Premium
Intimations of Immortality: From Anthropological Fieldnotes, from an Anthropological Life History, and from the Resources of Ethnography
Author(s) -
Turner Edith
Publication year - 2006
Publication title -
anthropology and humanism
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.153
H-Index - 17
eISSN - 1548-1409
pISSN - 1559-9167
DOI - 10.1525/ahu.2006.31.2.157
Subject(s) - fieldnotes , immortality , ethnography , consciousness , grief , aesthetics , history , dead body , sociology , psychoanalysis , psychology , literature , art , anthropology , epistemology , philosophy , archaeology , psychotherapist , autopsy
The most common experience of a spirit is that of the dead—a parent, lover, relative, friend, or mentor. Many people in my countries of fieldwork who have been bereaved have described how the dead came back to help or comfort them as they struggled with their grief. The sense of the presence of a spirit is far from rare. I myself have had that experience five times. In all these cases, the people themselves do not cause the visitation. It is as if a door was quietly opened and there the visitors were—unexpectedly. This article gathers together some of the characteristics of spirit events as a preliminary to getting a sense of the workings of the spirits, that is, their effective interweavings with what we call “the ordinary level of consciousness”; also where one can put one's finger on the interweavings, the question of when they are present and when they are not, and one's evaluation of them as part of one's existence. For this purpose, the best way to gather characteristics is to recount the stories in‐depth, take them seriously, and listen to what they are trying to tell us.