Being Changed by Cross-Cultural Encounters: The Anthropology of Extraordinary Experience

Thomas S. Abler is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Waterloo and the author of A Canadian Indian Bibliography, 1960-1970.

Anthropologists frequently report other cultures whose members are
guided by encounters with beings, forces, or entities not part of our
secular academic tradition’s view of the “real” world.
Anthropologists sometimes also encounter such phenomena. This book
argues that these experiences merit serious investigation, describing
encounters emanating from a variety of field settings. For example,
Jean-Guy Goulet and Marie Franзois Guédon report dreams appropriate to
the groups they were studying, and important interpretations of those
dreams by local elders. Edith Turner, while studying the Ndembu of
Zambia in 1985, reportedly saw “emerging out of the flesh” of the
patient’s back at the climax of a curing ritual “a large gray blob
about six inches across, opaque and something between solid and
smoke.” C. Roderick Wilson relates being a patient in a partially
successful ceremonial rite conducted by a Métis healer, who holds a
doctorate in psychology and is a former Oblate priest. Lisa Swartz
details how eagle (and dolphin) powers, acquired through an Alberta
Woods Cree medicine man, preserved her family sailboat off the coast of
Florida. Charles D. Laughlin, Jr., suggests physiological explanations
for visions he experienced during a trance. Yves Marton sees parallels
between his own “psycho-cultural apprenticeship with an Afro-Brazilian
teacher” and narratives by Carlos Castaneda.

Thus the book reports a range of experiences and varying explanations
for them. It is aimed at anthropologists, and on the whole does not
feature “the romanticization accompanying the commercial exploitation
of non-Western spiritual traditions in the New Age movement” that
Marton found in Castaneda’s work. In their concluding chapter, the
editors raise possibilities of levels of reality and extra-somatic
forces. They call on anthropologists working across the spectrum of
human cultures to test the validity of such constructs.