Shamanism and the Art of Charismatic Otherness with Manvir Singh

Decoding the Gurus

Christopher Kavanagh and Matthew Browne

Science, Leisure, Social Sciences, Society & Culture

4.2 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 7 June 2025

⏱️ 82 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The Decoders welcome back cognitive anthropologist Manvir Singh for a continued exploration into the social and cognitive dimensions of shamanism. Building upon their earlier conversation, this episode involves further discussion of the psychological mechanisms and cultural patterns that make shamanic practices a recurring feature across human societies. Drawing from Singh's latest book, Shamanism: The Timeless Religion (2025), the discussion addresses how these ancient practices persist and adapt in modern contexts.

Taking our standard meandering conversational journey with Manvir, we traverse topics such as whether Jesus and the Buddha were shamans, the parallels between the Siberian tundra and Silicon Valley, the potential emergence of AI-driven shamans within virtual reality environments, and whether dialogos with Hermes counts as a soul flight.

Something for all the family!

Links

Shamanism: The Timeless Religion by Manvir Singh (2025)
Prof or Hobo website
New Yorker: The President Who Became a Prophet
Our first interview with Manvir
Buckner, William. 2022. "A Deceptive Curing Practice in Hunter–Gatherer Societies" Humans 2, no. 3: 95-103. https://doi.org/10.3390/humans2030007

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	I'm Hello and welcome to decoding the gurus with the psychologist Matthew Brown in Australia,
0:36.4	the anthropologist of sorts working in the psychology department.
0:41.5	Me, Christopher Kavana in Japan, and today we have returning guest anthropologist slash psychologists slash cross-cultural researcher evolutionary theorist
0:58.2	Manvir Singh. Second time Manvier has been here.
1:02.5	We didn't scare him away the first time. But the first time, Matt was too drunk to attend
1:07.2	and he missed it. So now he's nice chance to meet up for it.
1:11.6	I was ill from something, yes. I was performing my important rituals. That's just
1:19.2	leave it at that. Good day, Manvi, good to see you. Yeah, good to see you too. Thank you for having me on again.
1:24.6	Yeah, it's a good, you have a book coming out, but actually, it's just a good excuse to
1:30.6	talk to you again, because we, we have a official policy.
1:35.0	It comes down from the higher-ups, you know, we can't, we can't mess with them.
1:38.2	And they tell us we're not allowed to do book promotions, but, you know, we're rebels.
1:44.0	We can push back. We make exceptions. So I'm
1:46.7	very happy to talk to you about your book and do our part in like encouraging people to read
1:53.8	it. But yeah, you're in the category of special people, Matt. There you get an exception from.
2:00.5	Thank you. Yeah exception from, yeah.
2:04.0	So what did you guys talk about in the last episode? Like what, what were the key things
2:08.5	that you covered? I mean, it was so long ago. Are you testing, I guess what? Do you think he
2:12.4	remembers? He read back and reviewed it? Fortunately, I did because it's the kind of thorough person I am.
2:20.9	But we were talking about shamanism, but mainly around Mandir's article in behavioral brain science
2:29.1	and in the context of it being like an early developing profession.
2:33.6	And then all the things as well.
	...

Transcript will be available on the free plan in 9 days. Upgrade to see the full transcript now.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Christopher Kavanagh and Matthew Browne, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Christopher Kavanagh and Matthew Browne and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.