JOSH: Hello, and welcome to Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg, the podcast about ideas that matter. I'm Josh Castle, the producer of the podcast, and I'm so glad you've joined us today! In this episode, Spencer speaks with Manvir Singh about western misconceptions of horticorturalist cultures, the anthropology of small-scale societies, shamanic practices, and the moralization of taboos.

SPENCER: Manvir, welcome.

MANVIR: Thanks for having me.

SPENCER: Do people in the West often misunderstand tribal cultures?

MANVIR: What do you mean by tribal culture?

SPENCER: Well, I guess the Western idea of a tribal culture is a group of people that are living fairly isolated lives, disconnected from modern economies, not so influenced by Western media and so on.

MANVIR: I think a group like that is very hard to find in the modern world. I think the idea that there are even groups like that is increasingly a misconception.

SPENCER: See, that's fascinating, because I think a lot of people believe that there are these groups that are really, truly disconnected.

MANVIR: Maybe there are these so-called uncontacted groups that you might find in parts of the Amazon or maybe parts of Borneo or possibly parts of New Guinea, but it's very hard to find such groups. I'll give you an example. I have a good friend, Luke Glowacki. He is an anthropologist at Boston University. He has been working among these pastoralists in East Africa, kind of at the border of Kenya, South Sudan, and Ethiopia, since around 2010, maybe late 2000s. When he first started working in this part of the world, he was interested in it because this was very remote. This is a part of the world where there was still tribal warfare. That's what he was interested in, kind of warfare outside of the state. He tells the story about people seeing a yellow plastic bag for the first time. I think they called it a container of sunshine, something like that. But now, if you go to Nagatom country, there are roads. People have clothes; they're much more connected to the world economy. I just use that as an example of a person who really deliberately tried to find a very remote part of the world where you still have tribal warfare, and even that has been utterly changed. So, I talk about in my book, Shamanism: The Timeless Religion, when I first started to conduct fieldwork. I've been conducting fieldwork in western Indonesia in the Mentawai archipelago since 2014, and I had expected to find a group like the one you described, not part of the world economy, kind of isolated, and that is not at all what I found. I found radios. I found people who wanted education. I found clothes. There are people who still practice an indigenous religion; they hunt, they have a very subsistence-based lifestyle, but they're so connected with the global economy and with the political world.

SPENCER: So, how would you describe groups in the Mentawai that you've studied?

MANVIR: In anthropology, in at least my sub-discipline of anthropology, I think there are a couple of ways that people often describe such societies. One is a small-scale society. When people talk about small-scale societies, they mean those in which most interactions are with a small group of people, and you know them quite well. You don't interact often with anonymous strangers. People also often talk about societies based on their subsistence. The Mentawai are what we would call forager horticulturalists, meaning that they hunt and gather, but they also plant. They do small-scale gardening. The staple of the diet is a Sago palm. It's a big palm tree. They take out the pith and turn that into flour. They also have a bunch of tubers and fruits. They are a small-scale society, foraging and horticulture. But these kinds of concepts are becoming complicated because, like peoples everywhere, the Mentawai are also increasingly becoming incorporated into global markets and the state.

SPENCER: Do you think they're being influenced by Western culture?

MANVIR: There are many examples. One example that comes to mind is, and I think this is happening everywhere, female upper body nudity. Even in my early days in Mentawai, you would see a lot of women who were not wearing shirts, who were kind of openly breastfeeding, but even when they weren't breastfeeding, weren't wearing shirts. Now, the last time I went last summer, you really almost see no one who is bare-chested. They are also impacted by Indonesian norms and Islamic norms, so I wouldn't say it's just Western culture, but it is these dominant, globalized cultures. That's one way. My first summer there, no one had a phone. Now everyone has phones. Not everyone, but a lot of people have phones. They have WhatsApp. Related to that, I remember I went one summer and the Internet came, and people had phones, and then you also saw a lot of teenage boys going there and downloading pornography. It's innumerable and countless the ways that they are being shaped and impacted by the global dominant cultures, Christianity and Islam. Those are two big things also.

SPENCER: Do you have a sense of whether it's a completely shocking change to them? I mean, you can imagine going from a small-scale forager society to suddenly having the global Internet.

MANVIR: I think it's pretty shocking, but at the same time, when I was born, America Online happened when I was a kid, and now I have a phone.

SPENCER: That's true, but they jump forward, yeah? We kind of got it slowly, gradually over our lives. And they just got, all of a sudden, the entire thing.

MANVIR: Yeah. But I mean, at the same time, this is the complicated thing. You go there, and most of their calories are probably coming from sago palms and foraging. I think it's shocking. You will hear people say, "My father lived in the forest. Now we don't live in the forest. Now we live in these villages. That's why everyone gets sick," or "My grandfather would climb trees to get honey. Now no one does that." They definitely recognize that there are monumental changes happening, but they're trying to take advantage of them. They're trying to position themselves well. I think it's shocking, but I think they're also trying to be strategic, like everyone.

SPENCER: What were you focusing on when you were with these people, and what was your daily life like there?

MANVIR: There are two main things that I've studied in my 10 years with the Mentawai. One has been indigenous religion: shamanism, local gods, taboos, and the other has been justice. When there's a conflict or an infraction, how do the communities deal with that? An average day has really changed a lot over the last 10 years. In the beginning, my second summer, for instance, I was just living with a family. I really just needed to learn the language, so I would wake up with them. We would all have food together. Honestly, I was bored a lot because I can't do a lot of what the Mentawai are doing. I can't hunt. I don't know how to process sago, or I very much did not at that point.

SPENCER: What's sago?

MANVIR: Sago is a palm tree. It's a big palm, and then you cut it down, take out the inside, and turn that into a flour, and that is the staple of the diet.

SPENCER: Some people have said that Westerners are kind of babies when they go to cultures like this, because we don't know how to do any of these things.

MANVIR: For sure. Yes, no doubt. I can't even walk very fast in the forest. Now, I'm pretty decent, but I still am quite slow in the forest. I'm not very good with a machete, but in the beginning, you are totally incompetent, and you are super lonely, you can't speak the language, you also cannot do anything. I remember I would want to do little drawings, just to be like I can do something, I can draw. But for sure, you were a baby. Now when I go, it's very different, because I not only have a network, but I know the language much better. I get up in the morning and I'll often have a project in mind, maybe I'm doing surveys about a local God, and then it's often the case that I'll have a project going on. But if there's a cool event, a healing ceremony, or a justice mediation, bride price mediation, or maybe they do these things where they make canoes and drag them down from the forest to the village. If there are these kinds of events, then I join and I take pictures and I take notes.

SPENCER: Tell us about bride price negotiations. What is that?

MANVIR: My daughter, for instance, is marrying your son. We will discuss how many resources you are going to give our family. We would negotiate over that. We want this many coconut trees. We want this many pigs. We want a motor, and it can become especially complicated if your son has impregnated my daughter, and now they have to get married, or we both want them to get married. But there's also an added fine for the shame of this.

SPENCER: Really? It gets priced in the shame.

MANVIR: For sure, yeah. I mean, the Mentawai is very litigious. Also, they find each other a bunch, and they fine each other for shame. They fine each other for inconvenience. They mostly fine each other for, "You destroyed my resources," or, "You physically hurt someone." But yeah, I once was supposed to meet someone, and I didn't. And then they later came and they were like, "We're fining you."

SPENCER: Wow. And who decides? Is there some kind of leader who says, "Yes, this is a valid fine," or is it bottom up?

MANVIR: It's bottom up. Well, so the way that it works is you can do it face-to-face. So I can come to you and I can say, "Spencer, you killed my pig. I want two pigs." Or I can send a mediator, and I can say, "Hey, mediator, go to Spencer, tell him that he has to give me my two pigs for killing my one pig." And then he'll go and he'll talk to you, and you'll maybe be angry, or you want to pay less. And then it'll go back and forth. And then eventually, if I get my resources, I'll pay the mediator a small amount, like a coconut tree.

SPENCER: And what if I refuse? What if I say, "No, I'm not going to give you any pigs?"

MANVIR: Then I have a couple options. One, I can seize pigs. That's called Tuka Ake. That means I just go and take the resource. Historically, you find this much more infrequently now, but I might go with a machete, and I might kill one of your pigs, or kill you, or slash you, or slash someone in your family, or I can just be like, "He doesn't care about our relationship. Then that's fine." Of course, I would be upset, but I would take that as an indication that you are no longer invested in us having a good relationship.

SPENCER: Is there some kind of shame that comes with refusing to negotiate that would cause your standing in the group to go down?

MANVIR: I thought there would be. I guess when I came in to study justice, I thought it would be enforced much more by the community, but I realized it's much more dyadic, kind of between negotiating partners or parties. I think that's actually reflective of the fact that people's individual relationships are so particular. For instance, maybe you don't want to pay me my pigs because there were accusations that my family engaged in witchcraft against yours. Or historically, we requested a very heavy bride price and then mistreated a woman from your family. There are all kinds of relational considerations between you and me that make it hard for other people to pass judgment or make inferences. It's more like, "Well, that's between them."

SPENCER: It seems in American culture, we expect justice to be something that's societal level. You take someone to court, or you call the police, whereas this seems like a very different take on justice, sort of a dyadic justice.

MANVIR: Sure. I mean, that was one of my major lessons from studying justice in society, that it's emergent, it's dyadic, it's not really community enforced. I think that's actually how justice works in a lot of societies. I have some papers on this where we've also looked at justice among Kiowa bison hunters and Nuer pastoralists in East Africa, and we find that this kind of dyadic justice is actually more common. Among the Kiowa, you do have some kind of community enforced justice, especially for what the anthropologist called crimes, like murder or ruining a bison hunt. There are some things that the entire society would come together to enforce, but the majority of things among the Kiowa, and almost everything I've seen among the Mentawai, with one exception, has been dyadic. The single exception, and I haven't seen this, I've just heard about it, was presumably someone who was thought to be engaging in witchcraft. It's rumors. My understanding is that in a different part of the island, this person was killed by the community. But again, it's rumors; that's not in my data set because I did not observe that. I did not interview the people who were a part of that.

SPENCER: Going back to the bride price. It seems that there are quite a number of cultures where there's an expected exchange of goods with marriage, and that sometimes they go towards the bride's family, sometimes they go to the groom's family. Do you know about the general research on that?

MANVIR: I had a piece in The New Yorker last year on the opposite institution, dowry. Bride price is where the groom's family pays the female's family. Dowry is where the female's family pays the groom's family. You find dowry more often in hierarchical societies, like India. Historically, there were many parts of the world that had dowry. Parts of Europe had it, colonial South America had dowry, and China had dowry. Now the stronghold of dowry is South Asia, and you find it in hierarchical societies, but you also find it in terms of market dynamics. Is there a market for women?

SPENCER: What do you mean by a market? Do you mean over supply relative to demand, or something else?

MANVIR: I guess it means kind of whose labor is valued. There's a general anthropological finding that in societies where women contribute more to agricultural labor, they are valued more, whereas in societies where men contribute much more to agricultural labor, women are treated worse. In plow societies, where you have plow agriculture, it really requires a lot of upper body strength. It favors male traits; those societies tend to treat women worse, whereas in societies that are host societies, both men and women can engage in agriculture, and they tend to treat women better. That's kind of an old anthropological wisdom, but it's also been supported by economic research. North India, where my family is historically from, is plow agricultural land, and it's also a place where you have the dowry, a place where you have femicide, and some people will argue that a lot of that stems from the fact that women's labor is valued less, that women are, in some ways, described as burdens.

SPENCER: It's an interesting example where the economics makes such a clear prediction that seems to match reality, where, "Oh wait, it turns out it's actually just boiling down to economic value, but that's having these huge cultural effects on how women are viewed."

MANVIR: Yeah, for sure. There are certainly, it's not like whether you have hoe agriculture or plow agriculture explains everything, but it's a strong effect, and it's consistent. I think it is a good example. The paper that demonstrated that recently got, it's a well-cited paper, but I agree. I think it's a striking example of how material conditions can shape the social and cultural world. It's kind of a Marxist view, in a way. You have the material economic conditions that then create the superstructural cultural world.

SPENCER: For particular bride price negotiations, what are they arguing about? Are they saying, "She's a really good, effective member of the community, so you should pay more?" What's the actual debate?

MANVIR: Oh, that's so funny. I like that. So what explains your interest in bride price?

SPENCER: I just think it's a fascinating microcosm of human psychology.

MANVIR: Okay, so there was one bride price discussion that I can remember that I observed for a long time. I took a lot of notes. I interviewed the people afterwards, and honestly, that was a case where a boy impregnated a girl. I think they were both in high school. So, I think "boy" and "girl" are to some degree justifiable. But a lot of that conversation was honestly about the boy's family claiming that they just did not have the resources. It was really the girl's family being like, "We need more. We need more." They want the girl's family to get married because that supports the woman, and she's pregnant, and there's a baby involved, but they also want to be paid the bride price and the added fine for this hassle. These kinds of cases often also involve something called ganti rugi. It's a new institution, but it comes from Indonesia and is supposed to cover all of the education that the girl has engaged in, but now she can't capitalize on. This girl has gone to middle school and high school, and the parents have put in so much money, but now she can't become a school teacher or get a government job, things that could lead to money. So they demand compensation for that. Anyway, the girl's family was demanding a lot. The boy's family said they did not have it. A lot of the conversation was, "What can you give us? Can you ask this member of your family to give us something?"

SPENCER: It's funny because it sounds much more like a negotiation over a purely material good, rather than a negotiation over a spiritual good or social good.

MANVIR: Yeah, it's very much a material good. I will say, when I came to Mentawai, people would often use this; they would even use the word price, the same word that they would use for the price of something that you would buy at a shop for bride price. And so I really had the sense of, "Okay, the boy's family gives the girl's family these resources, and they come out like that." But then I realized after observing weddings that there's actually much more transition or transfer of resources going both ways. So the boy's family is giving the girl's family the bride price, but then the girl's family is giving the boy's family pigs to be sacrificed and distributed among them. And then there are other gifts that go back to the girl's family, and then there are other gifts that go back to the boy's family. It's within the context of much more gift exchange to create relationships.

SPENCER: It's economic enmeshment between the two families.

MANVIR: Yes, yeah, yeah. But I mean, the interesting thing is, though, if you took a step back and you tallied it up, you don't need so many gifts to go back and forth. You could just say, "We'll give you X amount of money.' So which is only to say that I think it's not only a financial transaction or economic transfer, but also something symbolic about, "We're giving you this, you give us this," something about the action of gift giving. There's a long kind of anthropological literature on the power of gift giving, even in a very ritual sense, when it's reciprocated very soon afterwards, as a way of building relationships. You can think about Christmas.

SPENCER: It reminds me of the economists' take on gift giving. It's, "Well, how about instead of I give you a gift and you give me a gift, we both just exchange money with each other. But we don't even need to do that, because if we're going to give each other the same amount, we could just not do it at all."

MANVIR: Exactly, exactly. Yeah. So that logic only clearly fails to describe what humans are motivated to do.

SPENCER: You also mentioned toplessness, and I think that's a really interesting microcosm as well into human psychology. Because I think some people might take the view that, "Oh, well, women's breasts are inherently sexual," whereas other people say, "No, that's just a cultural phenomenon that they're being sexualized, and it's not inherent at all." And I'm wondering, having seen this culture and having seen them go through this shift, do you have a take on sort of how cultural things like that are?

MANVIR: So, okay, I will say, even though women cover themselves on the top, there was still a sense. So I remember talking to someone not too long ago, and he was like, "Can you please explain to me why Western women cover the tops?" But he was kind of talking about women who wear swimming bottoms, where you can see the upper thigh. So I guess, for the Mentawai, apparently, the upper thigh area is much more sexual and should be covered than the breasts, which is just to say that they also sexualize body parts. But interestingly, those that they sexualize are different.

SPENCER: So if there's universality, maybe it's not so much around which exact body parts are sexualized, but something about parts of the body being hidden and sexualized.

MANVIR: Well, here's what I think, just a quick hot take about the universality of modesty. I think the most universal modesty norm is hiding erections, which is to say there are many societies where you can see the penis, but you can't tell whether it's erect. I was going to first say that I think it's hiding genitalia, but I think that is the only one universal, and maybe women in front of men covering up their genitalia. So I don't think it's even necessarily about things that are covered being sexualized. I think parts of the body are sexualized and then they're covered, but you can also have parts that are uncovered but that are still sexualized.

SPENCER: I wonder if it goes both ways. Though, if a part of the body is covered by tradition, then it becomes sexualized. You hear about cases where, in cultures where they cover themselves very thoroughly, the elbow might be sexualized.

MANVIR: Yes. I remember when I was in middle school, I was watching an old episode of Cheers, and the character Cliff went wild after a woman exposed her shoulders. I remember finding that so weird, but I think it speaks to your point that, "Yeah, I guess that was at a time when shoulders were covered more or something, and just that glimpse of a shoulder got him all riled up."

SPENCER: You spent time with this culture in particular, and another culture as well, and I know that you have written about how people in the West bring a lot of misconceptions to these forager or horticulturalist groups. What are some of the biggest ones that you think they are bringing?

MANVIR: That's a good question. I think the biggest one, and it's the one that broadens the conversation we started, is that these groups are disconnected or separated from currents in the global world. I myself came to this community expecting to find people who lived in the forest and were relatively remote and governed themselves. And that's not what I found. In the beginning, I was struck and wondered, "I wanted to continue working here." With time, I began to realize that everyone in the world is connected, but that doesn't mean there isn't so much rich cultural depth and that they themselves continue to live a subsistence lifestyle. That's one thing. The Mentawai Islands are interesting. They are right off the west coast of Sumatra, but they are also world-class surf spots. You find surfers who come there, and you find other tourists. I talked to some of these tourists, and there's a sense that the outside world is destroying the Mentawai or that their culture is degrading and needs to be saved. But I think that sometimes fails to appreciate how people in these societies often really want to take advantage of things in the global economy and global market. They want soap, they want medicine, they want clothes. They want to educate their kids so that their kids can get jobs that pay them money so they can buy everything that I just described. They can buy motors, they can buy a bigger house. They can have lights, they can have electricity. So, I think the second misconception is that these people often need to be protected or their culture needs to be saved from outside global forces when, in fact, they often want to embrace them. There are a bunch of other ones I have in mind. I'll just mention one more for now, and that's that I think there are many societies that are egalitarian, but that doesn't mean that everyone is equal, that there are no differences in wealth, that there is no difference in property, that there aren't small power dynamics. I think really what's at the heart of egalitarianism — and this is an argument that other anthropologists make, like Chris von Rueden and Duncan Stibbard Hawkes — is a respect for autonomy. I think a lot of societies really prize not having other people telling them what to do or controlling their decision-making. They care about that more than they care about having an equal amount of resources.

SPENCER: Because you do hear people use these cultures as examples of egalitarianism and talk about how, in modern society, we've become less egalitarian in certain ways.

MANVIR: Yeah, I will say there is a lot of resource distribution or redistribution in these societies. Among Mentawai, if someone gets a pig, if someone goes on a big hunt, they get a pig, they get a monkey, they get a deer, they will distribute that meat through social networks. In other societies, if people try to get out of hand or become a bully or become dominant, they will be leveled. So I think there is some kind of status and resource leveling, but I think what people care more about is that we have no chiefs, that we have no boss, that we control our own time, that we are autonomous. When you do hear people complain about their confrontations with the outside world, it's often that they don't like having to go to a market and not being able to decide, "How much we sell our bananas for? Someone has to tell us how much we sell our bananas for, or the government says that we can't practice our indigenous religion." Those are the things that I think get them fired up.

SPENCER: So do they not have leaders?

MANVIR: They do, to some degree, but again, I'll say I don't think egalitarianism means a lack of leadership. People might have leaders in particular contexts, or they might have leaders who articulate the preferences of the group. The Mentawai traditionally have two kinds of leaders. They have Sikerei, and then they have what are often called Rimata. Sikerei are shamans, and that's kind of a spiritual leadership, and that's, of course, the thing that I have been very interested in and have written about. But then they also have these Rimatas. They have Sika Bucha or elders. The Rimatas might have ritual leadership during some time periods. The Sika Bucha might be able to transfer land or sell land, but the rimatta is still kind of a contextual leadership and the Sika Bucha, these elders, their leadership is still kind of contingent on the consensus of the group. It's never that an elder would give away land when no one else in the clan wanted to do so; they would be more articulating a consensus. If that's clear.

SPENCER: Do you think that people in the West use these kinds of stories of these small-scale cultures without really understanding them, just as fodder for making their particular argument?

MANVIR: Yeah, no doubt for sure, constantly. I think a lot of what we think about human diversity, small-scale societies, hunter-gatherers, traditional horticulturalists, a lot of what you read about them, a lot of the claims that are made about them are less reflections of the empirical reality and more because they serve some ideological, monetary, or political point. One thing that I write about in my book, Shamanism: The Timeless Religion, is the whole narrative about psychedelics. Psychedelics are becoming very popular right now. They're shifting from the counterculture to more mainstream, especially with their connection to therapy and mental health. A big part of that narrative, or a big part of that transition, are these claims that psychedelics have been used around the world for millennia. You find that constantly: psychedelics have been used around the world, societies around the world for thousands of years, often in therapeutic or shamanic contexts, and the reality is very different. Classic psychedelics, serotonergic psychedelics, like psilocybin, LSD, psilocin, DMT, have been used by very, very few cultures, or at least we have reliable evidence from very, very few cultures, and in the context that we're using them, are very different from the kinds of psychotherapeutic interventions that you see becoming popular in the West. It is often deeply tied to sorcery, to witchcraft. Even when it's not, you're less often giving it to the patient than it is the specialist taking this substance as a way of tapping into greater powers. I just mention this as one example of where there is a big misrepresentation of cultural diversity for what seems to be kind of an ideological point.

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SPENCER: One thing I've heard claimed about these cultures is that they nearly universally have a sense that nature is spiritual or mystical or alive. Do you think that's true, or do you think that's nonsense?

MANVIR: I think it's somewhat true. Many cultures attribute some kind of agency to the natural world, and the natural world is filled with entities that have souls or spirits, and those can be offended or not offended. I can speak best about the Mentawai. If you're building a new house and you've cut down all these trees and used all these leaves from Sago palms, a shaman will come in, a Sikerei will come in, and they'll do a ceremony to acquaint all of these substances or materials with each other. Each of these has its own kind of personality and soul, and they have to be melded together. The Mentawai also believe that the natural world is filled with all kinds of local spirits. There's Sikameinan , the crocodile spirit, there's Silakikyo, the forest spirit. There are ghosts. I think it's richer and more complicated. I don't think it's a huge misrepresentation to at least say that people often think that nature, or the entities in the natural world, have souls or spirits, and you can engage with them and you can offend them.

SPENCER: To what extent are the kind of spiritual belief systems of these smaller scale cultures analogous to religion, and in what ways are they different from religion?

MANVIR: I guess it comes back to what you think religion is. I would say a definition of religion, if we want to boil down what religion is, is very often two things: a belief in supernatural agents, gods, spirits, ghosts, etc., and then techniques to engage with them.

SPENCER: I would probably add one more thing to that, which is that religions tell you something about how to be good and what is not good, who's being bad.

MANVIR: Okay, interesting. I'll deal with the first two, and then we'll come to your third, because your third has been a long-standing conversation in anthropology. For the first two, I think the first two are super widespread. I think shamanism is religion by that regard, or by that definition. I think even a lot of malicious sorcery is religion in that regard. You're summoning spirits to go and attack someone else. That is a form of prayer, roughly analogous. If we use those first two criteria, then religion is ubiquitous. To your last point, the supernatural enforcement of morality. A long-standing view in anthropology has been that this is a very recent phenomenon in history, but a lot of work now, over the last 15 years, 20 years, including work that I've done in Mentawai, has shown that the story is a bit more complicated. The understanding is that many societies have some relationship between supernatural agents and moral preferences, but it looks pretty different from how it does in the Abrahamic context. I use the Mentawai example. In Mentawai, there is the spirit. I actually referred to it a couple sentences ago, Sikameinan. Sikameinan, the crocodile spirit. Sikameinan will attack you if you do not share meat with your regular sharing partners.

SPENCER: It's very specific. It's fascinating.

MANVIR: It's a very specific moral jurisdiction. Sikameinan can get things mistaken, so it can misunderstand; it can't read your mind. Sikameinan watches you from the river, crawls into your house, and climbs on top of you. I think we notice a few things, and you mentioned this. One, its moral jurisdiction is much more constrained. Two, its powers are much more limited. Three, the moral circle that it cares about is much more parochial. A new perspective in anthropology and cultural evolution is that perhaps historically, in many societies, if not most societies, there is some connection between the supernatural and some kind of prosocial behavior, some kind of moral behavior. But the trend historically may have been an expansion of the moral jurisdiction, caring not just about food sharing or murder, but caring about the entire moral spectrum and the powers that go from a local spirit that watches you to something that exists everywhere, can read your mind, can watch you always, and cares about morality with a much broader set of people.

SPENCER: Some people argue that these smaller-scale religions morphed into these larger-scale religions, because in order to have a large-scale society, you need this binding glue of shared values. You can maybe have hundreds of people living together with more parochial gods or spirits. But if you want to have millions of people living together, you need something stronger saying, "You can't do this, and you have to do that, and if you hurt someone, you're going to go to hell." What do you think of that theory?

MANVIR: Yeah, interesting. That is a theory that my advisor at Harvard, Joe Henrich, has been a big contributor to that theory.

SPENCER: Actually, I don't know if you noticed, but Joe is on the podcast.

MANVIR: Oh, sick, yeah. Joe is my PhD mentor. I think maybe it's an interesting theory. I don't think we have enough evidence at this point. I think it's plausible. There are moments historically that I find incredibly striking, and I can mention a couple, but there's still a lot of debate. It's still an open question to what extent does even claiming a religious belief or endorsing a religious belief, or saying you believe in a particular religious tenet actually shape your behavior. It's still kind of contested, this link between behavior and religious belief, and there are alternative hypotheses. Maybe the political system changes, and then you have religious beliefs that justify it, or at least people are trying to produce these religious beliefs, but they aren't effective. Maybe people think they work more than they actually do. I guess my view is that it's interesting, it's reasonable, it's striking. But I'm trained as a social scientist, and so I'm always a bit careful about the extent to which I believe anything before I see a lot of good evidence. I will say, the thing I find really striking is the Arab conquests after the emergence of Islam. That was something I have had a lot of personal interest in. You have a new Abrahamic religion that has a moralizing God, it creates a common identity, and then very quickly they come to rule the two largest empires at the time. It's examples like that that make me think that maybe there's something here, but I think it still needs to be confirmed and better tested.

SPENCER: You've written about this idea that people often want to say that the reason for beliefs has something to do with what works, what causes successful society, et cetera. But there's another way to analyze that, which is the point of view of power. And saying, "Well, sometimes beliefs are not just what works or what the powerful people want you to believe because it's in their best interest."

MANVIR: For sure. Honestly, this has been something that I've increasingly argued about. I have a paper with a couple of colleagues coming out very soon. It's like preliminarily released, but we make this argument for the rise of prosocial religious beliefs that perhaps prosocial religious beliefs emerge as people are trying to control each other's behavior, especially extractive ones when you have large power asymmetries. Maybe the powerful are investing in particular religious beliefs to maintain their hold. I definitely think that's plausible. I think that makes sense, often.

SPENCER: It's funny how almost everyone sees themselves as someone who is paying attention to the world and noticing that some things are true and other things are not true, and then believing based on what they observe. Yet when we look at other people, we can tell that they are not doing that. We can tell that many people are just believing things because other people believe them.

MANVIR: Sure, for sure. I guess this is what you're getting at. But I think I feel this so much as an anthropologist. "What are all of the beliefs and strictures that I live within that are wrong, false, or delusional? What can I not see beyond?" I think it's hard. Engaging with intellectual ideas, but also engaging with beliefs and worldviews from other perspectives can kind of shock you out of your own familiar context. But yeah, I think it's hard to often see outside of our little parochial worldview.

SPENCER: One thing I would love to have someone do, if it hasn't already been done, is an anthropology of academic psychology to study academic psychologists and how they actually make decisions and so on. Some of the things that really fascinate me are topics like terror management theory, where there are hundreds of papers about this, trying to study every single aspect of it. Then suddenly the field decides that it's not worth investigating and maybe not true at all, after hundreds of papers have been published, and then the field moves on to something else. To me, that blows my mind. Anthropologically, I really want to understand that kind of thing, but it seems like it's so hard to turn our sights on ourselves and use the tools we're using to study others to study our own in-group.

MANVIR: Yeah. Now that you've given that example, I guess it is actually the case constantly in academia and in scholarship, and I guess in popular discourse where an idea will become trendy, and then other people will criticize it, and it will have been shown to have major limitations or mistakes. The example that I think of right now that is very relevant is thinking about the universality of human cognition. I think, 15 years ago, 20 years ago, there was a lot more assumption that human cognition and human thinking cells are the same everywhere, or there's much less variation. Now, I think partly because of work by Joe, but also there's a lot more cross-cultural work. There's more systematic work about how psychology has changed throughout history. I think there's a much greater appreciation for psychological diversity or cognitive diversity.

SPENCER: The concept of weird populations, and for anyone interested in that, we talk about that in the episode with Joe Henrich. I recommend checking that out.

MANVIR: So I think that's one example. You could even take the paradigm shift to appreciating that human psychology can be analyzed through an evolutionary lens. I think in the 70s or 80s, that was an incredibly controversial point of view. To say that you can think about aspects of human psychology as having existed because they were adaptive in ancestral conditions, and now you just find it often invoked in everyday speech. Oh, maybe we are scared in these kinds of circumstances because in ancestral environments a snake would have gotten us. I think sometimes it can be sloppy, but I think there has been a total paradigm shift. That being said, there's that saying, I forget exactly what it is. Academia moves forward one funeral at a time. The implication there is it's a lot harder for individuals to change their mind than it is for people to appreciate new intellectual currents as they are being trained in their 20s and learning about a field.

SPENCER: Once you've been working a certain way for 20 years, the chance of your changing your mind about it is not that high.

MANVIR: Once your entire research program is committed to or invested in or built on a particular worldview, to give up aspects of that worldview is to kind of admit that a bunch of your research might not be relevant, which is hard.

SPENCER: Speaking of evolutionary principles that can help you understand human psychology in the evolutionary environment, it seems very dangerous to miss out on a danger signal. If there's a tiger there, you better be aware there's a tiger there. On the other hand, if you hear something rustling in the bushes and you think it's a tiger, but it's not a tiger, "Okay, no big deal. Fine, maybe you wasted a few minutes, but at least you're not dead." There's this crazy asymmetry between error detection and failure to detect. I know you've done some writing and thinking about that. Do you want to elaborate on that for us?

MANVIR: Yeah, you're touching upon this idea that's been talked about in many disciplines. It's signal detection theory, but in evolutionary work and in cognitive science, it's called error management. This idea that whenever we're picking up a signal in the world, we have these two errors: one of which is a false positive or a false negative. You can think something's there when it isn't, or you can think it's not there when it is. This very simple principle has been incredibly fruitful in thinking about a lot of puzzles of human behavior. I have found it useful for thinking about superstition and magic. If something looks like it might work, if I did this thing and then tomorrow it rains, I might as well hedge my bets and continue doing it. That kind of bet-hedging logic seems to explain a lot of why people engage in magic, particular rituals, and superstitions. I found it useful for thinking about agency detection. Why do people think that a god, ghost, or spirit might exist in a particular context? On average, it is better to think that there's an agent than there isn't. Recently, for example, my wife and I were chilling, and there was a sound coming from outside, like a knocking. She said, "I think someone's walking on the roof." I went outside, checked, and it was the wind hitting something on our roof. But it pays, on average, to wonder if there's actually a person behind it because if there is a person, that can be very costly. I find it useful for thinking about supernatural stuff, magic, and superstition, but it's an idea that has also been used for thinking about anxiety. Why do people develop anxiety or think about overconfidence? A lot of things that just, at face value, don't make sense. It's a basic principle that I think has been incredibly useful.

SPENCER: It seems that as humans, our pattern detection is on overdrive, almost, where we're constantly looking for patterns of all kinds. A number of interesting errors we make are that we seem not to be willing to give up patterns that we thought we found. You see this in gamblers, where they have some theory about how they can win if they just bet in the right pattern, or, "Oh, well, I've lost a bunch of money, so now I'm likely to make it back." I would argue you see this in astrology, where maybe people have some really good first astrology experience, where the astrologer seems to know important things about them, and then even if they get evidence that later astrologers don't seem to be predicting accurately, they'll cling to that original idea that astrology is accurate.

MANVIR: For sure. I think it's easy to identify these in apparently irrational contexts, like gambling or, depending on how you feel about astrology. But the more interesting question then becomes, what about the supposedly rational worldview built on that same overactive pattern detection? People have argued about how you read markets. Right now, I've looked at a bunch of the chatter about Tesla stock crashing, and there's all kinds of chatter about, "Oh, the actual value is going to continue falling to this, or it's going to stabilize at this." A lot of people's confidence seems to be built on an overactive pattern recognizer, but it raises the question of what contexts this is happening that we don't recognize. Thinking about policy implications, it's easy to build stories about what kind of effect a particular policy will have on the economy or politics. Society is chaotic. The interesting question is, what about our own worldviews is built on erroneous pattern recognition? Do you have any thoughts about where you might be going wrong, SPENCER:?

SPENCER: I think it's a great query. And before I get into where I might be going wrong, one example that comes to mind is that people want to blame everything on the president. It's very tempting to do that whenever there's a new president, but the reality is many of the forces that come to occur are set many years before the president comes to power. Yes, the president can mess things up, and yes, the president can make things a bit better or a bit worse, but a lot of what the president is blamed for are things that actually were set in motion long ago. When there's an apparent new stimulus, we think, "Oh, that's the thing, that's causing it." Obviously, tariffs are different. If you suddenly throw tariffs on, that's going to change prices.

MANVIR: No. Agreed, agreed. Present moment notwithstanding, I think there's constantly this struggle in economics to figure out, "What long-term effect this particular president or policy has, or do presidents even matter?" I totally agree. I think that is a case where it's very easy to attribute responsibility when it's harder to see, again, present potentially notwithstanding. But anyway, I cut you off, continue.

SPENCER: I think about areas where I might be engaging in overactive pattern detection. One that comes to mind is I was trying to figure out why I sometimes have stomach pain, and I have very systematically ruled out that it's not due to food. I've tracked what I eat very carefully and rigorously, "Okay, it's not food," but my brain constantly attributes it to food all the time. It will be like, "Oh, my stomach's hurting. What did I eat last?" It's not like I'm consciously thinking this; it just immediately wants to go there. It started to make me wonder whether we might even have a special pattern recognition system for food because you can get poisoned so easily. Maybe your brain, just like, have you ever had an experience where you got violently ill and then you just can't eat whatever the last thing you ate was for months or years? Was that really even the thing that made you sick, or is that just the last thing you ate? And your brain's like, "Nope, we're not even going to take that risk."

MANVIR: Yes, for sure. For sure. I mean, I noticed how after either I or my wife gets violently ill, there's suddenly so much conversation about what exactly it was. Your comment also reminds me of how I think a lot of people will attribute health issues or physical issues to foods that they're kind of guilty about. So, like, "Oh, why am I developing all this acne? Oh, it's the fact that I eat so much chocolate. Or, why am I developing this rash on my elbow?" I wonder if, just as people are maybe predisposed to look at food after getting sick, if they're predisposed to suspect things that they otherwise felt a bit apprehensive about.

SPENCER: To your point, I think people almost want to have the world make sense. You've got acne. You want to be like, "Well, surely there's some behavior I have that explains this, right?" It's not just random biological factors that I have no control over, and we almost want it to be explainable by our own behavior because then we can do something about it.

MANVIR: Yes, exactly. I mean, I think it's not only that we want to do something, but that, on average, it pays to do something, and if you get it wrong, insofar as acne is annoying, it pays to do small interventions to get rid of it.

SPENCER: One thing that made me wonder about if you look at different religions around the world, different spiritual systems around the world, let's just take the assumption that at least some of them are not true. They're worshiping false gods or false spirits. They can't all be true, presumably, then it seems very wasteful at face value. It's like they're spending a whole bunch of time. Sometimes they sacrifice lots of food to the gods. They do all these rituals. Or they could be gathering food instead, or making money instead. So it's like, at first you're like, "God. How does this survive in a competitive evolutionary environment?" But then, these counterarguments come in like, "Well, maybe it's actually serving these other auxiliary purposes that help group cohesion or increase cooperation, and it actually makes up for the costiness of these essentially false pattern recognitions," right?

MANVIR: Yeah, right. My own view is, so what you're articulating is a kind of functionalism, this assumption that if something persists and is widespread and it's costly, it probably persists because it is serving some kind of benefit or providing some kind of benefit for the individual or the group. That is an idea that is very popular. It's been incredibly popular in anthropology and the social sciences for a century, even more. That is something that I think is overly applied. I think you can explain a lot of human culture, not necessarily by the fact that it provides some kind of objective group-level benefit, but rather that people construct culture that appears to give them what they want, that the ultimate thing that the survival of a cultural trait hinges on is that people will continue to produce it. Meth, for example, I don't think anyone would argue that meth exists and that it's taken and that there are even maybe traditions in certain areas for taking it because it benefits group cohesion. I think meth persists because it provides something to people who engage with it. It is subjectively appealing in some contexts. You can think about a similar thing for witchcraft beliefs. Witchcraft beliefs are very harmful in many contexts. They enhance perceptions of distrust. They can make you suspect that even your parents or your siblings are the reason that you got sick. There are attempts to explain witchcraft beliefs through functional lenses, but I think it's very, very hard once you really appreciate how dangerous and costly witchcraft beliefs are. But I think they're more explicable within the context of, as we're saying, people are predisposed to note patterns. There are some patterns that seem subjectively compelling. You don't need to invoke a functional benefit. I don't think actually, theoretically, it is even necessary. I think what ultimately matters for so much of culture is that it's subjectively compelling.

SPENCER: It seems like there's some limit to that. If you go back, wind back history, when there were lots of cultures and competition, and they would literally wipe each other out, and there'd be constant warfare between groups, if you had sufficiently costly behaviors in your group, it might cause you to get defeated by another group.

MANVIR: Yeah, so I guess you would need two things for that argument to hold true, and maybe you would need more. But two things come to mind. First, you would need them to be very, very costly that they impact the differential ability to reproduce or to defeat each other. But the second, really important thing is that you need variation. You need variation, and you would need a mechanism to maintain variation. So let's take witchcraft beliefs. It's plausible that a society that did not have witchcraft beliefs could outcompete competitors. They might have a diffuse, pro-social spirit that attacks you, but not have the belief that it's your neighbors who are the reason that you're getting sick. But if witchcraft beliefs are incredibly compelling, they would just reliably emerge or pop back up, making it very hard to keep them out and keep them down. Or if you don't even have variation in the first place, if all the societies in a landscape believe in witchcraft, then you would not have the kind of dynamic that you're describing. You're describing a dynamic called cultural group selection, but it would rely on variation. So I think the reason that cultural group selection does not necessarily always hold is that the incredible cognitive appeal of some cultural practices leads people to regularly redevelop them, even if they are costly, if that makes sense.

SPENCER: So if virtually every culture is going to reinvent them anyway, it doesn't give you a disadvantage to have it, at least not in terms of group competition. Maybe it gives you an increased risk of the whole group being wiped out by some natural disaster or something.

MANVIR: Yes, exactly. If everyone has it, then there's no differential benefit. There's no differential group-level fitness.

SPENCER: When you were working with the Mentawai. Did you witness any kind of witchcraft beliefs and behaviors directly?

MANVIR: Yeah, I saw a lot of suspicion. I got sick. It was this person. I saw a lot of that. There was a guy I knew. There was a whole family that had been kicked out of their village. They moved to the village where I lived because they were suspected of causing several people's illness, but then they were also suspected of causing illness in the village where I worked. This one dude who kept being accused had moved way out in the forest. He lived there alone. He had to pay all of these fines after all of these witchcraft accusations or sorcery accusations that he could no longer pay for his children to go to school. You see it a lot. Even last summer, right after I left, my postdoc was there. There was a murder in my community over witchcraft accusations. These people were convinced that this other man had killed their dad using sorcery, and they went and killed that man, and they killed his son, and they slashed his grandson.

SPENCER: And the dad died of, presumably, a medical problem of some kind.

MANVIR: I don't know why the dad died. He was very old. He was maybe in his 60s. He might be in his 70s, yeah. He was a very old guy. He was a very high-status, prestigious guy. But, yeah, he passed away. Then there were these suspicions. I haven't seen people explicitly engage in witchcraft. People are very secretive about that. I do know a person who's told me, a person I know well, a friend, who told me that after a bunch of his chickens were stolen, he went to a shaman and bought witchcraft knowledge. I don't know if he admitted to engaging in it, but he definitely said that he went and purchased that knowledge. There are probably some people who are also using it on the sly, and there are all kinds of theories about when it works, when it doesn't, when it's justified, when it's not, but there is a lot of conflict and tension and fighting that happens over witchcraft.

SPENCER: Do you think there's any extent to which it's replacing normal social dynamics where someone doesn't like someone else, and then it becomes a witchcraft accusation versus it's just totally pattern recognition gone wild and it really is correlating with nothing.

MANVIR: I think it can be both. I suspect ultimately that it's sometimes one, sometimes the other, sometimes a combination. So I do think it's sometimes the case that I don't like that guy, someone gets sick, I can leverage this moment to increase animosity towards that guy. I also think it's the case, and this is maybe a combination of the two. I got in a fight with that guy. The next day I get sick, I am predisposed to distrust this person and to think he's responsible for my misfortune. So it's a combination of pattern recognition, but also the fact that I am distrustful of this person. But then there's also the case that the person who's been accused of witchcraft twice asks a woman to marry him, she says no, and the next day she gets sick. If you live in an epistemic ecology where witchcraft is a thing and you subscribe to it and you believe in it, then I think that is a situation that can very easily seem to be sorcery or witchcraft.

SPENCER: Is shamanic healing in some sense the opposite of witchcraft, or is it just a completely different axis?

MANVIR: Yeah, fascinating question. I think they're often very intertwined. So in Mentawai, they are not super related in some ways, because the Sikerei, the shamans, are very clear that they do not know how to treat witchcraft. And I'll say, in societies where shamans can treat witchcraft, that often backfires, and they will be accused of witchcraft.

SPENCER: That seems like a great solution to witchcraft, you just have a placebo problem, and then you have the placebo solution. That's, "Wow, okay, you solved it." But it sounds like this is not so simple.

MANVIR: I think a lot of what shamans are doing is they're working with patients to co-create narratives of misfortune, often agent-centered narratives of misfortune, and then they enact these powerful experiences or ceremonies in which they attack or vanquish those agents. So you get sick, I come to you, maybe among your family, you talk about it, then we think, "Okay, maybe this is because you haven't been sharing meat. It's because the crocodile spirit caused it." I come into your house, I attract the crocodile spirit. I catch it in this bottle or this container of water, and then I go and release it into the river. I think a lot of shamanism is about leveraging or working with these agent-centered narratives of misfortune. In many cases, that can be witchcraft. In that way, I think of shamanism as kind of a mirror of witchcraft, where the witchcraft emerges and then you deal with it. But as we're talking about it, I also think that the shaman themselves can live in this liminal space between healer and harmer. When you are seen as being supernaturally powerful and having the power to remove witchcraft, you can also be seen as having the power to engage in it. Even though, in Mentawai, the Sikerei are very clear that they don't know how to treat witchcraft, they are still nevertheless predisposed, I think, to be suspected because they are understood to have special powers.

SPENCER: Do you tend to think that the shamans in the cultures that you've studied the most are doing helpful work?

MANVIR: I think so. I think it varies depending on the context, but I think in the context where I work, I think in Mentawai, when I came, I was skeptical. When you see a lot of these claims that shamans can provide therapeutic benefits, they are often endorsed by people who I don't think are so empirically rigorous, or people who want shamanism to be beneficial, but maybe are not being totally careful in evaluating that claim. I had seen a lot of these kinds of claims and had a kind of natural skepticism towards it. After having attended many shamanic healing ceremonies, I do think that shamanic healing ceremonies often provide therapeutic benefits, and I think about that in a couple of ways. One, as I'm saying, and I talk about this in my book on Shamanism, I talk about three mechanisms. One is that shamanic healing ceremonies are incredibly powerful sensorial experiences. There's a person who's entering trance, there's music, it happens at night, there's firelight, there's sometimes touch. It's incredibly sensorially powerful. If you are coming in with a narrative like, "I am sick because a witch caused this, or I'm sick because my soul is lost, or I'm sick because the crocodile spirit has attacked me," and then you are engulfed by this incredibly sensorially powerful experience, I think that can change your narrative about yourself. Insofar as distress comes from the stories we tell about ourselves, or it's perpetuated by those stories, then I think shamans do have the power to change those stories. That's one way, I think.

SPENCER: So it sounds like you're saying not just there could be a strong placebo effect, it's the ultimate placebo. It's so potent, but also, the stories we tell about ourselves can be changed, and those can be more helpful stories than the ones we had before.

MANVIR: Exactly, yeah. So, I think placebos are well designed to induce the placebo effect, but I also think they're powerfully designed to change people's stories about themselves. Where I worked in Colombia, there was a woman who thought she was being haunted by ghosts, and she would see them in her dreams, and she would feel them at night, and she wouldn't leave. Then they had shamanic healing ceremonies. These shamans took yopo, this psychedelic snuff, and they bathed her in a waterfall. They did this entire ceremony. They divined who exactly did it, and shortly afterwards, she was feeling better. Why was she feeling better? I'm not sure, but I think it is reasonable or tenable that this powerful experience that changes the narrative she lives within is one plausible mechanism. Again, that is what so much psychotherapy is built on, this idea of common factors. This is the center of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, changing the patient's narrative through awe-inspiring experiences.

SPENCER: It reminds me of a really interesting talk by this woman with schizophrenia who had these voices in her head for much of her life, and they would kind of narrate what was happening, but she didn't really think very much of them; it was just sort of, "Yeah, that's just my experience of the world." Then she tells, I believe it was her roommate about it, and her roommate gets very distraught and says, "Oh, you got to go to a therapist and talk about this." She goes to the therapist, and the therapist gets very concerned, and then they put her on antipsychotic medication. The thing about that is that it changed her narrative about those voices, where suddenly now she viewed them as scary. It went from, "Oh, you have these benign voices. They're not you, but they're just talking in your mind," to "You have these scary, bad things in your mind." It completely sent her down a tailspin having this different view of what was going on, and it took her years to come back out of that and reframe them in a way that's more helpful to herself.

MANVIR: Yeah, that's a great example; that is very striking. In the book, I talk about how I interviewed a big psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins, or an influential psychiatrist who works in their Pain Management Center. A lot of his approach, I mean, he even describes himself as a shaman. He says that a big part of his method is what he calls putting on the bird head. He works with people who have seen many specialists. The specialists tell them, "This is just in your head." He approaches it as he has to be a powerful healer in their eyes and help them change the story they're telling about themselves. "I couldn't walk; now I can walk. I'm broken, or I need to stay in the hospital. No, I'm empowered." I think a big part of healing is often working with the narratives we tell about ourselves. I don't think it's everything, but I think that's one powerful way that it happens across cultures, including in shamanism. The final thing I just want to highlight, which I also highlight in my book about these shamanic healing ceremonies, is that they're often intensely social. They often feel like parties. I had come kind of expecting, from having grown up in the United States and going to doctors' offices and seeing my family members go to the hospital, to feel a bit more solemn, but instead, they are incredibly festive. They're filled with feasting and dancing. You feel not only that your entire family is around you, but that these shamans are really fighting for you. They're engaging with these other spirits. They're staying up all night. They're touching you. It's a lot of assurance of social contact, of social support. That is another way that I think they are providing therapeutic outcomes.

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SPENCER: A reason why I don't tend to take the view that something might be false but it might make you feel better and so it's good is that I think it is really important to have your beliefs map onto reality to a reasonable degree. Insofar as our beliefs don't map onto reality, it can cause us to make very bad decisions because we think if I do X, Y, Z, I'm going to get this P, Q, R, but we misunderstand reality, and so it doesn't actually lead you to P, Q, R; it leads to something else. This is why I think if astrology doesn't work, people should believe it doesn't work. They shouldn't keep relying on it. I also think there can be better systems. Even if the system had some benefit, there may be a better system that's more aligned with reality. These kinds of thoughts make me wonder whether there's also a downside of shamanic healing. Even if it's an effective placebo effect and it can help reframe narratives, does it cause harm at the same time because it misaligns people with reality?

MANVIR: Yeah, I don't want it to seem like I think shamanism is monolithically positive. The way I talk about it in the book is to consider it foremost as a hyper-compelling cognitive technology, a technology that is deployed to convince people that they have some control over uncertainty. I think that can often have positive outcomes, but it can also have very negative outcomes. One example is the one we're talking about. I think shamanism is deeply linked to witchcraft and the suspicions and violence that ensue. A shaman comes, they confirm your suspicion that this was caused by a witch, which they treat you. You feel better, but now you are skeptical or aggressive or feel antagonistically towards another person. That's one way. Also, shamans are charismatic individuals who are understood to have special powers, and they can often leverage that understanding for extractive ends. An example I mentioned in the book, which I found really amusing, is that an anthropologist noticed this while working in India. A shaman was speaking to a woman, and he was channeling her husband, and as the husband said, "Now, you must have sex with the shaman because I am in the shaman's body." You find similar examples even in Inuit ethnography, where shamans would, as part of their payment, sometimes ask for sex. They could leverage their spiritual or supernatural authority to gain more resources or to avoid certain obligations. Shamans are, in many ways, people, and the services they provide can be beneficial, but they can also leverage that authority for all kinds of selfish ends. I don't want to deny that.

SPENCER: How do people become shamans?

MANVIR: Oh my God, it's incredibly variable depending on the context around the world. Some common features of becoming a shaman are initiatory illness. You might become incredibly sick and then become healed. You may need to be initiated to be healed, or you'll be healed and then you're initiated. Often, in many instances, you may seek out a teacher and gain knowledge, but very common is some kind of fundamental or essential transformation that you go from being a regular human to being this kind of new human. In Mentawai, a big part of the initiation is the transformation of your eyes. They take you into the forest, and they magically treat your eyes, and then they take you into public. I describe the ceremony in the book, but they apply all of these magical herbs to your eyes so that you can now see spirits. It's understood that you develop a new set of eyes. In other contexts, it might be understood that the shaman's chest is opened up, and all of their organs are taken out, and new organs are put in with magical substances. They might have death and rebirth ceremonies. That's relatively common. There's an example I describe in the book, I think it's from Nigeria, from the Igbo, where some shamanic initiates were taken into a hut, and they would take a dog into the hut, kill the dog, and take out the dog's eyes. It was understood that the initiate would be given the dog's eyes so that they could see spirits. What's common to all of these is a fundamental transformation that explains why this person has abilities that normal humans do not, making them different from humanity to make more tenable their claims of special powers.

SPENCER: One topic that fascinates me is cults, and I've spent a bunch of time reading about many different cults. There are definitely commonalities in the leaders, and I think narcissism is a common strain in the leaders, often extreme narcissism. Separately, if I think about the people I know who give the most shamanic vibe, it's often people who have some link to schizophrenia. Often, it's not that they have schizophrenia, but maybe their mother is schizophrenic, their father is schizophrenic, or their brother is schizophrenic. I'm wondering, do you think that there are certain mental health conditions or personality traits that you think are linked to shamanism?

MANVIR: This is a big, long-standing debate in anthropology. Many people have argued that shamans have maybe schizotypal traits or psychosis-adjacent traits. I have not seen that a lot in Mentawai. There's one guy who comes to mind who's a bit eccentric in how he speaks, and it's hard to follow him, but a lot of them are just very charismatic, very socially adept men. That's my particular ethnographic experience, but I think in the literature more generally, many people argue that shamans often have these traits. There's even a theory that perhaps these traits are maintained in populations because of shamanism. Normally, these would be selected out, but because they can predispose people to become shamans, there's less of a selection against it, and it maintains the genetic variants that predispose to psychosis or related conditions.

SPENCER: Before we wrap up, the last topic I wanted to ask you about is taboos. People talk about certain taboos as being universal, like incest taboos or cannibalism taboos. We know they're not truly universal. Because there are some cultures that are actually more accepting of practices like that. Is that true?

MANVIR: I would assume that there are cultures that, for instance, allow you to marry your first cousin, or where royalty might marry a sibling, or there are societies where you can eat some people sometimes. But I don't know of a society that has no taboos against incest and no taboos against any kind of cannibalism.

SPENCER: Interesting. So even if it's allowed in certain situations, it's still forbidden in many situations.

MANVIR: I really don't know of a society in which there is none. It's a good thing that needs to be examined more systematically. But as far as I know, it's very hard to find. Not only is it very hard to find. Some societies, like the !Kung, the Kalahari !Kung, I talk about them a bit in the book. They are a hunter-gatherer people, historically, and they have a mythological figure who engaged, I think, in both incest and cannibalism. The ethnographer writes that these are the worst actions you can engage in in this society, and I think that's very common for incest and cannibalism to be among the most moralized actions, and also often the actions that are suspected of witches.

SPENCER: One evolutionary explanation of this is that cannibalism can spread disease because eating human flesh is much more likely, as I understand it, to get you sick compared to eating animal flesh. We're not animals, and so it's harder for us to get diseases from them because the diseases tend to be optimized based on different species. And then for incest, if you inbreed, you greatly increase the chance of having children that have serious problems due to people carrying essentially genes that, if paired together, can cause really bad problems. Is that your explanation for why there's a near-universal taboo on these?

MANVIR: Yeah, so I think there's an interesting question here, which is, why are they moralized? It makes sense that humans will have an evolved predisposition not to engage in incest because, as you're saying, there are fitness costs. I can have children with a higher mutational burden, and for people not to engage in cannibalism, I can easily get infected. But I don't think that easily explains why these are so deeply moralized across societies. You might say, "Oh, well, things for which there's an evolutionary predisposition not to engage in are moralized." But that doesn't make sense as a theory. There are lots of things that I have an evolved predisposition to not engage in that are not moralized. I don't want to — sorry, this is maybe a bit weirdly graphic — eat my feces. But it's not like we live in a society that moralizes feces.

SPENCER: Some people would judge you for it, but I do agree that it's not moralized in the same way, but some people would be morally disgusted.

MANVIR: I'm sure people would be disgusted. Would they say that I have engaged in a very morally wrong act? I'm not sure.

SPENCER: I think people would be split. Some Jonathan Haidt studies on this, you'd be like, imagine this scenario of someone having sex with a dead chicken or things like that. Some people were like, "Yeah, it grosses me out, but it's not immoral." And some people are like, "No, no. That's bad. I can't really explain why, but there's something morally wrong with that."

MANVIR: Jonathan Haidt is a good example here. What I find interesting about cannibalism, incest, and having sex with dead chickens is that all of them are victimless acts. Jonathan Haidt has argued that this reflects a conflation of disgust with morality, that we have a purity moral foundation. If something disgusts us, we're predisposed to moralize it. But I don't think it explains why some disgusting acts are moralized much more than others. The reason that I've been so intrigued by this is that the incest and cannibalism observation is an important puzzle because it reflects the fact that we actually don't have a great theory of morality. Jonathan Haidt is one attempt to say that we have these different moral foundations, but I don't think, as it currently exists, disgust can explain why some things are moralized. I have my own suspicions for why we moralize cannibalism and incest, but in sharing them with some colleagues, not everyone buys them.

SPENCER: I'd love to hear your thoughts on that, but I'll just throw out one speculative idea of why cannibalism and incest might be moralized, whereas other things that we don't want to do, that are bad for us, are not moralized. Could it be that most people learn to be grossed out by these things, that if you were not taught to think of them as bad, many people would engage in them, whereas that might not be true with engaging with your own feces?

MANVIR: What does it mean?

SPENCER: So obviously, we're all raised to think of incest as being gross, and cannibalism has been gross. But could it be that without being taught, people would not actually be grossed out by it as much, and therefore it has to be moralized, whereas some things, maybe with feces, we just find inherently disgusting on an intuitive level. So nobody has to teach you that it's bad.

MANVIR: Okay, then let's take that argument. Let's say that people do not moralize or they're not taught to be disgusted by cannibalism. For the sake of intellectual argument, then why would cannibalism be bad? Someone dies. Now we live in a society where it's not disgusting; it's a more rational use of resources. We disinfect it, we cook it.

SPENCER: The cost would be that in an evolutionary environment, insofar as that exists, it would spread disease, and so you would end up with societies getting a lot more infections. What I'm attempting to explain with this speculative argument is not why today we moralize it, but why societies moralize it broadly, why it's a thing that humans moralize.

MANVIR: The argument would be that we moralize those things that, if everyone engages in them, they might cause disease.

SPENCER: Yes, and we don't have the built-in instincts to avoid them anyway with high fidelity. Because if everyone avoids it due to instincts, then we don't need to moralize it. But let's say you're not taught to moralize it. Many people would engage in it. Well, then you need it to be moralized because, from an evolutionary perspective, otherwise the behavior might become widespread, and that actually causes lots of bad problems which cause those groups to fail.

MANVIR: So let's say drinking unboiled water. If you drink river water, you could get sick, and it has pathogens. Among the mentality now, people will drink boiled water, but it's not moralized. It's just understood that if you do the opposite, you can get sick. Why do you need morality in there?

SPENCER: Did people boil water 50,000 years ago?

MANVIR: No.

SPENCER: So I think all of these were created long, long ago, 50,000 plus years ago.

MANVIR: So you're okay. So your argument is that there's an evolutionary predisposition to moralize it because that protects people from infection.

SPENCER: Exactly. Now, I'm not saying I believe this. I'm just stating it as a possible explanation.

MANVIR: I think the counterargument, as you can see, I am throwing lots of counterarguments, and I'm seeing which necessarily stick. But I think the first one would be, then, why would evolution make such a complicated system rather than just making everyone find it disgusting and not want to engage in it?

SPENCER: Yes. So my theory about that is that morality is a social enforcement mechanism. When you feel like something's immoral, you don't feel like it's just a transgression on you. You feel like it's a transgression on the group. There are some things where it's very effective to view it as a transgression on the group rather than on the individual.

MANVIR: So are you saying that I am more disincentivized to engage in a behavior if I see it as costly, not only to myself, but to the group in its entirety?

SPENCER: Yes, and for the whole group to view it as a transgression.

MANVIR: Then why wouldn't eating feces be moralized? I mean, it's not articulated in the way that ancestor cannibalism is.

SPENCER: So, by this argument that I don't necessarily believe, but by this argument, it's because we already have such a strong intuition not to eat it that we don't need this.

MANVIR: Then, I guess the question would be, why is feces eating something where you can modulate the aversion, but not cannibalism?

SPENCER: Well, that's a really good question. It might be hard to say without getting into the details, but it could be that cooked meat smells good. It's hard to distinguish cooked meat of different species, and it all kind of smells good to us. Then you'd either have to genetically evolve a mechanism to detect cooked meat that's of your exact species, or you could use this other mechanism. But anyway, what's your theory?

MANVIR: Well, that's interesting. Yeah, I'm not sure, but I'm going to reflect on your theory. Okay, I'll give you my view, and then I'll tell you why I'm not sure it holds. One thing might be that if you are someone who eats meat or eats human flesh, then if we are in a situation where you could quickly kill me, we're alone on a mountain, I would not trust you. I would think that I wouldn't want to be around you because you might kill me and eat me. Same with if, just as you find moral prohibitions against eating flesh, you find a lot of moral aversions to manipulating dead bodies. You take a body and make a purse out of it, or necrophilia. One thought is that we are so morally turned off by necrophilia, the manipulation of dead bodies, and eating dead bodies because someone who has that predisposition cannot be trusted when you are in close quarters and no one can find out.

SPENCER: This would be sort of a state of very high resource scarcity, I'm imagining.

MANVIR: Yes, exactly. We're just in a circumstance where it could be resource scarcity. I guess the more important thing is that no one can find out. Is the most important thing, I guess,

SPENCER: You can imagine in modern society that even if you enjoyed the taste of human flesh, it wouldn't be very practical to use that, and you had no moral compunction. But if you're in a place where literally people are starving to death, then it actually matters whether you have a moral compulsion against it or not.

MANVIR: Yes, yes. I guess you need more resource scarcity than you find in certainly, you would need more resource scarcity. I mean, we do very little to forage for our own food, let alone kill other organisms and cook them. But okay, that's one thought. So it's kind of like we evolved to highly judge people who engage in these acts, and then we also have a predisposition to try to signal to other people that we find these incredibly morally abhorrent. The reason I would argue against that is that, the main thing I often think about is that we don't moralize psychosis. People are kind of freaked out by psychotics in some instances, and they don't trust them totally, or they don't want to be near them. But it's not like they think that they're morally bad individuals. The reason I use psychosis as an example is it's another example where you cannot totally predict an individual's behavior because maybe their understanding of reality or their set of preferences is kind of warped by mental illness. So just as it's not always the case that individuals who can't be trusted in all circumstances are deemed morally bad, I don't think that this account necessarily explains anything outside of these particular behaviors.

SPENCER: So, by this traits like narcissism and psychopathy and selfishness are often moralized.

MANVIR: Yes, those are because they have impacts on social others, and maybe that's — if you're narcissistic — also means that you would benefit yourself at the cost of me. I think what's common to all theories of morality and relatively easy to explain is why we don't like behaviors that harm other people. But the question is, why don't we like behaviors that seem to harm no one.

SPENCER: But "Do they harm no one?" I guess is the question. I think, because we're not talking about now, we're talking about whatever created these underlying dispositions, those points in history over hundreds of thousands of years.

MANVIR: Yeah, no. What are your thoughts? Your thought is cannibalism can harm someone because you could have a system of cannibalism where no one is harmed. Just every time someone dies, we cook up their flesh and distribute it. You still have a norm that you still moralize killing. You just do not moralize the consumption of flesh.

SPENCER: There was, to my knowledge, a small-scale group that had this really terrible virus. I think it was Kuru.

MANVIR: Yeah. A prion disease.

SPENCER: Yeah exactly. It took anthropologists a long time to discover why it happened, and it's because of cannibalism, right?

MANVIR: Yes. And so earlier, when you asked if cannibalism and incest taboos are universal, I was thinking about cases like this, but my understanding is that the circumstances in which they were eating each other's brains were very contextualized, and it's not that they could eat everyone. I guess that's the case. So is your thought that cannibalism harms the person who's engaging in it?

SPENCER: No, my thought is that it harms the whole group. Maybe it's just much more dangerous than we realize because we never engage in it, so maybe it's actually extremely dangerous to the group.

MANVIR: Yeah, but then it would be a risky behavior. I would have to think about that because then the question is, are other group-wide risky behaviors, or behaviors that predispose people to get hurt, moralized?

SPENCER: So before we wrap up, I just wanted to find out, when you were writing this, how much of it is based on your firsthand experience versus pouring through the literature to understand different cultures around the world.

MANVIR: That's a good question, maybe 40-60, or something like that. The way that I structured the book is kind of a journey where I go from Indonesia, then I travel to France, I go into ancient caves, I go to Colombia, I go to Burning Man. I go into the psychedelic field or space, and at points it's kind of hard to disentangle, but I would say it's about half and half.

SPENCER: It's funny that you mentioned Burning Man. Because, as someone who's been there, to me, it's fascinating from an anthropological perspective, because it's like, what is going on here? It's such a different culture, such a different place.

MANVIR: It is so fascinating from an anthropological perspective. It totally violates a bunch of anthropological predictions. There are a bunch of our basic expectations about human behavior. I went to Burning Man, or in the book, I talk about Burning Man because of the representation of shamanism there. There's a shaman dome, and it's an interesting context to see how shamanism is understood and practiced in Western societies. More generally, yes, I totally agree that Burning Man, just the way that people socially interact, the constant gift-giving, the lack of expectations, is really interesting. Anthropologically, yeah.

SPENCER: I think a lot of people have never really understood it, and they think of it as almost a big festival, when, in fact, I think a better analogy is an in-person Wikipedia where everything there is because people decided to put time into making it be there, and it's completely built from the ground up.

MANVIR: Right. I mean, that's something I highlight over there, for sure. Yeah, I think people imagine it to be a festival when it's more like a city that every single person contributes a small part of.

SPENCER: Yeah, exactly. So, final question for you, what do you think we have to learn from anthropology? What do you see as the importance of anthropology in the world today?

MANVIR: Yeah. I mean, anthropology has this motto that really resonates with me, which is that by looking across cultures, we can make the strange familiar and the familiar strange. And so I personally think the great value of anthropology is that we have a better appreciation for how things that are very familiar to us resonate in contexts very distinct from us. But then we also, by studying things very distinct from us, get a new perspective on the things that we take for granted and which are so second nature. That's something that I think is really valuable intellectually, as a scientific or academic discipline, but also, personally engaging with anthropology, I've really appreciated how it has changed my relationship to both human diversity and the familiar world.

SPENCER: Manvir, thanks so much for coming on.

MANVIR: Thank you so much for having me, Spencer. This was a lot of fun.

[outro]

JOSH: A listener asks: "Based on the personality tests on clearthinking.org, what is your personality type?"

SPENCER: So my personality type on our test, the Ultimate Personality Test, is the Rational Optimist type, which I think captures me reasonably well. Generally speaking, I tend to be high in conscientiousness, high in openness, high in agreeableness, like maybe 80th percentile. Neuroticism is interesting, because I actually tend to test low in neuroticism, but I am high in worry, which is a specific subset of neuroticism. So I tend to be a worrier, but I tend to not have the other types of neuroticism; like I tend to not be depressive, not be moody or volatile. So that one's kind of an interesting mixed bag. And then extroversion is interesting because I test pretty high in extroversion, but it's funny because I'm also like completely happy being solitary for a long time. But I do have a real excitement around people, and so I think I'm kind of an ambivert, really, fundamentally, where I can be happy with people, but I can also be happy in solitary pursuits, and it kind of can function in both ways.