from Queens College in 1945,[3] she began graduate studies at Northwestern University, working there under Melville J. Herskovits and Alfred Irving Hallowell.
In Switzerland, Leopold and Charlotte settled in Zurich, while Erika attended a boarding school in the Rhone Valley[7] The following year the family obtained visas to emigrate to the United States and arrived in New York City in October, 1939.
[1] From 1963 to 1968 Bourguignon directed the “Cross-Cultural Study of Dissociational States.” She published the report of the outcome of this project in 1973, in Religion, Altered States of Consciousness, and Social Change.
From 1970 through 1990 much of Bourguignon's academic work sprang from her fieldwork in Haiti, where her primary interest had been possession trance, a culturally sanctioned part of the Haitian Vodou religion.
Altered states of consciousness unsanctioned by the societies in which they are found are often (but not always) considered mental illness, and Bourguignon was interested in these as well, and thus in cross-cultural psychiatry.
During her academic career Bourguignon would write hundreds of articles, reviews, and books including about “religious syncretism among new world negroes” (1967), and “religion and justice in Haitian vodoun” (1985).
In addition to several shows in Columbus and other Ohio locations she exhibited his work in galleries in New York City, Sedona, Arizona, and Santa Fe, New Mexico.
In addition to being considered the foremost anthropological authority on altered states of consciousness, Bourguignon was known "above all for her pioneering work on the relationship of religious trance to gender roles and social change.