physicists (and scientists as western shamans

 The xapiri (an Amazonian tribe) are hard to contact, but not many of us can commune with quarks and leptons either. It requires years of training, education and experience to be in a position to do so.

 It would be fruitful to take seriously an idea of physicists (and scientists in general) as western shamans: they are the people who can visit certain sorts of exotic islands of stability for us and report back to us on other worlds. But two differences between science and shamanism remain worth contemplating, both of which concern the anthropological problematic of translation, bringing home other cultures. It is worth emphasising that neither of these would need discussion in the representational idiom with its focus on words, representations, meanings and symbolism, but both are pressing if we want to take different worlds seriously as genuine performative engagements of the human and nonhuman.