singh, though, strains to shoehorn disparate local customs into a one-size-fits-all paradigm.
For all this, the most acute limitation of Shamanism is its dull style. Anyone who has been part of a ceremony, with the enlightenment as well as the discomfort it entails, knows that “xenizing” is illogical and nonsequential, deriving not from the intellect but from other sources of knowledge. Thus, describing it in effective, clear-cut scientific language makes it predictable. What is missing—desperately—in Singh is bravura, a daring, poetic bent that emphasizes the spiritual dimension.
