IN THIS EPISODE OF THE HUMAN UPGRADE™...

… you’ll find out about the relevance of shamanism in a modern world and why high performers are turning toward shamanic practices to get ahead.

The show’s guest, Manvir Singh, Ph.D., is an anthropologist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse, France. He studies universal or near-universal cultural practices, including music, shamanism, and witchcraft. For the past seven years, he’s conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Indonesia.

He recently wrote an article in WIRED magazine titled, “The Shamanification of the Tech CEO,” noting some curious parallels.

“Silicon Valley austerity continues to grow more extreme. By 2020 intermittent fasting was no longer enough, and dopamine fasting—an abstention not just from food but from any form of stimulation, including music, eye contact, and playing Magic: The Gathering—had taken off. These self-denial fads are often touted as biohacking innovations. Yet as an anthropologist who has studied austerity in some of the most remote regions of the world, I see them as part of a larger pattern: the self-shamanification of tech CEOs.”

“Analyzing an old dataset of 43 nonindustrial societies, I found that shamans in 81 percent of the societies observed prohibitions on food, sex, or social contact. Given that these data were collated from reports by travelers and anthropologists, they are probably an underestimate. Silicon Valley deprivation, it turns out, is less a strange, new development and more the most recent manifestation of a ubiquitous shamanic practice.”

This conversation gets into:

shamanism in general
the cultural significance of shamans
how shamanic practices have made their way into modern culture
why humans think they need shamans—or similar “magic” or “other” beings

More about Manvir Singh, Ph.D.: Manvir earned a Ph.D. in Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University and a Sc.B. with Honors in Human Biology: Evolution, Environment, & Ecosystems at Brown University. He’s received multiple awards, honors, grants and fellowships—from Fulbright Scholarship to visiting scholar and research fellow. He’s written more than a dozen peer-reviewed journal articles and more than a dozen articles for general audiences. He gives talks domestically and internationally on the topic of shamans.

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#72: Represent: 2017 in Review