Being Changed by Cross-Cultural Encounters: The Anthropology of Extraordinary Experience / Edition 1

by Jean-Guy Goulet, David E Young

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781551110400
Publisher:	University of Toronto Press
Publication date:	01/01/1994
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	384
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.73(d)

About the Author

Jean-Guy Goulet is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Calgary. David E. Young is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Alberta. He is the author of Cry of the Eagle: Encounters with a Cree Healer (University of Toronto Press, 1990).

Table of 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 Guedon: 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 and Transpersonal Experience: A Biogenic 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-Culteral Encounters

Antonia Mills: Making a Scientific Investigation of Ethnographic Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation

Part IV: Conclusion

Yves Marton: The Experimental Approach to Anthropology and Castanda's Ambiguous Legacy

Jean-Guy Goulet and David Young: Theoretical and Methodological Issues

References

Index

What People are Saying About This

Charles Lawrence

Very interesting. It will allow me to teach cultural anthropology with a difference!

— Charles Lawrence, Seattle University

Phillip Stevens Jr.

An important book, ground-breaking—and overdue.

— Phillip Stevens Jr., State University of New York, Buffalo

Jennifer S. H. Brown

A challenging and thought-provoking book.

— Jennifer S. H. Brown, University of Winnipeg

Editorial Reviews

A challenging and thought-provoking book.

—Jennifer S. H. Brown, University of Winnipeg

An important book, ground-breaking—and overdue.

—Phillip Stevens Jr., State University of New York, Buffalo

Very interesting. It will allow me to teach cultural anthropology with a difference!

—Charles Lawrence, Seattle University

From the Publisher