Participation and Hybridity in Transpersonal Anthropology

* Article. Greg Lahood. Participation and Hybridity in Transpersonal Anthropology. ReVision. V. 29 No. 3. 2007

URL = http://participatorystudies.com/2011/03/29/one-hundred-years-of-sacred-science/

Abstract

"The discipline of anthropology has been a major influence on transpersonal psychology. The transpersonal movement has now, in turn, influenced many anthropologists and opened new fields of research. In this article, the author explores the historical emergence and basic premise of transpersonally oriented anthropology and, in particular, its participatory and hybrid themes. He also examines the major innovation of the subdiscipline: the potential for data gathering by anthropologists participating in altered states of consciousness."

Excerpt

From the conclusion:

"There has been a gradual shift over the past one hundred years in the recognition and value of researching such phenomena by participating in them.

This trend is concomitant with sweeping changes in Western notions of reality (Laughlin 1988) and a movement away from conformity to an external “higher truth” and toward a subjective turn in the wider culture (Heelas et al. 2005). A growing cadre of anthropologists have moved a long way from discounting or pathologizing such states, and Berger’s (1969) caution to the would-be visionary or emic anthropologist on the political dangers of going cognitively “native” and its penalty—dropping out of the “universe of discourse” altogether (23) and slipping into academic anomie— have become largely redundant. Conversely, the penalty for not dropping the modernist mindworld is to restrict oneself to the slim pickings gathered in one cognitive sphere. Suspending this sphere allows anthropologists to participate in other realities and access vital ethnographic information, insights into transpersonal realities, and a reassessment of the boundaries of the human and more-than-human condition. Most of these participatory approaches (e.g., purposeful conversion, plant ingestion, ritual participation, meditation, shamanic training) emerged with what Bourguignon (2003) calls the psychedelic revolution that, coupled with the 1960s American counterculture, begot the transpersonal movement. This movement in Western science provided a legitimizing academic forum for the research of sacred states from a userfriendly standpoint and for criticizing the shortcomings of the Cartesian mind-world. The transpersonal journey continues into the second phase of its intervention with the participatory turn, the uprooting of subtle constrictions from previous epochs, and thus remains true to its liberationist impulse."

(http://participatorystudies.com/2011/03/29/one-hundred-years-of-sacred-science/)