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Shapeshifting is not new. There is a long lineage of human coordination and sense-making. From shamans, merchants, and diplomats, to organisers, translators, and fixers, many forms of work-in-between have long been performed, and named.

Below is a short list of ‘shapeshifter ancestors’

• Priests and shamans. As mediators between the human and the divine, those figures sometimes ‘become’ someone else, or serve as a ‘vehicle’ for some superior force that operates through them. Functionally, they also often acted as peacemakers in communities.
• Diplomats: people officially representing the interest of a state or leader, who reside in a separate land or next to a separate leader, and whose primary functions are a) to cultivate goodwill and b) to gather information (i.e., spy). Essentially, maintaining good channels of mutual intelligence, as a way to anticipate conflicts and mediate them early.
• Missionaries: Jesuits in China, Japan and India, or missionaries to America.
• Judges and Mediators: people whose function is to maintain balance in society by solving conflicts, listening to both parties, and creatively identifying some acceptable way forward that avoids the conflict spiralling.
• Merchants: moving goods across places through networks, often family relations, that attach them to different locations.
• Courtesans and Salon hosts: how do you create the conditions for some unified culture? There is a long tradition, in Europe and elsewhere, of women inviting different people for informal conversations.
• ‘Jacks-of-all-trades’ and Fixers: we hear of those figures in literature, people who travel around, shifting from role to role, sailors, salespeople, repair-people. Figaro Figaro Figaro.