RT Article
T1 Possession trance covaries with measures of social rigidity in the Ethnographic Atlas
JF Religion, brain & behavior
VO 14
IS 3
SP 245
OP 268
A1 Rácz, Péter
LA English
YR 2024
UL https://ixtheo.de/Record/1902694821
AB Possession trance is an altered state of consciousness resulting from spirit possession, belief in an alien entity residing in the self. Though treated as an individual psychopathological condition in Western medicine, cultural anthropology has long tied possession trance, and trance and possession phenomena in general, to marginalization by increasingly complex and inflexible social structures. This paper revisits these claims by analyzing cross-cultural data from the Ethnographic Atlas and two cultural phylogenies with the use of gradient boosting, Bayesian hierarchical generalized linear models, and phylogenetic comparative methods. The findings support a correlation between possession trance and many, though not all, social factors proposed in the literature. I do not find evidence for the co-evolution of possession trance and such factors.
K1 Machine Learning
K1 cross-cultural research
K1 Psychiatry
K1 Religion
K1 Anthropology
DO 10.1080/2153599X.2023.2224447