Review of Edith Turners's "New Advances in the Study of Spiritual Experience."

Published in the March 2007 issue of Anthropology News: 48 (3)in the Society for the Anthropology of Consciousness column section, page 52. Edith's work is related to my essay on "Personal Encounter with Paranormal Dreaming." Edith cited an essay of mine in her paper and lecture "New Advances in the Study of Spiritual Expeience."

Turner SAC/AAA Distinguished Lecture
Mark A. Schroll, Ph.D.
rockphd4@yahoo.com

Edith Turner’s 2006 Distinguished SAC/AAA lecture “New Advances in the Study of Spiritual Experience: Drawing Together Many Threads” in San Jose, CA, was a historical tour de force of consciousness studies emergence throughout the last 100 years. Among the pioneers that have assisted anthropology and related disciplines with mapping the farther reaches of cognition, Turner cited her late husband Victor Turner. Pointing out that his quest to make the invisible visible was the result of an epiphany at age 12, when he experienced in a dream the passing of his first mentor. Nevertheless, Vic sought to be “brilliantly orthodox” as his budding career in anthropology began to unfold years later, mindful of the fact he had a wife and children to support and jobs were scarce. Still Vic’s quest to understand the mysterium tremendum was reawakened when he read Henri Junod’s Life of a South African Tribe (1912/1962) whose framework of analysis uses van Gennap references to liminality. Influenced by their personal experience and field work, Vic and Edith expanded liminality’s conceptual understanding into what they have called communitas. This felt commonality of transpersonality exceeded the conceptual limits of Durkheim’s understanding of religion and was received with puzzlement regarding its anthropological significance by their colleagues, including Max Gluckman, Vic’s old professor. Offering us this insight, that the Turner’s—without intending to be agents of change—were among the first to advance a new understanding of what it means to be human.
Meanwhile several other like-minded anthropological explorations were taking place here in the USA, that the Turner’s found themselves to be in alliance several years later after their immigration from England. These advances began with Eliade’s inquiries into shamanism, followed by Harner’s fieldwork with the Jivaro (who insisted the only way Harner could comprehend their religion was to ingest ayahuasca). Harner’s insights were closely paralleled by Castaneda’s controversial claims about a separate reality that further challenged the methodological divisions between nomothetic vs ideographic methods of inquiry. Douglas Price-Williams recently wrote about his relationship with Carlos (AoC 16 (1) 2005), agreeing with Stanley Krippner that Castaneda’s books are not important anthropological documents, yet played an important role in furthering anthropology’s investigation of shamanism. These stirrings coincided with SAC’s early meetings initiated by Joseph Long that sought to usher in the scientific investigation of psi into anthropology. But when SAC applied for AAA membership it was decided that naming its focus of inquiry consciousness studies reflected a linguistic referent that better fit the paradigmatic criteria necessary to gain acceptance (Schroll & Schwartz AoC 16 (1) 2005).
This point reflects the essence of Turner’s central thesis - that our inquiry of psi/spirit, liminality, communitas and our experiences of transpersonality are only acceptable if we keep quiet about them, or translate them into recognizable phenomena that fit the conceptual limits of EuroAmerican science. This kind of ethnocentric bigotry calls into question the very nature of anthropological inquiry, whereas Turner counters it will not keep new generations of anthropologists from encountering instances of psi/spirit during their field research, even though a smug postmodern countenance continues to dominate mainstream conversations. Defiantly, Turner asks: “What right has anthropology to tell us that psi/spirit does not exist?” Turner cites Dan Moonhawk Alford’s linguistic insights into Native American languages; equally courageous is the memory of Alford telling us at the 2001 spring SAC meeting in Seattle about his paper “The Origin of Speech and the Deep Structure of Psi.” We now also have, quoting Turner, “Marjorie Balzer, Claire Farrer, Antonia Mills, and Bilinda Straight, all writing ethnographies that take the battle into the enemy’s camp, and give the positivists classical, scholarly, and above all human pictures of life where people live naturally in the milieu of spirituality.”
Toward the end of her lecture, summing up her thesis that we need a new kind of science, Turner asked rhetorically, “what then is psi, and do we have to prove it exists?” Telling us, “nobody plans or constructs a spiritual healing; it is given to the healers.” The point being unlike our EuroAmerican scientific orientation, indigenous healers are not at all concerned with proving the existence of psi/spirit or understanding its modus operandi because knowing this would contribute little or nothing to their ability to heal. Turner’s thesis deserves priority concern as SAC defines it role in the 21st century.