this anthropological study examines dream, visionary, and hallucinatory phenomena and their role in cultural understandings of personhood and identify among lower and working class Puerto Ricans in a U.S. inner-city context. Combining ethnographic methods and structured psychiatric questionnaires, the study will describe how diverse experiences of remarkable mental, emotional, and somatic imagery influence personal and social identity. In phase I, a community-level, ethnographic description of an inner- city, Puerto Rican Barrio will combine systematic interviewing and participant observation with data from the US Census and local health statistics. Interviews will focus on interpersonal relations and on the experience and sharing of diverse psychological and spiritual phenomena including emotions, memories, dreams, and visions. This ethnopsychological ethnography will provide context for a more focused examination of the experience and meaning of visions. In phase II, 50-60 individuals willing to discuss and evaluate their own and others~ dreams, visions, and hallucinations will be interviewed. In addition, structured psychiatric questionnaires probing diagnoses and symptoms will be administered. As a meaning centered description of personhood and visionary experience among inner-city Puerto Ricans, the study will provide a culturally valid basis for evaluating and comparing the folk-spiritual and professional-psychiatric significance of visionary experience.
| Jacobson Jr, C Jeffrey (2009) The nightmares of Puerto Ricans: an embodied 'altered states of consciousness' perspective. Cult Med Psychiatry 33:266-89 |
