Return of the Shaman

How visionary healers became a fixture of contemporary American culture and politics

- James Parker

Manvir Singh's new Shamanism: The Timeless Religion ranges widely, introducing us to all sorts of shamans and neo-shamans and proto-shamans. We meet the cigarette-loving tribal healers among the Mentawai people of Indonesia, whom Singh, an anthropologist, has studied since 2014. We meet the psychiatry and medicine professor at Johns Hopkins who reckons that his clinical interventions and against-the-odds healings are the stuff of classic shamanic practice. And we meet the money managers and “hedge wizards” who traffic quasi-shamanically with the capricious spirits of the global market.

It's a panoramic survey: Singh has done the fieldwork, the legwork, and the drugwork. (“Then, with the immediacy of waking up, my trip ended. I became aware of my surroundings. People were watching us through the doorway. Vomit was everywhere.”) But his book lacks something I need—namely, an account of how neo-shamanism and its visionary baggage have looped around into conspiracy theory and burn-it-down far-rightism. It doesn’t, in other words, quite take us up to the present American minute.