Trance And Possession States

The authors then go on to develop criteria for the diagnosis of possession and to present a new theory of possession. They also offer multifold comparisons of normal trance-possession in the Balinese with the condition called MPD in the West

Ideal for any student or health care professional who needs an authoritative text that is sharply focused on clinical psychiatry, this book contains the most relevant clinical material from the bestselling "Kaplan and Sadock's Synopsis of Psychiatry, 10th Edition" and includes updated information on recently introduced psychiatric drugs.

Winner of ISSTD's 2009 Pierre Janet Writing Award for the best publication on dissociation in 2009! Dissociation and the Dissociative Disorders is a book that has no real predecessor in the dissociative disorders field. It reports the most recent scientific findings and conceptualizations about dissociation; defines and establishes the boundaries of current knowledge in the dissociative disorders field; identifies and carefully articulates the field’s current points of confusion, gaps in knowledge, and conjectures; clarifies the different aspects and implications of dissociation; and sets forth a research agenda for the next decade. In many respects, Dissociation and the Dissociative Disorders both defines and redefines the field.

First Published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Ongoing debates about the “return of religion” have paid little attention to the orgiastic and enthusiastic qualities of religiosity, despite a significant increase in the use of techniques of trance and possession around the globe. Likewise, research on religion and media has neglected the fact that historically the rise of mediumship and spirit possession was closely linked to the development of new media of communication. This innovative volume brings together a wide range of ethnographic studies on local spiritual and media practices. Recognizing that processes of globalization are shaped by mass mediation, the volume raises questions such as: How are media like photography, cinema, video, the telephone, or television integrated in seances and healing rituals? How do spirit mediums connect with these media? Why are certain technical media shunned in these contexts?

Ritual trance has always been closely associated with music—but why, and how? Gilbert Rouget offers and extended analysis of music and trance, concluding that no universal law can explain the relations between music and trance; they vary greatly and depend on the system of meaning of their cultural context. Rouget rigorously examines a worldwide corpus of data from ethnographic literature, but he also draws on the Bible, his own fieldwork in West Africa, and the writings of Plato, Ghazzali, and Rousseau. To organize this immense store of information, he develops a typology of trance based on symbolism and external manifestations. He outlines the fundamental distinctions between trance and ecstasy, shamanism and spirit possession, and communal and emotional trance. Music is analyzed in terms of performers, practices, instruments, and associations with dance. Each kind of trance draws strength from music in different ways at different points in a ritual, Rouget concludes. In possession trance, music induces the adept to identify himself with his deity and allows him to express this identification through dance. Forcefully rejecting pseudo-science and reductionism, Rouget demystifies the so-called theory of the neurophysiological effects of drumming on trance. He concludes that music's physiological and emotional effects are inseparable from patterns of collective representations and behavior, and that music and trance are linked in as many ways as there are cultural structures.

Shamanism has always been of great interest to anthropologists. More recently it has been discovered by westerners, especially New Age followers. This book breaks new ground byexamining pristine shamanism in Greenland, among people contacted late by Western missionaries and settlers. On the basis of material only available in Danish, and presented herein English for the first time, the author questions Mircea Eliade's well-known definition of the shaman as the master of ecstasy and suggests that his role has to be seen as that of a master of spirits. The ambivalent nature of the shaman and the spirit world in the tough Arctic environment is then contrasted with the more benign attitude to shamanism in the New Age movement. After presenting descriptions of their organizations and accounts by participants, the author critically analyses the role of neo-shamanic courses and concludes that it is doubtful to consider what isoffered as shamanism.