Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology
The term ‘possession’ has been applied to Africa, the African diaspora (especially Brazil and the Caribbean), the Middle East, the Pacific, and sometimes South and Southeast Asia in contexts in which humans are said to be temporarily displaced, inhabited, or ridden by particular spirits. During these often highly framed episodes, voice and †agency are attributed to the spirit rather than the host; the host is not held accountable for what occurs and indeed may claim subsequently to have no knowledge of it, or at least no ability to have influenced its direction. The spirits are generally conceptualized and experienced as discrete persons, whether *ancestors, foreigners, historical figures, gods or members of an alternate species. These persons may be viewed as more or less distinct from their hosts according to the particular performance tradition at issue as well as the stage the relationship between an individual host and spirit has reached.
Some commonly recognized cultural forms (which may cover a range of local variations) include Zar (Northeast Africa), Bori (Hausa), Vodou (Haiti), and Umbanda and Candomblé (Brazil). While some writers have sought to clarify differences between possession and *shamanism (a term generally applied in Asia and indigenous America), a categorical distinction does not appear to be useful and much of the South and East Asian material can be framed in the same general terms as the African. Nor does it make sense to firmly distinguish possession as a sociological type from other instances in which people find themselves subject, in varying degrees, to the influence of disembodied external powers. The choice of whether to exorcize a demon or assimilate a spirit generally represents less a distinction of kind than a local politics of religion as well as an informed reading of the immediate social context and personal circumstances of the particular host.
Spirit possession has long exercised the anthropological imagination. This may be, in part, because it is itself an imaginative construction. Indeed in many instances possession forms a sort of unrationalized counterpart to anthropology itself, whereby what is foreign or distant is appropriated, framed, inspected and used for local reflection.
The main difference is that while anthropological knowledge is objectified, rationalized and reproduced in textual form (such as this encyclopedia), spirit possession is embodied, reproduced in the bodies of human hosts. The presence of spirits is made manifest in episodes of illness, dissociation, *dreams and *taboos, as well as in performances in which the spirits may dress in their own clothing, eat their own foods, speak in their own voices and generally display behaviour which contrasts with that of their human hosts. Spirit possession thus occurs in the real time of human life and is experienced as an impingement upon it.
Spirit possession forms a complex and exciting subject for anthropological analysis for two main reasons. First, it combines both an order of collective thought in the distinctions among the spirits as a semiotic system (*myth, *totemism) and an order of collective practice (*ritual, therapy, oracles) whereby hosts are initiated, particular voices are legitimated, and spirits are provided with the spaces in which to perform. Possession thus provides a context in which contemporary experience can be actively mediated by past myth models and vice versa. Second, it provides an instance in which the collective and personal clearly interpenetrate. Collective forms are internalized by individuals and become self-transforming. Likewise, individual intentions are externalized and given form through the voices and acts of the spirits and the careers of their hosts (Obeyesekere 1981). Performances of possession therefore have a degree of unpredictability that many other kinds of rituals lack. Possession raises fascinating questions of agency and accountability for participants and anthropologists alike.
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