Join anthropologist Manvir Singh, PhD, and Professor Charles Stang for a conversation about Singh’s new book, Shamanism: The Timeless Religion (Knopf, 2025), which draws on immersive research with shamans in Indonesia and the Colombian Amazon. Singh explores how shamans use trance, music, and plant medicine to heal, prophesy, and confront life’s uncertainties—and how these ancient practices reveal deep insights into belief, transformation, and the human mind.

MANVIR SINGH is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of California, Davis. He holds a bachelor’s degree from Brown University and a PhD in Human Evolutionary Biology from Harvard University. A regular contributor to The New Yorker, his work has also appeared in Wired, Vice, Aeon, The Guardian, and academic journals including Science and Nature Human Behaviour. He has studied Indigenous psychedelic use in Colombia and, since 2014, has researched shamanism and justice among the Mentawai of Siberut Island, Indonesia.

CHARLES M. STANG is Professor of Early Christian Thought and Director of the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School.

Please register in advance online using the link found here.

Sponsored by the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School.