Keywords
Ritual
Personal identity
Sociality
How to Cite
Abstract
The main thesis of this article is that ecstasy, trance, and possession are social experiences in which transcendental life is historically concretized. Altered states make visible the affective and intersubjective genesis of personal identity through the primary feeling of a “we” that ecstasy, trance, and possession foster and regulate within ritual. In the first part, I present the resources of Husserl’s theory of intersubjectivity and the anthropological theory of ritual for the analysis of altered states, through the structure of the human person as a self-aware subject; in the second part, I distinguish the most precise traits and elements of each experiential level, not through their social function, but through the variable structure of the “we” that is expressed in each case. The ultimate aim of this study is to establish phenomenological distinctions between these different forms of ego alteration that are constituted interpersonally.
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