Some religious experts in Ghana's traditional religion—okomfo priests who speak with their gods—may experience a schizophrenia-like psychotic process that is managed by their religious practice, allowing them to function effectively without being seen as ill. Phenomenological interviews and a novel auditory probe revealed that priests shared common understandings of how gods speak, but their personal experiences varied widely: some heard auditory, negative voices; others described trance-like states linked to trauma or violence; some reported sleep-related events; and some interpreted ordinary inner speech. These differences aligned with responses to an auditory clip simulating psychosis voice-hearing. The findings suggest that apprenticeship training in talking with gods, combined with a non-stigmatizing identity, may shape the content and emotional tone of voices associated with a psychotic process.
The postmortem state of tukdam, unknown to science until recently, cannot be adequately explained in biomedical terms. The article argues that tukdam is best understood as a particular kind of Indo-Tibetan death, emerging from different cultural bodies and death processes. Drawing on medical anthropology, history of science, and cross-cultural medicine, the author critiques the epistemological assumption of one reality 'out there' and instead proposes an ontological approach where epistemology and ontology collapse, so that different ways of conceiving-perceiving produce different forms of being. Exploring Yogācāra Buddhist philosophy and its Tibetan appropriations alongside science studies and ontological anthropology, the author sketches how tantric Buddhist bodies and deaths remain largely incommensurable with and invisible to the modern medical gaze and the Euroamerican regime of truth that privileges visibility, quantification, and technological measurability.