Shaman/Scientist: Jungian Insightsfor the Anthropological Study ofReligionKAREN A. SMYERS

ABSTRACT Anthropology still regards the experience of religionthe same way it did when its interpretive paradigm was basedon "scientific objectivity/' To understand this situation, thework of C. G. Jung is helpful in two ways. First, by exploringhow anthropology has dismissed Jung as a cultural universalistand/or mystic, often without an actual consideration of his writ-ings, we see how he signifies what the field defines itself against.Second, Jung's empirical forays into the religious worldviewprovide us with both methodological and descriptive insightsabout that realm in which many of our informants (and evensome anthropologists) live.

M1M0P010GY Or RE1GKM*—THE SfllTE OF I K HOD

The strengths of the field of the anthropology of religion are in eth-nographies and theories that deal with the social and institutionalizedforms of religion; with ritual and related aesthetic productions; with phi-losophies, myths, or dogmas—in short—with the tangible forms of religion.However, there is still a discomfort in the field in general with the experi-ence of religion, evidenced by studies that attempt to explain away theexperience, to explain it as epiphenomenal of some other cultural system,or to imply it is something "they" experience but "we" do not. Other sub-fields of anthropology have employed reflexivity to locate their biases andethnocentric assumptions, and it is time for us in the field of the anthro-pology of religion to reflect on the rather ironic situation in which theexperience that gives rise to many cultural forms of religion is itself highlysuspect. Our colleagues in other subfields of anthropology are pursuing

£0ras29(4):475-490. Copyright © 2002. American Anthropological Association.

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lines of thought and action that openly deal with former taboos such assexuality, gender, politics, race, ethnicity, marginality, emotionality, andelitism—both theirs and their informants'—but it is a rare study in whichthe anthropologist participates in the religious experience along with hisinformants.

In Magic, Science, Religion, and the Scope of Rationality (1990),Tambiah has begun the work of our reflexive task, clearly showing thehistorical and cultural embeddedness in Western, post-Enlightenmentthinking of the term religion (and related terms magic and science). Ad-ditionally, he has made a persuasive argument that human beings haveand employ multiple rationalities—that they act and think in not only"rational" ways based on linear causality but that they also act and thinkin more holistic, associative, "poetic" ways as well. He calls these twomodes "causality" and "participation" (Tambiah 1990:105). The work ofscience takes place with causal thinking;1 the experience of religion ofteninvolves participation. This is not a new insight in our field: Malinowskistated that all cultures have the language of science and the language ofmagic (1978:236); Evans-Pritchard noted people can switch easily frommystical to empirical frames of mind (1965:91,1976:244); Levy-Bruhl ar-gued that all peoples in all types of cultures have what he (unfortunately)termed "pre-logical" and "logical" forms of thinking (1985:xv, 386). If it isthe case that humans have two modes of thinking or knowing, and if relig-ious experience largely occurs in the "poetic," "associational" mode, thenstudies that attempt to understand the experience of religion purely interms of the "scientific," "linear" mode would seem to be dealing with onlypart of the phenomenon, while perhaps missing important dimensions.The discomfort with religious experience in anthropology seems to be alegacy from the days when the "science" of social science was the domi-nant interpretive paradigm.

For those scholars interested in studying religious experience sympa-thetically, however, problems remain, perhaps the most difficult beinghow to steer between the Scylla and Gharybdis of reduction, on the onehand, and confession (or mere description), on the other.2 We do not havemany examples of how to strike a balance between the experience andanalysis of religion in academic studies, and this is why I propose weshould take another look at the work of G. G. Jung (1875-1961). I am notarguing that we necessarily adopt Jung's theories concerning religion but,rather, that his struggle to understand the "irrational" side of human ex-perience has great importance for those engaged in similar endeavors.

IK MMMUUZMMN V MM W IK ttUWYIn spite of being one of the major social scientific thinkers of the 20th

century, Jung is almost totally ignored by the aoademy. He developed the

Jungian Insights for the Study of Religion • 477

now common concepts "introvert," "extrovert," "complex," and "Electracomplex"; he had important input in the formation of Alcoholics Anony-mous; his personality typology is the basis of the widely used Myers-BriggsPersonality Indicator; more of his ideas on dreams than Freud's have beenproven correct by research on dreaming;3 and his concept of "archetype"(or something very similar) has been rediscovered independently in variousfields.4 Like Durkheim and Weber, Jung is concerned about the spiritualcondition of humanity in the modern period. Jung posits nonobservablebases or laws of psychological or mental phenomena, but so do Freud andLeVi-Strauss. Jung's thought is teleological, but so is Marx's. Jung makessome unfounded claims about "primitives," but so did many early anthro-pologists. And unlike some of the armchair variety, he traveled to Tunisand Algiers, Kenya and Egypt, and two times to India, and spent time withPueblo Indians (Jung 1963:238-288). Scholars tend to pick and chooseangles or time frames when reading Freud, Marx, Weber, and other denseand sometimes contradictory thinkers, and it would be quite easy to dothis within Jung's 20-volume, well-indexed corpus. Why, then, is Jung soavoided by anthropologists, when he has so much to offer concerning sym-bolic interpretation, language, understanding the despised and marginal,alterity theory, reflexivity, intuition, hermeneutics, and the relations be-tween dreams and ritual, therapy and magic?

Jung is rejected by academics for three main reasons: He is said to bea mystic, a cultural universalist, and an anti-Semite. But it is interestingto note that many who condemn Jung have never actually read Jung's ownwork.5 Part of his negative reputation derives from the "production of adiscourse" about him that started after his falling out with Freud. Gallantnotes that "In Freud's letters to Jung between 1909 and 1912 one can seethe definition forming of what is to be considered taboo for psychoanaly-sis—and it was everything that Jung was finding most exciting and full ofpossibilities" (Gallant 1996:6). The words still used to dismiss Jung are theones by which Freud referred to his work, terms such as mystical, occult,spook complex (Gallant 1996:22), and their power to condemn was formi-dable: "After this break I had with Freud, the pupils that I had all over theworld left me and turned to Freud. They were told that my book was rub-bish, and that I was a mystic, and with that the matter was settled. Sud-denly I found myself completely isolated" (Jung 1989:25). Jung wasinterested precisely in what dominant intellectual culture relegated to themargins, including religious and "paranormal" experience, and therebywas himself banished to the margins.

The claim concerning cultural universalism derives primarily from amistaken notion of what Jung means by archetype, due in part to a distor-tion of this idea by various popularizers.6 The accusation of anti-Semitismwas also leveled by Freud after their break. I am convinced bv the documents

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and chronologies presented in Maidenbaum and Martin's study, LingeringShadows (1991),7 that the anti-Semitic claim is not justified, and will fo-cus in this article on the questions of cultural universalism and mysticism.

JUNG'S TKORY OF ARCHETYPE

The notion of "archetypes" is probably the most misunderstood con-cept in Jung's thinking, possibly because of the way the term has been usedby Jung's popularizers. Similar to Levi-Strauss's structures, they are notideas but modes of psychological functioning, similar to the animal in-stincts that enable birds to build nests and salmon to return to theirspawning grounds (Jacobi 1959:43). Jung often uses the analogy of a crys-tal lattice in solution to express the idea that a pattern exists but that theway it takes shape is infinitely variable and depends on particular condi-tions: "It preforms the crystalline structure in the mother liquid, althoughit has no material existence of its own" (Jung 1969:79). Archetypes cannotbe observed directly, but only from their effects. Jung distinguishes be-tween "the archetype as such," which is nonperceptible and only poten-tially present (the crystalline pattern) and the "actualized archetype,"which takes on form from individual psychic material or from collectivematerial (Jacobi 1959:35).

The central psychic law in Jung is that of balance: "The psyche is aself-regulating system that maintains itself in equilibrium as the bodydoes. Every process that goes too far immediately and inevitably calls fortha compensatory activity" (Jung 1933:20). The unconscious is not full ofimages but structures that channel energy in certain compensatory ways.When the archetypes constellate as images, there are recurring patterns,but in forms specific to cultures and individuals (Jung 1976:228).

Jung's system is similar to LeVi-Strauss's in that structures of themind are inherited, but not the particular symbols that the structures cre-ate. Levi-Strauss thinks that binary oppositions and mediating symbolsresolve contradictions in the culture; Jung thinks that the structures pro-duce symbols in compensation for excesses in the culture or the individual.It is interesting that LeVi-Strauss misunderstands Jung, when (because?)their systems are so similar (Kugler 1982-.43).8 Whether or not we agreewith L£vi-Strauss, his work is important in anthropology, and perhaps therecognition that Jung's thinking is similar will allow a more sympatheticreading of him by anthropologists in the future.

The collective unconscious (which he later termed the objective psy-che because of misunderstandings) is not a collectivity or a mass psychebut the "image-producing stratum" of the unconscious.

Jungian Insights for the Study of Religion • 479

What Jung calls the objective psyche may then be likened to an encompassing energystratum from which arise varying field activities discernible to the experienced ob-server through the patternings of image, emotion, and drive configurations. These psy-chic field expressions Jung has called complexes and archetypes of the objectivepsyche. They are typical energy configurations which are activated by situations andproblems, both outer and inner, by people, emotional conflicts, maturational needs,etc. [Whitmont 1969:42)

Contrary to his reputation among people who have not read his works,Jung does not believe symbols have fixed meanings, and he is hermeneu-tically sensitive and sophisticated. His many comments about the analyti-cal process (especially dream interpretation) have direct application to theanthropologist's situation in interpreting unfamiliar cultural systems, in-sisting that theory must not dominate: "It goes without saying that he [theanalyst] should hold no preconceived opinions based on a particular the-ory, but stand ready in every single case to construct a totally new theoryof dreams" (Jung 1933:12). The analyst must admit his lack of under-standing (1933:12) and must always contextualize the dream in the pa-tient's life and within a series of other dreams (1933:14). In contrast toFreud, he does not believe the meaning of the dream is hidden but, rather,is in a language we do not know (1933:15), a situation parallel to an an-thropologist in a new culture. Jung uses whatever tools a particular situ-ation seemed to require:

The practical knowledge of human nature I have accumulated in the course of sixtyyears has taught me to regard each case as a new experience, for which, first of all, Ihave to seek the individual approach. Sometimes I have not hesitated to plunge into acareful study of infantile events and fantasies; at other times I have begun at the top,even if this meant soaring into a mist of most unlikely metaphysical speculations. It alldepends on whether I am able to learn the language of the patient and to follow thegropings of his unconscious toward the light. Some demand one thing and some an-other. . . .

This is eminently true of the interpretation of symbols. Two different individuals canhave almost the same dream, yet if one is young and the other old, the problems dis-turbing them will be correspondingly different, and it would be absurd to interpret bothdreams in the same way. [1976:225]

The term mystic is used in a pejorative sense to describe Jung's unre-liability as a social scientist. Replacing mystic with shaman more accuratelydescribes Jung's experience—he survived what he termed ua confronta-tion with the unconscious" (Jung 1963:170 ff.) and then used insights fromthat experience to help others—he became a healer.9 Additionally, theterm shaman removes the assumption of ontological claims concerningthe transcendent that usually accompany mysticism, for as LeVi-Straussshowed, even a "fake" shaman can be a great shaman (1967:170). Jung

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can be seen as both a "shaman" and a "scientist" and developed ideas onthe types of knowing particular to each.

Jung's formal training was in science and medicine. His first work wasexperimental: He developed his theory of autonomous complexes throughthe word association experiment. By timing the responses of subjects tostimulus words and noting delays and unusual responses, Jung came to histheory that supported Freud's similar discoveries about the unconscious—that the conscious ego is not always in charge.10 Although his father wasa minister, Jung felt that scientific influences were stronger than religiousinfluences on his development, for his father had a profound crisis of faiththat impressed Jung more strongly than the positive side of religion. Hesays in a letter:

I grew up in the heyday of scientific materialism, studied natural science and medicine,and became a psychiatrist. My education offered me nothing but arguments againstreligion on the one hand, and on the other the charisma of faith was denied me. I wasthrown back on experience alone. [Jung 1975:257)

In spite of all this, Jung had experiences that convinced him of the reality(by which he meant psychic reality and not ontological reality) of the re-ligious dimension. After his traumatic break with Freud, Jung withdrewfrom most external commitments and began a period of introspection thatlasted for four years, from 1914 to 1918. During this time, in what sympa-thetic writers term his "creative illness" (Ellenberger 1970:477) and crit-ics term his "psychotic breakdown," Jung experienced a flood of imagesfrom the unconscious that threatened to overwhelm him. He had vividdreams and waking visions, and experienced paranormal phenomena (ap-parent also to other members of his family), and he dealt with this flood ofpsychic material by writing (and sometimes painting) "with iron disci-pline" the images, all the while striving to understand their meaning (Jacoby1992:305). At the end of his life, in his autobiography, Jung says:

It is of course ironical that I, a psychiatrist, should at almost every step of my experi-ment run into the same psychic material which is the stuff of psychosis and is foundin the insane. This is the fund of unconscious images which fatally confuse the mentalpatient. But it is also the matrix of a mythopoeic imagination which has vanished fromour rational age. Though such imagination is present everywhere, it is both tabooedand dreaded, so that it even appears to be a risky experiment or a questionable adven-ture to entrust oneself to the uncertain path that leads into the depths of the uncon-scious. [Jung 1963:188]

A mystic may write about his experience but probably does not rigorouslyanalyze it to locate patterns, formulate theories, and then test these theo-ries against further empirical observations. Whether or not Jung is seen as"scientific" depends on one's definition of science,11 but it is a fact that heconstantly modified his models and terminology as his ideas changedbased on evidence from his clinical practice and continuing study andtravel, showing an empirical openness to evidence.

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TWO WHYS OF THMMCflWO WAYS OF JWUVHK

Jung's intensive examination of the human psyche convinced himthat the unconscious worked in a different way from consciousness. Al-though he often noted the conundrum peculiar to the field of psychologythat the psyche was simultaneously the object of study and also the subject(the means of observing) (Jung 1968:5), he thought that study was possiblebut that an emphasis on causality would yield only partial results.

Jung's two ways of thinking (as described in 1925) are intellectual ordirected thinking and fantastic or passive automatic thinking. In the for-mer, "thoughts are handled as tools" and are under the direction of theconscious ego, while in passive thinking the thoughts seem to have a kindof autonomy, no hierarchy, and may be contrary to the ego's intentions(Jung 1989:27). As early as 1906, he described a kind of "thinking in sym-bols" that he thought was necessary for psychoanalysis: "It is a way ofthinking that is innate in a poet but is carefully avoided in scientificthought, which is said to be characterized by clear-cut ideas. Thinking insymbols demands from us a new attitude, similar to starting to think inflights of ideas" (1973:289). Jung recognized the difference of these twomodes of thinking, as did the various anthropologists mentioned above,but also—and this is a valuable hermeneutic contribution—thought thateach required a different kind of analysis to be understood properly. In anessay called "On Psychological Understanding" (written in 1914), Jungdescribes what he termed "retrospective" and "prospective" types of un-derstanding. Retrospective understanding uses the analytical-reductivemethod and reduces the "unknown to the known and the complicated tothe simple" (Jung 1960:181); this is the method of scientific analysis,which searches for causes. But reduction to causes or elemental humanuniversals is not the most salubrious method to employ on human psy-chology when the goal is to understand its meaning.

But when we apply this method [analytical-reductive] to Faust, it becomes clear thatsomething more is required for a real understanding. We even realize that we havecompletely missed the deepest meaning the poet strove to express if we see in it onlythe universally human—for we can see the universally human wherever we look. Whatwe really want to find in Faust is how this human being redeems himself as an individ-ual, and when we have understood that, we have understood Goethe's symbolism.12

(Jung 1960:181)

Jung's prospective understanding uses the constructive method, a moresynthetic analysis of meanings rather than a search for their determiningfactors (Jung 1960:181). He was clear from the start that this kind of un-derstanding was different from scientific understanding, based solely on

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causality (which he noted made Freud's method scientific) (Jung 1960:181). He also noted that this kind of understanding is subjective andspeculative "and therefore not scientific for those who identify scientificexplanation with causal explanation" (Jung 1960:181). He returns to theFaust example and reminds us that scientific understanding only gives uspart of the story: "To understand the psyche causally is to understand onlyone half of it. A causal understanding of Faust tells us very clearly how itcame to be a finished work of art, but it does not show us its living meaning.That meaning only lives when we experience it in and through ourselves"(Jung 1960:183). Jung always insisted his was a heuristic model andshould not be reified (Bennet 1985:28, 32) and that theory should not befixed: "you cannot be empirical if you have a fixed theory" (Jung in Bennet1985:84). The subjective factor was always clear to him, and he insistedthat he did not have the truth but his truth, but if his views were "applica-ble and meaningful to other people, that was fine" (Wheelwright 1982:98).

Recent scholarship has noted the similarity of Jung's method of am-plification to "read" the psyche with the method of deconstruction. Gal-lant explains:

Amplification is the process of interpretation through an ever-widening considerationof parallels and correspondences from ancient as well as contemporary cultures, andassociations with worldwide myths, religions, arts, and histories. It is like the poststruc-turalist concern with intertextuality and the ways in which the palimpsests are nevertruly erased but continue to dimly affect the present text being read. (1996:73-74)

It is important to note that Jung was not equating specific elements withmore general elements but, rather, eschewing Aristotelian "identity," em-ploying a hermeneutic of difference (sicut—"like" or "as") (Miller 1992:271-272). This strategy combats reification of the "truth" and avoidscausal-reductionist thinking of the type that William James called the"nothing but" variety (this neurosis is nothing but . . .) that Jung resistedboth in his own thinking and about his thinking (Miller 1992:270).

Jung steered a course between reducing psychic creations to "nothingbut. . ." and simply taking them at face value (Bertine 1958:35). Concern-ing dealing with the unconscious, Jung said, "Taking the other side seriously. . . does not mean taking it literally" (Jung 1969:88). Jung considered "ir-rational" systems and phenomena such as alchemy, which had been dis-missed as literal nonsense, to be "true" in a symbolic or mythic sense(Segaller and Berger 1989:150). Another reason that Jung's ideas may beseen as "mystical" is that he borrowed terms from alchemy, Gnosticism,and myth to create a "grammar and lexicon of the inner world for Westernculture" (Senn 1989:116; see also Miller 1992:271).

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None of this is new from the point of view of anthropology—our bestethnographies employ both reductive and constructive analyses of complexsymbol systems and rituals; "thick descriptions" are constructive analyses.But many anthropologists remain unaware of Jung's sophisticated herme-neutics and therefore his usefulness for anthropology.

VMS JUN6 « MYSTIC?

The charge of "mystic" has at least three possible meanings concern-ing Jung. First, if we mean "a state of consciousness that surpasses ordi-nary experience through the union with a transcendent reality" (Dupre1987:246), then Jung partially qualifies as a mystic; however, he definesmystical experience as "experience of the archetypes" (Jung 1968:110),not of some external ontological reality. And again, he rigorously analyzedthe experiences and constructed theories about them, something mysticsgenerally do not do.

In the second sense, "mystic" is a pejorative term used by "rational-ists" to describe what they are not. This definition is not arrived at by anexamination of actual mystics but consists of the characteristics thoughtto be opposite to those that define rationalists or scientists. When ex-cluded from the normative, the Other or othered characteristics relegatedto the margins are often perceived as dirty and dangerous, although theysimultaneously seem to possess great power and fascination (Douglas1966; Stallybrass and White 1986; Turner 1969).13 In this usage of "mys-tic," Jung is seen, both because of what he studies and how he studies it,as Other to the world of science and rationality. The assignment of thelabel "mystical" to Jung's work worked as a kind of taboo and rather suc-cessfully prevents people reading it from drawing their own conclusions.

The third use of "mystic" to describe Jung is because his subject mat-ter consists of a worldview that can account for phenomena that cannotbe explained by a mechanistic Newtonian worldview (this is therefore re-lated to the second usage but goes beyond it). What is interesting aboutthis worldview, which might be termed "religious" or "magical," is that itnot only echoes the 16th-century episteme of resemblances (Foucault1970:17-45) but also has intriguing parallels with recent discoveries inquantum physics. In either case, it is not the dominant worldview of con-temporary Western intellectuals.

In contrast to the implicit assumption of rationalism/materialism that"ultimately all of nature can be logically explained in terms of the quanti-ties and movements of material bodies" (Robertson 1987:154), Jung pos-its a system in which "spirit" (psyche) operates in ways beyond theconscious control of human beings. The ego is but one complex amid many

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in the human unconscious, and although it seems to us that the ego is incontrol, other complexes behave with a certain autonomy.

The unconscious "is capable at times of manifesting an intelligenceand purposiveness superior to the actual conscious insight" (Jung 1938:45). Jung calls the organizing principle of the unconscious the "Self' andsays that experience of it is powerful, numinous, and often understood as"God." Additionally, Jung concluded after observing various "paranormal"phenomena that the unconscious behaves in a "psychoid" manner: It isboth spirit and matter, which are two aspects of the same reality (Jaffe1986:36-37). The two poles of the archetype work both like biologicalinstincts and in the more spiritual generation of meanings. In similar fash-ion to the wave/light structure of light, they behave like spirit or matterdepending on how they are observed (Jaffe 1986:22). Jung said that theidea that the soul has a substance was the dominant view of the MiddleAges and the Greeks but that today's emphasis has shifted to the primacyof matter and the material (1933:201). Realizing that this is an extremelyunpopular position, he argues:

To postulate mind is no more fantastic than to postulate matter. Since we have literallyno idea of the way in which what is psychic can arise from physical elements, we arefree to frame our assumptions the other way about for once, and to hold that the psychearises from a spiritual principle which is inaccessible to our understanding as matter.To be sure, this will not be a modern psychology, for to be modern is to deny such apossibility. (1933:208-209)

Before dismissing this out of hand as "mystical" nonsense, it is impor-tant to note that "religious" people (i.e., our informants if we are studyingreligion) live in this kind of world (at least some of the time). Further,recent scientific discoveries are tantalizing in their parallels to Jungianthought. Although the similarities between Jung's observations of psychicphenomena and quantum physics have been described for decades (NobelPrize winning physicist Wolfgang Pauli was an early supporter of Jung),perhaps because this new science is so contrary to our everyday Newto-nian worldview, its corroboration has not helped to move Jung's claimsinto the realm of respectability (Mansfield and Spiegelman 1989:3, 5). Re-cent work in quantum mechanics has disconfirmed Bell's Inequality—which assumes that spatially distant things are mutually independent—and this would also seem to confirm Jung's observations about synchronic-ity, "acausal orderedness" (Mansfield and Spiegelman 1989:16-17). In an-other example, recent experiments at the University of California, SanDiego, have shown that there seem to be "neural circuits in the temporallobe that may be part of the machinery of the brain that is involved inmystical experiences and God" (Hotz 1997:21). Patients with a certaintype of epilepsy affecting a part of the temporal lobe not only experienceintense mystical experiences but are "unusually preoccupied with mysticalthoughts" at other times too (Hotz 1997:21). Jung had long argued that the

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experiences of religion or God are archetypal realities, inherited as psy-chic structures (which have the possibility of producing images) by allhuman beings. The experience of God occurs in the psyche but is usuallyprojected outward.

CONCLUSION

Jung's investigations of religious and other "irrational" phenomenaled him to conclude that there are powerful psychical forces that operatein humans and that throughout the millennia have been projected outwardas gods and spiritual beings. Although understanding religion as psychicfunctions may sound reductionistic, it is not, for Jung considered the psy-che to be real, possessing knowledge unknown to the individual ego. Thismay sound "mystical," but heuristically, it explains much (the origin ofreligion, the continuing creation of new religious symbols, the dynamicsof spirit possession, and the like) and merits consideration as a countertheory to that of Durkheim.14

Returning to the assertion by various anthropologists that humanshave multiple rationalities, it is an intriguing possibility that the participa-tory (paradigmatic, associative) mode may be the way the unconsciousworks, while the causal (syntagmatic, linear) mode is the style of con-sciousness. Kugler draws fascinating conclusions from Jung's observationsduring his word association experiments that meaning was the criterion ofassociation by alert subjects, while exhaustion or distraction in subjectsled to phonemic associations (Kugler 1982:14-15). Tying this in withFreud's work on dreams, Kugler argues that

The ego's habitual linguistic mode tends to linear sequential metonymic reactions,whereas the unconscious associative process is characterized by multidimensionalmetaphoric sound reactions. For the ego, prosaic metonymy, and for the unconscious,poetic metaphor are the linguist lines of least resistance. [1982:59]

Spiegelman amplifies this idea through physics: "Along with the parallelbetween the behaviour of the collective unconscious and quantum me-chanics is the parallel between the behaviour of consciousness and classi-cal physics" (Mansfield and Spiegelman 1989:27).

The difficulty in studying the unconscious is that by definition, it isun-conscious and, hence, unavailable to conscious scrutiny except by in-direct means. Poetically speaking, the unconscious is the "other world,"which shamans can reach but to which ordinary people have no access. G.G. Jung, as a shaman of the modern world, had unusual access to thisrealm and brought back much data, out of which he constructed rich theo-ries that account for what he found without explaining it away. These arenot "mystical" insights only—Jung rigorously worked at making sense ofhis experiences and systems such as alchemy—working along philological

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lines as if this material were an unknown language (Jaffe 1979:99). Heprovides us with an "ethnography" of the kinds of thinking that underliereligious experience, alchemy, Gnosticism, paranormal phenomena, andother phenomena that (even if they are merely products of human imagi-nation) do not "operate" by the rules of the Newtonian universe.

I have tried to show in this article that Jung's dismissal as a culturaluniversalist is unjustified and applies more to the work of his popularizers.The rejection of Jung as a "mystic" confuses his experience with his analy-sis and tells us reflexively what our field defines itself against. I am notarguing that all anthropological studies must focus on experience or thatcausal explanations should be abandoned but, rather, that the held shouldwelcome sympathetic portrayals of religious experience without automat-ically designating their authors "mystics." It is time to examine the extentto which the dominant ideology of the field of the anthropology of religionmay preclude us from studying some crucial aspects of our subject.Whether or not more anthropologists of religion read Jung is less impor-tant than the reflexive work for our field that I hope this example helps usto undertake.

KAREN A. SMYERS is Associate Professor in the Religion Department at Wesleyan University.

NOIB

1. However, the inspiration behind science or mathematics may come from the realm of"participation." See Von Franz (1980:95-96).

2. Recent studies that have steered this course admirably are Edith Turner's Experienc-ing Ritual (1992) and Karen McCarthy Brown's Mama Lola (1991).

3. Stevens says, "On the whole, it is true to say that Jung's theories have stood the test oftime far better than Freud's. Thus, it is now fair to conclude that dreams are not, as Freudmaintained, guardians of sleep; they are not predominantly the disguised manifestations ofrepressed sexual wishes; and they are not primarily responses to outer stimuli. On the con-trary, they are, as Jung and Jouvet independently proposed, the result of spontaneous activ-ity in the central nervous system and are transpersonal expressions of patterns involvedwith crucial life events—that is to say that they are archetypal expressions (Stevens1993:24).

4. "The theory [of archetypes] has been rediscovered and propounded in different termi-nologies by the ethologists (Lorenz's innate releasing mechanisms), Gestalt psychologists(Wolfgang Kohler's isomorphs), developmental psychologists (John Bowlby's behavioral sys-tems), biologists (Ernst Mayr's open programs), anthropologists (Fox's biogrammar), andpsycholinguists (Noam Chomsky's language acquisition device)" (Stevens 1986:13).

5. I make this claim based on talking to colleagues about Jung over the years. Addition-ally, during the 1996 American Anthropological Association annual meeting in San Fran-cisco, I distributed questionnaires to those attending sessions dealing with anthropology andreligion.

6. Most famous are Joseph Campbell and Mircea Eliade. Campbell's vastly popular booksand video series present the world's myths reduced to a single pattern, or "monomyth."

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Eliade too finds recurring religious patterns in world mythology that he presents in reifiedform. Jung finds recurring patterns, types, and themes in myth but tends to use the materialto amplify particular questions he is working on rather than to create a mono-theory ofreligion or myth. See quotation below in text regarding the futility of reducing Faust toarchetypal patterns.

7. This book provides a thorough review of the anti-Semitism question through a detailedchronology of Jung's actions as well as essays from both pro and con positions.

8. See D'Aquili (1975) and Kugler (1982) on the similarities between Jung's and Levi-Strauss's ideas. D'Aquili has shown that Jung's idea of innate structures that create symbolswas published 10 to 20 years before LeVi-Strauss's similar contention (D'Aquili 1975:41),and he wonders if LeVi-Strauss denied their similarity to avoid the contagion of Jung's "mys-tical" reputation (D'Aquili 1975:48). Chang (1984), on the contrary, argues that the twothinkers use the term unconscious in totally different ways.

9. Jung's shamanic initiation is described in an anthropologically sophisticated way bySenn (1989) and in a more universalized way using Eliadian patterns in Groesbeck (1989)and Downton (1989). He is referred to as a shaman in Stevens (1993:108) and Bernstein(1992:24). The period of Jung's life that corresponds to the shamanic initiation and the wayshe wrestled with the material it produced in his work are described in his autobiography inchapters 6 and 7, "Confrontation with the Unconscious" and "The Work" (1963:170-222).

10. Jung's gradual improvement of the word association experiment and his conclusionsbased on it can be seen in the essays found in Experimental Researches, Collected Works,volume 2.

11. Discussions of Jung's claims to empiricism can be found in Fordham (1960) andFuller (1992).

12. This quotation shows that Jung's main task was not simply to reduce the complexityof human experience to a few archetypes, as is often claimed.

13. Interestingly, Jung has one of the most elegant and useful theories concerning theOther, his theory of shadow projection, but his own "othered" position in the academy pre-vents it from getting a very wide hearing.

14. For Durkheim, god is really a projection of the experience of society; for Jung, god isa projection of an internal, psychological experience.

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