Abstract

This article was presented as the Society for the Anthropology of Consciousness Distinguished Lecture, 19 November 2010, New Orleans. It highlights four decades of changes in the anthropology of consciousness, US society, and the author's views of “religion.” It also interrogates the shifting ethics of writing about friends (or about anyone else) and the special responsibilities of ethnographers. It ends with a consideration of the challenge of writing about people in possession, a special case of the problematic representation of “native voices.”