The cultural evolution of shamanism

Bibliographic Data

ID23344476
AuthorsManvir Singh (0000-0002-6026-947X, Harvard University, corresponding author)
Year2018
Volume41
Pagese66-e66
Publication date2018-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueBehavioral and Brain Sciences (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0140-525X • E-ISSN: 1469-1825
PublisherCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s0140525x17001893
PMID28679454
OpenAlexW2727508439
LanguageEN
Citations received67
References cited240

Shamans, including medicine men, mediums, and the prophets of religious movements, recur across human societies. Shamanism also existed among nearly all documented hunter-gatherers, likely characterized the religious lives of many ancestral humans, and is often proposed by anthropologists to be the “first profession,” representing the first institutionalized division of labor beyond age and sex. In this article, I propose a cultural evolutionary theory to explain why shamanism consistently develops and, in particular, (1) why shamanic traditions exhibit recurrent features around the world; (2) why shamanism professionalizes early, often in the absence of other specialization; and (3) how shifting social conditions affect the form or existence of shamanism. According to this theory, shamanism is a set of traditions developed through cultural evolution that adapts to people's intuitions to convince observers that a practitioner can influence otherwise unpredictable, significant events. The shaman does this by ostensibly transforming during initiation and trance, violating folk intuitions of humanness to assure group members that he or she can interact with the invisible forces that control uncertain outcomes. Entry requirements for becoming a shaman persist because the practitioner's credibility depends on his or her “transforming.” This contrasts with dealing with problems that have identifiable solutions (such as building a canoe), in which credibility hinges on showing results and outsiders can invade the jurisdiction by producing the outcome. Shamanism is an ancient human institution that recurs because of the capacity of cultural evolution to produce practices adapted to innate psychological tendencies.

Aesthetics · Archaeology · Credibility · Environmental ethics · Epistemology · Shamanism · Sociology · Trance · Anthropology · Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation · Evolutionary Psychology and Human Behavior · History · Philosophy · Primate Behavior and Ecology · Psychology · Social Psychology

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