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Anthropologists of recent generations have always expressed enormous sympathy with 'non-rational' modes of thought with the 'supernatural' experiences of people around the world. What they have rarely in their scholarly writing admitted to doing is giving any credence to the 'irrational' themselves --- though such beliefs have long been common among those who have lived and worked for extended periods in cultures different from those that dominate Western society. Now, in a ground-breaking volume, leading anthropologists describe such experiences and analyze what can occur "when one opens one's self to aspects of experience that previously have been ignored or repressed." The ten contributions to the book include Edith Turner on 'A Visible Spirit Form in Zambia', Rab Wilkie on 'Ways of Approaching the Shaman's World', and Marie Françoise Guédon on 'Dene Ways and the Ethnographer's Culture'. The editors' introduction and conclusion extensively discuss the general issues involved.

Being Changed is a book that directly challenges the rationalist bias in Western tradition by developing a new, 'experiential' approach to extraordinary experiences --- and a book that takes traditional cultures seriously in a way that anthropology has rarely done before. David E. Young (Professor of Anthropology at the University of Alberta), and Jean-Guy Goulet (Professor of Anthropology at the University of Calgary), have both written widely on the native peoples of North America. Young's most recent book is Cry of the Eagle: Encounters with a Cree Healer (U. of T. Press, 1990).

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.

CONTENTS

DAVID E. YOUNG AND JEAN-GUY GOULET. Introduction PART I: EXTRAORDINARY EXPERIENCE AND FIELDWORK JEAN-GUY GOULET. Dreams and Visions in Other Lifeworlds MARIE FRANCOISE GUÉDON: Dene Ways and the Ethnographer's Culture EDITH TURNER: A Visible Spirit Form in Zambia PART II: MODELING EXTRAORDINARY EXPERIENCE CHARLES D. LAUGHLIN, JR.: Psychic Energy & Transpersonal Experience: A biogenetic structural account of the Tibetan Dumo Yoga Practice RAB WILKIE: Spirited Imagination: Ways of approaching the shaman's world DAVID E. YOUNG: Visitors in the Night: A creative energy model of spontaneous visions  PART III: Taking Our Informants Seriously C. RODERICK WILSON: Seeing They See Not LISE SWARTZ: Being Changed by Cross-Cultural Encounters ANTONIA MILLS: Making a Scientific Investigation of Ethnographic Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation PART IV: CONCLUSION YVES MARTON: The Experiential Approach to Anthropology & Castaneda's Ambiguous Legacy JEAN-GUY GOULET AND DAVID YOUNG: Theoretical and Methodological Issues REFERENCES

 

DAVID I. YOUNG AND JEAN-GUY GOULET

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 peoples 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 participating 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 experiences 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 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 imaginary 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. Nevertheless, experiencing "alternate realities" provided by other cultures can come as a shock, especially when there is no experiential context in which such experiences can be placed. Extraordinary experiences force one to deal with the possibility that reality is culturally constructed and that instead of one reality (or a finite set of culturally-defined realities), there are multiple 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 experience 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 ostracism, 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, extraordinary 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 enlightenment as a movement to ever higher dimensions, either in this life or in lives to come. Because it has to do with ultimate meaning 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 the notion that what was is seen at first as an "extraordinary experience" is in fact the normal outcome of genuine participation in social and ritual performances through which social realities 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 extraordinary experience probably is not the result of experiencing something from another dimension, but an experience which occurs when one opens one's self to aspects of experience that previously 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 information 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 extraordinary experiences seriously. The case of dreams and visions can be used to illustrate this point. As a result of 18th century Enlightenment, intellectuals dismissed visionary experiences as the source of a belief in spirits and ghosts. Experiences of such phenomena were described as hallucinations, and the beings encountered 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 processes and defense mechanisms such as wish fulfillment and projection. 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, anthropologists 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 experiences such as "seeing spirits" or engaging in "soul travel," anthropologists generally prefer to use functionalist, structuralist, or symbolic models to explain why their informants have (or claim to have) such experiences. Semiotically-oriented anthropologists attempt to go beyond traditional structural and functional analyses to treat informant accounts as "texts" to be analyzed in terms of their meaning. This willingness to focus on meaning is refreshing, but it is not as radical a departure from traditional structural-functional analysis as it might seem. Neither the structural-functionalists nor the semiotic-symbolic anthropologists consider viewing their informants' "stories" as accounts of reality which could have explanatory value for Western culture.

To state this thesis most baldly, and thereby to run the danger of exaggeration in order to make a point, anthropology has not been fully able to shake off its earlier involvement with cultural imperialism. The emic (inside) reality of one's informants is frequently viewed as something which may be intensely interesting --- even eminently reasonable (given the premises upon which the system is constructed). But emic views are not considered as serious alternatives to Western scientific conceptions of reality. In other words, one's informants are not taken seriously.

Recently, however, some anthropologists have begun to take what might be called an experiential rather than a rationalist approach to extraordinary experiences. The emphasis of this approach is on the firsthand experience of rituals designed to induce altered states of consciousness and on viewing phenomena such as dreams and visions as alternate ways of processing insights and information relevant to one's life situation. For the first time, the experiential approach allows anthropologists, such as those represented in this book, to view visionary experiences in a way that is compatible with the views of most traditional cultures around the world.

There is no consensus, however, as to how extraordinary experiences such as dreams and visions are to be interpreted. At one end of the interpretive continuum represented in this book is Edith Turner who believes that the simplest way to interpret an extraordinary experience is to accept the native account of what has happened. At the other end of the continuum is Charles Laughlin who believes that such experiences can be satisfactorily explained with a neurological model. Most of the authors fall somewhere in between. In other words, they believe that native accounts of what the anthropologist regards as an extraordinary experience should be taken seriously but do not have to be taken literally. In other words, they must be reframed or translated if they are to make sense to outsiders. We will allow each author to speak for himself/herself on this issue.

What the two editors can do, however, is to speak for ourselves. We can outline the kind of personal biases that will be discussed more fully in our two individually-authored articles. It is our point of view that anthropologists should, at a minimum, temporarily suspend disbelief, and attempt to take as seriously as possible informants' reports of extraordinary experiences, as well as their explanations for them. This is a minimal condition because good ethnographic reporting requires a real effort on the part of the anthropologist to go beyond simply recording what is said and done to as deep an understanding of the native meaning system as possible.

Beyond these minimal requirements, there is a great deal of variation among anthropologists concerning how far the investigator should go in adopting the explanatory models of one's informants. It may not be practical to either prove or disprove many aspects of a native model. Both editors agree that if a particular belief is in principle, beyond the scope of scientific investigation, there is very little to be gained by debating its "truth value". If, on the basis of existing evidence, however, a native belief appears to be testable in some way (or is at least capable of suggesting testable hypotheses), the anthropologist may have some obligation to point this out. He/she may even wish to pursue the issue and engage in collaborative research with other scientists with a view to collecting evidence pertaining to the truth value of the belief in question. In other words, paradoxical as it may seem, subjecting emic claims to etic investigation is an expression of an anthropologist's willingness to take traditional cultures seriously.

Another way to take traditional cultures seriously is to use the rich non-western traditions, which have been developed over long time spans, to provide a multi-faceted view of reality which might overcome some of the limitations of a single, dominant, Western view. What we are arguing here is that after anthropologists have come to some understanding of the world view of their informants, they should proceed to use these world views to address larger questions, such as those dealing with the nature of reality, or with pressing ethical and social issues.

There is a well-known Japanese movie, Rashomon, which revolves around the fact that several people have witnessed a murder. As the plot unfolds and each witness is questioned by the authorities, it becomes apparent that no two people saw the same thing. The Western viewer anticipates that by the end of the movie, the authorities will sift through the. differing accounts and piece together what really happened. They are usually surprised, when in typical Japanese fashion, the movie ends without a clear resolution. In the process, however, of seeing the event through the eyes of different people, the viewer is presented with a much richer understanding of the reality of the situation, in all of its complexity, than is the case with most Western "murder mysteries."

If clarity, parsimony, and logic are the criteria of successful metaphysical enterprise, there is an obvious advantage in selecting a single view of reality and regarding the other views as skewed or illusory. If reality is complicated enough to transcend the theoretical and methodological blinders of Western science, however, having access to a variety of views on matters such as "the nature of cause and effect relationships" or "the nature of our relationship to the physical environment" might be an advantage even if the views are not consistent.

How one builds meta-models of reality on the basis of crosscultural, and often contradictory, world views is one of the central theoretical tasks facing modern anthropology. It is not something anthropologists can do by themselves, as the task of understanding the universe in which we live is a concern of many human endeavors ---including science, art, philosophy and religion. As a first step, however, anthropologists can begin to take their informants seriously and to entertain the idea that an informant's account may be more than a "text" to be analyzed. It may have something of value to contribute to our understanding of reality.

This book therefore attempts to do three things: (1) provide personal accounts by anthropologists who have taken their informants' extraordinary experiences seriously or who have had extraordinary experiences themselves, (2) develop the beginnings of a theoretical framework which will help facilitate an understanding of such experiences, and (3) explore the issue of how such experiences can be conveyed and explained to a "scientifically-oriented" audience in such a way that they are not automatically dismissed without a fair hearing.

The book is organized into four parts. Part I consists of articles by anthropologists who describe extraordinary experiences they have had in the field and how their normal perceptions of reality have been challenged by such experiences . In the lead article, Jean-Guy Goulet raises a central question of how to deal with one's extraordinary experiences in the context of ethnographic reports. Marie Françoise Guédon describes the process by which an anthropologist is changed by experience in another culture, and Edith Turner describes seeing a spirit form while conducting fieldwork in Zambia.

Part II deals with modeling extraordinary experiences. Charles Laughlin uses the concepts of biogenetic structuralism to account for extraordinary experiences in a way that can be comprehended by a "scientifically-oriented" audience. In contrast, Rab Wilkie attempts to convey his understanding of extraordinary experiences by creating a fictitious scenario in which basic issues are discussed by the participants in an elder's council. David Young takes a stance somewhere between that of Laughlin and Wilkie; he argues that the anthropologist must be a cultural broker who can use meta-models that encompass the views of one's informants as well as the views of a scientific audience.

Part III deals with taking our informants seriously. C.R. Wilson relates how his experiences in Bolivia affected his own sacred world view. Lise Swartz describes how working with a Cree healer affected life on a sailboat with her retired husband. Antonia Mills documents the cross-cultural prevalence of a belief in reincarnation and describes the effects of this research on her own views.

In the concluding Part IV, Yves Marton discusses the questions surrounding Castaneda's work and persona, and mentions one of his own "extraordinary" experiences, which occurred after participating in an Afro-Cuban Santeria ceremony. Finally, the two editors examine themes and issues that are raised either directly or indirectly by the contributors to this book. They argue for the necessity of revitalizing the experiential approach by developing the "intellectual tools" that will allow anthropologists (as well as lay people) to be more open to experiential journeys that may take them beyond the conventional Western boundaries of society and self.

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