ABSTRACT
While Michael Harner and Carlos Castaneda helped to inspire a new movement in anthropology aimed at integrating the inner world of mind/spirit in its account of the human world, other developments within and without the discipline also fed into the ‘consciousness’ revolution. Anthropologist Philip M. Peek has taken up the neurobiologists’ insights into the innate, genetic basis of our millennial human capacities to expand and transcend the world of ordinary consciousness, to investigate the process of ritual divination in Africa. Contrary to the alienated apprehensions of conventional science, we are proposing a fundamental harmony between the human species and the universe. The classical period of field research in an alien culture becomes a moment when the anthropologist, already and inevitably socialized into the reductionist materialism of mainstream Western science, learns to experience subjectively, in his or her own person, the ‘altered state’ realities of trance and spirit communication.
