“This is a book about shamanism as a timeless practice. But it could have just as easily been about music — about how, despite our incredible differences, we devise songs with deep similarities capable of evoking common emotional tones. Music, like shamanism, is dazzlingly varied, yet there is a structure underlying that variety. Dance songs everywhere tend to exhibit certain features. So do lullabies and healing songs. Transport an Indian American anthropologist to a remote island in Southeast Asia, and the local music would not only prove addictively catchy — it could also urge him to move.
“In fact, this book could have been about any number of complex, near-universal cultural traditions. Hero stories, origin myths, property norms, institutions of justice, rites of passage, beliefs in gods and souls — the list can seem endless. As with shamanism, these are cultural products. They require humans to transmit them, maturing into their spectacular forms as generations of learners shape them.”
