What Spirit Possession Can Teach Us About Ethics, Philosophy, and Personhood

Concepts and Persons book cover

One day in 2015, Professor Michael Lambek was sitting on a beach on the island of Mayotte, talking to a friend, when a young man whom he hadn’t met before came up and began speaking to him in English.

The young man who spoke to Prof. Lambek was a university graduate with a liking for Voltaire and someone who had also become a very devout Muslim.

“He said to me that he wished he had time to write his thesis,” remembers Prof. Lambek, “which was something I could relate to.” But that wasn’t his main problem. The young man explained that he was being troubled by spirits.

“His mother was a very widely known practitioner of spirit possession and was also reputed to use the spirits to practice sorcery against other people,” says Prof. Lambek. “She died very suddenly. He loved his mother, and was very attached to her, but he panicked because he thought she was going to hell, and it was his fault. Therefore, he had real troubles.”

Since 1975, Prof. Lambek had been visiting Mayotte and Madagascar to research the cultural phenomenon of spirit possession. Mayotte is an island in the Indian Ocean, between Madagascar and the African coast, a former colony that has recently become a département of France.

“In spirit possession people speak in more than one voice, they speak as a spirit and they speak as themselves, and that raises all kinds of interesting questions about voice and agency, what we mean by the self, and how we think about mind and body,” says Prof. Lambek.

The spirits also have their own clothes – worn by the medium when they speak with the voice of the spirit. After his mother died, the young man burned these clothes, alongside the money she had made from the practice. But soon he began to have trouble sleeping, and came to believe the spirits were punishing him for breaking his mother’s obligation to them.

“I argue that his problem concerned not only his relations with his mother but his relationship with the concepts pertaining to spirits,” says Lambek. “There are two concepts of spirits in Islam, djinn and shaitan, shaitan providing a concept of anonymous and unambiguously evil beings or being, and djinn as personalized amoral (neither fully moral nor immoral) creatures created by god. He was collapsing those two concepts into one, considering spirits entirely evil, to be expunged and expelled. So, I suggest he made what philosophers call a category mistake, he took these two concepts, which are actually different logical types, and collapsed them into one, losing the concept of the djinn. There was a conceptual problem as well as a personal problem.”

This story became the linchpin of his recent book Concepts and Persons, based on his Tanner Lecture of the same name. The Tanner Lecture, one of the most prestigious occasions in the humanities, was delivered at the invitation of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Michigan in 2019. In the book, Prof. Lambek examines the intersection of philosophy with anthropology as a means of exploring the moral basis of human action.

While it is sometimes said that philosophers deal with concepts, while anthropologists deal with persons, in fact, both fields address both, says Prof. Lambek. “Moreover, we can show how in ordinary life the ways in which we relate to our concepts can be actually quite similar in some respects to the ways in which we relate with one another as persons. When it comes to our relations with spirits, deities or demons—which we can call more broadly meta-persons—it is evident that they are simultaneously persons and concepts. For many Christians God—spelled with a capital G—is a person. But god without a capital G is equally a concept. When anthropologists explore how people relate in their everyday lives with these powerful non-human beings, we can see how they shift between thinking of them conceptually and thinking of them personally.”

Furthermore, Lambek argues, our deployment of concepts can be described with reference to the ethical. “When we use concepts,” he says, “we are exercising our judgement, because there are no concepts to match perfectly onto reality. Concepts don’t fit together neatly with one another. So that, similar to the way in which we exercise our judgement about how to act in relation to other people, so we exercise judgement in terms of which concepts we use to describe our actions, and their actions, and so on. There is really no rigid distinction in that sense between reasoning and ethics.”

With a Foreword by philosopher Elizabeth Anderson, Concepts and Persons includes interchanges with three distinguished commentators, Jonathan Lear, Sherry Ortner, and Joel Robbins that address how we conduct our lives and how we think and write about the lives and thought of others.

Concepts and Persons is available now from University of Toronto Press.