My Microbiome is a Shaman

At Somerville College at the University of Oxford an anthropologist is attempting to redefine the study of shamanism. His name is Cesar E. Giraldo Herrera. In a new book titled, "Microbes and Other Shamanic Beings" he makes the claim that much is lost in our understanding of shamanism due to Christian interpretations of shamanic traditions and practices by scholars and scientists in the West. He asserts that closer study reveals microbiomes actually having more in common with shamans than explanations derived from Christian ontologies.

A description of his book -
"Shamanism is commonly understood through reference to spirits and souls. However, these terms were introduced by Christian missionaries as part of the colonial effort of conversion. So, rather than trying to comprehend shamanism through medieval European concepts, this book examines it through ideas that started developing in the West after encountering Amerindian shamans. Microbes and Other Shamanic Beings develops three major arguments: First, since their earliest accounts Amerindian shamanic notions have had more in common with current microbial ecology than with Christian religious beliefs. Second, the human senses allow the unaided perception of the microbial world; for example, entoptic vision allows one to see microscopic objects flowing through the retina and shamans employ techniques that enhance precisely these kinds of perception. Lastly, the theory that some diseases are produced by living agents acquired through contagion was proposed right after Contact in relation to syphilis, an important subject of pre-Contact Amerindian medicine and mythology, which was treasured and translated by European physicians. Despite these early translations, the West took four centuries to rediscover germs and bring microbiology into mainstream science. Giraldo Herrera reclaims this knowledge and lays the fundaments for an ethnomicrobiology. It will appeal to anyone curious about shamanism and willing to take it seriously and to those enquiring about the microbiome, our relations with microbes and the long history behind them."


Syncretic Ontologies of the Microbial-Shamanic Beings
César E. Giraldo Herrera

Abstract
"This chapter examines the similarities between the notions of Amerindian shamanism and of microbiology; it suggests the common grounds shared by both ontologies and proposes the hypothesis that some shamanic beings might be microbes. The chapter starts reviewing the notion of shamanic beings, and how it appeared in early accounts and in recent ethnographies. Then the chapter exposes these notions are paralleled by recent understandings of the workings of the microbiome. The chapter then questions the traditional position of anthropologists towards medical materialism, as well as some of the positions of science and technology studies (STS) towards microbes."

Syncretic Ontologies of the Microbial-Shamanic Beings 


Similarities of Microbiology and Shamanic Ontologies
César E. Giraldo Herrera
First published: 04 March 2018 

"Masters of game “spirits” might seem alien to western science and more akin to religious notions. Yet through microbiology we have come to understand not only that entities—normally invisible to the naked eye—inhabit the air, the water, and the earth, affecting their properties and dynamics (Margulis et al. 1993; Hamilton and Lenton 1998; Nealson and Hastings 2006; Haddock, Moline, and Case 2010) but also that we, like other plants and animals, are ourselves microbiomes, complex ecological systems in constant change (Ley et al. 2008; Blaser 2010; Robinson, Bohannan, and Young 2010). We have recognized that we are made of cells but more importantly that our mammalian cells are vastly outnumbered by a highly diverse community of microbes, mostly bacteria, comprising 90% of the cells in our body (Savage 1977; Blaser 2006; Sekirov et al. 2010). Furthermore, providing for roughly 98% of our working DNA, microbes make our bodies operational, foster our development, and mediate our ability to interact with the environment (Gill et al. 2006; Turnbaugh et al. 2007; Blaser 2010).

Besides being our symbiotic guests, bacteria can be considered as our living, and most distant, ancestors. Our eukaryotic cells evolved from the cooperation of prokaryotic bacteria (Margulis 1970; Margulis et al. 2006; Wier et al. 2010). However, due to their asexual mode of reproduction, bacteria and many protozoa generate replicas of themselves. Hence, although vulnerable as individual cells, they are practically immortal as entities. Furthermore, like xapiripe, kuku, and other “spirits,” microbes are highly “social” (Dunny, Brickman, and Dworkin 2008; Nadell, Xavier, and Foster 2009), both among themselves and in their complex and intricate interactions with their hosts (Hastings and Greenberg. 1999; de Kievit and Iglewski 2000; Xavier and Bassler 2003; West et al. 2006).

Lowland South American Amerindian communities recognize the visions of hallucinations and dreams as means to enquire into the fundaments of physical reality. Their ontologies are grounded on these experiences and their shamans derive from them some of their diagnostic means to understand the body and deal with the pathogenic owners of wildlife. Assimilating these entities to Christian notions such as souls and spirits, Amerindian epistemologies and ontologies were dismissed by early anthropology. Labeling these experiences as metaphorical constructs or as neurogenic “short‐circuits,” symbolic and neuropsychological approaches void these experiences of their empirical value and fail to take shamanism and animic ontologies seriously.

The possibility of observing cellular structures and microbes through entoptic microscopy substantiates shamanic epistemologies bridging the gap between shamanism and microbial ecology. Microbial ecology offers a view of the world highly coherent with shamanic ontologies. It portrays our bodies and environment as constituted by a dense and fluid population of highly social entities, which can affect our health and behavior and play an important role on the environmental balance. Microbial ecology corresponds well with the medical specialty of shamans, whose knowledge is derived from and closely associated with wildlife management and the treatment of hunting‐related (i.e., zoonotic) diseases. Assimilating animic “souls” to cells and masters of game to microorganisms does not imply a reductionist view so long as we remain aware of the complexity of the cellular and microbial worlds and the potential insights offered by the subjective approach of shamans. Our sensorium, our organism, and its interaction with a wide variety of guests provides multiple potential modalities to explore our subjective interactions with the microbial world that constitutes us and the environment. Moreover, it is not necessary to relinquish symbolism, but perhaps we should consider the possibility that symbols and the “mind” or soul might not be abstract or contained in neuronal vats but flow more freely and be widely distributed through the body and the environment."


Microbes Maketh Man
People are not just people. They are an awful lot of microbes, too
Aug 18th 2012

"POLITICAL revolutionaries turn the world upside down. Scientific ones more often turn it inside out. And that, almost literally, is happening to the idea of what, biologically speaking, a human being is.

The traditional view is that a human body is a collection of 10 trillion cells which are themselves the products of 23,000 genes. If the revolutionaries are correct, these numbers radically underestimate the truth. For in the nooks and crannies of every human being, and especially in his or her guts, dwells the microbiome: 100 trillion bacteria of several hundred species bearing 3m non-human genes. The biological Robespierres believe these should count, too; that humans are not single organisms, but superorganisms made up of lots of smaller organisms working together.

It might sound perverse to claim bacterial cells and genes as part of the body, but the revolutionary case is a good one. For the bugs are neither parasites nor passengers. They are, rather, fully paid-up members of a community of which the human “host” is but a single (if dominating) member. This view is increasingly popular: the world’s leading scientific journals, Nature and Science, have both reviewed it extensively in recent months. It is also important: it will help the science and practice of medicine."