CaMP Anthropology

https://iupress.org/9780253075888/dancing-at-the-thresholds/

Interview by Jane Goodman

Jane Goodman: The idea of the threshold figures in the title of your book and is prominent throughout your analysis. How did you land on the concept of threshold? Is this something you brought to the research, did it emerge through the research, or did you come to it while you were writing?

Tamara Turner: The concept of thresholds emerged across ten years of fieldwork and as I sat in dozens of diwan rituals and searched for ways to describe what I observed. As part of understanding the context of diwan, I reflected on Sufi epistemologies and the fact that the notion of liminality or the in-between emerges again and again. This isthmus between two spaces turns up in the Arabic term, barzakh. However, as I sat through Algerian rituals and felt what was transpiring, those notions didn’t quite fit. Rather than a kind of liminal, third space or in-between space, instead, what I observed was a both-and overlapping space–a kind of two-way contact territory where two or more supposedly opposite notions, feelings, or discourses meet and co-mingle. In that overlap, the borders of opposing concepts blur. The juncture where they meet initiates a threshold where one can be either in both modes at once or can move wholly into one or the other. For example, certain trance songs simultaneously call forth both the energy of an unruly animist spirit and a noble Muslim saint, expressing both Muslim and non-Muslim sensibilities in one phrase. Trance dancers literally dance at the thresholds of conscious states, moving in and out and between various registers of trance. Diwan practitioners, negotiating epistemologies of religion and therapy (seen locally as opposites), similarly debate what they identify as the mixing of sacred and popular contexts in the performance of diwan music even while traces of the sacred can never be cleansed from popular performances: diwan practice resounds the thresholds connecting and complicating polar opposites. 

Jane Goodman: You say that you learned about the relationship between music, affect, and trance primarily “through [your] own moving body” (22). Can you tell us a bit about your own embodied or felt experience of attending diwan, particularly given that you were presumably inhabiting multiple roles: you are yourself a musician and were learning the stringed instrument ginbri; you participated in the ritual via trance dancing yourself or by tending to those around you; and you were simultaneously present as an ethnographer attending to the various sounds, colors, and forms of dance/trance while also keeping an eye on your recording equipment. What was the experience of inhabiting and navigating these multiple roles like for you?

Tamara Turner: Indeed, throughout my fieldwork I inhabited so many roles and oftentimes, simultaneously. I didn’t want to miss anything in a ritual that might prove critical later to my analyses. So, in every ritual, I set up an audio recorder, I photographed, took videos of key moments, and scribbled copious field notes. At the same time, I didn’t want to be only up in my head, but also present in my body so that I could experience and potentially learn to feel diwan as it is intended. I was striving to stay open to the stirrings in my own body, not only as part of the participation element of fieldwork, but also as part of my conviction that our bodies pick up on cultural cues and can teach us in ways that go beyond the limits of our minds. To this point, I see myself aligned with Jeanne Favret-Saada and fellow anthropologists writing on embodied epistemologies. (I published a separate book chapter where I zoomed in on this particular aspect). I did learn how to trance dance—having watched others trance for so long, I followed their lead on how to move my torso, arms, and legs. I listened for sensations in my body and let my body lead me as to what it wanted to do. As I did so, I received explicit verbal and physical instruction from ritual leaders, including being told when to get up and dance again or when to move back because my turn was over. This kind of guidance and learning was invaluable. Being in the ritual space with other trance dancers was the sort of embodied learning that shaped my understanding. Being out there, moving to the music in the right way, without impeding or bumping into others and, as a woman, being covered in drapes so that my vision was blocked, proved a lot harder than it looked. Being right there in the space for the direction from ritual leaders gave me glimpses into how both individual and collective healing processes unfold together.

In diwan there are many forms of trance and not all of them involve the spirits inhabiting bodies. Some forms of trance might be compared to absorption or dissociation precipitating on a dance floor. I considered myself to be learning how to master these forms of trance in diwan, while my interlocutors saw my states as involving spirits and nonhuman entities. From their perspective, the spirits were interacting with me; I just didn’t realize it. This difference in perspective was ripe with learning potential.

Jane Goodman: Did this project mark your own psycho-spiritual pursuits in ways that you continue to cultivate? For example, did you develop an affinity for any particular spirit, and if so, (a) how did you experience this? and (b) Is this affinity something you can foster outside of Diwan?

Tamara Turner: Absolutely. Long before I embarked on this research, I wanted to better understand what healing and wellness could mean across cultures and across different orientations to the world. Although my family were not particularly religious, I had always had an interest in psychology, health, and in the wisdom traditions of other cultures. My father was a professor of sociology with specialties in the sociology of deviance as well as religion and medicine, so I grew up with big questions about how humans make meaning and understand their place in the world.

I also grew up composing and playing music. It was as a composer that I wanted to learn other non-Western musical vocabularies and this curiosity led me to ethnomusicology. When I first discovered Moroccan gnawa music in the mid-2000s, something in me knew I had to go there and learn more. The combination of ritual, psychology, medicine, healing and music encapsulated everything that I wanted to pursue. After completing an MA on ritual musicianship in Marrakech, and through a series of serendipitous events, I set off to explore Algerian diwan in 2013 and that began the long journey to publishing this book.

In terms of my own personal experience across ten years of fieldwork in Algeria, I noticed that I had emotional affinities for certain songs. I will never forget the first time I found myself sobbing to one song and had no idea why. My Algerian friends announced that that was my song and from that time forward, the musicians made a point to play it for me. Later in my fieldwork, other songs stirred strange sensations in me too, and I collected them as my favorites. Some of these were from the Hausa repertoire which is often skipped in ritual because it comes very late in the night. I discuss this part of my journey in the book because it served as a primary form of learning. I aimed to be open to my body and what was happening and I let my Algerian friends guide me in the process. 

Moreover, it did not escape my attention that – with the colonial history of anthropology and the pattern of outsiders determining what they understood to be what is going on in another culture, as if they hold a position of epistemological authority – that my Algerian friends informing me what was going on with my own intimate bodily sensations and experiences, whether I agreed or not, was a delightful miniature reversal of those power dynamics.

Jane Goodman: The diwan ritual leaders (moqeddemin) were critical to your project. Describe how one moqeddem marked you in particular ways.

Tamara Turner: The most profound relationship I had with a moqeddem in Algeria was with Moqeddem Jallul Motam from the city of Saida, who is quoted and mentioned throughout the book. Jallul still practices many of the old ways, striving to keep the ritual protocol in line with his ancestors’ recommendations, and sticking by what he grew up with. His knowledge of the spirit world called to mind the Songhay sorcerers in Paul Stoller’s work. It was clear to me that what I learned from Jallul was just scratching the surface of his knowledge and lifeworld. There was so much he couldn’t share with me but gave me only hints of, such as the danger and risk in working with the spirit world where not all entities are benevolent. As I mentioned in the text, the role of the moqeddem in Algeria is dying out and there are few people left who still perform the role as it was intended: the commander of the spirit world and the one who protects the energy of the ritual. Jallul could command a room with a single glance. In one of the first conversations we had in 2013, I recall his challenge to me to really try and understand diwan. He had been quite disappointed by journalists who occasionally went to Saida to learn about the diwan ritual. He had never been satisfied with their depiction of the practice and what I would later understand to be the ways that Black communities in Algeria are still portrayed. It was my single intention to do justice to the countless diwan practicants, like Jallul, who so badly wanted to be taken seriously and acknowledged for their own wisdom.

Turner, Tamara. D. (2023). Learning to trance: The affective grounding of becoming another body in another place. In E. Pierini, A. Groisman, & D. Espírito Santo (Eds.), Other worlds, other bodies: Embodied epistemologies and ethnographies of healing (pp. 153-171). New York: Berghahn.

https://www.multilingual-matters.com/page/detail/being-understood/?SF1=work_id&ST1=CVIEW-67dd512c2ee28

Tsung-Lun Alan Wan: In your book, your discussion of signing songs really stood out to me. From my experience in Taiwan, signed songs are a highly contested genre. Historically, when the Taiwanese government attempted to erase regional variation in Taiwan Sign Language, they hired hearing experts and special education teachers to compile sign-language dictionaries, including books of signed songs (!), which were then criticized as promoting signed Chinese rather than Taiwan Sign Language by the signing community.

In many hearing-led signed-song performances, lyrics are translated word by word into signs, handshapes are modified for choreography, and signs are sometimes invented for aesthetic effect. As a result, these performances may become unintelligible to deaf people, while allowing hearing performers to enjoy a form of supposed sign language that overlooks deaf perspectives and sign-language conventions. In contrast, the work of some deaf artists in Taiwan seems much closer to what you describe in your book: they begin from the meaning of the lyrics, select appropriate signs, and then adapt them rhythmically and aesthetically to the music, but this is not as popular as those led by hearing and circulated among hearing people.

For readers outside the U.S. who may not be familiar with the American context of signed songs, could you share why you chose translation/interpretation in signed songs as a research topic? What made this genre theoretically or ethnographically important for you?

Kristin Snoddon: Thank you for sharing these insights and experiences from the Taiwan context. I did not know about the government’s attempts to erase regional variations of Taiwanese Sign Language. To understand how signed songs can provoke controversy, it may be important to consider how sign languages are often viewed as a means to an end–a translation–that also functions as a vessel to convey something–such as signed Chinese and cultural artefacts from hearing communities like music. It’s another issue as to how signed Chinese (like signed English) is often presented as a standard, hegemonic language variety when so much that makes sign languages intelligible to deaf people is missing from manually coded Chinese and English.

The artist whom I interviewed in my book, Robert Bhola, had disparaging words to say about many hearing-led signed-song performances. But as you say, some hearing people–who are apparently the majority of song signers on the Internet–enjoy creating and consuming this work. I do not think deaf people in general are usually as interested in signing songs or viewing signed translations of popular music–but this can also be culture-specific, and many deaf people enjoy various forms of musical participation.

When I began to explore the topic of deaf interpreters and sign language ideologies, musical translation in signed songs was a research topic that inspired me, because I found Robert’s work–like that of other deaf and hard of hearing song signers like Rosa Lee Timm–to be inspiring. This was due not only to the artist’s sign language proficiency but also to being able to convey the essential message contained in a song. This makes the signed song an artistic creation in its own right. In my book, deaf interpreters are presented as exceptional facilitators of intelligibility. With signing songs, this extends to making intelligible what might otherwise be inaccessible and beyond ordinary language, such as the tone and instrumentals of a song. Theoretically and ethnographically, I was interested in the struggle to cross borders when there are sensory asymmetries and unequal access to semiotic resources. To make something intelligible, you need to understand what is intelligible to the other person–to know something about what it is like to live in that person’s body. I do not think the message always gets through, maybe because the other person also needs to be willing and open to receive it.

Tsung-Lun Alan Wan: I really like the phrasing: “the struggle to cross borders.” It made me think of a point you make in the book: that some hearing people assume communication with deaf people must be mediated by a sign language interpreter, while in some situations, other modalities such as email and the chat box during a video meeting may allow for a more direct form of interaction between deaf and hearing interlocutors. I had previously tended to assume that, compared with writing things down, communicating through a sign language interpreter would be a more respectful way for hearing people to interact with deaf signers. But your discussion helped me see that, what matters may be whether the hearing interlocutor is willing to participate in the struggle of crossing borders with “sensory asymmetries and unequal access to semiotic resources”.

This also reminds me of a small scene I recently witnessed in Taiwan. A deaf mother was ordering food at a bento shop. The staff at the counter took out paper and a pen, assuming that she would need to write down her order. The customer signed “troublesome” in TSL, which the staff obviously did not understand. Then the customer pointed directly to the items on the menu. At that moment, the staff seemed to realize that, within that semiotic environment, the deaf customer did not need paper and writing at all. The menu itself, pointing, and the shared material setting were already sufficient for communication.

I found this small moment of boundary negotiation very interesting. It seems to show that communication access is not always about introducing an additional mediating tool or person. Sometimes it is about recognizing and learning to use the semiotic resources that are already available in the interactional environment, hence a collaborative way of doing communication. Would you say that this is a fair reading of your argument? 

Kristin Snoddon: I agree that it can often appear more respectful to the deaf person to communicate via a sign language interpreter, and indeed it is often the default mode of communication for deaf academics working with hearing colleagues and students. However, some of my favourite moments have taken place when the hearing interlocutor–such as a student, faculty colleague, or an audience member during a presentation–understands me, and I understand them, and we exchange ideas even when the interpreter does not know what we are talking about. I think this can also be a mark of successful interpretation since the interpreter does not manage the discussion. As John Lee Clark said to me once, we should try and hear what lives beyond translation and what lives in the gaps.

The scene with the deaf mother ordering food resonates with me–while it was kind and well meaning of the staff to offer a paper and pen, it is much quicker to point at a menu. I think there is also a point to be made here about distantism–what John calls a standing apart, an insistence on adhering to normative communication via sight and hearing. In the scene you describe, the pen and paper offered a more detached, formal, and logocentric way of communicating that appears almost circumlocutory as compared to simply pointing at a menu. 

So I agree with you about communication access and efficiency, and making use of resources in the environment to achieve immediate goals. Part of making this work is collaborative–what Mara Green refers to as the willingness to co-construct meaning when there are sensory asymmetries. The other part is creative–seeing how to make use of the affordances of objects and instruments that another person who typically faces fewer communication barriers may not have previously realized were latent in the environment. 

Tsung-Lun Alan Wan: Yes, distantism seems to be a very important entry point here, and it was one of the concepts in your book that felt truly illuminating to me. I agree that distantism speaks to many of the issues you discuss in the book, including the possibility of more direct collaborative communication rather than a more circumlocutory form of mediation through a third material object (or person). This also connects to the third part of your book on ethnography at Carnival in Trinidad and Tobago. There, the focus seems to move away from translating music into signed song and toward a more direct experience of music through fleeting vibration, touch, movement, and affect. You frame this partly in terms of epistemology, which seems to suggest that how we define certain forms of interaction as more direct, and others as “standing apart,” is itself grounded in culturally specific understandings.

This makes me curious about the role of modality here. Is modality as decisive as the formulation of distantism, with its critique of the dominance of sight and hearing, might seem to suggest?

I once met a young deaf-blind man at a disability studies forum in Taipei. When he introduced himself to me, he explained to me that he could not see sign language, so he didn’t think about learning it. I mentioned that tactile signing has been developing in the United States, but he did not seem especially interested. For him, it was more desirable to have hearing people speak into a microphone, have their speech converted into text through AI speech recognition, and then enlarge that text on his iPad screen so that he could still read it (also the way he received language from me).

In this case, he seemed to believe having our interaction mediated by AI speech recognition and a tablet interface is a more direct way of communication, compared to involving a third party human interpreter (it is also likely because he has never experienced tactile signing, so for him of course it is more distant). This makes me wonder how we can take seriously the problem of “standing apart” without assuming in advance that certain modalities are necessarily more direct, more intimate, or more connecting?

Kristin Snoddon: I agree there is a potential tension between the critique of distantism and that of autonomy in communication. The critique of distantism arises in the context of deafblind communicative practices, where there has been a movement to foreground direct experience and contact instead of trying to emulate normative communication. In this case, normative communication has often meant communication through a sign language interpreter because this is a normal practice in sighted deaf communities–many deafblind people are or have been part of deaf communities prior to losing their vision. The Protactile community in the USA arose in the context of deafblind community members having to talk with each other through interpreters and not being able to communicate directly. For direct communication with each other, they needed a language based on touch, which is Protactile. So I agree this is a culturally specific understanding of distantism that privileges tactile (and olfactory) modalities, including proprioception, over sight and hearing. Many social norms for appropriate behaviour and language needed to be overcome in order for this understanding to arise. 

But the point of anti-distantism arguments is to claim residence in the world as an autonomous being, despite these social norms that govern human behaviour and language. I advance this critique of distantism in my book when writing about deaf people’s direct experience of music at Trinidad Carnival instead of via a song signer or interpreter–the latter is also a logocentric orientation toward music and understanding compared to being immersed in the experience of Carnival. So I would argue that the young man you describe is acting in accord with an anti-distantist view that supports autonomy if he is choosing to communicate using speech-to-text technology. There is no right or wrong way to use language as long as it works for us. 

There is a social movement to share Protactile with deafblind community members and interpreters or co-navigators through training workshops because learning Protactile opens up communication for many people. I know that encountering signing deaf communities and learning sign language changed my entire life. However, there needs to be an opportunity and an incentive to learn a new language and modality for communication. 

Tsung-Lun Alan Wan: The final question — in the last part of your book, you discuss how the intersection of deafness and queer identity may further marginalize gay deaf people in Trinidad and Tobago, especially when hearing sign language interpreters may refuse to interpret LGBTQ+ content because of their homophobic beliefs. You also show how PT, a deaf Caribbean interpreter, intervenes in this situation and also does work translating LGBTQ+ identity terms for the local LGBTQ+ deaf community. I found this to be a powerful example of linguistic flourishing, one of the core concepts in your book. We know that, in neurodiversity advocacy, there is more and more discussion on flourishing in relation to individual well-being and the creation of conditions that allow neurodivergent people to live well. It is nice to see linguistic flourishing theorized from the perspective of deaf epistemology. Could you say more about how you understand linguistic flourishing in relation to “being understood”? What might this concept allow applied linguistics to see or ask differently, and how would you like the field to engage with it further?

Kristin Snoddon: I am glad that you recognized the presence of linguistic flourishing in this chapter through sign language practices related to Trinbagonian LGBTQI+ identities. In some ways, this chapter was the most difficult for me to write with respect to my positionality as someone who is an outsider to Caribbean and LGBTQI+ communities (not to mention deaf interpreter communities, since I am not a DI). The issues of positionality and difference are fundamentally related to understanding because there are central aspects of identity and experience that we can never understand firsthand if we do not share a particular social identity and lived experience with someone else. At the same time, I believe there is a common desire to be understood, including by people who are different from us, which may be felt more by those whose experiences are minoritized. This includes understanding our own experiences as part of a process of self-actualization.

Experiences of not being understood and of communication barriers are a central part of deaf lives. Because these experiences and barriers shape language practices, I would like the field of applied linguistics to engage with them further by exploring their impacts when there are sensory asymmetries. In the context of deaf epistemology, linguistic flourishing happens when there is an anticipation that what we are saying–in whatever form this takes–will be understood. In the chapter, PT describes learning a language to identify and express their own experiences as a queer person, and how this in turn opens up the possibility for new experiences and ways of building identity. But these processes rely on having access to alliances and coalitions with various kinds of people that can support flourishing. 

https://www.ucpress.edu/books/the-avatar-faculty/paper

Jie Wu: Your framework draws on anthropology, psychology, psychiatry, epidemiology, communication, and game studies. How do you navigate the tensions between these disciplines, especially given their different assumptions about mind, agency, and causality? Do you see your work as integrating these fields, or more as translating between them?

Jeffrey Snodgrass: Psychologists focus on individual mental structures and processes such as attention, cognition, emotion, motivation, and personality. Anthropologists highlight the importance of culture, in the sense of socially shared and learned knowledge and practice. As a psychological anthropologist, I integrate perspectives from each of these fields to emphasize how individual minds can be more fully understood by considering their social and cultural context. So, for example, I focus in the book on the underlying cognitive capacity to temporarily visualize and embody an alternative possible self (Markus & Nurius, 1986) such as a spirit or deity (in a religious setting) or a character (in gaming contexts). However, I show how specific local cultural traditions sanction and thus shape how spirit mediums and role-players alike enact and experience these alternate and even ideal secondary selves. In these terms, I highlight the human capacity to cultivate and identify with alternative vehicles or vessels for the self that come to feel real—what I term an avatar faculty—while also showing the quite variable forms those secondary selves can take. This approach has been referred to as universalism without uniformitarianism (Cassaniti & Menon, 2017). I aim to integrate these disciplinary approaches to reveal mental and behavioral processes that are at once individual and sociocultural rather than simply translating between or across the perspectives of psychology and anthropology.

Further, I show in the book how by uniting with an avatar—that imagined vehicle that gives form to one’s secondary self—one can inhabit alternate realities and accomplish new kinds of things in ways that can be psychosocially beneficial. Thus, coming to experience oneself as a deity, and having others accept that identity as valid, can provide the possessed with new sources of social belonging and status. In the central case I describe in the book, that of Bedami of the Bhat community, this helps her to mend fractures she experienced with other members in her group, helping to re-integrate her and her husband with her natal family. That in turn helped Bedami personally, alleviating sources of stress and conflict in her life, which contributed to her overall health and well-being. For gamers, skillfully enacting an avatar identity—as a warrior, a healer, a hero—can also provide players with an elevated secondary identity and status, which, as with Bedami Bhat, could spill out into the actual world. I learned that players could come to understand themselves differently in their offline lives, for example, as more able to enact and complete projects that were important to them. In theoretical terms, their sense of self-efficacy or agency had been enhanced, which in turn could strengthen their overall sense of identity and well-being.

These additional examples demonstrate the implications this research has for health fields such as clinical psychology, psychiatry, and epidemiology and for religious and games studies. My ability to make potentially novel contributions to these fields again emerges from my integrative psychological anthropological approach. I would add that a psychologist might use a term like self-efficacy to discuss the way that internal and somewhat enduring self-representations can shape one’s capacity to make choices and act independently, while an anthropologist would more likely frame such issues with the term agency or even moral agency to emphasize how social contexts propel individuals to pursue actions that are personally meaningful and culturally valued. So, there is undoubtedly a degree of translation between these fields’ terminologies in the book, and that might help readers from different disciplines avoid talking past each other. Nonetheless, even here, my primary aim remains integrative, in the sense that I want to illuminate how individual choices, actions, and well-being are constrained both by inner self-concepts and external sociocultural contexts. Avatars illustrate such hybrid psychosocial processes in the way they allow us to project an oftentimes more idealized internal vision or concept of ourselves into external forms—spirits, characters—that are shaped and constrained by culture-specific expectations and behavioral scripts. Overall, I develop in the book a psychological anthropological framework that is ideally better able to address these and other behavioral and health questions as compared to any single disciplinary approach.

Jie Wu: You propose an avatar faculty, a general human capacity to identify with or project consciousness into alternative self-objects, expressed across culturally diverse practices such as spirit possession, shamanic trance, and immersive digital gaming. While these phenomena differ significantly in context and interpretation, you argue they share a common underlying structure involving absorption, dissociation, and identity transfer. What is gained analytically or epistemically by framing these as expressions of a universal capacity, rather than treating them as culturally specific but only loosely comparable practices?

Jeffrey Snodgrass: The book’s central comparison is between what we might call sacred role-play of Rajasthani spirit mediums and secular role-play as we might find in digital or tabletop role-playing games. Both allow for the temporary transformation of players into culturally sanctioned identities—spirits or characters—who confront and resolve challenges, thus providing rehearsal spaces for meaning making, identity formation, and the transmission of culturally scripted responses to adversity into everyday life. However, as I show extensively in the book, the specific transformations that occur are constrained and shaped by cultural expectations and scripts that in the end, yes, mean that a spirit medium’s compared to a gamer’s avatar transformation can look quite different (for my team’s latest on this line of thinking, see Snodgrass et al., 2026).

As alluded to above in my response to your first question, and as echoed here, universal does not mean uniform or completely the same. Rather, developing the idea of an avatar faculty implies there are features that are shared across contexts that can be productively compared to each other. The pragmatist in me asks: Is this abstraction useful or productive in some way?

So, yes, the notion that there is an avatar faculty is an abstraction, which identifies a parallel between spirit possession and gaming. But that’s the role of theory and analysis, as I understand it. In this case, I hope the abstraction is a useful one, which might help readers see these and other phenomena in new and even parallel ways.

In fact, one aim of the book is to develop avatar as an analytical categorythat highlights how a general human capacity to cultivate alternative representations of the self (avatars) can help religiously minded persons and gamers alike to enact the good life. This highlights how non-western categories of thought can usefully ground analysis outside of their original ethnographic and historical contexts.

This is to say that one response to your question would be to turn it back on you and ask: Why resist using avatar in this abstract analytical manner, when we (as psychologists or anthropologists) might commonly employ other abstract terms such as consciousness, identity, mind, self-efficacy, agency, community, culture, power, religion, ritual, trance, play, or games?

Yes, we can—and many have—similarly critiqued each of these terms as well. Yet, these ideas still can prove themselves to be analytically useful, and I would hope this might also be the case with my use of avatar. That is, my analysis might encourage readers to think in new ways about their relationships to secondary selves or identities in their own lives, along with the benefits they might enjoy from enacting those alternate identities.

Jie Wu: You describe a shift from your earlier ethnographic work in Rajasthan, conducted largely as a solo researcher, to later work on World of Warcraft carried out collaboratively with students and co-researchers. How did this transition shape your research design, particularly in terms of data collection, participant observation, and interpretation?

You also mention the Ethnographic Teaching and Research Laboratory (ERTL), where students were trained to conduct repeated fieldwork in gaming environments over multiple semesters. How did this structured training model affect the consistency and comparability of data across different student cohorts, and how did you maintain coherence in multi-researcher ethnography?

Jeffrey Snodgrass: Let me address these questions by telling you how the book’s research came about.

I have a longstanding interest in the power of stories, for example, beginning most fully with my dissertation research on the Rajasthani Bhat community, who were professional poets, puppeteers, and storytellers (Snodgrass, 2006). The seed for this book was planted when as a new professor I was brainstorming creative ways to teach anthropological research methods to my students. I came up with the idea of leading a research team inside World of Warcraft, an online game that some in my tabletop roleplaying group were playing at the time. The idea was that we would conduct field observations and interviews, interacting with other players’ characters or avatars, inside this game-world.

I thought of games like World of Warcraft as dynamic, living stories, where players actively take on character roles rather than just reading about or viewing them as one might in a novel or film. In fact, that’s in part how I thought about spirit possession, something I had earlier studied (and continue to study) in India. In part because of my relation to the Bhat community, I thought of spirit possession as performances of a kind, and stories, where the possessed would strongly identify with gods and spirits and then act out those identifications in ritual contexts.

The deeper I delved, the more I became interested in the relationships and exchanges a person might have with such secondary (performative) selves. In spirit possession, the possessed person comes to think of themselves as the avatar or vehicle-vessel of some spiritual entity. But still the god or spirit is a second self of a kind. In games like World of Warcraft, the character or avatar is the vehicle or vessel of the player’s consciousness. The player projects themselves into the character.

So, to answer your questions more directly, bringing student collaborators into the research process and developing my lab changed how I thought about research. The heart of my research remains ethnographic, relying on participant-observation and interviews. That’s where I continue to make big discoveries and have my “aha” moments, like seeing health and wellbeing parallels between spirit possession and gaming.

Those discoveries follow what the American pragmatist philosopher CS Peirce referred to as a logic of abductive inference: When encountering perplexing new observations, what concept might we posit to explain those phenomena or data? In my case, I thought that enhanced social status or prestige helped explain the health and wellbeing benefits of identifying with avatars in both ritual and gaming contexts (for more on abductive logic, see Snodgrass, Dengah II, et al., 2024; Snodgrass, Lacy, Dengah II, et al., 2024).

To my mind, there is no better mode than ethnography to discover new things about the world. But I am now more committed to the idea that we anthropologists, who are so keen to discover things about the world via our largely qualitative methods, should and can also put our ideas at risk and attempt to further confirm or even falsify them (in the language of philosopher of science Karl Popper (2005)) with alternate modes of inquiry. Quantifiable field survey results, which are presented in greater detail in the book’s appendices, can prove helpful here. Ethnographically sensitive counting helps one clarify the wider distribution within a group of a certain pattern like a relationship between gaming immersion and stress relief. One can also check for whom, and with what qualifications those patterns hold, again using quantitative analyses that include covariates like gender, socioeconomic status, and age. These larger patterns and distributions can be very difficult to detect via qualitative methods alone.

This is why I follow a mixed qualitative and quantitative approach to ethnographic analysis (Snodgrass, Lacy, Wutich, et al., 2024). Approaching a phenomenon through various analytical avenues increases my confidence in a particular finding. Yes, there is the risk of loss of coherence, as you allude to. However, careful documentation of the relevant cultural contexts associated with each dataset helps my various teams avoid that. So, it is ultimately the ethnographer’s sensitivity to context that helps preserve the integrity of the analysis, in a mode of inquiry we might call ethnographic science (Aunger, 2003).

References

Aunger, R. (2003). Reflexive ethnographic science. Walnut Creek. CA: AltaMira Press.

Cassaniti, J. L., & Menon, U. (2017). Universalism without Uniformity: Explorations in Mind and Culture. University of Chicago Press.

Markus, H., & Nurius, P. (1986). Possible selves. American Psychologist, 41(9), 954.

Popper, K. (2005). The logic of scientific discovery. Routledge.

Snodgrass, J. G. (2006). Casting kings: Bards and Indian modernity. Oxford University Press.

Snodgrass, J. G., Dengah II, H. J. F., Sagstetter, S. I., & Zhao, K. X. (2024). Causal inference in ethnographic research: Refining explanations with abductive logic, strength of evidence assessments, and graphical models. PLOS ONE, 19(5), e0302857.

Snodgrass, J. G., Lacy, M. G., Dengah II, H. J. F., Zhao, K. X., & Sagstetter, S. I. (2024). Sharpening causal reasoning in applied ethnographic research. Human Organization, 83(4), 389–400. https://doi.org/10.1080/00187259.2024.2412986

Snodgrass, J. G., Lacy, M. G., Wutich, A., Bernard, H. R., Oths, K. S., Beresford, M., Bendeck, S., Branstrator, J. R., Dengah II, H. J. F., Nelson, R. G., Ruth, A., Sagstetter, S. I., SturtzSreetharan, C., & Zhao, K. X. (2024). Deep hanging out, mixed methods toolkit, or something else? Current ethnographic practices in US anthropology. Annals of Anthropological Practice, 48(1), 20–35. https://doi.org/10.1111/napa.12213

Snodgrass, J. G., Sagstetter, S. I., Chakrabarti, C., Branstrator, J. R., Zhao, K. X., Lacy, M. G., DengahII, H. J. F., Wagner, A., Giardina, A., & Billieux, J. (2026). Tabletop Role-Playing Games as Drama Therapy in the Wild: Developing Personal Bonds with Characters Improves Players’ Self-Concepts. Transcultural Psychiatry, 13634615261418363. https://doi.org/10.1177/13634615261418363