Trance States and Accessing Implicit Memories: A Psychosocial Genomic Approach to Reconstituting Social Memory during Religious Rituals

Abstract

This article explores the relationship between efforts by members of diverse social groups to regain, reconstruct or remember disappearing cultural pasts - in which life was believed to have been better and more meaningful - and the distinctive forms taken in the ritual and other practices of so many of today’s religions. The author proposes that religious rituals that enable participants to enter into trance, or other altered states of consciousness (ASC), contribute positively to the reconstruction of social memories and make it possible for seemingly forgotten beliefs and practices to be retrieved. A combination of recent developments in research, theory and conjecture in neuroscience and older theory, data and speculation in anthropology are employed to explicate this idea. The analysis focuses on the (individual human) body within which social practice (or culture) and biophysiological processes converge. For so many in the contemporary world who see their lives as shattered by modernity’s secularizing and dehumanizing forces, what is taking place as they strive to reconstruct their social pasts is a cultural-biological response manifesting itself in a range of social practices in which religion is pre-eminent.