Erika Bourguignon (1924-2015), professor emerita of anthropology, was a founding member of Ohio State’s Department of Anthropology and taught the first course at Ohio State on the anthropology of women. She also was the first woman to chair a department in Ohio State’s College of Social and Behavioral Sciences.
She was a pioneer in the field of psychological anthropology and was at one time the preeminent authority on altered states of consciousness and spirit possession. Unusual for its time, she performed a landmark study that analyzed spirit possessions and trance states in a cross-cultural sample of 400 societies. Her ethnographic work in Haiti changed the common perception of trance states as bizarre symptoms of psychological illness, showing that they were normative in certain cultural contexts.
During Bourguignon’s career, she published seven books and more than eighty professional articles.