Transsingularities: the cognitive foundations of shamanism in Northern Asia
Social Anthropology May 1, 2015 Charles Stépanoff 12 citations
In Tuva, Southern Siberia, people recognize that every category of beings—humans, animals, trees, and even landscape features—can include singular individuals distinguished by unusual bodily or behavioral traits. Shamans are one example among humans, but similar singular beings appear across species and places. This pattern, termed 'transsingularity,' links these atypical beings across categories. The underlying cognitive mechanism is a 'singularity detection device,' an inferential schema connecting individuality with categorical norms. This device explains representations of metamorphosis and client-shaman interactions, and appears foundational to Northern Asian shamanism, potentially also operating in animist cosmologies elsewhere.