Differing Adaptive Roles of PSI in Primitive and Nonprimitive Societies*

The objective of psi in primitive societies, however much the styles of its experience and use may vary between different ones, is to secure information and to gain control over external events. This is accomplished through divination in dream, vision or trance, and through beneficent or maleficent manipulation of people, animals, crops, materials, etc., by the powers of the mind. To the primitive such information getting and such manipulations are not magical in the sense that what is aimed at—and allegedly accomplished on occasion (Hallowell, 1942)—is apart from the natural order of things. This order is itself what we would call magical in that the categories of time, space, and causality that constitute the framework of the primitive's experience of reality are far less rigid, far more infused with human thought and will, than the way in which these categories are envisaged and experienced in nonprimitive societies.1 To the primitive, thus, behaviors based upon the power of thought and will to accomplish things are reality oriented. He simply makes use of processes considered to be inherent in the social order and the universe.

In today's highly developed Western societies, by contrast, persons believing in, or engaging in practices based upon, the efficacy of thought and volition that the primitive takes for granted are considered deviant. This includes anthropologists who give credence to the possible reality basis of such beliefs and practices. Depending on the type and extent of these deviant activities, moreover, various kinds of sanctions are brought to bear on these persons, from social and academic