Hallucination and Trance: An Anthropologist’s Perspective

Abstract

Ten years ago, in a paper written for a psychiatric audience, the anthropologist A. F. C. Wallace spoke of hallucination as “one of the most ancient and widely distributed modes of human experience” [9]. This broad claim is facilitated by his definition of hallucination as “pseudo-perception”, which includes dreams and hypnagogic imagery. While I do not wish to make my definition quite so broad, I must recognize the considerable difficulty which exists in distinguishing waking hallucinations from the two other types of pseudo-perceptions in the self-reporting of ethnographic informants. For example, in many North American Indian societies, young men went out in quest of a vision, to obtain the help of a guardian spirit. From their reports, usually narrated many years after the event, it is often impossible to tell whether the “vision” they experienced was, in fact, a waking hallucination, a sleeping dream or hypnagogic imagery and, for the purposes for which they sought the vision, this distinction is, in fact, quite immaterial.