This book caught our eye first because we so very rarely see books on shamanism (I follow the author’s lead by lower-casing the word). The subject is often treated, like Zoroastrianism, as something ancient that’s only part of history, without contemporary relevance. This isn’t true for Zoroastrianism, either, but that’s for another day.
Author Manvir Singh is a young Indian American scholar, an anthropologist teaching at the University of California, Davis, with degrees from Brown and Harvard. He writes regularly for The New Yorker, often on their “Annals of Inquiry” pages. He’s a writer to track. He is Sikh.
His book is born out of ethnographic fieldwork with Mentawai communities on Siberut Island, Indonesia that began back in 2014. He explains early on, “I had lived with shamans, studied healing rituals, and interviewed people about gods, black magic, and deprivation. I spoke the Mentawai language and had a small house.”
Manvir introduces the reader to living shamans and communities that live with shamanism as a part of daily life. He aims to counter perceptions that shamanism is either “superstitious savagery” or “primeval wisdom.” Instead, he makes clear through story, example, and study that shamanism not only characterized the earliest human religions everywhere, but still echoes and reemerges because of “the universality of its principles and the intrinsic needs it addresses.”
No better than an anthropologist to do this. Manvir describes his field with “power to turn the strange familiar and the familiar strange.” His book is full of stories of healers and diviners, songs and drug use, ceremonies and songs.
The second of two parts addresses what the subtitle says: that shamanism is “the timeless religion”; in fact, that it is “the first religion,” meaning the continually most common. In contrast to one other scholarly book that some readers will recall on this subject, by Mircea Eliade (Shamanism, 1951), Manvir makes clear that shamanism remains evident in religious practice all over the world — not just in “the most distant” places, like Siberia, as Eliade posited. Marvir offers many examples from his own direct experiences. He finds shamanism both beautiful and “timeless” in that it keeps on forming and appearing because it does what people need religion to do.
