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

Book Overview

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 Francoise Guedon 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, 'experimental' approach to extraordinary experiences-and a book that takes traditional cultures seriously in a way that anthropology has rarely done before.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1551110407
• ISBN13: 9781551110400
• Release Date: January 1994
• Publisher: University of Toronto Press
• Length: 384 Pages
• Weight: 1.16 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.9" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

Ha!

This is an interesting book in which professional anthropologists dared to put off their straightjackets (if only for a second) to voice their suspicion - that the emperor is naked indeed. One cannot escape a suspicion that for many of the authors academic anthropology as we know it today is a mostly useless discipline designed to confirm its own superstitions which have little to do with real life and everything with timidity and capitulation to the social consensus. This is, I fear, rather clear to most interested outsiders.... and increasingly to the anthros themselves (especially the younger ones willing to stick out their neck for their beliefs). The authors of the book chapters all profess (more or less timidly) their disenchantement with the discipline and narrate their own "extraordinary" experiences which cannot be fit within the framework of science as we know it. For anyone even remotely acquainted with native spiritual practices these experiences are all rather tame and unsurprising (i mean...what is all the fuss about?) yet it it may be useful to pause for a moment and realize that for your run o' the mill antropologist they represent nothing if not revolutionary revisions of reality as he/she knows it. For example, one implication of the authors' experiences is that using statistics and "models" to address the role of awareness in creating reality is like using the proverbial flashlight in the search of darkness. As a result, this book has been conveniently ignored in the field and its authors more or less marginalized. Still... the edifice is crumbling and this book is bringing portents of its eventual downfall.