ROUGET, GILBERT

Ethnomusicologistof the Musée de l’Homme, Paris. Rouget is best known for his bookMusic and Trance(1985), in which he argues for a distinction betweentranceandecstasy.Tranceis said to involve and be induced by movement, noise, company, crises, sensory overstimulation, and amnesia and to lack hallucinations.Ecstasy, on the other hand, is said to be induced by stillness, silence, solitude, lack of crises, sensorydeprivation, recollection, and hallucinations. Much of Rouget’s data relate to fieldwork inAfricaand may be culturally specific. Alternatively, his use ofecstasymay be different from that ofMircea Eliade, especially in relation toSiberianshamans.Rouget’strancemay be closer to other scholars’mysticism. In some cases, Rouget’s terms may apply to phases of shamanicperformanceand thus clarify stages of a shaman’s work. Similarly, Rouget’s argument that “possessiontrance seems to require, everywhere and at all times, a form ofmusicbelonging to the most everyday and popular system” may be true in African possession cults but is inapplicable in, for example,Korea, where shamanic music is distinct from everyday music, and inAmazonia, where shamanschantin languages unknown to those who have not beeninitiated. However, his argument that music, especiallyrhythmalone, is insufficient to induce trance oraltered statesof consciousness, and that it does not do so automatically, has been widely accepted among ethnomusicologists in contrast to someneoshamansandtechno-shamans. Rouget argues that trances and altered states are induced only in those who have made a decision to enter them—and even then a variety of other factors is required both to induce a trance and to make the practitioner’s actions meaningful to others. Among the most important of these factors, as Roy Willis (1999) shows, especially in relation to the Nguluspiritcult of Zambia, is the “quality of relations between the individuals making up the trancing group.”