I shall extend understanding of the variety of intentional explanation and prediction of behaviour, and of the kind of work spirit possession can do in a community. The aim is partly to reveal what can be learnt from the remarkably resilient and widespread institution of spirit possession, especially with regards to behaviours that are taken by societies around the world to imply 'madness' or 'mental disorder.
Eventually I bring things back to earth by examining the implications of this exercise for a range of concerns. For now, however, I urge the reader to suspend disbelief and to accept that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy.
I begin with a short story. Girgis is a fifty-year-old Coptic-Christian male who lives with his wife and two children at the far end of the oasis where you can see the edge of the desert.
He became involved with a farmer who had unknowingly trespassed upon and damaged his habitat. Angered by this incident and by the damage sustained to his home, Girgis began harassing the farmer.
He would wake him up at night, put him in a bad mood all day, prevent him from praying at the mosque, and generally make everything difficult for him.
The farmer sought one of the local healers to intervene and arbitrate between them. The healer agreed to do so, and upon meeting with Girgis, he reminded him that both Christians and Muslims are people of the Book and should not harass each other like this.
He assured Girgis that the farmer had no intention of trespassing upon his habitat, and that it is time to end this misunderstanding.
The reader may be surprised to learn that Girgis is not a human person; he is a spirit of a variety known in Egypt and in Muslim societies across the world as a jinni plural jinn. Despite not being human persons, spirits are represented as persons. They are deemed to display features required for personhood, and it is on the basis of these features that people in the community consider it possible to reason with them. Providing a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for personhood is fraught with difficulty and disagreement, and it would seem that there are several, as opposed to one, concept of the person see Braude , ch.
Features that are commonly put forward include the following: a person is a member of a "significant and ordered collectivity" Carrithers pertaining to which the entity in question has or will have rights and towards which it has or will have obligations.
It is considered a requirement for this sense of personhood that the entity must be capable now or at a future time of practical reasoning: of generating goal-directed action through deliberative reflection.
Moreover, some accounts require that a person must not only be capable of acting on the basis of reasons, but must have a sense of oneself as an agent for whom things matter in accordance with certain standards.
Taylor calls these standards the "particularly human significances" such as shame and guilt Requirements for this sense of personhood are not met by all individuals, for example those with severe brain damage or who are in a coma. Braude distinguishes this sense of personhood from what he refers to as the forensic concept of the person This refers to entities that do not have the capacity for practical reasoning—and who thus might be free of obligations—but who nevertheless are, or should be, considered bearers of rights.
Current debates on the moral status of individuals with severe cognitive impairment and certain non-human animals can be understood as pertaining to the forensic concept of the person see Kittay and Carlson These debates have become an occasion to revise what we take to be constitutive of forensic personhood.
A recent account, for example, argues that the capacity to care rather than the capacity for practical reasoning should be the basis for ascribing to others moral status as persons Jaworska Recognition of forensic personhood evinces cultural and historical variation.
Historically, personhood was denied certain individuals on the basis of their status as slaves Mauss In both cases, the individual may be capable of practical reasoning but is only recognised as a person, and hence worthy of respect, on completion of the relevant initiation rites or after being granted his or her freedom.
The assumption in the previous discussion has been of a one to one correspondence between a person and a living organism see Braude , However, certain conceptions of the person do not require this. Of note is the fact that in many cultures and religious traditions entities considered persons can inhabit many bodies and one body can be inhabited by several persons.
Moreover, personhood and embodiment come apart. Spirits, as indicated earlier, are regarded as disembodied persons who are able to acquire executive control of a human individual. But acquiring a body does not add to their status as persons.
This status is evident if we consider the manner they are represented and which fulfills several of the criteria listed above. The jinn are members of a significant and ordered collectivity: they are socially organised, work, marry, and procreate. They are gendered, have human-like traits and concerns. They are capable of goal-directed action and possess moral agency which renders them subject to trial and punishment.
It is by virtue of these features that it is possible for the healer to reason with them and to appeal to their sense of right and wrong as the vignette above demonstrates. The jinn also enjoy recognition as persons in the forensic sense. Thus, healers are wary of harming the spirits in so far as it is not necessary to do so, and this stems not only from fears of retaliation, for instance, but from an understanding that spirits are persons and are, at least, worthy of respect on that basis.
By contrast to the jinn , in Islam, angels are not persons; they are emanations of god's will and hence are incapable of agentic behaviour. Given their status as persons, how do people attain knowledge of these spirits? How is the general and impersonal category 'spirit' individualised into a specific spirit-person with an identity, name, gender, religion, history, traits, dispositions, and intentions?
Observations of spirit possession in Egypt demonstrate that knowledge about spirits is gained through various modalities each with its own claim to certainty and level of detail: religious texts, traditions and social interaction, direct communication, embodied experience, and frank emergence.
Religious texts such as the Qur'an and the compendiums of hadiths sayings attributed to the Prophet of Islam do speak of a category of being known as the jinn. For believers, such texts while they are high on certainty are nevertheless low on detail as they can only offer knowledge of a general nature.
By contrast, the oral history of the community and the exchange of stories pertaining to recent or present experiences of possession, offer more detail about the nature of spirits and how they behave. The remaining three modalities all involve an experience of the spirit rather than hearing a story about it from other sources. As the name implies, direct communication pertains to persons having auditory and visual experiences of certain spirits, thereby coming to learn about them.
Embodied experience and frank emergence may occur spontaneously or at a healing session. Consider this typical description of a diagnostic and healing session as would be conducted by a Qur'anic healer in the community I studied.
With his right hand placed over the subject's forehead, the healer reads loudly the ruqya incantation of specific Qur'anic verses and registers the subject's response: four possibilities are recognised. The first possible outcome is that the jinni emerges and animates the subject's body, whose voice and identity are now replaced.
The healer proceeds, through conversing with the jinni , to identify his or her name, religion, whether or not there is sorcery, the reasons behind possessing the subject, intentions at the present moment, and other questions relevant to getting to know the spirit. The healer then proceeds to negotiate with the spirit and secure its exit from the human host.
The second and most common outcome is that the person responds with symptoms and signs such as mild tremors or numbness in the limbs, headache, screaming, stiffness, blurring of vision, arousal, violence, attempts to leave the room, crying, or perhaps would be seen scanning the room in disdain and with an incongruent smile. Any of these are sufficient indications that a jinni is involved.
Applying this to the vignette mentioned previously we find the following: initially the farmer experienced insomnia and dysphoria. He suspected spirit interference pathogenic possession and went to the healer who administered the incantation. A jinni emerged executive possession , and the healer began conversing with it. This is how the healer was able to learn the jinni's name, religion, and understand the circumstances that occasioned the possession incident. Note that knowledge regarding the spirit's intentions can already be suspected from more general information pertaining to it.
For example, a pagan jinni —in this community—is regarded as potentially dangerous as it would have no regard for God and religious morality; it would have no qualms to harm the host or to behave in capricious ways. On the other hand for a Muslim host, a Muslim jinni is generally considered less likely to harm the host or behave insolently, and is easier to negotiate with by appealing to his or her sense of right and wrong.
The exposition, so far, sought to portray spirits as social persons who may interact with humans under various circumstances. Their identity as beings with such and such traits and capable of agentic behaviour is demonstrated and further refined when a spirit displaces the host's agency and makes its presence explicit or otherwise directly communicates with the host. This is how spirits are perceived in some societies where the institution of spirit possession exists. In order to further understand spirit possession and appreciate some of its consequences in relation to behavioural disturbances, I will introduce for this purpose Daniel Dennett's conception of the intentional stance, and the development and application of his theory by Derek Bolton in the case of mental disorder.
According to Daniel Dennett , , we can assume three stances to explain or predict the behaviour of an organism or machine—a system. From the physical stance we appeal to our knowledge of the physical constitution of the system and the laws that govern its conduct.
From the design stance we assume that the system has a particular design and that it will function as designed; we do not require, for this purpose, knowledge of the physical implementation of the functions in question. From the intentional stance we attribute to the system beliefs and desires, and by assuming that it is rational—i. The intentional stance underpins the power of folk psychology at providing predictions of other people's behaviour as well as of some higher animals and complex machines such as chess-playing computers.
It is the stance most commonly adopted in everyday interaction with others. Dennett notes that there will be cases beyond the power of the intentional stance to describe and, by way of analogy, cites the difficulty in discerning the behaviour of an artefact from its design if the artefact is physically damaged In the case of human beings he implies that fatigue and malfunction may similarly hamper prediction from the intentional stance ibid.
When there is such breakdown in function, Dennett , 5 suggests, we drop to the physical stance to explain behaviour. This idea has been substantially remarked upon and developed by Derek Bolton Bolton ; Bolton and Hill in the context of the apparent absence of intentionality that is generally considered a hallmark of mental disorder.
Starting with the point that failure to recognise intentionality in the mental states and actions of others underpins attributions of 'madness,' he points out that attributions of intentionality are observer-relative Bolton , Upon encountering activity, different observers "may see different patterns of intentionality at work, including the vacuous case of seeing no such patterns" Bolton and Hill , The assumption that apparent lack of intentionality signals physical dysfunction may thus indicate hastiness in dropping to a lower level explanation , Bolton then proceeds to demonstrate that there are a number of options from within the design as well as the intentional stances to explain breakdown in function.
That aside, the key point here is that the intentional stance is abandoned when the mental states or activity in question fail certain normative distinctions as judged by the observer. Bolton and Banner express some of these distinctions as applied to action and various mental faculties:. Perception of reality can be veridical or mistaken, or in an extreme, hallucinatory. Beliefs may be true or false, reasonable or unreasonable, based on good evidence or otherwise.
Emotions may be understandable reactions to events, for example, anger is an understandable response to being hurt, or not understandable, being angry for no reason; and so on. The will may fail to control action. Action may be reasonable or otherwise, depending on whether it follows from beliefs and desires, or on whether those beliefs and desires are themselves reasonable. Behaviour may be random, without any relation to the achievement of goals, without method, and in this sense may fail to be real action The observer relativity and hence the wide range of possible evaluations and interpretations at each of these faculties is evident.
Different observers may see in a child's tantrum an attempt to coerce the parents to provide yet another toy or in that same behaviour merely that the child is 'tired. Observer relativity also has a cultural dimension. An example, further discussed below, is the tendency in some societies to see certain emotions— say unhappiness in a marriage—as having nothing to do with the personalities involved or other relational issues, but rather as states imposed by an interfering spirit.
Many readers are likely to understand interpersonal emotions as having to do with the person and the relationship. The idea I want to pursue in what follows is that spirit possession—or as I shall call it henceforth the spirit stance —occupies a peculiar position: it is an intentional strategy in the sense that it aims at predicting and explaining behaviour by ascribing to an agent the spirit beliefs and desires, but it is only deployed once the mental states and activity of the subject the person are deemed to have failed normative distinctions of the sort just outlined.
It thus subverts the person's agency, while simultaneously maintaining a peculiar form of intentionality where otherwise one might expect a drop to the physical stance. Whether it achieves this and the manner by which it does will be subsequently discussed.
First I will describe some of the situations in which the spirit stance is adopted and the normative distinctions that occasion this. These examples will serve to illuminate the way in which the spirit stance cuts across the ascriptions of what may be described as a disenchanted folk psychology.
For both the healer and the possessed person, a question arises as to why the spirit had targeted that person in particular.
In the Dakhla oasis of Egypt, where I had conducted research, three answers are available. The first is bad luck, such as in the case of the farmer cited above who inadvertently stepped upon a jinni's habitat.
The third, and most common, is sorcery se'hr : here a person who would like to see another disadvantaged visits a sorcerer who is able to direct a jinni at the victim. The jinni is instructed to wreak havoc usually in a specified domain—physical health, behavioural, psychological—with the final purpose of imposing various sorts of social failures e.
Whatever the means by which person and spirit are brought in proximity, the understanding is that a person is made more vulnerable to possession if he or she fails to secure protection through prayer and other forms of worship. The spirit stance is adopted to explain a wide range of behaviours and is certainly not limited to 'illness.
In each of these cases, un-understandability, unreasonableness, inappropriateness, etc. In order to draw out the implications of the spirit stance it is helpful to have a view on what to contrast it with. I will take the contrast to lie in a disenchanted folk psychology, the kind, for example, where interpersonal conflict is usually explained by consideration of the personalities involved and, say, their temperaments.
It is also one in which 'madness' tends to be seen as a consequence of dysfunctional physical or psychological mechanisms. Given this, and in light of the preceding examples, it can be seen that the spirit stance cuts across ascriptions of such a folk-psychology: it extends into areas that would normally—though by no means exclusively—be described from the intentional stance marital discord, other social and interpersonal problems , as well as into areas that would normally be described from the physical stance 'madness,' mental disorder.
We can say that in both areas the spirit stance subverts the agency of the person but in the latter mental disorder it preserves another form of intentionality, where otherwise there may have been a drop to a physical stance explanation of the person's behaviour and mental states. The spirit stance is a variant of the intentional stance in that it explains the inappropriate or un-understandable behaviour of a human-agent by positing a non-corporeal entity now seen as the agent of this behaviour.
To demonstrate how it works, consider behaviours that may attract a social judgement of 'madness'; a few have been listed in table 1. These will vary from one socio-cultural context to another. Now recall that spirits are represented as agents with beliefs, desires, and dispositions, capable of setting goals and acting on them.
What does it mean to say that the person is behaving in this way because he or she is possessed by a spirit? The first sense in which this can be understood is executive possession; that is, the behaviour witnessed is literally the spirit's. As indicated at the beginning of this paper, displacement of the host's agency need not be accompanied by a trance state—an altered state of consciousness. Thus the behaviour is understood as intentional by virtue of the spirit's agency.
Most generally, it would be said that it is in the nature of a spirit to seek deserted places and isolation, to be pre-occupied with fire, to be restless. The second sense in which behaviour is ascribed to a spirit is pathogenic possession.
Here, the spirit is 'making' the person behave in those bizarre ways. While behaviour in this case is not, strictly speaking, the spirit's, it remains describable in an intentional idiom in those cases where sorcery is involved. Sorcery is a common reason why spirits become involved with human hosts. As practiced in Dakhla, sorcery typically involves three agents: the seeker the person who wants the harm arranged ; the sorcerer; and the spirit that will do the work.
The purpose is to make the person behave in a 'mad' manner and thus to harm that person socially. The victim's behaviour is therefore goal-directed but the beliefs and desires that direct the behaviour, and the goals that are being served, have been established elsewhere in the nexus of relations that constitute sorcery.
In terms of prediction of behaviour, this requires that the applied theory e. The researchers behind that study have gone on to speculate that using the Ouija board as a technique to unlock subconscious knowledge could lead to insights about the early onset of Alzheimer's and other neurodegenerative diseases.
In other words, the Ouija board is potentially a very powerful communication tool — just not in the way most people think. This real physical effect causes some people to believe that seemingly miraculous or paranormal phenomena are behind certain behaviors and occurrences.
Often, the ideomotor effect is used to defraud people who visit exorcists, psychics, mediums, and other self-proclaimed spirit-channeling types — sometimes leading to severe financial, physical , and psychological harm. Dowsing is another example of the ideomotor effect being exploited for financial gain. Ironically, the same factor lies at the heart of both the cause and the effects of the ideomotor phenomenon: We want to believe.
In reality, the true wonder of the Ouija board is what lies within our own subconscious. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower through understanding. Financial contributions from our readers are a critical part of supporting our resource-intensive work and help us keep our journalism free for all.
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Hint: It's not ghosts. Reddit Pocket Flipboard Email. It is important to note that demonic possession is not the automatic explaination for unexplained behavior. Typically those viewed as "possessed" were merely afflicted by some mental condition unknown or untreated. In addition, exorcism is not the desired treatment. If the victim is truly possessed by demons, determined by authorities of the Church, then, and only then, may an exorcism occur.
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