The Familial Occult: Explorations at the Margins of Critical Autoethnography 9781805391760

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THE FAMILIAL OCCULT

EASA Series Published in Association with the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) Series Editors: Jelena Tošić, University of St. Gallen Sabine Strasser, University of Bern Annika Lems, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle Social anthropology in Europe is growing, and the variety of work being done is expanding. This series is intended to present the best of the work produced by members of the EASA, both in monographs and in edited collections. The studies in this series describe societies, processes, and institutions around the world and are intended for both scholarly and student readership.

Recent volumes: 47. THE FAMILIAL OCCULT Explorations at the Margins of Critical Autoethnography Edited by Alexandra Coţofană

42. ETHNOGRAPHIES OF POWER A Political Anthropology of Energy Edited by Tristan Loloum, Simone Abram, and Nathalie Ortar

46. AN ANTHROPOLOGY OF DISAPPEARANCE Politics, Intimacies and Alternative Ways of Knowing Edited by Laura Huttunen and Gerhild Perl

41. EMBODYING BORDERS A Migrant’s Right to Health, Universal Rights and Local Policies Edited by Laura Ferrero, Chiara Quagliariello and Ana Cristina Vargas

45. ETHNOGRAPHIES OF DESERVINGNESS Unpacking Ideologies of Distribution and Inequality Edited by Jelena Tošic´ and Andreas Streinzer 44. OTHER ARGONAUTS Ethnographers Before Malinowski Edited by Frederico Delgado Rosa and Han F. Vermeulen 43. TRACING SLAVERY The Politics of Atlantic Memory in The Netherlands Markus Balkenhol

40. THE SEA COMMANDS Community and Perception of Environment in a Portuguese Fishing Village Paulo Mendes 39. CAN ACADEMICS CHANGE THE WORLD? An Israeli Anthropologist’s Testimony on the Rise and Fall of a Protest Movement on Campus Moshe Shokeid 38. INSTITUTIONALISED DREAMS The Art of Managing Foreign Aid Elz˙bieta Dra˛z˙kiewicz

For a full volume listing, please see the series page on our website: https://www.berghahnbooks.com/series/easa

The Familial Occult Explorations at the Margins of Critical Autoethnography

Edited by Alexandra Coţofană with assistance by James M. Nyce

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

First published in 2024 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2024 Alexandra Coţofană All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Cotofana, Alexandra, editor. Title: The familial occult : explorations at the margins of critical autoethnography / edited by Alexandra Coțofană. Description: New York : Berghahn Books, 2024. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023021766 (print) | LCCN 2023021767 (ebook) | ISBN 9781805391753 (hardback) | ISBN 9781805391760 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Occultism. | Ethnology—Methodology. Classification: LCC BF1999 .F246 2024 (print) | LCC BF1999 (ebook) | DDC 130.72—dc23/eng/20230802 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023021766 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023021767

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-80539-175-3 hardback ISBN 978-1-80539-389-4 epub ISBN 978-1-80539-176-0 web pdf https://doi.org/10.3167/9781805391753

Contents

List of Figures Introduction. “How Does That Make You Feel?” Writing about the Familial Occult as Therapy Alexandra Coțofană

vii

1

Chapter 1. A Chinese American Religious Healer: Toward Filial Ethnography Kin Cheung

17

Chapter 2. I Am My Mother’s Son: Revelations of the Divine Earl Clarence L. Jimenez

45

Chapter 3. Of Bibles and Broads: The Familial Occult as Academic Lens Alexandra Coțofană

62

Chapter 4. Facing My Genies: A Commute between Self, Familial Spirits, and Anthropology Kamal Feriali

84

Chapter 5. On Familial Occultism James M. Nyce Chapter 6. The Familial Occult in Yakutia: Changeling Children and Tricking Demons Natalya Khokholova

114

129

vi ◆ Contents

Chapter 7. Can Ethnography of the Occult Be Transformed into Occult Ethnography? Contextualizing a Local Religious Practice in Abkhazia Rita Kuznetsova, Igor Kuznetsov Chapter 8. “My Father Was a Reader”: Practices of Folk Medicine in Northern Sweden Annelie Sjölander-Lindqvist and Johan Wedel

152

173

Afterword James M. Nyce

191

Index

196

Illustrations

Figures 1.1

My presentation on my father at Drake University on 25 October 2018. Credit: Leah Kalmanson.

27

My parents in attendance during this presentation. Credit: Leah Kalmanson.

28

My father gave qigong treatment to an audience member after my presentation. Personal archive of Kin Cheung.

29

My father’s altar in his New Jersey home. Personal archive of Kin Cheung.

31

Bușteni seen from the Caraiman Cross in the Bucegi Mountains, with the Baiu Mountains behind it. Personal archive of Alexandra Coțofană.

63

3.2. and 3.3 Main road in Bușteni (left) and railway (right), photographed from my family’s home, looking toward the dreaded downtown, 1 November 2020. Personal archive.

65

1.2 1.3

1.4 3.1

3.4

My twin sister and I as infants (ca. 1988). Personal archive of Alexandra Coțofană.

75

viii ◆ Illustrations

3.5

3.6

My mother waving a few years before meeting my dad (ca. 1983). Personal archive of Alexandra Coțofană.

76

My grandmother, grandfather, and infant father (ca. 1950). Personal archive of Alexandra Coțofană.

79

Map 3.1

Map of Bușteni. © Open Street Maps.

64

Introduction “How Does That Make You Feel?” Writing about the Familial Occult as Therapy Alexandra Coțofană

Our process of cowriting this edited volume began in the fall of 2019. The chapters explore the authors’ experiences growing up in households where the consanguines practiced ritual magic or witchcraft, something that in this volume we call “the familial occult.” The development of this particular edited volume has been remarkably long compared to previous experiences we had, or to experiences that our peers in academia have shared with us. Several authors approached us with a desire to contribute to the volume, then withdrew within the next year. While it is not uncommon for potential authors to withdraw during the process of editing a book, it is important to discuss why this happened for the authors who wanted to write on the theme of the familial occult, and how the topic affected their emotional lives. Some of the authors were met with resistance from their family members, despite having previously shared their intention of analyzing this aspect of the family’s life in an academic context. Others realized the topic was too raw to write about. The authors who did make it into the volume had their own issues, too. Some lost the family members who tied them into the familial occult during the process of writing their chapters. Others found the process to be emotionally overwhelming. And still others, despite being wellpublished scholars, found it particularly difficult to treat this experience like any other academic article they have produced. Most notably, for almost all the authors in the book, this is the first time they have written about this topic. In a workshop we organized on

2 ◆ The Familial Occult

11 December 2020,1 the vast majority of scholars who lived with the familial occult admitted to feeling overwhelmed by the experience of writing about it for the first time. This is significant, considering there are several senior scholars among our authors, including an emeritus professor. This introduction explores themes that have emerged from the exchanges had in the making of this volume, as well as the current state of the literature. Furthermore, on matters of methodology, the introduction investigates the ways in which the chapters intersect with scholarship that is broadly understood as critical autoethnography. While our volume does not neatly fit the methods and logics of critical autoethnography, we have found most kinship with authors in this academic subfield. The introduction also includes a tribute to Anne Parsons, daughter of sociologist Talcott Parsons and an anthropologist working at the intersection of psychological anthropology and the occult. We find kinship with Parsons and her sense of outof-place-ness, and like her, we use academic tools to navigate difficult dynamics in our familial contexts. The tribute to Parsons is not just focused on introducing readers to her work but on analyzing the themes of the book through a psychoanalytical lens, which Parsons has extensively employed in her own work. As such, the subthemes of the introduction discuss writing about the familial occult as therapy, focus on themes of parent-child tensions present in all the book’s chapters, and use the chapter vignettes to highlight primary emotions—shame, fear, anger—all experienced by our authors when reflecting on the familial occult as a component of their academic and personal lives. One theme that emerged during the December 2020 workshop was our shared realization that we had not found our lived experience of being tied into the familial occult present anywhere in the academic literature. Instead, as scholars at different levels of seniority and from various ethnoreligious backgrounds, we found ourselves thinking with the work of scholars who did not grow up tied into the familial occult but chose to pursue apprenticeships in the occult away from home. Workshop participants noticed that there is a certain sequence that repeats itself in published work where authors have conducted ethnographies of the occult: such scholars begin fieldwork, usually in a cultural space away from and different than home, often marked by a colonial relationship (meaning a scholar institutionally based somewhere in the First World will travel to conduct research outside this First World). Sometimes before or during the encoun-

Introduction ◆ 3

ter with the natives, these scholars develop a curiosity for forms of occult practice (witchcraft, magic, divination, geomancy, foretelling, trances, etc.), and throughout their prolonged period of ethnographic observation, they seek (or encounter) a healer/divinator/witch with whom they spend longer and longer periods, often years, and become an apprentice.2 These scholars desire and seek this apprenticeship; the knowledge they gain furthers their understanding, research, and career; and— most importantly—they are able to return to a familial context devoid of the occult. This relationship is fraught with colonial dynamics and often marked by extractivism, in which those who grew up tied into the familial occult are treated as provincial, static (both in terms of their global mobility and in terms of their personal growth), and easy to exoticize. The scholar on the other hand, is painted in this dynamic as worldly, able to acquire knowledge from the most diverse cultural contexts, and mobile, both geographically and in his or her ability to grow. These are the obvious anticolonial critiques that can be brought to this model of doing scholarship, which are certainly worth mentioning but are not new. Less obvious perhaps is what happens when such scholars switch off the apprentice mode and return to their own familial context. The workshop attendants noted that the narratives told by scholars who write ethnographies of the occult from this perspective focus on the relationship of the apprentice-scholar to the shaman-teacher (often also referred to as an adoptive teacher-parent), but rarely have we found in this literature a reflection on the complexities that the shaman must navigate in being tied into their own familial occult. This is one gap that our volume attempts to fill: as scholars tied into the familial occult, there is no off button to push. The context of the family is always there, as older generations die and new generations take on a role in the practice.

Methodological Notes This edited volume is a collection of chapters from scholars in the social sciences and humanities who have experiences of the occult (witchcraft, ritual magic, divination, charms, conjuring of spirits, etc.) within their families, which is what we call the familial occult. The main question that the volume seeks to address is: How has the presence of the occult in one’s family life affected one’s epistemo-

4 ◆ The Familial Occult

logical and ontological worlds, as well as one’s identity as a scholar? We are less interested in issues of the occult’s “legitimacy,” which can divert attention away from the myriad ways the familial occult can shape hierarchy, power, and knowledge in scholarly practice and daily life. As we began the process of writing the chapters of this edited volume together, we found ourselves at a loss with regards to the scholarship we would be using, especially as this is a book about a perspective that is currently lacking in the literature. The scholars whose work we felt most connected to were critical autoethnographers, whose perspective is best crystalized below: Critical autoethnographers contest the possibility of achieving the objectivity and neutrality touted in most social science research, reclaiming perspective (what some might call “bias”) in order to identify and challenge oppressive cultural beliefs, norms, and practices. They use the subjective turn in ontology (how we understand/apprehend and experience “reality”) and epistemology (how we create knowledge) to argue that it is impossible to stand or act outside of world-building and meaningmaking processes. These researchers argue that we have a relational and ethical obligation to acknowledge our positions, views, and commitments in scholarship, claiming the language of “I” and “we” and “us” in their representations. (Adams, Jones, and Ellis 2021: 6)

This makes clear that autoethnography prefers the discomfort of revealed intimacy to the falsehood of objectivity. Assumptions of neutrality and objectivity are rooted in the colonial origins of ethnographic methods and have become increasingly problematic in the social sciences and humanities, as more and more researchers acknowledge the need to think with the researcher’s positionality. The Handbook of Autoethnography (2021), edited by Tony Adams, Stacy Jones, and Carolyn Ellis, elaborates on this perspective in which autoethnography rejects the objective “view from nowhere” and instead adopts a view in which personal experiences and perspectives are always present in social life. While some of the chapters in their book are situated at the intersection of memoir, anthropological narrative, and autoethnographic account, they all present personal and hidden aspects of everyday life with the familial occult that are often messy, traumatic, and challenging. As such, we see the chapters in the book using affect as an analytical tool, and through this, the book manages to explore, critique, and expand the relationship that the social sciences and the humanities have with the topic of the

Introduction ◆ 5

occult, revealing the concept of the familial occult, which has been, until now, obscured and left out of scholarship. During our workshop in December 2020 and in subsequent conversations, we have openly discussed matters of ethics and of writing these pieces with respect toward those involved in our storytelling. The work of all the authors who contributed to the manuscript is grounded in the principle of beneficence, with the focus of writing these chapters being not to harm but to heal (Tullis 2021). In all situations where one or several members of the family are or were practitioners of the occult, their role was known in the community, so the chapter did not reveal occulted information. Furthermore, all authors in the manuscript analyze their context of living within the familial occult responsibly and maturely. Where possible, authors have informed family members of their intentions and process. Many of the chapters in the edited volume are written about the relationship of the chapter’s author with a parent or grandparent, often dead, which simplifies issues of informed consent. Also, living family members and other participants are not named and, where possible, have been made aware of the nature of the manuscript. While the book can be considered at the margins of autoethnography, since it does not rely heavily on interviews (Paxton 2018), all the chapters in the book tick the three boxes of autoethnography: the auto, the ethno, and the graphy (Adams, Jones, and Ellis 2021): • Auto—the chapters usually center the personal experience of the authors, using memory work. The authors employ photos, diaries, meaningful objects, life stories, and interviews to analyze relevant experiences. This is done with the hope of challenging current practices and logics within the social sciences and the humanities with regard to how scholars have positioned themselves in relation to the occult. • Ethno—an autoethnographic project is meant to describe and even critique cultural beliefs and practices by doing fieldwork and using field notes, interviews, textual analysis, memory work, and archival material. Because the personal experiences of our authors are infused with cultural norms, the analytic rigor of their self-reflection is used to tease out culture from personal experience. • Graphy—the autoethnographer strives to responsibly represent the experiences and perspectives of those discussed in their project.

6 ◆ The Familial Occult

A Note on the Occult We broadly understand the occult as ritual attempts to affect the future by invoking the supernatural, which is usually frowned upon in several religious traditions, where fate is ordained by God and should not be tampered with in such a way (Gottlieb and Graham 2012). As the chapters reflect on diverse contexts and traditions, we use magic/occult/witchcraft/divination interchangeably throughout the introduction and conclusion, while the individual chapters provide context that is specific to each tradition. The book is less about debating the lines between magic, witchcraft, religion, the secular, and their intersections, as this work has been generously covered by anthropologists and religious studies scholars since the early work of E.E. Evans-Pritchard and Bronisław Malinowski (Jones 2017). Instead, we see the main role of the book as an exercise in thinking with the familial occult, and how this affects scholars and their analytical lens. Although we can all attest that writing on the topic has been an uncomfortable and painful academic exercise, we hope to plant a seed for a kind of anthropology of the personal that has the potential to start productive conversations in our fields and beyond. Witchcraft as a term is powerful, has destructive potential, and has fascinated anthropologists since the early days of the discipline. Most recently, it has been discussed as a force for modernity and globalization (Geschiere 1997; Federici 2008), but rarely is it discussed in the context of the family. We acknowledge Geshiere’s ethnographic account (2013), which contained themes reminiscent of those found in the familial occult. In it, the author analyzes stories of witchcraft performed by one close family member on another. Technically, what Geshiere calls here “the dark side of kinship” (1997) is the occult, and it is familial, or consanguine. Unlike what anthropology has traditionally painted as characteristic of the family and the home (see Marshall Sahlins’s understanding of the three concentric circles in his 1974 model of primitive exchange), the two are not always a space for trust and stability. Sometimes, familial intimacy sprouts from an obligation to keep secrets that are too big to share. Illustrative of this point is the fact that most of our authors’ chapters are the first time they have discussed these aspects of their familial lives, and the weight they have all felt in doing so. In the twenty-first century, the discourse of linear progress and singular modernity has not entirely gone away. The conceptual legacy of the occult relies on, and heavily reflects, Western categories. From postcolonial studies to critical intersectionality, academia is

Introduction ◆ 7

constantly faced with its own limitations in being truly critical of its lens. As a long-standing ubiquitous other to academia, the occult needs to be understood and employed as a conceptual tool that implies plurality, especially when thinking about ontology and epistemology. As such, academics do not only need to continue dialogue on important themes like variations in practice, colonial and postcolonial encounters, gender, and race, but they ought also to explore the many ways in which we have come to understand the occult as being, at the same time, integral to and marginalized in society. By employing critical theory and looking at familial history as a place for making and unmaking discourses of the occult, the edited volume invokes personal and family life as a space of knowledge-making. While much has been written on encountering the occult during fieldwork or becoming an apprentice in an occult practice, little has yet been published in the academic literature about growing up with the occult from a first-person perspective. This is in part because those tied into the familial occult have often been spoken for, in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s words (2010), by scholars who lacked this experience and whose translation of their experience often lacked essential details. By contrast, having a book written by scholars tied into the familial occult gives power to those traditionally exoticized by scholarship, and it recognizes the scholar as a humanized figure, who exists not solely in the service of idealized objectivity. Those with backgrounds in the familial occult often experience a series of conflicting relationships and different ways of interacting with binaries such as the subjective and objective, a powerful conceptual pair that still governs academic thinking. When the familial occult is delegitimized as a frame of reference for knowledge making, such binaries can remain both intact and unquestioned. This is because the literature on the occult is generally written by those living outside of its ontological world, that is, by those who have observed it from some distance rather than by those for whom the occult has always been part of daily domestic life. In this volume, we intend to follow the path of Spivak (2010) and Dipesh Chakrabarty (2000) by investigating the critical value of often excluded experiences of the familial occult. These experiences have the potential to challenge and expand understandings of the world by adding complexity to some of the standard binaries in anthropology, academia, and Western society at large. The occult is still one of the most important unvoiced cultural others of the West, so often spoken about, but rarely listened to. While experiences of gender, race, religion, nationhood, and their many intersections have found their

8 ◆ The Familial Occult

way into the academic literature, the occult has often only been given a space as it is understood by its academic outsiders. In the scholarship currently available on the topic, scholars have encountered the occult most often during their fieldwork, and it has been analyzed mainly through that angle. The lens offered by someone from another culture who has “become native” is of course very important. Yet, the question remains of what has been lost in the absence of an anthropology, autoethnography, or ethnography of the familial occult. What could we learn, and how could we rethink social science and what it defines as worthy of study, if we explored the stories of those born native, not just those who became native, in their interaction with the occult?

Anthropologists and Their Familial Troubles: Inescapability and the Occult While we may not find a lot of literature on the familial occult per se, we have found kin in Anne Parsons (1930–1964),3 who is best described as a clinical anthropologist. A trained ethnographer as well as a trained psychoanalyst, she dedicated her tragically short life to bridging the methods of the two fields. Although her career ended abruptly, we know she was interested in the familial and was curious about the similarities and differences between the ways in which the occult and mental disease are experienced. Her life was dominated by the theme of inescapability, which she often referred to in her work and in letters to family. What little we know of Parsons comes to us via a volume edited by her colleagues after her demise, Belief, Magic, and Anomie: Essays in Psychological Anthropology (1969), as well as from the biographical work done by Winifred Breines. Breines recovers Parson’s story by using letters that the scholar sent to her parents and to a few friends, as well as reports and diary pages. In these, Breines is able to show Parsons’s personal negotiations with the familial, especially the pressure of living up to her father’s academic legacy and the many social pressures of the 1950s. As a white Protestant woman, Parsons was considered deviant, faced backlash, and experienced social isolation because of her status as unmarried, childless, and interested in an academic career. She felt out of place in her professional life as well, as her attempts to combine anthropological fieldwork and psychoanalytical categories drew backlash from her clinician colleagues, and eventually the psychotherapy community, which ultimately led to her demise. Although

Introduction ◆ 9

not alone in her gendered and generational tragedy—as Sylvia Plath and Ann Sexton, for instance, also committed suicide—Parsons has been far less the subject of academic inquiry. Brilliant but struggling to find a permanent academic position (in part because of her interdisciplinarity), Parsons spent considerable intervals of her last few years of life as a patient in mental institutions,4 where she did clinical research on other patients and increasingly critiqued psychiatric methods, explaining her struggle as a misunderstood patient through her clinical training and understanding of the practice. During this time, she also became increasingly critical of the West and its ways of life. Parsons understood the logics of psychiatry to mimic Western society’s belief that it could smother and delay human instincts in order to turn them into Protestant work ethic later in life. Put another way, her anthropological sensitivities led her to define the techniques of therapists as cognitive colonialism over the emotional self of patients, instead of the former trying to become familiar with the cultural beliefs and understandings of the latter. Her fieldwork with southern Italians made her acutely aware of the cultural differences between the ways the two societies understand and deal with human emotions, and as a consequence she felt less and less at home in her native American East Coast. Most interesting to our volume is Parsons’ work with south Italian, specifically Neapolitan, families in Italy and Neapolitan immigrants to the US. She frequently drew parallels between them and American Protestants. Specifically, her examinations of Neapolitan schizophrenic women reflect extensively on concepts of culture and personality, as she maps out connections and differences between being women who are the victims of witchcraft and the feelings of persecution experienced by women suffering from paranoid psychotic episodes. Her keen interest in the differences between these two forms of ailment is notable, considering this made her simultaneously someone trained in the methods of psychoanalysis and someone who took the occult seriously, a rare combination in the 1950s. On the topic of the occult, the author’s analysis and her bifocal training are essential. Parsons urges that both psychotic delusions of persecution and beliefs in witchcraft should be taken seriously by the researcher, as important social and cultural dynamics can be teased from both. Furthermore, Parsons insists that the two are not the same, despite Western and disciplinary tendencies to see them as manifestations of empirically unsound, unmodern, and unsecular thinking, and she offers a clinical example to this effect. Parsons observed a schizophrenic patient accuse a neighbor woman of using

10 ◆ The Familial Occult

witchcraft against her and her family, and in doing this, she reveals how psychosis can disturb the normality of a witchcraft ritual, as it is understood culturally. While the patient uses terminology and a course of logic intelligible to others in the culture (the accused stared longingly at the patient and her child, then took some of another child’s belongings, presumably to use them in a ritual), the clinical anthropologist notices that from a point on, the patient’s narrative does not follow the logic of how bewitching and unwitching would happen in a Neapolitan context. Significantly, as the patient initially suspects the neighboring woman of jealousy and witchcraft, she soon begins to speak of a collective, unnamed group of entities who follow her, watch her, hide or steal her things, and even speak to her. While she does follow the symbolic function characteristic of being bewitched by seeking a cure from a fortune teller, Parsons notices she breaks the pattern by diagnosing the issue and naming the culprit herself, a task customarily entrusted to the fortuneteller. Initially, as she follows the fortuneteller’s advice, her state becomes stable once more, only to spiral out of control in the following months, when the unprovable presence of the collective evil other drives her to the edge and she dies after setting herself on fire. Parsons’s lens as a clinical anthropologist shows the great importance of being both a good clinician and literate in the culture of the subjects under study. A clinician lacking Parsons’s ethnographic experience would not have understood in detail the complex symbolic meaning of witchcraft for the southern Italians and would have reached an impoverished set of conclusions, at best. Also worth a discussion from Parsons’s reflections is the fact that witchcraft—its logics, its fairly stable cultural categories, its technicians, and so on—is culturally legible to the people of a place. This points to the fact that Parsons recognizes witchcraft to carry complex symbolic constructs. It is a language in which the people of the community are fluent, whether they share a belief in the occult or not.5

“So, Tell Me about Your Parents”: Autoethnography as Therapy As a tribute to Anne Parsons, this next section will analyze themes in the book’s chapters through the lens of a clinical anthropologist. First, we will explore connecting themes, then chapter vignettes. Marked by consanguinity, all authors are the children and grandchil-

Introduction ◆ 11

dren of people working with the occult, and all recount memories, often from early childhood, from that vantage point. As children, many of our authors were mentored into the familial occult by a family member from an early age, without having a full understanding of what that means or what the implications of such a process might be. Almost exclusively, the PhD pursuit is the space where the authors explore the familial occult. As adults, they make use of the distance and the language offered by academia to help make sense of their lived experience. In almost all the chapters, themes of intimacy and occulting come to the fore, as the home is understood by the child-cum-scholar as a vessel of secrets, closed to the outside world. In more than one instance, the authors report having felt responsible for keeping these secrets into adulthood. As proof, this volume is the first account of these memories and analysis for most of the authors. Several authors experienced grief and loss, writing this into their chapters. At the time of writing, both Feriali and Coțofană lost the parent that most tied them into the familial occult. Our authors’ accounts reveal that there is almost always identification with one parent more than with the other, and often we find familial triads: grandmother-father-daughter in Coțofană’s article; mother-sister-son for Jimenez; husband-wife-parents for Kuznetsova and Kuznetsov, and for Sjölander-Lindqvist; and father-uncle-son for Cheung, to name a few. All authors reflect on the traditions of the practice: for Nyce and Feriali, we notice a primary tradition, while for the other authors, the familial occult mixes traditions, either because of the colonial context (Jimenez, Sjölander-Lindqvist, Khokholova, Kuznetsova and Kuznetsov), or because of some personal reason of the practitioner (Coțofană). Jealousy is another important theme emerging in the dynamics of the familial occult. For Coțofană, the father directs jealousy toward his daughter when his mother denies him access to the familial occult. For Sjölander-Lindqvist, the author experiences jealousy when her father makes gendered decisions about whom he offers the gift of knowledge. Connected to this, both taboo and desire also come up. In some accounts, the desire to be tied into the familial occult is present (as for Nyce, Sjölander-Lindqvist, Cheung, Jimenez), while in other accounts, the familial occult is uncomfortable and taboo (Khokholova, Coțofană, Kuznetsova and Kuznetsov). The volume opens with Kin Cheung’s chapter, “A Chinese American Religious Healer: Toward Filial Ethnography.” In his case, the

12 ◆ The Familial Occult

familial occult is a shared practice between father, son, and uncle. What Cheung calls “filial autoethnography” works as a methodological intervention, revealing the gaps in literature at the nexus of Asian-American communities and religious studies, where scholarship is focused on religious conversion. The chapter is rich in reflections on the intimacy of writing about a parent and on negotiating one’s rationalized agnosticism in light of the somatic experience of occult rituals. Later, the teacher-student dynamic flips, as Cheung becomes the teacher, and his father the pupil. The reader will encounter themes of feeling out of place in the familial spiritual practices. One of the strengths of Cheung’s autoethnographic reflection is his understanding of how qi represents standard practice in the space of emigration but is understood as a backward occult belief in the space of immigration. Earl Clarence L. Jimenez’ chapter, “I Am My Mother’s Son: Revelations of the Divine,” traces the author’s academic work with religious soundscapes and his academic fears of revealing more about the familial occult. While an accomplished academic, Jimenez is also the son of and successor to a female spiritual leader, whose trances and practices were considered heterodox by many Catholic figures in the Philippines. Jimenez and his sisters lead the community after their mother’s death. But the group experiences a schism, and the followers are divided between them. The uniqueness of the experiences recounted by Jimenez lies in the fact that all six siblings became involved in the mother’s practice, which began with an astonishing spiritual trance that Jimenez describes in vivid detail. Alexandra Coțofană’s contribution, “Of Bibles and Broads: The Familial Occult as Academic Lens,” is marked by two deaths in the span of a decade. The road to and from home is fraught with shame and has been for decades, as she explores the forms of social isolation experienced by someone with several generations of consanguines tied into the familial occult. The author’s focus is to bring attention to the experience of social scientists living with the occult and to contrast it with the experience of peers who have engaged with the occult while lacking a familial history. Using terminology borrowed from medical practice, Coțofană likens the familial occult to a chronic disease in order to point to its inescapable nature. Kamal Feriali’s beautifully written chapter, “Facing My Genies: A Commute between Self, Familial Spirits, and Anthropology,” is a lucid account of the balance one must keep between the secularism often associated with academia and living with the familial occult. The constant back-and-forth between somatic experiences and the

Introduction ◆ 13

pressure to think rationally as an academic seems insurmountable and leads, as Feriali rightfully points out, to experiencing a great amount of vulnerability. Feriali’s chapter is marked by death and, remarkably within the context of the volume, by the fact that both parents experience engagements with the occult. The chapter by James M. Nyce, titled “On Familial Occultism,” focuses on German Mennonite communities in the US. Nyce reflects on the seeming freedom experienced by anthropologists who study the occult without having grown up with it, many of whom he considers flaneurs, and differentiates them from ethnographers tied into the familial occult. Nyce analyzes multigenerational genealogies of the familial occult and reflects on their role in accusations of practicing with the occult made against the anthropologist. The author reflects candidly on belief in the occult: “The question many people want to ask is, does magic really work? The answer I discovered through my web of familial magic is that it does.” Natalya Khokholova’s chapter, “The Familial Occult in Yakutia: Changeling Children and Tricking Demons,” explores the tensions of living with the familial occult in Yakutia, an area long colonized by Russia in its various political forms. Here, more than in any other chapters in the book, the theme of extractivism is potent with political critique, as the geographical space is used by the colonizing powers for its natural resources, while the people of Yakutia are treated as invisible, backward others. In the particular context of the author’s life, communism, Orthodox Christianity, and the occult blend together to form unique ontologies. Khokholova’s reflection on how the familial occult has affected her life as an academic are centered precisely around this fact: that divergent elements can constitute a worldview. From the Western end of the former Russian Empire comes Rita Kuznetsova and Igor Kuznetsov’s chapter, “Can Ethnography of the Occult Really Be Transformed into Occult Ethnography? Contextualizing a Local Religious Practice in Abkhazia.” Cowritten by a husband and wife, the chapter is bifocal and bivocal and presents the family’s involvement with a marginal spiritual practice as well as the complexities of Kuznetsova’s early life. Born in a mixed GeorgianAbkhazian family, her parents’ love story was lived in broken colonial Russian. Through her lens, Kuznetsova decries the early 1990s, when she grew up observing “the fratricidal war of our Abkhazian and Georgian relatives against each other.” Kuznetsova depicts Abkhazia as a complicated space where privacy and suspicion are the social standard, not just between ethnic groups but also between

14 ◆ The Familial Occult

consanguines. The multilayered ethnic, religious, and linguistic dynamics of Abkhazia may feel dizzying to readers who are used to defining their ethnoreligious selves monochromatically, but they are vital to understanding the inner workings of the familial occult presented in the second half of the chapter. Lastly, the chapter authored by Annelie Sjölander-Lindqvist and Johan Wedel and titled “‘My Father Was a Reader’: Practices of Folk Medicine in Northern Sweden” has a unique narrative structure. The chapter is built around an interview, where the first author is interviewed by the second. This structural choice adds a layer of intimacy, as the reader is left with the sense of witnessing a private confession, and at the same time an extra layer of distance, creating a sense of the deliberate building of mediation through the interviewer. In Sjölander-Lindqvist’s memories, both parents are tied into the familial occult, the father as a healer, the mother experiencing foreboding. In attempts to learn from her father, the author is rejected on account of her gender. The manuscript concludes with a reflection from James M. Nyce, dedicated to Jeanne Favret-Saada, an ethnographer of the occult who defends intimate ethnographies of one’s own culture.

Alexandra Coțofană is a cultural anthropologist and assistant professor of social sciences at Zayed University in Abu Dhabi. During the past ten years, her research has focused on the complex connections between the occult, nationalism, and the environment, with primary fieldwork in Romania. Her work can be found in monographs (Palgrave Pivot, 2022), edited volumes with ibidem Press / Columbia University Press (2017 and 2018) and Berghahn (2022 and 2023), and in journals and edited collections.

Notes 1. Of the workshop attendants, 60 percent remained in the project, the rest withdrew. We have since received other requests from scholars who wanted to tell their stories, most of whom are present in the book. 2. A more comprehensive literature review on this pattern can be found in Coțofană’s chapter in this volume and for the sake of brevity will not be repeated here. 3. Parsons committed suicide at the age of thirty-three while a patient in the Yale Psychiatric Institute in New Haven, Connecticut.

Introduction ◆ 15

4. The political tensions of the 1960s and talks of nuclear war triggered a panic attack for Parsons, leading to a prolonged period of therapy, which she increasingly saw as needless. Her undiplomatic antagonism against the methods of psychotherapy (including her protests and attempts at unionizing patients) only furthered her suffering, her sense of failure, and her captivity (Breines 1986). 5. Also relevant to the volume is the fact that witches tend to represent a negative symbolic complex in the sense that the community often describes them as the moral opposite of the imagined collective self. This is a theme that our authors have encountered time and again and have discussed at length throughout the chapters.

References Adams, Tony E., Stacy Holman Jones, and Carolyn Ellis. 2021. “Introduction—Making Sense and Taking Action: Creating a Caring Community of Autoethnographers.” In Handbook of Autoethnography, 2nd edn., ed. Tony E. Adams, Stacy Holman Jones, and Carolyn Ellis, 1–20. New York: Routledge. Breines, Winifred. 1986. “Alone in the 1950s: Anne Parsons and the Feminine Mystique.” Theory and Society 15: 805–43. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2000. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Federici, Silvia. 2008. “Witch-Hunting, Globalization, and Feminist Solidarity in Africa Today.” Journal of International Women’s Studies 10(1): 21–35. Geschiere, Peter. 1997. The Modernity of Witchcraft: Politics and the Occult in Postcolonial Africa. Charlottesville: The University of Virginia Press. ———. 2013. Witchcraft, Intimacy, and Trust: Africa in Comparison. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gottlieb, Alma, and Phillip Graham. 2012. Braided Worlds. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Jones, Graham M. 2017. Magic’s Reason: An Anthropology of Analogy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Panourgiá, Neni. 2008. “Fragments of Oedipus: Anthropology at the Edges of History.” In Ethnographica Moralia: Experiments in Interpretive Anthropology, ed. E. Neni, K. Panourgia, and George E. Marcus. 97–113. New York: Fordham University Press. Parsons, Anne. 1969. Belief, Magic, and Anomie. Essays in Psychological Anthropology. New York: The Free Press. Paxton, Blake. 2018. At Home with Grief: Continued Bonds with the Deceased. New York: Routledge. Sahlins, Marshall. 1974. The Spirit of the Gift: In Stone Age Economics. London: Tavistock.

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Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 2010. Can the Subaltern Speak? Reflections on the History of an Idea. New York: Columbia University Press. Tullis, Jillian A. 2021. “Self and Other: Ethics in Autoethnographic Research.” In Handbook of Autoethnography, 2nd edn., ed. Tony E. Adams, Stacy Holman Jones, and Carolyn Ellis, 1–20. New York: Routledge.

1 A Chinese American Religious Healer Toward Filial Ethnography Kin Cheung

Neither I nor my father, Cheung Seng Kan 張成根, was born into the occult. Rather, we helped introduce each other to it. As a teenager, I was taught qigong (also romanized as chi kung 氣功) by my father because he wished to share something recently learned from my uncle. Qigong can be described as the practice and manipulation of qi (also romanized as ch’i), or life force, for healing oneself or others. Alternatively, it is the regulation and exchange of life energy that is not only intrapersonal and interpersonal but also exists between humans and the heavens (tian 天), or between living beings and the cosmos. To frame this practice as a healing meditation with unremarkable ontological commitments or as an esoteric religious ritual—akin to how the Chinese Communist Party paints Falun Gong as a cult—is a political decision.1 This continual navigation of how much to conceal or reveal of a practice shared by my father and myself is the subject of this chapter. I argue that my father’s role as a religious healer and my role as a scholar of religion are intertwined, and this mutual influence impacts the way each of us presents our self-cultivation practices to our respective communities: immigrant Chinese Americans in the New York City area, and scholars in academia. Cheung and his community represent an overlooked research area in multiple fields of study. In Asian American Studies, the engagement with immigrant religion is dominated by work on conversion to new religions, the development of Asian American theologies, or the use of heritage religion as a way to continue the culture of immigrants (see Yoo and Khyati 2020 for examples). Scholars acknowledge

18 ◆ The Familial Occult

some Asian Americans immigrate to America with unique Christian or Catholic backgrounds from Asia. However, there is less attention to Asian Americans being introduced to Buddhism,2 and even less to their introduction to Chinese popular or folk religions in America. Theological works articulate new Asian American Christian theologies, yet there is comparatively less work on innovation of contemporary Chinese religions in America. Compared to scholarship on Japanese American Buddhists, Chinese American—especially Cantonese speaking—Buddhists receive less attention.3 The scant work on Chinese American Buddhists centers around congregations.4 However, scholars note the inadequacy of focusing only on temples or official religious institutions in order to understand how religion impacts people, relationships, and communities.5 In Buddhist Studies, the earliest analytic typology divided Buddhists in America into a problematic “two Buddhisms” binary, which juxtaposes white or European-descent convert communities against heritage or cultural Asian American Buddhists (see Hickey 2010 and Han 2021 for challenges to this binary). As will be explained below, Cheung was introduced to Buddhist practices after the age of fifty-five, and over two decades after he immigrated. In religious studies and sociology, there is little research on children influencing and legitimating religious practices of their parents as scholarship is typically done on influence from parent to child. Anthropologists are giving more attention to autoethnography, but religion remains understudied from this method (Narayan 2012 and Ng 2012 are rare examples). The problem with this neglect is not simply the absence of an area of knowledge. Rather than merely making an empirical addition, this chapter highlights familial relationships to make a methodological intervention on reflexivity and how the position of researcher is entwined with the research subject. My academic research on Buddhist meditation, conducted in my role as Cheung’s son, led my father to start the practice of Buddhist meditation and the use Buddhist chants to heal his community. Reflecting on the methodology in writing this chapter brings me to a question raised after I presented a case study of my father’s healing practice as part of a panel on Buddhist medicine in a 2016 academic conference. My panel co-organizer and I invited a prominent senior scholar to be the respondent, who interrogated my paper’s discipline and methodology. He did not see the case study fitting neatly into oral history, philosophy, or any other discipline. If asked about methodology now, the answer I can provide is critical autoethnography. Gresilda Tilley-Lubbs (2016) argues that this method, which

A Chinese American Religious Healer ◆ 19

“combines ethnography, autobiography, and critical pedagogy,” is invaluable for writing about marginalized communities because it forces the researcher to confront one’s own position of power to prevent further oppression of vulnerable populations often perpetuated through scholarship (3). In writing about my working-class nonEnglish-speaking father, who never received more than a grade school education, how do I as a recently tenured university professor with a PhD impose unconscious values gained from US academic training onto the research subject? Below, I argue for a turn toward filial ethnography as a methodological intervention to draw attention to how it is different from closely related autoethnographic work. Elizabeth Dauphinee (2010) argues that ethical autoethnography involves making explicit the motives for writing. Is the work done out of love (Speedy 2014)? Does the writing serve to deal with loss (Levitt 2007) or trauma (Jonsdottir 2014)? Does it heal the author (Wright 2014) or mend a strained relationship (Rowe 2014)? Is the motivation partly out of “enormous guilt,” similar to how Ajnesh Prasad (2019) understands his debt to those he encountered in his fieldwork? My motives are to raise awareness of how religion spreads through healing in a contemporary Chinese American community, and, this usually goes unsaid, to fulfill the publication expectations for tenure and promotion. Am I capitalizing on my father’s story? Do I have an obligation to produce scholarship on a neglected area of religious studies and Asian American Studies? Dauphinee and Prasad both highlight the importance of inserting the self into autoethnography. “The erasure of the self is a violence in that it purports to provide the grounds for objective knowledge that is always and necessarily about others” (Dauphinee 2010: 813, original emphasis). However, Alecia Jackson and Lisa Mazzei (2008) warn autoethnographers to pay attention to claims of authority and to not simply substitute personal experience as mere replacement of the “objective” outside researcher, who is the unquestioned reliable producer of knowledge. Instead, they offer a process of asking deconstructing questions, some of which I have already raised for this chapter. They suggest using the authorial voice as an active creation of a self in process, rather than a narrative, already-completed self. Christopher Driscoll and Monica Miller (2018) argue that academic theory and methodology are based on identity and that to posit distance from the subjects of study assumes and elevates one type of invisible hegemonic (white, male, hetero, Christian) identity as acceptable or rigorous scholarship. They focus on how this “manufacturing” of “distance” relegates work on minoritized or marginalized

20 ◆ The Familial Occult

racial groups. My project is not the typical autoethnography spotlighting myself; rather, it is filial, spotlighting my father’s religious healing for his immigrant community. Though the intention is to write about a parent, in doing so, I cannot help but expose myself. Writing about a family member, especially a parent, is intimately connected to writing about myself. My personal practice of qigong, reiki 霊気,6 and Chan (more commonly known in the Japanese: Zen 禪) Buddhist meditation and my academic study of these practices has led me to a position of strong agnosticism. Rather than the stance of a weak agnostic, who is withholding judgment on the ontology of qi, I am making an epistemological claim that it may be impossible to obtain justified knowledge of qi. Though I have predictable and repeatable sensory experiences of qi, it is only corroborated by select individuals, such as my father and uncle. My strong agnosticism sows a deep skepticism of my own sensations and experience as reliable access to some external ontological reality. Even though I am sympathetic to Buddhist arguments against reifying any external ontological reality apart from my conscious active phenomenological construction of such, I unconsciously default to simplistic dualisms between subjective experience and an objective world. My reiki practice challenges my epistemology and ontology even further.7 I have performed distance healing through reiki, and I recall asking one of my reiki teachers how it works. She rebuffed. Why should I expect to learn or fully grasp how it works? My practical side is satisfied that reiki heals, but my intellectual side—ingrained with academic expectations—still seeks answers to why and how. My academic path, including my PhD dissertation on Buddhism and science, was initiated by my attempt to reconcile the ontology of qi with that of a scientism-based materialism as exemplified by recent works on Buddhism and science that excise the religious aspects of the former as “hocus pocus” (Flanagan 2011; Barash 2014).8 At times, I reflect on how my research and teaching are influenced by my strong agnosticism. In the fall semester of 2019, I taught a course on Death, Dying, and Rebirth, in which I presented to an audience of mostly skeptical students evidence of rebirth starting with children’s memories of previous lives, moving to cases of such memories corroborated by witness testimony and biological marks, and ending with cases of xenoglossy (speaking a language one has not learned— in the current lifetime). In an effort to be transparent, I explained to students my personal agnosticism and that my purpose was not to convert them into believers in rebirth. Rather, I wanted to expose them to what may justify such beliefs in large populations around

A Chinese American Religious Healer ◆ 21

the world. I also regularly teach a course that presents qi in the same agnostic manner. My hybrid identity of agnosticism/oscillation contrasts with my father’s hybrid identity of assimilation. As different ways of being Asian American, my father is comfortable in his identity as Asian American and wishes to assimilate in order to become more American, whereas I continue to question my Asian American identity even as it forms. Min Zhou (2009) shows how internal impulses toward assimilation are nuanced and uses segmented assimilation theory to analyze Chinese Americans in New York City.9 On the one hand, I oscillate uncomfortably between Asian-ness and American-ness (e.g., pulled between family goals and individual desires), while on the other, I am developing comfort in my strong agnostic stance. This chapter also contributes to the growing discussion of how scholars of religion affect their object of study. Jason Ānanda Josephson-Storm (2014) models “reflexive religious studies” after “reflexive sociology,” in which “the discipline of Religious Studies shapes and produces” what is labeled as religious. Jolyon Thomas (2019) writes on how scholars of religion were complicit in justifying the United States’ occupation of Japan following World War II by defining the various practices of Japan as religious or not. Josephson-Storm and Thomas point out how the religious is always defined against an Other—the nonreligious—whether that is secularism, science, philosophy, superstition, magic, or the occult. In my courses on Asian religions, I explain to students that the term religion does not map neatly onto Asian contexts. I emphasize that the Japanese and Chinese words for religion, shūkyō and zhongjiao 宗教 respectively, were late nineteenth-century neologisms invented after encounters with European nations. Is qigong an occult practice? Is it religious? Is my father’s chanting of esoteric Buddhist spells to call on the power of Buddhist deities to heal an occult practice? I will reemphasize that the act of labeling and categorizing is a political move. When I teach a course on Buddhism and mindfulness, students ask if I personally think mindfulness is religious when we look at arguments that categorize mindfulness as Buddhist or as secular. I direct them to the answer given by Jeff Wilson (2014), namely that he is not interested in finding a definitive answer to this question. Rather, he is more interested in what agents stand to gain when they label mindfulness as religious or not. The label of religious can be used to connect the practice to an ancient tradition of wisdom, while stamping a practice as nonreligious allows researchers to obtain funding from secular sources. Ira

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Helderman (2019) examines the relationship between psychotherapy and Buddhism from the perspective of American psychotherapists and offers six different approaches clinicians use to delineate, or not, the religious from the nonreligious. With this context made explicit, I acknowledge that claiming qigong as occult or religious serves my interest in publishing peer-reviewed work that counts towards my tenure and promotion working in a Global Religions Department. As stated at the beginning, I do not belong on either side of a binary between researchers who were “born native” or researchers who became “native” because I helped co-create the “native.” I witnessed my father transform from a person who employed healing arts mostly on himself and his family, to a community healer in 2012. He incorporated esoteric Buddhist spells due to my academic work in Buddhist Studies. Perhaps I became “native” in a way that is different than normally assumed in anthropological circles. This ambiguous identity and how I navigate and present this identity is precisely the subject of this chapter. In the sections to follow, I will provide more details of my worldview and practice through the lens of hybridity. Next, I explain my father’s practices and reflect on how to categorize his repertoire. Then, I examine his presentation of his practices to his respective communities. I follow that with how I present to mine. Finally, I suggest a theoretical contribution to autoethnography by proposing categories of filial and filiation ethnography, explaining why such writing is different from related work.

My Practice and Worldview as Hybrid Identity The evolution of my religious practices reflects a hybrid identity that is at once double and partial. Michelle Voss Roberts (2010) offers metaphors of religious hybridity, rhizomes, and fluids to replace ones of religious belonging, which implies ownership. The hybrid is double in their two (or more) epistemological-ontological realities, yet is partial in their failure to be “at home” in any one reality. I experience a tension in my oscillation between worldviews that my father does not. At a young age, I was uncomfortable in my hybridity. However, my writing of this and related autoethnographic work has led to an interrogation of the tension in my hybridity. Not limited to the religious, my hybrid identity is also experienced at the level of oscillation between Chinese-ness and American-ness. In writing my experience, I enact how the fields of Asian American studies, and

A Chinese American Religious Healer ◆ 23

ethnic studies in general, aim to write on oneself and one’s culture for a larger audience. I was six years old when I first encountered multiple, and at times conflicting, epistemologies and ontologies, when my parents and I emigrated from Guangzhou China to New York City in 1988. We had moved from a country where people practicing taijiquan 太極 拳 (a form of martial arts that improves health) and qigong could be found in public parks,10 to a nation that ranges from uncritical embrace stemming from Orientalist romanticization of these practices to swift dismissal of qi and any practice that purports to manipulate it as backward superstition. New York City has a large population of Chinese Americans, more than half a million, which creates a bubble for the diasporic community and their hybridity. There are Chinese-speaking doctors, accountants, lawyers, and other professionals in the neighborhood to support Chinese Americans, such that my parents never had the need to learn more than a few basic words of English in their thirty plus years living in this metropolitan area. I experience a different epistemology and ontology than my parents because, while they have stayed in their Chinese American community, my schooling and social circle gradually expanded to include, proportionally, fewer and fewer Chinese Americans. My first school was a kindergarten in Guangzhou China, and I had 100 percent Chinese classmates and teachers. My elementary school in New York City’s Manhattan Chinatown, P.S. 42 The Benjamin Altman School, has over 90 percent Chinese American students. The majority of them come from low-income families, a group to which I also belong. Two blocks down the street was my junior high school, which was Dr. Sun Yat Sen I.S. 131 at the time and is now Dr. Sun Yat Sen M.S. 131. It has over 75 percent Chinese American students. I tested into the magnet Stuyvesant High School, which has drawn attention over the years for being increasingly dominated by Asian students, who comprised 72 percent of the student body in 2022. These recent demographics are similar to when I attended. High school was my first chance to regularly encounter Korean and Indian Americans. Not all Chinese and Asian Americans I encountered accepted the ontology of qi. Rather, the epistemological and ethical frameworks of my social circles shared Confucian and Asian values of filial piety and communalism to various degrees. The worldview of those around me included a strict hierarchy of parents above children and the placing of family goals over individual desires. This is in tension with the individualism championed as quintessentially American. Russell Jeung,

24 ◆ The Familial Occult

Seanan Fong, and Helen Jin Kim (2019) argue that Chinese Americans replace religion with familism as a nexus for meaning and values. Jordan Paper (2019) argues that familism is at the heart of Chinese religion. The work by these scholars explains how I, as a one-and-ahalf-generation Chinese American, and my peers grew up in a hybrid world. It was not until my undergraduate program at New York University that I regularly spent extended periods of time in a room not dominated by a Chinese or Asian American majority, that is, I was gradually confronted with my hybrid identity more explicitly. Part of my diasporic identity formation was reconciling Chinese familism with American individualism, incited by my increasing awareness of, and self-comparison against, non–Asian American classmates and friends. It is qigong practice that contributed another layer to my multiple epistemologies and ontologies. I recall the night my father taught me the practice in our living room in 1999. Processing that first bodily experience of a magnet-like push from invisible balls of qi that I could manipulate with my palms made me laugh aloud because I could not make rational sense of these physical sensations. Reflecting on this experience over two decades later, I realized how much I had bought into one ethnocentric version of what counts as rational. At the age of seventeen, my first sensation of qi ruptured my understanding of the world. No longer was a materialist explanation adequate. I enthusiastically taught my high school friends and was extremely disappointed when they did not experience qi the way I did, if at all. Excitement was reduced to resignation to a reality that others may fail to reciprocate my epistemological-ontological rupture. I had expected others would gain similar immediate physical sensations of qi after one session, as I had. Without directly sensing and manipulating qi, my friends never experienced a challenge to their worldviews. Though I shared the hybridity of being Chinese American or Asian American with many friends, my religious hybridity set me apart. I presented a group research project on qigong with some classmates in my high school English course during my senior year, and I led the entire class in a ten-minute practice. Though some reported feelings of calm, no one felt qi the way my father, my uncle, and I did. At New York University, I attempted to start a qigong club but never got past the administrative and bureaucratic obstacles. During my senior year, I took an undergraduate course on the Theory and Practice

A Chinese American Religious Healer ◆ 25

of Zen Buddhism, which was vital to my later pursuit of graduate work at Temple University. My PhD dissertation on Buddhism and science was my attempt to reconcile the epistemologies and ontologies of qigong with scientific materialism. Initially, I turned toward scientific studies on Buddhist meditation, searching for third-person empirical verification or objective measurement of physical changes that result from selfcultivation practices. Though that was the starting drive of the research project, working on it over time led me to a different course. I ended up producing a Buddhist-studies response to the overemphasis on neuroscientific experiments of Buddhism-based meditation practices in the growing dialogue between Buddhism(s) and science(s), and I offered perspectives from medieval Chinese and Japanese monks to suggest a different direction for this dialogue. I never questioned that desire to reconcile competing worldviews because I took for granted that holding contradiction indicated unclear, illogical, and irrational thinking—ingrained from my undergraduate degree in Anglo-analytic philosophy. Graduate work on Buddhist logic and the strategic use of contradiction opened up more possibilities for what counts as sound logic and rationality. It was only through writing autoethnography that my desire to reconcile my hybrid worldviews became explicit, and then, no longer a significant compulsion. This research area only began at the tail end of my graduate work. Without my graduate studies in Buddhism, my father might have never turned to Buddhist practice. I started graduate school in 2008 and ended in 2017. In 2009, I started practicing Buddhist meditation in the style of Dharma Drum Mountain, a Taiwanese Chan Buddhist lineage, because my academic advisor encouraged all his students who study Buddhist philosophy to experience meditation. It was a combination of my trips to meditation retreats and academic study of Buddhism that led my father to his interest in Buddhist chanting.

My Father’s Practice (As I Present It, Since He Does Not Know English) In 2010, prompted by my academic interest in Buddhism, my father started Buddhist meditation and began using Buddhist spells for healing. He was always interested in healing because he grew up with stomach pains that got worse over the decades. He has found mild success with various new practices, but their ability to mitigate his

26 ◆ The Familial Occult

pain generally subsides, prompting him to seek the next promise of relief. He practices an eclectic gamut of Chinese medical arts: cupping, scraping, moxibustion from moxa he gathers in nearby parks, making his own diedajiu 跌打酒 healing liniment, herbal bath soaks, electronic acupuncture machines, acupressure massage, and fengshui 風 水 geomancy. His repertoire is not limited to Chinese practices as he also uses reiki and Japanese and Korean talismans. Elsewhere, I have published an interview with him that I conducted with a colleague who researches Buddhist medicine in order to provide a primary source for contemporary Buddhist healing.11 In that interview, I acted as interpreter. I reflect now on my role as not simply a translator of Cantonese Chinese to English but as a translator of his practices in a way that I judge to be suitable— and in other situations, palatable—to the audience. Since he does not know more than a few basic phrases of English, he cannot review my translations himself. He has no interest in doing so. Listening to the recording of our interview, I realized that rather than offering a word-for-word translation of my father’s Cantonese to English, I unconsciously raised the register of my father’s grade-school-level speech (since he has not attended middle school) into academic jargon for my colleague. I did that because my bilingual upbringing as a Chinese American in New York City made code-switching a default: I automatically adjust to my interlocutors. I grew up serving and continue to serve as translators for my parents. In preparing the written translation, I had to purposefully rephrase my own recorded words spoken to my colleague into a lower register to better capture the voice of my father.

My Father’s Presentation of His Practice to Various Audiences The way he spoke about his practice to my colleague during the interview in our Brooklyn home reflects a consideration of his audience.12 He wishes to present himself as an expert in healing to my academic colleague. He was happy to list examples of the many conditions he has cured for the various types of patients and students he works with: a middle-aged male Filipino American truck driver with back pain, a senior Chinese American female with a golf-ball-sized cancerous tumor, a Chinese American female teenager with a dislocated jaw, and a senior Chinese American female with a balance disorder

A Chinese American Religious Healer ◆ 27

and amnesia. He presents a confidence in the ability of his practices to help with all possible maladies. Yet, as a son, I know he hides his own health problems from others. It is only to my mother and I that he directs constant complaints regarding his stomach and skin ailments. Clearly, there is a certain kind of discrediting he wishes to avoid by hiding how the healer so esteemed by his students and patients is unable to heal his own conditions. A different colleague, who researches comparative philosophy but has a personal interest in self-cultivation healing practices, invited my father and me to Drake University in 2018. I gave a talk about him as part of a lecture and dialogue series on miracles in The Comparison Project (see figures 1.1 and 1.2).13 The following day, my father gave a healing workshop on qigong. It was the first time my parents saw me give an academic presentation, and I can only speculate about how they felt seeing a picture of my father on the slideshow projected onto a large university auditorium to an audience of approximately fifty people.

Figure 1.1. My presentation on my father at Drake University on 25 October 2018. Credit: Leah Kalmanson.

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Figure 1.2. My parents in attendance during this presentation. Credit: Leah Kalmanson.

During the discussion after my lecture, the audience members asked my father some questions through me as the interpreter. I emphasized the fact that I am always mediating his interaction with anyone who is not a Chinese speaker. Someone asked about the percentage of his success rate in curing maladies, to which he responded roughly 80 percent. I reflect now that this is very difficult to track because I did not begin keeping a detailed account of his healing until 2015. It was after the aforementioned interview with my colleague that I began taking field notes. As his son, I have serious doubts about the accuracy of my father’s success rate claim. During the discussion, he asked me to stop someone in the audience because he sensed sincerity and interest in her, and he invited her to get treatment. She said she would come the following day to the workshop. After the event was over, outside the auditorium while someone was asking me a question, he interrupted me and mentioned that he sensed sincerity and interest in that same person and wanted to give her some qi so she can feel it. He did so for five minutes (figure 1.3). What I sensed here is a desire to convince audience members of the power of his healing. Perhaps he feels that photographs of him and

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Figure 1.3. My father gave qigong treatment to an audience member after my presentation. Personal archive.

my speaking about him is not enough. Discussion of healing and qi is no substitute for the experience of it. At the same time, I gathered that he enjoys the attention. He was also eager to offer healing to my colleague the next day, which she happily accepted. During the workshop the following day, he taught a qigong routine to a smaller audience of about a dozen. While teaching the bodily movements, he referenced the need to use conscious intent to direct an exchange of personal qi with heavenly and earthly qi. After the group session, he gave individual consultations and personalized qigong healing treatment to a handful of participants. Throughout these interactions with my academic colleagues, his teachings were focused on the practical healing arts. Ontological assumptions of qi were implicit. He did not mention Buddhist doctrine and etiology—especially the karmic causes of disease. He positioned himself as a student or someone ready to learn toward my colleagues, since they hold the title of professor and he acknowledges their expertise on Buddhism. This is different than how he presents himself to his Chinese American community of students and patients. As a healer, he is the one holding the honorific “Teacher Cheung,” with knowledge of both healing and religion.

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My father never makes it explicit, but his presentation of karmic explanations of disease, and thus his authority as a teacher of Buddhist doctrine, rest on the perceived efficacy of his healing and my PhD in Buddhist Studies. For instance, in his treatment of a senior female with leukemia, when the temporary relief provided by qigong was not the result of remission he was looking for, he prescribed to his patient a Buddhist ritual practice of fangsheng 放生. This life release practice is typically performed inside or near a Buddhist temple or monastic complex. Small animals such as fish, turtles, crabs, or birds are bought by the patron in order to release into the “wild.” These animals usually return or are caught to repeat this process. A monetary donation, which then supports the Buddhist institution and the spread of Buddhist teachings, helps generate good karmic returns that can be dedicated to healing. Superficial criticism of this practice as a greedy monastic attempt to extract money from lay adherents ignores the rich history of Buddhist engagement with economics and business matters (see Brox and WilliamsOerberg 2020; Schopen 2004). However, ecological criticisms of this disruption to biodiversity as an act of biological invasion deserve more attention (see Everard et al. 2019; Liu, McGarrity, and Li 2012). My father’s innovative take on this practice, which he participates in and prescribes to his students and patients, is spurred by his working-class material conditions. Instead of paying a few dollars per goldfish, the least expensive live animals typically sold, he advocates a practice of buying brine shrimp eggs to incubate and hatch then release into a local body of water not near Buddhist institutions. The cost paid per life released lowers significantly to fractions of pennies per brine shrimp. He prescribed the release to take place on the birthday of Guanyin, the Buddhist bodhisattva of compassion, during an auspicious hour according to Chinese astrology. It is important to note here his fluid and frequent assemblage of multiple religious systems. My father’s presentation of fengshui geomancy also takes on the language of science when he wishes to lend legitimacy and authority to yet another audience, my Chinese American wife. Over dinner conversation on one of his student’s troubles with bad fengshui in an apartment, my father explained how it was basically an ancient science. He reframed the fengshui guidelines that state a bedroom facing the kitchen is inauspicious as explicable by current scientific understanding. A bedroom should not face a kitchen because cooking can cause chemicals and pollutants that could irritate people in their sleep.

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Yet another audience is a different colleague of mine, who is both a scholar of Buddhism and a monastic. In 2013, I brought my father to visit the upstate New York temple of which my colleague was head abbot at the time. There, my father took on the role of a student and asked many questions about meditation practice. During that visit, my colleague gifted my father a poster of the Mogao Cave 220 north wall image of the Seven Medicine Buddhas, which is now framed and proudly displayed on my father’s private altar, at which he chants Buddhist spells every morning (figure 1.4). Connecting my father with my colleague and the resulting addition to his altar are examples of how I am intricately involved in introducing my father to, and reinforcing, his practice.

The Gradual Reveal or Presentation of My Practice Being a scholar of Buddhism, I was initially hesitant to present on my father in an academic conference and reveal myself as the son of a religious healer. I was slow to tell colleagues in the Global Religions Department at my university and still have not revealed this to the majority of faculty there. Within Buddhist studies, there are more

Figure 1.4. My father’s altar in his New Jersey home. Personal archive.

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or less “acceptable” private practices and beliefs mentioned. Personal meditation practices may be hidden or openly shared, but personal ritual healing by chanting to deities is not openly discussed. A major contributor to this is the discourse of American Buddhists of European-descent that constructs quiet sitting meditation as “universal” and “secular,” while dismissing chanting spells as “cultural baggage” and “religious.”14 Ann Gleig (2019) describes how her personal meditation practice allows privileged access to her research subjects: “My particular location is also representative of a general fluidity between scholars and practitioners of Buddhism” (15). Though some Buddhologists may mention their sitting meditation practice, they rarely write on their own religious experiences. Important exceptions include Rita Gross (1993), Charles Prebish (2011), Edwin Ng (2012), and participants of the Buddhist Critical-Constructive Reflection Unit in the American Academy of Religion. I follow in their footsteps to write about my family’s experiences with religious healing rituals in order to add Chinese American diasporic voices to the conversation on how religious studies scholars negotiate their personal and professional identities. I was hesitant as a graduate student to reveal my familial connection to my research subject. My first presentation on my father in an academic symposium happened only after heavy encouragement by an academic mentor in the spring of 2016, and it took place at my PhD institution, where I felt safe and supported. Even so, at that time, I did not reveal my own practice of qigong, reiki, and Chan Buddhist meditation, only my father’s. I was finishing my dissertation and gave myself permission to present on my father only after recently securing a tenure-track position that would start in the fall of that year. Though I published on my father as a junior scholar without the protection of tenure, I did so due to inspiration from Ng’s autoethnography and the 2019 compilation by Prebish of the “autobiographical/career sketches and reflections on the field of Buddhist Studies” by over three dozen senior scholars (Muller 2019). These encourage me to be more open regarding my practice. Many of the authors of these essays share their experiences with Buddhist practice. This is not to say I reveal it all the time to everyone. One reason I do not is to fight the Orientalism that is projected onto me, especially in the town where I work, which in the few years I have been here is the site of more questions of “Where are you from?” than all three decades living in multicultural New York City, Philadelphia,

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and Edison, New Jersey. The editor of my university magazine asked me to participate in a professor spotlight article. In thinking about what photo opportunities to use for the magazine spread, she asked if I meditated. I refused to answer this question because I did not wish to present a literal image of myself as the Asian guy in a seated meditation pose. I did not reveal a familial connection to this research topic to the departmental colleagues at my current institution until after my first year there, when I had become confident of their support of my work and their trust in my teaching and research. My fear reflects the struggle of many religious studies departments to position themselves as providing academic research, rather than what many students and colleagues in other departments misunderstand about our courses, which they may perceive as a type of “glorified Sunday school” (this has the additional problem of being a Christian-centric understanding of religion). Having taught at a public university, I am also hypervigilant over our roles as teachers—not preachers—of religion. After grappling with the methodology in presenting on and writing about my father, I now embrace the ambiguity of my epistemologies and ontologies. My father’s role as a healer and my role as a scholar of religion are entangled, and this mutual influence impacts the way we each present our self-cultivation practices to our respective communities. Why does this presentation matter? It shows a continual creation of the self, as argued by Jackson and Mazzei (2008). This is also an answer to the senior scholar respondent’s concerns regarding which discipline my case study belongs to. Wrestling with methodology in writing this very chapter as an academic presentation of myself and my father leads me to consider a new subcategory of autoethnography.

Toward Filial Ethnography I propose filial ethnography as a term to characterize the type of writing I am currently producing for this chapter. Filial is not only defined as going from child to parent, but also involves respect and piety. Filial ethnography is not limited to parents, but applies fully to writing about parental figures or persons who raised the author. I reflect now on my motivations, whether conscious or unconscious, to present my father in a positive light. I may also have motivations to unveil or expose the human being behind the romanticized image of the master healer set on a pedestal by his students and patients.

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Employing the term filial ethnography may not be apposite in placing the word filial, with its Latin etymology, before the word ethnography, with its Greek etymology. Nevertheless, these are English words I am using to capture my description of my Chinese father and his eclectic practices. The connotation of Confucian filial piety I wish to invoke is the Latin-rooted translation of the Chinese term xiao 孝.15 Xiao ethnography may be more appropriate but would not quickly convey meaning to my intended English-language audience. Additionally, xiao ethnography would mean something different to a Chinese audience. I want to translate xiao, whereas I prefer to leave qi and qigong untranslated after my introduction of those terms. Furthermore, common examples of individual words that combine Latin prefixes with Greek suffixes include Anglophone and Sinophone, adjectives that precisely apply to the subjects of this chapter. An ethnographer’s gaze, the lens of a video or photographic camera, or an audio recorder always influences the ethnographic subject. For instance, when my father realized I was taking a picture of his morning meditation for an image to use during an academic conference presentation on his healing, he quickly changed sitting positions from a more comfortable riding-the-crane style to a full-lotus position.16 That was the image he wanted to be captured and presented.17 Here, I presented this version of him, mediated through me, to the audience of this academic volume. Filial ethnography is necessarily autoethnography. As Mark Freeman (2014), writing on his mother’s dementia, explains: “I want it to be mainly about her, her world. This doesn’t mean that I want to leave myself entirely out of the picture; I couldn’t even if I wanted to” (54, original emphasis). I enable and inform my father’s practice. He has taught me qigong and used it to heal me, and I have also healed him. He asks me about Buddhist concepts, which I explain to him and then he teaches them to his students. What is the significance of overhearing him preach what I consider incorrect doctrinal interpretation based on my academic training, then proceeding to correct him in private (usually after the fact as it is proper filial conduct not to embarrass him in front of his students or patients)? What does it mean to correct one’s father in the Confucian and Chinese American context? He asks me to obtain items for his altar, and I often think of him when I travel and bring back amulets that I know he would appreciate. This is intimately about myself, as my father and I create each other’s worldviews. My proposal for a category of filial ethnography and a related genre of filiation ethnography distinguishes the former as a subcat-

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egory of autoethnography, while the latter is not. Offspring writing about their parents is commonplace,18 as is writing about oneself. However, ethnographic writing is a specific methodology. Relating filial and filiation ethnography to autoethnography will clarify these three closely connected types of ethnographic writing: 1) that which focuses on oneself—autoethnography; 2) that which focuses on the relationship between an offspring and parent(s)—filiation ethnography; and 3) that which focuses on one’s own parent(s)—filial ethnography. Examples will help delineate filial ethnography from filiation ethnography. Jennifer Fox’s (2011) documentary film My Reincarnation captures a changing father-and-son relationship over the span of two decades. The film shows footage of interactions and private interviews with the Tibetan Buddhist Master Chögyal Namkhai Norbu and his son Yeshi Silvano Namkhai. Both the father’s and son’s reflections and thoughts on each other are explicitly presented. This filiation ethnography is created and produced neither by Norbu nor his progeny, but by Norbu’s secretary and student, Fox. The genre of filiation ethnography can be created by a third party, the offspring, or the parent. The latter two affects the creator of such work in different ways. Derek Bolen’s (2014) work on “Aesthetic Moments of Father-Son” exemplifies filiation ethnography as he hyphenates the two nouns to emphasize father-son as one unit. Bolen explains aesthetic moments are about connection, communication, and relationship. His chapter is in an edited volume of autoethnographies (Wyatt and Adams 2014). As the volume’s title indicates, On (Writing) Families: Autoethnographies of Presence and Absence, Love and Loss is about the autoethnographer’s family. All seventeen content chapters mention at least one parent (some both, and some include other family members). Though all these autoethnographies mention parents, only a handful of them put the focus on the parent. Thus, only a few are filial. Only Bolen’s is filiation. Alisse Waterston and Barbara Rylko-Bauer (2008) propose “intimate ethnography” to describe the product of ethnographers who write on those they are close to. Waterston reflects on writing about her father; Rylko-Bauer, her mother. They write: “While our projects could be considered experiments in autoethnography because of the intimate connection between ourselves and our subjects, our ultimate goal, however, is to go beyond the reflexive ‘I’” (42). This is a shift from Waterston’s (2006) earlier description of work on her father as an experiment in autoethnography, where she writes: “Auto-

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ethnography liberates this daughter to enter a deeply private and interior place as an ethnographer” (45). Waterston and Rylko-Bauer’s key insight on writing about those we are intimate with, family or not, regards the preexistent relationship. They write, “we started our projects with old intimates as research subjects and with dynamics (of power, duty, and status) in our relationships with them that were determined long before the projects began” (42). Though filial ethnography could be considered a subset of intimate ethnography, it deserves to be delineated because of the sui generis impact of a parental figure. Suzanne Juhasz (2000) uses a psychoanalytic approach to argue that writing the other, which in her examples is the mother, is done to define the self, who is the daughter. She writes, Recognizing the separate subjectivity of the mother helps to bring a daughter’s own identity into being, even as her own vantage point or subjectivity is what permits her to recognize her mother. . . . When daughters write to and about their mothers, they are seeking to work out the complex matter of subjectivities: their own and that of their mothers. (157)

Juhasz focuses on more literary works, which are not examples of ethnography (though the boundaries are not completely rigid), but her argument regarding writing about one’s parent applies to (filial and filiation) ethnography as well. One more example of filiation ethnography, before I turn to filial ethnography, is provided by Tony Adams (2006). His article focuses on his relationship with his father. Since he is the one writing, not a third party, he considers it autoethnography. I would add the filiation classification for Adam’s piece. In contrast, Gotham Chopra’s (2014) documentary film, Decoding Deepak, on his father Deepak Chopra serves as an example of filial ethnography. Gotham Chopra provides an exposé of his father, a world-famous guru, in an oftentimes unflattering light. The purpose is to humanize him as a father, in contradistinction to an otherworldly mystical teacher of wisdom. I do not believe my father will be nearly as famous (or infamous) as Deepak Chopra. However, I do share some of the sentiments of the younger Chopra, who has reflected in his film on how much that project, though ostensibly focusing on his father, is intimately about himself and their relationship. How we differ is in that Gotham Chopra can only remember when his father was already famous and always on the road helping others. In contrast, I can clearly remember my father before he had

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any students or patients. I have witnessed him change and develop as a healer, trying out numerous methods, abandoning some, and collecting and keeping others for his repertoire. I also influence my father’s practice and worldview and provide doctrinal explanations of karmic causes of disease. As mentioned earlier regarding the origins of this project, my father was open to being interviewed for a scholarly project by my colleague. I sensed in my father joy in talking about his practice, Buddhism, and healing. In writing about him, as someone trained in the academic study of religion who is writing a piece on his father, I am reflecting on my embedded connection and contribution to his community and his religious healing practices. The reason he started Buddhist meditation in 2010 was precisely because of my own personal interest in the study of it beginning in 1999 and the practice of it in 2009. Undoubtedly, my trips to meditation retreats sparked his interest and curiosity. From the other direction, he taught me qigong in high school and other martial arts when I was younger. I met his martial arts shifu 師傅 (master) in China and observed his practice over the years. These events collectively instilled in me an interest in self-cultivation practices. As his ethnographer, it has been difficult in writing this piece to translate his know-how and expertise not just from Chinese to English, but also from his—and by extension my—Chinese American immigrant working-class worldview, to the vocabulary and framework of Anglophone academic audiences. There is a struggle to present my father in what I believe to be the most honest light (e.g., exposing his perhaps hypocritical hiding of his dietary preferences to prevent aggravating his stomach ailment from his students and patients) and to present him charitably to a public audience who may have dismissive or negative responses to some of his convictions and repertoire—possibly viewing them as superstition or as uninformed, misguided beliefs and actions.19 These are some issues that may arise in filial ethnography. How much purchase do these genres of filial ethnography and filiation ethnography have? Do they avoid the criticism of narcissism that is launched at autoethnography, or the charge of not enough literary merit because autoethnography is not quite biography or memoir, or the charge of not being applicable enough to others who may not have interesting parents? Do we need any more genres? Can people not write about their parents simply as biography, or ethnography?

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Conclusion The payoff in filial ethnography is the recognition of how the writing and scholarly construction of one’s parent(s) is intimately an activity about oneself. To use an analogy, the image that is captured by a filial ethnography places the focus squarely on the parent, highlighted in the foreground. Yet, the offspring as author is undoubtedly there. The progeny is reflected not only in the framing and composition, but is perhaps visible in the background of the image. To put it another way, the image presented contains a mirror reflection of the offspring creating the picture, somewhat akin to the king and queen in Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas. The genre is a matter of focus, determined by the center of attention, either the writer (autoethnography), the parent(s) (filial ethnography), or both in their relationship (filiation ethnography). This is not a symmetrical spectrum because autoethnography does not necessarily implicate an intimate analysis or construction of the parent, while filial ethnography necessarily does so for the self. Filiation ethnography can cover the middle ground and focus on the relationship, and it may be produced by a third party. This is the methodological significance of my contribution. The empirical significance of this chapter is the use of my father and myself as case studies to address topics of religion and healing, immigrant and transnational community, family narratives, Chinese religious eclecticism, and conflicting religious identities and worldviews in order to engage with multiple fields of study: Buddhist studies, Asian American studies, and reflexive scholarship—particularly autoethnography and how scholars impact their subject of study. My father and I are two different examples of how to navigate hybrid identities. While my motivation to reconcile competing worldviews changed over time, my father never felt that compulsion. In other words, this contribution’s theoretical significance is to contrast two ways of Asian American hybridity: my father’s assimilation versus my agnosticism/oscillation. This project pioneers the intersection of Asian studies, American studies, and religious studies. It asks how identity and relationships affect scholarship. How do my kinship and personal practice affect my research? This filial ethnography provides some description of the range of religious healing practices available to the Chinese diaspora in the contemporary New York City area and more generally to Sinophone audiences around the globe. It shows how religion is spread through healing. My father’s community and their practices of mar-

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tial arts, acupuncture, qigong, fengshui, Buddhist medical arts, and other miscellaneous/eclectic Chinese religious practices exemplify the transnational flows of knowledge that break down state boundaries and static notions of “Chinese” medicine/religion. As a node, my father provides a local reassembly of practices in order to continually create novel modes of religious healing. Reflecting on the methodology of writing about one’s father, I propose recognition of the genre of filial ethnography, in which writing about one’s parent(s) is intimately a construction of oneself and is thus a subcategory of autoethnography. Though this may seem obvious to some readers, or to myself after the fact, this was not the case in the initial stages of this project.

Kin Cheung is associate professor of East and South Asian Religions at Moravian University. He researches how contemporary agents use Buddhist doctrine and ritual in Chinese and American contexts as well as transnational networks—specifically, Buddhist engagement with healing, meditation, ethical dilemmas, economics, capitalism, and secularism. His work appears in The Journal of the American Academy of Religion; Religion, State and Society; and The Journal of Buddhist Ethics; as well as in the edited volumes Miracles: An Exercise in Comparative Philosophy of Religion; Teaching About Asia in a Time of Pandemic; Buddhism and Medicine: An Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Sources; and Handbook of Ethical Foundations of Mindfulness.

Notes 1. See Palmer 2007 for a history of qigong, including its modern creation and how the Chinese Communist Party initially presented it as a practice backed by science, then claimed qigong’s later developments—such as Falun Gong—to be a superstitious evil cult. Qigong, like meditation, is not one monolithic practice. 2. See Chen 2008 for rare scholarship on Taiwanese immigrants being introduced to Buddhism through a temple in Southern California. 3. See Salguero 2019 for a range of Asian American, including Chinese American, Buddhists in Philadelphia and their various communities of healing. 4. See Wu 2002 on a Chinese American Buddhist Cultural Center in Boston, and Di 2018 on a Chinese Buddhist Temple in a large metropolitan city in the US.

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5. Kniss and Numrich 2007; Cadge and Ecklund 2007. 6. See Stein 2019 for a genealogy and history of this transnational and varied practice. 7. The second character of this Japanese word here, ki, is the same as the Chinese qi. The term reiki can be translated as spiritual or luminous ki/ qi. 8. I have written elsewhere on “how race undergirds the construction and classification of one set of specific beliefs and practices as ‘secular,’ ‘universal,’ ‘rational,’ ‘philosophical,’ ‘pragmatic,’ and ‘scientific,’ in contrast to another set that is relegated as ‘religious,’ ‘provincial,’ ‘cultural,’ ‘irrational,’ ‘dogmatic,’ ‘nonsensical,’ and ‘superstitious.’ This hierarchical construction is political in that classifiers adjudicate aspects of Buddhism deemed superior, denigrating the rest as inferior.” See Cheung, forthcoming. 9. See Lee and Kye 2016 for how non–Asian Americans continue to be racially assimilated and marginalized by other Americans. 10. As mentioned in note 1, Communist China has to contend with and reconcile multiple epistemologies and ontologies in the aftermath of its encounter with Western nations. The Chinese Communist Party’s changing stance on qigong exemplifies this uneasy balance between qi on the one hand, and Marxist materialism and scientism on the other. 11. Cheung and Salguero 2019. 12. He has lived in Brooklyn with my mother for three decades, and has recently moved to New Jersey, walking distance from the home where I live with my wife and two children. We are in Edison, a township of over a hundred thousand people, of which 43 percent are Asian, because this allows close access to Chinese professionals, markets, and restaurants, and an hour-long public transit trip to New York City and its many Chinatowns. See Zhou 2009. 13. “The Comparison Project.” That presentation argued for the category of natural miracle to understand instances of his religious healing. See Cheung 2022. 14. See note 6. 15. The word Confucius is a Latinization of the Chinese name Kongfuzi 孔 夫子, and because of that, some authors prefer to use Kongzi (Master Kong). 16. Zhengzuo正座 (more commonly known in the Japanese: seiza) on a cushion. 17. He wanted to see the pictures and video I took of him because his students said they have seen auras on him during his practice. He wanted to know if these captured it, which did not happen. 18. See Keyes 1992 for a collection of essays by sons on their fathers, Richesin 2009 for essays by women writers on their mothers, and McMullan 2015 for essays by female writers on their fathers. 19. My gratitude goes to Edwin Ng who has raised these points via personal communication.

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Flanagan, Owen. 2011. The Bodhisattva’s Brain: Buddhism Naturalized. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. Fox, Jennifer. 2011. My Reincarnation. Documentary, Adventure, Biography. Freeman, Mark. 2014. “From Absence to Presence: Finding Mother, Ever Again.” In On (Writing) Families: Autoethnographies of Presence and Absence, Love and Loss, edited by Jonathan Wyatt and Tony E. Adams, 49–55. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Gleig, Ann. 2019. American Dharma: Buddhism beyond Modernity. New Haven: Yale University Press. Gross, Rita M. 1993. Buddhism after Patriarchy: A Feminist History, Analysis, and Reconstruction of Buddhism. Albany: State University of New York Press. Han, Chenxing. 2021. Be the Refuge: Raising the Voices of Asian American Buddhists. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books. Helderman, Ira. 2019. Prescribing the Dharma: Psychotherapists, Buddhist Traditions, and Defining Religion. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. Hickey, Wakoh Shannon. 2010. “Two Buddhisms, Three Buddhisms, and Racism.” Journal of Global Buddhism 11: 1–25. Jackson, Alecia Y., and Lisa A. Mazzei. 2008. “Experience and ‘I’ in Autoethnography: A Deconstruction.” International Review of Qualitative Research 1 (3): 299–318. Jeung, Russell, Seanan S. Fong, and Helen Jin Kim. 2019. Family Sacrifices: The Worldviews and Ethics of Chinese Americans. New York: Oxford University Press. Jonsdottir, Gunnhildur Una. 2014 “Temporary Blindness.” In On (Writing) Families: Autoethnographies of Presence and Absence, Love and Loss, edited by Jonathan Wyatt and Tony E. Adams, 123–29. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Josephson-Storm, Jason Ā. 2014. “Reflexive Religious Studies: A Note,” Religion Bulletin. The blogging portal of the Bulletin for the Study of Religion, 18 April, 2014. http://www.equinoxpub.com/blog/2014/04/ reflexive-religious-studies-a-note/ Juhasz, Suzanne. 2000. “Towards Recognition: Writing and the DaughterMother Relationship.” American Imago 57 (2): 157–83. Keyes, Ralph, ed. 1992. Sons on Fathers: A Book of Men’s Writing. New York, NY: HarperCollins. Kniss, Fred, and Paul D. Numrich. 2007. Sacred Assemblies and Civic Engagement: How Religion Matters for America’s Newest Immigrants. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Levitt, Laura. 2007. American Jewish Loss after the Holocaust. New York: New York University Press. Lee, Jennifer C., and Samuel Kye. 2016. “Racialized Assimilation of Asian Americans.” Annual Review of Sociology 42 (1): 253–73. https://doi.org/ 10.1146/annurev-soc-081715-074310.

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Liu, Xuan, Monica E. McGarrity, and Yiming Li. 2012. “The Influence of Traditional Buddhist Wildlife Release on Biological Invasions.” Conservation Letters 5 (2): 107–14. McMullan, Margaret, ed. 2015. Every Father’s Daughter: Twenty-Four Women Writers Remember Their Fathers. Kingston, New York: McPherson & Company. Muller, A. Charles. 2019. “Generations of Buddhist Studies.” H-Buddhism. Accessed 15 December 2019. https://networks.h-net.org/node/6060/ pages/3572157/generations-buddhist-studies Narayan. Kirin. 2012. “Local Boons: The Many Lives of Family Stories.” In Locating Life Stories: Beyond East-West Binaries in (Auto)Biographical Studies, edited by Maureen Perkins, 239-258. Honolulu: Published for the Biographical Research Center by the University of Hawai’i Press. Ng, Edwin. 2012. “The Autoethnographic Genre and Buddhist Studies: Reflections of a Postcolonial ‘Western Buddhist’ Convert.” Journal for the Academic Study of Religion 25 (2): 163–84. Palmer, David A. 2007. Qigong Fever: Body, Science, and Utopia in China. New York: Columbia University Press. Paper, Jordan D. 2019. Chinese Religion and Familism: The Basis of Chinese Culture, Society and Government. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Prasad, Ajnesh. 2019. Autoethnography and Organization Research: Reflections from Fieldwork in Palestine. Cham: Springer International Publishing. Prebish, Charles. 2011. An American Buddhist Life: Memoirs of a Modern Dharma Pioneer. Richmond Hill, Ont: The Sumeru Press Inc. Richesin, Andrea N., ed. 2009. Because I Love Her: 34 Women Writers Reflect on the Mother-Daughter Bond. Don Mills, Ontario: Harlequin. Rowe, Desirée. 2014. “Roses and Grime: Tattoos, Texts, and Failure.” In On (Writing) Families: Autoethnographies of Presence and Absence, Love and Loss, edited by Jonathan Wyatt and Tony E. Adams, 37–41. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Salguero, C. Pierce. 2019. “Varieties of Buddhist Healing in Multiethnic Philadelphia.” Religions 10 (1): 48. Schopen, Gregory. 2004. Buddhist Monks and Business Matters: Still More Papers on Monastic Buddhism in India. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Speedy, Jane. 2014. “Dying in the Care of the NHS: Fragments from a Daughter’s Love Song for Her Father.” In On (Writing) Families: Autoethnographies of Presence and Absence, Love and Loss, edited by Jonathan Wyatt and Tony E. Adams, 115–22. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Stein, Justin B. 2019. “‘Universe Energy’: Translation and Reiki Healing in the Twentieth-Century North Pacific.” Asian Medicine 14 (1): 81–103. Tilley-Lubbs, Gresilda A. 2016. “Critical Autoethnography and the Vulnerable Self as Researcher.” In Re-Telling Our Stories: Critical Autoethnographic Narratives, edited by Gresilda A. Tilley-Lubbs and Silvia Bénard Calva, 3–15. Imagination and Praxis. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers.

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“The Comparison Project: The Intertwining of Healing and Religion in a Contemporary Chinese American Community.” 2018. Accessed 15 October 2020. https://comparisonproject.wp.drake.edu/10-25-the-inte rtwining-of-healing-and-religion-in-a-contemporary-chinese-americ an-community/. Thomas, Jolyon Baraka. 2019. Faking Liberties. Religious Freedom in American-Occupied Japan. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Voss Roberts, Michelle. 2010. “Religious Belonging and the Multiple.” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 26 (1): 43–62. Waterston, Alisse. 2006. “The Story of My Story: An Anthropology of Violence, Dispossession, and Diaspora.” Peace Research Abstracts Journal 43 (2). Waterston, Alisse, and Barbara Rylko-Bauer. 2008. “Out of the Shadows of History and Memory: Personal Family Narratives as Intimate Ethnography.” In The Shadow Side of Fieldwork: Exploring the Blurred Borders Between Ethnography and Life, edited by Athena McLean and Annette Leibing, 31–55. Oxford: John Wiley & Sons. Wilson, Jeff. 2014. Mindful America: The Mutual Transformation of Buddhist Meditation and American Culture. New York: Oxford University Press. Wright, Jeannie. 2014. “Living Places.” In On (Writing) Families: Autoethnographies of Presence and Absence, Love and Loss, edited by Jonathan Wyatt and Tony E. Adams, 77–78. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Wu, Hongyu. 2002. “Buddhism, Health, and Healing in a Chinese Community.” The Pluralism Project, Harvard University. http://pluralism.org/ wp-content/uploads/2015/08/Wu.pdf. Wyatt, Jonathan, and Tony E Adams. 2014. On (Writing) Families: Autoethnographies of Presence and Absence, Love and Loss. Rotterdam: SensePublishers. Yoo, David K., and Khyati Y. Joshi, eds. 2020. Envisioning Religion, Race, and Asian Americans. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Zhou, Min. 2009. Contemporary Chinese America: Immigration, Ethnicity, and Community Transformation. Asian American History and Culture. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

2 I Am My Mother’s Son Revelations of the Divine Earl Clarence L. Jimenez

Recent literature on academic identity among teaching staff has largely focused on the tension brought upon it by institutional pressures (Quigley 2011; Ching 2021; Yang, Shu, and Yin 2022). Muted are the tensions between the academic and his self, particularly one tension that references religious or spiritual being, as the need for this volume attests. This is even more the case if one’s upbringing and current orientation is toward new religious movements often seen as the Other and derogatorily labeled as “cults.” But as Elms (2007) has shown in his study of first-year college students, individual religiosity does have an impact on one’s academic success. This chapter contributes to the conversation between familial religiosity—or in the case of this volume, the familial occult—and academic identity, which my narrative foregrounds. I grew up and still belong to a new religious movement, The Holy Church of Yahweh, which began in 1978 as a loose assembly of people who sought out my mother, Salud, for her healing powers. For me, that meant living deeply in the spiritual and divine world I grew up in alongside the rarefied world of the academe, where I was both educator and scholar. Living in these intersecting worlds required navigating the collision between the subjectivity of religion and the objectivity of scholarship. This came to the fore in my choice to study my spiritual community for my PhD in ethnomusicology. I was not prepared for how deeply personal the research would be, forcing me to inadvertently confront the tension between my dueling identities as a member of academic and spiritual communities. Nav-

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igating these challenges opened up a process by which I discovered myself and realized how deeply embedded my spiritual self is within my academic self. This process continues to manifest itself in my current positionality as the narrator of this chapter, in which I go back to my dissertation journey and my subsequent academic life, teasing out the tensions as I navigate my academic and spiritual selves. In this chapter, I explore the anxieties faced by academics like myself who feel that their spiritual being, particularly one that is rooted in family, is a liability to their academic identity. This is a pressure felt by so many others (Anderson and Glass-Coffin 2013; Briggs 2016; Chang and Boyd 2011), and I wish to show that such pressures can be eased by recognizing how these seemingly opposing identities have much in common when one considers the possibility of academic development informed by one’s spiritual life practice. I turn to social psychology’s positioning of identity as both “internal” and “external” to the individual (Cote and Levine 2002: 49): It is internal to the extent that it is seen to be subjectively “constructed” by the individual, but it is external to the extent that this construction is in reference to “objective” social circumstances provided by day-to-day interactions, social roles, cultural institutions, and social structures.

I thought that my identity as an academic was my personal construction through all the years I was studying, teaching, and engaging in research; but unknown to me, its foundation lay in my identity as a spiritual being. In combining my reflections on the process of writing my dissertation and writing this chapter, I formulate an understanding of my identity as a product of a person negotiating passages through life and reflecting on these actions, culminating in the creation of “stories” or “narratives” that explain past actions (Cote and Levine 2002). As Giddens (1991: 53) notes, “It is the self as reflexively understood by the person in terms of her or his biography. Identity here still presumes continuity across time and space: but self-identity is such continuity as interpreted reflexively by the agent.” Included in this biography is my narrative inheritance (Goodall 2005), the stories told to me by my older sisters and people in the community when my memory and my journal from my childhood years fail me. Thus, this chapter is written within an autoethnographic frame as it allows me to use my personal experience to engage with others and the larger world (Ellis 2004). I reflexively point my lens to my familial background to show how this has shaped my understanding of the spiritual and my own identity and positionality both as a scholar

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and a practitioner of the divine. Admittedly, doing so is cathartic, as autoethnography allows us to make sense of who we are in relation to the larger world we belong to (Jones, Adams, and Ellis 2015). It engages us with the world through our engagement of ourselves. My approach in writing this autoethnography springs from the need “to reflect on the consequences of my work, not only for others but also for myself, and where all parts of myself—emotional, spiritual, intellectual, embodied, and moral—can be voiced and integrated with my work” (Bochner 2005: 53). No less muted is the power of autoethnography to bridge the private and the public. This is the power to offer a means by which others could take part in a hitherto unknown world through my narrative, and in reliving my experiences, make sense of who I am. More importantly, it allows others to obtain an understanding of how this cultic world operates through my own lens and the transformative impact it has had on my life as an academic, thereby easing its Otherness. It is that power of autoethnography to facilitate an “understanding, and often a critique, of cultural life by encouraging readers to think about taken-for-granted norms, experiences, and practices in new, unique, complicated, and challenging ways” (Jones, Adams, and Ellis 2015: 33) that I appropriate. I make sense of the connection between my spiritual self and my academic self through my narrative of the process of writing my dissertation. Autoethnography is living one’s life (Ellis 2004); it is a form of storytelling. In connecting my story of writing my dissertation with my story of writing this autoethnography, I harness Denzin’s (2003: 126) interpretivist approach, where “in bringing the past into the autobiographical present, I insert myself into the past and create the conditions for rewriting and hence re-experiencing it.” Thus, I begin with the community I belong to.

The Holy Church of Yahweh My mother was born Salud Maquiraya Lomuntad to an Army brigadier general father and a mother with Spanish blood. She grew up in a respectable family. She and her siblings lived a good life and even went to Manila for university. She received a BA in English from the University of the Philippines, the country’s premier state university, and went on to teach literature at the University of the East. She married my father, a budding lawyer at the time who eventually became quite famous with his controversial and news-making legal cases during his prime. My father often said that it was his lawyer’s mind

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that prevented him from accepting my mother’s spiritual calling.1 We were six children, and I was the fifth and the only boy. I was only seven years old when my mother fell into a trance on the evening of 13 August 1978. I don’t quite remember it anymore, but my eldest sister tells me that my mother noticed the lips of the statue of the Sto. Niño (Child Jesus) moving. She called my second sister to look at the statue and to turn the lights on and off to check if it were just the flickering of shadows. The statue’s lips continued to move. My sister called all of us siblings to the living room where the altar was and where the statue, a two-foot-high image clad in red and gold and wearing a crown, stood. With my mother declaring, “God is in the house,” we all knelt down to pray. It was during the praying of the third Glorious Mystery, the Descent of the Holy Spirit Upon the Apostles, that my mother fell unconscious and a deep male voice emanated from her, identifying itself as Diyos Ama (God the Father). Since that night, our lives have never been the same. My sisters and I grew up in the spiritual community (referred to as a congregation back then) that formed out of our mother’s calling. Aside from Diyos Ama, other holy figures such as the Virgin Mary, Jesus, and the Sto. Niño have manifested themselves. Salud claimed that Diyos Ama had given her the power to heal as proof of his presence in her—thus the start of the healing sessions. During my mother’s lifetime, there were as many as a thousand people coming to these sessions held at a small house in the suburbs of Quezon City. That number has gone significantly down to about a hundred since my mother’s death in 1992 and the schism that arose from it, which resulted in separate communities now headed by my eldest sister and I in one and three other sisters and a cousin in another. We were witness to numerous things that people our age would normally not see or experience. My older sisters were in their teens then, and the youngest was just a small child. There were spirit possessions and exorcisms, healing sessions, and events that were symbolic battles between the forces of good and evil. We participated in purification ceremonies, abided by ritual practices meant to cleanse us of the vestiges of evil, learned prayers and oraciones (sung prayers), and so much more. We became accustomed to our mother’s trances, when the spirits of Diyos Ama (who was eventually referred to as Yahweh), the Virgin Mary, Jesus, and the Sto. Niño would speak to us and other people. God and even the devil became tangible presences in our lives. They were unseen but felt and experienced through visitations, intense moments of emotion, dreams, and myriad other ways. As our mother’s children, whom she referred to as “seeds,” we

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were expected to emulate her and be instruments of divine presence ourselves. We were told of our past reincarnations, some of which are Biblical, and the roles we were to play in the community. We, too, had our own special callings. These did not alter our normal lives, however. We went about our daily lives, playing outside our house, going to school, and celebrating our birthdays with friends and classmates, who were unaware of the supernatural aspect of our familial lives. Some parents at the small close-knit school knew that our mother was a healer (a “divine healer” my mother told them), but what they thought about it or whether they told their children, our classmates, we never knew, as we were never treated differently. We grew up just like any other person, not immune to the secular and materials ways and inclinations of this world. When we became adults and took on careers, this aspect of our lives remained closed to colleagues, friends, and acquaintances, even as we continued to be active in our religious community, which we now referred to as a “church.” To this day the divine, the supernatural, and the spiritual are lived experiences in my daily life. As mentioned earlier, my spiritual being, my identity as a “sheep,” which is what we call ourselves, only started to unfold through the process of writing my dissertation. So, I return to the day I proposed to write about my own spiritual community, the day that started my journey of reconciliation.

Proposing Myself “So, you are doing an autoethnography,” remarked my seventyplus-year-old professor and dissertation adviser. I had just finished explaining to him that I wanted to research my spiritual community. I had grown up fascinated with its soundscape and how it mediated our own experiences of the divine. It seemed a perfect fit for my research interest in acoustemology, Steven Feld’s concept of knowing society and culture through sound. It was an extension of my search for the meanings of the divine and the supernatural and of the relationship between a heavenly god and an earthly being. It seemed that my very personal spiritual life was trying to connect to my life as an academic—two existences that seemed to clash. These were all taking place at around the same time that I became active again after years of hibernating from my religious community following the death of my mother. My distance from the church’s community, however, was only physical. Throughout my time away from it, I retained a

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sense of belonging by maintaining the spiritual practices I had been accustomed to. Now, after a few years, I was back. Perhaps, like one who has been away from the homeland for so long, I tried to reassert my presence in the community. I was reclaiming it for myself, remembering who I was and who I am among the people it harbored, and I was warmly welcomed. This coming home had a parallel in my acoustemological study of religion. As my interest in sound studies progressed, I found within me the right subject for what I wanted to explore. Slowly, I was opening the door to myself, certain that I was in full control of what I wanted to reveal and could reveal. I remembered the controversy, several years back in the first year of my master’s in anthropology, around the dissertation of a wellknown Catholic priest on his own experience running around the Philippines to call attention to various political issues. “How can an anthropologist write about himself?” some of my classmates asked. I, too, was skeptical. Now, here I was, doing something similar. In defense of my decision, I included a disclaimer in my proposal: It is easy to assume an autoethnographic stance in which I engage in a form of critical reflexive narrative inquiry, critical reflexive self-study, or critical reflective action research while taking on an active, scientific, and systematic view of personal experience in relation to the community being studied (Hughes and Pennington 2017). However, I decline to do so for I do not wish to study myself and my religious experiences. (Jimenez 2019: 10)

My desire to keep my experiences muted was congruent with the need to establish my academic integrity. Autoethnography requires that one lays out one’s life for everyone to see, and this was simply too much for me. I was not ready for it, especially when the audience would be people in the academe. As Tony Adams, Holman, and Ellis write, I initially steered clear of autoethnography as the primary research method for my dissertation; stubbornly, and ignorantly, I thought that the method would thwart the possibility of having an academic career. I worried more about pleasing (imagined) traditional scholars at other schools than about pleasing the professors with whom I worked and doing the work I felt mattered. (2015: 7)

I was worried about how my work would be received and whether it would ever find its way into publication. I wondered how many researchers were ignored and were not published because their work

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was intensely personal. While ethnography had taken a reflexive turn in the past decades (Fabian 2008; Davies 1999), it was mainly concerned with the positionality of the ethnographer in relation to his subjects and not what it revealed about the ethnographer’s own life. Also, like other scholars of music and religion, I had to operate and translate in what Englehart (2011) refers to as an epistemological divide, where one engages with the study of music and religion from a secular-critical perspective in order to reveal the human agency in both religion and religious music while circumscribing them within the faith of the believer. This allows the production of knowledge without questioning the efficacy and truthfulness of the religious experience of music. I was crossing that divide, operating on both sides as a secular scholar and as a believer.

Writing Myself The biggest challenge was unraveling my spiritual beliefs, something that my colleagues and even friends in the academe do not seem to perceive as part of my identity. While almost all of my colleagues are aware that I am involved in a church (after all, religion is important in Filipino culture), what they do not know is the depth of my involvement in it, or that it is a church founded by my mother with its own unique beliefs and practices.2 “I belong to a church. Our own church,” is my standard reply, which suited most people. After all, the term “church” sounds safe. Churches founded by individuals outside dominant religious institutions like the Catholic Church are quite common in the Philippines. They do, however, continue to identify with Christian practices and beliefs, albeit in their own configuration. “Church” also conjures images of beautiful congregational spaces with ceremonies and practices that fit within a traditional Christian framework. Our church also had those “safe” practices and spaces. When asked, I give sanitized accounts of our celebrations and ceremonies, some of our practices, and our belief system. Missing are accounts of the trances that my mother fell into, my participation in exorcisms growing up, the healing sessions we had, the visitations of the Holy Family, my role as a priest and at times a messenger of God, or any of my experiences tangible with God and the devil. I am especially careful at the university. A church community that sounds cultic, at least from the vantage point of Catholicism in the Philippines, does not seem like a comfortable cloak to wear as one

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treads the hallowed corridors of the academe. I have always felt that my spiritual self was incompatible with my academic life. It is a sentiment echoed by others, as Glass-Coffin narrates: “At the beginning of my undergraduate studies in anthropology, though, I felt my identity as a spiritual being to be at odds with my immersion in the social sciences” (Anderson and Glass-Coffin 2013: 59). While I am not ashamed of who I am, there are aspects of my life and my spiritual practice that I felt would diminish my reputation as a scholar. Religion and spirituality operate on faith and belief. One acknowledges the existence of gods, deities, and their cosmological worlds with little space for doubt—a contrast to the empiricism and reasoning that is a hallmark of the academe. It is from this dichotomy that my fear operates springs. In the course of crafting my ethnography, I realized that refraining from writing about myself did not prevent the anxiety that I would reveal myself through the narrative I was creating. In the process of writing about my spirituality, I was also writing about the impact of all spiritual experiences, from the time I was seven until this very day, which constitutes who I am today, including my identity as an academic. The ethnographic descriptions of ceremonies and practices were also descriptions of the activities of my community and thus of my personal activities away from the public eye. In short, I was revealing myself to everyone, and I was not quite sure how much I was willing to do that. This is an issue that finds resonance with many other scholars, for beneath the analyses, discussions, and academic jargon is the writer’s identity. As Hyland (2002) notes, “Academic writing, like all forms of communication, is an act of identity: it not only conveys disciplinary ‘content’ but also carries a representation of the writer” (1,092). What I realized was that the more I tried to choose what to present and how to sanitize things, the more I needed to engage with myself, going deeper into the process of understanding who I am as a scholar and a spiritual being. I also realized that all the resistance I was feeling was borne of my resistance to the idea that one can be both scholarly and spiritual and my unwillingness to reconcile my private self with my public self. What Ellis (2004) calls the “Ethnographic I” was being interrogated, as I laid it out for everyone to see. Anderson and Glass-Coffin (2013) write: It is the “I” of emergence, the “I” of dialogue, the “I” of being-changed-by inquiry. The ethnographic “I” is visible as an actor and an agent, acting and reacting visibly to the implications and the consequences of inquiry. Yet, ironically perhaps, the “I” that may seem deliciously in control by virtue of its visibility is not autonomous at all. Instead, the ethnographic

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“I” exists only as it is both framed and opened by the Other. In autoethnographic inquiry, the “I” that is emphasized and celebrated is, therefore, the “I” of connection and position and unfolding. (71–72)

If the self is seen as a process of linking the private with the public and linking images of the past, present, and future (Poole 2002), then writing my dissertation was part of the process of recognizing myself. I needed to free myself and to acknowledge that I became a scholar because of who my mother was and the life I had with her in the community. Only with this freedom can the tensions between my seemingly opposing identities cease.

Defending Myself During my oral defense, I was especially concerned with one member of the panel, the university president, a young intellectual with a PhD in comparative literature from Cornell University and a former faculty member at the University of Washington. I had sat in many of his guest lectures, and he had a certain affinity for my department. We often interacted academically, and he had always monitored my graduate studies along with two others in the department, as expectations for our academic careers were high. The time had come for the reveal, and I was worried about what he would make of me. While academic institutions claim to be free, open, and equal spaces, issues of discrimination based on identity continue to exist (Hall 2006; Milkman, Akinola, and Chugh 2015; Pilkington 2011). Such discrimination, whether on an institutional or individual level, is based on stereotypes or personally formed biases and highlights the anxieties that an academic might feel whose spiritual identity is not mainstream. While I did not expect to be discriminated against, having always found my institution (and the president) to be respectful of individual identity, I was concerned about how I would be perceived and what image might be formed about me. My concern extended beyond my own identity to that of my church and community. It was no longer just a case of what he and the rest of the panel would think of me but what they would think of us. The latter sounded more painful as it included my sisters, some of my relatives, and my closest friends, many of whom were like family. As Jenkins (2008) notes: So, who we are, or who we are seen to be, can matter enormously. Nor is identification just a matter of the encounters and thresholds of individ-

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ual lives. Although identification always involves individuals, something else—collectivity and history—may also be at stake. (3)

Thus, my research also brought up issues of my past and my upbringing, considering that I had lived this kind of life since I was seven years old. My past, my present, and even my future were up for scrutiny. I suddenly felt like the Other, facing all the prejudices and biases that implies. It was a position I was not used to. If identity is a process, rather than a “thing” that someone can have or not have, and if it is rooted in something that one does (Jenkins 2008), then all those ceremonies, rites, rituals, exorcisms, celebrations, and other spiritual practices I have been engaging with for the past forty-plus years have constructed a large portion of who I am. My identity as an academic with its decade of graduate studies, teaching, and conducting research pales in comparison. My oral defense was more than a defense of my research, it was a defense of who I am, and I realized that it was an identity worth revealing and defending. As I write this, I go back to the many conversations I had with my eldest sister, who has taken over the leadership of the church. We often laugh during our recollections of our years growing up together and all the unusual things that we did as part of our spiritual practice. One evening, our talk turned to my work and the apprehensions and pressures I was feeling. My sister could relate. We often talk about the disconnect between our public and spiritual lives. While she and my other siblings have none of the anxieties I feel (after all, there is no need for them to disclose that part of their lives), they are conscious of the dissimilarities between their public and private worlds. I remember my eldest sister telling me that it was a matter of perspective, and that my being an academic was a validation of our beliefs and spiritual practices. Mag-isip (to think) has always been part of our process of knowing the divine. Our mother always insisted that believers should not follow and believe blindly but strive to know, think, and understand their faith. A former literature professor, she valued knowledge and the need to scrutinize even our own beliefs. “Pag-isipan nyo (think about it),” she would often say. That’s why infusions of knowledge from what we refer to as “Rings of Power” figure prominently in our practice.3 “Is your being an academic not a validation of the integrity of our beliefs and evidence that it can stand the scrutiny of scholarship,” my sister responded to me. It was that question that led me to stand confidently before my oral defense and talk about myself. If identity is formed by what we do as human beings, then what I do as a student, teacher,

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and researcher should stand on equal ground with what I do as a spiritual being, even if the former threatens to overshadow the latter. When identity is perceived through the lens of what one does rather than through the superficial labels of race, gender, age, social status, and religion, then the apprehensions and disquiets of who one is can be laid to rest. Whatever anxieties I had were unfounded, as it turned out. Perhaps I mistrusted too much and had judged my panel hastily in the same manner I was expecting them to judge me. I earned my PhD and continue to interact with members of the panel in academic matters. I have also been given new roles in my department. I would like to believe my sister is right, that ultimately, it is my entire identity, the totality of my being, that matters, especially when the multiple identities that I keep are complementary. On the day I defended my dissertation and myself, I reconciled my spiritual and academic selves. Reliving that moment of reconciliation, I connect to the role that my familial occult has played in shaping my life of scholarship. I turn to a comment from the panel during my oral defense: It seems that you are trying to suppress yourself. You are in all of these pages. From what I read, you are now what your mother made you to be. You are her reflection. I think you should write a biography of yourself and your mother to give more context to your analysis.

It came from a respectable elderly female ethnomusicologist who has known me since my undergraduate years and was my professor in many courses. I stood silent for a moment. I had never thought of it that way. It dawned on me that there was much more truth in her statement than I would care to admit. Interpersonal relationships impact identity formation, and the close relationship I had with my mother coupled with the immersive life I had in the spiritual community constructed my selfhood. After all, identity is not one’s personal property as much as it is realized through extended interactions.

I Am My Mother’s Son My sisters often say that of all the siblings, I was the one who took after my mother’s intellect and artistic inclination. Measured against my interests, I guess it appears to be quite true. My introduction to Dante came by way of her copy of the Inferno scribbled with her annotations. I remember oral readings of Macbeth and Beowulf. She

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brought me to piano lessons and performances and bought me books and musical instruments. She was especially proud of my musical talents and supported me as I went to the music conservatory for further studies. Needless to say, I was at home with the sonic experiences of ringing bells, chants, utterances, prayers, and other sounds that were so much and continue to be a part of our spiritual practice. Musical inclination is cultivated in childhood through constant exposure in the environment (Campbell 2010; McPherson, 2015; Nyland et al. 2015), and while my sisters and I grew up in the same sonic environment of our spiritual practice, the musical relationship I had with my mother set me apart. To many members of the community, it comes as no surprise that I would turn out to be a professor of music whose position finds value in the life of the church as I continue to create the soundscapes that permeate our ceremonies, celebrations, and rituals. To others, it was a role that had been preordained and had found its fulfillment. To me, it was the realization of my dream as a thirteen-year-old as written in an entry in my journal dated 28 August 1985: “I wish I could teach them music. I will be very happy if I am given that chance by God the Father.” My mother instilled in my sisters and me a sense of identity in connection to the community and who she is as an instrument of the divine. “You are seeds of Salud,” she would often say. Other people would also refer to us as such. More than a reminder of who we are, it is a reminder of how we should be and the kind of identity we should keep no matter what others have constructed us to be, similar to what Sondra Briggs’ mother tells her: “You know what your heritage is,” Mama had told us from an early age. “You are Austrian and White European on your mother’s side and Black American on your father’s side.” (2017: 132)

This sense of identity is tied to a sense of belonging. “Remember who you belong to” (Helps 2016) has as much prominence as “remember who you are.” As Helps notes: I like the idea that we do not/cannot divide ourselves and that we need to resist others’ efforts to divide ourselves into separated parts. So, my relationship with belonging is with me at every moment, including when working as a family therapist. (142)

Spiritual identity is as much a part of one’s heritage as ethnicity, family origin, and history. Heritage also conjures a sense of belonging, a sense of home. For many, one’s spiritual or religious beliefs

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and their expressions, practices, and the communities they create are home, the “heart of a heartless world” (Marx and Engels 1964: 42). “Remember who you belong to” is a call to come home. I recall a dinner conversation with two of my sisters. R. said that she had been reading the “Notebooks”4 and said that our youngest sister, A., who has since converted to born-again Christianity, will somehow find her way home. An absence of a sense of belonging can have an adverse impact, as Briggs (2017) experiences when she is unable to anchor the heritage her mother reminds her of in either of the two worlds she inhabits: the affluent, White, Hebrew school she and her siblings go to, and her low-income neighborhood of Spanish Harlem. Neither world makes sense to her or fully accepts her. Thus, it is my sense of belonging that connects to my sense of self so that everywhere I go, whatever I do, I remember who I am. Faced with moral dilemmas, I am expected to know who I am: a seed of Salud, a priest, a reincarnation of a figure, a deliverer of divine messages, and many more. And I am expected to think and behave accordingly. This resonates with the kind of work that I do in the academe, to think deeply and critically as I have been brought up to do with my beliefs and spiritual practices. “Mag-isip” (“Think”), as my mother would always say. As Chang and Boyd observe (2011: 31), Spirituality and personhood are intimately interconnected. Personhood encompasses not only personal self, existentially and relationally existing in the context of their homes and communities, but also professional self, playing multiple roles in their workplace.

I see my work now in the academe as an extension of my spiritual work to make the world a better place not just for myself and my students but for everyone, using the tools of my profession to make appropriate moral choices. In a world of disinformation, historical revisionism, and truth distortion, I can apply the rigors of academic inquiry to surface the truth, give voice to issues, and enable social justice. In the course of doing so, I fulfill my spiritual calling. This is a position taken by others such as Sally Galman, whose roles as teacher and mother find context in her Jewishness: My work as a scholar, a Jew, and a mother is to make the world a better place—to engage in tikkun olam or “healing the world”—by making it a place where all people have the opportunity to become more fully human and become habituated to honoring all people as made in the image of

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G-d. I hope to do this through research and writing, through teaching and advising, through advocating for mothers and families, and through having children and raising them to be good, kind, and just people also committed to tikkun olam” (2011: 43).

My identity as a scholar, then, finds its roots in my relationship with the woman who was both my mother and my spiritual leader, and in my relationship with my community, which persists to this day. As Poole (2002) points out, the formation of one’s identity is shaped by a socialization process that lasts a lifetime.

Conclusion Was/am I writing academically to resist the stereotypes applied to a descendant of a spiritual leader branded as cultic? Was/is it a means to show the world that one can have this kind of belief, spiritual upbringing, and community, and yet be “normal” in accordance with social expectations? Does my consciousness of being my mother’s son and inheriting all the assumptions of being one help shape my work as an academic? These are the questions I ask myself as I end this chapter. I say “yes I was” when I was writing my dissertation and “yes I am” as I write this. The autoethnographic process has allowed me to reconcile the two halves of myself, the spiritual and the academic, and to realize that both can exist together as one. I have also realized that identity anxieties born out of experiences with the familial occult are resolved through an examination of our histories, telling our stories, and merging them with our everyday selves. We are shaped by our childhood, our experiences, the stories we are told, and what we are told of who we are and what we are, and these have shaped what I have become. Even in death, my mother calls out to me. Her memory and presence are made tangible and real by the practices, rituals, and ceremonies that I continue to conduct and participate in. Her voice, echoing in the recorded healing ceremonies, reaches out to me reminding me that no matter what world I find myself in or what identity I assume, I will remember who I am and who I belong to.

Earl Clarence L. Jimenez is an ethnomusicologist who has done research among different ethnolinguistic groups in the Philippines, most notably among the Tboli of Lake Sebu, South Cotabato. His re-

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search has been published in Studia Instrumentorum Musicae Popularis and the Asia-European Music Research Journal, among other venues. His research interests include organology, sound archiving, urban soundscapes, music and the body, and indigenous music education. He is an associate professor at the Philippine Women’s University School of Music in Manilla.

Notes 1. After my mother’s death, my father eventually accepted her calling and started joining the spiritual community. 2. During my mother’s time, it was referred to as a congregation. It was much later that the term “church” came into use. 3. A pair of diamond rings that were pressed against the temples by my mother and believed to infuse someone with knowledge. 4. These are written records of community events, conversations, and messages from spirits to my mother that have been kept by my sister.

References Anderson, L., and B. Glass-Coffin. 2013. “I Learn by Going: Autoethnographic Modes of Inquiry.” In Handbook of Autoethnography, ed. Stacey H. Jones, Thomas E. Adams, and Carolyn Ellis, 57–83. New York: Routledge. Bochner, Arthur P. (2005). “Surviving autoethnography.” Studies in Symbolic Interaction, 28, 51– 58. Boylorn, Robin M. and Mark P. Orbe. 2014. Critical Autoethnography: Intersecting Cultural Identities in Everyday Life. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, Inc. Briggs, Sondra S. 2016. “Teaching While Lesbian: Identity and a Case for Consciousness in the Classroom and Beyond.” In Doing Autoethnography, ed. Sandra L. Pensoneau-Conway, Thomas E. Adams, and Derek M. Bolen, 27–138. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Campbell, Patricia Shehan. 2010. Songs in Their Heads: Music and Its Meaning in Children’s Lives, 2nd edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chang, Heewon, and Drick Boyd. 2011. Spirituality in Higher Education. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, Inc. Ching, Gregory S. 2021. “Academic Identity and Communities of Practice: Narratives of Social Science Academics Career Decisions in Taiwan.” Education Sciences 11(8): 1–17. Cote, James, and Charles G. Levine. 2002. Identity Formation, Agency, and Culture: A Social Psychological Synthesis. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

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Davies, Charlotte A. 1999. Reflexive Ethnography: A Guide to Researching Selves and Others. New York: Routledge. Denzin, Norman K. (2003). Performance ethnography: Critical pedagogy and the politics of culture. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Ellis, Carolyn. 2004. The Eethnographic I: A Methodological Novel About Autoethnography. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press. Elms, Richard T. 2007. The Role of Religiosity in Academic Success. PhD dissertation, Washington State University. Engelhardt, Jeffers. 2011. “Music, Sound, and Religion.” In The Cultural Study of Music: A Critical Introduction, 2nd edn., ed. Martin Clayton, Trevor Herbert, and Richard R. Middleton, 299–307. New York: Routledge. Fabian, Johannes. 2008. Ethnography as Commentary: Writing from the Virtual Archive. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Galman, Sally C. 2011. “Now You See Her, Now You Don’t: The Integration of Mothering, Spirituality, and Work.” In Spirituality in Higher Education, ed. Heewon Chang and Drick Boyd, 33–50. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, Inc. Giddens, Anthony. 1991. Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Goodall, Harold Lloyd Jr. 2005. “Narrative Inheritance: A Nuclear Family with Toxic Secrets.” Qualitative Inquiry 11(4): 492–513. Hall, Ronald E. 2006. “White Women as Postmodern Vehicles of Black Oppression: The Pedagogy of Discrimination in Western Academe.” Journal of Black Studies 37(1): 69–82. Helps, Sarah. 2016. “Remember Who You Belong To: A Story of Multiple and Temporary Belongings.” In Doing Autoethnography, ed. Sandra L. Pensoneau-Conway, Thomas E. Adams, and Derek M. Bolen, 139–48. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Holman Jones, Stacy; Adams, Tony, and Carolyn Ellis. 2016. “Introduction” in Handbook of Autoethnography. eds. Holman Jones, Stacy; Adams, Tony, and Carolyn Ellis. London: Routledge. Hughes, Sherick A., and Julie L. Pennington. 2017. Autoethnography: Process, Product, and Possibility for Critical Social Research. Los Angeles: Sage. Hyland, Ken. 2002. “Authority and Invisibility: Authoritarial Identity in Academic Writing.” Journal of Pragmatics 34(8): 1,091-1,112. Jenkins, Richard. 2008. Social Identity, 3rd edn. London: Routledge. Jimenez, Earl Clarence L. 2019. The Divine Sound: Acoustemology of Faith in a Religious Community. PhD dissertation, Philippine Women’s University. Jones, Stacey H., Thomas E. Adams, and Carolyn Ellis, eds. 2013. Handbook of Autoethnography. New York: Routledge. Layder, Derek. 2004. Social and Personal Identity: Understanding Yourself. London: Sage.

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Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. 1964. On Religion. New York: Shocken Books. McPherson, Gary. 2015. The Child as Musician, 2nd edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Milkman, Katherine L., Modupe Akinola, and Dolly Chugh. 2015. “What Happens Before? A Field Experiment Exploring How Pay and Representation Differentially Shape Bias on the Pathway into Organizations. Journal of Applied Psychology 100(6): 1,678–1,712. Nyaland, Berenice, Aleksandara Acker, Jill Ferris, and Jan Deans. 2015. Musical Childhoods: Explorations in the Pre-school Years. London: Routledge. Pensoneau-Conway, Sandra L., Thomas E. Adams, and Derek Bolen, eds. 2017. Doing Autoethnography. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Pilkington, Andrew. 2011. Institutional Racism in the Academy: A Case Study. London: Trentham Books. Poole, Fitz John. 2002. “Socialization, Enculturation, and the Development of Personal Identity.” In Companion Encyclopedia of Anthropology, ed. Tim Ingold, 831–60. London: Routledge. Quigley, Steven Anthony. 2011. “Academic Identity: A Modern Perspective.” Educate 11(1): 20–30. Syed, Khalida Tanvir. 2012. Through White Noise: Autonarrative Exploration of Racism, Discrimination, and the Doorways to Academic Citizenship in Canada. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Thomas, Louise M., and Anne B. Reinertsen, eds. 2019. Academic Writing and Identity Constructions: Performativity, Space and Territory Constructions in Academic Workplaces. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Yang, Shanshan, Dingfang Shu, and Hongbiao Yin. 2022. “Teaching, My Passion; Publishing, My Pain: Unpacking Academics’ Professional Identity Tensions Through the Lens of Emotional Resilience.” Higher Education 84: 235–54.

3 Of Bibles and Broads The Familial Occult as Academic Lens Alexandra Coțofană

I grew up in the small mountainside town of Bușteni, in the southern Carpathians, a town to which tourists flocked all year long, as it is a mere hour and a half away from the Romanian capital of Bucharest and is the closest town to the Bucegi Mountains and its homonymous national park. The settlement of fewer than nine thousand people lies in a narrow valley named after the Prahova River that traverses it. The town is flanked by the rocky Bucegi Mountains on one side and the softer, more plateau-like Baiu Mountains on the other. With the exception of a few neighborhoods that climb up the mountainside like ivy, Bușteni is linear. Its main road and railway, both heavily traveled as they connect Bucharest to Transylvania’s tourist attractions, follow the Prahova River’s narrow basin. Tourists visit Bușteni for camping, hiking, skiing, ice climbing, and to see the world’s tallest monument, The Heroes’ Cross, also called the Caraiman Cross, towering over the town at 2,291 meters above sea level. When the tourists leave at the end of every weekend, the social dynamics in Bușteni change. Fog and gossip are often trapped in the narrow valley. As is the case for many of us, middle school was a particularly turbulent time for me, and it involved many disagreements with my mother. These arguments were not what you would expect—I was not interested in drugs, alcohol, tobacco, or love, and I was fairly motivated by academic and creative endeavors. Instead, I remember a particularly traumatic ritual my mother and I would go through at least once a week. As was the case at the time for many households in an Eastern European country with a Christian Orthodox majority,

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Figure 3.1. Bușteni seen from the Caraiman Cross in the Bucegi Mountains, with the Baiu Mountains behind it. Personal archive of Alexandra Coțofană.

when it came to domestic work, women did the cleaning and preparing of food, while men did their part of gendered work (plumbing, electrical work, woodworking). My twin sister and I shared our house with my paternal grandmother, her only son (my father), and my mother. As the only children in the house, my sister and I were thus expected to help our mother more than our father. My domestic tasks often involved cleaning and cooking, which I was eager to do. Tragedy only ensued when my mother would ask me to go get something from one of the several grocery stores downtown—or even worse, from the market. I remember feeling tremendous anxiety in relation to this assignment, and protesting with everything that I had, hoping I would be tasked with anything else. While my strategies worked in a handful of instances, I had to comply the majority of the time. Defeated, I would get dressed, leave the house, and with almost no exception, jump onto the railway to start my trip. Our family house is located directly between the main road (white in map 3.1) and the railway (dotted in the map), both of which run parallel to the river (grey in the map). The ritual would always be the same: Closing the gate behind me, I would face the main road. I would walk on the sidewalk for a little bit toward downtown, enough to not raise suspicion if my mother were to watch from the window; then, once I knew I was out of sight, I would cross a narrow green space, jump over an open sewer, and walk on the railroad, all the way on the right side of all the tracks (see figure 3.3), until I reached the train station. There, I would

Map 3.1. Map of Bușteni. © Open Street Maps.

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Figures 3.2. and 3.3. Main road in Bușteni (above) and railway (right), photographed from my family’s home, looking toward the dreaded downtown, 1 November 2020. Personal archive of Alexandra Coțofană.

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go back on the adjacent main road, quickly shop for whatever I had been tasked to get, ideally buy all the items at the same shop, then go back into the train station, resume my walk back home on the railway, and reemerge on the main road right before I got home. My mother did not find out about this until 2012, when my paternal grandmother died. I told her the dread I felt every time she would send me out for groceries. I told her about my route, and she declared herself impressed, albeit saddened, by the amount of effort I would put into this. Her only question was why. I told her it was out of shame. It was a reaction to the shame I was feeling at being told time and again that my friends’ parents did not approve of our friendship. My late grandmother was the subject of much gossip in town, as she was believed to practice witchcraft. One by one, sometimes more than once over the years, my friends announced unceremoniously that they were no longer allowed to maintain a relationship with me because of my grandmother’s practice. It was not all my friends—the hive for these rumors among adults seemed to be the Christian Orthodox church downtown, directly facing the train station. After a moment of silence, my mother admitted, heartbroken, that she had no idea I had gone through all this. She did not know the gossip in town had affected my life so much, and she had had no way to know. She did not frequent the downtown church herself, preferring the monastery farther away in the heart of the mountains, where she would go with my sister almost every Sunday. My father and his mother were not churchgoers, and the double burden of my mother’s long hours as a construction engineer, combined with weekends full of housework, did not allow her much time to catch up with the latest gossip in town. I had my first heart-to-heart conversation with a priest in town only in the fall of 2020. For the longest time, I felt local clerics had been complicit in my marginalization. It was a priest who traced the misfortune of several of my friends’ families back to my grandmother’s alleged practices. I know this because when my friends would come to bear the bad news about no longer being able to stay in touch, they would also try to probe the reality of the witchcraft allegations. I never confirmed anything, even though I knew the most about my familial occult, as I was the only one allowed to observe my grandmother’s rituals. Instead, I continued to walk on the railway. Walking on the railway was not easy. In time, I convinced myself I did it because it is a faster route. I even convinced friends, and later my husband on his first visit to Bușteni, to walk that way with me. But the route is truly undefendable. I had to jump an open sewer

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each way. As I grew taller, it was easier to make the jump, but even then the long Carpathian winters would make the sides of the sewer very slippery, so the jump was always a hazard. For most of the walk, the path between the open sewer and the first set of tracks was extremely narrow, and I would often stumble on the railroad rocks and be at risk of spraining an ankle. Because of the narrowness of the only walkable portion I could use, it was very frightening whenever a train would go by me, as it was mere inches away, enormous and loud. Incoming trains would cause me to flinch, and I would try to walk faster, still attempting to avoid an ankle sprain on the unstable railroad rocks. Yet all this seemed worth it as long as I could avoid the prying gaze of the people of Bușteni. By 2012, when I attended my grandmother’s funeral, I had completed my first master’s degree in anthropology. I was working in Bucharest at the time and took three days off to go to Bușteni for the funeral. Dressed in black, as is the custom for the Christian Orthodox at funerals, I was going to the train station after the funeral rites ended to catch the train back to Bucharest. I took my regular railroad route, and I remember thinking about how the big names in anthropology engaged with the occult. I had read their ethnographic accounts during my courses, and I thought it was particularly odd that many anthropologists would travel across the world to study the occult, that some even took apprenticeships. Why would anyone want the occult in their lives? Here I was, ritually walking on railroad rocks for over a decade to avoid the communal gaze because the occult was too close to home.

Anthropologist-cum-Shamans My first contact with anthropology was an undergraduate course I took with professor Vintilă Mihăilescu in Bucharest. The course covered “the classics,” so I figured out very quickly that anthropologists had a fascination with the occult. Although doing so was not my main motivation to pursue a masters in anthropology and later a PhD, I assumed at least some of these classics, and some of the living ethnographers, could help me figure out something about my lived experience in a house where witchcraft was practiced. This was not the case. Initially I thought it might be because my research for my master’s thesis was not focused on the occult. Maybe I wasn’t diving into the right literature. So, during my PhD at Indiana University, I studied Romanian politicians and their involvement with the oc-

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cult. I spent five years reading every anthropology book and article I could get my hands on that focused on the occult. I spent an entire year taking classes in the Religious Studies Department and got a PhD minor in the field. Still I found nothing. No one spoke of the familial occult. Instead, what I found was that the most cited and appreciated researchers of the occult were those who studied it outside of their home, outside of their culture.1 They spoke of the occult as something exotic, desirable, difficult to reach, yet somehow decodable and ingestible by a select number of Western anthropologists. I found myself most inquisitive about the logic and process of those Western anthropologists who seek apprenticeships in the occult. The first book I ever read of an anthropologist-cum-sorcerer2 was Paul Stoller and Cheryl Olkes’s 1987 In Sorcery’s Shadow: A Memoir of Apprenticeship Among the Songhay of Niger. Stoller first arrived in Niger as a Peace Corps volunteer, a common initiation route for American anthropologists (Marksbury 1980). Stoller mentions he has his own history of the familial occult, although one generationally quite distant (“my paternal grandfather’s grandmother, a healer and a herbalist herself”) (1987: 76). At the time the book was published, Stoller had visited Niger several times over seven years. In this period, he learned the practice of the occult from various experts (referred to locally as sorko, zima, and sohanci). The answer to “Why would anyone want the occult in their lives?” is answered ritually through Stoller’s firsthand account: “I couldn’t deny my private desire to become a more powerful person” (27); “I was drawn inexorably to the power” (153); “I swelled with the thrill and confidence of power” (166); “confused and troubled by my quest for power” (168); “I hoped that eating the kusu would increase my personal power” (184); “I had yet to develop the will to resist his tempting offerings to make me powerful” (185); “I would seek more power in Wazembe. I would become Kassey’s apprentice” (208); and “I could increase my powers to unimaginable magnitude in Wazembe” (217). As the book progresses, Stoller talks about his relationship to one particular sohanci almost as if it is a familial relationship, even as he brings gifts and money for initiation to all his teachers. Through the ethnographer’s narrative, we find out the sohanci who trains him is unhappy with his own son and decides to occult-adopt Stoller. Even so, Stoller does not seem to see a disparity between his own relationship with the occult and that of his teacher. The sohanci talks about being chosen for the occult as a burden he has to take up when his father dies. “When I was a young boy, my father chose me to inherit

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his burden” (77). In contrast, Stoller’s narrative about himself is not a burden, but something magical in itself. The ethnographer is received joyously and with verve every time he returns to Niger. He recounts being stopped by all types of practitioners of the occult— sorko, sohanci and zima—who want to tell him their stories and their ways, showing that the occult knowledge he desires just comes to him freely. And he boasts of possessing knowledge only a few of the natives have. At the end of his fieldwork, he has the freedom to flee the occult when things get scary. While this is possible for Stoller, it is impossible for people involved with the familial occult, including his teachers. More recently, Timothy R. Landry’s 2018 book Vodún Secrecy and the Search for Divine Power has a similar yet even more fantastic narrative. Landry claims his initial interest in the occult came at the age of twelve while reading a fiction book. Later, the author says he was motivated to become an apprentice by “a psychological need to feel ‘real’ and ‘valid’” (153). While the book is about Landry’s initiation as a diviner’s apprentice in Vodún during his trips to Benin from 2011 to 2013 (as a paying spiritual tourist), we find out Landry has also been initiated into Haitian Vodou during his fieldwork in 2003–2005, from which he claims to have gained knowledge of the “highest rank” (175). Even though he published about his experience in Haiti, there is no mention in his 2008 article of how he learned or gained access to the occult. Much like Stoller, he claims an almost familial bond with his teacher, even as he admits he pays for initiation and even as his teacher told him that there are certain rituals he will only teach his own children (26). Similarly to Stoller, Landry is caught in admitting he is an outsider to the culture but also speaks of his experience as if it were superior to that of other spiritual tourists, deeper, more unique. In other words, the ethnographer claims most spiritual tourists leave Benin not feeling initiated, but the fact that he spent eighteen months there meant that he did in fact become initiated, which confuses the reader. Landry quotes Beninois interlocutors who say, “I can teach a white person how to be possessed by the spirits but it’ll never happen” (8), and he admits that in the Beninois ontology “foreigners simply lack the habitus or embodied memory to undergo ritual events such as spirit possession” (9). Landry admits the Beninois are gatekeepers of their rituals and that they sense racial and colonial tension in relationship to the tourists and their perceived whiteness.3 Furthermore, in his experience as an anthropologist-cum-shaman, Landry participated in a tension he himself recognizes. On the one

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hand, tourists are perceived by the Beninois to be wealthy, so the Beninois charge a fee to teach the secrets of their occult practice. On the other hand, the Beninois are perceived by the tourists to be poor and exploitable, so there is an expectation that they would be selling their knowledge (20). Even as he acknowledges this, Landry writes his narrative convinced that his long stay in Benin has earned him the trust of the people and that he is the only one who gets access to their knowledge. Furthermore, much like Stoller, he has the freedom to ontologically hop between spiritual worlds, including several worlds of occult knowledge, a freedom many people living with the familial occult lack. A third case of an anthropologist-cum-shaman comes from reading Kathryn Gottlieb’s 2017 honors thesis at the University of Maine, entitled Cultural Appropriation in Contemporary Neopaganism and Witchcraft. Gottlieb identifies as an anthropology student and a “modern witch.” Her identity as a modern witch seems to be much more about self-identification than practice, as she herself recognizes. She describes her practice as “eclectic, meaning that I pull from a variety of different traditions and sources to create a spiritual and magical practice that is unique to me” (2). Later in the thesis, Gottlieb discusses eclecticism and cultural appropriation interchangeably and says modern witches appropriate because “the reality of neopaganism is that it is enjoyable. Witchcraft is deep and spiritual, moving, life changing, beautiful. And more than that, it’s fun” (27). The author is also a member of the woke generation of young people who are sensitive to postcolonial values, and understanding the issues surrounding such a statement, she quickly tries to redeem herself. “Treating the religions of the world as if they were a religious buffet there for our pleasure is a colonial way of thinking,” she explains. “It is very hard for a white individual who grew up in the United States to let go of the melting pot ideology they were raised with, to think of cultural blending of any sort as anything but a very, very good thing because this is America so everyone shares” (28). Even though the thesis ends up reading as a soft manifesto for cultural appropriation by modern witches, Gottlieb usefully reflects on the fact that Wiccans and neopagans are a mostly Caucasian group who attempt to become more ethnic through their occult practice. She relates the love affair that contemporary Wiccans and neopagans have with the concept of the Celts to an idealization of the Celts as a colonized people. This allows Caucasians to elude the label of the oppressor and to claim an ethnic identity that then eases into further cultural appropriation.

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A classic case of a female anthropologist-cum-witch comes from Jeanne Favret-Saada’s 1977 book Les mots, la mort, les sorts: La sorcellerie dans le Bocage (Deadly Words: Witchcraft in the Bocage). FavretSaada’s argument for becoming a practitioner differs from those of the three American anthropologists. This ethnographer theorizes that French rural witchcraft is based on words, meaning it can be deadly to use words when witchcraft is concerned, so people would not risk talking to an ethnographer about it. The only way to find out about witchcraft is to become entangled in it. Favret-Saada attempted to interview people about the occult with no results, then accepted bewitchment as a diagnosis, then sought occult-based healing from this bewitchment, and then became an apprentice herself. She does not describe her experience, explaining only in a later article that it was “all but untellable. It was so complex that it defied memorization and, in any event, it affected me too much” (2012: 7). Favret-Saada was later criticized by anthropologists visiting her field site who charge that her theory is a result of her own methodological choices, and that she in fact separates witchcraft from everyday life. As one critic wrote, “There is no doubt that she became radically involved in the healing process, a transformative experience in which she could finally understand words in their context. . . . She never seems to have tried the easy way: to learn about witchcraft by participating in everyday life” (Dobler 2015). Some examples of anthropologists believing what they experience as part of their apprenticeships are Evans-Pritchard (1996) describing a ball of light vision during his fieldwork on the Azande, Bruce Grindal (1983) reporting an extraordinary experience during his fieldwork involving a corpse doing a ritual dance, Edith Turner (1994) experiencing a spirit vision during her Ndembu fieldwork, Robert Desjarlais (1992) describing the trance state during his shamanic apprenticeship in Nepal, and Deirdre Meintel (2020) experiencing clairvoyance as an apprentice in the Montreal Spiritual Church of Healing. Sometimes even if anthropologists go through their apprenticeship with the occult, they can remain skeptical and claim they do not believe in the occult (Luhrmann 1989: 18). The community where the ethnographer did his or her fieldwork may be going through a form of delusion (Ferraro and White 2019: 8), a claim which can then lead the entire community to distrust other anthropologists (Pearson 2001). In other cases, the very experience of an anthropologist-cumshaman can deeply affect the fieldwork of future generations of

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anthropologists. Sometimes, the work of the anthropologist-cumshaman comes full circle. Linda Jencson (1989) became the apprentice of a witch who learned her practices in a shamanism workshop held by Michael Harner, an anthropologist who famously quit academia to focus full time on teaching shamanism after experimenting with the Amazonian plant medicine ayahuasca. Even anthropologist-cum-shamans who have fallen out of grace, like Carlos Castaneda, can provide inspiration. Bonnie Glass-Coffin’s research on, and apprenticeship with, Peruvian shamans was motivated by the work of Michael Harner and Castaneda (Glass-Coffin 2010). In her narrative, the ethnographer feels that as someone who studies the ways in which Peruvian shamans access unseen worlds, she should try to access those worlds in the same ways, in order to best convey their process. She claims to also be motivated by wanting to “enter the life worlds of shamans and bring back that knowledge to larger audiences” (208). Her description of her own initiation is refreshingly less triumphalist than Stoller’s or Landry’s. Over the years, Glass-Coffin claims to have ingested “gallons of the psychoactive San Pedro cactus (Echinopsis pachanoi) in an attempt to access the normally unseen worlds of spirits and encantos (magical landscapes)” (2010: 208). Even so, nothing happened. She laments being “blind to their world of vista (magical ‘sight’) and unable to ‘cross over,’” and “envious of the spiritual experiences of my shaman mentors, yet unable to ‘let go’ or ‘lose myself’ to the process” (208). She was finally transformed in 2006, after an ayahusca ceremony, and arrived at the by now common conclusion in the literature that the sensuous body should be central to ethnography (i.e., doing research with all the senses, instead of classical anthropology, where sight is privileged) and that we are one with all living things. By the 1990s, the trope of the scholar possessed by the occult was everywhere. Outside of the civilized West, Jim Wafer was experiencing possession in the Brazilian Candomblé; yet not even the Western metropolis was safe. Studying Santeria in New York City and Vodou in Brooklyn, scholars fall into a trance time and again. The cases of anthropologists seeking initiation into the occult of other cultures are so numerous that the practice gets its own term. “Writing with the left hand” (Johnson 2016) refers to stories of scholars narrating their own spirit possessions, especially in the context of African religions. This reflects on the notion that the left-hand is sacred, one of the disparate social phenomena studied by French ethnographers in opposing structuralism, the occult being a prime example of this.

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While the left hand is always seen as occult and illegitimate, it finds its purpose. The motivations of scholars, as well as their relationships of power with those who facilitated their possession, even in early cases of scholars possessed, can be polar opposites. In Zora Neale Hurston’s 1935 Mules and Men, it is her connection with her own past that drives her to experience the extraordinary. For Michael Leiris in his 1934 L’Afrique fantôme (Phantom Africa), it is very much about a colonial incursion into “savage” Africa in an attempt to escape his own French bourgeois family history and identity.

What the Anthropologist-cum-Shamans Miss— The Familial Occult Is Not Glamor Occult The process of becoming a shaman has become a distinct literary category, with authors emphasizing the authenticity of their experience even when it is transcultural (Ivanescu and Berentzen 2020). The trend of anthropologist-cum-shamans should not surprise us, as it is part of a larger social phenomenon. Many people who go through their apprenticeship talk about how they have, from an early age, either been attracted to the occult or known they were somehow spiritual. This still does not address the fact that they treat their involvement with the occult as a choice, one in which they have the global marketplace of traditions to choose from, an opportunity that people living with the familial occult do not often have. At the end of fieldwork, the anthropologist-cum-shamans claim their initiation badges and fly back home to write their triumphalist tales, hopping back into an ontological world where they are revered academics who return bearing the gift of sacred knowledge. In local communities, the narrative for those living with the familial occult, including their teachers, is quite different. The burden of accepting the familial occult and practicing within a community throughout one’s life is quite taxing. It has social, spiritual, and personal consequences, is not easy, and does not leave life unchanged. The apprenticeship that these ethnographers mention is important, yes, but it is only one step, and a long one. And it does not by itself make someone a practitioner. The focus of anthropologist-cum-shamans of the occult on the apprenticeship points to the fact that their goal is to gain access to a certain type of hidden knowledge, yet that is not what makes one a practitioner. Stoller calls himself a sohanci, even using this as

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his Twitter handle, and Landry claims he has become the “highest rank” of Vodou practitioner in Haiti, yet they treat these denominations through the lens of their own tribe: academia. Initiation to them sounds like an academic diploma, which is quite different from a lifetime spent in a community as a practitioner of the occult. Eighteen months in the field or “seven years” of returns—the latter truly meaning only several months, between semesters, of direct contact each year—are a legitimate temporal marker for the anthropologist-cum-practitioner only in the eyes of academics. To the local community from which they extracted sacred knowledge, they will always be an outsider, at best a betweener. As an outsider to the village or town, the anthropologist-cumshaman will always be met with a certain level of distance. Stoller himself recognizes this in an open letter he pens to Jared Kushner and publishes on his blog. In the letter, he asks Kushner to reflect on how strong he thinks his ties to the Saudi Royal family really are: “What do you think he [the king] says about you when he speaks Arabic to his family? What do you know of the Saudis and their ways? Do you speak Arabic?”4 Why are these questions, especially the first, not mirrored in the way Stoller sees himself in the worlds of the Songhai? While it seems that Western anthropologists desire to be recognized as practitioners, people who have inherited the burden of the familial occult are labeled by their communities as practitioners with or without their consent through the use of markers of difference that depend on their cultural context and cosmology, such as an illness, a physical peculiarity, or a difference in habitus, none of which are considered desirable or validating. I myself have been the subject of the community’s witchcraft diagnosis many times. According to the townsfolk, my body is a map of red flags, proving that I carry my grandmother’s witchcraft burden: my psoriasis (which, in all fairness, has been passed down to me genetically from my grandmother’s brother—but this is not known outside of the familial context), my uneven thumbnail beds (a symptom of my psoriasis), and my recurring fainting during church service at an early age (which I personally attribute to my claustrophobia and being trapped between adult bodies in a small, hot, crowded church). My parents told me the story of our birth many times. We were born at the municipal hospital in Cîmpina, less than an hour south of Bușteni. They expected a boy but received nonidentical fraternal twin girls instead. My dad made an unsavory joke about the misfortune that we will bring to our family, and my mother smiled sheepishly.

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My father’s parents arrived at the hospital with my father; the rest of the family came from farther away around the country and met us at a later time. Both my mother and father recall that my grandmother picked me up entranced. I became her favorite of the two, despite my sister’s clear genetic resemblance to my father and my almost identical features to my mother. I will never know why my grandmother chose me from such an early age, but her favoritism went beyond her allowing me into her rituals. The differences she made between me and my twin sister were cruel, and my sister bitterly remembers each and every one of them. The favoritism started early, and I did not know what to do. It took my sister and I years before healing could begin. Alas, I remember my grandmother and I spending a lot of time together, just the two of us. Not her son, not her daughter-in-law, not her other grandchild. I remember from toddler age the walks we took together in town, conversations she had with people her age, and the visits she received from men and women alike when we were at home. No one besides me was allowed in the room where she received her clients.

Figure 3.4. My twin sister and I as infants (ca. 1988). Personal archive of Alexandra Coțofană.

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Figure 3.5. My mother waving a few years before meeting my dad (ca. 1983). Personal archive of Alexandra Coțofană.

In her divinations and rituals, she would test me. “What do you see here?” she would ask, pointing to the topographic coffee grounds in the cup that were waiting for her reading. I would answer. This made her smile contentedly. “Very good.” I will never know when people started talking about our familial occult, nor how my grandmother’s practice and favoritism toward me became the cause of worry for my friends’ parents and, consequently, the cause of my sorrow. Perhaps my grandmother’s clients told the town that as a child I was by her side during their visits, the only one in the family allowed in the room. Perhaps they thought I was the next in line and she was preparing me to carry on her rituals after she passed. Perhaps the very fact that I was the only one accepted in her ritual room had tainted me in the eyes of the townsfolk. For me, the burden of the familial occult came early, and became chronic. Even in the absence of any proof that I would ever practice the occult, the town had made its decision.

Evolving (Out of) Shame In 2010, halfway through my master’s in anthropology, Alec Bălășescu, a young and talented professor who received his PhD from

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UC Berkeley, acted as a liaison for a couple of American anthropologists who were looking to add three Romanian graduate students to their research team for that summer. I applied, was accepted, and soon met Jim Nyce and his wife, Gail Bader. They gathered a team of students from Ball State University’s anthropology department and flew together with them to Romania for an intensive ethnographic summer school. We were all housed in a Transylvanian guest house, doing research by day and discussing our data in the evening before dinner. We were surveying three different communities in three different teams, and I had been assigned to work as part of Jim’s team. As days and evenings went by, Jim and I got to know each other, and I asked him about his early life. He told me the story of his PhD research at Brown University on the occult, a choice in part influenced by the fact that his grandfather was practicing the occult. My heart stopped. Someone else had gone through this who was an anthropologist, and I had a million questions. For the first time in my life, I talked about my experience with the familial occult, safely, away from the gaze of the townsfolk of Bușteni, I talked about my grandmother to someone who had gone through something similar. Jim and I kept in touch after the ethnographic fieldwork ended. We emailed about the research, but increasingly we discussed the occult as a research topic. We met again the next summer for another ethnographic study in a smaller team, and again in 2012, right after my grandmother died. This time, the team was made up of me, Jim, and his graduate student Jessica LaFountain, and we were doing research about witchcraft in Romania, for the first time since we met. It was a big move for all of us. For Jim, it was the first time he had studied the occult since he finished his PhD. For Jessica, it was data for her master’s thesis. For me, it was exploratory data for my application to PhD programs in the US, and it was a safe way to think about the occult in my own culture, but away from home at an anthropological distance that I needed at that time. The years spent with my grandmother during her rituals came in handy in all sorts of unexpected ways through the years. I would bring it up during uncomfortable silences in interviews with practitioners, or when I would want to start talking about someone’s rituals and practice with the occult. This was particularly helpful in the years of my doctoral studies, when I was interviewing male politicians about their involvement with the occult, as it seemed to diminish any worries or anxiety people had about my intentions and background with the occult. This was years after my grandmother’s death, when I was better equipped emotionally and as an academic to approach

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the topic. However, in the summer of 2012, mere months after my grandmother died, the familial occult felt like an open wound, and it almost cost Jessica a very valuable interview. We were traveling to a village in northeastern Romania, looking for M., a woman we had been told was an extremely powerful healer. We arrived at her house unannounced, just me and Jessica. A woman in her sixties came to the gate, asking what we wanted. I introduced myself as the Romanian translator for the American graduate student, but the woman did not introduce herself. She listened to my story, then told me to translate, explaining to Jessica that M. is not home, and that we should return on a different day to meet her. She also explained that M. is not a bad woman, like people say, and that she helps people and does not hurt them with her powers. Then the woman told me she would say something that I should not translate to Jessica. She said, “Your grandmother gave you a great gift, but I can give you an even greater one.” She then told us to leave and to return another day. I was left speechless. We were a twelve-hour drive away from my hometown—how could she have known anything about my grandmother? Days later, we returned, and the same woman greeted us, though this time admitting she was M. She received us in her house and performed a ritual for Jessica. She then told me to sit down and offered to do a divination for me. I refused, saying only my grandmother had divinated for me. M.’s smile turned to an icy look. She got up from her chair, told us our meeting was concluded, and added that if we needed anything else from her, we should call her on the telephone. Her tone implied another visit would be unwelcome. We left her house, met Jim, and talked about what had happened. I was tearful and frustrated. My inability to engage with the occult in the ways that the Western anthropologists did cost Jessica a very important respondent. I was angry—at myself, and at the fact that the familial occult was a burden not only for my identity in my hometown of Bușteni but also for my identity as an academic.

Daddy Issues On 1 April 2012, I got a call from my dad. “Come home,” he said, chocked with tears. “Your grandmother died.” “April first,” I thought. “Nice move, grandma.” I called the HR department at work to let them know I would need to take some days off for the funeral. I took the train to Bușteni and walked home using my usual route,

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trying not to stumble on the railroad rocks. I entered the yard, then the house. My grandmother was lying in her coffin in the guestroom, as is the custom for the Christian Orthodox, waiting for people to pay their respects. My mother and twin sister greeted me first. They could not cry—understandably so, since my grandmother had been unkind to them for too long. On the other end of the hallway, I saw my dad. I rushed to his arms and cried. I cried violently. I later understood part of it was relief. At last, the gossip would dissipate; this was an opportunity for the familial occult to no longer burden me. I was wrong. In the weeks and months following her death, my dad and I would recount stories of my grandmother’s life. At one point, he revealed that he had always felt jealousy about the fact that my grandmother allowed me to witness her rituals. She had never agreed to his presence in her ritual room, which irritated him, as he had always been very eager to learn her ways. This was news to me. I had never known my father had expressed a desire to learn occult rituals from

Figure 3.6. My grandmother, grandfather, and infant father (ca. 1950). Personal archive of Alexandra Coțofană.

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my grandmother, let alone that she had rejected him. My father then informed me that he would start learning about the occult all by himself, and that he would become an initiate in the occult arts. I tried to dissuade him, but to no avail. Besides, my time with him was limited. I was working full time, and in less than a year I was leaving for the US to begin my doctoral studies. I tried to keep track of what he was learning, where his interests were leading him. I went back to Bușteni every summer as part of my doctoral research. His occult library was growing with books on black magic, alchemy, Wiccan crystal magic, herbalism, and many other subjects. I tried to reason with him about the way in which he was combining all these traditions. The way he would talk about his practice and knowledge, melding together practices from all over the world, seemed greedy, and I could not accept it. Acquaintances told me he went around town introducing himself as a practitioner of the occult. The shame was back, and the burden of the familial occult was heavier than ever. At the end of September 2020, I flew back to Bucharest. Because of COVID-19, closed borders, and international travel bans, the summer of 2020 was the first time in ten years that I could not travel to Bușteni for my research. But here I was, on a cold autumn night, walking home from the train station. A couple days before, I had received a 6 am call from my sister. She was crying, my dad had died. I emailed my students to cancel class and made preparations to fly out of Abu Dhabi with the earliest flight. Before I could understand what had happened, I was back in Bușteni. I could not cry the entire time I was there, but I still don’t fully understand why. After the funeral and all the rituals were over, I said goodbye and packed for my trip to the airport. I said goodbye to my family, closed the gate behind me, and faced the main road. I walked on the sidewalk for a little bit toward downtown, enough to not raise suspicion if my mother were to watch from the window. Then, once I knew I was out of sight, I crossed a narrow green space, jumped over the open sewer, and walked on the railroad, all the way on the right side of all the railroad, until I reached the train station.

Alexandra Coțofană is a cultural anthropologist and assistant professor of social sciences at Zayed University in Abu Dhabi. During the past ten years, her research has focused on the complex connections between the occult, nationalism, and the environment, with primary fieldwork in Romania. Her work can be found in monographs (Palgrave Pivot, 2022), edited volumes with ibidem Press / Columbia

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University Press (2017 and 2018) and Berghahn (2022 and 2023), and in journals and edited collections.

Notes 1. Two cases of “native” accounts—but still not anthropological studies of the familial occult—come to mind: Tanya Luhrmann’s 1989 Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft: Ritual Magic in Contemporary England, where she studies within her culture, and Susan Greenwood’s 2000 Magic, Witchcraft and the Otherworld: An Anthropology, a study of contemporary British paganism told as a native account. 2. Throughout this chapter, I use the following interchangeably: anthropologist-cum-shaman, anthropologist-cum-sorcerer, anthropologist-cumpractitioner, and anthropologist-cum-witch. 3. In some cases, the whiteness is not there per se: in some cases, it is more of a class identity tied to being from the West (e.g. African Americans, Brazilians). 4. https://paulstollersblog.wordpress.com/2018/12/12/to-jared-from-un cle-paul-the-anthropologist/.

References Castaneda, Carlos. 1998. The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge. New York: Washington Square Press. Dauge, Alexandre. 1975. “Photos, Fantômes, Phantasmes: Michel Leiris et les clichés de L’Afrique fantôme.” Études de Lettres 239(1–2): 179–93. Desjarlais, Robert. 1992. Body and Emotion: The Aesthetics of Illness and Healing in the Nepal Himalayas. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Dobler, Gregor. 2015. “Fatal Words: Restudying Jeanne Favret-Saada.” Anthropology of This Century 13 (May 2015). http://aotcpress.com/articles/ fatal-words-restudying-jeanne-favretsaada/. Evans-Pritchard, E. E. 1996. “The Notion of Witchcraft Explains Unfortunate Events.” In Perspectives on Africa: A Reader in Culture, History and Representation, ed. Roy Richard Grinker, Stephen C. Lubkemann, and Christopher B. Steiner, 303–11. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Favret-Saada, Jeanne. 1977. Les mots, la mort, les sorts. La sorcellerie dans le Bocage. Paris: Gallimard. ———. “Being Affected.” 2012. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 2(1): 435–45. Ferraro, Shai, and Ethan Doyle White. 2019. Magic and Witchery in the Modern West: Celebrating the Twentieth Anniversary of ‘The Triumph of the Moon.’ Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave McMillan, Springer Nature.

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Glass-Coffin, Bonnie. 2010. “Anthropology, Shamanism, and Alternate Ways of Knowing—Being in the World: One Anthropologist’s Journey of Discovery and Transformation.” Anthropology and Humanism 35(2): 204–217. Gottlieb, Kathryn. 2017. “Cultural Appropriation in Contemporary Neopaganism and Witchcraft.” Honors thesis (BA), University of Maine. https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/honors/304. Greenwood, Susan. 2000. Magic, Witchcraft and the Otherworld: An Anthropology. Oxford: Berg. Grindal, Bruce. 1983. “Into the Heart of Sisala Experience: Witnessing Death Divination.” Journal of Anthropological Research 39(1): 60–80. Ivanescu, Carolina, and Sterre Berentzen. 2020. “Becoming a Shaman: Narratives of Apprenticeship and Initiation in Contemporary Shamanism.” Religions 11(7): 1–21. Jencson, Linda. 1989. “Neopaganism and the Great Mother Goddess: Anthropology as Midwife to a New Religion.” Anthropology Today 5(2): 2–4. Johnson, Paul Christopher. 2016. “Scholars Possessed! On Writing Africana Religions with the Left Hand.” Journal of Africana Religions 4(2): 154–85. Landry, Timothy R. 2008. “Moving to Learn: Performance and Learning in Haitian Vodou.” Anthropology and Humanism 33(1–2): 53–65. ———. 2018. Vodún Secrecy and the Search for Divine Power. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Luhrmann, Tanya. 1989. Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft: Ritual Magic in Contemporary England. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Marksbury, Richard. 1980. “Anthropology and the Peace Corps.” Practicing Anthropology 2(2): 6–22. McCarthy Brown, Karen. 1991. Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn. Berkeley: University of California Press. Meintel, Deirdre. 2020. “Extraordinary Experience, Intersubjectivity and Doubt in Fieldwork: Studying Urban Spiritualists.” In Extraordinary Experience in Modern Contexts, ed. Deirdre Meintel, Véronique Béguet, and Jean-Guy A. Goulet, 211–48. Kosmos: Les collections du monde, Université de Montréal, Département d’anthropologie Montréal. Murphy, Joseph M. 1988. Santeria: An African Religion in America. Boston: Beacon. Neale Hurston, Zora. 1979. I Love Myself When I Am Laughing: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader. New York: City University of New York Press. Pearson, Jo. 2001. “‘Going Native in Reverse’: The Insider as Researcher in British Wicca.” Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions 5(1): 52–63. Stoller, Paul. 2018. “To Jared from Uncle Paul, the Anthropologist.” Paul Stoller (blog), Dec 12, 2018. https://paulstollersblog.wordpress.com/20 18/12/12/to-jared-from-uncle-paul-the-anthropologist/.

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Stoller, Paul, and Cheryl Olkes. 1987. In Sorcery’s Shadow: A Memoir of Apprenticeship Among the Songhay of Niger. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Turner, Edith. 1994. “A Visible Spirit Form in Zambia.” In Being Changed by Cross-Cultural Encounters: The Anthropology of Extraordinary Experience, ed. David Young and Jean-Guy Goulet, 71–95. Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press. Wafer, Jim. 1991. The Taste of Blood: Spirit Possession in Brazilian Candomblé. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

4 Facing My Genies A Commute between Self, Familial Spirits, and Anthropology Kamal Feriali

Almost four decades ago, my father would tell us about his solitary twilight encounter as a young adult with a malicious river genie that attempted to strangle him with his own tunic hood, before my dad eventually warded off the entity with a combination of physical struggle and Quranic incantations and ran for dear life back to his native village. I was a middle schooler at the time of my dad’s narrative, and I only spoke Arabic and some French. I never envisioned myself eventually writing a dissertation at a North American university on Moroccan spirits, amid magical encounters with other forms of human religion on that side of the Atlantic. I grew up in a culture that teems with the uncanny, so I never became an atheist. I eventually gravitated toward mainstream cosmopolitan religion and avoided meddling with genies because I intuitively considered them to be volatile, like the one that attacked my dad. I nonetheless cultivated an anthropological interest in altered states of consciousness. For my doctoral work, I studied Moroccan music-induced possession trance—which, of course, involved genies. While these spirits rarely make colorful three-dimensional apparitions as in my dad’s story, they do ritually possess human subjects. My fieldwork, added to my family narratives, eventually brought me back full circle to reconciliation with genies, both others’ and my own. This work is structured in six parts. The first part briefly describes my methodological and theoretical positioning. Part 2 introduces Morocco’s genies and places them in the context of my research. Part 3

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contains reconstructed narratives of my family’s experience with genies and other entities that are in Morocco’s realm of the supernatural. Part 4 weighs in on the consequences of the familial occult for my anthropological perspective. Part 5 reflects on the ways my spiritual evolution was enriched by exposure to the supernatural at home and in the field. Part 6 includes personal remarks on vulnerability and the inevitability of anthropological prejudice. The chapter concludes with a critical reflection on anthropology and the occult.

Methodological and Theoretical Considerations For purposes of this work, I adopt autoethnography as a model for critical reflection and writing. Autoethnography is broadly understood as authors being simultaneously their own subject and their own ethnographer. Debates about autoethnography have been polarized ever since Hayano (1979) coined the word. Some theorists (Sparkes 2000; Walford 2004) strongly criticized the propensity of this approach to degenerate into autobiographical navel-gazing. Others defended only an “analytic” variety of autoethnography that can directly contribute to objective research and theory building (Anderson 2006). The current state of the art makes room for a liberal bundle of practices whose common goal is to evoke emotional response and conversation (Bochner and Ellis 2016; Tilley-Lubbs and Calva 2016). While I concede that evocative autoethnography can be abused if it is indulged as an end in itself and is divorced from the scholarly ideal of increasing the stock of objective knowledge, I do not consider the analytic and evocative schools to be mutually exclusive. Anthropological selves, while carrying out research, are just as fully immersed in the experience of being human as their subjects. While autoethnography is not the only way of doing anthropology, it is definitely a tool in the box. Critical conversation about anthropological life stories has the potential for producing theory dialectically. This is true because anthropology is a comparative science that, through evaluative exchange, can invest in long-term cumulative Kuhnian breakthroughs.1 My familial narrative contributes therefore one building block among many for improving anthropology’s understanding of the occult and religious behavior in general. I aim past reductionism and at multidimensional understandings that value empirical rigor while acknowledging the mystery of religion and accepting contributions

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from multiple disciplines. Aspiring to this also means not fitting my autoethnographic narrative to a preexisting paradigm. As I explain in a later section, I resist paradigmatic encampment and I choose to subscribe to a dialectical eclecticism. This is all the more prudent because the occult and all religion are aspects of our humanity that are complexly wedged between the natural and the symbolic. The final section of this work recapitulates this fact and expresses my hope for theoretical integration of the many puzzle pieces gleaned from cross-cultural ethnographies of religion and consciousness.

Genies and Possession Trance The fearsome spirits of the underworld—variably called jnun, afarit, or mluk, among other names, in Moroccan Arabic2—are part of Moroccan and Muslim lore and were extensively discussed by Finnish anthropologist Edward Westermark (1968) in a two-volume classic on Moroccan popular religion. These spirits are not exactly fallen angels as in biblical demonology. They are a distinct class of entities that God created from fire in the same way he created humans from clay and angels from light. Their societies are parallel to ours, and they have the ability to choose between right and wrong. Their realm is subordinated to human religious history since they have no religions of their own. They can be nonbelievers, Muslims, Jews, Christians, or other. Evil ones are invariably harmful, and pious ones have served King Solomon and converted to Islam when Muhammad read the Quran to them.3 But their ontological nature is so different from ours that contact with them is discouraged in all cases. Clay-born and fire-born creatures just do not mix. Exemptions for interacting with genies are granted only to trained and religiously observant mediums and exorcists. For their part, genies are not enthusiastic about human contact either. They inhabit the wild and they resent encroachment on their territory by human urbanization. They eventually manage as best as they can to cohabit with us in cities by retreating into our sewer systems, and they socialize at night in our public hammams after all human bathers are gone. There is etiquette to observe with regard to spirits. For one, never pour hot water into the sink, or else you might scald a genie that could come back to torment you with a vengeance. Religious or not, they require social distancing from members of Homo sapiens. On the other hand, if a family of pious genies happens to choose your house as their abode, they will most likely discreetly

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protect your home and family, again, as long as you do not disturb them. Genies can disguise themselves as ordinary animal life or take on hybrid human-animal shapes, but they do not make frequent appearances. They usually appear when a human happens to be in the wrong place at the right time. Individuals are not supposed to visit public hammams alone too early in the morning or linger in there too late in the evening. Reports of solitary bathers before or past regular hours emerging with physical or psychological trauma are not uncommon. Genies also expect men and women to stay clear of bushes and streams in the country at times when humans are supposed to be socializing elsewhere among their own kind. Spirits want nothing more than exclusive access to spaces, both pristine and humanized, outside of typical human hours. When individual humans breach this basic rule, unplanned encounters can be unnerving or traumatic for both genie and human. Such was my dad’s case, among others reported by my parents. Most people are never possessed by genies, and none in my family ever were. But some people do get possessed following a serious breach of etiquette by a human, or if a genie takes a special interest in a particular man or woman. The possessing entity may be either godly or ungodly, but once they are in a person, they all require to be served with regular trances and offerings. Genies are legion, but there are about a dozen major ones that Moroccan lore specifically names, both male and female, each associated with different tunes, colors, smells, temperaments, foods, natural ecologies, and trades. Some of their traits will rub off on the humans they possess, affecting their behaviors and preferences. In extreme cases, they may even fall in love with a man or woman, claim them as a spouse, and prevent them from intimacy with other humans. One such case is depicted in Vincent Crapanzano’s (1980) anthropological classic. At some point during their lives, some Moroccan men and women will discover that they fall into uncontrolled trance episodes upon accidental exposure to traditional tunes that are culturally understood to be spirit invoking. Diagnosis by a spiritist will identify the culprit genie, and options are set out for either exorcism or permanent enrollment in the genie’s cult. Most attempts at exorcism seem to fail, and most subjects eventually accept a pact with the genie, whom they then regularly serve via trance and votive offerings. In exchange, the genie becomes their patron spirit and may even endow them with supernatural gifts of divination and healing, which they use to minister to the nonpossessed who seek them out for various personal needs.

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During night-long communal parties hosted in private homes by and for the genie-possessed adept, a hired band sequentially plays the tunes of all major spirits between pauses of prayer, food, and drink. Ritualized trance is triggered in possessed individuals when specific tunes associated with their specific patron spirits are played. When the proper tune is played, subjects will spontaneously go into ritualized dissociative convulsions. Their consciousness is significantly altered, and they occasionally engage in seemingly painless feats of self-mutilation using sharp or burning objects, depending on the particular temperament of their spirit. When the tune is over, experienced trancers quickly regain ordinary consciousness, while more recently possessed individuals will first slip into a catatonic state for several minutes. Subjects usually have no memories of their trance episodes, but most of them report a highly cathartic effect, a generalized sense of psychological and physical well-being afterward and for days to come. They express the need to periodically repeat the experience, usually every few months. A few, however, hope to be eventually delivered from what they regard as a cumbersome spiritual bondage. Until liberation happens, if ever, they are compelled to regularly attend trance nights in order to avoid long episodes of reclusive anxiety, punitively imposed by the rebuffed spirit, that disrupt their daily social functioning. My doctoral work (Feriali 2009) found considerable similarities between Moroccan possession trance and other practices ranging cross-culturally from shamanism(s) and Vodou to Sufi and Pentecostal trance. A common element appeared to be dissociation. Both psychiatrists and anthropologists have converged since the mid-1990s on a somewhat shared understanding of dissociative states, both afflictive and nonafflictive (Delmonte et al. 2016). I also found that whether ritualized dissociation in Morocco should be considered afflictive or not depended significantly on the specific values, both religious and political, that individual Moroccans internalized via socialization. I used approaches from psychiatry and political history to study Moroccan possession trance. While those tools were highly useful, there is one thing that they could never obscure—that somehow the occult, and the numinous in general, had a life of its own, both for my subjects and in my own family experiences. The supernatural was very much molded by culture-specific expectations, but at the end of the day, it was also very tangible. I have been unable to think otherwise given both my field observations and familial stories of the occult. To be sure, that position earned me both friends and scoffers

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across all spectrums, academic and nonacademic alike. It exposed me to challenges and vulnerabilities, at once personal, ethical, and social. Those challenges were amplified by my identity as a citizen of the world eccentrically caught between Easts and Wests that shaped me. But that eccentricity also resolutely shaped my anthropological vocation, and I owe that in part to my family’s genies.

Genies in the Family Dad’s River Genie Dad’s clammy encounter took place near his native village at morning twilight when he was approximately eighteen. He was returning from the collective dawn prayer performed by adult men at the village mosque. At this stage of his life, he had successfully finished memorizing the entire Quran, a landmark rite of passage into full manhood in rural areas back then. He was riding a donkey and he strolled a bit to enjoy the quiet fresh breeze, reaching the nearby river. It was the dry season, so the river would have had little or no water in it. Upon nearing the dry stream, the donkey suddenly balked. Despite my dad’s best efforts, his mount wouldn’t budge and emitted unnatural-sounding brays. This is a sure sign in Muslim demonology that a place is actively occupied by genies. Of all domestic animals, donkeys and dogs are capable of detecting demonic presence. It is not obvious at this point why my dad had the temerity to dismount instead of changing course. Perhaps he counted himself spiritually armored by the worship he had just attended. Once he was afoot, he noticed a dog-like entity that shapeshifted as it sneaked among the dry rocks. Realizing that the situation was rather serious, my dad began reciting standard Quranic verses meant to repel spirits. The genie walked out of his line of sight and surreptitiously behind his back. Before my dad knew it, a fully dexterous but mute presence was grabbing his jellaba hood,4 pushing it forcefully over his face and neck and tightening it to strangle him. He struggled for breath as he tried to wrest his hood from the unhuman grip. He frantically repeated the deliverance prayers faster and louder, and eventually the entity let go as suddenly as it had attacked and faded away toward the dry stream, giving my dad enough time to race off afoot back to the village while his humble steed made its way back home more leisurely. My parents’ experiences of the occult were not bedtime fables. The stories of genie encounters were shared matter-of-factly on different

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occasions with adults and children alike, in the same way more mundane events were narrated. My parents also knew the difference between genuinely eerie happenings and ordinary ones that resembled them. I recall as a case in point another one of my dad’s river stories. A young villager was bathing in the semidry stream and wallowed in its dark creamy clay. My dad, riding by, noticed the young man standing naked by the wayside, unrecognizably coated in mud from head to toe. My dad was stunned by the young man’s nonchalance and feared that the clay bather could be easily mistaken for a genie and be fatally stoned by passersby. Everyone in the countryside knew that genies had a predilection for dry rivers, and disguising yourself as one in broad daylight near a wadi was just plain foolhardy.

Mom’s Cactus Genie My mother also reported close brushes with spirits she once inadvertently disturbed as a child in the countryside in a thicket of overgrown prickly pear plants. The thicket was used as a general-purpose dumping ground by the villagers, making it a perfect environment for our reclusive fire-born neighbors. My grandmother always warned her kids not to play near that one thicket because it was a “bad” spot. On one occasion, my mom and her siblings were allowed to help chase a farmyard chicken in order to catch it and prepare it for dinner. While visiting my mother’s native village as a child, I remember seeing those poultry pursuits last for several minutes, with children especially excited to participate. In her childhood story, the chicken escaped into the sinister cactus thicket and my eight-year-old mother followed it in full adrenaline rush. She located it and called her sister for support to ambush it. While peering inside the thicket, and waiting for backup, she leaned her hand on an abandoned burlap doum-padded donkey saddle that had been left decaying there for at least several months.5 The object happened to be haunted and wasn’t eager to be touched, so it started moving slowly while making faint guttural sounds until my mother lifted her hand. My young mother had not yet been fully socialized in Morocco’s lore of the occult, so she wasn’t exactly frightened at first. She kept calling for help to extract the chicken from the thicket and leaned a second time over the haunted sack. At this, the unearthly jiggling resumed, and the guttural sounds became more perceptible. She felt the hump of the retired saddle become more pronounced under her hand, and she finally looked at it. The burlap sack was vaguely assuming the likeness of the back of a corpulent woman, hunched as though

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over a floor cloth, performing the traditional sideways motions of mopping, and grunting gravely. This time the spirit(s) had managed to unequivocally communicate their presence, and the young girl finally realized that something serious was happening. Needless to say, she forgot about the chicken and raced off back to the house to tell of the terrifying episode, obviously triggering my grandmother’s I-told-you-so rebukes about the “bad” thicket.

Amicable Genies Not all of my parents’ encounters with genies were adversarial. When my parents married and moved to the city, eventually to Meknès, my future birth city and hometown, they bought the family house, which still stands today. The house turned out to be shared by another peaceful but nonhuman couple. Soon after my parents moved in, the couple appeared in human likeness to my dad and explained to him that they invisibly lived there. The man and woman assured him that they were amicable and that my parents, their new human housemates, would be welcome. Only one unfortunate incident happened over the years. The genies had explained to my father that their favorite hangout spot in the house was one particular room that doubled as a garage, with an accordion-shaped gate that closed it off on the street side. For our purposes, this was a highly versatile space converted multiple times over the years, into a storage room, a bedroom, and a kitchen extension. We had a relatively small kitchen, so when my sisters grew up, my mother moved the gas stove to the garage to make room for multiple helping hands with cooking chores. We still have that portable stove. It is one of those oblong cookers with three different-sized burners, and it was hooked to a much heavier butane cylinder. My mother would use the shallow stove directly on the tiled floor of the garage, which naturally conducted a small amount of heat to the floor. At one point, she abruptly decided to start using a small wooden stand under the stove and firmly instructed my sisters to henceforth do the same. It turned out that the genie man of the house had come again to see my father. This time, his humanoid face appeared to be seriously burned, and he was in tears. He blamed my mother for burning his face by using her stove directly on the garage floor, which he occupied, and admonished my parents for this undeserved treatment of their friendly spirit housemates. To be sure, the male genie seemed to have totally forgiven the stove mishap later on, although he permanently bore its scars. About

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two years later, my twin sisters were pulling all-nighters in rooms on different floors to study for their high school diploma exams. One of them was studying in the downstairs bedroom directly adjacent to the garage. A middle-aged man in a white shirt with healed face burns unexpectedly peeked over from the door into my sister’s study space so only his chest showed, smiled kindly, and suggested that she take a break and get some sleep, before he disappeared. My sister at once identified him with the good-willed genie described by my father, but his kind demeanor did little to make the brief encounter any less blood-curdling. And she rushed upstairs to find human company and tell her twin of what had happened.

I Too Met Them Many years before my sister’s study incident I too had an uncanny experience of our home’s patron spirits, in the very same bedroom my sister would use to study for her baccalaureate finals. I was sleeplessly lying in bed at night and was able to peer into the central courtyard of the house. The lights were turned off and I fully knew it was pitch dark. Yet as though with altered vision, I unnervingly observed things unfold outside. There were either three or four women figures in traditional Moroccan dress, strikingly similar in shape and corpulence to my mother’s childhood cactus genie, but they were not hunched over. The three or four women huddled and parleyed mutely among themselves in one corner of the courtyard before moving together very slowly to other corners and repeating the same behavior. I was unable to see their faces. Although they had distinct backs and fronts, their heads had long straight black hair all over, wherever they turned. They seemed to mind their own business and ignore my presence in the bedroom. When I recounted the incident to my mother, wondering whether I had been dreaming, she asked me about every single detail of what I had experienced. Then she confidently announced that I had had a glimpse of our home’s patron genies and assured me that our mysterious housemates were good-natured and were not to be feared.

Genies That Entertain Spirits would also make their presence indirectly known via experienced mediums who could be consulted for a variety of utilitarian, day-to-day reasons—undoing spells cast by a malevolent neighbor, healing sexual or fertility problems, or divining the future of a mar-

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riage or business project. Spirits can also be recreationally consulted via simple divination games that anyone can play in much the same way Ouija boards are used in the West. My mother taught us one such game that she played as a child. This game, which invokes a certain Sidi Bushrawet (Lord of Rags), involves using twigs or matches and improvised strips of fabric, about fifteen centimeters long each. These strips represent the rags worn by the genie in question. Each strip is first doubled once over a twig before it is rolled to make a little scroll. A wish is made to know a future event with simple binary yes/no outcomes. For instance, Will Auntie visit tomorrow? The rags’ lord is then asked to give the answer. The scrolls are then carefully unrolled. If the answer is negative, the strips will be found, as would be normally expected, still doubled over the individual twigs. If the answer is positive, one or more twigs will be found outside and on top of the folded strips. More twigs mysteriously found outside the original fold indicate a higher likelihood of the positive outcome materializing. In order to test Sidi Bushrawet’s accuracy, children would often ask questions about obvious or nearly obvious future outcomes, such as whether the following day would be a Friday, or whether it would soon snow. My mother would demonstrate the game for us with such theoretical future events that were either certain or absurd. The answers, which were almost always accurate, amused and creeped us out at the same time.

The Angel of Death Not all of my familial occult involved genies. Angels and spirits of the dead are also part of Morocco’s religious worldviews. These entities appear in various family reports surrounding the passing away of relatives. The only narrative involving angels that we have pertains to the final night of my maternal grandfather’s life. He had been a heavy smoker and was in the terminal delirium stage of an advanced respiratory tumor. This was well before my parents met, in the same countryside where my mother had come too close for comfort to the cactus-dwelling genie. While her dad agonized that night, my mother briefly stepped outside to relieve herself in the bushes. She then had a glimpse of Azrael, the archangel commissioned to collect the souls of the dying, and realized that the end was near. She didn’t see Azrael in his full seraphic glory but as a will-o’-the-wisp in the distance. It looked like bright purplish flames burning from several candles in the wild where there should be none. She walked toward it out of curiosity, but the lumi-

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nous presence seemed to retreat at first, apparently not eager to be bothered by someone who was not on the list of souls to collect that night. My mother walked closer until the bushes thickened and the entity had no more visible background to retreat into. But it didn’t disappear. Azrael had to stay put because he was out on an appointed mission that night. The closer my mother moved toward the purplish flames, the brighter they glowed. As this happened, my mother intuitively realized that she had to desist for her own safety and feared that the ever-brighter presence would literally blind her if she were to get too close. She decided that a dying father and a visually impaired daughter would be too much for her family to handle in one night. She was convinced that she saw Azrael waiting to collect her dad’s soul at the appointed time. Sure enough, my grandfather left us later that night.

Dad in the Air In summer 2005, my dad passed away in Meknès, and I fortunately happened to be in Morocco. He had been slowly deteriorating from hepatoma over four years and all state-of-the-art treatment options had been exhausted. He luckily experienced no pain throughout and was fully lucid, but he had all the classic symptoms of a failing liver, was emaciated, and was barely ambulatory in the final days. Doctors warned us that he would at one point slip into a terminal coma, which is what eventually happened, and he died at the hospital on a Thursday night a few hours later. A neighbor, who happened to be a nurse working at the clinic he was transported to, attended to him. We had to act fast because of the Muslim injunction to bury the dead as quickly as possible, so a grave was dug overnight in the local cemetery, and preparations were made to ritually wash the body at home and prepare it for burial immediately after the next day’s noon prayer at the nearest mosque. Although I was able to pull myself together and cooperate in the process, being his eldest and only male child, the whole experience was traumatic for me. I felt emotionally suffocated by the crowd that provided little space and time for family recollection. As part of my own journey, I had privately interiorized other expectations about the mourning process while in the US. I couldn’t help but feel that my deceased dad’s dignity and our own were being transgressed. Something however happened on that fateful night that brought the whole family some solace. Our neighbor, the nurse (let’s call her Malika) who had attended to my comatose father, and her family were religiously observant.

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They would get up every day at dawn to perform the first of Islam’s five daily mandatory prayers. Their house faced ours, and ours had a small gated garden in front with two evergreen trees, a carob and a bitter orange. In his final days, my dad would sit on a small stool, his weakened back propped by the wall, serenely facing the garden in late afternoons. When Malika’s older sister got up at dawn after my dad’s passing, she heard floor-cleaning sounds emerging from our house. She surmised, fairly enough, that our family was up early to clean the house for the funeral. She looked from the window, but none of our windows were lit at all. Instead, she reports unmistakably sighting a half-sized version of my dad, in his usual brown jellaba and trademark brimless hat but with no visible feet. My miniature dad circumambulated our gated garden several times as though floating several inches above the ground. Malika’s sister claims that her visual experience was so vivid that she could not believe her own eyes. She rushed to wake up Malika, then their mother, and finally their brother, to come watch and corroborate her experience. And they all did. They whispered about the sighting, which lasted about fifteen minutes. My father’s apparition at one point noticed their presence across the street and made eye contact, faintly smiling. His demeanor was peaceful, and he didn’t seem bothered in any way by the onlookers. He kept circumambulating the garden until the dawn light grew brighter. As the twilight slowly heralded a rising sun, the apparition grew progressively smaller in size, while still circling the garden, until it eventually faded out. Later in the morning, the three women wasted no time in knocking on our door and telling my mother and sisters of what they had witnessed. They were gesticulating wildly and speaking loudly past one another. They were not merely trying to comfort a bereaved family. They were convinced and awed that my dad was doing very well beyond the Styx and had revisited his favorite spot in front of our house the night before. They implored us to preserve and take good care of the garden for his sake even though it was slated for extensive reworking because one of the trees was overgrown and becoming a structural hazard for the house. Fifteen years later, in December 2020, my mother would fatally contract the coronavirus, and my miniaturized dad apparently returned one last time to comfort her in her hospital room. The nurses did not see the moving presence behind their backs that she appeared to be tracking with her eyes, but she mentioned my dad. She passed away two days later. My parents’ bond had been complex and we went to extraordinary lengths at the height of the pandemic to ar-

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range for her burial within twenty-four hours in the same vault as his.

Familial Spirits and My Intellectual Journey Meeting US Anthropology I came to anthropology late, in graduate school, after initially obtaining a Fulbright grant to study for a master’s degree in English and linguistics in the United States beginning in 1995. It was my first exposure to a foreign country. My parents’ finances would have never made travel or study abroad imaginable. The career switch to anthropology was both tortuous and providential. In Morocco, I had been compartmentalized in a rigid school system that placed high schoolers in either literature or science tracks. I had virtually zero exposure to social science before and during college. The late king’s regime had suppressed most teaching in social science and philosophy because Hassan II regarded both as breeding grounds for left-wing activists, mandating instead its own brand of “moderate” Islamic education. It had also cut out evolutionary theory from all science curricula both in high school and college. Experiencing US academia gave me free rein to openly explore existential questions that I had been entertaining ever since I secretly discarded Islam as a personal religion during my college years in Morocco. My rejection of Islam wasn’t born of any Marxist temptations—the kind that worried the regime—but of my inability to disentangle my native religion from the things about it that personally bothered me: women’s supposed inferiority, belligerent attitudes toward non-Muslims, and suffocating legalism. But even though I quit Islam, I was still fascinated by the substance of religion because I vividly remembered the narratives of my family’s genies, and because I was aware, from movies and literature I could access in Morocco, that human spirituality was vast and diverse. In the US I became attracted to four-field anthropology because its purview seemed to match many of the philosophical questions that haunted me. During an unusually protracted graduate career, I straddled both cultural and biological anthropology in search of answers. For the first time in my life, I understood the basic mechanisms of biological evolution and appreciated the complex story of our species. For the first time I also had a chance to mingle with real people from diverse ethnic and religious backgrounds. And I was

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free to visit non-Muslim houses of worship ranging from Quaker and Episcopalian to Hindu and neopagan.

Resisting Encampment I intuitively came to believe that empirical science and faith each had their own different set of tools for apprehending the nature of being, and that opposing the two was useless and intellectually dishonest. I came to terms with the fact that we are bipedal primates whose consciousness in many ways boils down to the same neural algorithms used by all sentient organisms to navigate a universe that is grimly physical and temporal. But my experience of familial spirits in Morocco, and my uncensored encounter with religious diversity in the US, also led me to appreciate our species’s unique capability to venture into the realm of what Rudolf Otto ([1924] 1968) called the numinous. And the essence of that fascinating and ever-mysterious realm, I felt, eluded the tools of classical positivism. The interplay of the numinous with the profane often flies in the face of empirical logic. How could our family home’s gentle patron spirit suffer facial burns from a butane-powered stove if he had no skin to begin with? And why would he even somehow choose to merge his face with the floor tiles that conducted the heat from the stove? The whole thing is nonsensical if taken at face value. But my father’s encounter with the patron spirit was very real. Something genuine happened, whatever it was. My dad was reporting an experience. He was neither telling anecdotes nor suffering from any condition known to produce hallucinations. The fascinating world of religion, alongside our species’s stark physical and biological reality, left me quite unimpressed with the interminable dueling I watched unfold between champions of science and fans of postmodernism in my lively four-field doctoral community at the University of Florida, and at meetings of the American Anthropological Association (AAA). The whole debate felt spurious. The ideological morass was further complicated by the fact that neither paradigmatic entrenchment nor even subfield appeared to determine religious opinion. I met religiously observant biological anthropologists who kept faith strictly personal. And I met cultural anthropologists who clamorously dismissed the supernatural with paradigms borrowed from various shades of materialism or poststructuralism. At the end of the day, however, the foundation of that otherwise uncordial tug-of-war is exactly what I had come for when I switched

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from English literature to anthropology. Anthropology unmistakably became for me, in the oft-cited words of Eric Wolf, “the most scientific of the humanities and the most humanistic of the sciences.” (1964:13) Yet operationalizing that maxim was tricky. When studying Moroccan genie trance, I decided to address both the humanistic and the scientific aspects of the phenomenon while keeping them carefully separate in terms of methodology.

Lightening the Boat First of all, there were certain perspectives I had to resolutely decline. And that was relatively easy. As much as I admired Clifford Geertz for the stunning wizardry of his prose and his interest in complex religious phenomena such as Moroccan Islam (Geertz 1968), I was unable to accept a key aspect of his classic definition of religion, which reduced the supernatural to symbolic “conceptions [clothed] with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations [of religious experience] seem uniquely realistic” (1966: 4). I adhere to Durkheim’s concept of collective effervescence (1968) because religion is participatory, and its particular forms are molded by shared cultural imagery. But anthropologists are not acultural personas. They too use secular and/or religious imagery on a daily basis. No anthropologist is entitled to stand over the shoulders of several billion fellow humans and patronizingly affirm that their religious lives are steeped in nonfactual conceptions that only seem realistic. My father’s disturbing encounter with the river genie and the story of his postmortem interference with the consciousness of unsuspecting neighbors were not conceptions clothed with an aura of factuality. These are deeply human narratives that ought to be listened to without attempting to intellectually evict them by some grandiloquent sleight of hand. At the University of Florida, I was honored to take a graduate seminar with Marvin Harris, the pioneer of cultural materialism, who would consider Geertz to be his ideological opposite. Despite their differences, they both fundamentally dismissed the substance of religion. I agreed with Harris (1980) that religion was strongly modulated by such infrastructural forces as ecology and mode of subsistence. But I was unable to concede that religion, magic, mysticism, and the occult were mere ideational projections of a material infrastructure. Religious experience has a life of its own that is worthy of scholarly interest that draws from multiple disciplines—scientific, humanistic, and theological.

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Scholarly Prudence That Inspired Vincent Crapanzano, in a way, was more of a kindred spirit to me. His portrait of Tuhami, an illiterate Moroccan tilemaker (1980), was deeply sensitive even though he spared no efforts to experimentally bombard Tuhami’s narrative with interpretations stemming from psychoanalysis and literary theory. His attempts to explain Tuhami’s situation were legitimate because he was frankly using some of the best parts of the post-Enlightenment intellectual arsenal available to him. But I respected the fact that he eventually stopped short of pronouncing a verdict. The honest message of his work is that anthropology, as we know it, has theoretical and methodological limits because culture is an ever-unfolding enigma. In 2001, I was privileged to meet Crapanzano on the margin of a AAA seminar about the supernatural where Edith Turner was one of the speakers.6 The exchange between panelists and the audience over how anthropology should assess cultural belief in the miraculous and the occult was contentious. Based on her personal and field experience, Turner radically affirmed the objective existence of supernatural phenomena and, referring to Crapanazano’s classic, she went on to announce that the time had come for anthropology to boldly acknowledge that Tuhami was possessed by an afreet.7 Later Crapanzano told me that he felt very uncomfortable with Turner’s clearcut assertion. According to him, anthropology as we know it did not have the means for definitively labeling experiences such as Tuhami’s. Crapanzano’s prudence is compatible with my own view that a good measure of anthropological ambivalence is always in order when it comes to studying and describing human behaviors that fall in the realm of religion, the occult, or the supernatural. The spirits reported by my family, much like Western ghosts and Amerindian totem spirits, are culture-bound experiences that cannot be treated in the same way as natural taxa or material artifacts. With that in mind, I still believe that it is very important for us anthropologists to make space in our discourse for the concepts used by the men and women we meet because their experiences are often very real. Another author whose work assisted me in coming to grips with my family’s genies and those of my subjects while avoiding the pitfalls both of positivistic dismissal and of simplistic conversion of cultural concepts into stable scholarly constructs is Sidney Greenfield. Greenfield has been studying Brazilian spiritist healing practices since the 1980s (see Greenfield 1987). Brazilian medium-healers inhabited by spirits of the dead, including canonized Christian saints, perform

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rapid and highly invasive surgeries on patients without antiseptics or anesthesia. Greenfield minutely observed and described the phenomenon with the humility of an anthropologist who had no difficulty fully acknowledging that what he saw could not be discredited and seemed indeed to defy the basics of biomedicine as we know it. He even managed to film spiritist surgery sessions (Greenfield 1993). Greenfield adopted a stance that is intellectually unpretentious and methodologically scientific at the same time. He basically suggested acquiescing to the fact that various aspects of the phenomenon were unexplainable, but that it would be possible to empirically study its context. What roles for instance did room lighting, scenery, and the voice and physical proxemics of both healer and patient play in making the healing session more or less successful? I found Greenfield’s attitude particularly helpful in studying genie trance in Morocco. One thing I noticed, for example, is that although trance was not voluntary, specific communal settings were necessary for it to be triggered. Possessed individuals never fell into trance by mere exposure to recorded trance-inducing tunes that are commercially available, or video replays of trance sessions. For trance to occur, the music had to be played live by a band following a ritual protocol that also involves donning colors and burning incense that are specific to each spirit, among other things. At the height of trance, some nontrancers will also assist trancers by propping their backs to maintain their balance and reduce the likelihood of injury, and trancers cooperate most of the time. Ritual dissociation only occurs in well-defined settings that endow the whole experience with complex social meanings. The requirement of a socially orchestrated context for Moroccan possession trance strongly resonates with Coțofană’s (2017) own findings about the indispensable role of the audience in cuing the behaviors of both exorcist and exorcee during unbinding rituals in Romanian Christian Orthodox practice. While I was unable to explain the unusual physical feats that were sometimes performed during trance, I still managed to methodologically isolate trance episodes, measure their average duration, and inventory the psychosomatic symptoms observed or reported by trancers just before, during, and just after trance. I was able to align most of these symptoms with those reported in other trance traditions cross-culturally and listed in the more recent versions of the DSM (American Psychiatric Association 2013). Needless to say, despite this, possession trance is not necessarily pathological. It is no more pathological, indeed, than my childhood vision of the corpulent women spirits in our courtyard, or my sister’s hair-raising

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encounter with our home’s friendly patron spirit who bore permanent burn scars. The caveat that spirit possession and related cultural phenomena are rarely amenable to medicalization has always been voiced by anthropologists (Delmonte et al. 2016).

Genies and Discursive Ambivalence My anthropological outlook was also shaped by the discursive tools used by family members and research subjects to report their experiences of the occult. Consciously or not, we implement imagery and wordplay that borrow heavily from our native idioms. An interesting case in point is the evolution of our home’s patron spirits. When my parents reported my father’s encounter with the genie couple that welcomed them into their new home, my mother drew conclusions about the favorable spiritual condition of our house. She did so by employing a Moroccan figure of speech that can be literally rendered as “having a good threshold.” The threshold quality of a house, a store, or indeed any newly undertaken project is figuratively indicative of its future success or failure. It is no coincidence that many years later, after my father met the couple for the first time, the male genie suffered burns from a stove placed by my mother on the physical threshold of the garage. Versions I collected from my three sisters, and reconstructed from my own childhood memories, are ambiguous. They do not agree on whether the stove used to be placed directly on the cement threshold of the garage door, or just near it, more toward the inside, which is more likely. But the “threshold” came up in all the versions. The result is a complex mental schema that is not fortuitous at all: thresholds are important in Moroccan culture. Inadvertent offense was committed against the spirit, and the spirit appears to have chosen to place his face directly on or near the garage threshold. The threshold concept is a convenient tool that sews the whole worldview together. The way my family narratives of the occult spontaneously used wordplay, free associations, and seemingly odd parallels helped me considerably in making sense of my doctoral subjects’ own discursive strategies. They freely tap a vast preexisting folk repertoire to flesh out their stories, and they never commit to a specific version about the nature and origin of the spirits that possess them. What seems to matter for them is the possession experience. The rest is auxiliary. Although there is a broad implicit cultural consensus that these genies are fire-born creatures, there is a dizzying array of narratives that put genies on a continuum with saints and spirits of the dead.

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Aicha, the queen of Morocco’s spirit pantheon, induces the same specific trance symptoms in all her adepts.8 However, it is difficult to get a stable oral story about who she really is. Sometimes she is hushedly referred to as a demonic spirit.9 At other times, she is the spirit of a Moroccan heroine warrior who once fought Portuguese invaders in the sixteenth century. Or other times yet, she is the prospective Sudanese bride of Sidi Ali Ben Hamdouch, a seventeenth-century Moroccan Sufi figure who allegedly sent his closest disciple to bring him Aicha, before she and the disciple mysteriously went into occultation on the journey back to North Africa. This prolific ambiguity is true of all other major spirits of the Moroccan trance pantheon. Their moral nature is also very ambiguous. When contrasted to Jewish genies, who also can possess Moroccan Muslim subjects, they are all definitely considered as rabbani (godly, pious). When compared among themselves, they are variably described as either rabbani or khabith (evil or satanic) depending on their individual temperament, whether or not they require blood letting during trance, and so on. This is also true of the highly ambivalent concept of le’fu (pardon or deliverance) in Moroccan possession trance. This word frequently comes up both in the lyrics of the trance-inducing tunes, and in the trancers’ own words. This concept is remarkably complex because subjects only give it a precise meaning on the spot when pressed. Soliciting le’fu sometimes means entreating the possessing spirit to forgive any negligence in personal devotion to him/her. But it can also be understood as a prayer to God so as to one day be released from bondage to spirits, to lead an orthodox Muslim lifestyle, and to no longer feel the need to go into possession trance. The same subject can commute between those two very different meanings depending on context and conversation.

Genies and My Spiritual Journey A Religious Dilemma I have already mentioned that I never embraced atheism because the supernatural has been pervasive in my familial and cultural context. Specific choices I made, however, determined how my own spiritual journey would unfold. I was looking for some type of existential commitment. The occult, and all the magic, witchcraft, and possession rites that went along with it, fascinating as they all are, struck me as being mostly utilitarian in nature. They are not grounded

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in explicit moral philosophies. So I naturally veered toward major world religions. I was unable to stay in Islam for reasons I have already mentioned, so I explored Hinduism and Unitarian Universalism, among many other options. After a tortuous journey of many years, I settled on Roman Catholicism. I found the theology to be at once sturdy and capable of accommodating my deeply seated liberal leanings. It wasn’t long, however, before I had to grapple with religious dilemmas. The most important of these had to do with genies. There are no good or harmless demons from a traditional Christian viewpoint. All things occult are understood as the work of fallen forces that oppose God’s plan. I must admit that I too was quite a bit unnerved by similarities I noticed between the trance behaviors I observed in the field and the behavior of possessed individuals that Jesus exorcized in New Testament narratives. Many of the same elements were there: altered consciousness, self-injury, and the express desire to be liberated that is significantly evocative of the Moroccan concept of le’fu discussed earlier. Even the Beninese parish priest of Meknès, where I conducted most of my doctoral fieldwork, was understandably surprised and concerned that I attended possession trance nights. I was ready to abandon neither the faith that grounded me spiritually, nor my anthropological curiosity. And I was by no means ready to submit that my parents’ and sisters’ experiences were the work of the devil. I therefore had to do quite a bit of theological gymnastics, and it paid off. First of all, I had to constantly remind myself that Christian scripture and history have not been wholly saintly. The Judeo-Christian Bible and the annals of state Christianity abound in divinely sanctioned violence and persecution of others based on their ethnicity or convictions. I decided that a religious tradition with so much abuse under its belt was in no moral position to summarily condemn the occult in other traditions. Morocco’s genies have perpetrated far less harm than many biblical figures, Christian emperors, inquisitors, and modern fundamentalists. These spirits furthermore help many Moroccans heal emotionally through trance and dance, and they even protect homes. I looked around and saw massive political and financial corruption in my home country, as in much of the Third World, that clearly was the work not of genies but of power-hungry men. If the best that Moroccan spirits could do to sow evil was to ritually borrow human bodies, then they were doing an extremely ineffective job advancing Lucifer’s kingdom. And if a friendly house genie welcomed my parents, forgave facial injury they caused, and even felt for my sister’s nightly

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cramming burnout, then he and many of his kind cannot possibly be instruments of evil.

Theistic Anthropologists Familial and field experience helped me discard the dichotomies of conservative theology and the sweeping verdicts it pronounced on the occult. However, I would not have been able to do it entirely on my own. I found inspiration from two eminent cultural anthropologists who also happened to be observant Catholics. The first one is Edith Turner, already mentioned. Like myself, Edith Turner was a practicing Catholic, but that never prevented her from stepping into other religious identities, ranging from Inuit shamanism to sub-Saharan animism, by fully engaging in participant observation (see Mentore 2009). She is the one who urged Crapanzano to call Tuhami’s situation for what she believed it most likely was: possession by an afreet. The second anthropologist is Éric de Rosny, who was also a French Jesuit. He lived in Cameroon and became intrigued with practices of the nganga.10 In order to better assimilate the culture, he decided to become a traditional healer himself. With the approval of his church hierarchy, he embarked on a five-year initiation path that eventually transformed him into a respected nganga elder. He describes his experience in a powerful ethnography (De Rosny 1981). Both de Rosny and Edith Turner are anthropologists whose religious outlooks match the spirit of the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965), which considerably opened up Catholicism both to modernity and cross-religious understanding, despite fundamentalist resistance still alive today within its ranks.11 While I share Turner’s and de Rosny’s faith and anthropological interests, we have different mindsets when it comes to participant observation. I never became personally involved in possession trance because it lay far outside the edges of the spiritual practice I feel comfortable in. I like personal borders that roughly define me but still allow me to observe, listen, and empathize. I never opened up to the possibility of fusionally experiencing the spirits. I always jokingly said that queen spirit Aicha and her pantheon know to leave me alone altogether because my temperament and my mental schemata do not accommodate them. During a spirit trance night I was at, bread was broken and blessed to the tune of the spirits of the forest, and I was offered some of it to eat. I hesitantly but cordially accepted the morsel, and I held it in

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my hand before reverently disposing of it later. For me, it was too evocative of communion for comfort. While I regularly consume Eucharistic wafers with purpose, I couldn’t bring myself to eat bread consecrated by mysterious entities I didn’t specifically relate to. For similar reasons, I never again played my mother’s divination game after I settled in to my current spiritual path. I would sometimes watch my sisters play the game but not participate. To date my only direct personal experience of genies is my childhood vision of the rotund faceless women that occupied the four corners of our courtyard.

Genies to the Succor of My Faith I am grateful to familial spirits for having helped shape my faith in one important respect. Thanks to them, I learned that religious experience cannot be apprehended by dissecting it into discrete logical components. Religious experience, including experience of the occult, is strongly shaped by cultural expectations. It is cognitively appropriate in Morocco for people to meet spirits that take on extravagant forms of animal life, such as the protean genie that attempted to strangle my father, or the camel-hooved Aicha in folk narratives. On the other hand, I have never met a Moroccan who ever reported seeing a ghost. The very idea of those blurry ethereal apparitions is absent in Moroccan culture. Apparitions in Morocco always mimic the concrete attributes of physical bodies. Numinous experiences always match cultural norms. This, I noticed, is also the case in the faith I adopted. Stigmatists, such as Francis of Assisi or the much more recent Therese Neumann and Padre Pio, tend to receive the mystical hand wounds of the crucified Christ in the palms of their hands (Napolitano 2016). This is commensurate with cultural expectations and artistic depictions of the crucifixion over centuries. Modern forensic and historical research shows that Roman executioners mostly likely pierced the wrists instead because nailing the palm would not have lent adequate physical support for suspending convicts sentenced to a slow and excruciating death (Lussiez 2005). As with genie narratives that defy physical logic, a stigmatist’s wounds may not correspond to the historical reality of crucifixion. But the mismatch with history or physics does not diminish the genuineness of the reported experiences. My ability to appreciate narratives of the supernatural without expecting empirical realism has been my antidote both to atheism and fundamentalism. It helped me bring home my anthropological perspective, which affirms science while simultaneously appreciat-

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ing religious and ecstatic experience. My parish priest in Gainesville, Florida, once put it succinctly by saying that Catholics indeed hold that consecrated communion wafers become the body of Christ, but that submitting the transubstantiated bread to chemical analysis would not lead anywhere. Familial spirits helped me understand that inconsistencies are to be expected in reports of the supernatural, as in all human narratives. When I was reconstructing my father’s experience with the river spirit from my family’s individual memories, including my own, I had to grapple with two different versions. One version had my father stroll and cross the dry river afoot, and the other one had him ride a donkey. Their endings and other details were also slightly different, and they might even be two separate but significantly similar incidents. To tell the story, I decided to merge both versions into a single composite narrative with and without the donkey. I take that same approach to the stories of my own faith. The four Gospels recount the various events of Jesus’s ministry in slightly different details and sometimes even in contradictory chronological orders. This is known in biblical criticism as the synoptic problem (Goodcare 2004). I am not scandalized by it, and it does not change the substance of my faith because I grant each of the Evangelists his or her own literary technique for providing coherent narratives adapted to the needs of specific audiences.

Familial Spirits and My Path to Vulnerability Finally, let it be said that spirit experiences in my family not only enriched my anthropological and spiritual perspective but also led me down a course of personal vulnerability that was both inevitable and interesting. It started about fifteen years ago when I announced in Morocco that I was going to attend possession trance nights for my doctoral research. My family did not entirely warm up to the idea. My sisters had become comfortably employed and had married men of similar status, thus joining a segment of Morocco’s upper-middle class that overall looked with disdain on folk religion. From my family’s point of view, I too had scrambled my way up the social ladder by studying in the US. The last thing they expected is that I would revisit Morocco for “research” on possession trance amid uneducated superstitious folks. My invitations to family to attend some trance nights were generally declined and some of my in-laws were more embarrassed than

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others by my doctoral project. I had a similar experience when I interviewed a Moroccan psychiatrist in the course of my research to find out whether he was at all sought by patients claiming to experience possession. He dismissed the phenomenon by sexualizing it in broad Freudian terms before conceding that it pertained to the world of “devils and demons,” which did not interest him. Over time, I also found out that possessed individuals, out of shame, rarely saw psychiatrists because they assumed that their worldview would be dismissed out of hand, and that useless medication would be thrown at them. Spirits also made me vulnerable in a different way and in a different context—US academia. Familial spirits were pivotal in my intellectual openness to the numinous in general and my eventual conversion to Catholicism. Many US academics eagerly listened to me explain Moroccan folk religion and Islam. There was intense curiosity on their part as well as a sort of ethical impulse to be inclusive of other cultures and dispel stereotypes. But attitudes often flipped when I brought up my own spiritual journey. The implicit message, as I read it, was this: An anthropologist was expected to study and showcase religion that was exotic or different from the dominant faith in North America. He or she would be even more interesting to listen to if they personally embodied exoticness. But Christianity just did not belong. It had already been discredited because of a range of connotations related to imperialism and political conservatism. Such biases surfaced comically during my dissertation defense. My committee included nonreligious as well as Hindu and Muslim members. My US parish priest, a versatile intellectual with a graduate sociology background, dropped in during the defense. The entire committee looked askance at his plain Roman collar from the outset. I spoke for a good twenty minutes about trance, and so did committee members from their respective perspectives. When the priest had a chance to speak he pointed out that trance was a universal phenomenon and that his own homilies sometimes put parishioners into a trance-like attitude when they projected their individual journeys and predicaments onto his words. There were embarrassed giggles throughout the room. Personal Christian experience seemed to be out of place in good old American anthropology, especially at a state university, and should be hushed at best. Give me shamanism or neopaganism or Islam, but not that. That interaction at my dissertation defense was both comedic and assured me that no anthropologist ever, not me, not them, went about their trade with a true personal tabula rasa.

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I am not a tabula rasa. The other day in Casablanca, with a rosary hanging loose from my pocket, I was finishing a cooking chore and I prepared to pour used hot water into the sink. But then I felt a pang of pain for the gentle house genie my mother had inadvertently scalded with the gas stove. I paused and I diluted the liquid with cold water before disposing of it. Bon voyage, Mom and Dad. Pray for me, and for us all.

An Epilogue on Anthropology and All Things Occult The earliest occurrence of the word “occult” in the anthropological literature is most likely E. B. Tylor’s extensive discussion of “occult sciences” in the fourth chapter of his 1871 book. Tylor’s definition of occult science overlaps significantly with the contemporary popular usage of the term. Under the occult, Tylor lumps together everything from magic and witchcraft to astrology and all conceivable kinds of “-mancies.”12 In contemporary anthropology of religion, the concept of the occult also has some currency and appears regularly in specific case and area studies. Overall, it tends to be used to describe practices that fall in the realm of what Lewis (2003) would call “peripheral” religion that is not necessarily morality centered. But the distinction between peripheral and central religion poses as many problems as the definition of religion itself. Chinese folk religion and contemporary Shinto for instance are a complex blend of pragmatic magic and morality-centered elements from Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoism. And in Morocco, there are continuous gradients of (im)morality in the world of genies and in people’s relationship with them. The occult is part of the broad spectrum of religious behavior. For this reason, some anthropologists (see Levy, Mageo, and Howard 1996) studying the occult have adopted the term “numinous”—a concept that was originally proposed by a theologian to refer to all experiences of the uncanny from ghosts to sensations of the holy. Otto (1924) considers the numinous to be a basal building block of all religious experience regardless of whether or not morality is involved. I believe that there are good reasons for that. It is impossible for instance to miss the strong historical connections that exist between Halloween, All Saints’ Day, and All Souls’ Day. It is no coincidence that all three are celebrated back to back from 31 October to 2 November. Spirits, sainthood, and death all appear to have something in common.

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I consider the staying power of the occult as evidence that spirits are alive and well and that religion, all religion, is here to stay. In anthropology, Edward Tylor’s and James Frazer’s classical evolutionist schemes predicting the final replacement of superstition, magic, and religion by reason and science are clearly antiquated and are no more accurate than Marx’s reduction of religion to a tool of power, or Nietzsche’s proclamation of the death of God and the advent of the Superior Man’s unbounded existential liberty. Examples of the permanence of the occult are legion, but two ironic cases in point persistently come to my mind. The first one is public news. In 2017, UK water firms were grilled by science activists for still using divining rods, in addition to modern technology, to locate leaks and pipes. This was considered a squandering of public monies on discredited practices. In response, water firms admitted to the practice and plainly affirmed that they have found the traditional method to be as effective as modern ones such as the use of drones (Weaver 2017). The second case involves a Moroccan acquaintance whom I tried to assist back in 2009. He was an activist who openly branded himself an atheist and staged interesting public stunts against state-imposed Islam. I was on the phone with him while he was being tracked by the authorities. He told me matter-of-factly that he had been consulting a fortune teller and found out from her that he would soon be arrested. The fortune teller’s prophecy turned out to be inaccurate on that particular occasion. But that’s beside the point. So, if the occult won’t go away, what is the deal with Max Weber’s disenchantment of the world? It is still very much real, I believe. I was seriously “disenchanted” as a young boy when, like much of humanity since the Renaissance, I eventually came to terms with the fact that the sky overhead was not a turquoise ceiling separating us from God’s kingdom above. But disenchantment has not yielded the end of religion. It merely displaced it from realms of inquiry that rationalism and science handled better. Disenchantment has not created a postreligious world. Instead, we are observing a world where both science and faith to grapple with a disenchanted world where a multiplicity of truths should be appreciated on their own terms. Those two eminently human faculties, science and religion, cannot usefully encroach on each other’s territories. That is a very tricky equilibrium. In contemporary anthropology, there are hopeful signs that it is achievable. One such sign is the formal affiliation of the Society for the Anthropology of Consciousness (SAC) with the AAA in 1990. SAC’s journey has not been a linear success. It started with a ripening awareness over the years of the need

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to take shamanic claims seriously. In the process, however, it struggled with fine-tuning a balance between affirming the genuineness of those claims, and avoiding the pitfall of commuting them into well-defined scientific (or pseudoscientific) constructs (see Schwartz 2021). There is much to explore here. Thankfully, the occult and religious behavior in general is grounded in concrete facts that can be empirically described. But the religious impulse and experiences of the numinous amount to what Eller (2022) aptly calls “culture [taken] to the ultimate.” Only continued ethnographic conversation, including autoethnographic conversation, and the collaboration of tools from multiple disciplines can pretend to do justice to this ultimate expression of our humanness, as anthropology slowly edges forward toward the building of lawful, but complex, generalities.

Kamal Feriali is assistant professor of anthropology at Université Hassan II de Casablanca and is part of an effort to introduce anthropology as an independent discipline in Morocco within a collaborative four-field approach. He has been working on music-induced possession trance in Morocco and is more broadly interested in the anthropology of religion, the interplay of biology and culture, the practical challenges of cultural relativism versus universal human rights, and anthropology’s potential for aiding democracy building.

Notes 1. Khun (2012) argued in 1962 for the existence of an episodic pattern to the progress of science, where cumulative developments give way to sudden paradigm shifts 2. “Genies,” “demons,” or “kings,” roughly. Jnun (plural of jinn) is the proper name of these entities, but its utterance is considered taboo in Moroccan folk religion. I use the anglicized form genie(s) in this chapter. 3. Quran 27: 72. 4. A loose-fitting robe with a large hood traditionally worn by men in Morocco 5. Doum is the common Arabic word for the leaves of Chamaerops humilis, a Mediterranean dwarf palm. Historically it was used to fill burlap saddles for donkeys and mules, and occasionally futons and mattresses. 6. Turner was an anthropologist who, along with Victor Turner, her spouse, studied religious behavior and operationalized the concept of communitas. 7. Turner used this anglicized form of an Arabic word that is synonymous with genie for our purposes.

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8. Aicha’s specific trance has melancholic overtones. The possessed sometimes go into weeping spells during trance. 9. As mentioned in note 2, the word jnun is often avoided. 10. This is a Kikongo term broadly used in sub-Saharan African to refer to spiritual healers. 11. More recently, for instance, the 2019 Amazon Synod attempted a rapprochement with the spiritual traditions of the indigenous peoples of the pan-Amazon region. While it was cheered by many Catholics, it also faced fierce backlash that culminated in the vandalism of “idolatrous” Pachamama statues displayed in the Vatican for the synod. See Philip Pullella, “Pope Asks Forgiveness for Theft of Controversial Amazon Statues,” Reuters, 25 October 2019. https://www.reuters.com/article/ us-pope-synod-amazon-theft-forgiveness-idUSKBN1X427A 12. Tylor mentions oneiromancy, scapulimancy, chiromancy, cartomancy, rhabdomancy, dactyliomancy, coscinomancy, geomancy and necromancy.

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Feriali, Kemal. 2009. Moroccan Music-Induced Spirit Possession Trance: Implications for Anthropology and Allied Disciplines. PhD dissertation, University of Florida. https://ufdc.ufl.edu/UFE0024654/00001. Geertz, Clifford. 1966. Religion as a Cultural System. London: Tavistock. ———. 1968. Islam Observed: Religious Development in Morocco and Indonesia. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Goodcare, Mark. 2001. The Synoptic Problem: A Way Through the Maze. London: T & T Clark. Greenfield, Sidney, M. 1987. “The Return of Dr. Fritz: Spiritist Healing and Patronage Networks in Urban, Industrial Brazil.” Social Science & Medicine 24(12): 1095–1108. https://doi.org/10.1016/0277-9536(87)90024-4. ———. 1993. “‘Presenting Dr. Fritz’: The Making of an Anthropological Monograph on Video about a Brazilian Spiritist Healer-Medium.” In Anthropological Film and Video in the Nineteen Nineties, ed. J. R. Rollwagen, 37–66. Brockport, NY: The Institute, Inc. Harris, Marvin. 1980. Cultural Materialism: The Struggle for a Science of Culture. New York: Vintage. Hayano, David. 1979. “Auto-ethnography: Paradigms, Problems, and Prospects.” Human Organization 38(1): 99–104. https://doi.org/10.17730/ humo.38.1.u761n5601t4g318v. Kuhn, Thomas S. 2012. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 50th anniversary edn. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Levy, Robert I., Jeanette Mageo, and Alan Howard. 1996. “Gods, Spirits, and History: A Theoretical Perspective.” In Spirits in Culture, History and Mind, ed. Jeanette Mageo and Alan Howard, 11–28. New York: Routledge. Lewis, Ioan. M. 2003. Ecstatic Religion: A Study of Shamanism and Spirit Possession, 3rd edn. New York: Routledge. Lussiez, Bruno. 2005. “Anatomie de la crucifixion.” Chirurgie de la Main 24(3–4): 132–47. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.main.2005.06.002. Mentore, George. 2009. “Interview with Edith Turner.” Revista de Antropología Iberoamericana 4(3): i–xviii. https://www.aibr.org/antropolo gia/04v03/entrevistas/040301b.pdf. Napolitano, Francesco. 2016. Padre Pio: A Personal Portrait. Cincinnati: Franciscan Media. Otto, Rudolf. (1924) 1968. The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and its Relation to the Rational. 2nd edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schwartz, Stephan. A. (2021). “Boulders in the Stream: The Lineage and Founding of the Society for the Anthropology of Consciousness.” Anthropology of Consciousness 31(2): 129–53. https://doi.org/10.1111/ anoc.12140. Sparkes, Andrew C. (2000). “Autoethnography and Narratives of Self: Reflections on Criteria in Action.” Sociology of Sport Journal 17(1): 21–43. https://doi.org/10.1123/ssj.17.1.21.

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Tilley-Lubbs, Gresilda A., and Silvia B. Calva. 2016. Re-telling Our Stories: Critical Autoethnographic Narratives. Rotterdam: SensePublishers. Tylor, Edward B. 1871. Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art, and Custom, vol. 1. London: J. Murray. Walford, Geoffrey. 2004. “Finding the Limits: Autoethnography and Being an Oxford University Proctor.” Qualitative Research 4(3): 403–17. https://doi.org/10.1177/1468794104047238. Weaver, M. 2017. “UK Water Firms Admit to Using Divining Rods to Find Leaks and Pipes.” The Guardian, 21 November. https://www .theguardian.com/business/2017/nov/21/uk-water-firms-admit-usingdivining-rods-to-find-leaks-and-pipes. Westermarck, Edward. 1968. Ritual and Belief in Morocco (Vol. 1). NY: University Books. Wolf, Eric. 1964. Anthropology. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan.

5 On Familial Occultism James M. Nyce

With the possible exception of mortuary cannibalism, nothing signals the exotic for anthropologists (and the public) more than magic and witchcraft. Both are seen as the heart of the discipline because they are the most refractory to render in Western terms. Many anthropologists who study magic undertake an apprenticeship,1 believing that practicing in a magical tradition by completing an apprenticeship will allow them to gain entry and insight into the lives of the people and the community they study. For anthropologists studying magic and witchcraft, cross-cultural intimacy and competence is demonstrated by controlling and exercising power (see Coțofană’s contribution to this volume). These apprenticeships not only make for good stories at parties and in classrooms, they are also central to anthropology’s belief about itself—that a properly trained observer can make sense of the other through talk and participant observation. The stories anthropologists tell about themselves after completing a magic apprenticeship are typically presented in the vein of Horatio Alger stories (Don Juan and Carlos Castaneda seem to have helped legitimatize the genre), where the hero details the obstacles overcome in his or her rise to the successful practice of magic. Rather than discuss these accounts here, the reader is directed to Coțofană’s review of these accounts and the genre itself in this volume. As exciting as all of this may be to nonpractitioners, for those of us born into families in which magic is practiced there is little exotic about it, and we often meet these accounts of learning magic with skepticism. Individuals born into traditions of magic, both male and

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female, revered or feared by their communities, are in practice as ordinary as grandmothers or grandfathers, with all the kinship obligations that go along with those relationships. Those of us involved in familial occult traditions are in some ways prisoners of occultism, which gives us a different perspective on the anthropological study of witchcraft and magic.2 For us, with magic there is no distance between the exotic and kinship, one of the most intimate spheres of social life, but at the same time we also hold some of the discipline’s basic assumptions about magic. Still, we may regularly hear neighbors whispering about what a grandparent might have done last year. We cannot separate the occult and the traditions associated with it into some extraordinary reality that one must labor to explain, justify, or translate to others outside our community. We take issue with the accounts of these anthropologists and their framing of magic as a story of adventure and power. It is difficult to take them seriously because they reflect too much the Western preoccupation with power and the relationship of power to self (especially the masculine self). Further, as Coțofană points out, there is something very suspect when we seem to find the same game, that of adventure and power, played out the same way in so many of the narratives on magic and apprenticeship that anthropologists have published. An attempt to overcome this trope would require asking what it would look like if Western science did not dismiss magic as superstition, what it would be like to live in a community where magic is just one of many kinds of power, and one of many forces that can impact a person’s life? What if magical power were taken for granted like taxes? Anthropologists seem to tell us that the nature of magical power is that it makes the magical figure formidable and dominant. These authors rely, unwittingly or not, on Western masculine gender narratives of power that allow the magical figure (whether male or female) to simply dominate others as well as social reality. Perhaps the best known of these authors is Carlos Castaneda. For these writers, magical power seems to unite Newton’s physics with a male ideology of domination and control. Faust is a classic example of this leitmotif, which runs through much of the literature on magic. For those of us embedded in familial occultism, magical power means more than the ability to define, and so to control, a situation. When the community is added into the equation as a source of overt and latent meanings, power is not simply accumulated for individual aggrandizement to be held like property. It is also deeply related

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to what we might call cultural and individual competence, expertise, and enactment. As such, it can be used to achieve a magical figure’s vision of what reality is or should be. The existence of such magical figures of course implies an audience that can weigh in on (or even resist) that particular vision of social reality. Most anthropological accounts of magic and magical figures revolve around the difficulty an anthropologist had in learning to do magic. These narratives often sound like a personal vision quest, where the anthropologist and his or her accumulation of power have a central role. Most accounts of apprenticeships tend to have more in common with memoirs or confessions than with ethnography. They follow literary conventions more than the practices of ethnographic research, and they end up reading more like Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther than anything else in anthropology. One thinks here immediately of how Castaneda portrays his apprenticeship with Don Juan.

Growing up in an Occult Family My great-grandmother and grandfather were well-known magical figures, and there was no way to avoid community gossip, which I was aware of from my childhood on. Almost forty years ago, in the midst of a day’s ethnographic reconnaissance, this time in rural Pennsylvania, I visited a local hotel bar and began talking with another patron; we asked each other “who are you” and “who do you know,” essentially exchanging kinship information. I was confident the interaction was positive and that I was developing a potential dissertation informant, but after several minutes the man stopped, looked at me, said “like breeds like,” and then walked away. A few moments later, I was tossed out of the hotel by his friends and told never to return. It is worth noting that conversations like this about genealogy, typically determined by kinship and one’s family reputation in the community, play a central role in German Mennonite social exchange (Doering 1936; Doering and Doering 1938).3 While this is important in understanding families, family structures, and a person’s place in both, it is also a polite way of ascertaining who might be or is a magical figure. Much to my surprise, this exchange led to my identification as a potentially powerful magical figure. The fact that I came from a long line of magical figures did not necessarily mean I was a magical figure too, but it certainly increased the likelihood in the eyes of the com-

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munity. In my conversation at the hotel bar, I had revealed something about my background and thus potential, perhaps giving this man a reason to worry that I might be capable of altering his reality in ways over which he had no control. My willingness to reveal to him my genealogical information may have been the very thing that made him suspicious about me. In short, why did I want him to know that any magical figures were members of my family? Magical power in my family’s tradition is not proclaimed or decided by oneself. Community context, resources, and meanings can also decide whether a person is a magical figure. If one makes public statements about this, that person’s judgement could be regarded as defective and therefore their status as a responsible, competent adult could be challenged. On the other hand, it could mean this magical figure believes him/herself to be beyond any form of social control, which poses a different, more profound kind of challenge for his/her community.

Theory: A Few Words Having said all this, this chapter is not intended to be a contribution to (or variation on) that old argument in anthropology about the pros and cons of insider and outsider knowledge. In fact this chapter has more in common with the literature on informants who “transcend” the traditional boundaries of this role. (George Hunt and Tony Tillohash, for example, are often portrayed in this light). This chapter looks at the issue of “transcendence” as something that anthropologists who have experienced the familial occult can bring to this debate as they are simultaneously subjects, objects, and (“because power is in their blood”) interrogators (Sabean 1985: 15). By adding these anthropologists to the equation, it is not so much that the variables could change or the argument itself simply be revised. Rather, these anthropologists have the potential to challenge the standard physics that lie behind the debate itself. In short, having magic in the blood can help decenter this debate and reframe it in analytically more useful ways. It would do so by challenging the very Western, scholastic terms—such as inner/outer, objective/subjective, and empiricism/interpretivism—that so far have informed the debate. The ultimate aim of anthropology should be to both grapple with and translate for ourselves and others the “lived-in worlds of compelling significance” (Wikan 1990: 277). In short, if we cannot analytically handle the translating well, it seems we will ultimately fail

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in understanding the grappling. This raises all kinds of challenges for anthropology because to achieve this kind of understanding is not possible if we just rely more or less uncritically on the discipline’s usual intellectual stock-in-trade. Of course, there is a history (and precedent) in anthropology of grappling with just this interpretive problem. One thinks, for example, of A. Irving Hallowell (Nyce and Bowers 2017), but today this kind of debate has become rather muted. The problem is that the intellectual project of the familial occult, more than most in anthropology, is one of closure. Here, one often has to overcome many false starts and learn to be satisfied with just bits and pieces of interpretive success. Bits and pieces may trigger forms of academic anxiety, but they are not, in themselves, problematic. In fact, Weber had foreseen this concern about a century ago when he wrote: “A price has to be paid, admittedly, for these advantages of interpretative explanation over observation; the results obtained by interpretation are necessarily of more hypothetical and fragmentary character” (Weber 1991:19).

The German Mennonites: Some History and Ethnology The Pennsylvania Dutch, of whom these German Mennonites were a part, regarded later German immigrants arriving after the American Revolution as distinct from themselves. The two groups were quite different in a number of ways, even in language use, and as a result there was often little interaction between them. Pennsylvania Dutch and Pennsylvania German are often used to describe the first group. Here, German Mennonite is used for a subset of this group who, my family among them, came before the American Revolution to the United States and emigrated to Ontario in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Shortly after 1776, emigration to Upper Canada, now Ontario, began with the arrival of German settlers from New York (Reaman 1957: xiii). However, the majority of the Germans who came to Ontario between 1796 and 1812 were from Pennsylvania (Reaman 1957: 30, 44). In the eighteenth century, some two thousand of these Mennonites traveled through New York to Ontario (Epp 1974: 50–51, 67). Exactly how many Mennonite Germans emigrated to Canada has not been determined. However, by 1780 fifteen of the thirty-two counties in southern Ontario had been settled, and these Germans were the first people to come there in large numbers (Reaman 1957: 207). These settlers brought their traditions with them and to this

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day have maintained ties to Pennsylvania (Epp 1974: 105; Reaman 1957: xiii). From the first, travel back and forth (to marry or for other reasons) has been part of their lives. German Mennonite families, close neighbors, or relatives often helped one another with farm work. However, in all other respects, the family of the time perceived itself as autonomous, self-contained, and self-sufficient. Community assistance and support other than in farming or emergencies was not often extended to people outside the immediate family. As in Pennsylvania, land grants in Ontario led to isolated family settlements (Epp 1974: 70, 72). This notion of community has persisted in towns and village settlements as well (for ethnohistory on these communities’ parameters, see Nyce, Tajla, and Dekker 2015). Today community/ethnic membership is claimed by individuals who range from weekend genealogists to families who live in much the same way as their ancestors did when they first arrived in North America.4 The churches they go to (rural meetinghouses as well as big-box urban churches), the communities they live in, and the beliefs they hold can be as eclectic as their lifestyles. There has been little study of this tradition in Canada and the magical figures who in this period best articulated the tradition (see Nyce 1982, 1987). Around the turn of the century, a few papers on the subject were published in the Journal of American Folklore (Doering 1936; Doering and Doering 1938; Waugh 1918; Wintemberg 1899, 1906, 1907, 1950). Later studies of German Mennonites in Ontario seldom refer to this magical figure and are primarily anecdotal, providing only a limited understanding of the tradition (see McKegney 1989).

What Can Magical Power Do? Power, in the German Mennonite tradition of magic, is the ability of a witch to control the definition of any particular situation. Bayard (1935) describes this best when he recounts a fight between two witches. In this case the witches were fighting over a case of adultery. A woman had been discovered with a man not her husband, and one of the witches declared that the woman’s adultery was a sin. If her definition of the situation as sinful prevailed, the adulterous woman would be seen as having committed an unpardonable sin. Not only would the woman be held morally responsible but her family’s worth and reputation in the community could be damaged for years. The

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other witch claimed that the woman’s act was a case of love magic perpetrated by her lover. In this case, the woman, and by extension her family, would be seen as blameless victims, and the family’s worth and status could not be questioned. This raised a very serious issue for the entire community in which it occurred and helps us understand the everyday world of a German Mennonite community.5 This kind of magical power, while remarkable to us, is there just part of everyday life. Magical power, as it is known and feared in German Mennonite communities, is about the magical figure’s ability to impose a vision of reality, including the nature of the group’s world, that is compelling and convincing for other members of the community (Nyce 1987). This power is feared because of the magical figure’s known ability to manipulate reality, forcing community members to question their assessment of everyday life. Before undertaking any action, we in these communities must question, like the adulterous woman, the nature of the world around us. Are we seeing what is truly taking place, or has a magical figure influenced how we see the world?6 The magical figure’s magic is feared because they are perceived to have the power to change the way the world looks and feels, robbing a person of his or her autonomy and perspective (Gandee 1971). This also means it can be difficult to identify the magical figure who has stolen one’s self-control, leaving one powerless to help oneself or driving one to engage another magical figure to help regain control. The magical figure’s potential to control how a situation is understood can be a problem for the whole community, not just for an individual. What power these figures have is often epistemological in nature. It is through the literal manipulation of reality that their magic is achieved. It requires hard work and much competence for a magical figure to redefine reality in ways that are compelling and convincing to their community. Here magic that is meant to alter what a community takes to be common sense requires competence more synonymous with concepts like authority, expertise, and enactment than with capital accumulation or the acquisition of property, for example.

Can Magic Be Real? I discovered that magic can indeed work. In the German Mennonite tradition, magical figures can take a person from a state of illness to a state of health, determine whether an individual is a sinner or the

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victim of love magic, or make a healthy person ill by using their magical power in a way Western culture defines as impossible. They can impose their will—that is, use their power—in order to do this (for these practices, see Wintemberg 1899, 1906, 1907, 1950). What they cannot do with magic is impose noncultural or nontraditional constructions on their communities because they have no cultural reason to do so. For example, if a person walking down a road saw a magical figure walking ahead of them, they might be surprised but not astonished if the magical figure suddenly transformed into a black cat. However, if the person saw that same magical figure suddenly turn into a Kenmore vacuum cleaner, they would most likely believe that they or the magical figure or both had lost their mind. Both transformations are impossible from a Western cultural perspective, but only the second would worry a Mennonite because it is so outside how they construe the way the world operates.

When Magic Takes over Invoking notions of kinship, community, and magical traditions can be risky in the world of German Mennonites: it can open their world up to dispute and renegotiation (Dessecker 2014). Today, such ideas are seen as theoretical constructs reflective of an earlier generation of anthropologists searching for a cultural unity and agreement that does not exist in the postmodern world and perhaps never did. Familial occultism may provide us with a new way of understanding these seemingly unchanging, invariant concepts. Mennonite witchcraft, kinship, and community are not sites of unchanging traditional agreement but of contention, change, and shifting alliances. Where are squabbles, conflicts, and disagreements more common than in families and communities? While larger theoretical entities like states, constituencies, and interest groups are important, most real-life disagreements are worked out on more micro levels among family, friends, and community members. This is where people, including magical figures, perform in real life. The magical figure can be in fact a very powerful force in determining which versions of reality will win widespread social acceptance. If family and community serve up various versions of reality, witchcraft is one of the forces that can confirm or disconfirm them, but in doing so, it can also create even more splintered versions of reality. Familial occultism shows how kinship and community, driven by magical figures, are resources for change as much or even more than

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they are sources of stability. Magical figures are potential arbiters of both stability and change, which are central to and problematic for kinship and community. Certainly, magical figures are not the only arbiters of what counts as real, but they are known as individuals who have the power to define and enforce their definitions of what is real.

Dissent, Consensus, and Magic Information about dissent and change within this magical tradition began to emerge after I completed my first apprenticeship. I had just returned home when I met my grandfather coming in the door. He began to act strangely and sniff me, and after a moment, he stepped away from me and told me not to return to the magical figure who had been directing my apprenticeship. He told me to find another magical figure because the one I was working with was a poor witch. I took this to mean she had, in my grandfather’s opinion, little or weak magic, or that her magic was somehow suspect or potentially dangerous. I felt I had been learning a fair amount of magic and had been happy with this apprenticeship, but knowing what I did about my grandfather’s abilities, I took his advice and apprenticed with a different magical figure. I trusted my grandfather because of all the stories I had heard about him, and I had experienced the community’s response to me because of him.7 But this does not delegitimize magic, magical figures, or German Mennonite witchcraft itself. Still, the very existence of magical figures hinges on the community’s desire to control or resist social change—a common theme in almost all German Mennonite sociology. Living with disagreements and seeking to control the outcome is the business of everyone in these German Mennonite communities, but only a few will be so involved in disagreements that they feel compelled to reach out to a magical figure to influence the outcome. Attempting to control change, particularly change in family and community, can help move life along. For example, in 1918, my infant father became critically ill, and a doctor told his parents there was no hope that he would live. Hearing this news, my grandfather drove into the countryside to wake his mother, my great-grandmother. She was a well-known magical figure, as was my grandfather. Gathering herbs, they drove back to the dying infant. My grandmother was told

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to leave the house and heard chanting when she left, she told me. Hours later, my grandfather brought them back home, and the baby began to recover, which was credited to their use of magic. The story led to my father being seen within the family as a miracle baby. He was seen as living proof of the power and efficacy of his father’s and my great-grandmother’s magical power, and my father’s position in life, all his successes and failures, were attributed to the mark this magic had left on him. I have seen magic done and have myself done magic that Western science and metaphysics say is impossible, and yet familial occultism has posed community, kinship, and power, especially in relation to magic, as sources of dispute, change, and innovation, rather than something exotic or unknown. In fact, my grandfather chided me for initially choosing occupations and roles in which power or magic ostensibly has little or no place. Magic is not only part of my family, it also provides the rationale that allows me to negotiate obligations and rights that are common to any family or community but are especially problematic when magic is fact. The challenge of witchcraft for me is not a question of whether magic exists but of which problems magic will present to me and how I will attempt to solve them, especially those perennial but never resolved questions about social life.

The Study of Magic: Quo Vadis? The familial occult can make it difficult to deny that magical figures can make valid epistemological claims about reality and can do so in ways that are as profound and convincing as the claims of any philosopher of science. The long unacknowledged challenge for anthropology remains the question of what happens if the magic of others is real, and not just in the trivial way we often teach relativism and constructivism to undergraduates. Those of us embedded in the familial occult have a unique perspective from which to extend the anthropological study of magic, magical figures, and magical practice. We are able to study them free from questions about whether magic actually exists and can be used by magical figures to do things, and from notions that magical figures are heroic or superhuman. For us, magical figures are our grandmothers, grandfathers, sisters, or brothers, and we have seen the familial occult at work.

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A major difficulty in anthropological literature on magical apprenticeships is that authors want to explain what is happening in reality by describing an ethnographic experience. While recounting the steps they took, the items used, and the states of being they experienced, they often remain silent on the epistemological challenges this logic might have for their own beliefs about what is real, and they risk not taking their informants’ foundational beliefs about the world seriously. The failure to address the problematic nature of reality when interpreting the experience of a magical apprenticeship for outsiders also fails to acknowledge the ethical problems apprentices can face once they are able to use magical power themselves. Real magic that is able to change and manipulate the world has real consequences and comes with responsibility, and if we take our informants’ claims about the world seriously, any discussion of magic must necessarily have an ethical component. To advance the literature on magic, it will be necessary to address why we so often discount both reality and ethics when it comes to the powers of others. James M. Nyce is professor emeritus of anthropology, Ball State University, and a docent (computer/information science) at Linköping University, Sweden. Long interested in risk and danger as cultural categories, he has published with colleagues some two hundred papers from fieldwork carried out in Canada, Romania, Sweden, and the United States. For example, he has published, with Alexandra Coțofană, Religion and Magic in Socialist and Post-Socialist Contexts (2 vols., ibidem Press / Columbia University Press).

Notes 1. For more on this, see Reaman 1957, Fretz 1989, Reimensnyder 1989, and Donmoyer 2018. 2. Research on this occult tradition started in 1976 and continued for several decades in Canada and the US. It employed all of the standard methods in the anthropological tool kit—document analysis, participant observation, the collection of both life histories and oral traditions, and long-term participation in a variety of German Mennonite organizations. There is also an ethnohistorical aspect to this research. Christian Eby, the best-known German Mennonite magical figure in Canada, died in 1920 (McKegney 1989). Eby, the historical figure in ’my dissertation (Nyce 1987), is well known as a charmer. A charmer in

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3.

4.

5. 6.

southern Ontario is a magical figure, much like a folk healer. Christian Eby had people from all over North America write and ask for his help. This is most unusual for a charmer, or other folk healers of the period. Eby went on to change both this role and this tradition of magic (he also did much the same thing in agriculture) in a number of important ways. These transformations were not simply private or internal. They were tested and validated against experience through the work he did and the successes he had. What Eby did as innovator is what the Mennonite community would expect of an individual with power. As a magical figure, he transcended and reshaped traditional ideas and conventional forms. He made new medicines and invented new social forms to accompany them. He grew new crops and created new markets. A magical figure is often thought of as being tightly bound to an established, fixed tradition. His knowledge is seen as a closed set of ideas, and his work as simply rote performance. Eby’s life suggests that magic can be more than this. It can, through imagination, power, and labor, not only change the self but bring into being new natural and cultural forms. The aspects of German Mennonite life described here are often minimized in many accounts of Mennonite life written by Mennonite scholars and others. Those with connections to these communities, as well as those within the communities themselves, have good reasons, they believe, to fear both the hand of the state and public opinion. This religious minority’s project of implementing God’s kingdom on earth has meant that the community has often had a very ambivalent relationship with the outside world. As a result, these communities have become very adroit, in ways Erving Goffman would admire, in managing the expectations and understandings others have of them and their communities. However, Reimensnyder (1989), using a different data set, confirms what is described here. Further, there is primary literature starting with the German Mennonites’ 1663 arrival in North America providing evidence of these communities’ traditions (Yoder 1976). More recent negative media portrayals like those in TLC’s Breaking Amish, Peacock’s Sins of the Amish, or Hulu’s Mennonite Mob, about a pastor involved in a Mennonite drug ring, tend to reinforce the more positive aspects of these communities by contrast. The 1985 film Witness gave a mass audience its first look at the kinds of magic practiced in these communities when Philadelphia detective John Book (Harrison Ford) is ambushed, shot, and then powwowed for. See more on this in Epp 1974; Nyce 1982, 1987; and Nyce, Talja, and Dekker 2015. Any aspect of experience and community life can be influenced by magical figures, though instead of using their power to make large-scale, even melodramatic, ontological and epistemological change, these figures were often thought to be responsible for very mundane misfortunes, such as making cattle sick or milk turn. But then in the end how

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did Faustus use his new powers? To seduce Gretchen. As for German Mennonites, this just suggests how limited, or constrained historically by faith and belief, thought and practice could be in some of these communities. Listing individual examples helps reinforce the misperception that there can be exceptions to and omissions from the general rule that magic is ubiquitous and effective (Nyce 1987). In fact, folkloristic inventories of what magic can or cannot achieve have the rhetorical effect of providing epistemological “comfort” by diminishing what magic can actually do. However, such lists have been published elsewhere (see Hoffman 1888, 1889a, 1889b, 1889c, 1889d; Weaver 2004, 2011). 7. Remember the bar incident? This shows that indirect evidence and inference (with genealogy here) are enough to color how one and one’s family is perceived—whether it be negatively or positively.

References Bayard, Samuel Preston. 1935. Flying with Witches. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Dessecker, Maeghan. 2014. “Traditional Healing and Medical Pluralism in an Ohio Amish Community.” PhD dissertation, Georgia State University. Doering, J. Frederick. 1936. “Pennsylvania German Folk Medicine in Waterloo County, Ontario.” Journal of American Folklore 49: 194–98. Doering, J. Frederick, and Eileen Elita Doering. 1938. “Some Western Ontario Folk Beliefs and Practices.” Journal of American Folklore 51: 60–68. Donmoyer, Patrick J. 2018. Powwowing in Pennsylvania: Braucherei and the Ritual of Everyday Life. Morgantown, PA: Masthof Press & Pennsylvania German Cultural Heritage Center, Kutztown University. Epp, Frank H. 1974. Mennonites in Canada, 1786–1920: The History of a Separate People. Toronto: Macmillan of Canada. Fretz, J. Winfield. 1989. The Waterloo Mennonites: A Community in Paradox. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Gandee, Lee. 1971. Strange Experience: The Secrets of a Hexenmeister. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Hoffman, Walter James. 1888. “Folklore of the Pennsylvania Germans, Part 1.” Journal of American Folklore 1: 125–35. ———. 1889a. “Folklore of the Pennsylvania Germans, Part 2.” Journal of American Folklore 2: 23–35. ———. 1889b. “Folklore of the Pennsylvania Germans, Part 3.” Journal of American Folklore 2: 191–202. ———. 1889c. “Grammatical Notes and Vocabulary of the Pennsylvania Germans.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 26(120): 187–285. ———. 1889d. “Folk Medicine of the Pennsylvania Germans.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 26(129): 329–53.

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———. 1891. “The Midewiwin or ‘Grand Medicine Society of the Ojibwa.’” 7th Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology. Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 149–306. Kriebel, David W. 2007. Powwowing among the Pennsylvania Dutch: A Traditional Medical Practice in the Modern World. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. McKegney, Patricia P. 1989. Charm for Me, Mr. Eby. Bamberg Heritage Series No. 1. Bamberg, ON: Bamberg Press. Nyce, James, M. 1982. The Gordon C. Eby Diaries, 1911–1913: Chronicle of a Mennonite Farmer. Toronto: The Multicultural History Society of Ontario. ———. 1987. Convention, Power, and the Self in German Mennonite Magic. PhD dissertation, Brown University. Nyce, James M., and Evelyn J. Bowers. 2017. “Continuity and Dislocations: A. I. Hallowell’s Physical Anthropology.” In Historicizing Theories, Identities, and Nations, ed. Regna Darnell and Frederic W. Gleach, 107–134. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Nyce, James M., Sanna Talja, and Sidney Dekker. 2015. “When Ghosts Can Talk: Informant Reality and Ethnographic Policy.” Journal of Ethnology and Folkloristics 9(1): 81–97. Reaman, C. Elmore. 1957. The Trail of the Black Walnut. Toronto: McCelland and Stewart Ltd. Reimensnyder, Barbara L. 1989. Powwowing in Union County: A Study of Pennsylvania German Folk Medicine in Context. New York: AMS Press. Sabean, David W. 1985. Power in the Blood: Popular Culture and Village Discourse in Early Modern Germany. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Waugh, F. W. 1918. “Canadian Folk-Lore from Ontario.” The Journal of American Folklore 31(119): 4–82. Weaver, Karol Kimberlee. 2004. “‘She Knew All the Old Remedies’: Medical Caregiving and Neighborhood Women of the Anthracite Coal Region of Pennsylvania.” Pennsylvania History 71(4): 421–44. ———. 2011. Medical Caregiving and Identity in Pennsylvania’s Anthracite Region, 1880–2000. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Weber, Max. 1991. “The Nature of Social Action.” In Max Weber: Selections in Translation, ed. W. G. Runciman, 7–32. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wikan, Unni. 1990. Managing Turbulent Hearts: A Balinese Formula for Living. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wintemberg, W. J. 1899. “Items of German-Canadian Folk-Lore.” Journal of American Folklore 12: 45–50. ———. 1906. “German Folk-Tales Collected in Canada.” Journal of American Folklore 19: 241–44. ———. 1907. “Alsatian Witch Stories.” Journal of American Folklore 20: 213–15.

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———. 1950. “Folklore of Waterloo County, Ontario.” National Museum of Canada Bulletin 116, Anthropological Series 28. Yoder, Don. 1976. “Hohman and Romanus: Origins and Diffusion of the Pennsylvania German Powwow Manual.” In American Folk Medicine: A Symposium, ed. Wayland D. Hand, 36–52. Berkeley: University of California Press.

6 The Familial Occult in Yakutia Changeling Children and Tricking Demons Natalya Khokholova

I decided to contribute to the body of occult knowledge in this way because while growing up in the Republic of Sakha, formerly known as Yakutia, in northeastern Russia, I experienced firsthand divination and soul travel and observed the possession of my classmates at our boarding school by otherworldly entities. As a child, I was surrounded by a combination of communism, Orthodox Christianity, and shamanism. My grandfather, who raised me, had what I believe were special abilities; he was “born with open eyes and sensitive flesh,” as one says in my region. He was very logically minded and good with finances and math, and his mental health was always solid. He was also visited by a deceased woman talking about the exact location of lost cows, assisted his warlock red-bearded uncle in séances, and saw a UFO—all things not meant to be revealed or discussed. They are occult. The hidden and inherited mysteries in my family’s experience have made me who I am today and are part of my identity as a scholar, helping me succeed as an educator. At the same time, they have created tension with colleagues and former academic advisers, who have accused me of being “intuitive” and “strange.” I believe I simply see things as they are, with an ability to perceive and evaluate an event as it is presented. These experiences have made me better able to read and teach literature and film. As a native of Yakutia, I explore productive tensions between being indigenous, colonized, a scholar, and an expat, all while seeing the world through the lens of the hidden and mystic familial knowledge

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embedded in me. It is my hope that sharing this experience will help others who are different or who do not belong to the major religions that contribute to the construction of national identities and sociopolitical/socioeconomic facades. Shamanism, as a foundational custom of the northern minorities in Siberia, is the only occult practice that received acknowledgment among “reputable” Western scholars. However, it did not open avenues for studying the plethora of supernatural traditions in Yakutia. The phenomena and themes of the familial occult I experienced there are different from the established canon of shamanism studies and outside of the narrative style of the distant sympathetic observer, who records testimony from a position of learned privilege (if the author is of Yakutian origin) or the sympathetic objectivizing westerner. In the practice of withstanding the harsh climate of Yakutia, one survival method is the meditative practice of turuk to block fear, anxiety, hunger, and sensation of the cold temperatures. Another is abahyyttan kuottary, a ritual that deals with a grim but common event in Yakutia: the early death of children. In the established practices of writing about Yakutia, the region’s aura of the supernatural and the complexity of its culture and natural and human resources is often simplified and rendered uncouth or primitive. The region is presented only as a site for the oral retelling of folk traditions, a form of folkloric narratology limited to a single literary tradition, Olonkho. Hence, there is a need for documenting and recording descriptive and structured accounts of occult practices and experiences of the supernatural in the form of testimonies that are autoethnographic, decolonizing, and independent from the dominant influence of the Western theories. Critical autoethnography seems to be the most fitting method for uncovering the nature of the supernatural occurrences in northeastern Siberia and, therefore, for the study of turuk and abahyyttan kuottary, as it allows for the feral and marginal nature of these phenomena to be brought to the surface in an acceptable form of scholarly normativity. More than ever before, a changing social and natural climate urge indigenous people to voice their traumas about fragmented identities. For many of them, the tradition of folkloric storytelling is a means to regain and rewrite stories of self-identification, and the genre of autobiographical ethnography is appropriate for this purpose as a method of social research that allows authors to translate their innermost emotional perception of histories and experiences in a relatively objective and matter-of-fact empirical representation. According to Ufuk Keleș, doing so opens a possibility for a) a sense of transforma-

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tion through a story of illumination, healing, understanding, and/or learning; b) going beyond personal confessions by mindfully offering autobiographical and background information that makes sense; c) denaturalizing social issues by making invisible power dynamics visible; and d) embracing the subjectivity of memory and interpretation (3). Keleș states that the genre of autoethnography enables academics of the subaltern to avoid the use of Westernized and mainstream epistemologies while remaining in “the periphery away from the center” (2022: 2,027–28). Autoethnography has become an established qualitative method of inquiry in educational research “in a highly personalized style, drawing on [scholars’] experience to extend understanding about a societal phenomenon,” and in the process, the dual role of researcher and the researched is assumed (2,028). Writing critical autoethnography is an act of rebellion and resistance, on the one hand rebelling against and refusing to comply with unhealthy family dynamics that are often race and rank based, and on the other, writing against the oppressive realities of Soviet/Russian colonizers by claiming space for the familial and hidden, that is, the occult. It is an act of claiming and retrieving the existence of the supernatural and indigenous worlds. As this chapter unfolds, I present evidence consisting of testimonies, specific places, historical events, and customs that function as empirical data, which I scrutinize and systematize with the help of solidified theories of the compartmentalization of the mind (psyche) by Jacques Lacan and Mary Douglas, especially pertaining to binary systems of clean vs. unclean/dirty and open/obvious vs. hidden. The discussion is around whether the supernatural of the familial occult functions as a stimulating mechanism for the scholar or as a self-sabotaging delirium of overly stimulated emotional investment in the subjects within the realm of metaphysics and emotions—in contrast to the material and constant.

Notes from the Other Grounds, or on the Importance of the Occult Here, I employ the exposition and logic of writing as autoethnography, as Gresilda Anne Tilley-Lubbs does in Retelling Our Stories: Critical Autoethnographic Narratives, to develop a narrative that translates the hidden, the obscure, and the dark by bringing them to the surface and making them tangible and clear, based on “the concept that the oppressed need to come to a critical consciousness of the causes of their oppression” (Freire in Tilley-Lubbs 2016: 4).

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Drawing on the work of Tilley-Lubbs, one can see how autoethnography provides autonomy from the influences imposed “by the dominant culture” (ibid.) and serves as a liberating tool for academics from marginal parts of the world to find their voices. The “occult” and “occultism” imply the hidden, the imaginary, and the invisible, which cannot be measured by established means of empirical knowledge yet are influenced and significantly transformed by the domineering Western Christian canon of social and interpersonal interactions (i.e., politics). In the beginning of the twentieth century, through their interest in and study of Eastern esoteric practices such as yoga and meditation, occultists created inclusiveness and secularism within Western culture, allowing aspects of other cultures to seep through. This encouraged a study of the “other” African and Eastern cultures and initiated diverse areas of anthropological expertise. According to work in Aleister Crowley and Western Esotericism (Bogdan and Starr 2012: 9–11), the notion of the occult has a deeper meaning and is associated with phrases such as untergrund des Abendlandes (the underground of the West). This genitive case-based derivative phrase implies that the occult is a dimension of suppressed underground places—the realm where the alternative and the Other seek refuge (Bogdan and Starr 2012). Thus the occult, located within the shift to the West, became an integral part of modern discourse due to several prominent artists and philosophers working during the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, such as Helene Blavadsky (1831–1891), Aleister Crowley (1875–1947), and George Gurdjieff (1866–1949). One of the most influential figures of occultism, Crowley studied occult practices and esotericism primarily as part of his quest for the self, along with psychoanalytic psychedelic experiments. Based on the knowledge and experience he gained through his travels to Asia and the Americas, he claimed that the unconscious deals with cultural representations and tension between demons and angels (Bogdan and Starr 2012). The claim of tension between the subordinate good and orderly vs. the rebellious, unruly, and mischievous resonates with the Freudian, Lacanian compartmentalization of the human psyche. Crowley scholar Marco Pasi writes, “[When] occultists offered new interpretations of occult practices, for the most part they were trying to make these practices more attainable and acceptable to modern audiences” (Bogdan and Starr 2012: 53–54). In other words, occultists’ nonconformity to established knowledge opened avenues for alternative cultures, gender identities, languages, and holistic practices that are dependent on knowledge of nature. Exploring this

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further, I pick up on the underlying idea that the occult and its practices need to be reintroduced and acknowledged within postmillennial cultural studies as an additional means for the subaltern Other to continue the resistance against globalization and newer, more advanced forms of imperialism. On that basis, I will explore the discourse of the familial occult within the invisible hidden place of the Sakha Republic (Yakutia), which is part of the federal lands in the territory of the Russian Federation. The scope of this work encompasses the exalted state of self-regulatory sensory practice, such as turuk, and the coping ritual that deals with the fear of infant mortality, changing the child’s identity to save it (creating a changeling) and exploring game play with evil forces—all within the secretive network of the nuclear family and its confidants. The otherworldly climate and the people’s belief in the power of nature and natural forces makes Yakutian land rich not only in diamonds and warm, kind, gullible people, but also in the supernatural. I make this characterization of Sakha land as supernatural primarily due to the Sakha nation’s controversial attachment to cosmology in a form that works as a hidden mechanism spiritually, and because of the way its inhabitants’ quotidian life is established. As IvanovaUnarova, in Shamanism in The Interdisciplinary Context (2004), points out, children in Yakutia who receive knowledge on ancient Sakha cosmology are taught about three worlds as the foundational system for the world they inhabit: The Middle World is inhabited by people aiyy and spirits of nature ichchi. The unity of natural force and the spiritual world of an individual is the basis of the traditional world view of the Sakha. In an individual, the central place belongs to the notion of kut (soul). It has three forms: bor-kut (earth-soul), salgyn-kut (air-soul) and iie-kut (mothersoul), which plays the leading role, because it is given to a person at birth by the Goddesses Aiyhyt and Iyekhsyt. Bor-kut helps an individual to develop, and salgynkut connects an individual with nature. A special type of bioenergy of an individual syur personifies will power and psychology of an individual. (Ivanova-Unarova 2004: 194)

Later, there is a description of the Sakha people as being linked by a chord connecting their backs to these celestial bodies. (In the Teachings of Ayıy there is an expression: “Ar5ahıtan tehiinnaneh Ayıy Haan aima5a, kohsütten köntöstööh Kün uluuhun o5oloro,” which means: “With a harness (or a chord) on the spine of Ayıy-blood nation which is tied to the Children of the Ulus Sun,” which is how the Sakha

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people are described. In semantic terms, this means that the Sakha people are people adhering to the unchanging world order and the Cosmos: to the settings of the Sun, the Earth and the Moon.) (Ivanova-Unarova 2004: 199)

Additionally, together with how scholars of Olonkho (the national Sakha epic about the three worlds of the universe), Sakha movie directors, and American anthropologists describe them, the people of Yakutia, the Sakha Republic, also identify cognitively as a people by linking themselves not to a man-made restrictive religion but to expanding horizons of inquiry into human existence—that is, to cosmology. According to the Cambridge Dictionary, cosmology is “the study of the nature and origin of the universe.” This philosophical understanding was found in cultural works such as Sumerian literature and Early Vedic Indian texts. These texts usually serve as illustrations of the term “cosmology” from a metaphysical point of view, seeing it as philosophy and progress in science. The understanding of the world that surrounds the Sakha people goes through the appreciation of the moon, the stars, and the sun. For example, they have a special understanding and appreciation for the planet Venus: To begin with the case of an appendaged crepuscular star, among the Sakha (northeast Siberia) Venus, known as Cholbon, was said to be the daughter of the devil and to have had a tail in the early days. If it approaches the earth, it means destruction, storm and frost, even, in the summer, ‘Saint Leontius, however, blessed her and thus her tail disappeared.’ In The Idea of History and An Essay on Metaphysics, R. G. Collingwood makes these views of Sakha aesthetics and beliefs, which are similar to Native American and Sumerian perceptions of the world, clear: “First, that scientific thinking depends upon metaphysics, and second, that progress in science, when it occurs, occurs through historical thinking.” His point is that scientific thinking is implicitly guided by certain metaphysical assumptions or absolute presuppositions, and that an explication of these assumptions is the work of philosophy” (2002: 15). Apparently, before the arrival of Russians, at the time of the first settlement of Yakuts, Saysary Lake was a place of fertility and happiness. Before Yakutia became the site of illegal gold smuggling and frequent homicides, its waters were held in high regard. According to American anthropologist Susan Crate, water is an important part of Sakha’s spirit world. Its people, like many place-based peoples, consider all the parts of their natural world sentient and spirit filled.

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A commonly held understanding is Uu ichchiileekh, meaning “water has a spirit,” and according to Sakha cosmology, humans need to pay respect to that spirit when they interact with it (2006: 127). The Sakha Republic is the largest national republic of the Russian Federation, with an area as large as India but a population half the size of Slovenia. It is ethnically mixed, with a majority Sakha or Yakut population. Russians are a minority, and their numbers dropped further after the Soviet Union’s disintegration. The Sakha Republic is also home to old communities such as the Evens, Evenks, and the Yukagirs, as well as over a hundred other nationalities, from Swedes to Chinese. The Sakha people are a Turkic nomadic group believed to have migrated from Central Asia between the eighth and twelfth centuries. The republic also has a significant Slavic population, which includes the Russian “old-timers” (starozhyli), descendants of fur trappers, Cossacks, prospectors, traders, and priests. Russia’s eastward expansion began in the mid- to late sixteenth century under Ivan the Terrible. Subsequently, a fort was built on the Lena River in 1632, which developed into Yakutsk, the present-day capital of the Sakha Republic. Russian settlers erroneously referred to the Sakha people as Yakuts, which replaced the original Sakha name following the Soviet Union’s disintegration. My native region, Olëkminskii ulus, is located along the Lena River in the south of Yakutia. Its name has its roots in the Evenki word Olokhune, which means “a region or a nest of squirrels.” Olëkminskii ulus is primarily populated by an ethnically mixed group of people. Due to its mild climate and long history of gold mining, the region saw several generations of newcomers arrive from the mainland. These mingled with the local Evenks by hiring them as houseworkers and cohabitating freely with the local women. Brothels also contributed to the population growth in the town; the region was known for its trade in gold, horses, and women. Perhaps it was this history of temporary unions between men and women that stereotyped the region as one of unstable households and women of ill repute. Consequently, the origins of several families in the region are almost mythical and shrouded in an aura of mystery and adventure. My family is no exception. My grandparents, whose origins were obscure, raised me. My grandfather was born in 1928, and my grandmother in 1931. They claimed their great grandparents were exiles from the European parts of the Russian Empire. According to my grandfather, he was of the Don Cossacks, while my grandmother said that she had Russian noble origins on one side and Jewish origins on the other.

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Both were orphans. My grandfather’s mother died of tuberculosis when he was ten, and within a year, he lost his father to a head injury received when taming a raging military horse. My grandmother reckoned that she was about seven when her father’s employees brought back his remains on his sled from his gold-mining post. He had been shot in the back of his head by the members of the White Army (the resistance movement against communists). She remembered having a tough childhood; one winter, the children, then aged eight, nine, and eleven, were given the responsibility of finding wood to warm the house. Since they lived near a cemetery, the children would often play there. When it was time for them to return home, instead of looking for wood, they would chop the wooden crosses off the graves. This was considered to be highly disrespectful to the dead, and my grandmother believed it most likely brought bad luck into the lives of the children and resulted in the tragic destinies of their families. She herself suffered from Crohn’s disease and died rather young at the age of fifty-one. Although she gave birth to three healthy, smart, and beautiful daughters, none of the three had happy marriages. In fact, I would say that ours was not a happy family. My grandmother’s own family history conceals the story of the supposed suicide of her own grandmother. In reality, when she was eight months pregnant, she was pushed off the second floor of the house by her maid, the mistress of her master, who had promised to leave his wife to marry her. My birth and origin story being shrouded in mystery cemented my personal connection to the fictional characters and literature that I read, perhaps as a way to cope. Since early childhood, I remember lacking communication partners and social interaction, so I turned to reading and analyzing texts incessantly. For me, literature, especially a tale or a short story, fosters emotional and cognitive engagement and initiates communication. This showed me that short fiction provides grounds for various linguistic and cultural registers. Analyzing the structure of literary texts became a means of self-therapy. Retelling myself the familial occult events I experienced, I could see that a good story has a well-composed, logical structure and ample characters, some original and some stock, which makes plot development easy to comprehend and predict. It made me appreciate Russian structuralist Vladimir Propp, who identified thirty-one patterns in the plot developments of fairy tales, along with predictable behavioral patterns of the villain (Propp 1968). For example, the fairy tale “Masha and the Bear,” known in the Western world as “Goldilocks,” provides a familiar setting and plot development.

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I learned early on to untangle and make sense of the hidden mystery in my family through the literature I read. Growing up an orphan, my grandfather had one unceasing problem: hunger. He would eat field mice, fish from the lake, and occasionally ducks. In his uncle’s family, where he was employed as a cattle herder, they would often boil strips of cow skin for the soup base (the cow skin was later upholstered on the door to preserve warmth inside the hut). I remember my grandfather saying that, due to his continuous malnourishment, a 172 cm–tall man attained his full height only at the age of twenty-four. In the stories he told me, my grandfather’s life was a combination of starvation and being overwhelmed and influenced by the otherworldly. Only after his death was I able to compartmentalize these stories in my memory and differentiate those of hunger and adventure from stories of supernatural horror. Throughout his eighty-six years, my grandfather had several experiences with the occult, some of which he recounted to me. He did not perceive them as sensational or supernatural, and he shared them with the purpose of having a laugh or to teach me the moral of a story. For him, stories of the supernatural were no more exceptional or exciting than encountering a bear in the backyard of our home, or no more special than finding the perfect companion in a dog. This matter-of-fact perception of the supernatural paired with great, tragic personal loss only reinforced his mellow, generous nature. I believe turuk was always behind his ability to cope with stress and find a way to set himself in the required state of mind. Turuk functioned as a magical shield, as invisible protection. His ability to laugh at the tragic and scary circumstances in life helped me think beyond binaries and the colonial to process the fact that death, shame, and pain are interwoven with matters of love, life, honor, and the bliss of happiness. Later, as a graduate student in the US (2008–2013), I read a seminal essay by Mary Douglas that helped me understand the systematization of the laws of life (Douglas 1966). Turuk is a remarkable cultural phenomenon used for dealing with reality by entering a particular state of awareness, similar to meditative reflection. It is a shield from threats: fear, cold, abuse. It enables one to notice and observe that which usually remains “unseen” or occult, such as creatures lurking in the children’s playroom or the metallic orb of a UFO gliding above the familiar landscape. It is also intriguing to juxtapose turuk with the conditions and challenges outside of Yakutian reality that are often hostile and unfamiliar, sabotaging the formation of the worldly scholar. The indigenous people of Yakutia define turuk as a specific mode of consciousness characterized by an

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altered, meditative state of mind: “Yakuts use the term turuk to mean an altered state of consciousness, Turukka kiiri, ‘falling into a trance or ecstasy’” (Bravina 2018: 100). This is similar to a shamanic trance, wherein an individual’s perception of reality is subdued, and the inner primordial consciousness that governs the somatic processes takes over the emotional state. The Western equivalent of the state of turuk can be found in the Lacanian Real, a realm more familiar to the animal consciousness (Hotchkiss 1997: 44–96). The Real is a domain where structured and metaphorical language cannot have access, where you become closer to a “natural state of mind” and to animal consciousness. My grandfather saw creatures at his father’s house, had had conversations with the apparition of a dead woman (although he described her as if she were a real, living person), and later told me that aliens were real. It was his encounter with the dead woman that always haunted me. She had been proclaimed dead and buried for over three years but revealed herself to him in a very casual manner. Her name was Pelagia, and she was wearing a calfskin vest with a gird made of rope. When she saw that my grandfather had begun to turn pale and agitated, she smiled and soothed him with her words. She addressed him directly by his name and said, “Timofei, be calm. Do not be frightened. I came here to have a little chat with you about those lost cows you are looking for.” Grandfather froze as if he had been hypnotized. She gave him the location of the two lost cows, and grandfather said that he found them right away, stuck on a little island in the middle of the melting ice lake in town. Toward the end of their conversation, Pelagia asked my grandfather for a favor. She said that, after her death, her orphans were entitled to a cow from her brother’s herd. “Tell him to give our cow back,” she said, and disappeared. After this conversation, my grandfather felt chills run down his spine. He stayed up all night and kept the fire going in the oven (kamelyok). During his childhood and adolescent years, my grandfather often ran errands for his “Wiccan” uncle, who, at least from one photograph, looked European Russian (Slavic). He had a thick ginger beard, and his last name was Yershov. My grandfather recalled often witnessing his séances, in which he used hypnosis to project chimera serpents upon guests, primarily for therapeutic purposes and sometimes out of a sense of mischief. In 2010, my grandfather had a very close encounter with a UFO while out hunting with his nephews in November, the peak of the hunting season. He described the details of that encounter and claimed to have seen inside the UFO from be-

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low through its translucent floor. He was eighty-two and sane, and his nephews confirmed that they witnessed his claims. I was a child with weak physical health, and he cured my constant ear infections through a ritual with a flying squirrel stuffed with cotton balls, whose head, belly, and paws he had preserved with the mastery of a taxidermist. Another ritual we did together was imitating the cry of the raven (“cooghkh!”) at the table before eating bear meat or fat and symbolically claiming that it was the raven, and not we, who was eating the bear. Once, when I was thirteen and my cousin was four, we discovered the preserved foot of a bear in the depths of our grandfather’s closet while cleaning the house. When we showed it to the adults of the house, they told us that the bear’s foot was hidden for prosperity and the protection of our home, and by discovering it and bringing it to light, we had compromised its power. This was a formative event for a future researcher since the discovery sparked questions, interpretations, and further study of the odd treasure’s background story and the ritualistic language attached to it. Finding this hidden mysterious object in the house taught me to look for things to decipher in texts. In the relationship between the visible and invisible—which is essential to all concrete knowledge—a new alliance was forged between words and things, enabling me to see, to a degree, at the “archaic level of rationality” (Foucault 1991:104).

Thinking with Critical Autoethnography through the Familial Occult In this piece of autoethnography, I refer to the inhabitants of the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) primarily as “Yakutia” and “Yakuts.” My sources and witnesses are people I love and have known my whole life and who, due to the nature of their existence, have access to various social strata across Yakutia. These sources are reliable and have preferred to remain anonymous, their names either changed or not mentioned at all. 1989 and 1990 were difficult and confusing years for my family, in part because of the Soviet Union’s own distress before it fell apart in 1991. I turned ten in 1989 and, together with the other children in the house, adopted an owlet. We fed it mice and performed rituals around the pine tree where the bird roosted. When I came home, I excitedly shared the news of our new adventure with my aunt, who scolded us. “You idiots, this will bring bad luck!” she said. This was the beginning of a terrible winter, and one night my aunt said, “I saw a large polar owl flying out of our attic. I wonder if

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mama is okay.” The very next day, we received news that my grandmother had passed away. Our childish misjudgement of adopting an owl, together with my aunt’s vision, had predicted tragedy. Provoking death because of our desire to offer love and protection to an abandoned and starving owlet made me think about the interconnectivity and cycle of life and death, and I began to read Leo Tolstoy. I later became a professor of Russian literature, and I teach Tolstoy’s short story “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” religiously in my classes. I explain to my students that death was one of Tolstoy’s obsessions, most likely due to a number of unfortunate events he experienced in his life: the witnessed slaughter of an active-duty soldier in the Crimean War, the death of his brother Dmitry from tuberculosis in 1856, a man being guillotined in Paris in 1857, and the death of no fewer than five of his thirteen children before they reached the age of ten. The same theme of life and death is reflected in Tolstoy’s autobiographical memoir Confession. Similarly to Tolstoy, my own experiences with death, loss, and the familial occult have unequivocally impacted my life. In 1998, when I was nineteen, my grandfather and cousin saw me levitating over my bed and chanting, with only the whites of my eyes visible. This event cannot be clearly articulated and analyzed, as I have no recollection of the experience. I remember waking up as usual in the morning to serve breakfast and tea to my grandfather and my younger brother. But that morning, they were silent and looked at me strangely, instead of laughing and chatting as they normally would. I asked them what had happened, and they replied, “Oh, you don’t remember? You don’t remember anything?” Suspecting a prank, I demanded to know what this was about. Since we slept in adjacent rooms, we were aware of each other’s sleeping patterns and whereabouts, and the two of them told me that at approximately 2 a.m. they were awakened by me humming. They walked into my room and saw me levitating, singing something, and staring directly at the window that looked out onto the potato field and the dark fir forest beyond. My grandfather shook me, I sighed and closed my eyes, and I fell back asleep. I did not bring up the incident again, but I remembered their story and became interested in books and movies on what Westerners call demonic possession. I also tried to have conversations with elderly community members about people with “open” and sensitive flesh, meaning people prone to occurrences of the occult. Years later, the only explanation I have for my chanting levitation is that our house was most likely haunted, and an entity must have chosen my body because it was the most vulnerable and easiest to possess.

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In 1992, when I was thirteen, I was accepted to an elite school for talented and gifted children of the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia). We were provided with boarding, and I shared my room with two other girls. The schedule and regimen were strict, akin to that of a military school, but we found ways to cope with the stress, the burden of homework, and being stuck between the communal dining room, the kitchen, the school, and our dormitory. It was during this time that we discovered the game udavka, which, as I later found out, was considered a very dangerous and deviant activity. The game allowed people to seek exaltation and hallucinogenic experiences by depriving the brain of oxygen via suffocation and heart palpitations. It was our bonding experience and our bonding secret, which made us feel as close as members of a family. One person would do twenty or more sit-ups, and then we would choke them. As someone who grew up with the familial occult, I was quickly drawn to udavka. During the ritual, I had a strange sensation, as if I were finally home in a different realm, and I proceeded to have an engaging conversation with someone in that realm. My friends brought me back to reality by slapping my cheeks, and I remember being truly upset that I had been brought back to this less enticing realm. One night, we decided to sneak into the boys’ section and found a couple of volunteers to participate in the ritual. A pale, fragilelooking boy agreed. Once the choke was administered, his body went limp, and his head dropped as if he had fainted. To our surprise, he looked up at us, and his face was horrifying as it had become paler, almost white, and his eyes turned completely blank, as if drenched in ink. He proceeded to make claw-like motions with his fingers and started to crawl, sniff, and climb around as if looking for something. Simultaneously, he began to speak in a deep and scary voice, acknowledging us and telling us that we were hampering him in finding his way out. We were horrified, and his friend proceeded to grasp and shake him. He woke up, very weak and without any memory of what had happened to him. Although my peers at the boarding school are not my family members, these are memorable and intimate events that influenced my awareness that alternative realities can be perceived as “familial occult.” Experiencing alternative cognitive spaces also makes a human more than a material being stuck in mundane reality. It makes them more sensitive to social events and able to think critically and imaginatively. These experiences were similar to the challenges that the protagonists in fairy tales encounter, which change them into mature characters with the ability to assert and make their own decisions.

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The Geographies of the Familial Occult I will further explore the links between individual and community healing in multicultural social contexts. Indigenous peoples’ hopes for spiritual revitalization at personal, community, and national levels should be taken seriously, supported by burgeoning and eclectic literature on cultural revitalization movements. Revitalization movements are often responses to compelling and conscious ideas of internal social reform as well as to pressures from external social oppression. Many political, social, and religious movements have revitalization potential, despite differing manifestations and results. Whether termed revolutionary, messianic, nativistic, vitalizing, or revitalizing, the functional psychological vocabulary used to describe such movements often implies a mass easing of spiritual crisis related to cultural rebirth. A contemporary fledging movement of the moral, spiritual, and ecological healing of the Sakha people and lands is centered on a mother of shamanic heritage from the Kobei region, Dora Innokentievna Kobiakova, whose “miracle” cures and celebrated anomalies have become as renowned as her impassioned speeches and mass rituals. In an interview with Nina I. Protopopova (Balzer 2013), Dora describes how she conducts healing, although she also says she has trouble vocalizing her techniques or the requirements for being “chosen by nature” to heal people. Dora has helper spirits, especially birds, who tell her who will visit her. She also troubleshoots through dreams and perceptions at dawn. Additionally, she taps into the natural interconnectedness of humans, flora, and fauna. Each human at the moment of birth is linked in spirit to a tree and an animal, often a bird, living in that person’s homeland (205). The haunting landscapes of Yakutia, with its expansive dream-like forests, lakes, and mountain ranges, capture travelers’ imaginations. According to Verzilin (1953): (Located in the northeastern part of Siberia is Yakutskaia SSR. Its territory covers three million square kilometers, making it the seventh largest part of the Soviet Union. Writing in 1871, Nikolai Chernyshevsky stated that “the route to this place is long and challenging, and the post service itself is compromised for the entire year; the post service officers face deadly dangers and horrific delays. The move from Irkutsk to Yakutsk— from mid-April till the end of the year, and so, for a total of eight and a half months—is difficult and risky—even more difficult than traveling within the African continent.” Yakutia has a bizarre climate, with winter temperatures dipping below -60 degrees Celsius, and almost tropical temperatures of 35 degree Cel-

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sius in the summer. To this inhospitable land, the tsar would send revolutionaries and rebels, and to “this prison without bars and locks” were sent the Decembrists—writers such as Chernyshevsky and Korolenko, Bolsheviks Ordjonikidze and Yaroslavsky, and many more. Konstantin Ryleev, a Decembrist poet, wrote the following verse about Yakutia: This country of sorrow and sadness, wide in its numbers of the imprisoned, No traveler would visit, Fearing of its winter that is long and ruthless.)

While Yakutia has never been a liability for the Russian state—it has always been self-sufficient and underrepresented—the ideological beliefs and sanitizing practices that undergird the discourse of the “elder white brother” (belyi starshii brat) have depicted it as a savage region in need of educating to fit into the age of industrial modernity. Forced modernization led to an array of inconsistencies in infrastructure, as well as numerous social problems, from issues of self-identification to occupational opportunities, which continue to plague certain social groups in Yakutia. The disruption of both state support and the planned development of traditional industries, together with a rapid transition to a market economy, had a massive impact on indigenous peoples of the North in the Sakha Republic. Many of Yakutia’s economic problems can be attributed to the unsystematic use and underselling of raw materials from its mines and fields. Without policies for environmental sustainability at the state level, this has resulted in environmental degradation in the form of pollution, the poisoning of rivers and lakes, and the waterlogging of pastures, fishing areas, and hunting areas, causing an artificial reduction of habitat during industrial development in the territories of Indigenous peoples (Crate, 2009). The Sakha Republic is currently experiencing a gradual collapse of the network of industrial and social infrastructure, including transportation, resulting in real and clandestine unemployment (Baisheva 2015). Having lost many of the traditional mechanisms of life, and unable to be involved in the process of industrialization, many Indigenous communities subsist within a typically marginal way of life, in which the “fragments” of ethnic consciousness are intertwined with the hastily acquired “values” of urban lifestyles. The extreme population shifts among northern minorities are due not only to a decrease in the birth rate but also to an increase in mortality recorded from the 1980s onward. The increase in infant and child mortality is likely the result of disturbances in the ecological balance of the environment, decreases in the standard of living, and

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a marginal moral and psychological sense of self of the Indigenous population (Baisheva 2015). The acute population decline after the collapse of the Soviet Union served as a horrific reminder of the child mortality that had plagued Yakutia for centuries before the invention of penicillin and the establishment of standard medical and sanitary practices in the entire population by the Soviet state. Historically, child mortality has been a central issue in Yakutia, affecting every stratum of society, from the rich to the poor. It has led to the ritual of abaahytan kuottary to save children from the envy and desire of evil spirits (abaahy) that seek to possess the children’s souls. The ritual falls into the category of an occult practice, as it has to do with direct interaction with the demons by hiding or swapping the identities (true names and gender) of the potential victims.

The Children of Yakutia and the Familial Occult In this section the familial occult is discussed through themes of identity and social problems in Yakutia, primarily child neglect and child mortality, in order to understand why the discourse around children in Yakutian storytelling tradition and literature is largely nonexistent. The current situation in Yakutia under the “brotherhood” of the new Russian oligarchy calls for every possible effort to recover the communal cultural practices of the Indigenous peoples of Yakutia that can help them resist and reclaim their unique historical identity. One way to achieve this is through the teaching of Yakutia’s traditional practices of communal living. As one of many Sakha occult practices handed down generationally, the practice of hiding (or rather disguising) children from demons to prevent them from an early death falls into the category of the familial occult. While the practice can provide insight into the history of domestic hygiene and the level of medical care available in the region, as a cultural phenomenon and a coping mechanism against the fear of loss of a child, it also gives insight into the hidden space of the familial occult and early mental health practices. This is reflected in Sakha naming conventions for children. Studies of Sakha names note that contemporary names for Sakha children beautify and praise the child, whereas older names denote ugly or unpalatable attributes: (If it happens to be the first case of a child’s death in the family, the rest of the living children are immediately given names denoting disgusting

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qualities, such as a Mouse, a Field Rat, a Stink, etc. It is believed that children with unattractive names will not get sick and die easily as evil spirits are repulsed by them.) (Sapalova 1971: 13)

Western tradition considers the study of children and childhood as a premise for the study of human development, where childhood is linked to the concept of selfhood and the psychology of memory. Thus, the study of a child’s development becomes a prerequisite for understanding the modern human. In European Christian works such as St. Augustine’s Confessions, Grimm’s Fairy Tales, and Rousseau’s Emile, as well as in Freudian psychoanalysis, the child is situated at the core of the conceptualization of modern man. In Sakha Indigenous storytelling and literary traditions, by contrast, children are not often spoken of or seen, instead occupying the territory of sacred invisibility. This is perhaps because a newborn’s life was seen as fragile, and the joy occasioned by the child’s birth was sometimes short-lived. According to Sapalova (1971), Yakuts and Kyrgyz have similar superstitions around raising children. They never praise the child and often hesitate to call the child by name, for example, to trick evil spirits that are believed to haunt children and seek to steal their souls. Families often fake kidnappings to confuse these demons. These practices changed during the Soviet period according to Sakha literature from the time, such as the novel Tulaiaakh Oso (An orphan, 2018) by Vasilii Iakovlev (who wrote under the pseudonym Dalan) and Ivan Gogolev’s Khara Kytalyk (The black crane, 1984). They reveal the harsh realities of childhood in a Yakutia on the cusp of the civil war that led to the creation of the new Soviet Republic, before the establishment of medical centers and before antibiotics became available to global populations in the late 1920s. Afanasova (2013: 24–27) cites archival data from the time: (By 1925, in Yakutia, the infant mortality was up to 62 percent, reaching even higher numbers in other regions. For example, in the Oymiakon region, child mortality was indicated to be 80–90 percent of the total number of newborns.)

Literatures of Purity, Dirt, and the Occult I employ Douglas’s theory of dirt and order/purity to examine the presence of the occult in everyday life and the rituals of my family. According to Douglas (1966):

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Order implies restriction; from all possible materials, a limited selection has been made, and from all possible relations a limited set has been used. So, disorder by implication is unlimited, no pattern has been realized in it, but its potential for patterning is indefinite. This is why, though we seek to create order, we do not simply condemn disorder. We recognize that it is destructive to existing patterns; also, that it has potentiality. It symbolizes both danger and power. The ritual recognizes the potency of disorder. In the disorder of the mind, in dreams, faints and frenzies, ritual expects to find powers and truths which cannot be reached by conscious effort. (95)

Her reading of the necessity of dirt and disorder to help maintain order and cleanliness goes hand in hand with the self-perception of the oppressed Other. Thus, the inhabitants of the Sakha Republic struggle with their self-perception and the residue of the negative stereotypes associated with their oppression. The theoretical framing of liminality provided by van Gennep (1909) is helpful here to indicate the change of the destiny of children when their name or gender is ritually changed: “Betwixt and between: the liminal period in rites de passage” (23–59). Renner (2017) also provides a reading of the nature of the changeling as a functional trope in Irish folklore: “According to folklore, changelings are the children of other creatures, such as fairies, elves, or trolls, who are swapped in for human babies” (149–72). I define the changeling far more strictly as a creature that physically looks like a child but will never be one. More importantly, the changeling lacks the key childish qualities of innocence and vulnerability, instead revealing that what we really want is not so much an innocent child as an ignorant one, that we aim to control the knowledge children gain and the way that knowledge is framed, and that they must never become so wise that they question our choices and values or notice our flaws. We also need the child to be vulnerable so that we can feel superior in terms of skill, knowledge, and intellect, and to be dependent on us so that we can feel needed while simultaneously being loved and not seen as a resource to be discarded once we are no longer useful. Changelings are disturbing because they directly confront our assumptions about children, hiding behind the stereotypes associated with children and controlling us from this position of power. More disturbing, perhaps, is the changeling who no longer feels the need to pretend and reveals that the relationship between adult and child is actually an elaborate dance, which Van Gennep (1909) sees as part of the concept of the transitional journey and the desire to trick death and move toward life. The Sakha people’s fears are interwoven with their traumas and the innate fear

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of contamination and intrusion, as well as the learned fear of being inadequate and inhuman, and therefore of being eradicated—the fear that your land is uninhabitable and thus intended for abuse and exploitation. Khara Kytalyk (The black crane) (1984) is a magical realist trilogy set in the late nineteenth century (Myreeva 2013). The first book deals with the destinies of two hidden children, Khabyrrys-Khoborohos and Khoborohos. The mirroring effect of these names represent the interchangeability of the children’s identity and gender, and the boy in the story is dressed as a girl. Myreeva’s book describes the ritual for fooling demons: Naming the child with the ugliest possible name. For example, my uncle, who was born in 1943, was given the name “Adolph,” to associate him with the most horrifying person of that time, by whom even demons would be repulsed. He lived to the age of 75 and was a surgeon. Naming all the children in the family with the same name, such as Maria (for girls) or Ivan (for boys). Giving the child up for adoption to an unrelated person by handing them the child through a window.

Conclusion: Coping with Trauma and the Ugliness and Horror of Yakutia and Its Inhabitants Yakuts experience residual generational trauma similar to that of Indigenous people in the US who are impacted by the trauma of their ancestors’ experiences, such as the Trail of Tears, even though they may not have personally experienced them (Brave Heart 1999). The authors further state that historically traumatic events cause poor mental and physical health. The place of intergenerational transmission of trauma within historical trauma theory is critical, as it has been argued that a lack of knowledge of the impact of the multigenerational aspects of trauma has meant that impact on the descendants of survivors of historical trauma has remained “misunderstood and not treated appropriately” (Brave Heart 2000). Historical trauma is understood as: cumulative emotional and psychological wounding, over the lifespan and across generations, emanating from massive group trauma experiences. (Brave Heart 1999: 58)

Duran and Duran (1995: 16) also discuss the concept of the “soul wound.”

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Between the years 1870 and 1900, at least 80 percent of the population had been systematically exterminated. In addition, they explained how the earth had been wounded and how, when the earth is wounded, the people who are caretakers of the earth also are wounded at a very deep soul level. Earth wounding speaks to the process whereby people become destructive to the natural environment and disturb the natural order.

The horror of the occult and occult practices proven to be productive (reproductive) in this reading is used as a means of resistance since it aims to remove the external and artificial and reveal the truth. The horror narrative works to eliminate the obvious after suggesting or hinting at a source of danger and aggression. It is reminiscent of Cathy Caruth’s “narrative turn,” which states that reclaiming traumas and a reflection of the past create resilience as opposed to sadness, idleness, and melancholy (Visser 2015). The second story represents the bold, self-reflexive parody of the layers of historical stereotypes of Yakutia and the inhabitants of the region. These labels represent Yakutia as uninhabitable and infertile for newcomers, as in Ryleev’s ballad Voinarovsky (1825) and Chernyshevsky’s Makar’s Dream (1885), with the Yakuts being described as ugly, lazy, incestuous, and naive drunks. A review of Makar’s Dream states: (This is a short story but uncovers the entire essence of the Yakut nation. No one wants to write anything negative, but the real Yakut is the laziest. Though Makar is not indigenous, he picked up these traits from them.) (Visser, 2015: 2)

Yakutia represents a space for the occult and is itself the occult, with its people and culture unseen by rulers of the Russian Empire, for whom the place was an uninhabitable mining land rich in natural resources such as diamonds, gold, and timber, existing only on specialized, mineral-centered, geophysical maps. Meanwhile, its social landscape and people remain invisible due to the lack of a distinguishing national identity and the dominance of an oral tradition of storytelling located within the genre of epic song performance, which is fleeting and does not contribute to the sustainable preservation of cultural heritage. However, Yakutia also contains an internal occult that resists the outside and the imposed designation of occult. Contained within the fabric of everyday life, the occult in Yakutia is at the core of families and households, making itself tangible in the surreal experiences of inhabitants of this region. The stories articulated in communally shared secrets and repeated lore relate a variety

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of themes, from encounters with household demons to memories of how to deal with undead, flesh-eating relatives.1

Natalya Khokholova is a native of the southern region of the Sakha Republic, Russia. She uses ancestral knowledge to untangle the mysteries of cultural practices and emphasizes the importance of storytelling as a healing practice and for reclaiming the lost identities of the Sakha land’s inhabitants. She has authored articles on the financial adventures of characters in nineteenth-century Russian novels (2015), gender in Soviet film, Sergei Eisenstein’s aesthetics (2017), and romanticism (Romantik, 2019). She has also published articles on familial occultism in Sakha culture and lost and found children in the Russian subarctic in the journal Sibirica (2021). Natalya teaches in the Department of Environmental Studies at the Kyrgyz Aviation Institute. She is writing a book entitled Stories of Abandonment and Redemption of Changelings / Feral Children (forthcoming, 2024). Her article on the problems of fathers and sons, hoarders vs. spendthrifts, will be published in The Dostoevsky Journal: A Comparative Literature Review in 2024.

Notes 1. Blogs and other online forums discuss the supernatural on the website of the city of Yakutsk: https://ykt.ru.

References Afanasova Elena Nikolaevna. 2013. “Maternity and child welfare service formation and development in the yakut autonomous soviet socialist republic in the 1920s.” Gramota, 6 (32): 24-27. Baisheva Sargylana M. 2015. “Features of employment of the population of the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) in the conditions of new industrial development: territorial aspect” in The specificity of the territorial and environmental conditions in the socio-economic development of the country (the second international conference materials). Ans. Ed. G. Nyamdavaa, Ulaan Baatar: 177–186. Balzer, Marjorie Mandelstam. 2013. “Shamans Emerging from Repression in Siberia: Lightning Rods of Fear and Hope” in Horizons of Shamanism: A Triangular Approach to the History and Anthropology of Ecstatic Tech-

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niques. Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer, Jan N. Bremmer and Carlo Ginzburg, ed. Peter Jackson, 1-35. Stockholm: Stockholm University Press. Bel iaev ͡ Alexander. 1992. Posledniı˘ Chelovek Iz Atlantidy; prodave ts͡ Vozdukha; Ariėl´. Moskva: Izd-vo “Pressa.” Bogdan, Henrik, and Martin P. Starr. 2012. Aleister Crowley and Western Esotericism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brave Heart, M. Y. H. 1999. “Gender differences in the historical trauma response among the Lakota.” Journal of Health & Social Policy, 10(4), 1–21. Brave Heart, M. Y. H. 2000. “Wakiksuyapi: Carrying the historical trauma of the Lakota.” Tulane Studies in Social Welfare, 21–22, 245–266. Bravina, Rozalia. 2018. Shamans are Chosen Ones of Heaven and Ghosts. Bichik: IAkutsk. ͡ Collingwood Robin G. 2002. The Idea of History and An Essay on Metaphysics. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Crate, Susan Alexandra. 2006. Cows, Kin, and Globalization: An Ethnography of Sustainability. Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press. Douglas, Mary. 1966. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. Milton Park: Taylor & Francis. Duran, Eduardo and Duran, Bonnie. 1995. Native American postcolonial psychology. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Ferguson, Jenanne. 2019. Words like Birds: Sakha Language Discourses and Practices in the City. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Foucault, Michel. 1991. “Governmentality.” In The Foucault Effects Studies in Governmentality. Eds. G. Burchell, C. Gordon, & P. Miller, 87–104. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Hotchkiss, Barbara Jane. 1997. Natures Nurture: Imagining the Wild Child in the Nineteenth Century. PhD dissertation, University of California, Davis. Ivanova-Unarova, Zinaida. 2004. Shamanism in The Interdisciplinary Context. Irvine: BrownWalker Press Keleş, Ufuk. 2022. “Writing a ‘Good’ Autoethnography in Educational Research: A Modest Proposal.” The Qualitative Report 27(9): 2,026–46. https://doi.org/10.46743/2160-3715/2022.5662. Korolenko, Vladimir Galaktionovich, and F. Volkhovskīı˘. 2012. Makar’s Dream and Other Stories. Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing. Leete, Art, and R. Paul Firnhaber. 2004. Shamanism in the Interdisciplinary Context: Papers from the 6th Conference of the International Society for Shamanistic Research, Viljandi, Estonia, August 2001. Boca Raton, FL: BrownWalker Press. Myreeva, A. N. 2013, “The Philosophic Novel in the Yakut Prose of 1990th Year of the 20th Century.” Vestnik, the Academic Periodical Journal of the North-Eastern Federal University Named after M. K. Ammosov 10(3): 69–74. Pihama, Leonie, Paul Reynolds, Cherryl Smith, John Reid, Linda Tuhiwai Smith, and Rihi Te Nana. 2014. “Positioning Historical Trauma Theory within Aotearoa New Zealand.” AlterNative: An International Journal

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of Indigenous Peoples 10(3): 248–62. https://doi.org/10.1177/117718011 401000304. Propp, Vladimir. 1968. Morphology of a Folktale. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Punter, David. 2012. A New Companion to the Gothic. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Renner, K. J. 2017. Evil Children in the Popular Imagination. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Ryleev, Kondratiı˘ Fedorovich. 1857. Voı˘narovskiı˘: Poėma. Berlin: Schneider. Sapalova, Daria Usenovna (1971). “Yakuts and Kyrgyz: ethnocultural parallels and features” dissertation author’s abstract for the degree of candidate of historical sciences: specialty 07.00.07 / Sapalova Dariya Usenovna; [Far East. state humanitarian un-t] - Vladivostok, 2010. -27 p. Sieroszewski, Wacław, M. IA ͡ Zhorni tska ͡ ia, ͡ and Sh F. Mukhamed´ iarov. ͡ 1993. IAKuty: ͡ Opyt e˙tnograficheskogo issledovaniia. Moskva: Assotsia ͡ ts͡ ia͡ “Rossiı˘skaia͡ politicheskaia͡ entsiklopedi ͡ ia. ͡ Tichotsky, John. 2014. Russia’s Diamond Colony: The Republic of Sakha. London: Routledge. Tilley-Lubbs, Gresilda A. 2016. “Critical Autoethnography and the Vulnerable Self as Researcher.” In Re-Telling Our Stories: Critical Autoethnographic Narratives, ed. Gresilda A. Tilley-Lubbs and Silvia Bénard Calva, 3–15. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Van Gennep, Arnold. 1909. The Rites of Passage. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Verzilin, N. 1953. Пo Следам Рoбинзoна [In Robinson’s Footsteps]; DetGiz: Moscow, USSR; Leningrad, USSR Visser, Irene. 2015. “Decolonizing Trauma Theory: Retrospect and Prospects.” Humanities 4: 250-265.

7 Can Ethnography of the Occult Be Transformed into Occult Ethnography? Contextualizing a Local Religious Practice in Abkhazia Rita Kuznetsova, Igor Kuznetsov This chapter’s focus is both on the growth of a local religious cult in which several families participate and on an anthropologist who is a member of one of the families. This study is mainly autoethnographic, conducted by two coauthors, one of whom is both a participant observer and a native, though some of the data was collected using traditional fieldwork. Lidzava is a village of 1,500 on the historical western border of Abkhazia, a small country on the Black Sea coast between Georgia and Russia. During the Russian colonial era, Abkhazian refugees called muhajirs migrated to Ottoman Turkey to flee the Russian army. A Russian colony for about a century, Abkhazia was merged with Georgia during the Soviet period. However, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, an armed conflict (1992–1993) forced the Georgian majority to leave Abkhazia, and it became a Russian protectorate.

Narrator as an (Auto)ethnographer For the first two decades of my life, I (Rita) lived in my Georgian father’s and Abkhaz mother’s large childhood home in Lidzava. In Abkhazia, children of the penultimate Soviet generation, to which I belong, had three options for education: to study in an Abkhaz, Georgian, or Russian school. Of course, the language spoken at home played a determining role. My parents knew some of each other’s

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languages, but they usually communicated in broken Russian. When it was time for the children to go to school, my father sent my older sisters to Georgia to learn Georgian, and the rest of us were sent to a Russian school. Later, I attended the Kuban State University in the city closest to Abkhazia with a predominantly Russian population. It was in this context that I witnessed the fall of the Soviet empire, the fratricidal war between our Abkhazian and Georgian relatives, and the appearance of an autonomous Abkhazia on the map of the world, recognized only by Russia, the odious rulers of Venezuela and Syria, and a few Pacific island nations. Since then, my coauthor and husband (Igor) and I have wandered from city to city and country to country. Geography and professions and even central metaphors have changed. I gradually changed from autochthon of my country into a person having, as the saying goes, the blood of those and others flowing in her veins and visiting from time to time her parents’ house. In the research we present here, the role of anthropological knowledge is affected by all sorts of limitations, from the restrictive Russian version of the discipline itself, the so-called sovetskaia etnografia, to the peculiarities of communicative behavior among those being studied. Abkhazia remains a rare “lost world,” where people still feel it is their duty to answer a stranger’s questions, though they also expect a special kind of understanding from said stranger, as well as a corresponding printed product as the end result. In this culture, a printed word carries a higher status than one uttered. The ethnographer is thus perceived somewhat as a journalist, who can help a person but is more likely to harm a person instead, as the topics of inquiry are often not customarily raised in private conversation, let alone in public discourse. What follows in this chapter comes partly from field research in the form of conversations with informants and observation of the lives of the inhabitants of Lidzava and other settlements in Abkhazia, as well as our experience of the behavior and judgments of our neighbors and family members. By combining these different forms of research, we attempted to keep pace with the general evolution of autoethnography as a method, to correct some of the conclusions reached when more traditional approaches were used, and to contribute to a form of critical theory that takes into account the political aspects of research, as well as the identities, emotions, body, and more of both the researcher and the researched, who are “maneuvering through pain, confusion, anger and uncertainty” (Holman, Adams, and Ellis 2016: 34).

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Heterogeneity and Mistrust In modern multiethnic Abkhazia, the Abkhaz represent a “level three,” meaning they are the dominant indigenous group at the regional and local levels, according to the typology of elites within the international postcolonial system (Spivak 1988: 284). Their culture and social life exhibit symptoms of this level three designation, such as heterogeneity and social disintegration, in contrast with their Georgian and Russian neighbors. The Abkhaz lack public, communal cemeteries, for example. Instead, each family uses a separate graveyard behind the house. It is important to note that in the Abkhaz case a hostile attitude toward cultural others does not necessarily imply a high degree of social cohesion as a group. Throughout the nineteenth century, there were numerous attempts to form anti-Russian and sometimes anti-Turkish alliances between Circassian or Abkhaz nobles that happened to be at war with each other. But a truly mass anticolonial movement, in which commoners would unite, was almost nonexistent. Traces of this type of anticolonial social organization continued to appear until quite recently. Despite nationalism and patriotism, a sense of unity is much less widespread than many believe, even in the case of the descendants of the Abkhazian muhajirs in today’s Turkey, who came to Abkhazia as volunteers during the Georgian-Abkhaz war. Quarrels with locals, sometimes leading to murder, were one of many reasons a mass repatriation of Abkhaz people to Abkhazia never took place. On the other hand, mixed families like mine, with one indigenous partner and one partner descending from the former colonizers, are common. Writing from a different perspective, Moscow orientalist Aleksandr Krylov, who is popular with a modern nationalist-minded Abkhazian audience, argued that “[n]owadays the process of national consolidation of the Abkhazian etnos [i.e., nation] is complete: the Abkhaz are a nation that is small in number but united by their own national self-consciousness, common goals, culture, language, and way of life. The process of national consolidation of the Georgian nation is far from finished: approximately twenty sub-etnosy [i.e., ethnic subdivisions] are united under a common name. Moreover, the populations of Western Georgia (Svaneti and Samegrelo) differ so much from the rest of the Georgian people that it would be right to consider them each separate nations.” (2001: 6–7) This opinion is evidently driven by the author’s wish to point out the legitimacy of so-called Self-Recognized Abkhazia, as well

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as the groundlessness of Georgia’s claims for control over Abkhazia. In the past, Krylov has studied separatism in Ethiopia and expressed solidarity with the “heroic Abkhazian people” who defeated the “Georgian aggressors” and successfully proceeded on the path of independence. In 2015, he was awarded the Order of AkhdzApsha (Honor and Glory) in Abkhazia and received similar awards in other unrecognized Caucasian states, including South Ossetia and Nagorno-Karabakh. Krylov conducted short-term fieldwork in Lidzava for only four months and received an offer from the authorities of “the republic” to live in a former Russian government seaside residence. The farm where I grew up is located in the same village and is surrounded by green tobacco, cornfields, and other hallmarks of rural life. Is it possible to dispute Krylov’s conclusions? In a historical and ethnographic sense, the Abkhaz still have several divisions that are analogous to Krylov’s sub-etnosy among Georgians. Abkhazians who live on the Bzyb River, for instance, still avoid intermarrying with members of other local groups. My own matrilineal relatives belong to the Bzyb family of Dbar lineage, and none of them has ever seen the Abzhua, the southernmost and easternmost Abkhaz villages, althought they regularly visit Tbilisi, Moscow, and Western countries. One recent exception to Dbar’s genealogy, which includes no brides or grooms from the Abzhua (although there are a few Georgians in it, as well as a Russian) is my husband Igor. In Abkhazia, the outside world, where there are no relatives and so no reason to go there, begins an hour’s drive away. It is not surprising that isolationism, wariness, and mistrust permeate relations with ethnically different neighbors—often with accusations of using the occult. For a long time, Igor conducted fieldwork among the Armenians of Abkhazia. In the 1980s, he came across people who said that it was customary for the “Muslims” (meaning Abkhazians) to treat their neighbors of a different faith to vodka that they had previously used to wash the dead, and that the Cingana (Roma) were even worse, stealing Armenian children and putting them in special xnoci (butter churns) to drain their blood. In fairness, such ethnic stereotypes are not peculiar to the south Caucasus. Descendants of Czech colonists who settled on the coast of the Black Sea near Anapa at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries remember their grandfathers believing the “heretics” (Russians) had tails under their caftans like devils. Recently, such mistrust has become an object of ethnographic study for several scholars. Works with strong cross-cultural aspects

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by social scientists such as Ilya Utekhin (2018: 216) examine how communist ideology, which mistrusted strangers and searched for new enemies, was adopted by ordinary people in the USSR. In the south Caucasus, the Soviet seed of mistrust fell on the fertile soil of lives lived in fear after centuries of political instability and highly segmented social relations. Amid the late-Stalinist antisemitism that was rife in our region, a family legend developed of Igor’s young aunt being infected with tuberculosis by Jewish doctor-saboteurs in a hospital near Moscow. In the early 1970s, Igor himself, a pupil at a Soviet school, contracted pneumonia in a Krasnodar city hospital and was shocked by the nurse’s suspicions that a Jewish doctor might try to take some of his blood to use for ritual purposes. A few years earlier, one of my four my sisters was saved from death in an Abkhazian hospital. Later, our parents sent her to Kutaisi to study Georgian, and there she fell ill with pneumonia but refused to be treated. She had been frightened by stories of Georgian Jews allegedly collecting the blood of Christians in barrels that were then nailed shut. Such myths about blood used in occult rituals had come from medieval Europe and merged with local Caucasian horror stories; this propaganda supplemented the already rich repertoire of prejudices against cultural and ethnic others.

Social Networking Florian Mühlfried (2014: 64) argues that mass feasts (in Georgian, supra) create cohesion and a sense of responsibility toward one another, and that they can strengthen mutual relationships and build consensus in Georgian society. He tells the story of Sandra Roehlofs, the wife of former Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili. She loved her husband’s culture and learned the Georgian language, but she could not accept “the endless hours wasted at lavishly laid out tables, and the boring and equally endless speeches uttered on such occasions.” As a Westerner from the “world of the minute,” she did not recognize the institutional role played by collective feasts in the Caucasus. Abkhazia is indistinguishable from Georgia in its tradition of potlatch-style feasts, or delat’ kompaniiu, organized on a family’s important occasions, which include almost any visit from a guest. I remember one morning my uncle Mahmed Akhalia came from the mountain village of Achandara to visit us wearing his papakha (astrakhan hat), galliffet trousers, and high boots, and holding a wooden

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staff with a metal ring at the top, all indispensable items for a respected Abkhaz elder. He shouted “Shaliko!” at the gate (this was the era before mobile telephones), and my father went out to receive him at the gate, speaking in Turkish. A native of Imereti, Georgia, my father had learned Turkish in his youth while working at a dukhan (restaurant) in Batum near the Turkish border. Mahmed, who was married to my aunt Shyamina, came from Abkhazians who had returned from Turkey, like my mother Nunya Dbar’s relatives. Everyone knew each other’s languages to some extent, with Turkish or Russian likely serving as lingua francas. Every visit of a relative to the house caused a commotion. Someone immediately began to set the table, and someone else ran to catch a turkey to roast. If those who came to stay were from Georgia, a suckling pig would appear on the table. The power of this kind of social networking was not enough to save Abkhazia from a bloody ethnic conflict, the consequences of which are still felt after more than a quarter century. During the Georgian-Abkhaz war, Georgians told each other the story of Abkhazian guerillas who killed an elderly Georgian couple in Lidzava, then sat down to enjoy themselves without leaving the crime scene. The collective feast in both cultures is seen as having a psychotherapeutic effect that helps a person relax, so as not to lose one’s mind, but it does not lower one’s aggression, and more importantly it does not offer a solution to political or social problems.

Christianity or Islam Today the Dbar lineage consists of multigenerational extended families or households that originated in the Shlara quarter of the larger Abkhaz village of Blaburkhwa, where Dbar igəart’a (the place of the yard of Dbar) can still be found. My matrilineal ancestors were Muslims who left their homeland to join the Muhajirun movement (from the Arabic al-muhājirūn, singular muhājir, “having made an exodus, emigrated”). The Dbar family, together with another Abkhaz family, the Gubaz, hired a schooner and landed in Tuapse on the Russian coast of the Black Sea, then moved inland to Lidzava. The Mukba family, relatives of the Gubaz, already lived there among the Christian Abkhazians who never emigrated to Turkey (the Gochua, Djakonia, and other families). The Dbar family settled in Lidzava by chance. The Saatkeriy branch of the Dbar family arrived in Lidzava first around 1881. Ahmed Dbar, who was born in Turkey and from whom

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this part of the Lidzavian Dbar descends, was then three years old. After a while, they adopted Khaki (X’ak’y), from the age of twelve to seventeen, who had already tried to settle in Lykhna at the new home of his father (and Ahmed’s uncle), Gedlach. It is believed that Khaki, who is my grandfather, was born on a ship returning from Turkey. His mother died in childbirth, and his stepmother refused to accept him (interview with Said Dbar, 2003). There is no doubt that persecution of Islam drove the majority of the former population of Lidzava to Turkey. The village became predominantly Christian after the Russian conquest of the Pitsunda peninsula and the three waves of the Muhajirun that followed in 1854, 1864, and 1877. However, the division of the Abkhaz into two faiths did not prevent intermarriage, which is still common in Lidzava, as evidenced by my parents’ marriage. Many markers of belonging to either the Muslim or Christian communities that continue to coexist in Lidzava are just as situational, ambiguous, and therefore barely perceptible. Muslims, especially the elderly, do not often eat pork, though Nikoloz Djanashia (1917: 170n2) recorded a notable instance in the village of Adziubzha where one Muslim family sacrificed a pig like their Christian neighbors. The pork was then wrapped in paper, and people were instructed to put it in their mouth as if they bite it three times, and then spit it out. In my experience, Islamic food prohibitions dictated the choice of turkey, rather than pork, as the main dish. On the other hand, Abkhazian Muslims drink wine, although much less than Christians, a couple of glasses during a feast, for example. A guest visiting from afar is considered to be the most honored, even more than a relative with high status, and can expect a first-class reception and the best food and drink. Christian personal names became fashionable in the early Soviet period, even among Muslims, so that nowadays names can no longer be reliably used to determine religious affiliation. Muslims in Lidzava do not get circumcised, contrary to the religious tradition in much of the Muslim world. When someone dies in a family considered to be Christian, all of the unbaptized in the home are collectively baptized, including wives from traditionally Muslim families, before the deceased person is buried. This is how my daughter and son became Christians when my elder brother Ruslan died. Though the modern religious situation in Lidzava can be characterized as amazingly flexible, it is not equitable. In general, Christianity occupies public space in Lidzava, while Islam is exclusively a kind of intrafamily affair. This did not change when those few fami-

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lies of muhajirs, like the Dbar, later “returned” to the village. In the 1990s, when independent Abkhazia’s project to resettle a large number of Turkish repatriates in Lidzava collapsed, it was because the local Abkhaz population, overwhelmed with fears of the “Islamic threat,” rejected them. What bothered the Lidzava Muslim villagers the most was the piety of the returnees. They did not drink alcohol, they performed prayers five times daily in their courtyards, and they were rumored to be planning to build a mosque. Religious identity still overlaps with the clan, or lineage, in the structure of Abkhazian society: religion is practiced by entire family groups, membership in certain religious communities is determined by a person’s birth to a particular family, and these communities know whether a particular surname belongs to a Christian or Muslim family. There are notable exceptions to this, such as the Gubaz family, who changed their religious orientation a hundred and fifty years ago, although not without external pressure. And two Orthodox priests have come from traditionally Muslim families in recent decades, one being my relative Dmitry Zaurovich Dbar, who was baptized as Father Dorotheus (Dorofei).

Lidzava Shrine and the Familial Occult The annual prayers at the sacred site of Lʒaa-nəx (a-kadak), or Lidzava shrine, are associated with Christianity to the same extent as other public manifestations of religious life in the village, which its custodians and priests probably did not question until recently. Evidence for this is provided, for example, by Igor’s interview with one of them, the late Fedya Gochua, in 2003: Q: Do you think that the Lidzava shrine is a Christian thing? Fedya: Is it [laughing]? Or is it really Muslim? Q: Well, why do Muslim families like the Dbar family go there? Fedya: Well, what should I say to them, “don’t come?” They don’t know. (Interview conducted in Abkhazia, 2003)

In fact, the annual prayers originated in the Pitsunda church four kilometers from Lidzava, and in a classic example of colonial mimicry (Bhabha 2007), where the disciplining eventually becomes the desired, Muslim worshipers too began to see the site as holy. The first reliable evidence of a hybrid cult developing around this Ortho-

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dox temple is from the mid-seventeenth century (Chardin 1811: 197) when the institution of kadag-i (custodians or augurs) arose, which are thought to be an attempt by the surrounding rural population to take advantage of the sacred resources of the temple, and from which the Lidzava a-kadak prayer ceremony probably inherited its name. For centuries, the Pitsunda peninsula in the Abkhazian borderlands has attracted new flows of immigrants from all directions. The temple, and later its filial shrine, was established to provide them with protection, but in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the cult of the latter broke off several times from the temple that spawned it, inheriting elements from the religious practices of local highlanders, as well as from different Circassian groups. In the 1930s, the break with Christianity finally occurred after the Bolsheviks closed religious buildings (Kuznetsova and Kuznetsov 2017). Even when abstracted from their religious essence, public ceremonies like the a-kadak establish and maintain formal ties within the community at a level greater than an individual family, and the way they are used determines their structure. Such ceremonies are also simultaneously a public demonstration of the rights that members of society have to resources and a way for society to acknowledge those rights. An effect of the evolution of these ceremonies and collective feasts is that they can be used to compensate for strong disintegrative tendencies within the community that result from internal quarrels (Johnson and Earle 2000: 89, 133–34). We have already shown (see Kuznetsova 2013) how inclusion in the network of the Lidzava annual ceremony works as the most important factor of a specific Abkhaz (not Georgian or Russian) ethnic identity. However, the Ldzaa-nykh‘s function is not limited to the integration of families into the Lidzava community. In the pre-Soviet period, at least, the shrine also served as a powerful means of social control, not only in Lidzava but in other villages, as well. All Bzyb Abkhazians shared the belief that the Ldzaa-nykh was capable of punishing both nonbelieving strangers and treacherous local apostates. This belief culminated in a custom that people living in mountain villages had that was reminiscent of medieval compurgation. The Abkhazian enlightener Anton Chukbar (1915: 148–49) notes: I am gathering oath helpers, and next Wednesday or Friday (you can swear oaths only on these two days) we all—the plaintiff, the defendant (myself), my oath helpers, village judges, the elderly, [and] honorary members of the community, as well as people just interested in this matter—will go to Ldzaa. We will call the priest who opens the temple.

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Those present will persuade us to make peace, but the plaintiff will stand on his position. Then everyone will reverently approach, and I will move forward, stand between two oaks in front of the temple, take a branch from the oak in my hand, lift it, and say: “I didn’t take the horse, as they attributed it to me today, and I don’t know who took it, I swear by this shrine.” I will let go of the twig and walk away. One of my oath helpers will come up: “That N (the name of the defendant) did not steal the horse that they spoke about today, and does not know who took it, I swear by this shrine.” He will move away having said that. My other oath helpers will do the same.

It is clear that the annual prayer to the Ldzaa-nykh supports and legitimizes the function of a stable rural society in a manifestation of Victor Turner’s “disaster ritual,” at least in the view of the Lidzava villagers. Several such events were known during the Soviet era and now take place even more frequently. On 27 May 2000, Igor personally participated in a communal feast on the occasion of the reconciliation of the Gubaz and Kvitsinia (or Kirtskhalia) families, who had been at war with each other for many years. The ceremony took place at the site of a destroyed Lidzava chapel, where construction of a new cult complex was ongoing. At that time, larger annual prayers were held in the forest outside the village. A ceremonial candle lighting was followed by the preparation of a huge cheese pie (Abkhaz: amgjal), along with other ritual food such as the boiled meat of a sacrificial goat, wine, and salt. As in the time of Chukbar, the priest in these rituals first tried to talk out of doing so those who wanted to test their offenders using an oath (curse). According to Fedya Gochua, “this cannot be done right away. It is necessary to find a common language, and to do an oath right away is not good—it falls on the children. This is a serious question; the oath is not a toy.” It seems that the institution of oath-helpers has been preserved as well, but in a weaker form. “If it is a woman, then there must be a relative and one witness from the side of the people, so that he could tell the people” (interview with F. Gochua, 2003). There is a less public familial level within the religious system of the inhabitants of the village. One aspect of this is the ritual of a-mshsh’ara (day of the week), from Bzyb Abkhazian aash’ara (to be lazy). In the past, families at least partially closed themselves off from social networks on these days since observing such days prevented them from taking anything out of the house or selling anything, especially cattle. It was not recommended to sew, knit, spin, sweep the

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house, use a grindstone, shave, or cut fingernails and toenails. These prohibitions mainly concern the work of women in the household and are transmitted through the female line. In fact, the a-mshsh’ara can be accumulated in families, the newest being with the daughterin-law—the future mistress of the house—and so on with each generation of women in a household. My mother kept two such days, Thursday and Saturday, but the rhythm of urban life contradicts this tradition, and I no longer follow them, as is the case with other families in the village. Another aspect of this familial level within the religious system is azh’ira, which are ritual blacksmith’s workshops that some households in Lidzava keep in small sheds in their gardens. They normally include a small anvil and a hammer unsuitable for actual blacksmithing, and sometimes a toy pincer. Like the annual a-kadak prayers, these familial sanctuaries play a remarkable role in the villagers’ identity. It is believed that every full-blooded Abkhazian lineage should have its own azh’ira, though a household can allocate a share of the ritual to a member of the family who establishes his or her own household through sacrifice and prayer in the ancestral home. In Lizava, there are branches of the Dbar sanctuary in the houses of the late Alik Dbar and John Dbar, representing the sublines of Gedlach and Saatkeriy. Annual prayer in azh’ira takes place on New Year’s Eve, 13–14 January in the Julian calendar. First, the male head of the household, after having washed, sacrifices a goat. Then four akəakəar, round dumplings without filling, are prepared and a rooster is slaughtered for each male member of the family. My father was not Abkhaz, and my brother Ruslan bore his Georgian surname, so we did have a part of the sanctuary of the Dbar people. Instead, every year for the rest of her life, my mother killed one small bird for each son and lit a candle in the backyard, accompanying this with prayer.

Anti-religious Campaigns After Sovietization, both official Christianity and the people’s hybrid beliefs came under attack. A wave of Stalinist repression fully affected Lidzava. Village priests Djago Wondyrba and Joseph (Yesyf) Gochua were arrested. The first was never heard from again, and the second was shot. The Wondyrba family line is extinct today. Our Gochua relatives represent one of the oldest lineages, perhaps the oldest in present-day Lidzava. Their surname is widely known in Western

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Georgia as nonindigenous, and like other nonindigenous families, they do not have their own azh’ira. Some of them have taken to justifying this by invoking a special “priestly status” for their family, implying that the Abkhaz are connected by religious ties to the azh’ira or the village shrine. The late ethnographer Arvelod Kuprava expressed in personal communication to us the idea that the ancestors of the Lidzava Gochua could be freedmen who fled to the Bzyb area from Samegrelo in Georgia, where the feudal dependence of peasants was much more organized than in Abkhazia. He cited the case of a graduate student he knew who did not suspect the Megrelian origin of her Bzyb Abkhaz family, the Matua, until she found a document in her family home written in Georgian and dated to the early nineteenth century, signed by Prince Dadiani. It proclaimed the release of her grandfather Djisip Matua from serfdom. Migrants from Samegrelo did not receive land in Abkhazia but became sharecroppers, paying half of their harvest to the owner of the land, and many of these migrants put down roots in this way, eventually becoming Abkhazian. After 1937, public praying to the Lidzava shrine ceased, only fully resuming twenty years later. During this time, almost all the cult objects stored in the former chapel were looted and destroyed, and the sacred oak grove surrounding it was cut down. In 1947, an incident took place that shocked the Lidzava villagers to such a degree that they still remember it as one of the central episodes in local history. At that time, the village administration was headed by the Georgians, co-opted from above in Tbilisi, and the chairman of the collective farm was Yermolay Bakuradze, a nephew of the head of the KGB’s Gagra branch and a man of extremely low morals. During a festive meeting, the chairman was killed by a shot from a hunting rifle in the office of the collective farm. As he was dying, he managed to shoot his gun six times, breaking a lamp, and in the darkness the killer, Beso (Vissarion) Djakonia, was able to escape, throwing his gun over the fence to Fedya Gochua, who is a son of the aforementioned executed priest. My uncle Said Dbar was an eyewitness to the events (interview, 2003) and believes that a conflict between the killer and the victim had long been smoldering. Beso, who was Bakuradze’s predecessor as chairman, had received three years in prison for the collapse of the collective farm, and had sharply rejected the latter’s humiliating offer to become his deputy. Moreover, Bakuradze seemed to be harassing a member of his staff, Natasha Dbar, who was the wife of Beso’s relative Vassily Yakovlevich Djakonia. As people on the farm began to

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disperse for the day, the chairman did not allow her to leave, and Beso reacted. At that time, my mother worked as a taskmaster on a collective farm. She already had three children, the youngest of whom was only a few months old, but she had to leave them with a maid each day to go to work. She said that everyone who worked on the farm was afraid of Bakuradze, who rode a horse and carried a gun and a whip in his hand, threatening anyone who showed disobedience or discontent. Women mostly worked in the fields, trying not to catch the chairman’s eyes, especially if they were late to work or did not fulfill the labor expectation. When Fedya’s wife revealed what had happened, the criminals were brought in for interrogation in Tbilisi. Initially, they were threatened with execution, but since the death penalty was abolished in the USSR, they served eight years in Norilsk prison camps.

Gender Asymmetry As a result of the revolutionary changes in the country, Abkhazian women were granted property rights and the right to vote and hold office, which they had not previously had. However, formal proclamations of equality between men and women resulted largely in an increase in the economic exploitation of women in the maledominated society. The role of women in the production of goods was well understood by Stalin and the other leaders of the Soviet state (Smirnova 1955: 155). Female labor played a special role in the workplace during WWII, when women replaced men who had left to fight. It was clear that they could handle what was considered men’s work, and they demonstrated good organizational abilities. Women were made line managers and taskmasters on collective farms, and it seemed that everything was aimed at ensuring women and men were both able to take part in public affairs as individuals and citizens. But while women advanced to the forefront in the economy, ideology still served (and continues to serve) the power of men. The dramatic changes in religious practices associated with the Ldzaa-nykh of that period should be understood in this context. After the legitimate custodians of the shrines were removed, all activity around them was quiet, but gradually they began to be controlled by female family members. However, since active female participation in religious affairs was clearly contrary to the norms of the prevailing gender order, the Lidzava villagers found compromise. According to

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Fedya, whom Krylov cites (2001: 268), the heirs of the disappeared parents and husbands began to perform the preparations for sacrifices, passing the knife to the eldest boy from their family, so that “the sacrifice passed to the deity through the hands of little men.” Two people played an exceptional role in restoring the tradition following the break, which lasted until the Khrushchev era. The first was Margarita Akhba, the wife of Niko Gochua. At first, she picked up the baton in both the preparation of the ritual amgjal pie and in organizing compurgation. The Lidzava villagers believed that she could be a distant relative of the Wondyrba family, which is often seen as the predecessor of Gochua, another priestly family. Because of this, she was considered a legitimate master of ceremonies in her own right, and not through her husband. Margarita identified the ancestral home of her husband as a new place where the annual praying could take place. Witnesses say that she carried out the actual management of the ritual when men were still afraid to openly assume the priestly role. Noah Dmitrievich Gochua, who represented a different subline of the Gochua, also helped restore the tradition. He worked as a teacher in neighboring Pitsunda and enthusiastically conducted social activities, belonging to the Committee for the Protection of Cultural Monuments and maintaining personal contacts with local historian Vianor Pachulia, who was the chairman of the Abkhazian Council of the Georgian society of the same name. Noah Dmitrievich tried in every possible way to legalize the cult of the Ldzaa-nykh in the eyes of the official authorities. He and Pachulia worked to clarify the “legend” of the occurrence of the Pitsunda temple that was recorded by Vassily Nemirovich-Danchenko, a brother of the worldfamous theater director of the same family name. As stated in the text (Nemirovich-Danchenko 1880: 161–62), the villagers took refuge from the attacking enemy in a stone structure. The men left at night, but all died in battle. The famine began. . . . [M]others decided to throw the children and then themselves from the very top of the tower. . . . The angels caught the children and flew them safely past the camp of enemies beyond the forest and into the dark gorge.

In the gorge, the children met “Maryam, Mother of God,” who disappeared like a cloud as adults appeared. In gratitude to the saint, the villagers built a temple. For antireligious reasons, the angels and Maryam were replaced by authorities with a cloud, and “a flock of

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huge mountain eagles descended from behind the clouds” (Pachulia 2009: 120–23, 212–13). Similarly, the annual public prayers in the village had to be turned into something like a harvest festival, in which, if desired, one could see the glorification of peasant labor. As the model for the newly revived cult, the rural feast of acunəx’əa was chosen (from Abkhaz acu, “a village,” and anəx’əa, “celebration, festival”), the celebration of which is still customary in many Abkhazian settlements. Noah Dmitrievich determined, we believe, the main vector of the development of the Ldzaa-nykh during the period of militant atheism. Later, when the cult emerged from the underground, St. Mary’s mythological image, as well as the real role of Lidzava women in preserving the religious traditions that were so important for the local community, were forgotten. As I remember, to initially prevent people from being arrested, the ceremony was held in “no-man’s-land” between the backyards of the once intermarried and neighboring Gochua and Dbar families. My parents, brothers, sisters, and especially Aunt Misa, who married Constantine Gochua, took an active part in organizing the collective feast. It usually lasted two or three hours after a short prayer by Fedya Gochua. The villagers sat right on the ground. The sacrificial meat, boiled in the huge kettle, was served on common plates, together with corn porridge and salt on large leaves of burdock, from which people ate with their hands. In June 1988, Igor was invited to represent the men of our family in the annual prayers at the Ldzaa-nykh in a new style. The ceremony took place at a forest stream outside the village like a real acunəx’əa. Men participated in the collective feast alone, without women and children, who stood at a distance. Today’s “canon” is similar to what he saw then, with the only difference that the shrine has returned to its former place, that is, to the old Wondyrba’s allotment, and people have begun to sit on long benches at the community table, as they would at a wedding or a funeral.

Is It Realistic to Remain Neutral? In the wake of the Soviet atheistic ideology, several anthropologists, both in Abkhazia and in Moscow, began to doubt the Christian (and Georgian) roots of local cults, preferring, in the style of nineteenth-century survival theory, to see the Abkhazian tradition in them. Thus, professionally trained researchers began to write in their

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works (see, for example, Lavrov [1959] 2009) the same things that amateur local historians like Noah Dmitrievich did. Aleksandr Krylov (2001), in his studies of Abkhaz religious practices and the Lidzava cult in particular, saw neither gender asymmetry nor the sophisticated, ongoing dialogue that a-kadak had with official religions, but he did legitimize the primordiality of Abkhaz (neo)paganism. We are interested, however, in what could be described as a precarious social order based on the rivalry of families, while Krylov prefers to study the development of ethnonationalism in the same society. In certain aspects, the two approaches come together, and we seem to be in agreement that the nepotist clansmanship (klanovsh’ina) in many post-Soviet territories, including the Caucasus, is unlikely to strengthen the institutions of the nationstate. However, such a bird’s eye view does not suit today’s cult practitioners at all. Sashka Gochua, the current spiritual leader of the Lidzava, explains in his own essays his disregard for current academic literature by saying that he only gets the impression that he is describing “savages.” In contrast, he consistently uses our grassroots ethnography, extremely detailed and contextualized after more than thirty years of participant observation, as a guide. Nevertheless, Gochua’s position, which can be described as strategic essentialism (Spivak 1990), is contrary to what memory we retain of the Georgian prototype for the cult, and it is ignorant of the fact that there were other dynasties of custodians in the village preceding the family he belongs to. At this point, he is flattered by Krylov, who neglects the intricate history of the Lidzava cult, simply calling it “the annual praying of the Gochua priestly family” (2001: 13). His positivist ethnography also serves as a source for the explanatory model used by other researchers. It seems that Vyacheslav Chirikba, a leading Abkhazian linguist who received his doctorate from Leiden University, also constructs Abkhazian “heathen heritage” according to classic clichés common in the post-Soviet space. He deems it possible to propose, in the manner of the concept of Sprachbund—a “linguistic area” combining the northwest Caucasian, or Abkhazo-Adyghian, the northeast Caucasian (Chechen), and the south Caucasian (Georgian) languages—a pan-Caucasian, pre-Christian, and Islamic “mythological union” characterized by a list of twenty-one traits, from the presence of a supreme god to worshipping sacred groves, trees, and so forth. And he attempts to squeeze the “system” of the traditional religion of the Abkhaz into this framework (2015: 93).

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Similarly, Chirikba (2015: 156) accepts as truth the so-called seven main anykhas (abžʲnəxa). In their attempts to compose a single normative Abkhazian religion from different local cults, the advocates of neopaganism in Abkhazia pay a great deal of attention to this concept, dating back to the writings of such enlighteners and ethnographers as S. Zvanba ([1855] 1982: 34) and N. Djanashia (1917: 170), who briefly mention the form of Shasshu abzhnyh as an epithet of the deity of the azh’ira blacksmith shrines. The use of this term continued in ritual practice for some time. Ethnographer G. Chursin (1956: 67) also wrote that the name “Abzh-nykha” is “the seven divine forces” and now sometimes joins the name of Shasshu; I have noticed this phenomenon both in Bzyb and in Abzhua Abkhazia (Djgerda). Some family forges are also sometimes called “smithies of seven forces” (Gudauta County).

This author did not specify which anykhas are implied, rightly concluding that “[g]enerally the number seven is a symbolic figure.” We can also add that this religious symbol is widespread among various peoples. However, by the early 1990s, activists were trying to fill the expression “seven anykhas” with real meaning. The struggle for national sovereignty, and more specifically for the design of the Abkhaz flag, in the upper left corner of which its author, Valery Gamgia, placed a white palm and seven stars on a red rectangle, acted as a stimulus for their search in the broad sense. Nowadays this image is interpreted as an indication of the number of historical regions of Abkhazia (or modern districts and cities), but in those years, it was associated mainly with abžʲnəxa. The fact that this idea came from “above” perfectly illustrates the confusion that still arises in the minds of informants when trying to remember what the seven identities should consist of: only Dədrəpšʲ-nəxa (Achandra), Ldzaa-nykh, Jələr-nəxa (Ilori), and Ləxnəxa (Lykhny) are beyond doubt. The remaining three should be chosen from those cults that have long since sunk into oblivion, and only rare intellectuals know something about them. Even the lists provided by experts are not entirely clear. Sometimes four active shrines are complemented by the ruins of the Lashkendar temple near Tkvarcheli, as well as the following sacred mountains: Nal-kuba (Pskhu) and less often Adagua near Tsebelda or Bytkha in Sochi. Krylov (2001: 153) was apparently faced with other options, including the shrines Aerg-Lapyr-nykha, Napra-nykha, Gech-nykha, and Kapba-nykha.

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Abkhazian studies are still dominated by the belief in the preChristian origin of local cults, according to which all elements of the culture of the indigenous population are accepted as more ancient than those of the population that later appeared in this territory. Following this logic, the sources of modern religious phenomena among the Abkhaz are sought not in contacts with neighbors but in their own tradition, dating back to the Proto–(Northwest) Caucasian, and this tradition is inevitably traced stage by stage to a time prior to any contact with outside religions, whether they be Hellenistic cults, Christianity, or Islam. Some clergy, after Christianity was revived in post-Soviet Abkhazia, have also joined the struggle for the “correct” interpretation of a-kadak heritage. After the release of our publications (Kuznetsova and Kuznetsov 2016; 2017), Father Dorotheus (Dbar), then the head of the Holy Metropolis of Abkhazia, reacted on Facebook: “Be sure to read!” he exclaimed, arguing that it would not have been written in the period of state atheism, nor would the contemporary Abkhaz nationalist ideologists publish it today. Obviously, the Orthodox priest and the recent Lidzava spiritual leader (who died in 2021 and whose position is still vacant) sympathized with our findings and were too skeptical of mainstream anthropology. Both of them are also our relatives, which complicates the context of this research even more. Our long-term fieldwork among members of the community torn by conflict, and our attempt to penetrate deep into the causes of those conflicts, lead us to moral dilemmas. Of course, in a society that has not yet forgotten the excesses of the interethnic clashes and cleansings of the early 1990s, the strategy of a positivist-minded anthropologist engaged in the search for objective truth is doomed to fail. Insisting that indigenous familial occult practices are historically dependent upon Christian temples, which were associated with Georgian, Byzantine, or Russian history, is to support (neo)colonial attitudes toward Abkhazia, no matter from which side. The dramatic recent events in Ukraine have shown that the emerging threats of the restoration of the old imperial policies, at least those emanating from Russia, are very real. But to interpret local religious beliefs as a kind of tribal pagan cult, which young Abkhaz ethnonationalists might like, is to present oneself as oldfashioned in relation to the rest of the world. Both of these can be seen as attempts to appropriate the religious heritage of specific families and to establish control over their behavior and private life.

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As E. Dauphinee (2010: 818) reminds us, “responsibility, ethics, and love are not the same,” though they may “enable one another.” Even a sensitive subaltern and gender-oriented approach is not enough to make one welcome by everyone in the research context. It is not uncommon that once you state your interest in a research topic, you will start to have competitors, like some rural teachers and clergymen who are “interested in history,” or envious people, such as a neighbor who claims to be part of your family’s garden. A perfect example of such a conflict “below” took place in the summer of 2022. In our book, we mention how our late son-in-law Beslan Margania doubted the truth of the noble origin of another family, named Mikanba. (Kuznetova and Kuznetsov 2016: 99). A contemporary member of the Mikanba family, having read a not very flattering description of their distant ancestor, came to the son of our relative to express displeasure! Is it realistic to remain neutral in such situations, and to accept everyone’s understanding of truth? Is it possible to write a totally ethical ethnography now? The answer is contained in a warning from Stephen Tyler’s (1986: 140) article, the title of which we allude to in this chapter’s own title: “I call ethnography a meditative vehicle because we come to it neither as a map of knowledge nor as a guide to action, nor even for entertainment. We come to it as the start of a different kind of journey.”

Rita Kuznetsova is a senior lecturer of anthropology at Kuban State University. She is a native of Abkhazia/Georgia, which is the focus of her main academic publications. Rita is a participant and team member of fieldwork projects in different countries, including Turkey (2015) and Latvia (2016). She also researches gender relations and the history of anthropology in the Caucasus region. With Igor Kuznetsov, she copublished Akadak: iezhegodnoie moleniie lidzavtsev (Akadak: annual praying of Lidzava villagers, 2016) as well as several articles and chapters on Abkhazia and the Black Sea region. Igor Kuznetsov is currently a senior researcher at the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology RAS, Moscow. Dr. Kuznetsov’s research covers peoples of the Caucasus and North Pacific Rim, and the history of anthropology. Since the 1980s, he has conducted ethnological fieldwork in Abkhazia and other parts of the Caucasus as well as Siberia and North America. With Rita Kuznetsova, he copublished Akadak: iezhegodnoie moleniie lidzavtsev (Akadak: annual praying

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of Lidzava villagers, 2016) as well as several articles and chapters on Abkhazia and the Black Sea region.

References Bhabha, Homi. 2007. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge. Chardin, Jean. 1811. Voyages du chevalier Chardin en Perse et autres lieux de l’Orient, nouvelle édition. Paris: Le Normant Imprimeur Libraire. Chirikba, Vyacheslav. 2015. “Between Christianity and Islam: Heathen Heritage in the Caucasus.” In Studies on Iran and the Caucasus: In Honour of Garnik Asatrian, ed. Uwe Bläsing, Victoria Arakelova, and Matthias Weinreich, 145–91. Leiden: Brill Academic Publications. Chukbar, Anton. 1915. “Anan Ldzaa-nykh.” Sotrudnik Zakavkazskoi missii 8: 119–20; 9: 140–43; 10: 146–50; 11: 166–68. Chursin, Grigory. 1956. Materialy po etnografii Abxazii [Materials for ethnography of Abkhazia]. Sukhumi: Universali. Dauphinee, Elizabeth. 2010. “The Ethics of Autoethnography.” Review of International Studies 36(3): 799–818. Djanashia, Nikoloz. 1917. “Abkhazskii kul’t i byt.” Khristianskii Vostok 5(3): 158–208. Holman Jones, Stacy, Tony Adams, and Carolyn Ellis, eds. 2016. Handbook of Autoethnography. London: Routledge. Johnson, Allen, and Timothy Earle. 2000. The Evolution of Human Societies: From Foraging Group to Agrarian State, 2nd edn. Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press. Krylov, Aleksandr B. 2001. Religiia i traditsii abkhazov (po materialam polevykh issledovanii 1994–2000 gg.) [Religion and traditions of the Abkhazians]. Moscow: Institute of Oriental Studies. Kuznetsova, Rita. 2013. “Byt’ abkhazom (vybor etnichnosti).” In Arkheologia i etnografiia pontiisko-kavkazskogo regiona, Vyp. 1, 89–106. Krasnodar: Kubanskii gosudarstvennyi universitet. Kuznetsova, Rita, and Igor Kuznetsov. 2016. Akadak: iezhegodnoie moleniie lidzavtsev [Akadak: annual praying of Lidzava villagers]. Krasnodar: Kubanskii gosudarstvennyi universitet (Arkheologia i etnografiia pontiisko-kavkazskogo regiona, Vyp. 4). ———. 2017. “Akadak i Ldzaa-nykh: k istorii gibridnykh kul’tov v Abkhazii.” Gosudarstvo. Religiia. Tserkov’ v Rossii i za rubezhom 2(34): 38–66. Lavrov, Leonid I. (1959) 2009. “Doislamskiie verovaniia adygeitsev i kabardintsev.” In Izbrannyie trudy po kul’ture abazin, adygov, karachaievtsev, balkartsev, ed. Leonid Lavrov, 197–236. Nal’chik: KBGI. Mühlfried, Florian. 2014. “A Taste of Mistrust.” Ab Imperio 4: 63–68. Nemirovich-Danchenko, Vasily I. 1880. “Pitsunda.” In V gostiakh: Ocherki i rasskazy, ed. Vasily Nemirovich-Danchenko, 157–95. St. Petersburg: Emil Gartier.

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Pachulia, Vianor P. 2009. Padenie Anakopii (Legendy Kavkazskogo Prichernomor’ia) [A fall of Anakopia: legends of Black Sea coast]. Sukhum: Dom pechati. Smirnova, Yaroslava S. 1955. “Semeinyi byt i obshestvennoie polozheniie abkhazskoi zhensh’iny.” In Kavkazskii etnograficheskii sbornik, Tom 1, 113–81. Moscow: Nauka. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1988. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Marxism and the Interpetation of Culture, eds. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, 271–313. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan Education. ———. 1990. The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues. London: Routledge. Tyler, Stephen A. 1986. “Post-Modern Ethnography: From Document of the Occult to Occult Document.” In Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, ed. James Clifford and George Marcus, 122–40. Berkeley: University of California Press. Utekhin, Ilya. 2018. “Suspicion and Mistrust in Neighbour Relations: A Legacy of the Soviet Mentality?” In Mistrust: Ethnographic Approximations, ed. Florian Mühlfried, 201–17. Wetzlar: Transcript Verlag. Zvanba, Solomon. (1855) 1982. “Abkhazskaia mifologiia i religioznye pover’ia i obriady mezhdu zhiteliami Abkhazii (Iz zametok prirodnogo abkhaztsa).” In Abkhazskie etnograficheskie etiudy, ed. Solomon Zvanba, 31–42. Sukhumi: Alashara.

8 “My Father Was a Reader” Practices of Folk Medicine in Northern Sweden Annelie Sjölander-Lindqvist and Johan Wedel

In this chapter, we use a collaborative and interactive autoethnographic approach to take a closer look at the healing activities, or so-called folk medicine, in northern Sweden today. In particular, we want to contribute to the knowledge about little-known healing practices performed by non-Sámi healers in Sweden. We will approach this theme through an insider’s perspective, using a dialogue format. Following a joint literary review of the subject, the second author (JW), who is a social anthropologist with an interest in healing, religion, and magic (see e.g., Wedel 2004, 2019), interviews the first author (ASL), who is also a social anthropologist as well as a human ecologist, about her experiences and memories as the child of a “reader,” a northern Scandinavian healer who may use both traditional Sámi and non-Sámi techniques to treat illness. We will explore anecdotal and personal experiences and memories of practices related to magic and the occult, and in particular the healing of people through the practices of “reading” (most often undertaken silently) and the “laying on of hands” on people who suffered from various afflictions. The employment of dialogue and conversation, and an autoethnographic framework, offer us the possibility to share personal narratives and discoveries and to analyze these against previous research (Chang 2008; Chang, Ngunjiri, and Hernandez 2013). We find the autoethnographic approach to be particularly fruitful when exploring subjective experiences and marginalized practices in a broader sociocultural context. We agree with Schmid (2019), who describes her

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work as a researcher using an autoethnographic approach in studies of postapartheid South Africa: “[It] permits me to unashamedly connect the personal and professional. This is especially important to me as an individual that seems constantly and consistently to be spanning but also questioning [various] boundaries” (265; Tilley-Lubbs 2016). Schmid’s research is positioned in a social, cultural, and political context fraught with questions pertaining to issues of silenced voices and histories. In a similar vein, in our context, autoethnography, and especially the collaborative autoethnographic approach, may allow us to explore what for different reasons may be marginalized, hidden, disclosed, and untold, and to critically and reflexively analyze individual experiences. This narrative elaborates on previous research on historical and contemporary northern Scandinavian folk medicine (Alver et al. 1980; Rathje 1983; Miller 2015) and sets out to highlight how reading, laying on of hands, and other healing techniques were situated in the first author’s family, and in everyday life. Instead of exploring the voices of others, an autoethnographic approach builds the narrative around subjective experiences and the ethnographer’s own voice. Autoethnography can thus be described as “the study of one’s particular place in the world at a specific point in time” (Schmid 2019: 266). As an act transgressing the boundaries between the objective and the subjective, it allows the teller through critical reflexivity to be the story and the insider to be the outsider (Anderson 2006; Chang 2008; Mannik and McGarry 2017). While autoethnography builds on engagement with personal experiences and memories, it must be remembered that these are neither straightforward nor stable but rather data that, because of their personal nature, will be incomplete and subjective. Critics of autoethnography rightfully raise concerns that data derived from the researcher’s own life experience is questionable and problematic because the approach privileges the voice of the “I,” a voice that will always be incomplete (Jackson and Mazzei 2008). In dialogue, the voice of the interviewee (ASL) is first-person, partial, and individual. The stories told are glimpses of memories of larger experiences that unfolded in everyday life when the interviewee was a child and a young adult. The autoethnographic data, created through dialogue and framed in a literary review of current research on Sámi and non-Sámi healing experiences, is raw and partial. However, by applying an ethnographic, conceptual, and theoretical context to unsettle and complicate tensions and contradictions, we turn our eyes to the present and prompt a discussion of how cultural notions and practices reside in the co-

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presence of self, others, and not least of all of power relations and marginalized experiences (Spry 2009; Tilley-Lubbs 2016).

Trajectories of Healing Traditions in Northern Scandinavia Today in northern Scandinavia a variety of nonbiomedical healing techniques may well be the first choice when illness strikes, both among the indigenous Sámi and non-Sámi people. The traditional healing knowledge of the Sámi people, who have lived in the area for millennia (Kent 2014), has been resilient and survived, despite colonization, criminalization, marginalization, witch hunts, and sorcery accusations. Interacting with other healing traditions, including Western scientific medicine, both Sámi and non-Sámi healers are constantly exposed to new influences, healing techniques, ideas, and views on life (Miller 2015; Hætta 2015; Eriksson 2004, 2018). The continuities of healing knowledge and skills in the northern Scandinavian context should therefore be seen as located in a historical trajectory as well as a cosmology and worldview that are embedded in, and affected by, politics (Sande and Winterfeldt 1993). The fact that biomedicine seems to have played a minor role in the everyday life of people in the northern parts of Scandinavia before the second part of the nineteenth century is an important aspect of the development, practice, and use of folk medicine (Tuft, Nakken, and Kverndok 2017). In these regions, biomedical health facilities and doctors could be far away. The use of “wise” men and women to treat illness may sometimes have been the first choice. On other occasions, however, a visit to the traditional healer was a necessity due to a lack of hospitals, doctors, and roads. Often, the sick person had to be transported to biomedical facilities by small boat or horse sleigh in harsh conditions. In fact, by 1869, there were only five hospitals in the north of Sweden, and in one of these there were only eight beds for patients (Rathje 1983). The shortage of doctors meant that you had to rely on wise knowledge. . . [W]hen someone got sick you went to wise men or women to be cured. The medicine they used was made out of different leaves and herbs and often mixed with liquor. (Rathje 1983: 25)

Sámi healing is still practiced by the Sámi people in northern Scandinavia (Kiil and Salamonsen 2013; Langås-Larsen et al. 2017; Langås-

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Larsen et al. 2018; Sande and Winterfeldt 1993; Skott 1998; Sexton and Sørlie 2008; Eriksson 2018), although there is seldom a clear distinction between Sámi and non-Sámi healing when techniques and practices are described in the literature. According to Hætta (2015: 27), “Sámi traditional medicine cannot easily be differentiated from other traditional medicine in the same region, and many of the healing practices and techniques found among the Sámi are also found among other ethnic groups and in distant cultures.” Overall, descriptions of Sámi and non-Sámi healing tell of similar practices to cure or treat almost any kind of illness that can arise during the lifetime of a person (e.g., Alver et al. 1980; Rathje 1983). Even if there are similarities between Sámi healing practices and other kinds of nonindigenous folk medicine in the region, one major difference remains: whereas many aspects of Sámi traditional medicine and healing have been documented, there are comparatively few studies on non-Sámi healing practices in Sweden. Some researchers speculate that the tradition of consulting a wise man or woman already had started to fade away by the beginning of the 1930s (Rathje 1983; Rathje 1985; Alver and Selberg 2001). It has been argued that the use of healing knowledge and the skills of wise men and women declined simply because of improved conventional biomedical healthcare facilities, better means of transportation, and improved infrastructure, or because younger generations were not interested in learning the associated skills and healing knowledge. Whether non-Sámi healing practices in northern Sweden are truly in decline, or whether this is more a reflection of lack of interest on behalf of the research community, is a matter of dispute. Folklore researcher and writer Jörgen I. Eriksson (2004) has interviewed a number of Sámi and non-Sámi healers in the Swedish northern regions of Lapland and Tornedalen, and he has shown that healing practices that may involve reading or praying, laying on of hands, dreams and visions, or various objects are still very much alive. In the contemporary northern Scandinavian context, there are various reasons for visiting a shaman / healer / wise man / wise woman. Generally speaking, mistrust of the public healthcare system may be one reason why people consult healers and try alternative medicine (e.g., Daerga 2017). Biomedicine may also be seen as insufficient in terms of both diagnosis and treatment (Niemi and Ståhle 2016). It has also been argued that healers devote more time than conventional physicians to each patient and pay more attention to preventive and salutogenic aspects, and that alternatives to biomedicine are cheaper or even free (Alver 1995; Nilsson, Trehn, and Asplund 2001). In the

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context of northern Scandinavian healers, it is commonly held that they are not allowed to receive any compensation for their services, not even a “thank you,” or their healing powers will be lost (Myrvoll 2015). The reasons for visiting healers should also be understood in an existential context. The anthropologist Evans-Pritchard (1937) showed how healers, by placing illness and suffering in a larger social context, would help the afflicted to answer the existential “why me?” or “why have I have been affected?” questions. Nonbiomedical healing is often directed at the subjective experience of an illness, and at changing the sufferer’s social relations. Biomedicine, on the other hand, is more narrowly focused on the individual body and on curing a specific physical and organic problem (Kleinman 1980; Strathern and Stewart 1999).

Religion, Healing, and Illness Perceptions in a Historical and Contemporary Context The healing practices of the Sámi people, who today live in the northern and Arctic areas of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia, have their roots in shamanism and nature-oriented cosmological ideas and beliefs (Sexton and Sørlie 2008). Even if many aspects of shamanisticinfluenced practices are still in use and kept alive within many Sámi communities, the Scandinavian nation-states have historically and sometimes forcefully aimed at Christianization and “civilizing” the so-called Lapps. This has led to the loss of important knowledge and historic details about shamanic healing, although aspects of shamanic or neoshamanic practices, such as drumming, are still being used by healers and patients today (Sexton and Sørlie 2008; Miller 2015; Eriksson 2004). Religious and cosmological ideas and perceptions among both the Sámi and non-Sámi population have been important components of particular healing practices. These include herbs, such as fjällkvanne (Angelica archangelica), that are used to strengthen the immune system and treat infections (Daerga 2017; Túnon 2000), and the reciting of specific verses believed to have strong healing powers. According to a wise woman in the late nineteenth century, God created healing opportunities through the use of plants and herbs for medicine to nurse a person back to health (Alver et al. 1980). The verses are often of biblical origin, and “it is not the actual words that heal, but the power of God that comes with it” (Kiil and Salamonsen 2013: 483).

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This is not only the case for Sámi healing practices; it is also pertinent to folk medicine practices among non-Sámi Swedes (Rathje 1983). It is also important to recognize that the practice of both traditional and recent forms of healing in the circumpolar areas of northern Scandinavia are embedded in a context of cultural losses, marginalization, historical repression, abuses, and the suppression of illness beliefs and ideas (Sexton and Sørlie 2008; Sametinget 2016). This became evident when talking to a female physician who was of Sámi origin, and who worked at a health clinic in a town in northern Sweden. She claimed that many patients use nonbiomedical treatments in secret: This is Norrland [northern Sweden]. People go here and there, but it’s nothing they talk about. I grew up here. I know what’s going on and I know that some look for alternative treatments. Sometimes people tell me. I don’t have the power to decide for anyone and I reject nothing. But it’s not anything I record and register. I just say “it’s your choice, do as you please.” The reason that people don’t want to talk about it is also because of all the bad [historical] things that have happened here. Some researchers talk about a cultural trauma. (Wedel 2020: 60)

Sámi healing was for a long time suppressed in the north of Sweden and Norway. One important reason for this was that the nation-states in the two countries aimed at assimilating the Sámi people with the majority non-Sámi population. This pressure on behalf of the nation-state meant that many Sámi cultural characteristics became a sign of inferiority (Lantto and Mörkenstam 2008; Mulk 2009). The use of the derogative “Lapps” instead of Sámi is one example (Liliequist and Karlsson 2011). The reluctance of the Swedish state to change policy toward the Sámi people and to ratify International Labor Organization Convention No. 169 (concerning indigenous and tribal peoples in independent countries) has been seen as another example of the oppression of the Sámi people at a policy level (Lantto and Mörkenstam 2008). In 2007 and in 2016, Sweden was criticized for its treatment of the Sámi people in a United Nations report focusing on economic, social, and cultural rights (Daerga 2017; Sametinget 2016). This unjust approach is especially evident when Sámi healing and illness explanations are discussed by outsiders. People with extraordinary experiences, who may have spiritual encounters and experience foreboding, may be understood as mentally ill. This was explained by a Sámi nurse who worked in a health clinic in northern Sweden:

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Many Sami experience foreboding. My mother had it. She was warned when something was going to happen. She could hear a tree falling, but it did not fall. She could see black shadows running. The spirits warn you that something is going to happen. It’s not strange or scary. If a Sami patient who suffers from mental ill-health tells me this, I will understand. I could ask “did you invite them [the spirits].” A [non-Sami] psychiatrist would just say that the patient is mentally ill. (Wedel 2020: 61)

The curative and preventative strategies used in the past by both Sámi and non-Sámi people in northern Scandinavia include, but are not restricted to, curing skin problems, solving problems that may arise during pregnancy and childcare, and curing toothache, sepsis, jaundice, cystitis, and asthma, as well as contagious diseases such as cholera and the Spanish flu and even cancer (Rathje 1983). Various techniques of manipulation and natural remedies, such as herbs, plants, and sap collected from birch trees, are mentioned in historical literature (Alver et al. 1980; Rathje 1983). Spiritual and magical therapies aimed at working with both negative and positive forces involved “magic handbooks” such as the Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses (Eriksson 2018: 25f). Many of these treatments and therapies are still in use by the Sámi today. Particularly among reindeer herders, illness, health, and healing are closely related to the family and its animals, and to weather conditions, nature, and spiritual protectors of places (Sexton and Stabbursvik 2010; Daerga 2017; Helander-Renvall 2010; Skott 1998; Ingold and Kurttila 2000). Today, the healer, known as “reader” (gunsttar, guvvlar, or noaidi/nåejtie), may use prayers from the Bible, dreams, foreboding, helpful spirits, Christian images, herbs, massage, holy water, candles, fire, wool, ash, bone, urine, alcohol, tobacco, feces, hair, potatoes, natural stones, moss, blood, objects of steel, neoshamanic drumming, and “chakra healing” to deal with all kinds of illnesses, suffering, pain, and even bad luck. This may also include the “cleansing” of disturbing spirits and finding lost objects (Miller 2015; Sexton and Stabbursvik 2010; Langås-Larsen et al. 2018; Sande and Winterfeldt 1993; Eriksson 2018, 2004). The practice of stopping blood flow is particularly common among healers in northern Scandinavia. A healer who used a formula involving iron and steel described how he worked. The arteries appear to clog. It’s not the blood that coagulates. The veins are controlled by the autonomic nervous system—it is possible that you can influence it. It is a huge effort that you make. . . . I see for my inner

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vision how it whitens around the wound and stops bleeding. Shortly afterward, this also happens in reality. (Eriksson 2018: 80)

We will now turn to a more personal and experiential understanding of healers and healing in northern Sweden by using the dialogue format. In this conversation, as the second author (JW) interviews the first author (ASL), we will explore healing and practices that may be considered magical and occult from a familiar and kin-based, as well as academic, perspective.

“My Father Was a Reader” JW: In many healing traditions, healers pass on their healing powers and abilities to one of their children. It is also common to be “called” by spirits, for example through dreams and visions. What was this like in your family? ASL: I have a memory that I told my father that I wanted to become a “reader,” that is, someone who through hands-on contact or reading prayers of healing treats and cures illness and disease. I had seen my father treat blood flow, toothache, headache, and other pains, and it appeared as an intriguing arena. The response was quietly firm: “No, you’re a girl.” Even at this young age (I remember I was around eight or nine years old) I became annoyed by my father’s response, and I asked, “Why not?” Today, the question has become more nuanced to me. I asked him what was it that made his knowledge and skills a secluded space for me? He responded: “You will get married, and you will change your surname.” Mulling over what his answer meant and asking again on this issue sometime later, I could not really come to grips with the real meaning of this. It disturbed me, and I felt excluded from an arena that I was fascinated by, and wanted to be a part of. I tried to convince him that I was indeed the right person for this since my brother had no interest, but according to my father, my brother was the only one of us siblings who could learn how to “read.” JW: The words and formulas that healers in northern Scandinavia use are seen as powerful and often secret and said to be from the Bible (Miller 2015; Eriksson 2004). How did your father work when reading prayers of healing and what was his opinion of the power of these words? ASL: My father never disclosed that the words or verses he used when reading over people who suffered from headache, toothache, or

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blood flow were of biblical faith or origin, but it is likely, considering previous research and available archival data. When I asked my father about his knowledge and skills, he said that it all was about “reading,” meaning that it was about words and phrases with the power to alter a condition. Now, when I have read more about this (e.g., Rathje 1983), I think that it is likely that the words or verses he used were of biblical origin, even if I have no evidence of that. I mean, if we look at archival sources, they show a collection of verses that were used for healing purposes, and the reciting of verses for stopping bleeding often ended with reference to Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. JW: Contemporary Sámi and non-Sámi healers have been known to be particularly good at stopping bleeding, treating inflammation, and reliving toothache and pain, as well as at dealing with social and mental health problems. Common techniques are dreaming, reading, blowing, and the laying on of hands, which are said to become “warm” or “electric,” as well as massage and cupping, often in combination. Some healers are also said to be clairvoyant and experience foreboding, and they may work with spiritual helpers who offer protection and give advice (Miller 2015; Skott 1998; HelanderRenvall 2010; Wedel 2020). Do you remember any of these healing techniques and treatments? ASL: Many of these illnesses and techniques are familiar to me personally. I remember hearing about treatments and cures for different kinds of aches and other illness-related problems, and I remember treatment methods including ritual healing and natural remedies such as liquor. JW: Do you have any memories of specific treatments of pains and aches? ASL: I remember for example seeing my father lie on the kitchen sofa, looking with steady eyes at my mother, who complained that she had a toothache. After a few minutes, my father asked how she was doing, and she replied murmuring: “I don’t know what you did, and I don’t believe in it, but the toothache is gone.” My father showed a sapient smile and said nothing. On another occasion, an extended family member took me into a dark room to lay hands on my sprained ankle and smeared it with alcohol so I would be able to walk without limping. Yet another memory is how I had some kind of eczema on the fingers of my right hand. When my parents and I paid a visit to the same extended family member, I talked about how the rash-like eczema itched. One of the extended family members gently laid hands on my fingers, and a short moment passed silently, followed by “tomorrow morning this will be gone.”

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JW: Among the Sámi, there exist occult practices and nonbiomedical illness explanations, such as being exposed to an evil spell (bijat), a “death bird” (guottalvis), or “the evil ear” (Andersen, Persen, and Miller 2015; Beach 2001; Skott 1998). Many Sámi and non-Sámi people are also said to have unconventional and extraordinary abilities to heal, to foresee the future, and to find lost objects (Miller 2015; Eriksson 2004). ASL: When it comes to the clairvoyant aspect, an extended family member who practiced healing said to me that my very severe fear of the darkness was because of the spirits surrounding me. Perhaps this was just something this family member said to provide either some comic relief or a joke around the fact that I really had problems with darkness, and actually still do. I don’t know. The same family member also said that I had spirits watching over me and protecting me. Once I stepped out of a car completely uninjured after it had crashed and rolled over. That made me think of what had been said to me. On another occasion that could have ended badly, I was about to step into a car and drive away but something stopped me. If I had stepped into the car and driven away, I doubt that I would be here today. It was a stormy evening, and I was about to back out the garage. Something, and I mean literally something, stopped me for a moment. Some twenty to thirty seconds later, I did back out and felt something awkward underneath the wheels. I stopped the car, got out, and realized that the stormy winds had lifted one of the really large and heavy garage doors off its hinges. This really frightened me. It was clear to me that this something, whatever it was, saved me. These are probably only matters of coincidence, but they have somehow made me think of the possibility that there isn’t an answer to everything, and that there is more than we can perceive with our normal senses. As an academic, that is a bit annoying; I mean, we are more or less trained to think in terms of cause, effect, and evidence. Well, perhaps anthropology is some kind of an exception to that rule in the sense that anthropologists are more open, curious, and eclectic in relation to the unknown, and we do not dismiss people’s extraordinary experiences as superstition. Especially phenomenological and ontological approaches within anthropology, and all the stories of illness and healing I heard during my youth, have helped me understand the power of individual voices and that people’s stories and experiences really do matter. They should be taken seriously and not dismissed as anecdotal. JW: Recent research on the placebo effect or “meaning response” (Moerman 2002) has shown that symbolic, religious healing may ac-

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tually create physiological effects and alter bodily conditions. Still, this sort of healing is often seen as irrational and is explained away as unscientific “belief,” especially by biomedicine and many of its practitioners. How were these issues and controversies understood by your father and his clients? ASL: I wouldn’t choose to refer to the people he treated as clients, and even less as patients. It was more informal and like something that came up occasionally. While some of the practices were “performed” openly, I remember them mostly as enacted silently and in private. Perhaps this was a result of the healing practices being seen as something disputed, irrational, and backward looking. This view could have come from Swedish society in the decades following the 1950s, emphasizing, as part of general modernization efforts, scientific evidence as an inevitable part of medicine and health. JW: Do you have any specific memories of seemingly irrational or difficult-to-believe practices and results? ASL: One such incident was when the butcher asked my father to leave the pig slaughter since he affected the bleeding of the pigs with his presence, or when someone admitted they no longer felt the pain they had had after healing. I remember that the questioning of how healing actually worked did not bother my father at all. Perhaps he understood that people were uneasy about the boundaries between the different canons of medical/healing systems. On one hand, the “evidence” of traditional healing is usually only based on experience, while a patient’s understanding of conventional health services is embedded not only in personal experience but also in learned confidence that established, scientific biomedicine is to be trustworthy because it is based in laboratory science and measurable results. JW: Some healers are known to treat patients at a distance and may perform reading over the phone (Miller 2015; Eriksson 2004). Did your father have this ability? ASL: I have talked to my father on the phone and complained about having a headache. After a short moment, he asked, “How’s your headache?” Toward the end of our conversation, I could feel that my headache was gone. Perhaps it was because of my father or because I somehow had the belief that he could help. JW: Among the Sámi people in northern Norway, water from the fjord is used in healing. Water is said to separate a person from his/ her illness (Miller 2015). Did you come across similar ideas concerning how water may separate or unite and how healing may be performed at a distance?

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ASL: Even if I remember him saying that it was difficult to perform healing with running water between him and the person with the illness, he seems to have tried. Interestingly, I have now learned from the literature that traditional healing could be performed over the phone, but also how complementary and alternative strategies often require personal contact because the healer practices for example the laying on of hands with the patient (e.g., Miller 2015). JW: What was your and your family’s relationship to the Sámi people and the Sámi cultural, religious, and healing heritage? ASL: Perhaps the colonization process feeds into what I experienced myself during my younger years and as a young adult when I overheard how people queried the curative premises of the practices performed. It might be jumping to conclusions, but it was just a few years ago that I learned that I had actually grown up in a reindeer grazing area, and I wonder why this was an issue that we never discussed in school. I also recall that whenever (even if very rarely) the issue of reindeer and the Sámi came up in a conversation, the word “Lapps” was used. It seems like the word still lives, although it is often used in an ethnically discriminatory and derogatory way. A couple of years ago, I met an acquaintance of the family who started talking about a recent meeting with a “lappgubbe” (old Lappish man). Are these unsubstantiated memories, among many other glimpses and experiences of growing up in a context of folk medicine and alternative and noncommercial health practices, something shameful because the practices were a reminder of a troubled past? Even so, this geographical proximity to an indigenous Sámi village possibly reflects how the preventive, curative, and healing practices carried out by my family and my extended family can be considered an ongoing and constantly changing area of north Scandinavian healing tradition that may still be alive today. JW: How do you think these experiences and being the daughter of a “reader” has shaped you and your career path? ASL: Perhaps these moments and experiences led me to where I am today: an anthropologist / human ecologist working with holistic human-environmental interactions in a constant quest to turn things around out of curiosity about, and a desire for answers to, human conditions, experiences, thoughts, and behavior. JW: Some healers in northern Scandinavia refrain from having children as sexual reproduction is said to weaken the healer’s healing power (Dahlin 2014). You said in the beginning that your father did not want you to become a healer. Do you think there were cosmological/religious reasons involved, or was his opinion more based on societal and gendered notions at that time?

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ASL: I felt frustration over the fact that, according to my father, I could not learn the skills and knowledge to bring relief and cures to people because “it had to pass through the surname.” This has a gendered connotation, leading to the establishment of the healing domain as a closed system of learning related to wider cultural and social idioms regarding the assumed role of women and family in society. It may still be the explanation, or part of the explanation, for why I was not given the space to learn the powers to treat and cure. Against the current research context, however, it piques my curiosity that the skills to heal do not seem to be gendered in the sense that only women or men perform folk medicine treatments. Another frame of reference may be that my father was of the understanding that I was too young or did not have the required capacity to inherit the knowledge and put it into practice. Possibly, he might also have concluded that the skills and knowledge were too torn between different belief systems. JW: Autoethnography can produce “emotionally and intellectually powerful texts” (Tullis 2013: 246). Although individual stories are multidimensional and narratives of the self may serve as platforms for social critique (Pathak 2013), there are also important ethical implications and challenges. In this dialogue, you have shared your personal thoughts and experiences and we have learned about your father’s healing practices. What are your ethical and methodological thoughts here? ASL: I am aware that I take both an emotional and professional risk, firstly as narratives about occult-related healing practices may create prejudices against me and my family, and secondly as the autoethnographic method is often questioned and challenged, and even sometimes seen as dubious. This requires me to be very ethically engaged and first of all to follow the “do no harm” principle. I am convinced that my father would have appreciated what we have written and discussed in this text. He was an intelligent and open-minded person, with great social skills, easy to talk to, and someone who was not afraid of being in the center. This said, I think the benefits are greater than the disadvantages as autoethnographic texts can be very powerful and give unique perspectives and insights.

Toward a Conclusion: Researcher’s Gaze and the Self According to Andersen, Persen, and Miller (2015: 99), “expert and global knowledge systems have routinely undermined and overruled the local knowledge system.” The marginalization and silencing of

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Sámi and non-Sámi healing traditions and so-called occult practices in northern Scandinavia is no exception. In this chapter, we have tried to provide an insight into these rich traditions by using dialogue and an autoethnographic approach framed in contemporary ethnography. We have utilized the memories and experiences of folk medical curing practices from the first author as a means to examine and better understand these sometimes marginalized practices, as well as to reflect on some of the historical, social, and cultural complexities that have shaped her as a curious and open-minded researcher. This focus on subjective experience, meaning, identity, and relationships is more than narcissistic navel-gazing and a critical examination of the self (Coffey 1999). It also challenges the idea of the ethnographer as an “objective” observer and addresses “the wider sociopolitical contexts within which the discipline operates” (Mannik and McGarry 2017: 166). As Tilley-Lubbs (2016: 3) explains, “I don’t believe it is possible to function without preconceived thoughts and beliefs, or to maintain a completely objective position.” This approach reflects a selective process through which certain memories have been included, and others not. By situating the first author’s personal experiences and memories in a relational and contemporary context, we have emphasized the importance of reflexivity, subjectivity, and self-consciousness in both fieldwork and the production of ethnography. In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in nonbiomedical practices, including those deemed as magic and occult, both within and outside of academia. These practices should be understood in their own right and as a means for “radically questioning conventional understandings of what it is to be a human being and . . . extend[ing] to new horizons of knowledge” (Kapferer 2003: 25). It is our belief that collaborative and interactive autoethnography may be a fruitful way of contributing to this challenging task.

Johan Wedel is a lecturer and researcher in social anthropology at University of Gothenburg, Sweden. He has done fieldwork in Cuba, Nicaragua, and Sweden, and he has published articles in journals such as Kritisk Etnografi, Revue Korhogolaise des Sciences Sociales, Journal of Legal Anthropology, Socialmedicinsk Tidskrift, Anthropos, Anthropology and Medicine, Bildhaan, Stockholm Review of Latin American Studies, and Anthropological Notebooks. He is the author of Santería Healing: A Journey into the Afro-Cuban World of Divinities, Spirits, and Sorcery (University Press of Florida, 2004).

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Annelie Sjölander-Lindqvist is senior lecturer in human ecology and associate professor in social anthropology at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Her research addresses problems of sustainable development and conflicting values in areas of contested natural resource management, including the limits and possibilities of governance and policy work. She also analyzes issues of local identity, science, and politics in environmental contests and the link between place attachment, landscape dynamics, and resource management. Geographically, she studies environmental conflicts, rural development, and local food systems in Scandinavia and in Italy. She is the lead editor of the volume Anthropological Perspectives on Environmental Communication, published by Palgrave MacMillan in 2022. She publishes and serves as guest editor in journals such as Environmental Policy and Governance, Wildlife Biology, Frontiers HumanWildlife Interactions, Ecology and Society, Human Dimensions of Wildlife, and Environmental Values.

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Afterword James M. Nyce

When Pandora opens the box in the eponymous myth, she brings into the world wrath, gluttony, greed, envy, sloth, pride, and lust. In the study of magic, a more intellectual kind of sin is often at work when the questions we ask about magic become interrogations about naivety, misperception, and whether magic can be anything more than some epiphenomenon of socially grounded exotic beliefs and practices. “Those who see witchcraft on its way to injure some person at night say that when witchcraft moves along, it shines just like flame. I have only once seen witchcraft on its path, and its bright light was moving towards Tupoi’s homestead,” writes E. E. Evans-Pritchard in Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic among the Azande (1937: 34). Shortly after this, an old relative of Tupoi’s dies, and Evans-Pritchard adds, “This event fully explained the light I had seen” (34). To prove this, Evans-Pritchard notes that the only man nearby who owned a light that bright had not used it that night. By the end, Evans-Pritchard discounts the possibility that he had seen magic at work: “I never discovered [the light’s] real origin, which was possibly a handful of grass lit by someone on his way to defecate” (34). The social (bodily rituals, in this case) triumphs over what had been seen as empirical and existential fact. It is hard to find a better example of what anthropologists habitually do when confronted by magic or witchcraft. Writing them off in this way allows us to ignore the elephant in the room, namely, magic’s actual ontological status. While this ontological question should

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be part of any discussion of the familial occult, none of us have tackled it head-on here. To ask whether magic is real is not the same as asking, as Evans-Pritchard did, how magic works. By stopping here, an important analytical opportunity is lost. In other words, questions about magic often get turned into questions about how magic works (in specific cases like that above), and this tends to finesse any ontological issues that magic might raise. It is too easy to assume that we as anthropologists hold magic to the same standards as we do any empirical or “real” act when we define it as a set of instructions or a recipe that must produce something we take as real in the end. It is this litmus test that allows us to dismiss all other aspects or dimensions of magic as unessential, irrelevant, or fanciful—something only children or the gullible in our culture would be taken in by. In other words, it seems the height of intellectual imperialism that we judge the magic of others by the same standards we do our culture’s stage magicians (did he or she really pull that rabbit out of a hat?) as unessential, irrelevant, or fanciful. This afterword describes some of the rhetoric and literary tropes used to make magic disappear. In Favret-Saada’s wonderful Deadly Words: Witchcraft in the Bocage (1980), the bewitched are seen as participants in a particular language game. In short, certain boundaries, words, and actions have power only within the specific parameters of witchcraft—but they also have enough power to kill. However, to ensure that power (and magic) do not escape the boundaries of any game, Favret-Saada argues that there may not truly be a witch causing the series of unfortunate events that befall the victim, or that the witch may only exist in the imaginations of the individuals participating in the game. So, if the witches are not real for Favret-Saada, neither can be their magic. Here, magic and power are reduced to the epiphenomena of a particular set of social, linguistic, and historical conditions, nothing more. This of course suggests that magic can only “work” within bounded conditions. In this way, magic is naturalized but only within a certain set of social conditions, thus reducing it and its ontological status to a product of culture and history. Ingmar Bergman’s 1958 film The Magician opens with Dr. Albert Vogler’s traveling troupe. The Magnetic Health Theatre arrives in a small nineteenth-century Swedish town, like a medicine show. Many of the town’s people come to believe that the performers are in fact magical figures when the town’s representatives of the law, medicine, and the bourgeoisie attempt to discredit the performers. Eventually the troupe’s magic is revealed to be trickery and they are about to be driven out of the town. But at the last minute, the police chief noti-

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fies them and the townspeople that the king of Sweden has requested Vogel’s troupe perform for him at the royal palace. They then leave for Stockholm with a royal escort and their reputation seemingly restored. The take-home point is that troupe’s magic may not be (entirely) trickery. This is in part because, as the film goes on, Vogel’s grandmother, a troupe member, is revealed to be a witch. But in the end, as in Favret-Saada’s Deadly Words, the issue of magic’s reality is (here literally) taken off the stage. Further, both Favret-Saada and Bergman portray judgement(s) about magic as reflecting nothing more than local, bounded conditions. In short, as in Evans-Pritchard’s Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic among the Azande, questions about magic and ontology are muted because magic is presented as nothing more than some local theory of causality. In my own fieldwork, I saw magic transcend its usual associations with stagecraft and trickery. An older German Mennonite male in Ontario, Canada, told me a story around 1970 about a boy he knew who claimed his neighbor could bewitch things and could turn his pigs into elephants (Nyce 2014). In the middle of the story, he stopped short, perhaps noticing my stunned reaction, and continued by saying, “Now if you know what it is like to feed little pigs . . . they were used to feeding from mother and now they have to feed themselves. They get pretty hungry before they learn how to do it. They get skinny, and if they are not healthy, they get long snouts, and they get deformed a little bit, and they look like elephants.” Perhaps to avoid being accusing of lying or fabrication, the old man recast this story in which a witch had the power to change pigs into elephants into one where a young farm boy had misunderstood swine biology. In short, the old man gave me what he may have believed I wanted—an account of these events that would make (more) sense to anyone outside the boy’s community. Like Favret-Saada, the old man attempted to replace his social reality, rules, and principles with ones that I and my potential readers would see as more credible and natural. This rhetorical gambit ends up with magic being so domesticated that our (epistemological) side of the story comes out on top. Not only do we do this ourselves, as Favret-Saada and Evans-Pritchard show, but we can also have informant(s), as my informant illustrates, do it for us. In short, magic is generally treated as reflecting nothing more than the problems and difficulties of living in a particular society or community. During fieldwork in Romania, I was told about people going to witches for help to avoid a trap set for them by the commu-

194 ◆ The Familial Occult

nist security forces. The police had arranged for the two theaters in this community to show two different films at the same time, one of them ideologically suspect. When community members learned of the plot, they asked a local witch to make them invisible to the police monitoring the audience at the suspect film. A story such as this shows how easy it is to reduce magic to some social function and to finesse questions about its ontological status. Further, such theoretical precedent makes it easy to discount the possibility that magic could instead be something that is not merely social or normative in origin but rather something universal, like a law of physics. Maybe there is more to magic than being a social item? Could it be possible that magic not only “works” but is real? My mother would sometimes mock my grandfather (her fatherin-law) in front of the rest of the family, which no one else in the family did because we learned it can be dangerous to taunt any witch in public. My mother here defied both social and familial logic. But of course, norms are sometimes challenged in families and societies, and profound change can occur as a result. The question is whether we should locate the norms all entirely in a social space. The question “Is magic real?” may be an uncomfortable one, but if we continue to ignore or evade it, we risk impoverishing the anthropological inquiry into magic. We need to question anthropology’s commitment, when it comes to magic, to the real. The reason this stance seems so reasonable is not because some rationalist force maintains it without our knowledge behind our backs. It seems plausible because it both mirrors and reinforces how we believe the world and reality are constructed and work. Consequently, we as anthropologists work hard (intentionally or not) to reduce magic to its lowest terms. What a turn to the familial occult suggests is that it can be possible, through magic, to challenge and rewrite the natural order of things.

James M. Nyce is professor emeritus of anthropology, Ball State University, and a docent (computer/information science) at Linköping University, Sweden. Long interested in risk and danger as cultural categories, he has published with colleagues some two hundred papers from fieldwork carried out in Canada, Romania, Sweden, and the United States. For example, he has published, with Alexandra Coțofană, Religion and Magic in Socialist and Post-Socialist Contexts (2 vols., ibidem Press / Columbia University Press).

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References Evans-Pritchard, Edward, E. 1937. Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Favret-Saada, Jeanne. 1980. Deadly Words: Witchcraft in the Bocage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nyce, James M. 2014. “That His Pigs Turn into Elephants: Contrivance, Knowledge, and Magic.” Anthropological Studies 5: 216–26.

Index

Abkhazia, 13–14, 152–171 America, 18, 70, 132, 134, 170 American, 9, 11, 21–24, 32, 38–44, 68, 71, 77–78, 82, 84, 97, 100, 107, 118, 119, 125, 136 Asian American, 12, 17–19, 21–24, 38–44 brother, 95, 123, 138, 140, 143, 158, 162, 165–166, 180 Buddhism, 18, 20–22, 25, 29, 31–32, 37, 39–40, 108 Buddhist, 18, 20–22, 25–26, 29–32, 34–35, 37–39 burial, 94, 96 Catholic, 12, 18, 50–51, 103–104, 106–107, 111 charmer, 124–125 Chinese, 18, 22–26, 28, 30, 34, 36, 38–40, 108, 135 Chinese American, 11, 17–19, 21–24, 26, 29–30, 34, 37, 38–44 Christianity, 57, 103, 157–160, 162, 169, 171 Christian, 18–19, 33, 51, 66, 79, 99, 100, 103, 107, 132, 145, 157–159, 166–167, 169, 179 colonial, 2–4, 7, 13, 69–70, 73, 137, 152, 159, 169 conjuring, 3, 51, 56 critical autoethnography, 2, 4, 18, 130–131, 139 critical theory, 7, 153

death, 12–13, 20, 48–49, 58–59, 77, 79, 93, 105, 108–109, 130, 137–138, 140, 144, 146, 156, 164, 182 divination, 3, 6, 78, 87, 93, 129 Eastern Europe, 62 empire, 13, 135, 148, 153 epistemology, 4, 7, 20, 22–25, 33, 40, 51, 123–125, 131, 193 familial occult, 1–4, 6–8, 11–14, 55, 58, 62, 66, 68–70, 73–74, 76–81, 85, 93, 115, 117–118, 123, 129–131, 133, 136, 139–142, 144, 159, 169, 192, 194 family, 1, 3, 5–8, 10–11, 13, 20–22, 35–36, 38, 46–47, 53, 56, 63, 73– 76, 80, 86–89, 91, 93–95, 97, 99, 101, 106, 116–123, 126, 131, 133, 135–137, 139, 141, 144–145, 147, 153–154, 156–160, 162–167, 170, 174, 179–182, 184–185, 194 father, 11–12, 14, 17–22, 24–39, 47–48, 56, 59, 63, 66, 68, 75, 79–80, 84, 91–92, 94, 101, 105–106, 122–123, 136, 153, 157–159, 162, 169, 173, 180–181, 183–185 Favret-Saada, Jeanne, 14, 71, 192–193 Filipino, 26, 51 funeral, 67, 78, 80, 95, 166 generation, 3, 12, 71, 135, 147, 176 genie, 12, 84–93, 95–96, 98–103, 105, 108, 110

Index ◆ 197

Georgia, 152–154, 156–157, 163 grandfather, 5, 68, 93–94, 115–116, 122–123, 129, 135–140, 155, 158, 163, 194 grandmother, 5, 11, 63, 66–68, 74–80, 90–91, 115–116, 122–123, 135– 136, 140, 193 imperialism, 107, 133, 192 Islam, 86, 96, 98, 103, 107, 109, 157, 158 Italy, 9, 187 Japanese, 18, 20–21, 25–26, 40 kinship, 2, 6, 38, 115–116, 121–123 Korean, 23, 26 magic, 1, 3, 6, 8, 13, 15, 21, 80–82, 98, 102, 108–109, 111, 114–117, 119– 127, 173, 179, 186–188, 191–195 magical, 69–70, 72, 84, 114–117, 119–125, 137, 147, 179–180, 192 German Mennonite, 13, 116, 118–122, 124–125, 127, 193 Morocco, 88, 94, 96–97, 100, 105–106, 108, 110, 112–113 Moroccan, 84, 86–88, 92, 98–103, 105, 107, 109–112 mother, 11, 14, 27, 35–36, 40, 45, 47– 49, 51, 53–59, 62–63, 66, 74–76, 79–80, 90–95, 101, 108, 122, 136, 142, 157, 158, 162, 164, 168, 179, 181, 193–194 Muslim, 86, 89, 94, 97, 102, 107, 158–159 native, 3, 8–9, 22, 69, 81, 84, 89, 90, 96, 101, 129, 132, 135, 141, 149, 152, 157, 170, 176, 178, 184 Native American, 9, 134 ontology, 4, 7, 17, 20, 22, 24, 29, 73, 86, 125, 182, 191–192 Orthodox (Christianity), 13, 62, 66– 67, 79, 100, 102, 111, 129, 159 Parsons, Anne, 2, 8–10, 14–15

Pentecostal, 88 Philippines, 12, 47, 50–51, 58 Protestant, 8–9 Qi, 12, 17, 20–21, 23–4, 28–29, 34, 40 religion, 6–7, 17–18, 21, 24, 29, 32–33, 37–39, 45, 50–52, 55, 84–86, 96– 99, 106–110, 124, 130, 134, 159, 167–169, 173, 177, 194 Romania, 14, 67, 77–78, 80, 124, 196 Russia, 13, 129, 149, 152, 169 Sámi, 173–179, 181–184, 186–190 secret, 6, 11, 70, 141, 148, 178, 180 secular, 6, 21, 32, 40, 49, 51, 98 shamanism, 72, 88, 104, 107, 129–130, 133, 177 shame, 2, 12, 66, 76, 80, 107, 137 Siberia, 130, 134, 142 sister, 11, 48, 54, 55, 57, 59 63, 66, 75, 79–80, 90, 92, 95 spirits, 48, 69, 71, 73, 87–88, 91, 97, 99–102, 104, 106, 134–135, 142, 181 Soviet, 131, 135, 139, 143–144, 149, 152–153, 156, 158, 160–161, 166–167, 169, Stalinism, 156, 162 Sweden, 14, 124, 135, 173, 175–178, 180, 183, 186–187, 189–190, 192–194 Taiwanese, 25, 39 Tilley-Lubbs, Gresilda, 18, 85, 131– 132, 174–175, 186 trauma, 19, 87, 147, 178 Western, 6–7, 9, 13, 40, 68, 72, 74, 78, 99, 114–115, 117, 121, 123, 130, 132, 136, 138, 152, 154–155, 162, 175 witchcraft, 1, 3, 6, 9–10, 66–67, 70–72, 74, 77, 81, 102, 108, 114–115, 119–120, 121–123, 175, 192–194 Yakutia, 129–130, 133–135, 137, 139, 141–145, 147–148