In this paper I draw some connections between spirit possession and the concepts of personhood and intentionality, prompted by my engagement with the institution of spirit possession in Egypt. In these societies, spirit possession is not only an explanatory theory for illness it informs people's understanding of themselves and others in such domains as agency, responsibility, identity, normality, and morality. 2 Judging by more recent ethnographies, reports and reviews, and my own research in Africa, the prevalence and everydayness of spirit possession in many communities are not waning (e.g. In Sub-Saharan Africa and the Circum-Mediterranean (which includes North Africa) the figures were higher than the average, 81% and 77% respectively. In a cross-cultural survey published in the 1960s, anthropologist Erika Bourguignon (1968) documented the presence of institutionalised possession in 74% of the societies included (360 out of 488 societies). 1 Spirit possession is ubiquitous in almost all regions of the world. These agents- commonly referred to as spirits-may be ghosts of departed ancestors or foreign visitors, divine beings, demons, spirits of fire in general, ethereal creatures of various origins. Spirit possession refers to a broad range of phenomena whose basic defining feature is the involvement of a non-corporeal agent with a human host in a variety of ways. Centuries before the modern disciplines of psychoanalysis and phenomenological-psychopathology endeavoured to restore meaning to 'madness,' the social institution of spirit possession had been preserving the intentionality of socially deviant behaviour.
Applied to behaviours that are generally taken to signal mental disorder, the spirit stance preserves a peculiar form of intentionality where behaviour would otherwise be explained as a consequence of a malfunctioning physical mechanism. It argues for an understanding of spirit possession as the spirit stance: an intentional strategy that aims at predicting and explaining behaviour by ascribing to an agent (the spirit) beliefs and desires but is only deployed once the mental states and activity of the subject (the person) fail specific normative distinctions. It employs these concepts to articulate spirit possession, while also developing the intentional stance as formulated by Daniel Dennett.
Prompted by engagement with the phenomenon in Egypt, this paper draws connections between spirit possession and the concepts of personhood and intentionality. This manifests in a range of maladies or in displacement of the host's agency and identity.
Spirit possession is a common phenomenon around the world in which a non-corporeal agent is involved with a human host.
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