Raising the Dead: Altered States, Anthropology, and the Heart of Sisala Experience

Abstract

In this article, we examine Bruce Grindal's 1983 essay, "Into the Heart of Sisala Experience: Witnessing Death Divination." We do so from the perspectives of two Africanist ethnographers and a Mesoamericanist archaeologist for the purpose of exploring current epistemological presuppositions about anthropological research. We argue that Grindal's holistic approach to ethnography stands as a model for anthropological methods across the subdisciplines. We take archaeology as a particular example. Although the humanistic empiricism Grindal espoused has fallen out of fashion among positivist archaeologists and certain cultural anthropologists, the enduring quality of Grindal's writing offers a path beyond the tensions between so-called "scientific" and "unscientific" approaches in anthropology. He considered the evidence he gathered inseparable from his negotiation of the lived contexts in which he worked. Grindal thus overcame the daunting challenge of describing the temporary return of a dead man to life in northern Ghana in the 1960s. Rather than try to prove or disprove what he saw, Grindal documented his host's remarks about the event, aiming to testify intersubjectively to their shared experience, beyond dichotomies of objectivity and subjectivity. Grindal's contribution to anthropology therefore lies in his unified view of anthropological methods at a time when anthropologists have drawn battle lines over choices between supposedly explanatory and interpretive viewpoints. His genius lay in recognizing the continuities between both perspectives, rooted in interpersonal communication. As a result, Grindal's work stands as a way forward for those eager to bs_bs_banner