Fusion of the Worlds: An Ethnography of Possession among the Songhay of Niger

Record summary

Paul Stoller’s Fusion of the Worlds is an ethnographic account of Songhay religious specialists, possession, healing and apprenticeship in Niger. It matters for comparison because it describes altered bodily states within a locally coherent therapeutic and cosmological system, including the social learning involved in becoming a healer. The work is valuable for examining trance without presupposing either fraud or paranormal causation. As an interpretive ethnography, it relies on participant observation and narrated experience rather than blinded tests or independently measured anomalous information.