Anthropology and Parapsychology: Still Hostile Sisters in Science?

Abstract

After a long, slow journey from the leather armchairs of its forefathers to out-of-body travels over Amazonian jungles, the anthropology of psi has progressed through a number of historical, methodological, and ontological developments. The course of this transformation from the detached and disbelieving dismissal of the occult to the engaged and emic entertainment of psi as a scientific possibility is discussed. Following a century of obscurity within anthropology, the notion of magic as psi finally found unique refuge within the anthropology of consciousness. Nevertheless, despite decades of research anthropological parapsychology can still be considered a completely nascent field of study and is speculated to remain so until its interdisciplinary imperative is actually fulfilled and its subject matter is shared fully by the disciplines that border it.