Estimated reading time: 5 minutes
A ‘participant observer’ of cultures
Manvir Singh, assistant professor of anthropology at UC Davis, has always felt comfortable in the two worlds he inhabits – the Punjabi diaspora and mainstream America. Even so, he has always felt like an “observer” of both.
The realities of being raised by Punjabi immigrants in New Jersey gave him a sense of constantly traversing two cultures, an experience that informed his professional choices in no small way.
“The anthropologist is a liminal figure, someone who goes to other places and exists at the intersection between outsider and observer — a participant observer. I always felt like I had that kind of relationship with American culture and with Punjabi culture,” Singh told India Currents in an interview, around his new book Shamanism: The Timeless Religion, published by Knopf.
Based on a decade of research, the book is the result of Singh’s ethnographic fieldwork with Mentawai communities on Siberut Island in Indonesia, where he immersed himself in studying the psychological origins of religion. He has also studied the use of psychedelics in the Orinoco River Basin of the Colombian Amazon, near the border of Venezuela.
In Indonesia, he documented the “rich, colorful, almost phantasmagoric” lives of the Mentawai shamans or spiritual healers. “These are highly charismatic, very noticeable individuals; sometimes they’re painted in turmeric, they have tattoos, they wear loincloths, they have long hair… and the social and political world bends towards them, you can feel their presence, you can feel people paying attention towards them…” said Singh, who holds a PhD in human evolutionary biology from Harvard University.
Seeking out a slice of adventure
Before he began his doctoral research, he thought he would be a zoologist and study animal behavior and primates, particularly monkeys in Zanzibar. He’d previously studied insects in the Rocky Mountains and had also taken a trip to Karnataka where he shadowed a primatologist who took him to see monkeys in Southwest India.
But “bigger things” beckoned when, during the early years of his research, he met a fellow student studying warfare among East African pastoralists. “He worked at the border of South Sudan, Ethiopia and Kenya,” Singh said. “His life just sounded so adventurous and so fascinating…”
This prompted Singh to seek out his own slice of adventure in the study of psychedelics in Colombia. Eventually, he allowed his combined passion for “story, music, religion, art and law” to lead him to the magical, small-scale society of the Mentawai people. Singh, who grew up going to the gurdwara and participating in keertanas regularly, felt naturally drawn to the world of shamanism, given his own “transcendental, musically oriented” spiritual leanings.
Overcoming cultural barriers
The journey, Singh said, was an incredibly daunting and overwhelming feat, especially at the beginning. When he first arrived in Indonesia in 2014, he had a working knowledge of the local language, a few hundred dollars in cash and a backpack full of tobacco, cigarettes, sweets and sugar. Early challenges ranged from niggling inconveniences like books and belongings getting drenched, to deeper social hurdles like not knowing the language well enough, being a foreigner among strangers, and feeling lonely.
“Sometimes people think the physical stuff is hard — you fall ill a lot, you get sick — but honestly for me, it was the social dimension that was really, really hard…” he said, about the language and communication barriers he faced there. “People have no reason to see me as anything other than someone who’s just passing through and who has a lot of money.”
But every time he took breaks to visit home and then returned, it changed people’s view of him; they saw how invested he was in the work and it helped that he got incrementally better at speaking Mentawai.
The experience of working on this project has made a deep dent on Singh’s mind and outlook. “The book is an attempt to reconcile the universality of our human experience with the diversity of our cultural expression,” said Singh, marveling at how similar and “recognizably human” people are across cultures but how stark their cultural variations can be. “We have the capacity to create very different cultural worlds…”
Shamanism: Controlling uncertainty
Shamanism, though ancient, has a great deal of contemporary, everyday relevance, he believes. “Shamanism is a hyper-compelling means of dealing with uncertainty,” said Singh, according to whom, uncertain, chaotic systems, across contexts, tend to produce miracle workers who then use their charisma and perceived “super-humanness” to restore order.
“When there’s uncertainty in the world, people look to miracle workers, to specialists, to control that uncertainty,” he said. “The way that the specialists make that credible is through performance, through convincing us that they’re different from normal humans.”
Whether it’s in a forest far away or our everyday lives, the concept of a leader who can destroy uncertainty has remained constant through the ages.
Singh is a passionate reader of narrative nonfiction. Among his favorites are Charles C. Mann’s 1491 and 1493, Siddhartha Mukherjee’s The Emperor of all Maladies, Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction, Ezra Klein’s Abundance, and essays by Atul Gawande and Malcolm Gladwell.