Possession: Witchcraft, Shamanism, and Hedonism among Primitive Peoples

Record summary

Erika Bourguignon’s Possession synthesizes cross-cultural research on altered states, possession, trance and institutionalized dissociation, including African societies. It is relevant because it attempts systematic comparison rather than relying only on famous anecdotal mediums. The study’s categories and statistical comparisons can help locate African traditions in wider debates about ritualized altered states. However, its evidence is largely ethnographic and archival, and the terminology reflects the anthropology and psychiatry of the 1960s and 1970s rather than current clinical or indigenous frameworks.