The tendency in the past has been for aruhropobgists to rationalize away the native claim that spirits exist. But in this study, a number of incidents, some of which happened to the author, are described and used to bring this positwistic assumption into question. The author shows that "participant observation" in the fullest sense requires taking the final leap and "going native" in the most complete way possible.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. The MIT Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Drama Review: TDR. Anthropological literature is full of accounts of dramatic episodes which vividly manifestthe key values of specific cultures. Often these are case-histories of conflicts between lineages or factions, spreading into feuds, vendettas, or head-hunting expeditions. Frequently they describe how criminal behavior is defined and handled. Other accounts describe how illness and misfortune are ascribed to witchcraft or ancestral affliction and reveal tensions and stresses in the social structure. Such descriptions are richly contextualized; they are not flat narratives of successive events for they are charged with meaningfulness. The actors commonly share a world-view, a kinship network, economic interests, a local past, and a system of ritual replete with symbolic objects and actions which embody a cosmology. They have lived through hard times and good times together. Culture, social experience and individual psychology combine in complex ways in any "bit" or "strip" of human social behavior. Anthropologists have always favored the longterm, holistic study of a relatively small society, examining its institutions and their interconnections in great detail, locating the links among kinship, economic, legal, ritual, political, esthetic and other sociocultural systems. When they study, say, a particular performance of ritual, they are on the look-out for expressions of shared cultural understandings in behavior, as well as for manifestations of personal uniqueness.Nevertheless, while it may be possible for a gifted researcher to demonstrate the coherence among the "parts" of a culture, the models he presents remain cognitive. Cognizing the connections, we fail to form a satisfactory impression of how another culture's members "experience" one another. For feeling and will, as well as thought, constitute the structures of culture-cutural experience, regarded both as the experience of individuals and as the collective experience of its members embodied in myths, rituals, symbols, and celebrations. For several years, as teachers of anthropology, we have been experimenting with the performance of ethnography to aid students' understanding of how people in other cultures experience the richness of their social existence, what the moral pressures are upon them, what kinds of pleasures they expect to receive as a reward for following certain patterns of action, and how they express joy, grief, deference, and affection, in accordance with cultural expectations. At the University of Virginia, with an-All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions scripts" from them. Then we set up workshops-r...
Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978-0-230-33908-8 (paperback) ISBN: 978-0-230-33905-7 (hardcover) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Turner, Edith L. B., 1921-Communitas : the anthropology of collective joy / Edith Turner. p. cm.
This article traces some important changes in anthropology during the last 100 years, especially with regard to the study of consciousness. Vignettes of the field material of a number of scholars given here exemplify that the philosophy under which we have studied in the past is now no longer limiting itself but is extending its provenance all the way to the study of spirituality. Earlier, the concept of liminality broke through social anthropology and loosened the power of Durkheim, while the study of what the old consciousness scholars called psi proved ineradicable from researchers' reports and keeps coming back. Arising from whatever causes, there has been a literature explosion on spirituality and shamanism in the last fifteen years. This article draws the following conclusion from the vivid field examples given: that a thing variously called spirit-energy is everywhere and is commonly accepted at the heart of the ritual of all the different societies.AnthropologyandcolleaguesintranspersonalstudiesconsideredapplyingtotheAAA as a division on behalf of their newly named "Society for the Anthropology of Consciousness," (SAC) they avoided mention of the controversial topic of psi so that the AmericanAnthropologicalAssociation(AAA)wouldacceptthem.Theirconcernwas due to the fact that in 1986 a similar group with similar aims had already been refused in its application for divisional status with the American Psychological Association.Notwithstanding, this article shows that psi and its implications have been discussed in its many forms, and also are well demonstrated since 1990 by the expansion of excellent studies of the nonordinary, not only in the SAC but within the AAA generally. It is interesting to note that as a result, much of our liberated, present-day spiritual anthropology has stolen a march on present-day theologians, divinity school divines, religious studies textualists, and even gentle New Age philosophers and guides.Let's look at the difference in writing. Just now, the anthropologists of consciousness and religion are often right inside their subjects' own experiences, and their publications show it. This is most certainly because anthropologists do fieldwork. They've had the experience. They've been in situations of trouble where they've been praying, singing, chanting, or healing along with their people in trouble. This is a huge change. Putting it shortly, to study ordinary human changes of consciousness, certain of us have had to shift our own invisible, real spiritual life and what we know of that of others into a position to the front and have it working in us, so that we fully know the material of our fieldwork. We've then written this material, intimately. The method is gradually being taken up by the societies for the Anthropology of Consciousness, of Humanistic Anthropology, and, occasionally, the Anthropology of Religion, and it is evidence; it is the nitty gritty. Theory will have to work with this, not "theory with theory," as if theory were a game or depended on some set-up, scientifi...
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