Spirit possession has largely been interpreted by scholars as a phenomenon that impacts "traditional people," the poor, the uneducated, and women. The conjunction of spirit possession with oppressed or vulnerable persons has produced theories that Susan Starr Sered has called "deprivation theories" (1994, pp. 190–191) that begin with the assumption that possessions are abnormal behaviors and result from social, physical, and mental deprivations. From a feminist perspective, deprivation theories are suspect, and a revaluation of spirit possession suggests that: (1) the cross-cultural and transhistorical prevalence of accounts of spirit possession present a familiar rather than an exotic model of religious subjectivity to most human communities across the broadest spectrum of history; (2) the capacity to be possessed by an ancestor, deity, or spirit is best approached, as Sered and Janice Boddy (1989) argue, as an ability, like musical or athletic ability, although in the case of spirit possession it...