Michael Winkelman
Michael J. Winkelman, Ph.D. (University of California-Irvine), M.P.H. (University of Arizona) is retired from the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at Arizona State University where he served as the Head of Sociocultural Anthropology; Director of the Ethnographic Field School in Ensenada, BC, Mexico; and Director of the M.P.H. in Community Health. Winkelman served as President of the Anthropology of Consciousness section of the American Anthropological Association, as was the founding President of its Anthropology of Religion Section. Winkelman has engaged in cross-cultural and interdisciplinary research on shamanism, psychedelics, religion, and the alteration of consciousness for 40 years. His books on shamanism (Shamans, Priests and Witches [1992] and Shamanism: A Biopsychosocial Paradigm of Consciousness and Healing [2nd ed., 2010] use cross-cultural and evolutionary methods to examine these ancient spiritual and ritual healing capacities. He is the co-editor of Advances in Psychedelic Medicine and a Frontiers in Psychology special issue on Psychedelic Sociality, and editor of a special issue of the Journal of Psychedelic Studies on Psychedelics in History and World Religions. He also coauthored Supernatural as Natural and co-edited The Supernatural after the Neuroturn. In The Handbook of Entheogenic Healing (Brill, 2025) Winkelman and his contributors examine the contemporary practices of entheogenic healing and analyze their commonalities from the perspectives of evolutionary psychology. Winkelman currently lives in central Brazil where he is engaged in permaculture activities while continuing his academic career. His website provides information about his books and access to many of his articles at www.michaelwinkelman.com