Anthropology and the Paranormal

From 13^th – 17^th October 2013 the Centre for Theory and Research at the Esalen Institute (CTR), in Big Sur, California, invited group of scholars to discuss the contribution that social and cultural anthropology, and related disciplines, can make to our understanding of the paranormal. The Esalen Institute was founded in 1962 by Michael Murphy and Richard Price, and is in the vanguard of the human potential movement (Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion, Jeffrey J. Kripal, University of Chicago Press, 2007). Michael Murphy, director of the Centre for Theory and Research, as well as being a most gracious host, took part in our discussions. Michael Murphy’s vision is one of transforming society through dialogue and personal growth. He has the courage to ‘think big’ and encourages others to do the same. Esalen’s stunning setting on California’s Pacific coast, with its abundance of wildlife, beautiful grounds and natural hot springs, provide a wonderful backdrop to the work carried out there. This includes a wide range of personal development workshops, holistic therapies, and symposia for people from the worlds of politics, economics and academia.

 Anthropology & the Paranormal symposium participants

From left to right, back row: Michael Murphy, Susan Greenwood, Jane Hartford, Jeffrey Kripal, Raphael Locke, David Hufford, Charlie Emmons, Jack Hunter, Eddie Bullard, Stanley Krippner, Ed Kelly, Loriliai Biernacki. Middle row: Edie Turner, Tanya Luhrmann, Ann Taves, Deb Frost. Front row: Geoffrey Samuel, Antonia Mills, Fiona Bowie, Sam Yau, Frank Poletti, Paul Stoller, Gregory Shushan.




Before we met email discussions between invited participants got underway on the use of the term ‘paranormal’.  The word is commonly used in a Western setting but less useful when discussing non-Western societies where the boundaries of what is considered normal may vary considerably. The symposium was built on a long-running series of discussions that had been looking at evidence for the survival of consciousness from a variety of scientific and humanistic perspectives (known as SURSEM or the Survival Seminar). One outcome from these meetings was the publication in 2007 of The Irreducible Mind: Toward a Psychology for the 21^st Century, edited by Edward and Emily Kelly a.o. A second volume is in preparation. Around half the participants at our symposium had been involved in the SURSEM discussions. The inspiration for the Anthropology and the Paranormal symposium was the journal Paranthropology edited by Jack Hunter. Jack, along with Jeffrey Kripal and David Hufford, were responsible for putting together the participants for this symposium, with Frank Poletti in charge of practical arrangements. Our discussions also benefited from the presence of the Chair of the CTR board, Sam Yau, and the symposium funder, Deb Frost. For some sessions we were also joined by Michael’s PA, Jane Hartford, and a young member of the Esalen workforce, Lauren, who won a ballot to join our symposium as community representative.

Common Themes

I identified three common, overlapping themes that emerged from our discussions, with different emphases, to some extent along disciplinary lines. These can be summarised as epistemological, hermeneutical and morphological concerns.

1)    Epistemological concerns: ‘We know that there is something real going on’.

David Hufford coined the term ‘Experiential Source Hypothesis’ (ESH) for phenomena that appear to manifest across time and culture, as a result of personal experience. In Hufford’s case the key experience was sleep paralysis accompanied by the sound of someone approaching, the sensation of being suffocated and the sense of an evil presence. Many years after his own experience he conducted fieldwork in Newfoundland and found that what he had regarded as an unpleasant, private, and for all he knew unique experience, was culturally recognised as visitations by the ‘old hag’ (work published under the title, The Terror that Comes in the Night). The key features of this experience turned out to be universal, although the interpretation of them varies from one culture to another. Another example of the experiential source hypothesis was given by Gregory Shushan, who has studied near death experiences (NDEs), across unrelated cultures. Shushan found that he could reconstruct the key features of a NDE, as widely recognised in the writings of Bruce Greyson (who produced the so-called Greyson Scale), and Raymond Moody’s nine elements of a NDE, from his sources, without reference to these more recent American studies. The main characteristics of a near death experience appear to be universal and relate to actual individual experience, not easily explained by cultural programming, expectation or neurology.

The work done by the SURSEM group, and set out in The Irreducible Mind, provided a clear platform from which we could assert the reality of the paranormal, or anomalous experiences, and it was not necessary to go over that ground again.

The epistemological concerns expressed within the group took the character of:

(a) Problems of audience and translation. The dominant materialist paradigm in the academy and elsewhere in Western societies tends to lead to self-censorship and produces a deep-seated anxiety around finding terminology that is acceptable to the gatekeepers of this hegemonic discourse, while not wishing to deny the reality of spirits or paranormal phenomena. In published works most scholars, including those present, are therefore parsimonious with their statements, seeing their work as the ‘thin end of the wedge’, as Geoffrey Samuel put it, in a hostile academic environment. Many scholars in this field refuse to state their conclusions in public (such as Ian Stevenson with his work on reincarnation at the Division of Perceptual Studies at the University of Virginia) lest it damage their reputation for scientific balance.

(b) ‘We don’t know what it is, or how to explain it’. There were various levels of engagement, knowledge and experience relating to the issues discussed. Some participants had many years experience as healers, shamans, witches and mediums, (as well as out-of-body travellers, lucid dreamers, practitioners of meditation and followers of various spiritual paths), drawing on many different cultural idioms and traditions. Others were newer to the field and at an earlier exploratory stage, or used a less experience-near form of knowing. There was not surprisingly a gradient from those who were testing initial hypotheses to those who had a deep personal knowledge of, and context from which to explain, the ‘paranormal’ (the term was not one that was generally adopted when referring to a non-Western context). 

(c)  Following from this, some discussions returned to questions of what we mean by terms such as ‘real’ and ‘know’. The role of personal knowledge based on direct experience was a sub-theme that ran throughout our discussions, without being fully explored. In fact the extent of experience-near knowledge within the group did not fully emerge until it was time to part at the end of the symposium. This may well reflect the caution that academics are used to exercising when it comes to revealing personal experiences and orientations, even within a ‘safe space’ such as that created at Esalen.

(d) Each contributor had around 30 minutes to introduce themselves and to give an informal summary of their work, followed by an hour for discussion (papers were distributed ahead of the symposium). In almost all cases participants described an ‘Ah-ha’ moment that persuaded them that what might be described as paranormal phenomena are real. For the social anthropologists this often takes place in a non-Western setting – as when Edie Turner saw a gray plasma blob leave an Ndembu woman during an Ihamba healing ritual, and Paul Stoller’s encounter with sorcery in Niger. Stanley Krippner described numerous personal encounters with the paranormal power of shamans and mediums. For Jack Hunter in his study of a physical mediumship circle it was personally losing control of his body whilst in a light trance that persuaded him that there is at the very least a real somatic element to physical mediumship. This moment of personal knowing could be more prosaic, but equally life-changing for the researcher. Such was the case with Ed Kelly’s encounter with Bill Delmore, a research subject at the Division of Perceptual Studies at the University of Virginia, who consistently scored 35% or, 10% over chance, guessing one of four items on a random probability machine. For Fiona Bowie it was the recognition of the similarity in certain descriptions of the afterlife and how it operates in a wide variety of unrelated settings and cultures that led to a deeper engagement with the topic. The ‘ah-ha’ can therefore be cognitive and intellectual as well as somatic or sensory.

2)    Hermeneutical or interpretive questions

There was general agreement that studies in this field of research need to incorporate the perspective or standpoint of both researcher/s and subjects, and  be as inclusive as possible. Each issue needs to be examined from as many dimensions as one can find.  Another way of putting this is the necessity of using both left and right brain, to be open to phenomena that challenge our existing presuppositions. Ann Taves for example, in her work on Mormonism’s founding golden plates, revealed to Joseph Smith, was concerned to find a way of talking about the plates that overcame a dualistic true/false or believer/detractor dichotomy. Rafael Locke focused on what makes a good researcher, and the need for those involved in laboratory psi experiments to take account of cultural factors that they may not be aware of. Eddie Bullard tried to hold a middle ground in the contentious and divided field of ufology. Charlie Emmons and Susan Greenwood grappled with first-person research, in which subjective knowing and ‘going native’ are central to the enterprise but potentially compromising at the same time. BUT, it was clear that we all have our ‘boggle thresholds’ (such as one UFO contactee’s encounter with a giant ant in Eddie Bullard’s case), and we need to be aware of our personal boundaries and how we react to them. It is only then that we can come up with new interpretations and understandings of challenging phenomena. The process is essentially dynamic and dialogical.

3)    Morphological discussions, i.e. ‘What is it that we know?’

This is where careful, descriptive ethnographic work comes to the fore, with analysis and interpretation following rather than preceding the ethnographic process. Although this direction of movement (from practice to theory) is central to most social and cultural anthropology, it is often problematic when faced with necessity of coming up with hypotheses and premature results in grant applications, based on a model of science or quantitative social science, in which hypothesis testing and theory form the basis of subsequent research, rather than arising from the empirical investigation. Within this arena, some of the research presented focused on sociological questions such as ‘who’, ‘why’, ‘what’, ‘when’, i.e. the social context and its actors. Other research and subsequent discussions were more concerned with the phenomenological content of the experience (while not ignoring contextual questions). These tended to be somatic and often deeply personal experiences that opened the researcher to new understandings of their ethnographic material, and their own path in life. In different ways these interests were reflected in Tanya Luhrmann’s work on prayer among Evangelical Christians, Geoffrey Samuel and Loriliai Biernacki’s deep engagement with Buddhist and Hindu religious practices, and Susan Greenwood’s cultivation of magical consciousness.  For Antonia Mills, working with native people’s in British Columbia, the experience of one of her children being recognised as a reincarnation of a member of the group she was studying, and her subsequent own ‘memories’ of a previous life as a member of one of these groups, transformed her understanding of reincarnation among these peoples, as well as informing her understanding of her own life trajectory. The importance of story telling, another sub-theme, identified as a central form in which knowledge about the ‘paranormal’ is disseminated, was introduced by Jeff Kripal. It was demonstrated by some wonderful formal and informal story telling throughout the symposium by a number of colleagues (most notably in an evening of paranormal tales around the fireside – a kind of academics’ karaoke!).

These fascinating, sometime challenging, and often humorous, discussions tended to flow around and across each other, weaving a colourful tapestry. They provided a platform from which to continue our various explorations but did not of themselves provide a unified vision of a way forward. It is in the nature of Esalen’s symposia that relationships and ideas nurtured here are likely to be maintained and developed. Several of the participants, for example, will be attending the 6th Exploring the Extraordinary conference in Gettysburg, PA, from 21^st-23^rd March 2014, hosted by Charlie Emmons (all are welcome!).

Snake healing ceremony

After the official discussions had ended, Rafael Locke invited those who were still at Esalen (and who could be out of bed before 7am) to take part in an Australian Aboriginal snake healing ritual on the lawn outside Murphy house. (Those up early enough got to see a full moon set over the Pacific Ocean, a wonderful counterbalance to the spectacular sunsets we had enjoyed each day). Rafael is a shamanic healer as well as a cultural anthropologist, and he started by telling us one of the founding dreamtime myths of the formation of the land and first creatures in Australia. It included a spider with her egg-sack of spiderlings, who crossed the land in the stomach of a python, creating the landscape and its physical features as they travelled towards the centre. At a certain point the spiderlings matured and burst out of the egg-sack. Finding themselves in the darkness of the snake’s stomach they ate their way through the stomach lining until they reached the light of the outside world. They were then scattered by the wind to form the creatures of the air, earth and water. The snake was wounded by their activity but not fatally, and after resting recovered. She sloughed her skin, which was given life to become her companion, and together the snakes became powerful healers who will come when summoned. I saw our symposium participants a little like the spiderlings, struggling to reach maturity and then to fight their way through the walls of ignorance, fear and doubt towards the light that is the birthright of every human being. Each one, like the different creatures who were formed from the spiderlings, has a different and unique role. The institutions through which we fight our way may be wounded, but can also be renewed and find a healing power that can be used for the renewal of society. This might seem rather a utopian vision but it is consistent with Esalen’s mission to renew and transform society through dialogue, and through connection with the earth and one another.

Paul Stoller summed up the mood of the symposium with his post-Esalen farewell: ‘The Songhay people have a lovely custom at farewells. They never say ‘goodbye’. Instead they say kala ni kaya which means, “until your return”. Looking forward to our returns’.