This paper presents evidence that some—but not all—religious experts in a particular faith may have a schizophrenia-like psychotic process which is managed or mitigated by their religious practice, in that they are able to function effectively and are not identified by their community as ill. We conducted careful phenomenological interviews, in conjunction with a novel probe, with okomfo, priests of the traditional religion in Ghana who speak with their gods. They shared common understandings of how priests hear gods speak. Despite this, participants described quite varied personal experiences of the god’s voice. Some reported voices which were auditory and more negative; some seemed to describe trance-like states, sometimes associated with trauma and violence; some seemed to be described sleep-related events; and some seemed to be interpreting ordinary inner speech. These differences in description were supported by the way participants responded to an auditory clip made to simulate the voice-hearing experiences of psychosis and which had been translated into the local language. We suggest that for some individuals, the apprenticeship trained practice of talking with the gods, in conjunction with a non-stigmatizing identity, may shape the content and emotional tone of voices associated with a psychotic process.

ABSTRACT: This article examines the intersection of optimism and religion by exploring the spiritual experiences of Pentecostal Christians and Traditionalists in Cape Coast, Ghana. We argue that for both Pentecostals and Traditionalists (practitioners of indigenous Akan religion) an experience of contact with the spirit realm conditions movements between pessimistic and hopeful subjectivities. When the object of hope is definite, but uncertain, Pentecostal spiritual experiences are similar to those of traditionalists. Pentecostalism stands out as unique from traditionalist experience and practice because it also provokes states of confident expectation for a generalized object, resulting in periods of boundless optimism that shift seamlessly between confident expectancy for specific material aspirations and more abstract ends like blessing and anointing. These general states we analytically define as optimism. Pentecostal experiences generate optimistic stances that collapse the believers' economically modest presents and imagined wealthy futures, allowing for the identification of spiritual and material well-being, eclipsing actual wealth differences. For our Pentecostal interlocutors, optimism is a moment within a spectrum of states that include pessimism and variegated states of hopefulness—all of which are mediated by experiences with God/Spirit.

Abstract Many Orthodox Christians and Sufi Muslims in Ethiopia put Salafis and Pentecostals in the same category. Because both denounce the intercessory powers of otherworldly figures, like saints and awaliyya, some claim Salafis are “like Pentes.” Some refer to the similar mediation practices of Sufis and Orthodox Christians to paint Pentecostals/Salafis as other, as foreign. This article explores how these discursive parallels play out in practical interactions in Gondar, Ethiopia, a historical center of Ethiopian Orthodoxy with a sizable Muslim minority. In some ways, Orthodox-Pentecostal relations mirror Sufi-Salafi relations because of similarities in Orthodox and Sufi mediation practices. However, the Sufi–Salafi boundary is relatively porous due to the detachability of Sufi practices of intercession from more encompassing practices like salat and Ramadan. Pentecostal–Orthodox boundaries are more robust in part because the intercession of Saints infuses all levels of Orthodox practice. This boundary becomes particularly sharp in the context of funerals.

This essay argues that modalities of interreligious conflict and coexistence in Gondar, Ethiopia entail shifting sites of discernibility and concealment. In religiously mixed interactions, both parties tend to see concealment as a key facet of a self-conscious ethical project of harmonious, interreligious relations. Hence, many reserve interreligious evaluations for homogenous settings of religious insiders, where the expressions cannot frame real-time mixed interactions in antagonistic terms. On occasion, though, the concealment is unsustainable, and interreligious evaluations leak into shared spaces, becoming discernible in a mutually recognisable way, thus creating open conflict. Adhering to norms of concealment marks one as a respectful other, however, these norms can conflict with religious ethical imperatives. The way they conflict differs for Orthodox Christians, Muslims, and Pentecostals. Moreover, the significance attributed to concealment/revelation within religious and interreligious value frameworks often shapes patterns of relations across religious boundaries, including routine mutuality, ambivalence, and escalating tensions.

A common dilemma in practices of secrecy concerns the actors' obligation to conceal the secret while keeping it socially present and animated. This quandary often generates moral ambivalence about acts of concealing, revealing, and discerning the hidden. We explore these and similar tensions with a focus on what we call the ethics of discernment: those political and moral ambiguities involved in the uncovering, translation, and circulation of secrets. While such issues can be explored in all areas of social and cultural life, religious practices provide a particularly rich area to explore. The links between religion and secrecy intersect with questions of authority, hierarchy, and the ostensibly set-apart, transcendent character of the sacred. Contributions to this special issue explore the tensions and resonances between concealment, revelation and ethics in a variety of religious contexts.

This article details the piloting of a virtual reality activity in an introductory anthropology class at Utah Valley University. Anthropologists have only recently started exploring how VR technology can facilitate classroom learning. As Elzen (2018) writes, VR allows “students to immerse themselves much more than passively watching a video.” It is this immersive quality of the medium that makes it particularly useful for anthropological pedagogy.

ABSTRACTIn Ghana, many Charismatic Christians see their spiritual lives as very different from those of “Traditionalists,” practitioners of Ghana's indigenous religion. This article argues that, while there are differences in how each group experiences spirit or divinity, their spiritual experiences share much in common due to, what Strathern calls, “partial connections.” Charismatic Christian spiritual experiences stand out in creating a rupture with the preceding context and highlighting the qualities of inner thought. By contrast, spiritual experiences of Traditionalists give less attention to inner thoughts. Also, they are less characterized by rupture and more by contextual continuity. However, there are patterns of experience these two ritual communities hold in common. Both Charismatic Christian and Traditionalists experience the divine as exerting difficult‐to‐resist pressure. Also, members of both communities tend to blur the line between mental and sensory experience of spiritual entities. I argue that overlapping elements of their shared cultural lifeworld help constitute these common experiential patterns. This article shows that, in some cases, cultural forms with distinct origins interact in a semi‐coherent way to shape the texture of experience. In doing so, it contributes to anthropological thinking on cultural change that occurs at the intersection of local and global cultural forms. [religious experience, indigenous religion, Charismatic Christianity, Ghana]

We are deeply grateful for Terhune and Jamieson’s interest in our work (1, 2). We take seriously their concern that the observed relationships between absorption and spiritual presence events could be inflated by two items referring to sensed presences in the absorption scale (“I can often somehow sense the presence of another person before I actually see or hear her/him”; “At times I somehow feel the presence of someone who is not physically there”). We reran our key analyses (study 1: ref. 2, SI Appendix, tables S20 and S21; study 3: ref. 2, SI Appendix, tables S32−S35; study 4: ref. 2, SI Appendix, tables S40−S43), omitting these two items, and found identical patterns of significance and very similar estimates of effect size for the effect of absorption on spiritual presence events in all cases. This lends us confidence that our observations are not an artifact of these two items but instead reflect a deeper relationship between the general construct measured by the absorption scale and the experience of spiritual presence events. Terhune and Jamieson (1) raise two important questions: What exactly is the absorption scale (3) measuring, andwhich aspect(s) of “absorption” facilitate experiences of communication with spiritual presences? In terms of the factor structure of the absorption scale, our datasets do provide some converging evidence for the Modified Tellegen Absorption Scale (4) factors highlighted in the letter: Exploratory factor analyses pooling data from all field sites consistently revealed a factor that could be called “synesthesia,” one or two factors similar to “imaginative involvement,” and one or two factors similar to “altered states of consciousness” (although the particular items that characterized these factors varied across studies). In study 3, we also observed a factor reminiscent of “aesthetic involvement in nature” and, in study 4, a factor indexing “sensed presence.” We reran the key analyses using absorption “subscales” based on these factor analyses and did not find robust differential relationships between spiritual presence events and any particular absorption subscale. Moreover, factor structure varied substantially across field sites—further reinforcing that no one factor facilitates spiritual presence events across cultural settings. In other words, our data suggest that, while there may be important distinctions among different aspects of absorption within a cultural setting, such distinctions are culturally variable, and all items are related to the same underlying construct. This is also reflected in the high observed reliability of the absorption scale across studies and sites; all α ≥ 0.78 (2). Instead of a privileged relationship with one particular aspect of absorption, there is a general relationship between spiritual presence events and the broad construct of an “immersive orientation toward experience” that, we argue, underlies all of the items in the absorption scale. The deeper question here, familiar to Terhune and Jamieson (1), is the relationship between absorption, dissociation, hypnosis, and psychosis (5–8). Our intuition is that these are separate constructs often entangled in individual lives and in spiritual experience—and that the field cries out for more research.

Hearing the voice of God, feeling the presence of the dead, being possessed by a demonic spirit-such events are among the most remarkable human sensory experiences. They change lives and in turn shape history. Why do some people report experiencing such events while others do not? We argue that experiences of spiritual presence are facilitated by cultural models that represent the mind as "porous," or permeable to the world, and by an immersive orientation toward inner life that allows a person to become "absorbed" in experiences. In four studies with over 2,000 participants from many religious traditions in the United States, Ghana, Thailand, China, and Vanuatu, porosity and absorption played distinct roles in determining which people, in which cultural settings, were most likely to report vivid sensory experiences of what they took to be gods and spirits.

How do concepts of mental life vary across cultures? By asking simple questions about humans, animals and other entities – for example, ‘Do beetles get hungry? Remember things? Feel love?’ – we reconstructed concepts of mental life from the bottom up among adults (N = 711) and children (ages 6–12 years, N = 693) in the USA, Ghana, Thailand, China and Vanuatu. This revealed a cross-cultural and developmental continuity: in all sites, among both adults and children, cognitive abilities travelled separately from bodily sensations, suggesting that a mind–body distinction is common across diverse cultures and present by middle childhood. Yet there were substantial cultural and developmental differences in the status of social–emotional abilities – as part of the body, part of the mind or a third category unto themselves. Such differences may have far-reaching social consequences, whereas the similarities identify aspects of human understanding that may be universal. How do concepts of mental life vary across cultures? Weisman et al. show that a distinction between cognition and bodily sensation is present across five diverse cultures, but the status of social and emotional mental states is variable.

This article discusses an episode of open antagonism and violence that erupted between Orthodox Christians and Muslims in Gondar Ethiopia in 2009. In Gondar, a perceived symbolic attack on the Ark, a holy object with the qualities of the Ark of the Covenant, created an intersubjectively legible and affectively resonant impetus for escalating action. Conventions of Muslim-Christian coexistence appeared to be overturned, resulting in an alternative social (dis)order of open antagonism. I argue that a focus on values, in many cases, can sharpen our understanding of how quantitative change transforms into qualitative change, because such a focus trains our attention on continuous, and changing, fields of affective and conceptual import that frame collective action. Not that values determine action, or that escalations are predictable, but that novel articulations between different values that create new imaginative horizons of action that change the grounds of change. In such periods of escalation, novel courses of action can be framed within, and justified by, conservative value structures. The value relevance of some escalations enables these events to have a lasting, transformative impact.

This essay looks at the resonances between common cultural models of the mind in the central region of Ghana and patterns of spiritual experience among charismatic evangelical Christians and practitioners of southern Ghana's indigenous religion, known as traditionalists. In particular, I examine the resonance between the model of the mind that construes it as porous, as vulnerable to forcible take-over by hostile entities, and experiences of divine beings insistently pushing people to do their will. It is also relatively common for people in Ghana to report seeing the divine with their eyes and hearing it with their ears. I argue that this experience resonates with, and is perhaps facilitated by, a tendency of local models of mind in Ghana to blend sense and percept.

In anthropological works on collective violence, the term transvaluation refers to a process in which a particular conflict is reimagined on a higher scale, giving the conflict a general significance that can lead to wide-scale group violence. This article argues that by taking into account the varied iterations of transcendence and evaluation in transvaluative reframings, a reformulated concept of transvaluation can be used to understand the forces that influence collectivities to commit violence and to abstain from violence in a volatile situation. It provides an ethnographic account of collective reactions in northwest Ethiopia to a film released by ISIS in 2015 that documents the massacre of dozens of Ethiopian Orthodox Christian migrants in Libya. Using a reworked concept of transvaluation, it elucidates how actors framed the event within different imaginative scales and in reference to different values. These framings, I argue, have implications for whether collectivities anticipate that violent action will receive a positive or negative evaluation. While some Orthodox Christians privately equated ISIS with Ethiopian Muslims, which could have motivated collective scapegoating and violence, all the public transvaluations in this case worked to delink ISIS from Ethiopian Muslims and converged in casting a judgmental gaze on retributive violence. The article addresses how different transvaluations-religious, subversive, and nationalistic-compete and converge to make sense of destabilizing events and shape collective action in response to them.

This article explores how an evangelical community in southern California can embrace disparate worship modalities—formalistic/anti-formalistic, Jewish/Christian—as legitimate and acceptable moral options. It argues that a major engine driving the acceptance of a previously excluded worship form is the way that Jewish rituals become framed within a particular Christian model of time. The meta-ritual discourse of religious leaders and lay people connects the ritual context to other moments in Christian narratives, opening up a pocket of biblical temporality where divine phenomena can crystallize into material worship forms. The model of time I discuss instantiates distinct aspects of Christian metaphysics—immanence/transcendence, spirit/absence/incarnation—at discrete periods in salvation history. The ethnography and argument presented here suggest that attention to discourses that connect different temporal contexts may help us understand how theological ideas drive shifts toward both exclusion and greater inclusion of disparate worship forms in Christian communities.

While most studies of Messianic Jews focus on how they grapple with anxieties of in-authenticity in relation to the broader Jewish community, this article considers how adherents understand their faith as a unique form of authenticity. On one level, both Messianic Jewish claims of authenticity and critics of Messianic authenticity reflect the same cultural logic of what I call the "evaluative grammar of authenticity." The evaluative grammar of authenticity values causal/metonymic indexes over manipulated symbols and is undergirded by a suspicion that general appearances are symbolically manipulated in order to mask actual indexical underpinnings. This article argues that the strong stance on Messianic Jewish authenticity in this community is facilitated by the employment of the evaluative grammar of authenticity within a model of reality strongly influenced by the eschatology and epistemology of American Christian fundamentalism. The indexical underpinnings of the cosmos within this model of reality make it logical to conceive of the Messianic Jewish movement as a manifestation of authentic biblical religion. This mode of authenticity is briefly compared to that reflected by critics of Messianic Jewish authenticity who tend to employ this evaluative grammar within a more natural/historical model of reality. This ethnographic example is useful for exploring some of the basic contours of conflicts over authenticity, including how the value-laden domains of knowledge and agency are implicated in these conflicts. It also illustrates how the evaluative grammar of authenticity exemplifies a shared cultural value that, due to its internal logic, tends to engender division and cultural heterogeneity as much, or more, than it engenders cultural consensus.

This paper proposes that the transmission of common religious concepts—such as witches, hostile spirits, benevolent gods, and ancestors—is facilitated by the trajectory of the human emotional response. Because these religious concepts become associated with existentially relevant components of emotional themes they are likely to be internalized, recalled, transmitted, and institutionalized. Emotion is here treated as an evolved, and universally inherited, social heuristic that modulates interpersonal perception and action. Benevolent and malevolent religious entities and associated practices are posited as supernatural extensions of an imagined social world that is partially predicated on, and made meaningful by, the interpretive and motivational functions of emotion. While cultural psychology tends to focus on how culture shapes psychology, this paper begins to construct a theoretical framework that views culture and psychology as mutually constitutive.