danah speculates whether production of DMT (a brain chemical) helps explain how cults draw people in. Then, reflecting on it, she asks:

This then puts me into an interesting bind as an ethnographer trying to make sense of these things. If there are changes to the neural processes, are there ways to see practitioners on their own terms? Is it possible to understand the cultures there without experiencing the effects that the rituals are meant to bring on? I have to imagine that anthropologists studying religion and religious practices went through some of this. (Anyone?)

There is, of course, a long tradition of mystics warning that outsiders can only understand the experience by experiencing it. The epistemological question is whether mystical experience is any different from ordinary, non-mystical experience in its ineffability and unknowability. A difference in brain chemistry would suggest that, yes, mystical experience is qualitatively different. [Tags: danah+boyd epistemology anthropolgy]

Categories: Uncategorized dw