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Allumer le Dieu: L'expérience spirituelle chez les évangélistes américains
Abstract
L’article montre que les expériences spirituelles, qu’elles soient de type sensoriel ou paranormal, ne sont pas simplement déclenchées ou apprises, mais qu’elles participent d’un « embrasement » : les événements font l’objet d’une habituation qui dépend à la fois de la réactivité de l’individu et de l’importance que leur accorde la société. Tout le monde ne fait pas d’expériences paranormales. Les événements en question ne sont pas des phénomènes discrets : ils ont tendance à survenir en lien les uns avec les autres. Certains d’entre eux font l’objet d’une habituation tant au niveau du groupe que de l’individu, tout en étant contraints. L’apprentissage social ne suffit pas à expliquer la configuration de ces expériences.
Depuis 2012, un différend épisté- mologique oppose Aparecida Vilaça et Tanya Luhrmann au sujet du statut à accorder à l’invisible. Dans cet article, nous défendons l’idée selon laquelle ce genre de débat est mieux rendu si on l’aborde à partir de la catégorie d’« imperception » : on désigne par là le rapport que nous entretenons à ce qu’autrui perçoit, mais que nous ne percevons pas nous-mêmes, tout en lui attribuant un sens de présence important.
In this paper we suggest that it is important for the anthropology of Christianity and the anthropology of religion more generally to develop a comparative phenomenology of spiritual experience. Our method is to distinguish between a named phenomenon without fixed mental or bodily events (phenomena that have specific local terms but are recognized by individuals by a broad and almost indiscriminate range of physical events); bodily affordances (events of the body that happen in social settings but are only identified as religious in those social settings when they afford, or make available, an interpretation that makes sense in that setting); and striking anomalous events. We demonstrate that local cultural practices shift the pattern of spiritual experiences, even those such as sleep paralysis and out-of-body experiences that might be imagined in some ways as culture free, but that the more the spiritual experience is constrained by a specific physiology, the more the frequency of the event will be constrained by an individual’s vulnerability to those experiences. We will call this the “cultural kindling” of spiritual experience. © 2014 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved.
The articles in this special issue of the journal "Transcultural Psychiatry," examine cultural variations in sleep paralysis, a phenomenon that is both little known and remarkably common. Sleep paralysis must be distinguished from nightmares, nocturnal panic, and night terrors. In some cases, a person may awake in terror but have no memory of a dream; this may represent nocturnal panic, a phenomenon that has been found in 18-45% of patients with panic disorder. In night terrors, the person seems to awaken in fear and agitation, flailing about and talking loudly, but then falls back asleep and is amnesic for the event in the morning. Each of these types of event has been confused with sleep paralysis. In sleep paralysis, the person, during sleep onset or awakening, finds themselves completely awake but unable to move their limbs or speak. Often, the person sees a form, which may be shadow-like or indistinct, move toward him or her; frequently, the experience is also associated with an oppressive feeling of chest tightness, weight on the chest or body, or a sensation of shortness of breath. The paralysis may last from seconds to minutes. Sleep paralysis is understood as a disturbance of the normal regulation of sleep in which the muscular paralysis characteristic of REM sleep occurs during a state of waking arousal. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Hallucinations are a vivid illustration of the way culture affects our most fundamental mental experience and the way that mind is shaped both by cultural invitation and by biological constraint. The anthropological evidence suggests that there are three patterns of hallucinations: experiences in which hallucinations are rare, brief, and not distressing; hallucinations that are frequent, extended, and distressing; and hallucinations that are frequent but not distressing. The ethnographic evidence also suggests that hallucinations are shaped by learning in at least two ways. People acquire specific representations about mind from their local social world, and people (particularly in spiritual pursuits) are encouraged to train their minds (or focus their attention) in specific ways. These two kinds of learning can affect even perception, this most basic domain of mental experience. This learning-centered approach may eventually have something to teach us about the pathways and trajectories of psychotic illness.
This research investigated laypeople's interpretation of their dreams. Participants from both Eastern and Western cultures believed that dreams contain hidden truths (Study 1) and considered dreams to provide more meaningful information about the world than similar waking thoughts (Studies 2 and 3). The meaningfulness attributed to specific dreams, however, was moderated by the extent to which the content of those dreams accorded with participants' preexisting beliefs--from the theories they endorsed to attitudes toward acquaintances, relationships with friends, and faith in God (Studies 3-6). Finally, dream content influenced judgment: Participants reported greater affection for a friend after considering a dream in which a friend protected rather than betrayed them (Study 5) and were equally reluctant to fly after dreaming or learning of a plane crash (Studies 2 and 3). Together, these results suggest that people engage in motivated interpretation of their dreams and that these interpretations impact their everyday lives.
Hallucinations are often manifestations of severe psychiatric conditions seen clinically. However, little is known about the distribution of incident hallucinations in the community, nor whether there has been a change over the past century. Data from the NIMH Epidemiologic Catchment Area Program is used here to provide descriptive information on the community distribution, and data from the Sidgewick study from a century earlier provides comparative information. In the ECA data, the incidence of visual hallucinations was slightly higher in males (about 20 per 1000 per year) than females (about 13 per 1000 per year) across the age span from 18 to 80 years old, with a subsequent increase in the rate for females (up to about 40 per 1000 per year) after age 80. For auditory hallucinations there was an age 25-30 peak in males with a trough for females, and a later age 40-50 peak for females. Overall, there were substantial gender differences, and the effect of aging to increase the incidence of hallucinations was the most consistent and prominent. The Sidgewick study showed a much higher proportion of visual hallucinations than the ECA program. This might be due to factors affecting brain function as well as social and psychological changes over time, although methodological weaknesses in both studies might also be responsible.
The Gifford Lectures were established in 1885 at the universities of St Andrews, Glasgow, Aberdeen and Edinburgh to promote the discussion of 'Natural Theology in the widest sense of the term - in other words, the knowledge of God', and some of the world's most influential thinkers have delivered them. The 1901–2 lectures given in Edinburgh by American philosopher William James (1842–1910) are considered by many to be the greatest in the series. The lectures were published in book form in 1902 and have been reprinted many times. James, who was educated in the United States and Europe, and spent much of his career teaching philosophy at Harvard, was very influential in the development of modern psychology, and in these twenty lectures he explores the personal experience of religion. Some of the topics include religion and neurology, 'the sick soul', saintliness, and mysticism.
Since the time of atomists like Democritus, forerunner of Plato and Aristotle, two modes of scientific explanation have been used to fill the conceptual space between mind and brain, a dualism more grudgingly resistant to resolution than that of energy and matter. One method assumes a world of hidden realities, impenetrable, to be understood by conjecture and test, observations evaluated for their consistency with hypothetical constructs. The other requires an intuitive grasp of the essence, insightful awareness of the thing itself. The first approach defines a unification of mind and brain out of the possible; the second assumes it. Feelings about these orientations still run strong. In a recent book, the philosopher of science Sir Karl Popper expressed irritation with Plato for intermixing these two thought styles without acknowledging the intermixture, concluding that only the conjectural-test approach is valid; the other kind of knowing Popper dismissed as a “will-o-the-wisp” (Popper & Eccles, 1977).
Current scholarship in the social sciences and humanities, including the study of religion, shows a marked appraisal of bodily sensations, emotions, and experiences as eminently social and politico-aesthetic phenomena (rather than reducing them to a matter of mere individual psychology). How to grasp the genesis of shared perceptions and feelings, and even some kind of 'wow' effect, in relation to a posited 'beyond' has become a central issue for scholars of religion today. Placed against the horizon of the material turn in the study of religion, R.R. Marett's approach to religion as an 'organic complex of thought, emotion, and behaviour' and his concept of awe gain renewed topicality. Engaging with Marett's ideas in the context of broader debates about religious experience, in this article (which is based on my 2014 Marett lecture) I call attention to the surplus generated in the interplay of religious things and bodily sensations and explore its role in politics and aesthetics of religious world-making. My central point is that Marett's work offers valuable resources for an approach to religion that neither takes for granted the existence of a god or transcendental force (as in ontological approaches), nor invests in unmasking it as an illusion (as in critiques of religion as irrational), but instead undertakes a close study of the standardized methods that yield the fabrication of some kind of excess that points to a 'beyond' and yet is grounded in the here and now.
This paper examines apparitions that morph into embodied or channeled entities through a comparison of JZ [Judy Zebra] Knight (b. 1946), who claims to channel a 35,000-year-old spirit-warrior named Ramtha, and turn-of-the-last-century case studies of spirit possession and multiple personality. Considering visions as arising, like dreams, from internally rather than externally generated percepts and both as grounded in fluctuating states of consciousness, allows us to analyze the range of perceptions that arise without external stimulation of the senses, the extent to which they morph into other unusual states, and, in cases where this happens, the factors that seem to encourage this. In Knight's case, her ability to see and then embody Ramtha most likely rests on a combination of personal abilities and contextual factors linked by an openness to implementing suggestions from self and others.
ABSTRACT In this article, we use a combination of ethnographic data and empirical methods to identify a process called “absorption,” which may be involved in contemporary Christian evangelical prayer practice (and in the practices of other religions). The ethnographer worked with an interdisciplinary team to identify people with a proclivity for “absorption.” Those who seemed to have this proclivity were more likely to report sharper mental images, greater focus, and more unusual spiritual experience. The more they prayed, the more likely they were to have these experiences and to embrace fully the local representation of God. Our results emphasize learning, a social process to which individuals respond in variable ways, and they suggest that interpretation, proclivity, and practice are all important in understanding religious experience. This approach builds on but differs from the approach to religion within the culture-and-cognition school.
Kindling is an animal model of epilepsy produced by focal electrical stimulation of the brain. This chapter: describes the kindling phenomenon; considers the validity of kindling as an animal model and proposes a hypothesis as to how kindling might contribute to human epileptogenesis; presents a critical review of current insights into the underlying mechanisms; and emphasizes that, if progress is to be made in understanding the mechanisms, the network of brain structures underlying kindling must be elucidated. Recent investigations directly related to the network issue are considered, namely studies demonstrating that a brainstem structure, the substantia nigra (SN), can regulate the kindled seizure threshold. Thus, either microinjection of a GABA receptor agonist or a GABA transaminase inhibitor into SN, but not into nearby sites, elevates kindled-seizure threshold. Likewise, destruction of SN, but not of adjacent structures, is associated with an increase of kindled-seizure threshold. These treatments suppress not only clonic motor seizures, but also complex partial seizures and afterdischarge at the site of stimulation. These findings demonstrate that the SN can regulate the intrinsic neuronal excitability of forebrain structures. A hypothesis is advanced that generation of a complex partial seizure requires activation of neurons in the SN which in turn feed back through polysynaptic connections to influence neurons at the site of seizure origin. This nigral influence on neurons at the site of seizure origin is either a direct excitation or a disinhibition. Thus, the seizure represents reverberatory activity within a network of brain structures which includes the SN. Other investigators have proposed that the centrencephalic system subserved seizure propagation; the relationship of the hypothesis proposed here to these earlier ideas is discussed.
Although previous evidence has suggested that the etiologic role of stressful life events in major depression is reduced in recurrent versus first-onset cases, this question deserves reexamination because of potential methodological limitations of the previous studies.
Members of female-female twin pairs from a population-based registry (N=2,395), who were interviewed four times over a period of 9 years, formed a study group that contained 97,515 person-months and 1,380 onsets of major depression. Discrete-time survival, proportional hazards model, and piece-wise regression analyses were used to examine the interaction between life event exposure and number of previous depressive episodes in the prediction of episodes of major depression.
For those with zero to nine previous depressive episodes, the depressogenic effect of stressful life events declined substantially with increasing episode number. However, the association between stressful life events and major depression was not substantially influenced by additional episodes. This pattern of results was robust to the addition of indices of event severity, measures of genetic risk, and restriction to independent stressful life events. The same pattern was also seen upon examining within-person changes in number of episodes.
The association between previous number of depressive episodes and the pathogenic impact of stressful life events on major depression is likely causal and biphasic. Through approximately nine episodes, the association between stressful life event exposure and risk of major depression progressively declines but is largely unchanged with further episodes. These results are consistent with the kindling hypothesis but suggest a threshold at which the mind/brain is no longer additionally sensitized to the depressive state.
« Mystical experience
- Wulff David
« Out of body experiences
- Carlos S Alvarado
« Emotion, knowing, and culture
- Levy Robert
« The Threshold of Religion
- Marett Robert R