A Dominican Republic Vodou priest, followed from childhood to early adulthood, learned to control and adapt dissociative manifestations into a professional role, transitioning from a child with many problems. A multidisciplinary, developmental approach integrating ethnographic observation and psychological constructs explains how originally dysfunctional expressions of spirit possession became personally and socially beneficial. The community's shifting attitudes toward him are also accounted for by specific psychological and cultural conditions.
The self is not entirely socially constituted or distributed, despite claims from cognitive science, anthropology, and cultural psychology. While older scholarship contrasted a Western individual self with non-Western sociocentric conceptions, newer views treat subjectivity as a fluid, relational construct shaped by power structures. The author argues these accounts remain too crude, failing to distinguish different dimensions of selfhood. This leads to a radical social constructivism that cannot adequately account for first-person experience or the diversity of actual communal life.