Conceptualizing Spirit Possession: Ethnographic and Experimental Evidence

Abstract

Abstract We report the findings of a programmatic series of studies designed to investigate the cognitive underpinnings of cross‐culturally recurrent forms of possession belief. Possession phenomena are frequently portrayed in the anthropological literature as incompatible with common cultural assumptions and biases guiding Western notions of “self” and “personhood” and as resisting generalization and explication in comparative theoretical analysis. Our findings concerning the cognitive capacities and constraints that facilitate the emergence and transmission of possession concepts support the position that certain fundamental aspects of these concepts' forms are explainable in terms of ordinary, panhuman cognitive function. Ethnographic and experimental data indicate that successful possession concepts (e.g., those that entail the effective displacement of the host's agency by the possessing spirit's agency) emerge and spread, in part, because they effectively exploit universal cognitive mechanisms that deal with our everyday social and physical worlds and that this contributes to their enhanced incidence, communicability, memorability, and inferential potential relative to less “cognitively optimal,” less widespread possession concepts. [spirit possession, cognitive science of culture, cultural transmission, Afro‐Brazilian religion, mind‐body dualism]