LEWIS, IOAN M.

(1930– )

Professor emeritus of anthropology at the London School of Economics and author ofEcstatic Religion:AStudy of Shamanism and Spirit Possession(1971). His wide-ranging research is important as a clarification of the relationship betweentrance(an interior state of disassociation) andpossession(a culturally mediated interpretation of trance as the intrusion ofspiritsorotherworldbeings), between official and marginal cults (often distinguishable by thegenderof the main performers), and between control by andmastery of spirits. Lewis regularly contestsMirceaEliade’s construction of shamanism, generally seeing it as a system imposed on more diverse data.Demonstrating that possession is a performance established and interpreted by particular cultures, he challenges Eliade’s (andSergeiShirokogoroff’s) assertion that shamans master but are not mastered by spirits. Noticing that practitioners invite possession similarly undermines Eliade’s schema. As such, Lewis broadens the use of the termshamanismbeyond thelocusclassicusofSiberiaand theArctic, specifically toAfrica. Lewis’s abiding interest, however, is in the relationship between cults and experiences of possession and the wider social order. Paying attention to details of who gets possessed, what benefit they or others derive from the possession, what social mechanisms contain or are contested by possession cults, what role degrees of social power play in all this, and how shamans and their work fit intoclanand other social contexts enables a far richer understanding of the phenomenon than claims about “true” and “degenerate” forms of shamanism. Lewis engages with theSar, Zar, andBoricults of East, North, and West Africa, in whichwomenplay significant roles despite their general marginality in locally dominant forms ofChristianityandIslam.