Lexington Books
January 1, 2023
A. Sumler
2 citations
Psychoactive plants such as hellebore, mandrake, opium poppy, cannabis, and wine were common in ancient Greek and Roman societies, used in religion, medicine, magic, artistic inspiration, and recreation. Through primary sources and modern scholarship from Classics, philosophy, and ethnobotany, the work reveals that these societies held nuanced attitudes about intoxication, with its appropriateness depending on the context of use.
Lexington Books
January 1, 2014
Alessandra Benedicty-Kokken
1 citation
Haitian thought around Vodou possession played a crucial role in shaping French critical theory, yet this contribution has been largely forgotten. The book traces how Haiti served as the anthropological other that kick-started a French theoretical apparatus involving figures like Breton, Leiris, Bataille, de Certeau, Foucault, and Butler, but once established, Haiti's role was erased and relegated to what Michel-Rolph Trouillot called the "Savage slot." The work examines how narratives of Haiti became conflated with an understanding of Vodou as occult rather than as a philosophical system. Later chapters analyze how novels by René Depestre, Jean-Claude Fignolé, and Kettly Mars revisited possession after the fall of the Duvalier dictatorships.
Lexington Books
January 1, 2024
Leandros Kyriakopoulos
A mobile and multi-sited ethnography follows Greek EDM and party enthusiasts across psychedelic-trance gatherings in Hungary, Morocco, and Greece to investigate the revelatory experience of chemical psychedelic raving. The work situates the rave experience within the phantasmagoria of the festival—a dreamworld of the alien and uncanny—reformulating questions of liminality, spirituality, community, and identity. It initiates a discussion about the limits of cosmopolitanism and aesthetics as reorganized in 21st-century techno-political conditions, reframing taste, consumption, altered experience, and lifestyle through technoaesthetics. The author speculates on an impending techno-social world of augmented senses and artificial impressions, questioning the mediation of social events and the reification of utopian paradises as contemporary dreamworlds.
Lexington Books
January 1, 2023
Shalini Masih
Drawing on her childhood exposure to spirit possession and exorcism, the author extends psychoanalysis into traditional healing spaces. Through culturally sensitive conversations with participants who felt haunted and possessed, she explores the productive interface between cultural manifestations and psychoanalytic concerns without reducing possession to a formula. The work highlights the intrinsic beauty of this complex experience, using the author's own reveries, dreams, and nightmares to understand unconscious processes in informants' testimonies. Ghosts emerge as broken part-selves seeking spiritual meaning.
Lexington Books
January 1, 2017
H. Sidky
Shamanism is an ancient magico-religious, divinatory, medical, and psychotherapeutic tradition found worldwide. Drawing on first-hand ethnographic fieldwork and scientific theories from archaeology, cognitive and evolutionary psychology, and neurotheology, the work explores the origins of shamanism, spirit beliefs, the evolution of human consciousness, and the beginnings of ritual behavior and religiosity.