Multi-Layered Extrasensory Perceptions

Through "Remembering" and "Posture"

抄録

This paper aims to analyze the narratives of people who ordinarily sense spiritual beings while sharing our lifeworld and elucidate what their experiences are. Furthermore, we discuss how the ability to perceive or sense spiritual beings might be understood from the standpoint of an interviewer or someone who hears stories about spiritual experiences.

If you encounter with some strange incident and tell someone that it is an act of spirits, it means you refer the cultural idiom of "spirits." Yet, it does not necessarily mean that the perception has been culturally constructed. When we communicate with "spiritually sensitive" people, we get the sense that they perceive something antecedent to cultural construction – this premise, and what can be derived from it constitute the stake of this paper. I use the word "empathy" to correspond to this communication.

In academic literature, spirit possession has often been considered to be socially constructed, if not ascribed to psychiatric illnesses. The cause of spirit possession has lost its focal point in more recent works. Anthropologist Michael Lambek leaves the question of "why possession occurs in particular societies and to particular individuals or classes of individuals within those societies" (Lambek 1980: 318), and describes spirits as agents who equal humans, viewing spirit possession as a system of communication (Lambek 1980). I would like to suggest considering spiritual beings as devices to think with, through whom we can question the relation between our perception and existence, rather than trying to understand the nature of possession in a society where spirits naturally exist. For that, it is needed to think of the differences between informants who perceive spiritual beings and researchers who do not – for now – in plain and blunt terms.

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