Deborah Kapchan

Possessed by Possession: The Play of Paradox

Abstract

What does it mean to be possessed, to become another? What changes in the brain, in the body and emotions? Does the ability to empathize increase with the experience of spirit possession, as it does in meditation for example? And what of the capacity to listen, and to hear? What kind of possession are ethnographers performing in our studies of possession? Why and for whom?

In the vast literature on spirit possession (and the trance that accompanies it) authors rarely inhabit the emic point of view. Rather, anthropologists and ethnomusicologists either explain the phenomenon in rational terms — as catharsis, as a reaction to traume, as symbolic play, as a system of social cohesion or as a means of gender-bending and temporary power inversion – or they describe it aesthetically as musically-induced and sensorial performance. The musical angle is perhaps closest to current understandings of entrainment and subsequent brain plasticity, though the question remains: why are Western scholars possessed with possession? Is it because it shatters our narratives of coherent subjectivity? Why the need to translate spiritual realities, particularly those of Africa and its diaspora, in material and linguistic terms? What does this translation allow “us,” we who study possession trance, to know and to do? More importantly, what does trance allow us to be?

This paper begins by examining the processes of inter-semiotic translation at work in scholarship on trance, before moving on to suggest that the most humble and honest approach to these rituals is one that acknowledges both the inherent biases of all authorship and the productive role of paradox at the root of human existence.

Bio

Deborah Kapchan is a writer, translator and ethnographer specializing in North African art and poetry. Professor of Performance Studies at New York University and a Guggenheim fellow, she is the author of five books as well as numerous essays on sound, narrative and poetics. Her works include Gender on the Market: Moroccan Women and the Revoicing of Tradition (1996), as well as Traveling Spirit Masters: Moroccan Music and Trance in the Global Marketplace (2007)  Her latest work, Poetic Justice: An Anthology of Moroccan Contemporary Poetry (2020), was shortlisted for ALTA’s National Translation Prize for Poetry.