Reviewing anthropological analyses of possession forms cross-culturally and drawing from recent advances in cognitive psychology, this paper attempts to explain recurrent features of spirit possession. Spirit possession concepts fall into broadly two varieties: one that entails the transformation or replacement of identity (executive possession) and one that envisages possessing spirits as (the...

This paper proposes two hypotheses on the publicity requirement and the limitations of possession to provide information for legal titling. It then tests these hypotheses by examining how legal systems deal with possession in movable and immovable property, and comparing actual and documentary possession. It concludes that exercise of possession is effective as a titling mechanism when it is ob...

Legislative regulation, establishing the forms of relations between persons, in case non-compliance with proposed model behavior, provides for either application sanctions or qualification actual accordance established legal forms. In latter case, signs that may have nothing to do reality are often imputed such relationships. Thus, example, author proposes consider a group persons as collective...

universal across cultures and is documented in many ethnographic studies. Khalifa &Hardie assert that possession states can be understood only through a combination of biological, anthropological, sociological, psychopathological and experimental perspectives. Psychiatrist and anthropologist Roland Littlewood sees possession as the belief that an individual has been entered by an alien spirit o...

BACKGROUND As the "war on drugs" enters the latter half of its third decade since being forged into the American lexicon by President Ronald Reagan, the public has grown more skeptical of the current strategy and has proven to be receptive to a broader consideration of alternatives to incarceration. This has been the case most notably with marijuana offenses, where the policy discussion has shi...

Abstract This paper provides the first description of possessive system in Patani, a South Halmahera-West New Guinea language (Austronesian). Possession Patani involves interplay several parameters. Syntactically, there are two broad constructions: direct, and indirect. Morphologically, both constructions make use pronominal proclitics suffixes which express person number possessor. In direct c...