{"id":6922,"date":"2014-12-15T20:32:15","date_gmt":"2014-12-16T03:32:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=6922"},"modified":"2014-12-15T20:38:19","modified_gmt":"2014-12-16T03:38:19","slug":"the-anthropologist-and-the-ancestors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=6922","title":{"rendered":"The Anthropologist and the Ancestors"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"otto\"

Dutch anthropologist Ton Otto<\/p><\/div>\n

Thanks to Sabina Magliocco<\/a>, I read this interesting piece about a Dutch anthropologist experiencing an ancestor ritual, one involving both the ancestors of the people in New Guinea whom he is visiting and his own.<\/a><\/p>\n

And even though science failed to explain everything, the way I viewed the world was based on the idea that everything \u2013 with time \u2013 could be explained with logic and observations of reality.<\/p>\n

Most likely, spiritual manifestations were simply projections of the unconscious, the deceitful trickery of sensory impressions or misunderstandings of natural phenomena.<\/p>\n

I had no problem leading a life without spirits, but even so, deep down I always had a nagging feeling that I\u2019d cut myself off from a lot of experiences.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The photo with the article <\/a>is too perfect. I have cropped it here.<\/p>\n

In turn it reminded me of an collection published twenty years ago: Being Changed: The Anthropology of Extraordinary Experienc<\/em><\/a>e. (The late Judy Harrow<\/a> told me about that one.)<\/p>\n

A reviewer wrote,<\/p>\n

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\u2014though 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.<\/p>\n

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.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Note that it came from a small publisher, not a university press! But these experiences do happen, and it is good to get them into print.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, if you are interesting in “going native” in the physiological sense, I wholeheartedly recommend Carl Hoffman’s Savage Harvest: A Tale of Cannibals, Colonialism, and Michael Rockefeller’s Tragic Quest for Primitive Art<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

It’s the best combination of archival research, history, and walking the ground where it happened, talking to people who were there.<\/p>\n

And this is getting away from anthropologists . . . but spirits and possibly angry tribal peoples have been evoked to explain the “Dyatlov Pass Incident.”<\/p>\n

Writer Donnie Eichar followed much the same methodology as did Hoffman for his own 2013 book, Dead Mountain: The Untold True Story of the Dyatlov Pass Incident<\/em><\/a>. Some people treated those deaths as “high weirdness,” but his explanation is more naturalistic \u2014 and fairly convincing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Thanks to Sabina Magliocco, I read this interesting piece about a Dutch anthropologist experiencing an ancestor ritual, one involving both the ancestors of the people in New Guinea whom he is visiting and his own. And even though science failed to explain everything, the way I viewed the world was based on the idea that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[30,22],"class_list":["post-6922","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-anthropology","tag-weirdness"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6xQTg-1NE","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":6430,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=6430","url_meta":{"origin":6922,"position":0},"title":"Anthropologist Describes Rebirth of Mongolian Shamanism","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"April 30, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"A news release from the MIT News Office carries the subhead, \"MIT anthropologist finds that after Soviet domination, a rebirth of shamanism helped Mongolia rewrite its own history.\" The release continues, In 1990, as the Soviet Union was disintegrating, Mongolia, long a satellite of the U.S.S.R., regained its independence. Socialism\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"anthropology\"","block_context":{"text":"anthropology","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=anthropology"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/newsoffice.mit.edu\/sites\/mit.edu.newsoffice\/files\/styles\/news_article_image_top_slideshow\/public\/images\/2013\/20131213180343-0_0.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":837,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=837","url_meta":{"origin":6922,"position":1},"title":"The most controversial anthropologist","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"March 14, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"One episode of a BBC series called Tales from the Jungle on famous anthropologists examines the \"shamanthropologist\" Carlos Castaneda (d. 1998), appropriately described as the most controversial anthropologist ever.For those of us who can't watch the Beeb, it is available in segments from YouTube.There are also episodes on Bronislaw Malinowski\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"anthropology\"","block_context":{"text":"anthropology","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=anthropology"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1229,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=1229","url_meta":{"origin":6922,"position":2},"title":"Greenwood’s Anthropological Study of Magic","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"October 19, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"British anthropologist Susan Greenwood is interviewed at Pagans for Archaeology about her new book, The Anthropology of Magic.In this new book I have taken that argument further and related it to a classical anthropological debate on mystical mentality; and I have also explored the nature of reality in relation to\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"anthropology\"","block_context":{"text":"anthropology","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=anthropology"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"http:\/\/www.assoc-amazon.com\/e\/ir?t=chascli-20&l=as2&o=1&a=1845206711","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":5062,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=5062","url_meta":{"origin":6922,"position":3},"title":"Survey on Pagan Health","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"January 13, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"If you like taking surveys and want to help a Pagan anthropologist in her study of Pagan attitudes toward health care, start here.","rel":"","context":"In \"anthropology\"","block_context":{"text":"anthropology","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=anthropology"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":6116,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=6116","url_meta":{"origin":6922,"position":4},"title":"How to Dress for an Academic Conference","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"November 22, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"This combined annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Biblical Literature starts this evening. As I lay in my Baltimore hotel bed this morning, thinking about what to wear for the day, my mind kept going back to an essay read yesterday, \"Conference Chic, or,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"academia\"","block_context":{"text":"academia","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=academia"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5590,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=5590","url_meta":{"origin":6922,"position":5},"title":"Survey: Your Spiritual Relationship with Animals","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"June 10, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"Sabina Magliocco, anthropologist and folklorist and author of Witching Culture: Folklore and Neo-Paganism in America, among other books, has a new research project underway on people's spiritual relationships with animals. The purpose of this study is to understand how we imagine our relationship to animals, how we incorporate animals into\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"animals\"","block_context":{"text":"animals","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=animals"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6922","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6922"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6922\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6927,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6922\/revisions\/6927"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6922"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6922"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6922"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}