Abstract
The increasing recognition of indigenous perspectives regarding religious practices such as shamanism and spirit possession offers a welcome respite from the excesses of scientific skepticism. Anthropologists may, however, become dogmatic in the opposite direction through accepting and even promoting at face value the officially presented "emic" view. At times, ritual practitioners themselves accuse one another of "faked possession" or exhibit other indications of a complex "native psychology." The Afro‐Brazilian possession rituals I have studied suggest the workings of a dynamic process of "negotiated reality." Must researchers with a genuine respect for the spirit world therefore eschew any psychocultural, sociological, or other looking‐in‐from‐the‐outside (etic) forms of inquiry? The ethnographic study of religions, like these spiritual traditions themselves, calls for the practice of a "delicate science" of anthropological exploration.