One of the most difficult challenges for an academic writer is to craft a book that can appeal to both a scholarly and popular audience. Manvir Singh, an anthropologist at the University of California, Davis, successfully meets that challenge in this ambitious and engaging work. Singh, whose primary fieldwork took place on Indonesia’s Siberut Island, uses vignettes from his ethnographic research among the Mentawai people as a starting point for considering divergent views on shamanism’s history and central characteristics. He begins his journey by identifying three essential qualities of shamanism as he understands it: achievement of “non-ordinary states,” communication with spiritual or unseen forces, and provision of services, such as healing to members of a community. Such a capacious definition allows Singh to identify divination, millenarian prophetic movements, spirit possession, and speaking in tongues as facets of shamanism, a merging of categories that may vex scholars who prefer their classifications more tightly wound.
This definitional breadth gives Singh plenty of room for explorations of shamanic practices in different parts of the world. The intrepid anthropologist snorts hallucinogenic yopo powder in the Amazon’s Orinoco basin, drinks ayahuasca in the Peruvian Andes, has fragments of his soul recovered by a neo-shaman at the Burning Man’s Shamandome in Nevada, marvels at Paleolithic cave drawings in France, and documents a divination ritual in Mangalore. The writing is compelling throughout, even if squeamish readers may choose to fast-forward through his descriptions of hallucinogen-induced emesis.
Woven through these ethnographic accounts is Singh’s principal argument, which is that shamanism is not a practice associated with a specific evolutionary stage of cultural development. Instead, it is a persistent human predilection that reinvents itself in each cultural setting. Shamanism, he writes, “is a near inevitability of human societies — a captivating package of practices and beliefs that appears over and over because of its deep psychological appeal” (6). In making this argument, he reviews and sometimes contests interpretations of shamanism by such scholars as Mircea Eliade, Åke Hultkrantz, and Michael Harner, to name only a few.
Singh acknowledges that the emergence of stratified societies and rigidly doctrinal religions tended to push shamanism into the background. Noting the marginalization of shamanism by Polynesian chiefs, he describes the relationship as being “a dance of freedom and control, desire and dominion, anarchic spirit and organized might” (157). This is why, he says, it emerges in new forms even in developed industrial societies.
A key attribute of shamans in many places is their conspicuous otherness. Singh coins the verb “xenize” to denote the process of expressing physical or behavioral qualities that mark shamans as radically different from ordinary people. They wear unusual clothing, acquire distinctive tattoos, or abstain from sexual relations and desirable foods for long periods. They may have ambiguous gender identities or physical deformities that further separate them from others. Singh notes that this ambiguity can be moral as well: in some parts of the world, especially in Amazonia, people believe that a shaman’s healing knowledge can be used to kill others via sorcery.
Xenizing is emphasized in an entertaining chapter titled “Hedge Wizards,” which considers similarities between shamans and investment gurus. Over the long haul, few stock-picking investment managers are more successful than index funds that track the entire stock market, yet hopeful investors still gravitate to charismatic experts who succeed, in Singh’s words, in “developing elaborate performances to convince people of their unique abilities” (191). This performance extends to the public personas of CEOs who claim to sleep only three or four hours a night or follow austere diets of one sort or another. Steve Jobs was said to eat only fruit. Before her conviction for defrauding investors, the charismatic founder of Theranos, Elizabeth Holmes, claimed to subsist entirely on a beverage consisting of kale, parsley, and other vegetables. Singh does not declare that such people qualify as shamans, although they come close: “[I]n our efforts to manage a chaotic world, we create the magicians who dazzle us” (198).
In a work this provocative, there are inevitably things with which one can quibble. Does Jesus really qualify as a shaman, as Singh suggests? How plausible is it to declare that charismatic television preachers meaningfully represent a shamanic legacy? Singh rather glibly dismisses the complaint that white neo-shamans are guilty of cultural appropriation despite evidence that many Native Americans resent the activities of “plastic medicine men” purveying faux-Native spirituality. Singh’s powers of description are formidable, but the book includes no photographs of shamans at work, which would have bolstered his emphasis on the multisensory qualities of shamanic healing. A map tracing his global travels would have helped as well.
But these are minor flaws in a lively work that stands as an admirable contribution to anthropology and religious studies. It is also timely. According to Angel Au-Yeung (2025), investment managers and IT start-up employees are increasingly turning to hallucinogens such as ayahuasca to enhance productivity and mental clarity. Molly Worthen (2025) likewise observes that the fastest-growing Christian congregations in the United States are those that promote speaking in tongues and other altered states. Singh’s book sheds welcome light on the deep history of such practices as well as their tenacious hold on the human imagination.