Ritual Transformations of Consciousness: Second Annual cConference of the Black Sacred Arts Series
The Yale Institute of Sacred Music is proud to present its second annual conference on the theme of Ritual Transformations of Consciousness. Ritual transformations of consciousness (RTC)—often referred to in the literature as spirit possession, mediumship, more rarely shamanism; more broadly as trance, ecstasy, and altered states of consciousness—have, when addressed as elements of African and African Diasporic religions, long been the racialized domain of the Other; evolutionarily prior, a site of precarity or state of incompleteness for a developing rationality.