Manvir Singh
Description: Manvir Singh is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at UC Davis. His research examines why human societies around the world develop recurring traditions like shamanism, religion, music and legal systems. In this episode, we dive into his fieldwork with the Mentawai people of Indonesia, his investigations into shamanism, and the role altered states and psychedelics have played in human societies. Along the way, we also explore how these traditions help people create order out of chaos, and we illuminate the true nature of these ancient practices.
Websites:
Publications:
Book:
Shamanism: The Timeless Religion
Mentions:
Institute for Psychedelics and Neurotherapeutics at UC Davis
The Sambia: Ritual and Gender in New Guinea by Gilbert Herdt
Show Notes:
[0:04] Introduction to Professor Manvir Singh
[2:02] Aesthetics and Universal Traits
[3:38] Social Media's Impact on Culture
[5:00] Building Cultural Databases
[6:35] Integrating with Different Communities
[10:07] Travel and Personal Learning
[12:26] The Journey to Mentawe
[19:31] Challenges in Fieldwork
[22:45] Understanding Cultural Design
[24:44] Cultural Change and Individual Choices
[27:49] Layers of Cultural Evolution
[31:12] Anthropological Research in Developed Societies
[33:18] The Role of Religion in Societies
[37:13] Development of Polytheistic Religions
[41:10] Magic and Altered States
[48:11] Becoming a Shaman
[51:44] Beliefs of Shamans
[53:29] Shamans and the Placebo Effect
[53:36] Historical Use of Psychedelics
[58:17] Gender Differences in Psychedelic Use
[1:03:03] Modern Recreational Use of Psychedelics
[1:11:18] Measuring Psychedelic Experiences
[1:14:00] Writing and Creativity in Research
[1:15:31] Life Advice for Listeners
Unedited AI Generated Transcript:
Brent:
[0:01] Welcome, Professor Manvir Singh. Thank you for coming on today. Yeah, thanks a lot for having me.
Keller:
[0:06] Love to start out by hearing if you believe in universal traits across cultures and time.
Brent:
[0:11] Yeah, I definitely do. Although the longer I've studied this topic.
Manvir:
[0:17] The more I've learned that it's actually harder to discover or identify universal traits than I originally thought. But yeah, I think there are many aspects of human behavior of human psychology that appear in every society, music, some kind of aesthetic behavior, some kind of religious belief, but also aspects of our emotions, aspects of, you know, very, even very basic things like the mechanics of vision. So yeah, I think there are universals and I think they happen at all different kinds of scales.
Brent:
[0:48] Yeah. And then for the aesthetics, are you talking about clothing, architecture, like what, that part just intrigued me.
Manvir:
[0:55] Yeah. So when I think about aesthetics, I tend to think about three broad categories. I think about narrative, I think about music, and then I think about visual art and visual adornment. So every society, as far as we know, it's very hard to find a society that does not have some kind of storytelling tradition. So not only where they tell stories but they have some kind of shared cultural repository of stories music, as far as we can tell every society has had music visual adornment, It's widespread. I don't know. I guess that's probably the thing that is most implied by the word aesthetics. So the other two I've systematically studied. I've gone through, built big databases of societies. Visual adornment, I have not. So it might actually be the case that it is not universal, but there are definitely very reliable trends in what people are visually drawn to. So people are very consistently drawn to circles, drawn to parallel lines drawn to dots um and maybe that might seem self-evident but you know no other animal
Manvir:
[1:59] produces these particular visual shapes yeah.
Keller:
[2:03] And like looking across i guess more to modern time this may not like fully apply because a lot of cultures aren't on social media or access to you know being connected in that way but i think a narrative i hear a lot is because of social media these kind of universal traits or whatever are kind of coming into one or people are becoming more similar yeah there's some would you agree with that generally or would you say that it's actually allowing people to maybe show their culture in their own way and distinguish themselves so.
Manvir:
[2:33] I think on a broad scale it does lead to convergence and homogeneity homogeneity um yeah i mean so one thing that social media, the internet affluence allows for is cultural remixing. It allows for subcultures. It produces a lot more affluence, so people can just produce a lot more. Maybe this isn't the best example, but if we take language as an example, um, English is, in many ways, like a hegemonic language. More people today speak English than have spoken any language in the history of our species. And the spread of English has been associated with a diversification of English. There's Singlish, there's Indian English, there's New Guinean Pidgin, there's Patois. There's a huge diversity. But the diversity of Englishes is a much smaller linguistic
Manvir:
[3:35] diversity than the diversity of all languages that have ever existed. So I think in a similar way, there is a diversification, but it's often playing with a smaller set of elements.
Brent:
[3:44] Yeah. And then when you build up databases to investigate these ideas, how do you quantify or build a database that represents different aesthetics across cultures?
Manvir:
[3:54] Yeah, so we can use music for an example or as an example. So when we've studied music, we have systematized two aspects of music. First, field recordings. So recordings of music. And so you want to first you want to make sure that your database represents human cultural and geographic diversity. It's very easy. You know, you just like search a bunch of music, you collect that. It's very easy to have that be like overwhelmingly European or, you know, maybe Chinese and Indian. But you want to if you want to fully represent human cultural diversity, you have to like figure out some way of sampling human diversity. And so the way we do that is, you know, we identify cultural regions and then dig through libraries, contact anthropologists, contact ethnomusicologists, contact people who have gone there and recorded these things, you know, dig through old stacks. So then let's say now you have some database of music. You have, you know, we have, it's called the natural history of song where we have this discography of global music. Then it's like, how do you turn that into data?
Manvir:
[4:56] And any particular approach to turning that into data carries its own biases. So you might you might you know what we do is we have we transcribe it into western staff notation as one way but that carries all kinds of limitations and constraints so then we also use music information retrieval software but that misses a lot of additional information so then we also have experts listen to the music um but experts carry their own biases and so then we also have naive listeners you know we have internet users around the world but we also go into small scale societies and play these songs for people and we just ask them their impressions what do you think the song is used for how fast is it you know how complex is it and the idea is that you take a variety of approaches to annotating and hopefully each approach is compensating for some other limitation interesting so that's what we've done for for building for example a musical database we have different methods for different approaches but yeah the big things are, properly sampling human diversity and then having ways that turn it into data systematically but also deal with the biases that come with any single approach.
Keller:
[6:04] Is the music including lyrical and instrumental?
Manvir:
[6:09] Yeah, so... In our project, The Natural History of Song, everything that we've included is sung, and a lot of it is also instrumental, but we have nothing that has only been instrumental. And that was just like an early design choice with our database.
Brent:
[6:28] Yeah. Interesting. And you've also done incredible amounts of work in Indonesia, Colombia, other regions in South America.
Brent:
[6:36] How do you go about integrating with these different communities, especially when there's a huge communication barrier?
Manvir:
[6:41] Yeah, I mean, the experience has varied. So I've done most of my work in Indonesia. And that has been a very long process where my first trip was in 2014. I went there, I knew 900 words of Indonesian. I just had like a backpack. And I was looking for a guy, Rustam, who another anthropologist had told me to find. And it was incredibly hard because they also speak their own language Mentawai, not everyone speaks Indonesian I had to learn Mentawai and the first summer is incredibly lonely you can't really communicate with anyone you can't do anything, I can't walk in the forest, I can't use a machete.
Manvir:
[7:23] But over time what I really prioritized with my Indonesian fieldwork with my work with the Mentawai was living with people and learning the language so my first two summers, I barely collected any data It was really almost all language learning and just staying in people's houses. And that builds this personal connection. And then the most useful thing is just becoming competent in the language. And then for my long field work in 2017, I built a house. Other people built the house. But I stayed in the community. And by that time they had already seen that I had come three years in a row or three times that I was really investing that I had known the language and then it became much easier, Um, I've also been doing work in Columbia and there the approach has been totally different, um, which I can talk about, but, um, you know, now I have a wife, I have a child, I can't, you know, spend half a year in a place. And so I work in a place where people speak a lot more Spanish, but there's also the relationship works very differently where it's almost, you know, we have a contract written out.
Brent:
[8:35] Okay.
Manvir:
[8:36] Yeah. It's also, it reflects a very different relationship to colonialism and outsiders. So these different communities expect different things, work with you in a very different way.
Keller:
[8:46] You think generally in anthropologic research that people don't do what you did, that they kind of come in and they want results quickly, they want to come in and within, you know, two weeks they have data and they're not doing proper, I guess, integration? Or do you think generally the trend has been that it's established that if you want results, you have to put in the time and you have to commit two years of
Keller:
[9:10] research with these people and it has to be a relationship?
Manvir:
[9:13] So I think, yes, I think since the early to mid-20th century, there has been a recognition that the best anthropological fieldwork and research is done through long, intensive fieldwork where you learn the language and you live with people, participant observation.
Keller:
[9:34] Mm-hmm.
Manvir:
[9:37] Of course, not everyone can do that. And so there is also critique of what is called helicopter research, where you come in, you hire a translator, you spend a couple weeks, you collect your data, you leave. You don't have a long-term collaboration or relationship with the community. So there is that, but there's always a push against that. And there is definitely a recognition that really strong research requires these long relationships.
Brent:
[10:07] Yeah.
Keller:
[10:08] Does that pan down to just general travel for you and the way you approach, I guess, seeing the world or the things you've learned in that research that you just take with you when you're going about your day-to-day or when you do go to a new country, maybe just for vacation or just for the sake of your own pleasure that you use to integrate with the culture when you do have to be there for a shorter period of time?
Manvir:
[10:29] For sure. I think one thing that it has really reinforced for me are two related things. her. One is that I think I had found languages really daunting before my fieldwork. So I grew up in a household where my parents spoke Punjabi and I mostly spoke in English and then I learned Spanish throughout school. But in college, I didn't take any languages. And so going to Mintawe, even that first summer, I had learned 900 words of Indonesian on an app and no one spoke any English. Rustam, my main informant and guide and translator, spoke English. But even after a couple weeks, my Indonesian had gotten to the point where he preferred to speak in Indonesian, and then it really blasted off. So now whenever I... So we're going to Japan this summer, and right now I'm just learning a lot of Japanese. Now I always try to learn some basic amount of the language before I get there. So I think it really enforced A, that I can... Language learning...
Manvir:
[11:31] More possible than I previously thought, and that it has a lot of dividends. That people, you can enter worlds, if only by people recognizing that you were putting in some kind of investment, even without whatever level of competence you have. I think it's a real demonstration that you care. So that's one thing. I also, aside from that, it's hard to say, I do now travel in such a way that I'm down to go to a place where there's ostensibly nothing happening and spending like many weeks there so we're going to japan and we're probably going to spend just an entire month on hokkaido um and you know just like interact with people walk around see the world see the life um which is a very different way than i i think i had traveled earlier where i wanted to go to cities and like do events and like do things and now i think my relationship to to that aspect of traveling has also shifted yeah.
Brent:
[12:22] So the japanese trip is just like for fun like.
Manvir:
[12:24] Personal yeah it's just for fun yeah yeah.
Keller:
[12:27] And then with your trip to indonesia initially was there a particular reason you wanted to go to mentawe or did was it because you had that professor contact was the initial inspiration or what kind of drew you there to begin with.
Manvir:
[12:40] Yeah so i wanted to go to a place where there was a strong indigenous where there was an yeah like a, a strong indigenous religion. There was also a strong institution of adjudicating conflict, like local justice. I was really interested in rules. And so supernatural rules and kind of these more secularly enforced rules. I had a list of different societies that I was investigating. And Mentawi was really cool because the island where I work, Siberut, has many, many rivers. And each river has a slightly different language, slightly different taboo system, slightly different culture. And so it's kind of a laboratory of cultural evolution where you have this diversification, but you also have this similarity. So yeah, so Seberut was really exciting because it had what looked like a really interesting indigenous religion. It had this diversity. And then it also honestly seemed adventurous to go to this island.
Brent:
[13:38] I've always thought islands were cool um in southeast.
Manvir:
[13:41] Asia rainforest um yet it seemed exciting honestly.
Brent:
[13:46] Yeah and then was there any like stories you have from there like a highlight that stood out whether it was like a really hard time like a really interesting like event that occurred to you yeah sure.
Manvir:
[13:58] Um so i got there uh i went to indonesia i went to padang.
Brent:
[14:04] The city.
Manvir:
[14:04] In sumatra I met a professor. She and I had communicated earlier.
Manvir:
[14:10] And she has worked in Mantawe. And so she put me in touch with another researcher at this university who was going to the island. She was like, he's going to the island tomorrow. You guys can go together. And then we went, we went to a store, we got a lot of coffee and sugar and biscuits and tobacco, honestly. And I put it all in my backpack and these were going to be my gifts, and so we get to the island I'm with this guy in the book I call him Happy because he has a different name but I'm not trying to share too much about him so we get to the island and, I'm just like swung into some world, you know, two guys come pick us up. I go on one guy's motorcycle, happy goes on the other. We go to this house. Um, I'm like taking off my backpack. I, I like, don't really know what to do. I'm like, do I take out the tobacco now? Um, and they sit me down and it's several guys, Mentawi guys, there's a woman. And then there's this shaman, this, in Mentawi, Sikere, Lala. And I, I've come to know Lala very well. Um, But he has like a half-smoking cigar as an earring. He's wearing like, he's tattooed on his legs and his hands. And I think at that point he had a tattoo on his face potentially. And he's wearing like a t-shirt of a Balinese demon that I guess came from a tourist. And he's wearing, I think, a loincloth.
Manvir:
[15:33] And I'm like, I'm looking for Rustam. I think he lives in a particular village. So I say the village.
Manvir:
[15:40] And they're like, oh, we don't know where Rustam is. i was like i want to visit the groups in the interior and they're like okay we can like he'll take you this guy will take you um it'll cost i think like 20 or 30 bucks a day you'll also have to buy food and cigarettes for him and then you'll find rustam and then you'll also hire rustam and both of them will take you and that was like far beyond my budget could do um and, And I'm just like, am I being taken advantage of? What's going on over here? And I'm like, no, I think I'm okay. I'm not going to do this. I'm just going to try to find Rustam or find someone else who can take me to his village. And they're like, okay. And then I walk outside. It's so hot. The sun is beating down. I'm carrying this huge backpack. I just know that the poor town is in that direction. So I'm walking.
Manvir:
[16:31] So I get to the poor town, and tourists come to Sibirut for these like tribal tours where they go inside and you know you take them to a long house and you like make an arrow but it's also the mentawe islands are very well known for surfing they're like one of the best surf spots in the world because the indonesian or the indian ocean, it's largely there's no nothing between say madagascar or the east coast of africa and mentawe so the swells are just building up over the ocean and then they break on the Mintawe Island. So anyway, that's just to say that there's like a little, people are really like hustling for tourists in the port town.
Manvir:
[17:12] And finally, this one guy, I was told beforehand, when people are hustling for tourists, go for like the oldest people who seem the least tech savvy because they're probably going to exploit you the least.
Manvir:
[17:24] Yeah, that was just some advice I had gotten. But anyway, I go with this one guy and I'm so used to throughout the day, people keep like hassling me and we're going and someone stops him this like small man, and the guy's talking to me and i'm like i'm looking for rustum and he's like i am rustum um and so presumably word had gotten up you know 13 miles into the into the interior of the island that this guy is looking for rustum and he had walked to the poor town over the course of the day um yeah so this is becoming a much longer story than i had planned eventually several days later rustam finally takes me to where we're gonna go a place called atabai this is what he planned i'll take you to atabai um the first time we go to atabai it's a total failure i don't have enough water i'm like it's so um dehydrated the second day we go and like that doesn't turn out to be an issue because I just get rained on for hours. And then we finally get to the longhouse and I'm imagining like I get there and there's like a huge community, but there are like four people in this big longhouse and like, and we get in, it feels incredibly lonely and.
Manvir:
[18:37] I can't communicate with anyone. All my stuff is soaked, but also like these, you know, there's like, I had expected kind of an untouched tribe in the forest, but it's like, these people are integrating with the government village and they have a radio and like, I was, I was just like, I can't do this.
Manvir:
[18:56] I thought, you know, this was the first place I tried. I'm not going to do this. So I'm like, Rustom, I need to go home. I'm not going to be here. The plan was he was going to drop me off at this long house and come back in six weeks. And I'm like, I can't do this. Anyway, so then I leave. I go back to Sumatra and then I call people. And eventually I go back like a week later. That's because I try to, I contact someone who works in the Amazon. They can't take me. I'm like, Like maybe I'll go work with the Amish.
Manvir:
[19:26] But then I go back and Rusev and I traveled together for two months and it's an amazing experience. But the beginning was really, really hard to the point that I told myself I could not do it.
Keller:
[19:37] What was that initial period where you had to decide, like going on, I'm going to walk on my own. Or like when you decided to come back, how did you make that decision when it felt like it was a failure in many ways.
Manvir:
[19:54] So how did I decide to leave or how did I decide to return?
Keller:
[19:57] I guess the initial point of one, how do you decide to have the confidence to be like, I'm going to get there on my own. I don't need, even though I probably do need your help, I can do this. And then secondly, deciding to come back.
Manvir:
[20:10] Okay, yeah. So when I leave that house, it's been like more than a decade. So it's hard to put myself in that mindset. I think I was just like, and I often feel this where I'm like, I'm a walking bag of money. And like, it just seemed, it just seemed like way too much. It just seemed more than I can handle and like afford. It just didn't seem possible. And I guess I was confident that I felt like this dude who I called happy. I felt like he had betrayed me or he was setting me up or something. Yeah. I just, I, I.
Manvir:
[20:51] I thought maybe I could find Rustam if I tried a little harder. And here's the thing. Lala is Rustam's dad. So when I was talking to them, I forget, but Rustam was like, he was probably like, oh, Rustam's dead. Which, partly because they have tension, but partly also because the tourists are so much money in this economy. And so you are hustling to get yourself a tourist. Yeah, I don't fully remember. I guess I was just sufficiently confident that I could find Rustam. The decision to come back was i can't work in another place i've already come all the way to indonesia spent all of this money um maybe i can't do a longer trip here but i've only seen a single long house you know this is an entire island many villages i can't i can't make an entire judgment on that basis and even a friend was like no the places where tourists go are not going to be the most interesting the places where someone's going to take a tourist first Just travel around, see the island. Don't feel like you have to stay in one place and be lonely and have that difficulty. So then Rostam and I, I traveled a lot with him in one river and then he handed me off to a friend and we went to another river. And it ended up being an adventure and a lot of fun. And the feeling of movement...
Manvir:
[22:07] Made the entire trip much easier and then i also collected some very very basic data i conducted these interviews um not really data that i could use very very much later but and a suggestion was like you've come all this way collect something you know um so so i think it was this recognition that also that i left not because research here is not possible but because this was very overwhelming um and that if i change some circumstances maybe it will be less overwhelming and potential research
Manvir:
[22:43] opportunities will be revealed if that's clear.
Brent:
[22:45] Definitely a lot to take away from it um stepping out of just that initial story what explains the design of culture.
Manvir:
[22:59] Yeah great question um so a lot surely one thing that i have really focused on is the ways in which culture we shape culture to satisfy desires or needs um and it's pushing against there's this view that's very big in the evolutionary study of culture which is like culture exists because it's functional. It exists because it is good for individuals or good for the group. But an approach that I've really advocated for is that I think a better way to study culture is to think about how we shape culture so that it appears to give us what we want. An example that I like to write about, which is actually something that Steven Pinker had written about in the 90s, and he was using it as a metaphor for something else, but it's cheesecake. Cheesecake is incredibly gratifying. No one's going to argue like, oh, cheesecake exists and it spreads because it's good for individuals or good for the group. I mean, it's produced because it's good for the people selling it. But the reason people keep buying it and chewing on it is because it provides us with something we want. We want to feel gustatory pleasure. And that is what it's very effective at doing. And I think once you start to appreciate that humans...
Manvir:
[24:12] That the main thing that decides whether culture survives is that humans are investing in it and passing it along, then you start to appreciate how a lot of music is cheesecake, how a lot of story is cheesecake, how a lot of religious and magical practice is cheesecake, how even justice in some ways is cheesecake. And so a lot of my research has been about trying to explain culture, and I found this approach to think about the ways in which culture is foremost
Manvir:
[24:39] incredibly subjectively compelling as is is a helpful explanatory lens.
Keller:
[24:44] In in that i guess like framework and this might be a bit of a deviation but at the individual level if you're kind of using that idea that it's personally beneficial and you're kind of investing in it how do you think through people like deciding to leave a culture or like adopt a new culture because they find it to be more beneficial to themselves or more aligned with what they're doing even though from the outside, it might look like they're, I guess, like leaving or abandoning their culture and that might have a very different view or lens on it.
Manvir:
[25:20] Yeah. I mean, I, I would be careful not to say that I think all culture can be understood as people selectively retaining things that are subjectively compelling. Nevertheless, I think a lot of what is going on often when people are leaving particular cultural communities and moving towards others is that they recognize some kind of benefit for themselves, or they recognize it to be advantageous. And so one example, there's a great book on the shift from shamanism to Christianity among a tribe in India, the Sora. It's by Piers Vitebsky.
Manvir:
[26:00] And what you see happening in this community is an entire shift, not only in religion, but in social life and economic life. An example is that when you shift from this more shamanic indigenous religion to Christianity, you also shift from how goods are used. And so typically, people amass lots of goods and resources in the form often of buffalo. And then at funerals, they sacrifice buffalo and share that with other people.
Manvir:
[26:36] When you shift to Christianity, it frees you no longer to have to convert all of your resources into buffalo that are then sacrificed. You can buy bicycles, you can buy radios, you can buy soap, you can buy clothes and pay for your kids to go to school. And what I found really striking over there was that people's motivation to shift from one cultural system and everything that it entails to another was, you know, you can be like, why are you giving up this entire cultural system? But at the end of the day, it's because they've encountered a market that provides awesome stuff and they want to be a part of a community that allows them to to buy that and participate um i'm right now writing an essay about the Sikh turban and why people give up the turban and why they keep it and all of those complications and, at the end of the day a lot of that is very much about like what are my social goals i want to be attractive i want to be long i want to be a part of the community but i also want to be like sexy to you know these other people it's very much talked about in a discourse of of how is it individually useful so um which is all to say that i think thinking about individuals
Manvir:
[27:44] instrumental ends is actually very explanatorily powerful in thinking about cultural change.
Brent:
[27:49] Yeah and then when a society is like developing and the cultures are like being crafted do you see some trends emerge like this is kind of the first layer of a culture building and the second layer like or to use your analogy like this is the most important cheesecake and like the second most important like kind of like how do they build out.
Manvir:
[28:09] That's an interesting question it's a it's a bit of a complicated question um i think historically there was this very easy story that was like start out as small band hunter-gatherers then you shift to like horticultural chiefdoms then you shift to or then you you know then you have like tribes and then chiefdoms and then the state um.
Manvir:
[28:31] So that is a historical view. I think now there's an appreciation that, yes, there maybe is some kind of cultural evolution where societies become better at using energy and exploiting energy, and then that has all kinds of implications. But there's also a recognition that actually a lot of cultural evolution can be more cyclical or depend on your social conditions and environmental conditions. So one thing that I've written a lot about is what did human societies look like for most of our evolutionary history until the Ice Age ended and the Holocene began 10,000 years ago. What did our social organization look like for the first 190,000 years? And there's this long standing story that we lived in these small, mobile, relatively egalitarian bands, and then those became complex and egalitarian and sedentary. But one thing my colleague and I have argued is it's actually probably been the case that social organization has been more flexible, and that throughout the late Pleistocene, during which our species spent most of its history, we probably, depending on the environment and ecology, often were in societies that were larger, that were more socially complex, where there was some sedentism, where there was.
Manvir:
[29:42] More intense resource extraction, there was storage. And that is partly based on the observation that today, when you look around the world, or when you look around what the world has looked like for the past couple hundred years, in those environments where resources are dense, rich, reliable, patchy you find hunter-gatherers that become very socially, that look different from our model of a hunter-gatherer. They're much bigger they have hierarchy, some of them even have slavery, they have warfare they have villages, sometimes in the thousands so that's all to say that, I think thinking about, there is probably some way in which there is some kind of ordered cultural evolution, possibly, I'm not sure. But I think now we're at a point in anthropology where that view is, because it's been so important, there's a lot of reconsideration of whether that's the best way to always think about it, if you know what I mean.
Brent:
[30:37] No, definitely makes sense. Because if you have all the resources, why would you want to leave? And then I could see how the rest kind of builds out around that.
Manvir:
[30:44] Yes, yes, yes. Once there are dense, rich, reliable resources, you stay, you exploit them. Other people want access to them. They might be willing to take some kind of subordinate position to get it. You can have much larger villages, then there's conflict between groups to get it. But yeah, it's partly based on the hunter-gatherers that have been most intensively studied, especially those in Africa, like the Hadza, and most particularly the
Manvir:
[31:10] Kung San, who are kind of the prototypical hunter-gatherer. The Kung San live in the Kalahari. It's a marginal habitat that they only really inhabit because agriculturalists have had a hard time living there. When you look in history and you look at the places that today have big cities in agricultural societies, those had a very different kind of hunter-gatherer, you know, throughout Japan, throughout Korea, parts of South America that today have cities on the coast of Australia, you know, the coast of New Guinea, the Pacific Northwest coast of North America, you have a very different hunter-gatherer than these prototypical Kongsan type mobile nomadic small bands.
Brent:
[31:48] Is anthropological research way harder to conduct where the cities now are because it's so much further developed versus some of the tribes that are still kind of reminiscent of previous times?
Manvir:
[32:00] What do you mean?
Brent:
[32:01] So, I'm just thinking about, okay, we've studied these different tribes, and that kind of shaped our view of what early human ancestry was. I could see, because that's way more available than trying to find all this anthropological data in Istanbul, where there's a huge metropolitan city now. How do you go find all of this, whether it's bones or stuff buried in the ground? How would you even go about it? So do you think that's part of why we kind of missed the shaping of like a more robust picture of like human history?
Manvir:
[32:40] Yeah, I would say broadly, yeah, yeah. It's a kind of survivorship bias. It's like, when you look at the world today, where are the places that have hunter-gatherers? And it's in those places that agriculturalists have not, you know, been able to do a good job for the most part. And so, yeah, your understanding of what a hunter-gatherer society looks like is very much biased by harsh environments, marginal habitats. That's, um, there's some anthropologists who push back on that argument, but I push back on them. So, but yeah, I think that general sense that our understanding of hunter gatherers has been biased by just the hunter gatherers that still survive is definitely valid.
Keller:
[33:19] And why do you think human societies create religions? And I guess maybe first, like, how do you feel about the use of the word create in that?
Manvir:
[33:28] Yeah. Um, yeah, I don't mind the word create over there. uh i thought you were gonna say religion um i.
Brent:
[33:35] Was too well.
Manvir:
[33:36] So the way that i broadly think about it which i think is how many people think about it is that it's useful to think about what aspects of human psychology make religious ideas particularly sticky there's a whole field about this it's called the cognitive science of religion and it's about like the human mind has evolved in a particular way but because of the functioning of that mind that predisposes us to believe in invisible agents and, you know, the efficacy of rituals, et cetera. Um, so I, I think that has, I find a lot of that research compelling. You know, there's a lot of research on humans are very predisposed to think about agency. Um, something goes wrong, illness, um, you know, natural catastrophe we're very predisposed to attribute that to an agent um you can see that in our own society why is the economy doing badly you know immigrants the government the deep state you know whatever the administration known.
Brent:
[34:41] Having to identify something as like the target of like what's causing it.
Manvir:
[34:44] Yes yes there's a predisposition to when confronted with something big bad and important to think that some kind of agent is behind it.
Manvir:
[34:55] And yeah, and I think a lot of people take advantage of that. You provide very monocausal explanations of misfortune that attribute them to agency. But anyway, that predisposition, I think, means that throughout history, throughout human societies, when people have confronted misfortune, they've thought about what agent is behind it. And then there are other cognitive quirks and biases that predispose us to I think, you know, it was... A ghost or a god, you know, there's a whole literature on why are we dualist? Why, you know, why do we think that bodies and souls or minds can become separate? So yeah, I think that is a big part of it. And then I also think a lot of religion, again, develops because of what is individually and subjectively compelling. Whether I want to find explanations for misfortune, but also if I want to have some means of changing and dealing with uncertainty in the world. So like, why does prayer develop? Why does ritual develop? Why does shamanism, something that I study a lot, develop? I think often those develop because they are very compelling means of trying to deal with uncertainty. I want, you know, I want to recover from this illness. I want to, I want my harvest to do well. And so something that says uh here is a technology a technique that you can engage in that will shift that uncertainty in your favor is highly compelling especially if the the stakes are very high you know the cost of this is quite small and the potential benefit is quite big i might as well engage in it.
Brent:
[36:24] Yeah it just seems like broadly speaking it's ordering chaos.
Manvir:
[36:27] Yeah it's it's explaining and controlling uncertain outcomes yeah.
Brent:
[36:32] Do you think most like religions like the way they kind of started like their origin stories kind of are along those lines of like bringing order from chaos.
Manvir:
[36:41] So there is there's an argument that what the thing that all religions ultimately share is um engaging in practices rituals to invite blessing and avoid misfortune that that is also ultimately and what is blessing and misfortune other than like uncertain outcomes that are positively and negatively valenced. At the heart of it, the uniting thread is taming uncertainty.
Keller:
[37:14] And why do polytheistic religions tend to come first in the development of what might eventually become a large major religion?
Manvir:
[37:23] Yeah, that's an interesting question. So again, it's tricky to talk about an order because monotheism, i mean maybe some people will push back but like the abrahamic version of monotheism is really invented in one time and place and then just like spreads very well um so it's not like we have you know a thousand experiments and then we see that you know they reliably go from one thing to another um but so then the the the broader question of like why is polytheism why has polytheism historically been much more common and monotheism has had this one jumping off point I think it's like still kind of an open question. There are arguments that some people make. So there's one argument that is very popular in the cultural evolution literature, which says that.
Manvir:
[38:13] Big God-style monotheism, where you have this moralistic being who punishes you, has spread because it's very effective at promoting cooperation in large-scale societies where there are a lot of interactions among strangers. So when you have smaller societies where people are interacting regularly with kin or these long-term reciprocal partners, people you've known for a long time and you have these back-and-forth relationships, then you don't need as much this kind of, you know, super powerful, omniscient, moralizing deity. But then once you scale up, you have a lot more interactions among strangers, then it becomes more useful and more effectively motivates and produces cooperation. So that's a very popular argument. I myself am not totally sure you know.
Brent:
[39:02] But but i would say that's like a leading explanation because i can also see it being like the natural progression because from my crude understanding like a lot of polytheistic like god structures like have like a kind of dominant one over the other so then like you can see how that could morph into just okay now that simplify this there's one.
Manvir:
[39:24] Yeah yeah but it would raise this question of like why why should the trajectory happen in that way like what is what is being I guess like what is the theory of evolution cultural evolution.
Brent:
[39:37] It probably align with the idea of like larger societies like to simplify like mass adoption to be alright this needs to get simplified into like here's the package like.
Manvir:
[39:47] Yeah, maybe. Yeah.
Brent:
[39:49] Especially for outsiders coming in, it's like keeping track of all the different gods and what they all do. It's like, it could probably be pretty hard.
Manvir:
[39:57] Yeah. But you could also have a place like India, which until the arrival, I mean, there's obviously like a ton of religions, even apart from kind of what we now call Hinduism. You have Sikhism like my family's, which is monotheistic. but if you just think about hinduism when the british arrive you have a huge and you of course also have islam in in india which is also monotheistic but if you think about islam you have a huge diversity across the entire subcontinent where there are you know maybe shared gods but they look different and then you know some people also don't worship the same god and there are mythologies that tie the gods together which is all to say like you don't necessarily even need to have a religious system where everything is unified you know where there is a, yeah although I mean India was also like famously kind of decentralized politically so maybe the argument would be like when you have political centralization and you have and you want to create like a common state or church then yeah there is something more useful in having a single god that's interesting.
Brent:
[41:09] Yeah just thought of that i don't know.
Keller:
[41:11] And then looking at like i guess some of the i don't want to say like drivers but maybe like characteristics of a lot of religions magic and like altered states seem to be like a through line for a lot of them why do you think that is and i guess what are some examples that could kind of bring that into light.
Manvir:
[41:33] Yeah so, magic, can be defined in many ways but I honestly think the, So when people talk about magic, they talk about things ranging from like superstitions. So I'm going to get to the altered states, but just think about magic for a moment. They think about things on the spectrum from superstitions, you know, carrying a four-leaf clover, you can't see a black cat or whatever, to like shamanic traditions where you, you know, go to a specialist and they enter trance and they're like calling a, you know, talking to some spirit so as to heal your mother or something. Um and so when we think about all of those as magic then i think actually all of religion, comes to have magic because what is magic in this case other than what we were coming back to earlier which is practices to tame uncertainty um like the prayer actually i think it's very hard to include the two things i talked about and also say that prayer is not magic which is just to say that, yeah, I think magic is often just another practice to tame uncertainty, or another way of actually talking about practices for taming uncertainty. Altered states, yeah, as you point out, are incredibly common.
Manvir:
[42:54] So a lot of my research has been about shamanism, which is, a practice when a specialist enters an altered state to provide services like healing and divination there's it's a it's an open question about why altered states are so popular the thing that i really argue though is that they are hyper compelling both for audience and for specialist or practitioner and the idea more generally is that like let's say i want to, um let's say brent is like yo manvir i know that you're i know that you've been sick i can um.
Manvir:
[43:33] Spot the witch that has caused your illness and I would be like Brent what gives you that ability? You're just like a regular guy but then if to do that you know danced for three hours and then you entered this state that looks totally distinct from normal humans your eyes are rolled back in your head you're shaking on the ground then I would be like okay maybe Brent is actually.
Manvir:
[43:54] Normal humans do not or if Brent is like a god can come into me and talk to me and I'm like okay let's see it and you're like okay, yeah, here's what's going on. I would be like, that looks like you're just doing the same thing. But if the, if, you know, you have a booming different voice and to do that, you have to shake, um, that becomes much more compelling. And so what I often think about for these altered states is their power as performances, not necessarily performances that you're putting on in this super intentional way, but performances as ways of, of being that, um, change how other people understand you. And so I think they're hyper compelling performances, both for other people, but also for yourself. I mean, one thing, so a lot of groups use psychoactive substances and a psychoactive substance, you take it, that is a very compelling way to assure you that this is a different kind of state, especially if it's like, you know, a powerful hallucinogen where you actually understand yourself to be engaging with a deity. It's a mystical state. And so I think I think altered states are common because they convince both the people engaging in them, but also their audiences, that they are engaging with the supernatural. I think they're just a very effective way of making that clear. Yeah.
Brent:
[45:08] And are all shamans religious?
Manvir:
[45:12] Well, it depends on what we mean by religious. But if we take the most basic definition of religious, which is engagement with unseen forces or supernatural agents and dealing with uncertainty, then yeah, shamanism would be an example of religion. It's I enter a non-ordinary state to engage with supernatural agents and help you deal with some uncertainty.
Brent:
[45:37] And then would that be, could you still agree with that statement if religion has to be part of a larger practice and shamanism is just one element of that practice?
Manvir:
[45:49] Yeah, so if you say, for instance, that religion needs to be an institution with some centralized authority, then is that maybe what you're thinking?
Brent:
[45:59] I'd probably go somewhere in the middle of that. Maybe not full institution, but this is a way to practice a broader ideology.
Manvir:
[46:08] Yeah well so yeah i don't think so i think you can have shamans without some kind of shared consensus of like this is a particular we all understand ourselves to be practicing religion x um and i think in fact that many shamans have existed in contexts where people don't have some shared sense of like we are followers of you know ideology or movement why um, Yeah, but at the same time, I think shamanism has been very important in the emergence of a lot of institutionalized religion. I think a lot of founders of institutionalized religions have been shamans.
Brent:
[46:47] Honestly. Would you call Moses a shaman?
Manvir:
[46:52] Well the key thing is like so most if we look at the definition of shaman, it's a specialist who enters non-ordinary states to provide services like healing and divination so moses is divining right and he's divining through an engagement sorry it's three things specialist is or a shaman is altered states engagement with supernatural agents or unseen realities services. Moses, we have engagement with supernatural agents. We have divination, prophecy. So the question is, did that involve altered states? I don't know enough about, descriptions of Moses in the Hebrew Bible, but I would say there's compelling evidence that many other Hebrew prophets were shamans. I mean, there's music, they're taking off their clothes, or ecstatic behavior is very core to their whole performance and existence. So I think many Hebrew prophets were definite shamans. And I think this idea that they were not reflects more a bias that has pushed shamans to be non-western exotic you know it's wrapped up in all this primitivist imagery but when you look at everything we call a shaman you define it then
Manvir:
[48:08] so much other stuff also becomes shamanism definitely.
Keller:
[48:11] And looking at like the actual communities where shamans exist, what is the process to become a shot like in so much but hey like i'm gonna i want to be a shaman that's i think that's what i want to be or does they have to be some kind of calling or a selection process like how does that work.
Manvir:
[48:28] So it's incredibly varied um it could be you know you start to act super strange and you become incredibly sick and you run away into the forest um and that is seen as a sign it could be that you elect you say i want to become a shaman and you have to amass a huge amount of resources and find a teacher and then you know observe taboos for a long time and have a number of ceremonies. It could be that you elect, you have a death and rebirth ceremony, a shaman spits in your mouth. That actually happens in some groups. Yeah, so it can be incredibly varied. What I think a lot of them share, however, is some sense that this person has become a different kind of a human, that they have undergone some kind of fundamental transformation, or they're different from normal humans. And then if we come back to the Brent example where Brent is like.
Manvir:
[49:23] I can, you know, talk to the rain goddess. I would be like, Brent, I know you're a regular guy. But if before that, you know, you had a ceremony where you were buried alive and, or it was understood that you were taken to the desert and your body was cut open and crystals were put inside your body, or you were an ascetic for several weeks or months, or you've been taking hallucinogens every, you know, every couple of days for a year, then I would be like, okay, yeah, he has departed from normal humanness. It is more compelling, more tenable, more credible that he has these abilities he claims. So that is what I think is very important to a lot of shamanic practice, this transformation both through altered states, but also through this kind of initiation.
Keller:
[50:07] And is that departure generally singular? Like in the Brent example, once he becomes the shaman, is that the only state that I'll interact with him? Or is it going to be, he will do a ceremony for the River Goddess on Friday, and then on Saturday we'll go get coffee, and it would be as if he was a quote-unquote regular member of the community.
Manvir:
[50:28] I think it can be both. But the second, where you're getting coffee, is kind of the setup in Mentawe, or among the Mentawe. So they have these, to become a shaman, a lot of what I said you have to do. You have to, you know, observe a lot of taboos. You sometimes have to build a house in the forest and be alone there. You have to host a number of trance dancing ceremonies you have to find a teacher and then what's very important is that they transform your eyes they take you into the forest they apply all kinds of substances to your eyes they bring you back in public and they treat your eyes in front of everyone and the eye the idea is that your eyes are being transformed from normal eyes into eyes that can see souls and spirits and so on the other side yeah brent if brent had undergone this he would come out what they call a sikere. He would have these special abilities. He would have different eyes. It's understood that his whole constitution is different. If he eats certain foods now, he will get very sick or potentially die. He can't have eels and gibbons and white monkeys. And then during healing ceremonies, he will sometimes fall into trance. He will deny himself food and sex. But other times, in the morning, he might come over and we'll have some of the anthropologist cookies and bring
Manvir:
[51:42] some coffee and just chat about chat about life.
Keller:
[51:45] So yeah super interesting and do shamans always well and this might be a very subjective question but do they always believe that the powers that that the audience believes them to have they have themselves yeah.
Manvir:
[51:56] That so that is a very complicated question um, So shamans, I'll say evidence before and against that. So on the one hand, shamans engage in a lot of sleight of hand. This is well documented in the anthropological record. There's a famous example where this one shaman initiate was taught that when you're sucking illness out of someone's body, you want to take some down, feathery down, put that in your mouth, bite on your mouth to get it all bloody, and then you suck on whatever part of their body hurts and you pull it out. And you say, that's the illness, there it is. And this kind of sleight of hand occurs in many contexts and has been well documented. On the other hand, someone might do that, and then they get sick two days later and they'll go to the shaman. Their child will get sick, and in the privacy of their own house, they will do their shamanic techniques.
Manvir:
[52:51] There is a famous book that is essentially an autobiography of a Kwakwaka shaman from the Pacific Northwest where he starts and he says, I didn't know if shamans were for real, so I wanted to become one. And he's the person who describes this technique of biting down on your mouth. And he's skeptical, but then he also starts to believe later because he sees his patients becoming healed or at least recovering sometimes after his interventions. So I think their belief is complicated, but I do think they often believe at
Manvir:
[53:27] least partly in their powers or in others' powers.
Brent:
[53:30] Do you think shamans created the placebo effect i.
Manvir:
[53:33] Think shamans leveraged the placebo effect.
Brent:
[53:35] Yeah yeah for sure yeah.
Keller:
[53:37] And then looking at you mentioned psychedelics as one kind of route to get to these altered states could you give us i guess a brief background like how psychedelics have been used in that context throughout history and i might be like that's very broad but i guess like is there a spark spark notes on that yeah.
Manvir:
[53:55] So let's say there are two ways we can define psychedelics or which people talk about psychedelics. One is hallucinogens more generally, and then one is classic psychedelics, serotonergic psychedelics, psychedelics that, you know, things like LSD, psilocybin, psilocin, bifotinine, 5-MeO-DMT, DMT, what people are often talking about when they talk about psychedelics. So this category, there are a lot of claims that shamans around the world and throughout history have used psychedelics. Evidence of classic psychedelic use is very, very limited. Probably 5% of groups in the Americas, ethnolinguistic groups in the Americas, we have reliable evidence of them using classic psychedelics.
Manvir:
[54:40] Reliable evidence outside the Americas doesn't exist. Maybe there was a paper last year that reported potentially some use in Southern Africa, but it's unclear. What does that look like? It's incredibly varied. I would say the most common and important dimension of it for shamanic ceremonies is the shaman consuming the psychedelic and using it to enter a non-ordinary state and engage with unseen realities and derive powers from it. So I consume the psychedelic. Now I can, you know, summon souls and have them attack people. I can diagnose illness so I can see illness in my body or other people's bodies. I can see the future. I can speak to beings, et cetera. So that's one really important one. There is some evidence of consumption by patients, but there is, so that's like what's very big right now in psychedelic assisted psychotherapy in the West, but that seems to be quite uncommon historically. Then there are all kinds of other interesting uses. There's recreational use. So there's one group, the Pume in Venezuela. They have a Yopo snuff. It's a snuff, probably mostly Bufotenin, maybe a little 5-MeO, DMT and DMT. Every third night, all of the men have dances that go the entire night where they take maybe several blasts of yopo.
Keller:
[56:09] Every third night of like every week?
Manvir:
[56:11] 33% of nights.
Brent:
[56:13] What?
Keller:
[56:13] All adult men are taking several blasts of yopo in.
Manvir:
[56:16] All night dances. And what's striking about the pume is that the pume, to my understanding, really live on the edge of subsistence. It's a hard life being a pume person. And nevertheless, they're using a huge amount of energy to have these literally psychedelic-fueled parties every third night. Um, that's one example, something that I had seen with my colleague in our travels throughout Columbia are apprenticeships where you have a non-shaman who will find a shaman and they will take psychedelics or they will take, for example, Yopo with, um, copy, the vine that is a part of ayahuasca. Uh, they might take that and then have trips and then discuss them. And it's, it's a very mystical experience. You know, you want to use it to understand reality. There are um practices in which groups of of men organized by a leader would take, uh yahé essentially ayahuasca where you have dmt and you have copy and um in ritual ceremonial context and understand themselves to be traveling through the universe going past the milky way it's a very ritualistic practice so it's hugely variable but what I often find in the conversation about psychedelics, right now is that.
Manvir:
[57:39] Clinical applications today that are very popular are an echo or a mirror of uses throughout history and across cultures, and that is a total misrepresentation. Patients taking psychedelics, especially for something like psychological healing, is very rare historically. But you have much more interesting and varied use beyond that.
Brent:
[57:59] Yeah. And then you said it multiple times throughout there, men doing the thing. Could you describe about the sex differences between men and women taking psychedelics?
Manvir:
[58:08] Yeah, so we're actually, potentially, we applied for funding through UC Davis to investigate this further.
Manvir:
[58:18] But in the communities that I have visited, and about which I have read, consumption of psychedelics by women is incredibly rare. Um so i we had even gone to a community two years ago where in eastern columbia where um so do you all know how ayahuasca works very loosely okay so you make ayahuasca from two ingredients dmt which is essentially the psychedelic and an maoi um so this essentially just helps the trip last much longer in very simple terms. And so something really interesting that they were saying is that they sometimes take the MAOI alone for psychoactive effects, which isn't really talked about or documented elsewhere. And it's kind of unclear, but they said that women, even then women will only take it in very small doses just to deal with stomach illness but even they they wouldn't even take the the maoi in in high doses so there is, an interesting trend where psychedelic use as far as we currently know but you know again we want to do this more systematically seems very male biased interesting.
Keller:
[59:28] And looking at like some of the modern applications of psychedelics and i guess like the efforts to, commercialize maybe a word to use is a lot of them seem to from what i haven't looked into it very much but what i've seen is that they're trying to kind of take away some of the psychoactive components and just kind of especially here at davis get to the underlying kind of effects, what thoughts if any do you have on that because to me that seems like you're almost like cheating or like the the reason that these things are claimed to work in the way that they do for, potential benefits to your health or your spirit whatever is because of the potential pain points of the actual psychoactive component.
Manvir:
[1:00:15] Yeah.
Manvir:
[1:00:18] When I think about that, I immediately think of shamanism.
Manvir:
[1:00:25] If we come back to Brent's earlier question about is shamanism the original placebo effect or something like that? I forget the exact wording. What I think shamanism is very powerful at doing is creating very powerful, immersive, rich sensory experiences that change your story about yourself. I come in, I feel like I'm being haunted by witches, or I think a crocodile god is living in my house and punishing us, and the shaman enters another state. There's music, there's touch, there's performance, and the witches are battled, or the crocodile spirit is removed from my house. It is an incredibly powerful experience that helps change my story about myself and i think some i think psychedelic assisted psychotherapy that involves the subjective effects is also often doing that it's like of it's the the power of the sensory experience or the power of your subjective experience that is potent for changing your story about yourself now if it's the case that these psychoplastogens these psychedelics that have these effects without the subjective experience are as effective for changing your story about yourself for for shifting your narrative then i'm all for that um but my research on shamanism if anything has really led me to appreciate how important a powerful subjective experience can be for healing that especially works through changing harmful self-narratives yeah.
Brent:
[1:01:50] I think that just makes perfect sense if you look at typical neuroscience like what memories last longer are stronger it's one that are highly emotional like there's so many other ways of like showing like you kind of need to experience the thing and believe in the thing to then like reap the benefits of the thing.
Manvir:
[1:02:07] Right right so.
Brent:
[1:02:08] It's it's interesting because so is davis primarily looking at like removing the psychoactive part or like the subjective like experience part of these psychedelics to then try to create therapies.
Manvir:
[1:02:21] Well some of the some of the leading research on psychoplastogens these psychedelics without subjective experience has been happening at davis but the institute over here for psychedelics and neurotherapeutics i mean they were very enthusiastic for me and my research to to contribute so i think they're very much down with with research beyond just these yeah you know non-subjective psychedelics. But yeah, a lot of that... David Olson, who is the director of the center, I think has done a lot of really important work on these psychoplastogens.
Brent:
[1:02:55] I could also see that being funded a lot easier. Yeah, yeah, for sure.
Manvir:
[1:03:00] Yeah.
Keller:
[1:03:01] Then looking at, obviously...
Keller:
[1:03:03] Nearby silicon valley and there's what seems to be a massive trend now of ceos going down and taking an ayahuasca trip or even having like live-in shamans with them do you like what do you think about that like recreational use which in some ways seems like you know the ceos are maybe trying to tap into a more human nature and try to be better people but in some ways it also seems like they're doing it for that keyword of being better and they're doing it as a way to kind of reach something higher that is in any ways the opposite of what the experience should be.
Manvir:
[1:03:44] Um i mean and to be totally honest i if someone wants to go and use a psychedelic for whatever their personal goals are i don't think there is like you know what it should or should not be honestly um because again i think the use in these societies that have where it seems to have been used is incredibly diverse and people are often using it like i think sometimes there's this narrative over here that people don't use it for recreational purposes over there but you know in groups that we visit in columbia people will say you know we take it to loosen our tongue a little we take like a small dose to just make conversation a bit more fun um so i think the the use is quite varied um and yeah i i i don't think it's a it's like a blasphemy for them to do that.
Brent:
[1:04:30] Yeah do you think without the proper understanding of like the history though it's easier to like abuse those in environments or like especially the stuff that comes to mind for me just these like retreats yeah insert your stereotype of people going down there to experience this retreat and coming out of it someone completely different like, do you think they're losing the lack of understanding of like what this was actually supposed to be like takes away from their ability to like truly understand or like what they're doing or like how to get the most out of it.
Manvir:
[1:05:07] Well i think it does have a couple consequences in that vein i think one is that, creates this sense that what you are experiencing and what you're engaging in is this true, ancient, super legitimate way of being, when in fact that is something that is very constructed for your particular demographic and a reflection of the modern world.
Manvir:
[1:05:40] And so I think there's a bit of self-delusion that can come away when you engage in one of these retreats and you feel yourselves to be tapping into some millennium old knowledge. But then I also think that when you drape something in the language of ancientness and authenticity, it also allows for the people running it to maybe be more exploitative. You know, oh, I, you know, we've always had to touch people and, you know, massage them at this point of the ceremony or whatever.
Manvir:
[1:06:13] Yeah, I think that, so I think that that language can be dangerous in a couple of ways. Yeah. And I think it also, so one thing I had read about is that in these retreats, people will go down and there will be a lot of curation of who they're talking to and what they're talking about. Because it's the case that in many of these societies, ayahuasca is closely linked to witchcraft. You consume ayahuasca to identify witches, to battle witches. And it leads to this whitewashing of the practice and this perception that this practice is wholly good and beneficial and insight-driven, which I think not only misrepresents what the experience is like, but it also makes you feel like, oh, if I had this dark experience, is that something twisted about me? And it's like, actually, no, that's a very common feature. That's what it's often used for. Yeah, so I think there are all kinds of issues that come from selling something with this very ancient... Imagery yeah.
Brent:
[1:07:12] And then on that notion of selling something they are becoming a lot more popular like davis is funding the research like trying to create therapeutics how do you suggest biomedicine approach a lot of these substances in order to get like the best possible outcome for the patients for the people who make them or like from or the traditions that they come from.
Manvir:
[1:07:35] Yeah well i guess two things come to mind one is not feeling so obliged to say that what we're engaging in is some echo of an ancient practice um not only because that misrepresents but that's also constraining you know if if this is what the eternal practice is then it allows us to be less experimental less exploratory um although and then secondly i do think there is actually value in having a better sense of the psychopharmacology that is understood in these communities so you know, one of the communities that I've been visiting in Colombia and with whom I've also taken Yopo.
Manvir:
[1:08:14] I was very struck by their sophisticated understanding of, and it makes sense, but of, you know, first you will see the shapes and then there's a moment between the shapes and the more chaotic part where you really need to focus on what you want out of this experience because if you don't, your mind can scatter and you'll get lost. Um and i didn't really take the suggestion so seriously and i had a terrible experience i was vomiting on the floor and like um but but i mean they have an incredible sense of psychopharmacology an incredible sense of of what the cognitive trajectory is and i think um yeah i think there's potential value in in engaging with that and and yeah tapping on what they have also learned in the same way that the underground here has learned a lot about how these substances work and codified that knowledge i mean people who have been taking it for a long time regardless of where they are have a have a great understanding of how to use it and how it can go awry.
Keller:
[1:09:10] Yeah and are there yeah i guess consistent ways to measure psychoactive and i don't want to like harp on that necessarily too much but like on any i guess like altered state maybe and like are there consistencies of how you measure, I don't know if depth is the right word, but like the separation from like what we would consider reality in the regular plane.
Manvir:
[1:09:33] So there are all kinds of, well, I guess the two that come to mind are one is that there are all kinds of questionnaires. There's like the mystical experience questionnaire, the MEQ, which, you know, you fill out and, I hopefully have some sense of what your experience was like. There are all kinds of questionnaires that are being developed to try to capture the dimensions of your experience. And then there's also, of course, different neuroimaging techniques, which are a separate approach. But yeah, I think right now what people really rely on are these surveys. Although one thing that we've published is, by looking at the descriptions that you find in ethnography, you discover that a lot of the questionnaires that are commonly used in psychedelic trials actually leave out certain kinds of experiences like violence um i forget the other ones but violence was a big one that is common in a lot of these narratives but missing from how we are measuring these experiences do.
Brent:
[1:10:26] You think that's because like the people creating them maybe don't have the experience with them or they don't have a understanding of the culture like all the people who do have deep experience with them or where do you think that gap's coming from.
Manvir:
[1:10:38] Well i guess A couple thoughts come to mind. One is it might be, in fact, that the set and setting of psychedelic use in other societies maybe predisposes them to be more about violence. You think you're sick, you have this experience, you want to contend with that, or you have this experience to contend with that violence. Another is maybe that's an aspect of the experience that, especially if you are someone who's very enthusiastic about a broader acceptance of psychedelics, you as a researcher don't really want to focus on. Maybe it's, you know, in your published materials, maybe you're less interested in sharing the fact that these experiences can often go in a more violent direction.
Manvir:
[1:11:19] The third is maybe these are common experiences and people just aren't aware of them because they haven't thought to probe them maybe they haven't had those experiences and.
Keller:
[1:11:32] And when we were preparing for this episode, we saw that you had this poem online of, can we learn to be happy and make friends? I don't want to put you on the spot of necessarily having to recite it, but could you give some variation of it so that we can kind of have that on the recording of the core?
Manvir:
[1:11:49] I honestly do not remember that at all. I only read zero. I'm sorry.
Brent:
[1:11:53] Oh, really?
Manvir:
[1:11:53] Yeah, I don't remember that performance.
Brent:
[1:11:57] Super interesting. Yeah.
Keller:
[1:11:58] It was really good.
Brent:
[1:11:59] Yeah, it was fun.
Keller:
[1:12:00] I'm glad.
Manvir:
[1:12:00] Well, I used to do a lot of spoken word poetry. So, yeah.
Keller:
[1:12:04] Yeah.
Brent:
[1:12:05] What's the goal when you write the poems?
Manvir:
[1:12:10] My story with writing the poems is that I did a lot of spoken word when I was an undergrad. And then I went to nationals with my team and didn't do very well at nationals and was totally disheartened. And then I moved to Copenhagen and was doing spoken word there. And I felt like no one could understand me. So, I might as well just have fun. And then I started writing this like really weird stuff. I would allow it to be going totally strange directions and just write whatever. And it was not only super fun for me, but actually people really enjoyed it. Um and so after i came back from copenhagen i think my goal was to be artistic be creative um have fun and also i i did a lot during my phd so like a way of socializing and building community but i i shifted much more from the competitive scene after college.
Brent:
[1:13:00] I didn't know there was a competitive scene.
Manvir:
[1:13:02] Yeah how.
Keller:
[1:13:03] Is that like like what was the winning just on like crowd votes.
Manvir:
[1:13:08] Yeah yeah so you have some number of judges in the crowd so this was slam this was so i i was doing slam poetry um and even my brand of spoken word was not super slammish which is maybe why i didn't do super well in the competitive scene but um yeah you have some number of judges in the audience who are often just chosen randomly who here wants to be a judge or like you know you go around you give people can you be a judge um and then after a performance they give it as a score on on zero to 10 and they raise it in the air and so it'll be like 9.5 8.9 7.3 you know whatever and then they'll be like an average of 8.7 super.
Keller:
[1:13:49] Interesting yeah are there other ways you've maintained like outside of spoken word poetry you've maintained that creativity in your work at the school there
Keller:
[1:13:58] ways you integrate that in your research.
Manvir:
[1:14:00] Yeah i mean so I guess from spoken word I shifted more into popular writing so now I do a lot of, I mean the book was kind of an opportunity to channel some of that writing but now I also do a lot of writing for the New Yorker which is a very different mode of writing it's much more, essay-ish and you know a bit more academic but you you still get to have some fun and yeah i i love like how do you structure a story what stories do you tell um how do you shift from, a really interesting anecdote into a larger a larger lesson so so that is where that that energy has shifted for now.
Brent:
[1:14:40] I think could you describe your book real quick because i don't.
Manvir:
[1:14:43] Yeah yeah so my book is shamanism the timeless religion it comes out on may 20th so depending on on whenever this drops, it may have come out or might soon come out. It is about how shamanism is this hyper-compelling package of practices and beliefs that humans have developed everywhere, that it probably characterizes the earliest religion, that it was ubiquitous, but it still manifests in all of these unrecognized ways around us, and it will probably forever reemerge. And it talks a lot I mean a lot of the storytelling in the beginning is stuff that I write about in the book so it's a bit of like fieldwork memoir but also telling other anthropologist stories but then also making this argument that
Manvir:
[1:15:29] shamanism forever re-emerges Awesome.
Keller:
[1:15:32] Wonderful and then as we wrap up do you have any advice to the listeners whether that be how they can approach their studies of anthropology or just approach life broadly Life advice?
Manvir:
[1:15:50] I do feel a little like who am I to give advice I'm just like a dude trying to do his thing but, probably following things you find really interesting and allowing yourself to be super interested in things, honestly something that has been really good for me is just like reading, deeply but in a lot of topics um and like reading books that other people aren't reading um so i i work in anthropology and i find that i spend a lot of time in grad school just like reading up ethnographies and it gave me a lot of understanding for human diversity that sometimes i think some other scholars uh lack i mean they also have many things that i do not have, But that has been one thing that's been useful for me.
Keller:
[1:16:40] Do you have any favorite books? Not to like, if you don't remember now, it doesn't matter. But do you have any favorite books from that time that really like helped change your perspective?
Manvir:
[1:16:48] The Sambia. I forget what the subtitle is. Something like gender and ritual in a New Guinean society or something. The Sambia is a wild book.
Brent:
[1:16:58] Okay. Perfect.
Keller:
[1:17:00] Love to give it a look.
Brent:
[1:17:01] Well, thank you for coming on today. Yeah, thanks for having me.
Manvir:
[1:17:04] This was a lot of fun.
Keller:
[1:17:05] Sweet.