From a portfolio by Jacques Hérold, originally published in the Fall 1961 issue of The Paris Review.

In Jorge Luis Borges’s short story “The Ethnographer,” a white American graduate student named Fred embeds himself into a Native American tribe. Eventually, he penetrates its “secret doctrine.” His advisor then summons him back to report on it:

He made his way to his professor’s office and told him that he knew the secret, but had resolved not to reveal it.

“Are you bound by your oath?” the professor asked.

“That’s not the reason,” Murdock replied. “I learned something out there that I can’t express.”

“The English language may not be able to communicate it,” the professor suggested.

“That’s not it, sir. Now that I possess the secret, I could tell it in a hundred different and even contradictory ways. I don’t know how to tell you this, but the secret is beautiful, and science, our science, seems mere frivolity to me now.”

Borges’s story plays with the view that Western and non-Western cultures are fundamentally untranslatable. Stepping into a non-Western belief system makes one fall off the edge of purportedly rational, secular knowledge.

This exchange between the professor and his rebellious student captures the ambivalent frisson that surrounded transcultural work in the thirties, when Borges supposedly met the man who inspired this story. The period’s anthropologists hoped that such cross-cultural metamorphoses could liberate them and their readers from Western social ills and malaises. Perhaps, Margaret Mead speculated, learning about the relative sexual freedom of Samoan women could heal American women’s sexual prudery. Marcel Mauss and his student Georges Bataille speculated that learning about alternative modes of exchange—gift-giving, the potlatch—could break the spell of early twentieth-century capitalism. However, this excitement came with a certain trepidation: as “The Ethnographer” suggests, adopting a different cultural perspective might put one irretrievably out of touch with one’s own.

A century later, anthropologists are once again deploying cultural comparisons to estrange their (predominantly Western) readers from staid cultural assumptions. These more recent modes of estrangement play in a different key: instead of emphasizing striking differences between so-called modern, secular cultures and “traditional,” non-Western practices, they highlight the surprising similarities between them. They hunt for ways in which even supposedly disenchanted societies are pervaded by forms of enchantment.

Hunting down such similitudes involves taking the anthropologist herself down a notch from her scholarly position. Our supposed cultural others are typically more skeptical than we assume, and we ourselves are more credulous than we dare admit. To understand the faith of others, the anthropologist must admit to her own will to believe. In Shamanism: The Timeless Religion, which came out recently, Manvir Singh puts himself on such a Borgesian cliff’s edge. While witnessing a shamanic initiation on an island in Indonesia, he finds himself on the brink of succumbing to the dancers’ rhythms:

The veranda felt like an orb of spirit-infused light suspended in thick darkness. And as seemingly everyone around me went into trance, I experienced the same pull. I inhaled deeply and felt my eyes turn upward under shut lids. I stood on a precipice, a pool of water beneath me. I only had to jump. I could let the sound and social environment and a deeper consciousness wash over me. I could let my body jerk and my head shake. I could give in to ecstasy.

Singh speaks both as a scholar and as a popularizer of the new comparative assessments of human religiosity toward which his field has recently moved. “Comparison seems to dissolve cultural hubris much more than it reinforces it,” he insists. Universalism has long been a taboo notion within his field because of its associations with Western-centric oversimplifications of non-Western thinking. But a different kind of universalism—one that levels the playing field between supposed moderns and non-moderns—can, Singh argues, powerfully provincialize Western beliefs in the exceptionality of the so-called secular state.

Shamanism defines religion as a yin-yang battle between its “shamanic” and “institutional” elements. The chaotic forces of individual prophecy, possession, and inspiration give rise to formal religious rituals and doctrines, which in turn constrict those same forces. Singh argues for an extreme broadening of what “shamanism” refers to. It encompasses not only Siberian and Pan-American Indigenous practices, whose similarities (and potentially shared Asian origins) have long been acknowledged, but also a broad and much more transcultural spectrum of phenomena including charisma, possession, mounting, glossolalia, dream journeying, catching the holy spirit, trance, and other things. These phenomena all involve inducing special states of consciousness in the “shaman,” their audience, or both, in order to communicate with the beyond: to speak with gods and ancestors, to see the future, or to discover one’s spirit animal.

Singh’s broadening of the conceptual sphere of what “shamanism” means is exciting. Hebrew prophets were shamans, he argues; so was Jesus. So were the ancestral early humans who etched drawings of hybrid human-animal beasts into caves secreted in the French countryside; so are the hedge fund managers of Wall Street and the New Age shamanistas of Burning Man. To tie these figures together is heady, and it’s food for thought. Singh himself sees it as a gesture that humiliates the West even as it elevates its supposed cultural others: “Jesus and Wall Street money managers seem to exemplify Western exceptionalism,” he argues; “that is, until considered alongside Kalahari trance healers and countless messianic prophets.”

Singh, alongside others in his field, calls his readers to lift a supposedly fundamental divide between “enlightened,” self-reflexive thinking and the magical thinking it claims to have left behind. This is an important paradigm shift, though Shamanismalso exposes some of its weaknesses. Singh’s book ranges widely, but, dare I say, sloppily: A common denominator that expands too far rapidly runs the risk of losing its critical edge.

The shamans he encounters are all credible and all suspect; though he insists, in passing, that some shamans are more effective than others, he offers no clear criteria for how the sham shaman might be distinguished from the real thing. He provides no insight into what shamanism could—or should—mean to us, only a warning that we are bound, at some point, to be duped by it.

Which brings me back to Borges’s story. When Fred tells his advisor that science has become uninteresting to him, his advisor believes this to be a statement of cultural separatism. Yet, this turns out to not be the case:

The professor spoke coldly: “I will inform the committee of your decision. Are you planning to live among the Indians?”

“No,” Murdock answered. “I may not even go back to the prairie. What the men of the prairie taught me is good anywhere and for any circumstances.”

That was the essence of their conversation.

Fred married, divorced, and is now one of the librarians at Yale.

By placing Fred at Yale, a quintessentially Western institution, Borges suggests that his life and career might have proceeded along the same lines even if he had not enacted his dramatic cultural crossing. Did his time among an Indigenous tribe change him, or did it simply give him a slightly different lens on the same life path? It’s both a boon and a pitfall of Singh’s book that, at its broadest conceptual horizon, an Ivy League professor like himself, or like me, seem as shamanic as Siberian shamans.

Marta Figlerowicz is an associate professor of comparative literature at Yale University and a 2024 Guggenheim Fellow.