Towards a Methodology for the Ethnographic Study of the Afterlife

Building Bridges, Dissolving Boundaries: Towards a Methodology for the Ethnographic Study of the Afterlife, Mediumship and Spiritual Beings Fiona Bowie, Wolfson College, Oxford Locating the study of the afterlife The study of death and the afterlife, and our relationship with what are sometimes termed “nonhuman persons”, are matters of central human, as well as academic, interest, but finding the tools with which to approach such themes is far from straightforward. 1 With the exception of theology, with its starting point in revelation and the assumption of a co-present divine and natural order, academic discourses are largely secular in orientation. Post-Enlightenment attitudes to the sciences as the peak of human endeavour, especially when “science” is conceived rather simplistically in a mechanistic Newtonian manner, can lead to an inherent reductionism (cf. Martin & Weibe, 2012). When looking at technology, studying economic systems or devising mathematical formulae, reductionist scientific methodologies and may be necessary and appropriate, but in the study of religion the decision to ignore, discount or explain (away) local/native explanations and interpretations, imposes a severe limitation on the possibility of adequate comprehension. Lee Wilson (2012:43-45) argues for sceptical anthropologists, able to examine data with an open mind, rather than a sceptical anthropology that automatically construes all claims and beliefs outside the ethnographer’s frame of reference as axiomatically flawed, while Gavin Flood (2006:55) reminds us that “secular forms of reasoning about religions are themselves traditions of inquiry located in specific histories of the West”. This paper attempts to go beyond the limitations imposed by normative Western academic conventions to suggest a methodology for the study of the afterlife and related phenomena based on openness and engagement with “native” attitudes and interpretations. Flood usefully distinguishes between first order reasoning (the tradition itself), second order reasoning – reflections upon tradition, and third order discourses, which involve reasoning about the first two, which are implicitly comparative (2006:55-6). Within anthropology the first order discourse is represented by the emic (insider) view, and the third order discourse is an etic or outsider (meta level) perspective. Second order reasoning, reflections upon a tradition, might well encompass both emic and etic forms of reason – but these are likely to reveal radically different conceptualisations of the tradition in question. The inherent reductionism of many 1 academic discourses is, as Flood (2006:50) has illustrated, rooted in the belief that to explain a religion is to locate a cause - whether this be in cognition, genetics or socio-political structures (i.e. forms of eliminative, naturalistic or cultural reductionism). The external account of a religion produced by a psychologist, sociologist or anthropologist is generally “antithetical to the internal claims of traditions” (2006:50), although it is the predominant model in both the natural and social sciences. Flood argues for a model in which the explanation of religion is “the exposition of a meaning rather than the location of a cause” (ibid.). Meaning is to be found in contextualisation and demonstration or translation of semantic density. Such an account is both phenomenological in as much as it wishes to offer “thick description” (to borrow a Geertzian term), and hermeneutical, in wishing to draw out “the implications of description in theoryinformed, semiotically sophisticated ways” (ibid.). A third-order discourse situates the study within a Western academic framework, but all to often fails to capture the experience it seeks to describe in the process. The methodological challenge is to construct a critical space in which diverse forms of knowledge (that of the informant and that of the anthropologist) give rise to “the possibility of disclosure, discrepancy and insight generated from juxtaposition and reflection” (Wilson, 2012:55). In devising a methodology to study the afterlife and related phenomena we need to reevaluate the relationship between first, second and third order discourses, and to propose a dialogue that is respectful and tentative, rather than hegemonic and dismissive of ‘the native point of view’. The methodology I propose is a form of cognitive, empathetic engagement which, I argue, is particularly well suited to the study of the afterlife and phenomena such as spirit possession and mediumship, which fall outside a Western scientific hermeneutical paradigm. It shares characteristics with the dialogical method outlined by Gavin Flood in Beyond Phenomenology (1999), Geoffrey Samuel’s multimodal framework, which attempts to “make sense of concepts and modes of operating within traditional societies that have been very hard to incorporate effectively within Western modes of knowing” (1990:3), and the interpretive dialectic of Paul Ricoeur (1991) in which validation is not verification or proof, but a nondogmatic, open-ended weighing up probabilities in the light of experience and knowledge of the world. 2 An exploration of the meaning assigned to these three key terms (cognition, empathy, engagement) and their relevance to a study of the afterlife and related phenomena, is followed by two case studies, which are used to further elaborate the principles of cognitive, empathetic engagement. My background is in the anthropology of religion and my particular concerns are the ethnographic study of the afterlife, mediumship and religious experience, but I argue that the methodology proposed here has a wider applicability within the study of religion. Approaches to the study of the afterlife We need to start by delimiting the field of inquiry. By afterlife I refer to conceptions, descriptions and analyses of discarnate existence based on the premise that consciousness exists in an immaterial form, and that some aspect of conscious personhood (soul, spirit, energy) continues after the death of the physical organism.2 These conscious discarnate entities or energies are frequently located within a parallel “world”. Descriptions of the whereabouts, appearance, characteristics and natural laws that govern this unseen territory are culturally specific, but with certain consistent universal or near universal features (cf. Fontana, 2009; Heath & Klimo, 2010; Moreman, 2010; Shushan, 2009; Kellehear, 2012; Masumian, 2012). It is not possible to understand the nature, purpose or emergence of this world without appreciating its intimate relationship to the world of matter (Lipton, 2009). A study of the afterlife therefore necessitates seeing life on earth and human history within the context of a cosmic teleology (Laszlo, 1993). It might appear that, by definition, such a study is the domain of theology, religious studies, or myth and literature, but it impinges on a number of academic disciplines that have complementary and contradictory approaches. If we take spirit possession, ‘obsession’, and mediumship, for example, these widespread and enduring forms of human experience are based on the premise that human beings can form direct embodied relationships with discarnate spirits (Schmidt & Huskinson, 2010; Dawson, 2011). Sociological and structural-functionalist anthropological studies seek to understand the social correlates of possession behaviour – whether framed as resistance to oppression, a performance for the attainment of certain material rewards, the reaction of the weak or deranged to social pressure, or the exploitation of a religious marketplace in which possession by spirits may be commercially beneficial (Lewis, 1989). Psychologists and cognitive anthropologists have devised protocols and explanations to 3 determine the physiological correlates of phenomena such as trance and spiritual healing (sometimes based on controlled analogues with human or non-human subjects, rather than deriving from direct observation in the field) (Bourguignon, 1976; Greenfield, 2008). Laboratory-based studies of paranormal abilities such as clairvoyance, telepathy, and mediumship take place in departments of psychology, psychiatry and in medical faculties (Jahn & Dunne, 2011). Specialist units which have developed primarily, although not exclusively, from a psychological or medical foundation, painstakingly gather data on phenomena such as reincarnation, near-death and out-of-body experiences (Radin, 2006). The military and forensic interest in the purported ability of some individuals to view remote objects, people and places, to receive pertinent information from discarnate beings, or to “read” information imprinted in places and objects is also well documented (Ronson, 2004). Approaches to the afterlife and related phenomena vary within as well as between disciplines. The culture of most academic discourse draws on Enlightenment themes of rationalism, materialism and secularism. Matters of truth and the ontological status of the phenomena described (spirits, paranormal abilities, after death communications, and so on), are frequently put to one side (bracketed out), or ignored, through an emphasis on physical/biochemical correlates of behaviour rather than meaning and interpretation. This inherent reductionism can lead to a “schizophrenic” disjunction in which the full range of human experience fails to find expression. There are, however, a growing number of studies from a range of disciplines, of varied quality and conviction, that propose more embodied, humanistic or participatory approach to the subject of the afterlife (taken to include the exposition of ideas, behaviours and cosmologies that link seen and unseen worlds, and their inhabitants).3 My approach draws on the strengths of some of these latter studies and overlaps with many of them. It is flexible enough to lend itself to different methods (ethnographic, textual, literary, quantitative), subject matter, and disciplinary approaches, according to need, purpose and context. Cognitive, empathetic engagement does not presuppose any particular belief system or standpoint, but neither does it preclude them. It recognises the dialogical position of the observer in the process of acquiring knowledge, whilst retaining a focus of attention on the other. Its purpose is to elucidate the object of study rather than become an exercise in self-reflection. Although what I am proposing here is a methodology for studying the afterlife, issues of epistemology are an implicit concern. How can we know about something as apparently 4 ephemeral as consciousness? What constitutes the ethnographic knowledge that we are seeking to garner? How can we judge the accuracy or authenticity of our data and evaluate our sources? To deal adequately with these concerns requires a different focus to the present one, but my response is similar to that of Johannes Fabian in his explorations of ethnographic objectivity (2001). Knowledge is a not an object but an inter-subjective process of creative engagement between individuals. It has a time-bound, material element - we co-exist in time and space in our communicative embodiment. Provocatively, but pertinent to much fieldwork on phenomena such as spirit possession or mediumship, Fabian suggests that some of our best research is literally carried out while we are “out of our minds”. He is aware that allowing ourselves to relax our outer controls and “let ourselves go” can yield some of our most valuable results (2001:31-2). We might add here two essential elements to good fieldwork that are not considered below, namely curiosity and courage. Curiosity, to push the boundaries of human knowledge, honesty and courage to document and then to draw conclusions from this data, whether or not it transgress the largely materialist Weltanshauung of Western academic culture. Cognition The act of knowing or perceiving suggests observation of the givenness or facticity of the world, but the English word “cognition” also implies learning (L.nōscere). It is an act that involves observation and interpretation, leading to a tentative and contextual understanding of a process or object. In order to grasp this process we need to appreciate the tripartite nature of the act. First we must consider the identity of the knower – the mind or self that engages in the act of cognition. Secondly there is the object, event or process that the mind seeks to know or grasp, and thirdly there is the narrative or interpretive stance by which the object of knowledge becomes known in a particular manner to the knower. The hermeneutical move narrows down and delimits the perception of what is known. It is understood as this and not that, one thing and not another. The role of experience is a crucial factor in this process, and I return to it when dealing with the theme of engagement. The knower or self is not a disembodied mind (the Cartesian cogito), but an embodied person situated in the materiality of a body, which in turn in turn exists within an historical, cultural world. If the mind is not wholly autonomous from the body, neither is it synonymous with the brain. As Thomas Szasz (2008:581) points out, despite the fact that biologists, 5 neuroscientists, neurophilosophers and biological psychiatrists tend to treat the mind “as if it were the brain, or a function of the brain” it is self-evident “that mind and brain do not name the same thing”. An anatomist or brain surgeon would never mistake mind (which implies personhood) for brain (the physical organ). Consciousness is a facet of the mind not the brain. As numerous well-attested reports from people who have returned to their bodies following the cessation of brain function attest, some aspects of personality, agency and memory are separable from the physical body.4 This is not to deny that as embodied creatures our awareness of self, our consciousness, is inextricably linked to and derived from our experience of being a material creature in a material environment (cf. Metzinger, 2009; Zeman, 2003). The point at issue is whether mind or consciousness has an existence beyond the realm of the brain and matter (Sheldrake, 2012:212-230; Kelly a.o., 2010), or whether our understanding of the nature of matter itself needs to be reconfigured (Mitchell, 1999; Carpenter 2012). The socio-historical parameters of embodied existence are formative but not determinative; the knower retains free will and agency. We can see this dialectic in what Paul Ricoeur (1992) has termed the idem (physical) and ipse (intentional) aspects of the self. It is our inhabitation of a physical world and body that gives us a sense of “self-sameness” across both time and space. “Self-sameness” includes our genetic and cultural inheritance, and provides us with a sense of rootedness and continuity. If we are not wholly determined by these forces we must also possess a sense of self that is independent of materiality, creative, able to initiate action and to narrate a life-world (the ipse identity). As Dauenhauer (2005:8) puts it, the self “inhabits two irreducible orders of causality”, and any account of action, including an act of cognition, must accommodate both these aspects of the self. There is a social scientific narrative of the self that states that in Western thought the self is portrayed and experienced as bounded and individual, as against a non-Western paradigm of the self as social and “dividual” or multiple (Strathern, 1990:13). Murray (1993) challenges the view (using David Hume among others), that the Western view of the self is always individual, showing how in the West, as elsewhere, notions of the self are often complex, varied and contested. The Western self has in fact been seen in both essentialist and nominalist terms, and is regarded as both transcendent and contingent. Whatever the self may be, most if not all of us have experienced it as something separate from our physical body. Winkelman (2012), Peake (2011), Holden (2012) and others have pointed out that during out of body or near-death experiences and in lucid dreaming, for 6 instance, conscious awareness shifts from the embodied to the disembodied self (or in rare cases may simultaneously inhabit both). According to Ricoeur, evidence of the self inhabiting these two orders of causality comes from attestation rather than empirical verification. Attestation is defined as assurance – belief or credence – rather than certitude. Attestation presents itself first... as a kind of belief. But it is not a doxic belief, in the sense in which doxa (belief) has less standing than episteme (science, or better, knowledge). Whereas doxic belief is implied in the grammar of “I believe-that” attestation belongs to the grammar of “I believe-in.” One can call upon no epistemic instance any greater than that of the belief – or, if one prefers, the credence – that belongs to the triple dialectic of reflection and anaylsis, of selfhood and sameness, and of self and other (1992:21). What is known, the object of attention towards which the mind is directed, may be real (a person or tree may exist whether or not we are there to observe them or to see it fall), or relational (a conversation or a ritual in which the observer takes an active or passive role is called into being, co-created in that moment). Good description, sensitive to the nuances of speech, observant of material detail, disciplined and reflexive in interpreting sensory messages and context, is highly prized in ethnographic writing. There is no unsituated knowing, no unmediated “fly-on-the-wall” objectivity. The knower takes to him or herself an object of knowledge with all the limitations and inevitable entanglement of selfhood. Even at its most remote and sterile, when studying the action of electrons in a laboratory for instance, the observer-effect will co-create the event (Weizmann Institute of Science, 1998). When Edith Turner (1992) took on the role of healer among the Ndembu in Central Africa, and together with her fellow “doctors” witnessed the extraction of a troublesome spirit from a sick woman (materialised as a tooth but visible also as a nebulous gray object) her participation was an integral part of the event described.5 The act of interpretation is necessarily provisional. We seek to comprehend what the mind has perceived in the light of previous experience, our knowledge of the world, historical precedents and reading of the context. Our interpretation is open to revision if our experience subsequently proves it wrong, or an alternative way of making sense of what we have seen and 7 heard provides a better fit. If we start our inquiries with a dogmatic disposition, looking for facts to fit a pre-determined theory, or a sceptical disposition, seeking to disprove or undermine a theory or an empirical claim, we are closed to the interpretive dialectic between hypothesis and verification. Ricoeur refers to this open-ended quality of interpretation as “a logic of uncertainty and qualitative probability” (1991:159).6 We may need to accept that there is more than one equally good interpretation, and live with the fact that others with alternative explanations and interpretations have an equal claim to validity. As Dauenhauer, (2005:7) paraphrasing Ricoeur, puts it, “Throughout the process of guess and validation, there is no definitive outcome. It is always possible to relate sentences, or actions, to one another in more than one way”. An act of cognition must also take account of the situatedness of an event in time and space. It will have its own narrative and context. Interpretation needs to look to causal explanations of its occurrence as well as interpretations of its meaning. The sociological and hermeneutical are complementary and both are necessary in order to fully comprehend the object of study; the one is not reducible to the other. A cognitive approach to the study of the afterlife or mediumship goes beyond phenomenology – it considers all the available data without bracketing out areas of experience that seem awkward, are not scientifically verifiable, which conflict with the world view of the observer or with the dominant paradigms of the Western academy. Whatever is generated, performed, imagined and constructed by human beings is the proper object of study (which does not mean to say that all objects are equally appropriate foci of attention). Such a study has a dialogical imperative – the observer and observed are conversation partners, whether using language or engaged in non-verbal communication. Simply being co-present,7 is in itself an existential act of co-habitation and co-creation. There is a further step implied in a cognitive approach, which is not to be confused with the tendency within the cognitive sciences to see culture and mind in terms of the neural circuits of the brain which, as Clifford Geertz observed (2000: 203), “renders both the question of the social habitation of thought and that of the personal foundations of significance untouched and untouchable”. The methodology I propose requires imagination in order to enter into the world of the other, to “try it on for size”. As far as possible one seeks to interpret the world through the categories implicit or explicit in the emic model. This act of imagination enables the observer to deepen their understanding of the life worlds being studied, to see internal connections that 8 might otherwise remain obscured. It allows what is seen, heard and explained to take shape in the mind, and to provide information that is open to validation. When studying spirit possession, for example, the ethnographer or observer approaches the data “as if” it were “true”. Bubandt (2009), for instance, treated ancestor spirits in North Maluku as informants. There is also a tradition in Western Spiritualist healing of speaking to possessing or obsessive spirits (usually those who have died but who instead of moving on to the spirit world have become trapped, or have chosen to stay, in the “magnetic aura” of a living person), as if they were discrete intelligences (Baldwin, 2003; Wickland, 1974). This may prove therapeutically effective, even if the therapist retains a degree of scepticism as to who or what they are actually addressing (Fiore, 1988). This approach is not in itself new, even if not universally accepted or practiced. EvansPritchard wrote in the 1930s, referring to his study of witchcraft, magic and oracles among the Azande in Central Africa, that: You cannot have a remunerative, even intelligent, conversation with people about something they take as self-evident if you give them the impression that you regard their belief as an illusion or a delusion. Mutual understanding, and with it sympathy, would soon be ended, if it ever got started (1976:244). Evans-Pritchard consulted oracles and accepted Zande explanations of witchcraft as a normal part of life, saying that while living in that society “in a kind of way I believed them” (1976:244). The temptation to devalue the semantic density of a phenomenon by recourse to a single causal explanation is thereby reduced, giving way to a “spiritual science” (Dilthey’s Geisteswissenschaft) grounded in both the situated historical, cultural context of an individual life and the imaginative world of interpretation. This is not the same as “going native”, accepting the world view of the other at face value – an extreme relativism in which human experience of the world fragments into a thousand irreconcilable pieces. Nor is it compartmentalising data – keeping it in a part of the mind labelled “untrue but available for observation”. Evans-Pritchard noted that the ethnographer is destined to live between or in two worlds simultaneously, that of their own internal view of reality and that of their hosts. In order to reconcile the two “one must eventually give way, or at any rate partially give way. If one must act as though one believed, one ends in believing, or half-believing as one acts” (1976:244). Ricoeur’s “logic of uncertainty 9 and qualitative probability” involves a narrativity that includes self and other in a single ontological and hermeneutical framework. The act of interpretation is not deferred as one becomes absorbed by another mode of understanding and seeing. Having entered the world of the other the knower returns enriched, engaging not in a hermeneutic of suspicion, but a hermeneutic of expanded horizons. It could still be argued that the attempt to make another’s language and epistemological categories one’s own is merely to replace one view of the world (etic) with another (emic). For dialogue to take place, however, the knower must retain a sense of self as other than the object of study. There is no simple or automatic way of making the world of the other transparent, nor is it desirable to by-pass the process of discrimination (guesswork and validation) of phenomena. Kirsten Hastrup (1995:149) makes the point, in relation to ethnographic fieldwork, that “local categories do not exhaust the world, and native voices never tell the full story about the world” as “for natives, their culture is referentially transparent. It is not ‘seen’ but ‘seen with’”. To internalise the “native view”, even if this were fully possible, is to fail in the act of provisional open-ended discrimination that requires closeness, presence and distance, a theme we return to in our discussion of empathy as methodology. Empathy The concept of empathy has a long tradition within the social sciences. Giovanni Battista Vico (1668-1744), the Renaissance Italian rhetorician, philosopher and father of the social sciences, recommended approaching historical narratives through an imaginative effort to relive the experience of others (or as the Native American expression would have, to walk in another’s moccasins). For Husserl in the Nineteenth Century empathy (Einfürlung) was understood as the “penetration of the ‘object’ by consciousness; an intuition in which the object is actually reached and immediately apprehended or possessed by an intentional consciousness” (Flood, 1999:160). Intuition, which “gives us something of the object itself”, was distinguished from “signifying acts”, which involve pure thought. The object is represented within consciousness but without, as Levinas observes, giving us anything of the object itself (Flood, ibid.). Intuition or empathy is therefore a fuller and richer way of grasping the object than the mere representation of that object in consciousness. For Husserl, as for Levinas, empathy involves an actual contact with others and the world. This implies situatedness in time and space. The logic of this proposition, as 10 Gavin Flood (1999:168) indicates, is that “If the epistemic subject is situated in a particular, historical location, in a particular body, then understanding is dialogical and critically evaluative”. Johannes Fabian (1983) coined the term “coevalness” as a way of expressing the intersubjective nature the ethnographic encounter. Knowledge cannot be abstracted from the time and place of its production, and it is intersubjective communication that can form the basis of an objective comprehension of the data. In critiquing the colonialist empiricism of much Nineteenth and early Twentieth Century anthropology, Fabian challenged objectivist gaze and production of abstracted data, which served to fix its objects in a decontextualised ethnographic present, While empathy was not an explicit part of the anthropological repertoire for most Twentieth Century fieldworkers it has a long history within client-centred therapies. KossChioino (2006:51) cites Bohart and Grenberg (1997:5), for whom empathy includes making a deep, sustained psychological contact with another in their uniqueness, followed by an immersion in the experience of the other, and thirdly a “resonant grasping” of the client’s experience in order to help create new – presumably more wholesome or appropriate – meanings. Other psychiatrists and psychotherapists speak of the need for an empathetic attunement to the inner life of the client, or regard empathy as a mechanism to “co-create a web of meanings that weave the fabric of a new relational experience”. Within social psychology empathy is referred to as “social insight”, “interpersonal sensitivity” or “interpersonal judgment” (Koss-Chioiono, 2006:51-52). In the field of spiritual healing empathy is taken much further, without the same concern for maintaining discrete boundaries between client and therapist. KossChioiono (ibid.47) argues that a core feature in the process of spiritual healing is the notion of the wounded healer, and the healer’s capacity for radical empathy with the client or patient. This is a spiritually transformative process for the healer as well as the client, leading to “dramatic changes in the world and self-views, purposes, religious beliefs, attitudes or behaviour... often linked to discrete experiences” (Katz, 2004:1, cited in Koss-Chioino, 2006:47). Where the healing process involves the incorporation of spirits the spirit-other is becomes literally embodied in the healer (cf. Wickland, 1974). In her study of spiritual healing in South America, Koss-Chioino (2006:50) observed that: “Spirit work is based on the emergence of an intersubjective space where individual differences are melded into one field of feeling and experience shared by healer and sufferer”, and that in Spiritism “intersubjectivity is essential to 11 making a diagnosis that describes the spirits and the reasons they have for causing distress in the sufferer”. As a methodology for studying the afterlife I am not necessarily suggesting the radical empathy of the healer-medium or shaman who takes the invading spirit into his or her body, or undertakes a perilous spiritual journey to recapture a lost soul. The ability to “feel with” another and the natural sympathy one has for others will vary according to personality, circumstance, opportunity and inclination. Fortunately we do not need to like someone in order to empathise with him or her or with their position. Through an act of imagination we can put ourselves in their place and suppose or intuit how the world might look and feel to that person. There is an ascetic of “putting oneself aside”, “making oneself at one” with the other that can be practiced irrespective of personal likes or dislikes, judgments as to character or degrees of compatibility or friendship. In suspending judgement and allowing space for the other to be, we have the capacity to enter into a dialogue that both respects difference and values mutuality. We simultaneously maintain and cross the boundary that for Bakhtin (1986:214-5) both marks difference and connects people and cultures. Judith Okely draws on the literary concept of disponibilité, from the surrealist André Breton (1937:41), to describe an empathetic anthropological practice. The concept is “linked to wandering without express and pre-formulated aims…. also, although not exclusively, associated with love” (Okely, 2012:54). Okely’s understanding of ethnography links empathy and engagement. It demands a willingness to enter into relationship with others and an attitude of being available to them. Rather than working to a pre-determined plan, disponibilité also implies being ready to expect the unexpected, whether in encounters with persons, objects or events. The ethnographer needs to remain attentive to that moment when a fortuitous encounter allows the seeker to go beyond his or her presumptions (to paraphrase Okely, 2012:55). The key ideas here that Okely derives from Breton, which are relevant to the study of topics as central, controversial and ephemeral as the afterlife, mediumship, spirit possession and anomalous phenomena, are receptivity, openness, attentiveness and the ability to go beyond (dépasser) one’s presumptions. Engagement Engagement invites the ethnographer to bring the mind, body, intelligence, experience, energy, sensibilities and will to bear. What this means in context will depend on the specificity of each 12 case. As a methodology it mandates at least some degree of participation – a recognition of coevalness in shared space and time and willingness to enter into a dialogue. The fieldworker or scholar is not the distant, “objective”, emotionless reporter of external “facts”, but is asked to make him or herself available, vulnerable and flexible (Breton’s disponibilité). It demands being ready to step outside one’s comfort zone and to learn from life and from situations. This is no less true when studying the past or the printed word. The text can reach out across time and enter into a profound dialogue with the reader. As Vico (1968) suggested, we can imaginatively engage with the life-worlds of people who lived in the past – not with abstract time periods or representative vignettes, but open to real lives and events that continue to echo in the present. The writer Victoria Hislop (2009), when researching her novel about the Spanish Civil War, found that the atmosphere of Granada (the “vibes” as she put it) enabled her to enter imaginatively into the lives of those who had lived through that time in that place, and to reproduce stories that unwittingly bore a close resemblance to actual lives.8 We have to allow the serendipitous into our practice. As Judith Okely notes, “anthropologists cannot dictate those who might become their closest associates… Subterranean factors draw us to some individuals and them to us” (2012:55). The same could be said of subject matter. If we embark on the journey with a pre-determined route map we may fail to engage with the landscape, and its features and inhabitants, and reach our destination little wiser than when we set off. Within anthropology, the ideal of long-term engagement with a particular people has been a standard method of understanding the other since it was practiced and preached by Bronislaw Malinowski during and in the years following the First World War.9 That the fieldworker is generally an observer and not a tourist, friend or native is often apparent in the photographic record, with the anthropologist in the midst of village life earnestly writing in a notebook, filming a dance, or sitting in a corner tapping into a laptop computer. The degree of participation appropriate or possible will be contingent on many factors – age, gender, status, inclination, particular relationships and interests. When studying spiritual healing, for instance, the fieldworker will have to decide whether to position him or herself outside the main area of action as curious interlocutor, observer and recorder of events, as a client or as apprentice healer. The somatic knowledge to be gained from each will be very different, each with its particular advantages and disadvantages. Any mode of participation positions the fieldworker and in so doing excludes alternative choices and narratives. Participation is not in itself a guarantee of 13 depth or insight, but it enables a form of knowing that is both somatic and intellectual. It carries opportunities for later recall and evocation that are not available in non-participatory modes of practice (Okely, 1992). Engagement implies commitment rather than participation per se. It is an ethical as well as a methodological stance. Engagement with another is never value free and we cannot escape the fact that all action is consequential. Respect for the freedom of others and the intention to allow their personhood expression is a basic tenet of engagement. Where this conflicts with other rights or universal laws, Ricoeur recommends resort to “practical wisdom” in order to reconcile opposing claims. “Practical wisdom consists in inventing conduct that will best satisfy the exception required by solicitude, by betraying the rule [of universal law] to the smallest extent possible” (1992:269). He gives the example of a dying patient unaware of their situation. Should one tell them the truth of their condition as of right, and risk exacerbating their suffering, or withhold that information in the hope of avoiding suffering, but at the expense of ignorance? In this instance Ricoeur recommends a meditation on the meaning of suffering, which might reach the conclusion that suffering is not necessarily to be avoided, indeed is part of life and cannot be circumvented. While exercising due compassion for those who are “morally or physically too weak to hear the truth” (ibid.), it is also possible that “telling the truth may become the opportunity for the exchange of giving and receiving under the sign of death accepted” (1992:269-70). Ricoeur makes another interesting ethical statement – claiming that moral decision-making is, or should be of communal concern.10 This is not to deny responsibility and agency to individuals, but to recognize of our shared existence. It is not the ethics of the mob that we seek to endorse, but that derived from “the council of men and women reputed to be the most competent and wisest” (ibid.272). Practical wisdom is summed up by Ricoeur as a critical solicitude in the realm of interpersonal relations. Another aspect of engagement is friendship. Taking inspiration once more from Ricoeur’s studies in Oneself as Another, Gavin Flood (1999:213) states that: “There must be mutuality in the fieldwork encounter that entails not only the recognition of the nonsubstituability of self and other, perhaps divided by wholly contrasting narratives, but also entails reversibility in the recognition that ‘you’ are an ‘I’”. While friendship cannot be forced (and in some circumstances will be seen as neither desirable nor sought after), it is often a result of the fieldwork encounter, despite the fact that, as Flood observes, it “is often written out of 14 ethnographies in the interests of a notional objectivity” (ibid.). Fieldwork is the encounter of different narratives and creation through coevalness of a shared narrative. As such friendship often “facilitates understanding in the fieldwork encounter and is a positive force rather than an impediment to objectivity” (ibid.). Okely makes a similar point when she argues that participation in the field does not “contaminate” objectivity. Rather, total immersion opens the way to bodily knowledge that “confronts the misconceptions and limitations of verbal knowledge” (2012:77-8). We are challenged to build bridges between mind and body, intellectual knowing and embodied engagement. The final aspect of engagement that calls for our attention is the role of experience. As psychiatrist and regression therapist Brian Weiss (2000:8) has observed, “Our beliefs can be altered by the power and immediacy of personal experience. You can begin to understand something when you experience its essence. Your belief becomes a knowing.” This need not be first-hand experience, although this is invariably the most powerful mnemonic. If the self and other are not substitutable, it matters that it is one person and not another who undertakes a study, engages in fieldwork, reads a text, and sets off on an intellectual journey. We return to Gadamer’s (1989) description of human experience as consisting of both the “objective necessity” of the natural world, and the inner experience with its “sovereignty of the will”, and the necessary dialectic between them. Two individuals experiencing the same event or reading the same text share an experience of the world, but bring very different inner resources to bear. The process of guesswork and validation, testing against previous experience, and the exercise of moral and intellectual faculties, will result in a situated, uniquely individual outcome – true for that person, but never identical with the truth of another, however closely related and complementary these truths may be. Cognitive, empathetic engagement in practice There are numerous excellent examples of anthropologists and others who have approached phenomena, broadly related to the study of the afterlife and the world of mediums, spirits and other discarnate beings, in an open-minded, empathetic manner (cf. Gaffin 2012). I do not want here to rehearse the case for an anti-reductionist, some might say supernaturalist, position. Such a case can certainly be made on solid scientific, methodological principles (Tart, 2009). Here, however, I prefer to look at some case studies in which elements of cognitive, empathetic 15 engagement have been employed in order to assess the impact and empirical utility of the methodology outlined above. 1. Spirit Possession My first examples concern spirit possession, which serve to illustrate the role of personal experience in the interpretive act. Nils Bubandt, in his study of spirits and politics in North Maluku, eastern Indonesia, makes a persuasive case for treating spirits as if they were methodologically, if not ontologically, real. He resists explaining spirit possession as a phenomenon, and the possessing spirits’ discourse, in terms of the socio-historical, political context of North Maluku, stating in reverse that contemporary politics needs to be understood in the light of the (methodological) reality of spirits. Budandt (2009:296), argues that “spirits, when observed and engaged during possession rituals, are key informants who can be engaged, interviewed and analysed very much like the conventional key informant technique suggests”. The ethnographer needs to exercise “the same kind of methodological caution, ethical circumspection and critical distance” (2009:299) as one would with any other informant in the field. The justification for this move, in terms of the quality of the ethnographic description and anthropological analysis, is that for the people of North Maluku (including those who are internationally cosmopolitan, with impeccable Western educational credentials) the opinion of ancestor spirits is a crucial aspect of a political discourse in which they are both instruments and actors. Bubandt suggests that: when political power is worked out through a constant engagement with the spirits this has important consequences for the ontology of conducting (and language-games for talking about) politics and political agency. The spirits are not merely incidental to or products of politics in such an political ontology. Rather, the spirits are constitutive actors within this kind of spiritual politics (2009:312). Budandt did not learn to incorporate spirits but he was present when the spirits spoke through others, and was urged to converse with them. Of this encounter he writes, “I certainly felt that I had encountered more people and more potential informants than there were physical bodies present in the room that afternoon in 2003” (2009:297). This experience raised the 16 general problematic of the assumption of “one-body-one-informant”, as Bubandt (following Schutz, 1974) puts it, “[w]e all arguably live intersubjective lives in a reality of multiple orders, in which we all have shifting expressions of self” (2009:297). Bubandt also draws our attention to Katherine Ewing’s observation that while we may have an over-arching sense of the self (Ricoeur’s idem identity or “self-sameness”), “multiple and conflicting projections of the self may coexist within an overarching sense of the self that people around the world struggle to maintain against the exigencies of life” (Bubandt, 2009:297). Ewing’s suggestion is to locate these multiple forms of self-representation within a broader socio-political context, and the task for the ethnographer is to attend to “how such multiple self-representations are organized, contextualized, and negotiated in dialogue” (Ewing, 1990:274, in Bubandt, 2009:297). If we seek to apply a methodology of cognitive, empathetic engagement to our subject matter, the data we have to work with will be influenced by the level of our engagement, which in turn affects our personal experience. Nils Bubandt remained methodologically agnostic as to the ontological reality of the spirits with whom he conversed. The experience of anthropologists who have moved closer to the centre of the action takes on a qualitatively different feel. Their analysis will reflect this deeper engagement with the spirits. Paul Stoller (1984, 1987) entered the world of Songhay sorcery in Niger by becoming apprenticed to a sorcerer. He experienced in his own body the effects of sorcery, felt its power and was terrified by its ontological reality – ultimately fleeing Niger for the safety of the USA. Jeanne Favret-Saada, studying witchcraft in Normandy, France, in the 1970s, was drawn into the discourse of witchcraft when she suffered a series of misfortunes, interpreted as a deflected sorcery attack, and became an apprentice “dewitcher”. Unlike Paul Stoller, Favret-Saada did not conclude that witches really existed – she did not believe that neighbours were casting spells on one another, but she was clear that the discourse of witchcraft was real, and had profound effects on people’s lives. Favret-Saada’s engagement with witchcraft in the bocage (“hedge country”) of Normandy, with its initial somatic imperative – a mode of experience that opened the door to the otherwise hidden world coloured her interpretive endeavours, resulting in a sensitive and complex account of the phenomenon of witchcraft, psychic attack and spiritual protection. A paradigmatic case of experiential engagement with spirit possession is Edith Turner’s (1992) account of participation in an Ndembu healing ritual in central Africa. Edith Turner had witnessed the Ihamba (“tooth”) ritual in the 1950s when conducting fieldwork with her husband, 17 Victor Turner. In 1985, however, she was not an observer but close to the centre of the action as one of a team of five doctors seeking to draw an invasive spirit from Meru, a sick woman. Whereas on earlier occasions the Turners had been aware of the collective release at the climax of the ritual, they had not “seen” anything themselves. This time was different, and Turner saw and felt the spirit’s release from the sick woman, and its subsequent capture by Singleton, the leading healer, at the critical moment of the ritual. Healing for the Ndembu is a collective act, not a transaction between doctor and patient alone but a purgation and renewal of community relations: Then, when the psychosocial body was ready for some unseen triggering – even perhaps including that of the white stranger’s frustration and tears – all of a sudden the soul of the whole group was delivered from its oppression, and the patient’s brain, negated by trance, allowed her body to open and provide the outlet for the spirit to escape – that opaque mass of plasma – into the air, to be stuffed into the homey hunting-flavored mongoose skin pouch” (1992:165). This event was a conversion, a break-through experience for Turner. She could not deny this time what she, the Western outsider, as well as the Ndembu, actually saw – the spirit come out of the sick woman. As Turner wrote later, this event gave her a sense of absolute certainty that deeply affected the rest of her life: “Because of that event I can stand firm, and often feel truly happy, without a care” (2006:173). It was not seeing Meru healed of a troublesome, nagging spirit, in an African village on a November day in 1985 that produced this life-changing effect. For Turner the event was apodictic, an existential moment in which the ontological reality of spirits appeared as fact. A (re)conversion to Christianity had not brought about that certainty, but the insight gained when she saw the Ihamba was carried into Turner’s expansive Christian faith and practice, as well as all her subsequent anthropological work. This fine example of cognitive, empathetic engagement led Turner to particular insights regarding the relationship between spirit and matter in African healing. In a discussion of LéviStrauss’s (1980) tale of Quesalid, the Kwakiutl shaman from Canada’s North West coast, Turner finds striking parallels with her Ndembu experience. Quesalid was taught to hide a tuft down his cheek, which in the course of healing would be produced as evidence of a foreign object 18 removed from a patient. Regarding this sleight of hand as trickery, as Western observers have invariably done also, Quesalid was surprised to find that his patients nevertheless recovered. Lévi-Strauss’s perceptive observation was that “the coherence of the psychic universe, [is] itself a projection of the social universe” (1980:446, cited in Turner, 1992:165). Quesalid became a great shaman because the techniques he had been taught worked. The tufts concealed in his cheek were not substitutes for an imaginary, absent spirit, but objects designed to call-out and house the spirit, giving it material form, capturing its essence. Just as many Christians believe that the Eucharistic bread and wine actually become (house) the body and blood of Christ – drawn down by the words of the priest during the act of consecration, so the white enamel ihamba tooth, or Quesalid’s tuft, become the vehicles for a psycho-spiritual presence, no less real because seen only by a few, on rare occasions, in its material or semi-material form. What these examples share is a close engagement with the people and events being studied; willingness to accommodate a world view that incorporates witches, psychic attack and communication between seen and unseen worlds, and the ability to use this perspective as part of the ethnographer’s interpretive apparatus. The resulting ethnographies allow the reader to experience something of these worlds vicariously through the lens of the ethnographer’s firsthand account, and to engage with these worlds through an encounter with the “other”. Rather than stressing the distance between “their false” and “our correct” beliefs, the reader is given the opportunity to enter into other worlds and encounter their inhabitants as equals (cf. EvansPritchard, 1976:240-254). 2. Reincarnation The second theme I have chosen to illustrate ways in which a methodology that incorporates aspects of cognitive, empathetic engagement can produce new insights and further elucidate empirical data is reincarnation. The cases related here show how cognitive engagement with the data and openness to emic interpretations facilitates links between seemingly disparate phenomena. This in turn enhances access to specific cultural interpretations of reality and areas of cross-cultural continuity. As Winkelman (2012:200) states: This engagement with the possibilities provided by the “other” may be an essential aspect of engaging with these experiences of alternative realities. The mental framework 19 provided by belief and expectation is not merely some self-delusional abandonment of an appropriately empirical or skeptical attitude, but rather a preparation of the mental fields that can enable the manifestation of certain phenomena - much as a magnetic field produced by a magnet provides the organizing framework for the spatial distribution of the affected metal filings. Although it is a truism that we filter experience of the other through the lens of our own cultural understanding, this does not mean that our view of others is necessarily fixed. Indeed, there would be little point in undertaking ethnographic work, entering physically and imaginatively into alternative cultures and ways of viewing the world, if we are not open to learn from them and to change. In my case the new organising framework Winkelman refers to above took shape over a number of years as a result of comparative data that led me to re-evaluate not so much the internal logic of the phenomenon of reincarnation, as its ontological status – not something ethnographers are normally encouraged to consider, but central to those concerned and to an interpretation of the data nonetheless. When carrying out doctoral fieldwork among the Bangwa of South West Cameroon in the 1980s I recorded accounts of individuals being regarded as “single twins”, that is, two people who had been part of a friendship group in the spirit world of unborn children who had chosen to be born at the same time to different mothers. Single twins, like more conventional twins born to the same mother in a multiple birth, are considered especially vulnerable by the Bangwa. If one of the pair dies they might try to tempt the remaining infant to return with them to the carefree land of their playmates, mindless of the grief caused to their grieving parents (Brain 1969; Bowie, 1985). Bangwa cultural explanations of childbirth, loss and spiritual geographies show somewhat surprising continuities with accounts of Interlife journeys recorded by American clinical hypnotherapist Michael Newton (1994, 2004, 2008), despite cultural differences, such as the Bangwa’s telluric notion of the spirit realm as opposed to one located in the sky or “higher planes”. Newton’s therapeutic practice strayed accidentally into clients’ recall of apparent past lives and periods between lives, or life-between-life (cf. Weiss, 1988). The published results are fascinating and suggestive for their internal consistency and for their many points of contact with other cultures and historical periods. The Bangwa world of spirit children, seen within this context, appears less as rather exotic beliefs rooted in an African world-view, than another 20 instance of a well-rehearsed pattern, familiar from many varied sources, including Theosophical writings, data from mediums and clairvoyants, and accounts of near-death experiences. The comparative ethnographic picture that emerges involves the idea that people do not progress through their lives or cycle of lives alone, but with a group of friends or “soul group” with whom they often choose to reincarnate in order to provide support, and to learn certain pre-determined lessons designed for spiritual growth (Schwartz, 2007). The notion of a carefree childhood realm in which those who die young are given the time and nurture they need to grow and mature before returning, often to the same family, appears in Western as well as non-Western sources, as efeng, for example, among the Bangwa, as Summerland or Devachan in Theosophical writings (Besant, 2006), as a dedicated area of the astral world in which children are looked after in some channelled writings (Sandys & Lehmann, nd:5; Taylor, 1999:102). Reading similar accounts from so many disparate sources led me to question my initial assumption that Bangwa descriptions of the world of spirit children were an essentially “imaginary” cultural artefact. I am open to the possibility that a predisposition to religiosity or certain forms spiritual experience may be epiphenomena of chemical or electrical activity in certain regions of the brain, although such explanations are by no means clear-cut (cf. van Lommel, 2012; Beauregard, 2012). When it comes to the actual content of the experience or religious narrative, brain chemistry is inadequate as an explanation. How, for instance, would shared neurological functioning gives rise to the idea, shared across many cultures and historical periods, that those who die as children continue to mature in the spirit world, or that human beings belong to a “soul group” that persists across and between lives? Culturally functionalist explanations, while often enlightening, similarly fail to account satisfactorily for continuities across disparate times and cultures (cf. Daniels, 1974). This does not make such notions objectively veridical or testable, but it is a fact that they reappear in individual and cultural narratives time and time again. Antonia Mills (1994) describes a similar shift in perspective in relation to tales of reincarnation among some of the native peoples of British Columbia. Being neither interested in nor open to the idea of reincarnation, she initially failed initially to listen to the stories she heard, or to recognise the role played by reincarnation in local conceptions of personality. It was the experience of working with Dr Ian Stevenson, founder of the Division of Perceptual Studies at the University of Virginia, which led Mills to re-evaluate her own field material. Stevenson 21 undertook years of painstaking research in many parts of the world on children who claimed to remember past lives.11 The predominant interpretation among anthropologists and other Western scholars tends towards the social construction hypothesis. It is assumed, without compelling evidence, that cultural notions of personality, reincarnation, personhood and the afterlife are sufficient to account for examples encountered in the field of people who claim to remember past lives. Stevenson and his colleagues collected well in excess of 2,500 cases of children who were identified, and identified themselves, as another pre-deceased named individual. Stevenson’s data indicates that where it occurs, the conviction of having lived before in another personality expresses itself very early, generally as soon as the child learns to talk, but fades away by about the ages of seven or eight.12 Mills (1994:259-261) outlines several limitations of the social construction hypothesis as an adequate explanation of (all) occurrences in which a child believes that they have lived before. (1) If information relating to a past-life is gleaned from cues picked up from adults, consciously or unconsciously, one might expect these to increase rather than decrease with age as the child becomes more adroit at picking up pertinent information relating to the deceased. (2) If reincarnation is socially accepted and normative, and sometimes represented culturally in naming practices, one might expect a higher percentage of children to relate to a named forebear. (3) Birthmarks and birth defects sometimes bear a striking resemblance to injuries, defects or blemishes acquired by the previous personality. It is not just on children that such marks are sometime apparent. An English psychiatrist and Senior NHS Consultant, Arthur Guirdham (1974), came to the conclusion that he belonged to a group of people who in a previous twelfth century life had been Cathars in the Languedoc region of Southern France. The “evidence” for this claim was derived from numerous sources, including dreams, visions, clairaudience, synchronous coincidence and archival research, all presented in a somewhat quizzical down-toearth manner. One of the several factors that helped Guirdham identify one individual with her previous personality was the presence of unexplained marks on her side that resembled burns corresponding to a particular instance in which, as a persecuted Cathar, she had been struck with a burning torch (cf. Stevenson, 1997). When their psychic channels and memories were becoming more active, members of Guirdham’s group also appeared to take on aspects of the personality, pre-occupations, skills and ailments of their twelfth-century counterparts. It should 22 be noted, however, that in a review of this case by the writer Ian Wilson, Guirdham was unwilling or unable to supply any firm, independent corroboration of his accounts (1981:36-46). The cases of supposed reincarnation studied by Mills, Stevenson and others are not taken as proof (verification) that the phenomenon is real, nor that the stories recounted are straightforward accurate accounts with ontological veracity. In many instances, however, reincarnation appears to be the best explanation of the data, and on rational grounds (assessing the evidence and looking for validation) must be admitted as a possibility. If reincarnation is provisionally accepted, this would indicate that “personality may be more than the product of socialization of an individual with a particular genetic makeup” (Mills, 1994:265). The suggestion from some of Stevenson’s cases that children may choose their parents is also echoed in subsequent studies in different contexts (Tomlinson, 2005:125-6). Margaret Mead (1963) suggested that societies select for particular temperaments. Mills (again supported by more recent studies) goes further than this, proposing that: One implication of the reincarnation hypothesis is that the diversity of human temperament within and between different cultures may in part result from the interplay between socialization in past and present lives in which the previous lives remain largely inaccessible to conscious memory. The individual subconscious might then contain not only the parts of the current life that the individual has consciously or subconsciously suppressed but memories both good and bad from previous lives which manifest for most people only occasionally in déjà vu experiences, or when seeming to recognize people or places seen for the first time, or inexplicable philias, phobias and interests (1994:266). Whereas the personal, paradigmatic experiences of Edith Turner and Paul Stoller grew out of particular participatory events, it is equally the case that cognitive, empathetic engagement may lead, as with Antonia Mills, to an accumulation of data that is tested over time and which is continually cross-referenced and revised in the context of comparative cases and new information. Lee Wilson’s proposal for a sceptical anthropology (2012:45) implies the rejection of a stance of automatic incredulity towards the claims of others. In these examples adopting a cognitive openness to accounts of reincarnation enables the researcher to incorporate new data into a dynamic evaluative framework. The goal is not to prove a particular point but to use the 23 best available data in order to gain a deeper or richer understanding of ways in which we experience and express our humanity, and understand our place in the world. Conclusion One might draw the conclusion from these two examples (spirit possession and reincarnation), that belief in the ontological reality of spirits or an afterlife is being privileged, and is hermeneutically superior to agnosticism, or to attestation of their methodological but not ontological reality. Applying a methodology of cognitive, empathetic engagement does not, however, predicate such a view. The ethnographer seeks to enter into a dialogue with his or her subject, aware of the possible multiplicity of identities of both self and other, in order to construct what can never be a definitive description or interpretation of reality. New data will present itself, new possibilities of verification, deeper levels of self-awareness and intuitive perception – which in turn will be challenged by alternative descriptions and interpretations. As the title of David Young and Jean-Guy Goulet’s (1994) collection of essays suggests, being changed may well be part of this dialectic, as many investigators have documented. There are numerous cultural, religiously informed anxieties that introduce a fear of death – that the incorrect performance of rituals will deny one the status of an ancestor, or that failure to confess and repent of one’s sins will consign the soul to an eternity in hell, for example. It is a feature of more direct, unmediated experiences that fear of death diminishes (Fox, 2003:279288). The sense of being alone in the world, separated from those who have died, is often replaced by a sense of connection (van Lommel, 2010:208-9). Paul Ricoeur (2006:132), paying homage to Saint Augustine in Book 10 of his Confessions, observes, we do not enter the field of history “with the single hypothesis of the polarity between individual memory and collective memory”, that is, alone against the world or in the face of history, but with those who love us. They may not approve of our actions, but in the equality and mutuality of esteem that Ricoeur termed “attestation”, they approve of our existence, as we in turn affirm theirs. Brian Weiss’s contact with “Catherine” and the “Masters” who purportedly spoke through her, convinced Weiss that “when we reawaken the knowledge that we are all spiritual beings, our values shift and we can finally become happy and peaceful” (2000:112). Tim Ingold makes a strong case for “studies that are with people rather than of them” (2011:226). A dialogical approach to studying the afterlife in which we seek to engage intelligently, empathetically and respectfully with others 24 may not lead to profound and life-changing insights, but it does have the potential to enlarge our understanding of what it means to be an embodied, material human being. One cannot participate in another culture or engage with a set of ideas as if they were somehow separate from the observer – we now know that this is true even of inanimate laboratory specimens or quantum particles (Rosenblum and Kuttner 2007). As Evans-Pritchard noted, the ethnographer is often (always?) subtly transformed by the people they are making a study of: I learnt from African “primitives” much more than they learnt from me, much that I was never taught at school, something more of courage, endurance, patience, resignation, and forebearance that I had not great understanding of before. 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Notes 1 Hans-Georg Gadamer (1989) pointed to the necessity of establishing a methodology for the human sciences that takes account of our responses both to the natural world of “objective necessity” and the inner world of our personhood in which we have the capacity to “subject everything to thinking”. It is this inner world in which we form our conscience, that gives us our 36 autonomy and agency as human beings, although always in a dialectical relationship with the inescapable physicality of our bodily material existence. 2 The ethnographer or scholar undertaking a study of the afterlife need not accept these propositions as “true”; I am here outlining the parameters of the field of inquiry. Although this is not the place to go into a history of ideas concerning survival of consciousness, the debate between those who understand consciousness as a component of the physical body, and those who see the body as a vehicle for consciousness, has a long pedigree in Western thought (cf. Hyslop [1913] 2012, Krippner and Friedman, 2010). 3 For an example of the former approach see, for instance, Greenfield (1998) which attempts to fit rich ethnographic data on Brazilian Spiritist healing into a framework termed ‘cultural biology’. Some of the problems of an inherent reductionism are discussed in Turner (1993) and Winkelman (2012). Authors who have come closer to validating emic categories, and have examined the difficulties many Western scholars have in taking them seriously, include Samuel (1993), Hutton (2001), Campbell (1989), Gottlieb (2004) and Turner (1996). The ethnographic complexity of mind-body relations, and the importance in some contexts of relations with spirits and ancestors in understanding illness, for instance, is clearly illustrated by Scheper-Hughes and Lock (1987:21). 4 Several studies of patients who have suffered a cardiac arrest while in hospital indicate that the nearer someone comes to clinical death, the more likely they are to have a near-death or temporary-death experience, that is, conscious (accurate and verifiable) recall of events that took place when they were registering no brain activity (Fenwick & Fenwick, 2008:206-212; Carter, 2010). These clinical studies are supported by a wealth of anecdotal evidence. Physical mediumship is another area said to offer a challenge to a materialist interpretation of consciousness. See, for instance, Grant and Jane Solomon’s (1999) account of the results of the Scole Experimental Group researches into physical mediumship in the 1990s. 5 Participation in the lives of those studied has a long history within anthropology, from Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown in the early decades of the Twentieth Century onwards. For an excellent account of the place of participant-observation as a key methodological component of anthropological knowledge see Okely (2012). There is also a tradition of using one’s own experience as fieldwork data and as an interpretive tool. See, for instance, the very different ways this can be done in Ingold (2011:220-226), who argues that to merely observe and 37 not to participate is to take the life out of anthropology, by Jakobsen (1999), who analyses her own experience of taking part in shamanic workshops to link into the experience of others, and the literature on shamanism, and Renato Rosaldo (1993), who uses his own grief at his wife’s death to understand the violent anger of Ilongot headhunters in the Philippines. 6 From “The Model of the Text: Meaningful Action Considered as Text” in From Text to Action, cited in Dauenhauer (2005:7). 7 Co-presence could include a text and its reader as well as face-to-face contact. 8 Victoria Hislop, The Return (2009). Interview with Razia Iqbal, 1st May 2010 (http://bbc.co.uk/i/s8k10/) 9 Malinowski’s enforced residence on the Trobriand Islands during the War, was due to his status as an “enemy alien” (a Pole working in Australia, but carrying out fieldwork in the Oceanic Trobriand Islands off the coast of Papua New Guinea). As many fieldworkers have done since, he made the best of his situation and demonstrated in his subsequent writings the benefits of long-term engagement with one’s informants, learning their language, taking part in their ceremonies and daily activities and getting to know them as individual people rather than exemplars of a primitive way of life. The result was a classic series of monographs on Trobriand life that formed the basis for a more engaged anthropological practice. See, for instance, Malinowski 1922 and1929. 10 I would distinguish between ethics, as a system of norms and ideas, and morality, as a personal ethical code, relating to the development of an individual conscience. While notions of morality may vary from one person to another they will also invariably position themselves in relation to wider ethical systems, positively and negatively. 11 Stevenson and colleagues at the University of Virginia Division of Perceptual Studies have published numerous books and articles detailing this work over several decades. For a good summary of his work, see Stevenson 1987, 1997, 2001. 12 This is consistent with Theosophical and other accounts of pre-birth memories and the relationship between the spirit and body. The spirit of a child in utero is said to roam fairly freely, although maintaining contact with the body. It is certainly aware of events and people, including their thoughts and emotions that occur outside the mother’s body – and in certain circumstances may be able to recall verifiable information that could not possibly have been available to the foetus. The relationship between the spirit and body becomes more stable at 38 birth, when amnesia concerning the spirit’s true identity sets in. In many cases, however, this amnesia is not complete, and fades gradually, usually diapering altogether around the age of eight (Newton, 2008:381-394). 39