Deirdre Meintelfor more than a week, the banner is borne by a mounted horseman
into the house of the sponsor (the one paying most of the expenses of
the celebration). Amid the overwhelming noise of drums, call-and-
response singing, and fireworks going off, I was struck by the trans-
ported, beatific expressions on the faces of participants when the ban-
ner was passed. Malinowski’s notion of “phatic communion” came to
mind, and I could see the resonance between this event and V. Turn-
er’s “communitas” ( 1968 ). I envied those I was observing. How could
they be so deeply part of something beyond themselves as to lose their
usual preoccupations with quotidian individuality, if only for one
glorious, evanescent moment? The closest I came to such a state my-
self was during my last weeks in Cape Verde, after formal interviews
and systematic observations were finished. By then it seemed that my
mind, my dreams, even my daydreams, were taken over by the lives
of others, their worries and hopes and dramas, small and large, giv-
ing way to a heady sense of “losing myself.”
In the fieldwork that I present here, regularly letting go of the con-
ventional researcher role has allowed me to experience the meditative
and trance states that are part of Spiritualist religious practice. “Los-
ing oneself” becomes an integral part of the research process, how-
ever paradoxical this might seem. In terms of classical notions of ob-
jectivity, where intellectual rigor is predicated on the externality and
emotional distance of the observer from the object of inquiry, the em-
phasis on the visualist is open to criticism, as noted by Fabian ( 1983 ,
107 ) and Clifford ( 1988 , 31 ). Moreover, a number of ethnographers
working on religion, spirituality, witchcraft, and so on have, by their
research practice and styles of written representation, challenged mod-
ernist notions of objectivity (e.g., Goulet 1998 , E. Turner et al. 1992 ,
E. Turner 1996 , Favret-Saada 1977 , Cohen 2002 ).
I hope to show that taking a highly participatory role in certain Spir-
itualist activities has shaped and benefited the research. I cannot fully
discuss here questions related to intersubjectivity, religious commu-
nity, and the role of the body in perception. Here I seek to share what
it is like for a researcher to enter into such trancelike experiences and
convey something of how they transform one’s sense of self, one’s
notions of what is real, indeed, one’s view of the world. After a brief