What is Shamanism? And How To Get Ordained
The figure of the shaman beguiles anthropology. The scientific gaze of the anthropologist, sent into the remote culture to gather facts, snags upon the enigmatic shaman, and like in the Weezer song, unravels their objectivity as the shaman walks away. “What is a shaman?” the anthropologist cries, and goes on to write enormous books answering this question. Sometimes the anthropologist, after entering the trance guided by a shaman, abandons their own field and decides to become a shaman. Today we can all become shamans by going to Burning Man and getting ordained by a shaman at the Shamandome.
Manvir Singh is the most recent anthropologist to wade into this magic pool. His relatively short book of popular anthropology: Shamanism: the Timeless Religion, is yet another attempt to answer the burning question; what is shamanism? Written in the privileged skyscraper style of a New Yorker article—for whom behavioral psychology is the bleeding edge of the known world—the book can tend to flatten the discourse with its confident claims of a universal shamanism. Does the shaman exist outside of our western desire? Is the shaman a fantasy of modernity? Keeping these questions in mind the book is nevertheless an engaging foray into the shamanic hinterland; it’s a hinterland that is not as far away from us as we might like to think.
While it is typically assumed that the shaman is an atavistic remnant from a bygone superstitious age, Singh makes the credible claim, per his subtitle, that shamanism is no vestigial waystation on the way to modernity, but rather an integral and perennial mode of humankind; the shaman does not develop over time to become a priest, or an MD, but rather serves a necessary function independent of these more institutional figures of authority—even while those figures may take on certain shamanic attributes from time to time. One of the universal functions of the shaman is to mediate uncertainty; because humankind remains beset by uncertainty, the shaman is always in vogue; therefore the shaman is transhistorical.
I am not entirely sure why Singh refers to shamanism as a religion and so the book is rather confusing in this regard; it is as if when he says shamanism he means animism. He argues that the shaman is usually found at the borders of religion, is even at times antithetical to it, and that institutional religion often regards the shaman as a heretic, if not a devil worshiper. This does not prevent Singh from claiming that, according to his criteria, several old testament prophets are shamanic and Jesus is too, obviously.
Spirit is the second universal category Singh gives to the shaman. The shaman operates in an unseen reality that may consist of a literal spirit realm, complete with a variety of gods and demons, or more ambiguously, the zone of uncertainty and misfortune into which animate spirit is inevitably projected. As such, unfortunate events can increase the need of a shaman with whom one may mediate an apparently malevolent force, whether it is a crocodile god, a tsunami, or a severe economic downturn.
Actual spirits are one of the more weird features haunting the world of the shaman. The anthropologist Michael Harner, who has been integral in the rise of neo-shamanism—a la the shamandome—and who has written the best-selling book The Way of the Shaman (1980), had a death-by-astonishment style encounter with the spirit world when administered ayahuasca by an amazonian shaman. This is typical of a certain kind of trance, often brought about by psychoactive medicines, in which the recipient who, prior to the event, was skeptical if not disbelieving towards the existence of spirits, but who afterwards becomes a convicted believer—even while the world of spirit remains strictly unbelievable. “I can’t believe it!” Terence McKenna said repeatedly—a neo-shaman in his own right—after his own encounter with the elf-spirits of the DMT Realm. “I just can’t believe it!”
Singh, for his part, does not believe in spirits. Viewing the world squarely from inside the rational enlightenment castle, Singh pins spirit to an obscure feature of psyche that is projected outwards—basically the same argument Freud made in Totem and Taboo (1913) but without recourse to the unconscious.
While there are ever fewer indigenous shamans due to the march of colonialism and, as Singh claims, the rise of disenchantment, the generic shaman is always reappearing in new forms, whether the holy spirit movement in Uganda in the 1980s, the neo-shamans of Burning Man, or the tech-gurus of silicone valley. Hedge wizard is Singh’s amusing name for the financial advisor, or start-up CEO, who deploys the more performative elements of the shaman—claimed expertise, extraordinary work-ethic, weird diets—in order to convince a clientele that they can predict what is, properly speaking, unpredictable—namely, financial markets. Humankind’s tendency to superstitious ritual is, for Singh, a natural and rational response to an unpredictable and chaotic reality; it is the ego’s attempt at organization and mastery. The rational agent, as described in economic textbooks, is really quite superstitious and irrational, but all without they, or the economist, being aware of it. This would suggest that the powers of enchantment are by no means in the decline, but rather have only been transposed onto wealth.
Because Singh remains square within the borders of science-based psychology, he does not name the unconscious, and yet it would seem that the fact of the unconscious is everywhere in this book and in particular in his theory of the placebo effect. That sugar pills routinely produce real effects in the body, as demonstrated time and again by scientific studies, is, for Singh, an example of how the magic of the shaman becomes real; one does not have to believe in the power of the shaman in order for that power to have effect. The shaman/placebo acts upon the patient (unconsciously) even while the patient is suspicious of the shaman/placebo.
In this sense the—rather nebulous—figure of the shaman is built-in to the structure of the psyche and culture. We might go so far as to say that there is a shaman shaped hole in our psychical apparatus. Rather than Jung’s shaman archetype, it is instead a shamanic void; a basic susceptibility, or need, for an unusual person to negotiate, on our behalf, the invisible forces that beset us. Psychoanalysis offers a variety of elegant concepts with which to explore this innate necessity—transference, enigma, identification and so on—but Singh, clinging fast to the establishment, sticks to clunky behavioral explanations, together with lame Steven Pinker quotes.
The third universal feature by which Singh defines his shaman is that of the trance. If the shaman typically operates at the borders of society, living in a self-imposed exile—like residing in a cave for example—it is the trance that allows them to leave self and society altogether. The trance of the shaman comes in a great variety of modes and techniques and as a state it is unified by only one characteristic: it is non-ordinary. Even still Singh finds traces of the basic feature of the trance in certain phrases: something came over me; he was besides himself, what has gotten into you? I was not myself. The old definition of ecstasy—to stand outside oneself—is not only found in archaic Greece, but appears variously throughout diverse languages from Chinese to Spanish, German, to Arabic. What is this near universal fascination with the soul that momentarily departs the habitual boundaries of the known world?
Departure, 1952, Agnes Pelton
