2020-09-10, 07:27 PM
The Reality of Spirits
Edith Turner, first published in Vol. 10, No. 1 (Spring-Summer) 1997
Edith Turner, first published in Vol. 10, No. 1 (Spring-Summer) 1997
Quote:Edith Turner, a Field Associate of the Foundation, is a distinguished anthropologist who teaches at the University of Virginia. She is known for her fieldwork in Africa with her late husband, Victor Turner, and for her more recent work among the north Alaskan Eskimo (the Iñupiat), results of which are to be found in her book, The Hands Feel It: Healing and Spirit Presence among a Northern Alaskan People (Northern Illinois University Press, DeKalb, Illinois. 1996.)
Quote:Try out that spirit world ourselves? No way!
But at intervals, that world insisted it was really there. For instance, in the Chihamba ritual at the end of a period of ordeal, a strong wave of curative energy hit us. We had been participating as fully as we knew how, thus opening ourselves to whatever entities that were about. In another ritual, for fertility, the delight of dancing in the moonlight hit me vividly, and I began to learn something about the hypnotic effect of singing and hearing the drums.
Quote:Four months later in November, when I was settled among the Eskimos at Point Hope, Alaska, sitting in Ernest Frankson's house, Ernest pulled into the room the body of a ringed seal. His wife laid the seal on some cardboard and proceeded to take off the skin. She allowed me to help cut off the blubber. Then she made a slit down the stomach and displayed to view the internal organs. Wondering, I contemplated them carefully. It was striking to see the dark red parts, liver, spleen, intestines, lungs, heart, and so on, settled together, sliding together with such orderliness and easy movement.
Two days later I caught on, as my diary records. Those internal organs were the same organs that I had seen on the shaman TV screen in July.