Papua New Guinea spirit-mediumship and altered-state ethnographies

Record summary

Anthropological work in Papua New Guinea during this period documented spirit-mediumship, initiation, possession, healing and socially recognized changes in identity or voice. These sources may be useful for comparing possession and dissociation models with Western parapsychological interpretations. The lead must be narrowed to a named community and author, since Papua New Guinea contains hundreds of societies with different cosmologies. Such ethnographies describe reported practices and local explanations, not controlled demonstrations of spirit agency or psi, and their field contexts often involved colonial or missionary mediation.