Interview with Cultural Anthropologist E. Paul Durrenberger
Thursday November 1, 2007 8:06 AM
Professor E. Paul Durrenberger is a cultural anthropologist at Penn State University. I talked to him about experiences of the paranormal in other cultures.
Emily: As an anthropologist, to what parts of the world has your profession taken you?
Durrenberger: I started out doing archaeology in Texas, South Dakota, and Washington State. When I was in graduate school, I got into cultural anthropology and went to Northern Thailand, in the Northwestern-most province of Maehongson, on the Burma border. There I studied Shan lowland peasants. After that I was in the highlands farther north on the Burma-Laos border to study tribal highlanders, Lisu. A little while later, I returned to do further research with Shan. After that I started working in Iceland, and that work continues to now. I have also worked with commercial fishermen in Mississippi and Alabama, studied industrial swine production in Iowa, and then I started my work with Unions in Chicago and Pennsylvania.
Emily: Where in your travels have you see the most belief in various superstitions, ghosts, and other paranormal activity?
Durrenberger: Well, Lisu do a lot of things regarding spirits, but they don't consider them either paranormal... just aspects of reality that aren't visible to most people. Lisu say that Shamans can see ghosts and spirits possess them frequently. There's a fair amount of talk about witches, people who cause bad things to happen to others, among both Lisu and Shan. Though they are Buddhists, Shan also address offerings and ceremonies to a range of spirits. Again they aren't considered supernatural, but dimensions of nature.
Emily: What is your personal opinion on paranormal activity? You once told a story about a man in Thailand who claimed there was a spirit nearby.
Durrenberger: Yeah, that was when I was with Lisu (pictured). A guy had just been tragically killed in a shooting accident. So my neighbor, a shaman, walked into my house one night and says he's just seen the dead guy's ghost behind my house. I said, "Show me." Everyone else laughed and said, "You can't see a ghost. Only shamans, horses, and dogs can see ghosts." The shaman says, "Sure, come on," so I went with him and he says, "Right there, see?" and I said, "No." and I didn't see anything out of the ordinary. But just then all the horses started neighing and stamping and the dogs all were barking and baying... and the shaman looked at me as though to say, "See, I told you it was there." And I've talked to Christian missionaries who claimed to see ghosts and witches. But I never saw any such thing myself.
Emily: What kind of status, if any, do ghosts have in the various places you have studied?
Durrenberger: Lisu say when someone dies, they go to the land of the dead where they receive offerings from descendants. So we make offerings to ancestors, and this feeds them in the land of the dead, and they take care of us. These are dead people. Not everyone has descendants when they die, and some people don't die "normally." People who get shot, drown, or die of bloodshed... don't go to the land of the dead. They wander the earth... they can't receive offerings, so they're always hungry... they extort offerings from people by causing trouble so people will make offerings to them to get them to go away. There's pretty elaborate rituals when someone dies a 'bad death.' These rituals are meant to separate the ghost of the dead person from the living people and trap it or send it somewhere else. Shan are Buddhists, so they cremate their dead and say they go to their next life... but they don't hang around and become ghosts. Icelanders are pretty secular in most things...though there are stories of ghosts sort of like our ghost stories.
Emily: Can you tell me about the Lisu belief in the ability of souls to leave the body while a person is alive?
Durreberger: Yeah, that can happen for a couple of reasons. Men have nine and women have seven souls; kids don't have developed souls until they're about 12. Lisu say, "Sometimes you wake up in the morning and all you can see is pig shit." When everything looks down to you, your soul may just wander away because it's not very good to be here. So when you ask a shaman about your kid or husband, for instance, and he calls his spirits to ride him, and they possess him and tell you that the soul of that person has gone away... then you do something to get it back. You may do a minor ceremony [PDF] or you may kill a pig or two pigs and sponsor a major feast and call the whole village to eat and drink and have a major ceremony. The other thing that can happen with the same result is that some spirit may be angry with you and capture your soul and hold it for ransom until you figure out which spirit is mad at you and what you did to make it mad. Again, the shaman's spirits provide the information and you act accordingly. In any case, while your soul is gone, you feel depressed, lose your appetite, have insomnia, bad dreams... symptoms we'd call depression. The therapy is for a smaller or larger group to come together and let you know how much they love and need you.
