Anthropology of science in trance: practices of Self-induced cognitive trance.

Abstract

Reflexivity and auto-ethnography are essential to explore the Self-Induced Cognitive Trance (SICT) with an anthropological perspective.

The social, cultural and therapeutic implications of SICT are discussed, putting on the forefront its radical novelty.

The author shares his own experience of a cognitive trance initiation, describing the physiological and psychological effects, as well as reflecting on the necessity to deploy a scientific institutionalization, to reinforce the legitimation and acceptability of trance in a rationalist, western, society.

The question of social change is also evoked, through the possibility of a normalization of cognitive trance in our culture, which would gain a practice of its own to embrace the vastitude of human consciousness.