Table Of ContentB E I NG C H A N G E D . .. reviews
"This is a challenging and thought-provoking book. Ten
anthropologists testify frankly and openly about the
spiritual encounters and altered states of consciousness
which they experienced as their fieldwork drew them into
deepening relationships with their hosts and consultants in
Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Sensitively confronting the
personal dimensions of their research, their essays explore
the ways in which participatory anthropology fosters a
creative synergy between enhanced self-knowledge and
deeper understanding of others."
Jennifer S. H. Brown, History Department,
University of Winnipeg.
"Anthropology presents its fieldworkers with a paradox. The
methodological approach of participant-observation says
that anthropologists should try to experience the world the
way their subjects do. Yet the discipline, a Western science,
tends not to take seriously accounts of mystical,
transcendent experiences.
Here are 12 essays by 10 anthropologists who do take
seriously their informants' accounts of dreams, visions,
trance states, spirit encounters, etc. Some report on their
own 'extraordinary experiences' generated within the
reality of their informants' culture.
This is a book about culture, and reality, and ways of
knowing, and its premise is that this type of experience
may be essential to the fullest understanding of cultural
reality. It raises and discusses challenging theoretical and
methodological questions, with important implications for
the conduct of our discipline. It is an important book,
ground-breaking—and overdue."
Phillips Stevens Jr., Department of Anthropology,
State University of New York, Buffalo.
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B E I NG C H A N G ED
The Anthropology of
Extraordinary Experience
Edited by
David E. Young & Jean-Guy Goulet
IB
broadview press
© 1994 broadview press Ltd.
Reprinted 1998
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced,
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system,
without prior written consent of the publisher — or in the case of
photocopying, a licence from CANCOPY (Canadian Copyright Licensing
Agency) 6 Adelaide Street East, Suite 900, Toronto, Ontario M5C IH6 —is
an infringement of the copyright law.
Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data
Being changed: the anthropology of extraordinary experience
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 1-55111-032-6 (HARD COVER)
ISBN 1-55111-040-7 (SOFT COVER)
I. Ethnopsychology. 2. Psychological anthropology. 3. Intercultural
communication.
1. Goulet, Jean-Guy, II. Young, David E.
GN5O2.B45 1994 155.8 C94-930290-2
Broadview Press
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Broadview Press gratefully acknowledges the support of the Ontario Arts
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Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development
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PRINTED IN CANADA
C O N T E N TS
DAVID E. YOUNG AND JEAN-GUY GOULET: Introduction 1
PART I: EXTRAORDINARY EXPERIENCE AND FIELDWORK
JEAN-GUY GOULET: Dreams and Visions in Other Lifeworlds 16
MARIE FRANCOISE GUEDON: Dene Ways and the Ethnographer's Culture 39
EDITH TURNER: A Visible Spirit Form in Zambia 71
PART II: MODELING EXTRAORDINARY EXPERIENCE
CHARLES D. LAUGHLIN, JR.: Psychic Energy & Transpersonal Experience: A
biogenetic structural account of the Tibetan Dumo Yoga Practice 99
RAB WILKIE: Spirited Imagination: Ways of approaching the shaman's
world 135
DAVID E. YOUNG:Visitors in the Night: A creative energy model of
spontaneous visions 166
PART III: Taking Our Informants Seriously
rgkrjkjrafl;dskflfdkdflkdsflkslfkfsoororfmddfdflksflkdsflklflfdklg 197
LISE SWARTZ: Being Changed by Cross-Cultural Encounters 209
ANTONIA MILLS: Making a Scientific Investigation of Ethnographic Cases
Suggestive of Reincarnation 237
PART IV: CONCLUSION
YVES MARTON: The Experiential Approach to Anthropology
& Castaneda's Ambiguous Legacy 273
JEAN-GUY GOULET AND DAVID YOUNG: Theoretical and Methodological Issues 298
REFERENCES 337
INDEX 372
D A V I D E. Y O U NG AND J E A N - G UY G O U L ET
Introduction
This book is a collection of original papers by Western-trained
anthropologists who have had experiences which fall outside of
the range of what we tend to regard as "normal." We have called
such experiences "extraordinary," but it should be kept in mind
that experiences which may be extraordinary for Western-trained
anthropologists may be commonplace for most traditional peo-
ples around the world. The focus of the book is on dreams and
visions which carry an unusual degree of reality — as in the case
of Goulet who, while sitting quietly in a native Indian ceremony
sees someone fanning the fire, only to realize with a start that
the person he is watching is himself; or Turner who, while par-
ticipating in an African curing ritual, sees the ihamba spirit
emerge from the body of the victim. In addition to accounts of
extraordinary dreams and visions, the book includes other ex-
periences such as that of Swartz whose day-to-day life was
changed by contact with a Cree healer, or Mills whose work with
the Beaver and Gitksan on their "stories" of reincarnation led
her to consider the possibility that reincarnation might, in fact,
actually occur.
An interesting aspect of extraordinary experiences is that they
often take a form and content consistent with one's host culture
— even if the anthropologist is relatively new to that society. How
and why does this happen? There is no clear answer to this
question, but this book will explore some possibilities. Regardless
of how extraordinary experiences can be understood analytically,
one thing is clear: anthropologists who have such experiences
are usually changed by them. Extraordinary experiences tend to
INTRODUCTION 7
challenge one's conceptions of reality in the sense that normal
ways of classifying perceptual data are no longer adequate and
the boundary between the real and the imaginary is blurred.
This blurring of the boundary between the real and the imagi-
nary happens to everyone, of course. It is experienced whenever
we ease our hold on the world of "common sense" reality and
participate fully in a drama, a symphony, or a sports event. Nev-
ertheless, experiencing "alternate realities" provided by other
cultures can come as a shock, especially when there is no expe-
riential context in which such experiences can be placed. Ex-
traordinary experiences force one to deal with the possibility
that reality is culturally constructed and that instead of one re-
ality (or a finite set of culturally-defined realities), there are mul-
tiple realities — or at least multiple ways of experiencing the
world, depending upon time, place, and circumstances.
When the anthropologist has an extraordinary experience
which challenges his/her conception of reality, the experience
can be suppressed and the "threat" minimized. Or the experi-
ence can be accepted as valid and one's schemata reorganized
to accommodate the new reality. In either case, the investigator
may choose not to relate these experiences to others because of
fear of ostracism. Fear of ostracism is not unfounded if one does
not have the tools which allow the experience to be framed in
a "believable" way to the listener. Because of the fear of ostra-
cism, an entire segment of cross-cultural experience common to
many investigators, is not available for discussion and scientific
investigation.
A basic premise of the contributors and editors of this book
is that anthropology stands to gain by taking up challenges posed
by ways of knowing that are unusual to us. To begin, extraordi-
nary experiences related in this book should not be described
as "paranormal" or "supernatural". Such terms imply distinctions
such as real versus unreal, or normal versus abnormal which
exclude, rather than invite, serious intellectual consideration.
Likewise, we do not feel that such experiences necessarily fall
into the realm of religion. To put the matter succinctly, we would
like to distance ourselves from New Age approaches which tend
to view reality in terms of different dimensions, and enlighten-
ment as a movement to ever higher dimensions, either in this
life or in lives to come. Because it has to do with ultimate mean-
ing of life, the New Age movement qualifies as a religion. What
we are talking about in this volume has nothing to do, per se,
with religion, although it has indirect implications for the social-
psychological study of religious experience. We want to entertain
8 DAVID E. YOUNG AND JEAN-GUY GOULET
the notion that what was is seen at first as an "extraordinary
experience" is in fact the normal outcome of genuine participa-
tion in social and ritual performances through which social re-
alities are generated or constituted.
Although we are suspicious of attempts to view reality in
terms of different dimensions, we do not reject the concept of
"multiple realities" as espoused by scholars such as Mead, Schutz,
and Goodman. But this concept does not imply that reality itself
is multi-dimensional. Rather, reality is experienced in different
ways, depending upon cultural context and one's state of mind.
Even within a single culture, reality is experienced differently,
depending upon whether one is taking part in a religious ritual,
attending a drama, or drinking an intoxicating beverage. In other
words, from our perspective, what we have called an extraordi-
nary experience probably is not the result of experiencing some-
thing from another dimension, but an experience which occurs
when one opens one's self to aspects of experience that pre-
viously have been ignored or repressed. If we are genuinely open
to alternate ways of perceiving, experiencing, and interpreting
reality, our normal ways of processing and classifying informa-
tion are challenged and something has to give.
As a child of Western culture, anthropology is the heir to an
intellectual tradition which, until recently, has not taken extraor-
dinary experiences seriously. The case of dreams and visions can
be used to illustrate this point. As a result of 18th century En-
lightenment, intellectuals dismissed visionary experiences as the
source of a belief in spirits and ghosts. Experiences of such phe-
nomena were described as hallucinations, and the beings encoun-
tered in such experiences were termed apparitions. This sort of
terminology persists to this day. In 1900 with the publication of
The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud made it respectable to study
visionary experiences. His emphasis, however, was on analyzing
these phenomena in terms of unconscious psychological proc-
esses and defense mechanisms such as wish fulfillment and pro-
jection. Thus in his own way, Freud perpetuated the rationalist
distrust of products of the imagination.
In line with the rationalist bias in the Western tradition, an-
thropologists normally give little credence to informant accounts
which do not accord with the world view of Western science.
For example, instead of investigating the "truth value" of expe-
riences such as "seeing spirits" or engaging in "soul travel," an-
thropologists generally prefer to use functionalist, structuralist,
or symbolic models to explain why their informants have (or
claim to have) such experiences. Semiotically-oriented anthro-
INTRODUCTION 9
