Performative Indigeneity and the Shaman Industrial Complex

1.

A few months into COVID-19, a new friend invited me to a San Pedro ceremony that her friend was hosting at a tech incubator in Palm Springs. The details were blurry, something about an Indian pop star and a shaman going to a mansion with a group of entrepreneurs to do this mild hallucinogenic, and we would have to drive another friend's Tesla down from the Bay Area. Not without misgivings I agreed to come along, with the intention to glean some insights and have a meaningful exchange around a set of issues that feel increasingly consequential. Maybe there was something to be gained by stepping outside of my algorithmically-fortified comfort zone, and engaging with people who are involved in things I’m often critical of at a distance. 

The Tesla was leased by a man who was going to procure the San Pedro and facilitate the ceremony. It was my first time driving one and I found it thoroughly disturbing. My standing bias held that it was an obnoxious status symbol with a thin veneer of greenwash and further contribution to the disaster of scaled automobilism in the Fordist paradigm. Operating one felt like being inside a giant iPhone. Screens everywhere, moving images and data streaming constantly and an acute awareness that your battery was steadily diminishing. The Hal-like navigation system would issue mandates on charging stations with confounding durations and percentiles for optimal travel. It took a total of three charging stations in dispiriting regions of interstate 5 and some harrowing moments of single digit battery life. I can’t recall the last time I felt so subservient and anxious about my relationship to a technology allegedly there to help me—or perhaps it was the novelty of the technology that made the feeling more acute and over time it would simply join its place in the rote anxieties we’ve accustomed to.  

We received updates from friends as we drove down the coast. Instagram stories of our hosts in togas playing olympic sports. An invitation to an Arabian Nights-themed sex party in Los Angeles hosted by the brother of a Silicon Valley eidolon. There was a creeping dread and we kept joking about how it was not too late to turn around. We pulled into a palatial fortress of a McMansion abutting a golf course in a gated community around 2:30am. We crept into our shared room, perhaps 4x the size of the cottage I live in, and got into a huge bed across the room from two smaller ones where the shaman and the pop star were sleeping. 

The house was buzzing in the morning with preparations. Alters to be assembled, meals to be made, apps to be developed, smoothies to be blended, zoom meetings to be zoomed. I ate some sourdough bread with almond butter and a half of an avocado with some truffle salt. Halfway through the meal a chipper Polish CEO of a data and DNA based health optimization app cheerfully administered a COVID-19 test to me. I had seen his picture the day before in a leaf crown and bedsheet toga and did a double take when he introduced himself as the polonicized version of an infamous Roman dictator. He had a business call the following morning and wanted to start the ceremony as soon as possible so that the effects would wear off in time for the meeting. There were a dozen people in the house that were going to participate, another half dozen who were not, a small staff of cleaning people and a chef. 

A master bedroom was decided upon for the ceremony and bad sectional furniture was arranged in a circle around an altar of crystals, abalone and feathers. A young woman came in with a bouquet of plastic flowers she had procured and a deliberation ensued before the Indian pop star left to find living ones. The leader of the ceremony, who had brought the concentrated San Pedro cactus gave a terse overview of the proceedings. He specified that he thought of himself as more of a facilitator than a shaman—a guide with a lot of experience with this medicine. He offered some clinical comments about the spectrum of physical sensations that one might experience and then offered some colorless remarks about a universal field of love that we were all to aspire to access. We were to take turns going to him, proceeding clockwise and request a small, medium or large dose. We were then to share some gratitude and intentions before drinking the medicine out of the kind of goblet-like glass one might associate with a milkshake in a 1950’s diner. He shared that he had put a lot of resources into creating a service to offer in the experience economy and that COVID-19 foreclosed on his plans. He was moving to Costa Rica in search of a better life but was sad to be moving away from his children and was asking the medicine to help him travel through life with grace.

The pop star was seated to his left and was co-facilitating the experience. She asked for a small dose which ended up being larger than she intended and was encouraged to take that amount instead. Our host was seated beside her in a bathrobe with an embroidered captain's hat that he uncomfortably instructed his girlfriend to bring to him a few minutes before the ceremony began. He welcomed everyone, thanked the facilitators, requested a large dose and promptly asked the medicine to give him the strength to colonize outer space. His girlfriend, also robed and nervously vaping, had a bruise under her eye she said was dermatologically-related and asked if she could do her gratitude and intention silently with a medium dose of medicine. The circle proceeded with the cautious reserve of people meeting each other for the first time and sharing a little bit about themselves in a new and unknown setting. I made a canned statement about trying to find an ethical orientation towards the social and ecological imperatives of life under neoliberalism in the anthropocene and asked for help to be best of service to my eleven year old daughter—with a small dose, please. 

When the circle completed we were to go outside and move our bodies to get the medicine to circulate through our systems. After a couple hours we would return for another round of medicine and intentions. We moved towards the pool with yoga mats to protect ourselves from the fire ants. Tribal techno music blasted through bluetooth speakers and clouds of Juul smoke drifted over the pool while bodies extricated themselves from their robes and bathing suits. The captain and I began talking to each other. He shared that he had made an AI learning software that was licensed by many companies. He told me he moved to Maryland as a refugee from Iran because his family was at odds with both the Shah and the Ayatollah. He lamented that I had just missed a friend of his who was part of co-organizing a Davos-like conference of heirs that convene every year to imagine entrepreneurial solutions to social and environmental issues. While discussing a recent retrospective of Kiarostami films, we were encouraged out of our suits by a nude couple that looked like Greco-Roman sculptures and owned ‘the world's largest all-over print retailer,’ where one could go if they were inclined towards ‘salt bae’ Christmas sweaters, sublimated t-shirts with cats surfing slices of pepperoni pizza, or other dank memes. I imagined they were responsible for the many containers of Blue Raspberry Lemonade flavored Gym Molly pre-workout supplement left out around the house. The captain and I resumed our conversation, circling each other in the pool naked, doing something between qigong and aqua aerobics while the conversation moved to space travel.

He talked about Jeff and Richard on a first name basis and confidently explained that terraforming mars would take too long and he was at work on 10,000 person floating space colonies where people with like interests could live together in sustainable biospheres. So if you like Nascar and the NRA he offered—or Ira Glass and Cabernet... I replied. I asked him if he felt ok using the term colonize with the history of violence, oppression, slavery and ecological disaster that it implies. He seemed taken aback and thanked me for giving him something to consider. I offered, isn’t it better to focus our energy and the ill-gotten fortunes of wealth criminals on addressing the manifold ecological and social issues of this shared planet? The captain responded that there are 17 scenarios for mass extinction and that we shouldn’t put all our eggs in one basket. I continued, doesn’t the imperative to escape the devastation caused by those most responsible, who justify their own god-like position with a kind of utopian messianism, seem trapped in its own circular logic? The captain abruptly veered towards a rehearsed refrain about a ruling class that has near total control over the population, internet, food supply and military and that there could never be a real revolution. He seemed both distracted and further resolved in his thinking, though perhaps with an openness to changing the word ‘colonize.’  

The second round of intentions and San Pedro shots felt more like toasts at a bachelor party. The shaman facilitator offered to blast ceremonial tobacco up peoples noses or administer coca powder and the captain chimed in, ‘I’ve got acid, coke and mushrooms too’—to which the shaman discouraged the use of coke and acid but offered to revisit the mushrooms idea later. The medicine had not produced that strong of an effect in anyone and people drank their next dose less gingerly. The Indian pop star sang a hauntingly beautiful veda with a shruti box and the young statuesque woman, still nude, followed it with a strained version of Dust in the Wind. I went to the bathroom and stared for a long time at the fossil granite counter. Millions of years of time etched into small eddies of fleeting lives. A hollow sense of geologic time and an open container of neon blue Gym Molly. 

A couple hours into our trip I had a long chat with a soft spoken student from Berkeley who was studying computer science and philosophy. He was deeply concerned with what he called tech determinism and its increasing impact on our lives. I understood that we shared the opinion that data without ethics, instrumentalized by corporations who actively determine more and more of our lives is a terrifying prospect. We exchanged media theorists and made loose plans to keep in touch. I ventured a few words of Spanish to the women cleaning the house and then got into a long conversation with the chef. He came back to the desert for work and his son was living in Sacramento. He was commuting every day from LA where he was taking care of his elderly father. We talked about our kids, the dangers of eating sugar and showed each other photos on our phones. It was hard for me to track the effects of the medicine. I felt extremely aware of people's energy, sensitive to subtle social dynamics and overwhelmingly sad—though this is not uncommon for me. As the day progressed I felt increasingly out of rhythm with the group. 

I withdrew to find a quiet corner of the house and found myself walking out barefoot onto the golf course. In the waning golden desert light I watched a group of children playing and a murder of crows circling around a tree. I watched one crow clumsily fall off a branch and thought about the crow in Pasolini’s Hawks and Sparrows. I thought about how revelation-less this experience felt. Everything felt cheap and meaningless. I walked towards the tree where the crows were circling and when I came close they started diving towards my head. I emerged on a hill crest and looked out at what one could describe as a terraformed colony on a hostile planet. It occurred to me that the captains' plan to put people in small colonies of similar interests in outer space was not that different from the internet in its current state of algorithmic ghettoization. How so much of our lives and memories are floating in space, visible to a small number of people arbitrarily grouped for marketing purposes. I began walking back towards the group. Two of the crows followed me to the edge of the golf course and perched above my head in a tree. I stopped and we watched each other for a few long minutes. Another bird flew back and forth orthogonally making a noise that struck me as digital sounding. Like a kind of curious glitch, repeating itself. 

When I returned my friend said the group was waiting for me to close the circle. I went along, somewhat reluctantly, and sat quietly as the group went around sharing their experiences. I don’t remember so much of what was said. Some people were emotional, some jovial, some confused, some tired and hungry. When it got to me, I said I felt shame for my poor Spanish and that the women cleaning the house probably had the most claim to this plant medicine. I said it breaks my heart that the chef has to be away from his son and it mostly has to do with money, and then I started crying. The night didn’t get any better and I felt increasingly at odds with the surroundings. My anthropological cool was overwhelmed by stress and exhaustion. I called my daughter, who was preoccupied at a sleepover and went on too long about how much I love her and how important our time together is. I didn't sleep much and in the morning I took an Uber to the airport and rented a car for the drive back north. 

The trip felt like an untimely and self indulgent distraction in some ways. Within the COVID-19 inspired ecological reckoning had irrupted a new global stage of the Black Lives Matter movement and all media, corporate and social, was collectively focused on this conversation. All of a sudden, talking about anything but systemic racism, oppression and the murder of Black lives felt profane. I went from protesting in the streets to playing hang drum at a Tesla charging station with the speed of changing a Snapchat filter. I reasoned the occasion would give me some kind of Didion-esque vehicle for exploring a set of urgent issues and I could put on my journalist drag and write a participatory voice-of-a-generation piece that strains admirably towards an ethical position. I imagined it being a part of a series—something like slouching towards the anthropocene. 

After writing that, I watch a documentary about Joan Didion on Netflix and I’m horrified. There’s a passage where her interlocutor asks her how she felt when she saw the 5 year old child in the Haight on LSD. Her eyes widen and she says ‘gold!’

2.

Mid-teens, this millennium, I found myself living in a small cob house on a 17 acre permaculture garden in Northern California along with a couple of shaman’s (permaculture is perhaps the agricultural version of shamanism). I’m actually not sure if they identify as Shamans with a capital S. They’re maybe more shaman-adjacent. One was older and had spent years traveling around with Terrance McKenna. The other was a student at a school she playfully referred to as ‘Hogwarts’ and was trying to balance a vocation as an entheogenic therapist with student loans and the increasingly expensive cost of living in the Bay Area. New healing modalities and neologisms abounded in stories of celebrity shamanatrixes, guided molly trips for wealthy divorcees, $1500 a head boutique pharmacology parties and handsome healers who could suck the demons out of your yoni for hours.

The word shaman itself is a laughable western construct that indicts colonialism and anthropology more than says anything useful about the irreducibly specific cultural contexts in which people performed magico-religious and other community-embedded practices that were mostly illegible to occidental social scientists. Wikipedia informs me the word shaman likely derives from the Manchu-Tungus word šaman, meaning "one who knows." Academia.edu conjures 32,336 full length papers on Shamanism and I begin one authored by Gerhard Mayer for a peer reviewed journal on Paganism called Pomegranate that explores four facets of shamanism in the contemporary western imaginary: neoshamanism, the ‘urban shaman’ as cultural critic and rebel, technoshamanism / cybershamanism, and the field of performing and visual arts. After reading a few papers on Academia.edu a couple years ago about shamanism in contemporary art, I’ve received hundreds of email suggestions for shaman-y papers in my inbox. The dubious origins and drift of ‘Shaman’ as a concept makes it hard to apply meaningfully. It seems a common through-line is access to knowledge not readily accessible to most and an animism that holds a non-dual and interconnected view of the world, in which spirit—or perhaps something like the surplus of the empirical–can be communicated with. 

From my vantage in Northern California, the most readily available conception of Shaman tends to emphasize the aesthetic and entheogenic (or psychiatric) dimensions. Perhaps these are the most commercially assimilable features, offering the most economic and attentional remuneration with the least amount of sustained effort. Without a community that one is held by and responsible to, I’m unclear how the role of Shaman can be more than an aleatory and transactional exchange. Trusted members of a community helping people they intimately knew through transitional periods of growth and healing, feels distinct from the phenomenon of commercial entheogenic guides working with self selecting global clientele in experience economies. At least, distinct enough to distinguish itself with another word further removed from the already misappropriated word shaman. What’s the Siberian word for someone who doesn’t know but takes all major forms of payment?  

In this late stage enlightenment moment, with its excess of visionless data, it appears some people are looking back to earlier forms of knowledge that feel more connected to the natural world or at least outside of data positivism. This animistic turn finds an easy alliance with an ecological movement intent to re-sacralize or re-enchant the earth and its various creatures (or at least just slow down the staggering extinction rate). Simultaneously, capital rushes into the exploding market of wellness to offer the ever-optimizable Neoliberal subject quick hacks to betterment and enlightenment. So, what’s a shaman to do?

A recent unsolicited headline occupied the screen of my personal surveillance device, ‘Gwyneth Paltrow’s Victory Over the Haters. It wasn’t easy for Gwyneth Paltrow to graduate from movie star to wellness tycoon—but there’s no elixir more potent than having the last laugh.’ The combination of ‘wellness’ and ‘tycoon’ pierced the fog of undesired informational noise. After turning this phrase over and over for a couple weeks, I realized it could veritably take a lifetime to unpack—Gwyneth Paltrow provides an interesting answer to the question, 'what does a contemporary shaman at the global scale, under neoliberalism, look like?’

Power never seems to be too far away–from most things really—and as a concept, it has continued to haunt me. So many competing wills asserting themselves in their different ideological guises. The will of humans, their guts and minds, of plants and microorganisms. Elon Musk’s power seems easy to recognize. His grandiose plans, his domination of labor, his colonial space programs, and bad techno music demonstrate his will in mostly unambiguous terms. A friend recently recounted a story of him coming out of a bedroom at a party after doing DMT and mumbling about how the answer is not on mars. What a dispiriting scene. Looking towards Elon Musk coming out of a bedroom at a party on DMT for answers. 

Byung-Chul Han, after Nietzsche, offers that sense is power—that is, to communicate oneself is to extend one’s power over the other. Naming = appropriating. He also cautions of a deep kind of power that doesn’t need to use force because it has already realized itself in its host, so that they act in its interest without any coercion. This seems not unlike an algorithm or the way a system like Capitalism operates with interchangeable administrators. I wonder where the source of my will is located in this endeavor. My friend and I discuss the shaman-facilitator’s move to Costa Rica. ‘Shouldn’t he stay closer to his children?’ I implore. ‘He’s being called by the plant medicine,’ my friend replied. I wonder out loud that in the midst of this anthropogenic mass extinction event, is it really that bad for a person to commit themselves to another species? I also recall he largely agreed to this ceremony because he was interested in the Indian pop star. I guess these wills are complex and overlapping. I wonder about the thrall of other plants like corn, wheat and sugar. It occurs to me that all of these species have their own wills and seductions. I think of all the nectars, colors, scents and sensations. I think about the complex relations of microbial agents to their hosts. I think of Donna Haraway and staying with the trouble. 

A few days after returning I was visiting with a septuagenarian painter friend. He’s a retired, lifelong drug producer and dealer with a specialty in weed, mushrooms and acid—in addition to some other substances he’s less proud of. He went through the Haight, back to the land, and right along with the California counterculture until it went cyberculture and then he dropped out (again). Although, when I shared that summation with him, he maintains he never really bought in to any of it. Neither one of us do drugs anymore—including caffeine and sugar—and we share a vitriolic, if not humorous, hate of capitalism and it’s administrators. In the recounting of this story he gave me some of his insights. ‘That’s not a Shaman,’ he said, ‘that’s a shoe salesman.’ And continued, ‘Shamanism is mostly bedside manner.’ Someone who knows you, and their presence and wisdom bring you comfort. Their suggestions have the power to help you heal and their experience with the history of a place and its practices—including those of food and medicine—extends a tradition of commonly discovered and held knowledge. 

What does this role look like today? The group that convened in the desert came from all over the world and shared the desire to connect in a meaningful way—a precarious band of urban nomads increasingly consigned to the digital, looking for a container to hold rituals at an intimate and personal scale. This comes perhaps at precisely the time where we need to find a balance between our local responsibilities and our global ones. This is to ask, when we are born into a globalized world, to what scales do we claim our indigeneity? How does one be a part of a community, without the violence and exclusion of tribalism or the erasure of homogenization, while cultivating intimacies at variable scales? My feeling is that we should be operating in subtler registers. Less extreme forms of silver bullet enlightenment and planetary conquest. Perhaps it’s in our bedside manner with an aging neighbor or the solidarity felt with the factory worker across the world assembling our smart phones. Perhaps it is time to turn our attention to radically reimagining how we share a planet and what our priorities are. We urgently need new conceptions of belonging, borders, work, study, values and politics. Édouard Glissant suggests a solidarity of sufferings in a global dialogue he calls mondialité that respects the other’s opacity and dignity. This position departs from a world devastated by colonization that begins to remediate itself with a poetics of relation. Who are going to be the shaman-like figures we consult to guide and heal us at the planetary scale? I’m afraid it’s looking like a combination of AI determinism and Gwenyth Paltrow-esque wellness tycoons. 

The day after finishing a draft of this piece I went to a local farm stand and bumped into a shaman friend. I’ve never done ceremony with her and her partner but sometimes I accompany them while they’re walking their wolves. It feels good to be in a pack together talking about common concerns. I mentioned my experience and shared the contours of this piece. She said they had been doing plant medicine for 30 years. They came out of psychedelia and it felt like a natural transition. She resisted my claim that Shaman was an empty Western construct and said every culture has their way of trying to communicate with the arcana. She said after all this time witnessing people coming to her to try to meet god or see the stars she felt like the work and learning was only as good as how people applied it to their lives. We stood in a field looking at each other with what felt like a resolved tenderness, behind our COVID-19 PPE, with arms full of heirloom vegetables. 

I bumped into another shaman friend at the community center where we have been volunteering for a food relief program. She told me she started having visions in her 30’s and began cultivating a language with her guides that was not so much a spoken language but a set of feelings that affirmed or disapproved of her questions. She lamented the ‘man’ in Shaman, cautioned against using ‘I’ and recounted the experience of asking her guides if she should start releasing shamanic video content on her website. They were not in favor of it. Helping an elderly friend to her car with a box of food, I saw another shaman friend and stopped her for a chat. I had actually forgotten she was a shaman but had been surfing with a young woman in town the night before who mentioned doing a shamanic session with her. I waved her down and asked for her input. She told me she had studied with Michael Harner who had invented and then failed at copyrighting ‘Core Shamanism,’ which we both quickly agreed was overdetermined and misguided. She felt entheogens were not necessary and prefers to work with rhythm and touch. I wondered out loud if Shamanism might be better understood as the quiet, ongoing and unfolding of small acts of kindness and collective knowledge transfer. We smiled at each other warmly and I put my hand over my heart.

3.

An epistolary text written to my friend from Oaxaca last year and a memory of a young girl being told by a group of boys she was too small to be in the tree house. She patiently explained that she cares for it before walking off the platforms out onto the limbs.

I wonder what will come from the seeds you planted in Oaxaca. I’m continuing this response to you from there. We just returned from an autonomous Zapotec village. We went with a self-organized group of locals and foreigners. It was a really varied bunch. We were told about the gathering by Unitierra folks in Oaxaca City and met at the Benito Juarez monument to caravan out to Lachatao with a couple kilos of avocados to share. I immediately got into an argument with an arrogant American man who was there to promote microfinance. A kind of a pathetic battle of savior complexes playing out with a younger version of myself. I made an abbreviated attempt to place microfinance as a neoliberal device for introducing debt culture to the majority world at the expense of preexisting modes of relation in the context of IMF and World Bank structural adjustments, before we caught a ride with a Marxist pediatrician and his philosopher partner out to the mountains. We arrived at a beautiful plaza containing a Church and the most amazing multi-tiered tree house that immediately filled with children and their parents. Through my limited Spanish I observed a syncretic blend of indigenous culture, Catholicism, communalidad, and maybe something like a western NGO workshop culture. We all put our food offerings into a communal room and people wrote down skills or knowledge they felt compelled to share. The plaza then self organized into informal groups and the rest of the day and the next proceed with a loose time around specific events and rituals that our hosts prepared for us and offerings from the group. We gathered at 5 the next morning to do a walk up to a sacred site to make an offering. On the way up we listened to lectures from a decidedly patriarchal guide who seemed very content leading us through hackneyed exercises of hugging trees and walking around with our eyes closed. D remarked how Cage-like he sounded at the outset and by the time we got to the top of the mountain we couldn’t bear another platitude. Under his direction we missed the sunrise, lying together in a circle beneath a tree and as he moved himself into the sun, leaving the rest of us in the shade to further explicate something, I began sketching out a Didion-esque essay called Performative Indigeneity the Shaman Industrial Complex. 

It seems hard to disentangle all the various forms of colonization—and to what end, I'm not sure. Re-sacralizing the earth in the Anthropocene could be a good project, especially in the context of extractivism in the global south. Our group had a number of bourgeois parents from the city who seemed to view the weekend as an alternative educational experience for their kids. We met humanitarian eco-tourists, quite a few Northern European and midwestern transplants, and many local Oaxacans of diverse ages and backgrounds. It was certainly convivial and self organizing and appeared committed to rehearsing new ways of being together. At the top of the mountain, where the internet connection was a bit stronger, we got a WhatsApp message from a friend saying ‘I know how ridiculous this sounds while your in an autonomous Zapotec village, but we got reservations at Contramar with an Italian performance curator when you arrive in Mexico City.’