David T. Schmit. Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, Vol. 46, No. 1, (2010), pp. 1-26.
Abstract
Contemporary interest in Asian meditation raises questions about when westerners began investigating these practices. A synopsis of western-originating scientific meditation research is followed by a brief introduction to mesmerism. Next, the unappreciated ways the mesmerists explored Oriental mind powers is recounted. How the mesmerists’ cultural positioning, philosophy, and interest in mind-body practices facilitated their inquiries of Oriental medicine and Hindu contemplative practices is explored followed by a consideration of why these investigations were unique for the era. The way this work subverted Western cultural imperialism is examined. A consideration of the historical continuities and discontinuities between the mesmerists’ inquiries and twentieth-century meditation research concludes the article.
Additional Commentary:
When mesmerism was in its heyday in the 1840s, disbelievers in its power called the mesmeric trance artificial, as if it was contrived or even fake. This view continues today within hypnosis, where in some camps, the hypnotic trance is considered an artificial state. It’s not natural, these disbelievers claim, it is made up in some way, a contrivance. Nineteenth-century mesmerists – and later many hypnotists – rejected this idea, arguing instead, that the trance is a naturalistic state, proof of which can be found in the fact that it appears among many people around the globe where it performs similar religious and healing functions. Early work by anthropologists on religio-medical states and unusual trances amongst shamans and healers of different cultures confirmed how widespread it truly is. (Some even argue that the capacity to be entranced – mesmerized or hypnotized – exists among some animals, further underscoring its naturalistic character).
This article documents how mesmerists looked outside Europe and the U.S to see if something like their practice and the unusual states they were discovering could be found amongst peoples of other cultures. When they found it in wide geographic distribution – or found states of mind very similar to it – it helped give their practice its bona fides. These findings indicated that the capacity to be mesmerized was not artificial, it was actually innate, grounded in some unknown way in human nature. That was especially the case for the people of India who understood several of its properties and who mined these mind powers for hundreds of years through their yoga and contemplative practices. A side benefit of this 18th and 19th century cross-cultural incursion by westerners – and that’s what they were, replete with colonial blind spots and other forms of western entitlement and exploitation – was to spark a vision that cultural others were equals of sort. Select mesmerists came to understand that due to these shared interests in unusual states, that their Asian “others” deserved mutual respect in ways that subverted the prevailing western racism and ethnocentrism of the day.
