On belief and parapsychism

Individual experiences and collective discourse

Abstract

In line with the Durkheimian tradition, anthropology has played down the role of (individual) ‘experience’ in favour of (collective) ‘belief’ in understanding ritual and religious phenomena. As a result of this focus on collective constructions and representations, individual narratives of psychic experiences did not seem to fit within its scope, being at their best catalogued as various kinds of dreams. This article examines the striking similarities between written descriptions of psychic experiences in the Western world and collective discourses on spirits, ghosts, zombies, doubles, sorcery and the invisible, with which the anthropologist is only too familiar. Ultimately, it calls for the imperative need to acknowledge the intimate connection and ongoing communication between individual experience and collective belief, between psychic and religious territories. Ethnographic data from my research in Zanzibar, as well as from other contexts in diverse geographies, will be used for the purpose of the argument.