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JOURNAL OF NEAR-DEATH STUDIES
ertheless, as I understand it, this truly was a pioneering venture, and
in that spirit I found this paper stimulating of comments, suggestions,
and questions.
The article contained a number of interrelated assumptions that in
the life after life there would be a sociocultural order/ordering that
could be discussed by theory and/or concepts currently in vogue in our
social sciences. I would prefer to raise these as questions rather than
assumptions. One NDEr, reflecting upon her experience and its rela-
tionship to organized religion, said, "From my brief encounter, I got
the idea that being one with God is something that can be done without
rules" (Morse and Perry, 1990, pp. 145-146).
The nine Mormons Lundahl investigated apparently were the only
ones to observe social organization of the genre discussed by Kellehear.
Most NDErs, many of whom have had very deep experiences, reported
no sociological information. I do not believe in playing the numbers
game in research, but I think it is reasonable to ask if it is possible that
the transcendent society was not a society, at least as we commonly
know it, with no social organization, no norms, no institutions.
Accepting the assumption that there is some sort of sociocultural
ordering, Kellehear used an amorphous structural-functional frame-
work defined neither etically nor emically. He may have been reluc-
tant to impose etic definitions, which stance I would applaud; but then
he should have supplied direct quotes, "thick description," from infor-
mants so that grounded conceptualizations could have emerged. He did
not do that either, and we are left in confusion: what is a society? what
is meant by "transcendent"? what is the difference between society and
culture, and what are values and their relationship to social action?
and what is meant by social organization and process?
It might be helpful to discuss the transcendent society in terms of
sociocultural theory and concepts that relate more to right-brain think-
ing, since it has been proposed that NDEs are located in that area of
the brain and are anatomically associated with our unconscious de-
sires and ability to dream (Morse and Perry, 1990). The work of British
social anthropologist Victor W. Turner contained such theory and
concepts, which enable us to focus on anti-structural and processual
elements in sociocultural systems. By way of illustration, Turner de-
scribed the concept of communitas:
The bonds of communitas are anti-structural in the sense that they
are undifferentiated, equalitarian, direct, extant, nonrational, exis-
tential, I-thou (in Feuerbach's and Buber's sense) relationships. Com-
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