“I am not a thing - a noun. I seem to be a verb.” · R. Buckminster Fuller
This is a series of long conversations with the people who facilitate change: elders and initiators, clinicians and mediators, teachers and coaches, and the scholars who have studied it up close.
In conversation with Rehan Khan, 2026. Two chairs, a low table, an unhurried hour.
In conversation with Idris Mears, 2026.With Abdelwahed El-Wakeel.With Seth Appelbaum, St. John's College, Santa Fe, 2026.With Scott Buchanan, St. John's College, Santa Fe, 2026.With Rudolph "Butch" Ware.With Souhayl Maronesy.Earthna Summit, Doha, 2025.With Peter Gould, 2026.
Who is asking
An anthropologist by training, a deep listener by trade.
UC San Diego, the Boas–Mead–Geertz line, cum laude with the Mel Spiro Award. Field time in Candomblé houses in Bahia, monasteries in Thailand, Sufi circles in Andalusia and the Gulf, and the manuscript room at Saint Catherine's on Sinai. Six books in progress on how people are formed.
The day work is long-form Socratic conversation with people at thresholds in their lives, which is to say, listening for a living. In 2026 I hosted Logos Talks, a publisher's series of conversations with scholars.
I speak English, Spanish, Portuguese and Arabic. We can talk in the language your tradition uses about itself.
Why these conversations
The people who change people are almost never asked how.
The initiator, the healer, the mestre, the architect, the historian, the ethnographer who apprenticed for forty years, they are asked about the institution, the controversy, the book. I am curious about the other thing: what happens to a person in the roncó, in the dieta, in the trance, in the festival that remakes a town once a year, in the room built for the purpose, in the seminar that runs for fifty years. What changes. What it costs. How you know it worked. How it gets handed on.
I come as a learner. I have done the reading and I will not ask you to explain your tradition from the beginning, but I will not pretend to know it from the inside. That is what you are for.
Lavagem do Bonfim, Salvador. Photo: Tatiana Azeviche / Turismo Bahia, CC BY-SA 2.0.Vodun ceremony, Agbodrafo, Togo. Photo: Jonathanbwilson1, CC BY-SA 4.0.Theyyam, Kerala. Photo: Shagil Kannur, CC BY-SA 4.0.Cacique Isaká Huni Kuin, praying. Acre. Photo: Ilex Duca, CC BY-SA 4.0.The Great Eleusinian Relief: Demeter, Persephone and the boy Triptolemos. Roman copy, Metropolitan Museum. Photo: Marie-Lan Nguyen, CC BY 2.5.The Academy. Mosaic from Pompeii, 1st c. BCE. Public domain.
What this is for
Broad on purpose.
Candomblé and the Platonic academy, Sufi lodges and Korean shamans, an Achuar vision quest and a vision fast in the California mountains. Also the psychiatrist and the psychoanalyst, the anthropologist who apprenticed for forty years, the mediator, the coach, the teacher who has run the same seminar for half a century. And the celebration and the setting: the festival, the pilgrimage, the carnival; the courtyard, the monastery, the city block, the room built for the purpose; the historian who watches a people change over centuries and the sociologist who watches it happen in a decade. Different lineages, different vocabularies, one comparison held open: what changes a person, and how the people who do it know. The voices are often the ones nobody has platformed: the initiate rather than the institution, the scholar in a small department rather than the famous one, the practitioner rather than the commentator, the person who stands between worlds and is asked about everything except that.
Sixty to ninety minutes, no agenda, silences left in. Not a debate, not a debunking, not a promotion, when the subject is possession, initiation or ecstatic practice, the work is to take it seriously as practice, neither explaining it away nor endorsing its metaphysics.
Over time, a standing record of how humans change humans, told from inside by the people who do it, meant to be usable by people who will never meet you.
If you've been invited
What to expect, in plain terms.
Where
Remote, on Riverside
A laptop, a quiet room, headphones. The recording is made on your side, so a weak connection costs nothing. In person when we are in the same city, or when I am travelling. In English, Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, Thai or Japanese, your choice; other languages with an interpreter, said on tape.
How long
Sixty to ninety minutes, one sitting
Sometimes longer. Nothing to prepare, no questions sent in advance, no promotional segment. One host, no producer on the call; I work around your calendar and your time zone. You may think on tape; the silences stay in.
Before release
Nothing goes out that you did not intend
Anything you did not intend to publish comes out; that is a standing right, not a courtesy. Edits are for length only; nothing is re-ordered to change its sense.
Where it goes
YouTube and Instagram, monthly; Substack in writing
Released within a month of recording, on a date confirmed with you. A transcript, or an essay drawn from the conversation, follows on Substack (joshuabeneventi.substack.com). You receive the links and the full recording, for your own use. Short excerpts are drawn only from what you approved.
A yes is a reply and a few dates. A no is a one-line reply, and I will not ask twice.
Write to me
A reply, a few dates, or a question. One email is enough.
