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Abstract
A small but significant body of recent research has successfully crossed the boundaries between ethnomusicology and psychology, and both disciplines are demonstrating a growing interest in charting interactions between music, context and individual consciousness. The phenomenon of trance is a clear example of the interaction of mind with specific cultural contexts, and cross-disciplinary approaches would appear highly relevant to future research. However, outside ethnomusicology and anthropology, despite the burgeoning field of music and consciousness studies, attitudes towards the constructs of trance and altered states of consciousness as reputable areas of scholarly enquiry are somewhat ambivalent. One reason for this is a continued lack of academic consensus over definitions of the terms ‘trance’ and ‘altered states’. This paper re-assesses the different ways in which trance has been conceptualised in the literature. It argues that the continued ethnomusicological focus on high arousal models of trance has led to the neglect (or exclusion) of other types of trancing, particularly specific instances of European–American secular trancing, and associated literature. I draw on my own UK-based study of solitary musical involvement in daily life, which has been informed by both psychological and ethnomusicological perspectives.
Acknowledgements
The author is grateful to Andrew Killick for advice in the early stages of writing this paper, and to the two anonymous reviewers for suggestions that have strengthened the final article.
Notes
1. I do not attempt to provide an exhaustive list of ethnographies of music and trance in this article, but studies by Friedson (1996), Racy (2003), Kapchan (2001) and Jankowsky (2010)–relating respectively to musical healing as practised by the Tumbaka of Malawi, the Arab concept of tarab, Moroccan g'nawa trance, and Tunisian stambeli—immediately come to mind as examples of detailed and insightful explorations of manifestations of trance.
2. An ancillary anthropological debate regarding the categorisation of altered states of consciousness has focused on whether trance and possession should be distinguished from one another (see, for example, Halperin 1996; Huskinson and Schmidt 2010; Lambek 1989).
3. In fact, ‘universals’ were once a prime focus of study within both psychology and ethnomusicology's predecessor, comparative musicology, which were closely associated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, evident in the focus on psychoacoustics by early comparative musicologists (e.g. Carl Stumpf and Erich von Hornbostel), many of whom were based at the Psychological Institute in Berlin (Schneider 1991). Clayton (2009a:75) cites the ‘rejection of evolutionism and with it, to a great extent, both comparativism and scientific method’ as reasons explaining ethnomusicology's subsequent distancing from psychology. The topic of musical universals attracted the attention of ethnomusicologists from the 1960s onwards (see Nettl 2005, 2000), more recently complemented by a revival of interest in the evolutionary origins of music notably within the field of biomusicology, which combines evolutionary musicology with comparative musicology and neuromusicology (see Wallin, Merker and Brown 2000).
4. The discussion of Rouget's work in this article is based on the 1985 English translation of his book.
5. An exception to Rouget's omission of secular trance is his discussion of the Arab phenomenon of tarab.
6. Nembutsu refers to a Japanese form of mystic prayer, involving contemplation of the Buddha.
7. Ethnomusicologist Ali Jihad Racy is rightly critical of Rouget's division between trance and ecstasy, observing that his definition of ecstasy ‘essentially excludes the Arab ⃛arab experience, which is musically based, but can also be quiet or contemplative’ (2003:200).
8. See Ludwig Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations (2001:67).
9. Rouget's use of the word ‘symptom’ in this context is tellingly value-laden!
10. Chaucer makes several references to trance in his late fourteenth-century text The Canterbury Tales; for instance, ‘The lord sat stille, as he were in a traunce’ from The Summoner's Tale (Benson 1988:135) and ‘[L]onge tyme he lay forth in a traunce’ from The Franklin's Prologue and Tale (Benson 1988:182).
11. Erika Bourguignon (b.1924) is a highly regarded figure within the field of the anthropology of consciousness. Her work, which has focused on religion, ASC, trance and possession, spans a period of over 50 years, and continues to influence current scholarship. Rich (1999) offers a useful overview of her contribution to transcultural understandings of consciousness transformation.
12. For example, the emphasis on efficacy of treatment is clear in Batt-Rawden's (2010) account of the benefits of self-selected music on health and well-being.
13. Kaa is a fictional snake from Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book stories (published in two volumes in 1894 and 1895), later made famous in the 1967 Disney film The Jungle Book. In the Disney animation, Kaa traps his prey through a powerful ‘hypnotic’ stare.
14. Infamous advisor to Tsar Nicholas II, Grigori Rasputin's healing and hypnotic powers continue to be the subject of controversy.
15. Derren Brown (b.1971) is a British hypnotist, illusionist and mentalist who has gained a large following through his television and stage shows.
16. A total of 222 written self-reports of subjective experience were collected. In the first study, participants completed semi-structured interviews regarding their use and retrospective recall of experiences of music. These were transcribed and subjected to Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis. In the second study, individuals were instructed to log experiences of listening to music over a two-week period in unstructured diaries. In the third study, participants logged involving experiences with and without music for a two-week period. All names have been changed to preserve anonymity.
17. The experience was recorded at a time when she was looking after both her parents, who were seriously ill.
18. I refer here to the Sufi fable in which an elephant is examined in the dark by people who have never previously seen such a creature: ‘None could form the complete picture; and of the part which each felt, he could only refer to it in terms of things which he already knew’ (Shah 1964:36).
19. The notion of universals may seem ethnographically more palatable if a dichotomous ‘either–or’ conceptualisation of universal and relative characteristics is abandoned. ‘Absolute’ universals are those identified from the ethnographic record as occurring across all cultures. We should not ignore three other possibilities, however, that are easier to work with when considering music and trance: near universals allow for some exceptions (for instance, the keeping of dogs is a practice absent within some cultures), whilst conditional universals constitute an ‘if–then’ group (for instance, calluses may be common if certain activities feature within a culture). Lastly, statistical universals describe cross-cultural features that occur at a rate ‘well above chance’ (Brown 2004:48–9).
20. The DSM-IV-TR is a primary diagnostic resource used by clinicians.
21. Solitary musical trancing could include Killick's notion of ‘holicipation’, discussed earlier.
22. The cognitive science of religion identifies ‘human thought or behavioural patterns that might count as “religious” and then tr[y]ies to explain why those patterns are cross-culturally recurrent’ (Barrett 2007:1).
23. The book includes a chapter by Martin Clayton entitled ‘The Social and Personal Functions of Music in Cross-cultural Perspective’, in which he advocates cross-cultural comparison of ‘the role of music in inducing trance, possession healing and ecstatic listening’ (2009b:37).
24. For definitions of the term ‘phenomenology’ within psychology, see Ashworth (2004) and Colman (2009).
25. Functional resonance imaging, electroencephalography and magnetoencephalography constitute ways of monitoring changes in different areas of the brain through the measurement of electrical activity or blood flow.