Altered States of Consciousness in North American Indian Ceremonials
Ethos December 1, 1982 Wolfgang G. Jilek 58 citations
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Ethos
ISSN 0091-2131
3 papers in the library · 79 citations · publishing 1982-2025
Papers
Making Selves and Meeting Others in Neo‐Shamanic Healing
Ethos September 1, 2015 Nofit Itzhak 20 citations
Healing rituals may work not only by creating symbolic meaning and coherence, as Lévi-Strauss argued, but also by first confronting participants with something radically unfamiliar or other. An analysis of soul retrieval, a neo-shamanic ritual among contemporary Euro-Americans in the United States, shows that the healing process begins with and depends on a successful encounter with alterity. This encounter disrupts a person's implicitly coherent sense of self, and this disruption itself can be transformative. A fuller understanding of therapeutic processes must therefore include the transformative effects of discontinuities, not just the creation of meaning.
Therapeutic aQompaniments: Walking together in hypnotherapy—and ethnography
Ethos March 17, 2025 Nicholas J. Long 1 citation
Hypnotherapeutic care is best evaluated by whether therapist and client can successfully 'walk together' toward their goals, rather than by blanket preferences for self-hypnosis over hetero-hypnosis. Based on 16 months of ethnographic fieldwork with Indonesian hypnotherapists, the article introduces the concept of 'aQompaniment'—adapted from liberation theology and activist ideas of accompaniment—as a rubric for situated judgments about what constitutes good care. This approach also offers new perspectives on the relational work ethnographers themselves undertake during research.