Other Worlds, Other Bodies: Embodied Epistemologies and Ethnographies of Healing 9781800738478, 1800738471

Citation preview

Other Worlds, Other Bodies

First published in 2023 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2023 Emily Pierini, Alberto Groisman, and Diana Espírito Santo 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: Pierini, Emily, editor. | Groisman, Alberto, 1958– editor. | Espirito Santo, Diana, editor. Title: Other worlds, other bodies : embodied epistemologies and ethnographies of healing / edited by Emily Pierini, Alberto Groisman, and Diana Espírito Santo. Description: New York : Berghahn Books, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022045351 (print) | LCCN 2022045352 (ebook) | ISBN 9781800738461 (hardback) | ISBN 9781800738478 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Spiritual healing and spiritualism. | Experience (Religion) | Healers. | Mediums. | Channeling (Spiritualism) | Theological anthropology. | Knowledge, Theory of. Classification: LCC BF1275.F3 O93 2023 (print) | LCC BF1275.F3 (ebook) | DDC 615.8/52—dc23/eng/20221213 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022045351 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022045352 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-80073-846-1 hardback ISBN 978-1-80073-847-8 ebook

https://doi.org/10.3167/9781800738461

Contents

‫ﱬﱫ‬

List of Illustrations

vii

Acknowledgments

viii

Introduction. Embodied Epistemologies of Healing Emily Pierini, Alberto Groisman, and Diana Espírito Santo Part I. Paradoxes and Dilemmas

1

31

1. Playing with Other Worlds: Renegotiating Bodily Experience and Hierarchy in Afro-Brazilian Candomblé Giovanna Capponi

33

2. Embodied Knowledge and the Phenomenological Posture to Frame the Anthropology of “Extraordinary” Experiences Géraldine Mossière

52

3. Living with Spirits: Spirituality and Health in São Paulo, Brazil Bettina E. Schmidt

73

Part II.

Transitions and Transformations

4. The Ghosts That Haunt Me: Feeling with Affective Technologies and Doing Ethnography about Spirit Possession in Contemporary Japan Andrea De Antoni 5. “Try Feeding the Ghost More”: Illness Experience and Understanding the Unseen in a Tamang Village, Nepal Paula Bronson

93

95

115

vi

Contents

6. Encountering Other Worlds through “Transreligiosity”: A Comparative Account of Healing, Embodiment, and Transformation in the Field Eugenia Roussou and Anastasios Panagiotopoulos 7. Learning to Trance: The Affective Grounding of Becoming Another Body in Another Place Tamara Dee Turner Part III. Engagements

133

153

173

8. Ways of Knowing and Healing: Mediumistic and Ethnographic Epiphanies in the Vale do Amanhecer Emily Pierini

175

9. Learning to Read the World: Education of Attention and Parapsychic Perception of the Environment Gustavo R. Chiesa

193

10. Sensory Ethnography and Anthropology of Mediumship: Exploring Brazilian Spiritist Practices in (Mental) Well-Being and Health/Care Helmar Kurz 11. Channeling an Archangel: An Apprenticeship in Metatronic Life and Healing® Fiona Bowie Epilogue. Healing, Images, and Trust Roger Canals Index

211

230

250

269

Illustrations

‫ﱬﱫ‬

FIGURES 4.1.

The ritual tool (kinpei) used during the exorcism, 2018. © Andrea De Antoni.

103

4.2. The main priest performing the ritual with the kinpei, 2016. © Andrea De Antoni.

104

7.1. 11.1.

ʿAbdāqa (black-and-white tunic) singing in a dīwān ritual. © Tamara Dee Turner.

157

Visual map of the Metatronic Pathway. Retrieved 5 September 2021 from https://www.metatronic-life.com/metatronic-coursemap/. © Clare Glennon. 238

TABLE 4.1.

Bodily feelings during the ritual breakdown. © Andrea De Antoni.

vii

106

Acknowledgments

‫ﱬﱫ‬

Other Worlds, Other Bodies was envisioned through various collaborations with scholars—especially ethnographers—and healing practitioners who have contributed in many ways to our ongoing and fruitful conversation. This dialogue started with Emily and Alberto. Later it unfolded in a very productive way with Diana’s contribution and led to the development of the HEAL Network for the Ethnography of Healing. The editors thank the three anonymous reviewers for their feedback and contributions to the volume. Emily wishes to thank Alberto, Diana, and the authors who contributed their reflections and ideas to this book for the enthusiasm with which they engaged in this open-ended conversation around embodied epistemologies of healing. This book was edited during Emily’s Marie Skłodowska-Curie project “THETRANCE–Transnational Healing: Therapeutic Trajectories in Spiritual Trance,” undertaken between Sapienza University of Rome, Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina (PPGAS-UFSC), and the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography at the University of Oxford. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 895395. She is grateful to Pino Schirripa, Alberto Groisman, and Ramon Sarró for their valuable contribution to this MSCA project in terms of rich scholarly exchange. She is also grateful to colleagues at the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina in Brazil, in particular Vânia Zikan Cardoso, Bruno Reinhardt, Fernando Ciello, and the postgraduate researchers for the insightful seminar discussions while she was visiting professor at the PPGAS. Alberto thanks all the authors and the people who collaborated and worked on the research experiences that motivated the chapters proposed for this collection. Alberto is also grateful to Emily and Diana for the opportunity to share ideas and collective work. Diana is grateful to Emily and Alberto for having been invited to participate in several events where the seeds of the ideas for this book were

Acknowledgments

ix

planted. She is grateful for the extremely fruitful dialogue with both of them, given their many years of thinking about spirit possession and themes of embodiment and healing.

Introduction

Embodied Epistemologies of Healing Emily Pierini, Alberto Groisman, and Diana Espírito Santo

‫ﱬﱫ‬ THE “REALLY” REAL Concepts such as “spirits,” “possession,” and “personhood” have very particular historical trajectories.1 In our view, the anthropology of religion may have been misinterpreting them all along. There has been a tendency to understand spirit possession in terms of a “theater” of sorts (whether conscious or not)—a result of a “belief” in “supernatural” powers, which are then somehow embodied in rites of possession trance or shamanism. The concept of “dissociation” in spirit possession studies, a psychiatric notion that posits a self (or consciousness) that can somehow step aside for spirit entry, is indicative of a stance that has spirits, gods, or other invisible entities framed in terms of figure-ground. “Culture” is the context, the ultimate ground from which spirits emerge, sometimes causally. Societal change, political destabilization, resistance, as well as modernity itself are seen to cause spirits to appear (Comaroff and Comaroff 1993; Geschiere 1996; Ong 1987; cf. Pedersen 2014 for a counterexample). This is informed by a particular intellectual history, which then needs to replace their existence with other, more “real” facts. This intellectualization may be evident even in a consideration of shamanic practices, where the soul of the shaman is believed to “leave” the body so that it can take flight or seek other healing spirit beings. Traditional formulations of shamanism equally leave out complex nuances of the experience, which could and should shape analysis. It has not escaped unnoticed (for example, in Asad 1993) that anthropology has itself 1

2

Emily Pierini, Alberto Groisman, and Diana Espírito Santo

inherited not simply from a division between meanings and things but also between spiritual, religious domains, and economic, technical, and bodily ones. According to Fennella Cannell (2006), anthropology reproduces these uneasy and ethnographically untenable divides by implicitly positing religious phenomena as the epiphenomena of real, underlying, and clearly materialistic causes. These divisions go to the heart of modernity itself, the Enlightenment, personhood, even notions of material possession (property, for example). Paul C. Johnson traces the genealogy of the term “possession” and the idea that it implies a “dramatic displacement of everyday consciousness” (2014, 3). Spirit possession in plantation societies, which were in full force in the Americas mostly from the sixteenth to early nineteenth centuries, indexed the ultimate “absence of control, the body without will” (2014, 5). This is of course apt for societies for whom slaves were not persons, or only partially persons, and thus did not qualify for ownership of private property. From the Christian demonic scripts that circulated in the 1600 and 1700s in which some forms of possession were legitimate, not simply subjective, spirit possession again became a “stable cluster concept” (Johnson 2011, 398) when transposed to colonial slave societies, replete with object-like denizens: “Via the labor of the negative, ‘spirit possession’ defined the rational, autonomous, self-possessed individual imagined as the foundation of the modern state, in canonical texts from Hobbes, Jean Brodin, Locke, Charles de Brosse, Hume, Kant, and many others, as those texts constructed the free individual and citizen against a backdrop of colonial horizons and slavery” (Johnson 2011, 398). Spirit possession thus became one of the markers of a savage stage in society, according to E. B. Tylor and others. It was a savagery that contrasted with, and in so doing, justified European enlightenment. Most importantly, it indicated the absence of consciousness, morality, and personhood (and thus material possessions), in opposition to rationality, science, the modern citizen who possessed “things,” and property. In a similar vein, working on his history of “Atlantic modernity” from the point of view of Cuba, Stephan Palmié argues that “far from designating even only typological opposites, the meanings associated with the terms Western Modernity and Afro-Cuban tradition represent mere facets or perspectival refractions of a single encompassing historical formation of transcontinental scope” (2002, 15). Palmié maintains that the distinction between Western rationality and African religion is not a primary given, but rather stabilized through the effects of “physical and conceptual violence” (2002, 19), including human corpses. This speaks exactly to the kinds of misinterpretations and misrecognitions that we mention at the very beginning of this chapter with relation to certain categories such as personhood and possession.

Introduction

3

We can explore and briefly deconstruct two misleading ideas here, in order to open up to our alternative proposal of “embodied epistemologies” later on. The first is the notion of “substitution” of the self—or dissociation, implying an emptying of the body—so prevalent, even implicitly, among scholars of possession, as mentioned above. The second is the idea that spirits are in some sort of “transcendent” characteristic of Christian and, in a more recent sense, Protestant frames (Taylor 2007; Weber 2002). As already mentioned, these assumptions apply to spirit possession studies in their historical dimension. But we should consider how these could apply to studies of shamanism, where there is a “flight” of the shaman’s soul, and a conceivable world of spirits beyond it (where there is a “native” transcendent, so to speak). Both of these assumptions rely on ideas of a particular sort of self, one that Taylor describes as interior, buffered, no longer permeable or porous as it once was in the pre-Enlightenment. It is a self that, analogously to notions of culture and mind as content to container, seen, for instance, in the enduring idea of the “psychic unity of mankind” (Cole 1996), enacts a separation between the spiritual and the material. This is not a reality of “incipient being” (Ingold 2006, 12), autopoetic and flowing, emergent, animate or sentient, in which we could possibly conceive of the soul in alliance or in communion with its exterior and interior, or as becoming. It is instead a reality in which it is “belief” that holds together a particular cosmos, lest it collapse, because it is not an intra-connected cosmos (Handelman 2004) but one based on separations, including of self/spirit from bodies, divine from mundane, transcendent from immanent. If we were to simplify drastically, this would be the core of our intellectual baggage as anthropologists of religious and other phenomena. In relation to shamanism, this is also subject to critique. Many scholars have posited shape-shifting entities, passages, and thresholds between levels of reality that do not conform to standard analytical categorizations of immanent or transcendent, let alone a simple “substitution” of self (Swancutt 2022). The assumption of the “vacated” self in what we call spirit possession is a paradigmatic example of how not to proceed. There is, in a general sense, no “passive” victim to the acting, possessing agent. It is a collaboration (Ochoa 2007), a contiguity (Wafer 1991), a co-presence (Beliso-De Jesús 2015), particularly in some of the Afro-Latin worlds we describe in this book. But we could even turn to ancient philosophy to explore this. In a chapter on divine possession in the Greco-Roman world, Crystal Addey fleshes out the views of philosopher Iamblichus on the nature of divine possession. She says he dissolves the dichotomy that some authors, such as Mircea Eliade (1964), have claimed characterize shamanism and possession, with the former being “men rising to the gods while possession sees the gods descend-

4

Emily Pierini, Alberto Groisman, and Diana Espírito Santo

ing to man” (2010, 172–73). It is not the case, according to Iamblichus, that the recipient of divine possession has no consciousness: “the central point is that the inspired individual is not conscious of anything else except the gods” (2010, 174). Inspiration is not the transport of the mind, but rather the mind is replaced by a kind of super-consciousness (2010, 175). This has as much to do with Iamblichus’s concept of the soul as it does with his concept of the divine. For Iamblichus, “the soul bears an imprint or reflection of divinity” (2010, 175); it is linked necessarily with a divine intelligence or truth. Thus, the possessed, while in the act, can see through the eyes of the divine, but this is “only possible because the soul contains a reflection of the divine” (2010, 177). Consider a point of comparison, suggested by one of this manuscript´s reviewers: that among the Mongolian Buryats, for instance, shamans/spirits “see” through eyes embroidered on their shamanic skullcaps, but the rest of the shaman’s body is used to smell, touch, and taste in ways not related to sight. Katherine Swancutt, for instance, has argued (2012) that for the Buryats the soul also contains a piece of the divine. Transcendence merits inspection here, for it is also immanent: “For neither is it the case that the gods are confined to certain parts of the cosmos, nor is the earthly realm devoid of them. On the contrary, it is true of the superior beings in it that, even as they are not contained by anything, so they contain everything within themselves” (Iamblichus, Mysteries, 1.8, 28.11-29.1, in Addey 2010, 179). For Iamblichus, it is more that “we exercise our activity in common with him” (the god) than that he possesses us proper (Mysteries, 3.5, 111.7-11). Divine possession for Iamblichus, says Addey, is not a question of an alien agency taking over a supposed victim. In many of the ethnographic contexts explored in this book, spirit possession and the embodied experience of healing is better described as communion, incorporation, fluidity, and other tropes that denote continuity rather than a rupture of divine and mundane. There is no one ontology of spirit possession, mediation, or healing as such: no formula to presuppose that the spirit or soul leaves the body, nor one that dictates what soul and body actually are. For instance, Katherine Swancutt and Meirelle Mazard argue that, “beyond the singular or transcendent soul, animistic ontologies offer alternative imaginings and configurations of agency and personhood and even of what it means to be human” (2018, 2). In their edited volume on animism, the contributors employ various ethnographic concepts that underlie the notion that animism is essentially plural, not homogeneous: “soul-spider,” “soul attributes,” and “forerunner,” among other terms used by their interlocutors, with corresponding theoretical implications (2018, 3). The question is to what extent an anthropology that deals with spirit possession, shamanism, and healing must rely on concepts, or on concepts

Introduction

5

alone. Or whether we, as scholars of these phenomena, do not have any other forms of description, perhaps those based on direct experience, which could then feed into a conceptual rendering of a social phenomenon. But in asking this, are we implying that our own cultural baggage is somehow set aside? Is this even possible? One of the corollaries of an Occidental understanding of mind and matter is a particular theory of mind. Contra cognitive psychological views of the classical “theory of mind”—which supposes an empathic stance that begins more or less at the age of three—Tanya Luhrmann (2011) writes that in many societies the fact that mind is not separate from world leads to a more culturally particular cognitive development. According to Luhrmann, the theory of mind inferred by cognitive psychologists and some anthropologists has both a universal and culturally particular aspect. With colleagues, Luhrmann has found evidence for at least six complex causal models of mind that she describes as “theories” within their communities. The first one is the Euro-American modern secular theory of mind— where people treat the mind as if there is a clear boundary between things in the mind and things in the world (2011, 6–7). This is the most dominant theory of mind in the Western world, and also one that is consonant with the premises of science. One speaks of “imagination” to refer to images in the mind; these are quite different to proper, material “things” out there in the world. Entities, supernatural or otherwise, do not enter the mind, and thoughts do not act in the world. At the same time, however, thoughts and emotions are powerful and causally important. They can even make someone ill. The second is the Euro-American modern supernaturalist theory of mind (2011, 6–7). Luhrmann says this theory can be found supporting charismatic Christianity, contemporary Chinese healing, paganism, New Age practices and cosmology, and new forms of spirituality. Here, people treat the mind very much like the first modern secular theory, except in some senses. The mind-world barrier becomes permeable to certain entities, such as God, or the spirit of a dead person, or for energies of sorts—these are treated as if they have causal power to effect changes in the world. The person learns to identify these energies and discipline themselves, implicitly or explicitly. Luhrmann says the training is important because the secular model of mind is the default model with which these individuals learn (2011, 7). Other models of mind include the opacity of mind theory, found in the South Pacific and Melanesia whose main characteristic is the insistent refusal to infer what other people are thinking unless verbalized; the transparency of language theory, best seen in Central America, where language is seen to align with the world, not express it, and fiction is frowned on; the mind control theory, where there are different versions in Asia—when

6

Emily Pierini, Alberto Groisman, and Diana Espírito Santo

mind is controlled poorly, emotions and intentions can become powerful and enter other poorly controlled minds, as spirits or ghosts, and thoughts can affect other minds; and perspectivism, an Amerindian understanding of the world as it is seen by a particular perspective, such as a human’s or an animal’s (2011, 7). These models, as Luhrmann herself concedes, cannot reduce the vast richness of the imaginative ways in which people understand their minds, selves, persons, or souls/spirits. Imagination is a hugely operative concept here, but itself cannot be confined to the mind. In Cuba, for example, spirit mediums’ “selves” are extended outward into domestic materialities such as dolls and other objects of representation. This is not just a question of mirroring, or of making beliefs material, but of recursively making and remaking selves, minds, and spirits in the process (Espírito Santo 2015). What Luhrmann essentially argues is that there is no one way of understanding “minds” or for that matter souls as such. Some minds are porous, others more bounded; some thoughts and emotions traverse these boundaries, wander in the world, and create effects. In some circumstances, much importance is given to the senses as sources of information. In the West, the sense of sight is imperative, the sense of smell much less so. For many Evangelical Christians whom Luhrmann has studied, the senses themselves can be evidence of God and His intervention in their life (Luhrmann, Nusbaum, and Thisted 2010). The same goes for nineteenth- and twentieth-century spiritualism, which cultivates a particular cosmology of spirits through people’s attentiveness to their signs—not just on the “outside”—such as through raps and taps on tables—but also through the images salient in the body and in the mind and its imaginings. Perhaps in an effort to sidestep our own “theories of mind” as scholars, phenomenology seems to provide answers, at least for the first steps. This is of vital importance when the phenomena at stake are not simply ephemeral beings, and how to conceive of them, but healing processes of the body. According to Byron Good: “Research that attends only to semiotic structures or social processes seems to miss the essence of what gives illness its mystery and human suffering its potency. Even more importantly, any truly anthropological account of illness cannot afford to attend only to objective disease and to cultural representation, with subjective experience bracketed as a kind of black box” (1994, 117–18). Relying on notions of belief, cultural scripts or models, or idioms for oppressive social relations is as clearly unhelpful for illness and healing as it is for the experience of spirits in one’s body. Good investigates the phenomenological dimensions of illness experience through a focus on how narratives remake the sufferer’s world and place him back into it as an authoring self. On his end, Thomas

Introduction

7

J. Csordas (1994) looks at how the experience of the sacred and of deliverance can be understood as a construction of a particular kind of self and its orientation in the world. And, as mentioned, Luhrmann, Nusbaum, and Thisted (2010) analyze how prayer alters and enhances a mental and bodily experience with the divine—thus the “absorption” hypothesis that she and colleagues develop to explain how believers begin to hear the voice of God through training. However, as anthropologists, we have no direct access to either people’s psychological or phenomenological states other than through the medium of language and our own flawed concepts. Could we argue that a phenomenological participative observation method—that is, undergoing spirit possession or healing oneself—could provide critical anthropological insight into the nature of the experience of spirit and healing? And what of the consequences of these experiences for our own concepts, theories, and insights? What becomes in this interface? This is the fundamental question we attempt to answer in this edited volume. But this also presupposes something else: that what we might call “extraordinary” experiences, be these of spontaneous healing, spirit mediumship, or alien visitations, are actually ordinary for many people. What we will deal with in this book is a particular trope in motion, in action: ordinary cosmologies in encounter with extraordinary anthropological assumptions embodied in researchers (see Goulet and Miller 2007). This means that we need to think and feel through alterity with embodied understandings or imagery or metaphors that open up, rather than close or resolve, inquiry. These methods resist a final answer, or a call for objectivity or totalizing conclusion. Instead, they embrace what we have named “embodied epistemology” in an effort to refuse the extrication of epistemology and ontology, and of experience from concept and theory. What is knowledge in this case? Is legitimacy up for discussion? On the one hand, the ethnographer’s experience is seen to create earnest bridges, or spaces for dialogue, with that of our interlocutors. Epistemological embodiment thus signals that personal scholarly experience of the “unknown” shapes the concepts by which we craft out our analysis. In some cases, this could result in a forthright argument for the existence of spirits, on account of having seen or felt them (Turner 2010). On the other hand, this avoidance of reductionism may come with an embrace of anti-representationalism, and the idea that spirits, entities, gods, or invisibles do not stand for something else but must be grappled with directly in a conceptual frame that recognizes them as actants and subjects. Here we have concepts once more. But embodiment here is not the same everywhere. We therefore need to also reconceptualize what we mean by “embodied experience,” especially in contexts where both ethnographer and interlocutor have “different” bodies,

8

Emily Pierini, Alberto Groisman, and Diana Espírito Santo

biographies, and ontogeneses. Can we move beyond the notion of different worlds, proposed by the “ontological turn” (Holbraad and Pedersen 2018), and understand dialogue more productively by attending both to our own experiences and those of our interlocutors? What kind of interstitial, liminal, paradoxical spaces of exegesis are available or generated through this? How is this space both irreducible to concepts and at once conceptualizable? How are these interstitial knowledges “translatable” into anthropology proper? We could argue, with Mattijs Van de Port (2005), that there is always something, particularly in spirit-related cosmologies, that refuses signification, conceptualization, description. The “Real,” he says, quoting Slavoj Žižek, is “something that persists only as failed, missed, in a shadow, and dissolves itself as soon as we try to grasp it in its positive nature (1989, 169, in Van de Port 2015, 155). The Real is paradoxical, and as anthropologists we would probably be arrogant if we insisted on “representing” it. But what we hope to do in this volume is provide a third way of entry, so to speak—entry not into the Real but into the ways our experience of it can have recursive effects for anthropology itself. How would this experience be thought of in ways other than psychology, as products of mind? How can we as scholars move beyond the idea of generic objectivity and understand ourselves as partners, or collaborators, or at the very least recipients, of cosmologies-in-motion? This would require a radical rethinking of the role of the anthropologist in cases of “extraordinary” experiences, events, and occurrences, including spirit possession and healing. But it would also require a rethinking of the idea of the extraordinary itself, perhaps into one that recognizes that scholars, too, are intrinsic to the incipient and temporal movement of all social forms (Handelman 2021), even as we study them ourselves. In the next two sections, we will detail this idea, providing, as we go, an analysis of the contributions of this book.

TRANSFORMATIVE ENGAGEMENTS By examining healing practices around the world, this volume looks at the anthropologist’s own transformative phenomenological engagement in the field through shared images, emotions, and affects that lead to building common grounds in both healing and the field. The book is organized into three parts: “Paradoxes and Dilemmas,” “Transitions and Transformations,” and “Engagements.” These themes are somehow transversal throughout the chapters, yet each contributor engages with them in different intensities. Our authors reflect on how they have adopted different modalities of thinking and feeling through alterity as modes of knowing while approaching spiritual

Introduction

9

healing in their respective fields. We therefore ask what the consequences— theoretical, methodological, ethical, epistemological—are of beginning with this stance; and if the ethnographer can be pushed to think through experiences of alterity through his or her own encounters. But more than giving a definitive answer to these questions, and rather than prescribing or advocating phenomenological participation as a primary mode of grasping experiences of spirit possession and healing, we argue that exploring the anthropologist’s bodily involvement with their particular field generates several analytical avenues that are essentially productive in their nonreductive value, that is, in taking an event, or entity, as an object of analysis in and of itself, without reducing it to other causal factors in the environment at large. What is known as the “affective turn” in anthropology has moved further the examination of positionality proposed by the “reflexive turn” to delve into the affordances of the researcher’s affect and emotions for our understandings in the field (Davies 2010). Addressing how social research has privileged cognitively driven procedures, James Davies notes that because “reality” tends to unfold in response to the particular set of methods by which it is studied, our formal understandings of the “real” are always somewhat bound by the limits of the methods we employ. The danger, of course, is that those aspects of reality which sit beyond the reach of a specific method, by being seen as methodologically inaccessible, are somewhat depreciated in their empirical existence. (2010, 13)

Drawing upon William James, Davies proposes a guiding framework of a “radical empiricism,” which addresses the critical value of the “spaces between” the formal, self-contained methods of interviewing—when one temporally adopts specific postures of prescribed professional detachment—and between things in relationship that evoke emotions and sensations. Radical empiricism is therefore intended as being complementary to traditional empiricism, as they constitute two distinct modes of learning and moments of fieldwork (2010, 24). Thomas Stodulka, Nasima Selim, and Dominik Mattes understand affect not as a stand-alone intimate experience for the ethnographer in the field, but as contextualized and relational, arising from our encounters and relations with other human and nonhuman beings, as well as events, things, and places (2018, 523). “This means transmuting affects into purposeful analytical heuristics that make more relational and embodied ways of knowledge possible” (525). They argue for an “epistemic affect”: The term works as a synecdoche clustering specific ideas about anthropological practice, as embodied products of researcher-researched interactions, affects may either motivate or discourage further mutual engagement. Moreover, the

10

Emily Pierini, Alberto Groisman, and Diana Espírito Santo

affects we impart in our encounters with research interlocutors shape the ways in which stories are told and social realities are conveyed. And finally, making affects epistemologically productive requires the recognition of the humanity that ethnographers share with their interlocutors. (531)

Neither radical empiricism nor the analytical attention to epistemic affect suggest a conversion or initiation into a religious practice (although these affective approaches do not exclude it either); they involve a critical attention to the ethnographer’s embodied modes of knowing in the field, which may include different gradients of participation ranging from transitions to deeper engagements. The idea is that radical participation, rather than detachment, generates reliable ethnographic knowledge (Goulet and Granville Miller 2007), simultaneously reconfiguring “detachment” in a sense that it is far from being associated to a lack of empathy: it is a skill of standing outside the experience, which may involve “distantiation whether in shamanism or in scholarship” from the immediacy of the experience or situation (Obeysekere 1990, 229). Likewise, according to Arnaud Halloy, distance is to be achieved more productively in the phase of analysis, privileging engagement and empathic resonance during fieldwork by multiplying the levels of reflexivity in the ethnographic process (Halloy 2016). Bettina E. Schmidt, in chapter 3, recognizes that “there are different forms of objectivity as well as different forms of subjectivity.” Johannes Fabian maintains that “ethnographic objectivity” is grounded in knowing in the field, intended as “acting in company,” and thus intersubjective rather than contemplative (Fabian 2001). As Emily Pierini, in chapter 8, notes, participation also comes with an acknowledgment that among participants in healing practices there is no homogeneous category of “native” because participants—as much as the ethnographer—may have different backgrounds informing their experiences; therefore, all experiences are subject to critical analysis. Furthermore, we add that ethnographic objectivity also involves modes of narration, in which what is narrated does not cease to be infused with feeling and thus becomes more tangible to the reader. Affective approaches stand alongside those somatic, sensory ethnographies and phenomenological approaches that rehabilitated the role of the body in ethnographic knowledge production (Csordas 1993; Strathern 1996; Desjarlais 1992; Stoller 1997; Pink 2009; Desjarlais and Throop 2011). Affect emerges in these chapters as being central to the experience of healing. Therefore, we ask, what does affect move for ethnographers and participants in ritual healing? While affect fosters profound ethnographic insights for the ethnographer, it also transforms the ways he or she relates with subjectivities in the field, including their own ones. There is a recognition of the co-presences involved in fieldwork, and of the ethnographer’s self

Introduction

11

as being porous and thus able to be affected by other human and nonhuman beings in the field. In acknowledging their own experiences of “being affected” (Favret-Saada 1980, 1990), our authors also shed light on the centrality of affect as experienced by their interlocutors in the process of healing, in which the belief in God, spirits, and deities becomes secondary to the experiences of emotions, feelings, and imagination that arise from those encounters and permeate the people’s narratives of healing. Belief, alone, is deemed an insufficient category to assess healing; it rather perpetuates the mind-body divides. Subsequently, it reflects a distinction between cognitive and somatosensory approaches as though they would be mutually exclusive rather than constitutively intertwined. One may understand belief in spirits in terms of a “sense of revelation, of intimate certainty” arising from the confluence between “getting ideas about spiritual entities and being moved by them” (Vasconcelos 2009, 110). Though in some Spiritualist and Afro-Brazilian religions, belief in spirits is not even relevant to practitioners, as knowledge of the spirits is achieved by other means, such as feeling, experience, engagement, or faith (Pierini 2020; Mossière, and Capponi in this volume). Andrea De Antoni, in chapter 4, approaches exorcism rituals in the Kenmi shrine in Japan as “affective technologies.” Exorcism in these rituals involve the deliverance of spirits for the person’s recovery from illness. Both the evidence of spirits and the efficacy of healing rely on feeling, and belief is therefore presented as a consequence. De Antoni argues that access to spirit ontologies is possible if the ethnographer attunes to and “feels” with the affective technologies and with others in the field, including spirits. Both De Antoni, in Japan, and Paula Bronson (chapter 5), among Nepali healers, engaged their bodies in healing rituals, shifting their attention to include somatic modes of knowing. They describe undergoing healing themselves, and particularly how their feelings changed from the first to the second experience of participation in healing rituals in which a priest in the Japanese shrine and a Bompo healer, respectively, pray over the ghosts. In both of their first experiences, a combination of factors—such as attention to the formal aspects of the ritual, listening and trying to understand the healer’s words, observing gestures, as well as their own expectations—resulted in a feeling of detachment from the action. Whereas in a second experience De Antoni began “attuning” his “posture, orientation, and attention to what the others did,” eliciting a set of bodily responses and feelings that resonated with what his interlocutors had mentioned to him. Bronson, by letting go of her expectations in her subsequent experiences with the Bompo healer, began feeling some inner sensations. A gradual acknowledgment of her vulnerability and fear over her physical symptoms of chronic pain during

12

Emily Pierini, Alberto Groisman, and Diana Espírito Santo

fieldwork enabled her understanding of healing. Hence, the ethnographer’s vulnerability can be seen here as a connection between her experiences in the healing rituals and those of the patients. She notes that “the most significant initial shift in my understanding was when I realized that the villagers understood my illness to be from the spirit world. . . . This awareness garnered a sort of leveling of the playing field, so to speak, a commonality with my interlocutors, the community, and me.” As Ruth Behar reminds us, the ethnographer’s subjectivity has to go way beyond the mere exposure of the self in the text; they have to make their vulnerability essential to the argument (Behar 1996). Eventually, Bronson’s experience illuminated how healing involves a long process of commitment to the world of spirits rather than a quick recovery (in this volume, see also Tamara Dee Turner on dīwān rituals and Bettina E. Schmidt on Spiritist healing). Eugenia Roussou and Anastasios Panagiotopoulos, in chapter 6, compare their autoethnographies that involve the treatment of panic attacks during their respective fieldwork in Greece and in an Afro-Cuban religion in Spain. Roussou discusses her experience with a Greek spiritual healer using the Brazilian Kardecist Spiritist practice of passe—namely a transfer of spiritual fluid energies from the healer to cleanse the patient from low energies—in which healing is achieved through the encounters with a spiritual cosmos. Panagiotopoulos explores the points of convergence between the anthropologist’s personal crises and the crisis of a woman encountering AfroCuban religiosity in Spain, and he does so by means of the materiality of two dolls simultaneously entering the scene: one prescribed by a psychiatrist as part of the process of healing panic attacks, and an Afro-Cuban doll consecrated for a Spanish woman undergoing emotional difficulties. He argues that in molding the bodies of the dolls “the affliction is deontologized from the self, and it gets ontologized—first as an external material ‘representation,’ and second, and more importantly, as the ontological transformation from an afflicted self into a healed one.” Presenting spirits as both the cause of affliction and healing, Roussou and Panagiotopoulos propose to “play with the potentialities of them. . . of transformation”. These experiences of participation in healing practices are certainly interspersed with dilemmas, challenges, hesitations, resistances, and paradoxes. Giovanna Capponi, in chapter 1, rightly points out that full participation may also entail reframing one’s position or even being subjected to hierarchical dynamics, power relations, and politics that may then limit the access to a particular kind of knowledge or to groups considered to be in a position of rivalry by, in her case, those of the Afro-Brazilian temples (terreiros) she worked with. The idea of playfulness here returns with a different intensity. She builds upon Droogers’s (2008) approach of “methodological

Introduction

13

ludism,” which escapes the epistemological dichotomy between methodological atheism and methodological theism, in that it proposes a playful attitude that relies on the ethnographer’s ability to “play in and out of their role.” This playfulness should not be confused with pretending; it is rather intended as cultivating openness to the affective intensities of the field, which does not come without transformative consequences for the ethnographer. In fact, Capponi’s decision to enter the initiatory path of Candomblé was not the outcome of a methodological choice aimed at legitimizing a full access to the knowledge of initiates, nor was it a strategy of inclusion of the anthropologist by the leaders of the community for purposes of prestige or control over her work. Rather, her decision was led by bodily symptoms of “trance possession” during Candomblé rituals, such as “feeling dizziness, heat, increasing heartbeat, heavy eyelids, and light shaking.” These symptoms—interpreted in Candomblé as an initiatory call from the saint—led her to undergo an initiation ritual at the end of her fieldwork, finding herself positioned at the bottom of the hierarchy. Eventually, she recognizes the ethnographer’s body as “a fundamental place of renegotiation of one’s power, status, and inclusion within a social group.” This book does not intend to pursue a univocal definition of healing, but it delves into the experiences of healing understood as a multifaceted process to explore what healing practices mobilize in those who experience it, including ethnographers. Transformations of the sense of self and body, biographical narratives, or sense of purpose are not exclusive of those with whom the ethnographer studies. Profound transformative experiences may also occur to the ethnographer. While they may not necessarily lead to a belief, they may trigger a “flip” in the research process itself, bringing along unique insights or dilemmas that inform field relations and ethnographic knowledge. In this sense, “transformative” means “to form through a process” or “to give shape,” but it may also be understood as “to learn through something.” For this reason, putting these experiences under scrutiny, rather than bracketing them out, may illuminate the processual, pedagogical, and epistemological aspects of healing. The ethnographic field is therefore recognized for its transforming features; Roussou and Panagiotopoulos describe it as “a fluid space of embodied and sensory interactions where the identity boundaries between the researcher and his/her interlocutors are ever-shifting” or are even “transgressed,” and where the “epistemological, ethnographic, and ontological self becomes transformed and ultimately ‘transreligious.’” Transformation is also key to the healing process. Joan Koss-Chioino and Philip Hefner stress that “spiritual transformation is an essential aspect of most healing systems, with the exception of systems such as biomedicine,

14

Emily Pierini, Alberto Groisman, and Diana Espírito Santo

which is based mostly on biophysical concepts and on experimental rather than experiential validity” (2006, 5)—though a person’s trajectory through a biomedical system may equally be transformative at different levels, including the spiritual one. The effectiveness of healing involves the engagement of the senses, being moved experientially through sensation and imagination (Laderman and Roseman 1996). Healing rituals mobilize an “imaginal performance” that, according to Csordas, is less a metaphor or a representation than it is a feeling, intending imagery as “a bodily practice insofar as it engages multiple sensory modalities” (1996, 102). Csordas points to the fact that for Charismatics the efficacy of healing is “predicated . . . on an existential immediacy that constitutes healing as real. The immediacy of the imaginal world and of memory, of divine presence and causal efficacy, have their common ground in embodiment” (108). Authors in this book have engaged in these imaginal revelations and moved further in exploring their affordances for an embodied ethnography of healing. Gustavo R. Chiesa, in chapter 9, presents the work of the International Association of Laboratory Research in Ectoplasm and Parasurgery (ECTOLAB) in Brazil—namely, a multidisciplinary research team of doctors, psychologists, engineers, biologists, and neuroscientists interested in measuring the effects of a substance called “ectoplasm” on health and well-being. According to Chiesa, the attention to subjective experience and its comparison with other participants’ experiences emphasized by the team of researchers is part of “the construction of objective facts from the shared intersubjectivity.” Chiesa describes how, when participating in the sessions, paying attention to his perceptions and sensations, he found himself in this sort of shared imagery as he visualized, on different occasions, scenes of a stomach surgery and a shipwreck. Both scenes were then reported as having been perceived by other people. He notes the striking frequency in which such similar reports occurred even with a different audience. He reckons that his full bodily involvement allowed him to be “captured” by the experience and to “be affected,” and he “ended up falling into the web (or entanglement) of beings and energies that make up that environment,” which prompted a different understanding of people’s descriptions of their perceptions and experiences. From the standpoint of a sensorially engaged medical anthropology (Nichter 2008), Helmar Kurz, in chapter 10, explores the sensory modalities of Spiritist healing practices in a Kardecist psychiatric hospital in Brazil as resources for mental health care. Mediumship is indeed understood in Spiritism as a therapeutic mechanism to negotiate pathological experiences. Paying attention to his perceptions in sessions of “disobsession”—based on conversations with spirits deemed responsible for the patients’ affliction to

Introduction

15

help them to be released—he experienced “waves of heaviness and lightness streaming through [his] body” and mental images of colors and light, which he associated with “healing vibrations.” He adds, “On some occasions, I ‘felt’ the afflicted and afflicting spirits before they came: sudden feelings of anger, sadness, or pain would indicate to me their presence, and right after, one or another medium would transmit messages that resembled my feelings.” The similarity between his experience and those of other participants in mediumistic practice is seen by Kurz as a verification of the validity of his perceptions as ethnographic data as a result of “thick participation.” However, he refrains from interpreting his experience as an embodiment of a cultural habitus given his lack of socialization within a Spiritist context, although he recognizes that these experiences offer a way to “learn about content beyond form” in healing practices. Eugenia Roussou’s experience of radical participation in the encounter with spirits is also transformative in that it leads her to perceive shared visions of spirits visiting her and other participants in healing sessions. Those shared visions shed light upon how “transreligiosity” transgresses boundaries between the “ordinary” and “extraordinary,” “material and spiritual, belief and experience, scientific epistemology and empirical knowledge,” and they especially convinced her of the fluidity between her “ethnographic, embodied, spiritual, perceptual, and social scientific self” in the field. The idea of fluidity of the ethnographic self, along with that of porosity, may be seen as a response to the modern Western idea of the self around which the scholarly ethnographic body was constituted. Tamara Dee Turner, in chapter 7, assesses her participation in the Algerian “Dīwān of Sīdī Bilāl,” a Sufi ritual that draws upon the musical cultivation of trance in order to engage with, express, and release one’s disease, pain, and suffering. She reflects upon how she was perceived by her interlocutors as being “caught up” in dīwān ritual—that is, “owned by” it: “I was entangled with issues around transmission, on how embodied dīwān knowledge moves in and between and through people, teaching them things with or without their control, consent, or official association.” Her interlocutors sensed that she was in trance and interacting with nonhuman agents (jinn) without realizing it. Trance in dīwān ritual, she notes, has multiple registers, “affective textures,” and adjectives through which it is addressed, although there is only one recognized form through which jinn trance occurs. Despite her interlocutors’ interpretations, she did not perceive herself as being in trance, as she felt she was too in control during rituals, unable to “silence the observing voice” in her head even when she was experimenting with movement and gestures, emotionally carried by the music. Concurrently, another reason for doubt consisted in her personal history, which did not

16

Emily Pierini, Alberto Groisman, and Diana Espírito Santo

reflect the association of dīwān trance with trauma and suffering. These clashing perceptions raised a question about the different notions of control at play in her relationship with her interlocutors, and a dilemma about whether her increasingly strong and often unpleasant bodily sensations were the outcome of suggestibility or of the need of her body to learn “to become a body in another place.” Learning trance, how to move through embodied mimesis, how to feel through the body in motion and intercorporeality, has certainly provided a means to connect with her interlocutors and compare their experiences, highlighting differences, nuances, and the gradients of control involved in every trance experience. It also illuminated the ability of the body to grasp knowledge that is not accessible to the rest of the self. Géraldine Mossière, in chapter 2, makes a similar distinction between “communicable knowledge (informative)” and knowledge “learned through tacit experience (formative).” Indeed, being emotionally moved by a ritual, sharing intimacy and feeling as one with others, as well as engaging the body and senses in dances and hymns are all part of Mossière’s experience in Congolese Pentecostal congregation rituals in Montreal, Canada. In her chapter, she adopts a phenomenological perspective to examine “how these co-experiences impact the definition and boundaries between the self and otherness as well as their healing potential.” Not only have these authors established their somatic modes of attention, but they have also experienced ethnography as learning joint attention and shared focus. In these instances of shared images, emotions, affect, and feeling, participation has triggered an intersubjective embodiment, shifting the ethnographic relations and subsequent knowledge at a different level, beyond the verbal. There is a transversal recognition of how the ethnographer is—and participants perceive him or her to be—immersed in, and potentially affected by, an ecology of people, materials, and tangible and intangible substances, including spiritual forces, irradiations, and energies, as Emily Pierini examines in chapter 8 discussing healing in the Brazilian Vale do Amanhecer (Valley of the Dawn). Knowledge in the Vale do Amanhecer is thereby addressed along with ethnographic knowledge as being the outcome of an “entanglement between insight, skill, and craft.” She refers to a particular kind of knowledge that is suddenly emerging from experience—especially bodily experience—in terms of “epiphany” but that is also co-crafted processually. The process of knowing, she suggests, becomes relevant to the process of healing when it places the body at its center. She analyzes how her experience of bodily pains in the field led her to undergo a ritual of healing with spirit mediums in the temple of the Vale do Amanhecer followed by a medical assistance in a clinic “had mobilized different and interrelated concepts . . . such as: invisible entities and residues that

Introduction

17

move through, in and out of the body (may they be spirits or viruses); cleansing fluids; and ecologies of substances.” She also explores how a new way of knowing through the body in her experience of rituals may be understood in terms of co-presence once these experiences are compared to those of mediums building a common ground. Bettina E. Schmidt (chapter 3) discusses the complexity of her interlocutor’s healing trajectory in Spiritist healing in Brazil, and how rituals of passe in Spiritism involving a spiritual cleansing from energies have an impact on health. She points at how the belief in spirits is not a condition for a physical impact of these practices, such as in her case, as she states: “My physical response during the passe in São Paulo shows, however, that my body challenged this reluctance to engage with a different reality.” Her experience of her heartbeat slowing in a session of passe, which she felt as a reaction to the energy transmitted, thus has led her to reflect on the materiality of spiritual healing rather than considering the other worlds merely as symbolic. Likewise, Fiona Bowie, in her autoethnography (chapter 11) exploring different modes of knowledge arising from the engagement in a Metatronic healing apprenticeship in the United Kingdom, describes her bodily response to energies in the healing sessions. Through her method of “cognitive, empathetic engagement” she has shared her experiences of transformation with fellow participants on the Metatronic pathway, confronting the differences with people in her own country while maintaining a critical questioning, reflecting upon the conditioning and constraints of Western definitions. Several works have reflected on the ethnographers’ experiences in the field dealing in particular with spiritual phenomena (Young and Goulet 1994; Goulet and Granville Miller 2007; Davies and Spencer 2010; Pierini and Groisman 2016; Meintel, Béguet, and Goulet 2020). This book brings together both the ethnographers’ and participants’ experiences proposing a sensory ethnography of healing with a focus on ethnographic knowing as embedded in an embodied epistemology of healing. Furthermore, some works present people’s spiritual experiences as “extraordinary” (Goulet and Granville Miller 2007; Meintel, Béguet, and Goulet 2020; Young and Goulet 1994). Jeffrey Kripal (2019) has explored how intellectuals, scientists, and medical professionals suddenly going through what he calls unexpected “extraordinary” experiences, went through a “flip”—that is, a “reversal of perspective” born out of life-changing experiences that resulted in significant scientific ideas and new technologies, what he addresses as “epiphanies of the mind.” Our authors point to the ordinary character of these experiences in their interlocutors’ lives. Therefore, the stance we adopt is to avoid creating hierarchies of knowledge and experiences in distinguishing between the supposedly “extraordinary” experience of the “other” and the “ordinary”

18

Emily Pierini, Alberto Groisman, and Diana Espírito Santo

one of the ethnographers, while still addressing the transformative potential of these experiences of crafting bodies in the exploration of other worlds— whether tangible or intangible—for our ethnographic epiphanies.

ANTHROPOLOGY IN TRANCE With this volume, we seek to explore the relevance of the categories of reflection we have adopted—embodied epistemologies and ethnographic incorporation. The notions of epistemological embodiment and ethnographic incorporation are part of a contemporary transition movement in anthropology in which a classical principle is relativized. The principle that an ethnography is elaborated to show “collected data about the other” and to be then subjected to an ethnologizing comparativism. Contemporarily, an ethnographic contribution that we can call “clinical” becomes more and more relevant. The idea of a clinical ethnography is that in which the ethnographer takes the field experience in its fullness, considering all its implications, senses, and unfoldings, not only analytical but also personal, as a fundamental part of the knowledge s/he wants to share. So, the ideas of epistemological embodiment and ethnographic incorporation are not expected to be taken as the evocation of concepts or definitions, but rather to be tasks of an agency that stimulates the problematization of one’s own conceptions of how knowledge is acquired. They are also tasks to promote a deconditioning of a scientific academic training and praxis, or one committed to accepting ideologically science as the only consistent system of knowledge. That training which in the hierarchy of knowledges ideologically places rationalist scientific thinking as superior—or more consistent—in relation to other knowledges about the lived world. In this way, we formulate a framework and point to how our own conceptual and epistemological understandings of the field are embedded within our own bodily experiences, arrangements, trajectories, serendipities—and vice versa. In addition, we also seek to unfold what occurred since we began the dialogue that is now configured in this collection. We were concerned at the time, on the one hand, with the difficulty of effectively matching ethnographies with the field experiences lived by us, as ethnographers. And in the same sense, but on the other hand, we were concerned with the realization that a rationalist ethos/bias compromised and conditioned this correspondence. We could see this conditioning of our own experiences in events characterized as academic—those that take place in undergraduate and post-graduate courses in universities—or scientific, at conferences, congresses, and seminars. On these occasions, we felt that any empirical engagement

Introduction

19

that suggested a personal involvement or closeness that was communicated was treated as a kind of sin with science. Or that “being scientific” would require “distancing as a criterion for objectivity,” as a valid element for the consideration of the consistency of the knowledge presented. We then evaluated that the required criteria of consistency and validity—detachment and objectivity—as embedded in a positivist approach would result in a distortion and impoverishment of the relationships with our interlocutors. They also result in a double distancing: one in the field, and another in the ethnographic text. Thus, from the point of view of evoking what we considered to be ethnographic relations, which made our ethnographies feasible, by omitting the nucleus of these very relations (which were, to our interlocutors, other than positivist), we would only be promoting very debatable kinds of relations instead. This stance, if we were to take it, has inevitably implied hierarchical, even meritocratic, forms of exclusion. Most importantly, it implies the reification and the omission from our analyses of how these ethnographic relations occur, how they affect us, and how they influence our own epistemological incorporations—namely, for “academic” convenience, or adherence to a rationalizing paradigm. Then, as a consequence of reification, it also affects how they condition our scholarly careers, either including or excluding our own voices among peers. We have been asking ourselves how to live a field experience that evokes an empirical engagement unconditioned by double distancing, mistrust, and simplifying skepticism. And eventually in an overt or covert attempt to “demonstrate” empathy to the experiences, the metaphysics and ontologies, that motivated other research participants to organize their lives and elaborate the ideas they communicated to us, and even with whom we attempted a symmetrizing relationship. The impetus behind this was to occupy a place in the debate about the work of the ethnographer, and to be able to share our reflections in an effectively dialogical way—in the sense that the dialogue established also effectively includes our interlocutors. Ultimately, this fundamental contingency highlights the unfinished, procedural, axionomic, and even paradoxical nature of anthropology itself and its way of dealing with the knowledge, as well as with the unknown. The concerns on what can be called epistemological effervescence were also triggered by the cogitation that, like the North American Alcoholics Anonymous with whom Gregory Bateson had done research in the 1960s and 1970s (Bateson 1972), an epistemological deconditioning would be of interest for the “health” of anthropology—or a disincorporation of the deleterious epistemological conditioning of rationalist science, one that would allow the exchanges of knowledge and the learnings from living in the field to find a dignified place in the ethnographic text.2 This in turn requires

20

Emily Pierini, Alberto Groisman, and Diana Espírito Santo

an engagement, an epistemological activism that keeps the flame of scrutiny and critique of the aforementioned conventionalisms and conditioning, of self-critical and dialogical reflexivity, burning. As we see it, this can challenge and transform the idea that a science founded on providing stable answers—and thus promoting a maintenance of the status quo—is to stabilize the asymmetry with the other forms and methods of knowing and living in the world. It is relevant to consider that one of the starting points of our reflections was the contribution of the field of studies that became known as medical anthropology. Starting from William H. R. Rivers (1924)—who was a physician, and perhaps the first to record non-Western medical practices—the field was then consolidated by Forrest E. Clements (1932) and Erwin H. Ackerknecht (1942), followed by the elaboration of the field of ethnomedicine to which Arthur Kleinman (1980), a psychiatrist, contributed decisively with the concept of “cultural systems of health.” Along these developments a debate was triggered on how to take something “familiar” to Western biomedicine and understand it in “exotic” contexts. But from the point of view of “strangeness,” the problem of ethnocentrism remained. This ethnocentrism unfolded in taking the biomedical model of disease-etiology-diagnosistreatment as a parameter for the study of “localized” medicines, generally called “traditional.” The critique of this approach, in turn, unfolded into another perspective that became known as the anthropology of health (Langdon 2001). The anthropology of health, as an epistemological turn, relativized the notion of illness and inscribed it less as a set of organic symptoms but as communicational ways of referring to the experience of discomfort, emphasizing its relational and cosmic implications. This relativization drew the researchers’ attention to the relevance of personal and collective narratives as singular configurations, which formulated the knowledge and practices elaborated by experience itself. And as a counterpoint to the organic, biological idea of cure, it emphasized the idea of healing, in which the limits of the individualized body were no longer the parameter for understanding the transformative/educational praxis of illness, as communicated by many of our interlocutors. Thus, in taking the contribution of medical and health anthropologies in their historical and epistemological repercussions, or even of the anthropology of healing, we are recognizing that ethnographic data on healing is not just health related. Here, we particularly point out the elevation of the status of narrative and knowledge—different from that of biomedicine—on the “experience” of health, and Bateson’s empirical argument, that is, the idea of a therapeutic model based on an epistemological deconditioning. It

Introduction

21

can be multidimensional and also disciplinary in terms of an epistemological activism that may also include the deconditioning of the ethnographer’s bodily dispositions and narrative referentiality. We thus consider that our contribution is also directed toward the health of anthropology itself—not in the sense of “cure,” but of the engagements that transform an anthropology that could be said to be “in trance,” or, as in the trance events we have approached, an anthropology subject to a transformation, which unfolds from a temporary suspension of the ordinary. Other worlds, other bodies: it is a world in transition, not simply for our interlocutors and for us, ethnographers, but also for anthropology itself. What are the signs of this transition? To where are we heading? Most importantly, we would say, toward a sort of epistemological healing/activism, or a movement that could be considered social to stimulate a deconditioning of dominant conventionalisms, standardizations, and epistemologies. Each author in this volume has expressed this in a different way. While multiplying the understandings of “healing,” “other worlds,” and “other bodies,” this volume also seeks to address this process not simply for ethnographers and their interlocutors but also in the detection of the signs of this transition for the pandemic world itself: a state that may seem modified, transitory for the planet, and thus give the idea that “life will return to normal one day,” but that perhaps it has to be seen as a modifier one, which in fact makes another world emerge. An aim here is the will to make research relationships symmetrizing— therefore an epistemological incorporation that “natives” increasingly read what anthropologists write and speak; a consideration that respect for people in our research implies dialogue with interlocutors, including the critic; a consistent recognition of “native theories” not only as “elements of the culture of the other” but as central models for approaching events in the field, even with equivalent status to “non-native” theories; the recognition of an elementary philosophical principle: that when we become aware that the other recognizes some influential force in the world, invisible or inert to us, the only thing we can say is that our own conditioning does not allow us to recognize it ontologically. Therefore, a challenge we seek to bring forth in the quest to establish a place for reflection and debate is that of confronting and relativizing the project of rationalism (at least that of a simplifying, mediocre kind of rationalism), which has as its conviction that science can rationally explain everything that occurs in the universe, even if only provisionally. This conviction suggests that a capacity for explanation unfolds into an ability to solve all analytical problems, for instance, on the basis of criteria such as distancing as a condition for objectivity. On the one hand, this idea of distancing

22

Emily Pierini, Alberto Groisman, and Diana Espírito Santo

when raised to the condition for objectivity seems influenced by the image of the ivory tower, and thus, even when elaborated in a sophisticated way, it seems in fact a side effect of a deleterious positivism, which gives only to the “systematizing thinker” the status of being closer to “the truth”. In the same sense, this idea of objectivity conditioned by distancing obscures and avoids the possibility that one can approach objectivity less by its ability to totalize a set of variables than by exploring the potentialities of the text—or, in an alternative way, when the ethnographic text is able to address the conditioning and convivial implications of all kinds of knowledge (of sometimes diverse forms and natures) acquired in the field. But in fact, a claim to solve all problems also implies a distortion, or inconsistency, with the affective experiences in the life of the other. We mean “affective” here for experiences that effectively transform life, and thinking about life, such as those involving health and existence. Also in the sense that it is these experiences that sustain the other’s engagement with a metaphysics and an epistemology that give meaning to his/her existence in the world. One of the lived experiences of ethnographers is to encounter situations in which the people with whom we/they are doing research invite them—explicitly or even implicitly—to actually live what they experience. Particularly here we can mention the praxis of recognizing the existence, the influence, and the possibility of embodying invisible beings, forces, or energies. There is a play here with the notion of “beings.” On the one hand, these are cosmic “events” to which one can attribute some personified substance, circumscribed in a spiritual identity. Thus, beings are the entities recognized in the so-called mediumistic religions. Or, on the other hand, the “beings,” or devirs,3 that emerge from the personal transformation brought about by one’s own experience of recognizing oneself as a potential incorporator of these beings. This involves the challenges of conditioning—metaphysical, methodological, epistemological, and ontological—induced by the ideas that we incorporate, and from the moment we become aware that science exists, that scientific praxis is conditioned by a prescription of “distancing” and “rationality.” The incorporation of this prescription in our conduct, and in our ethnographic attitudes, implies also considering that our dispositions and availabilities are positional constraints on other “participants,” also in the ethnographic text. That is, a disposition to treat “other” forms of knowledge with a symmetrizing intent as we do with academically conventional forms. In this sense, particularly as related with systematized authors and theories that inspire us, as the relation we establish with our interlocutors, their ways of thinking (often referred as “native theories”), of doing, of living, and of living together.

Introduction

23

In this sense, there is the willingness to, and the availability of, condition the “living” of the experiences that the other lives. (De)conditioning, disposition, and availability are then variables of an ethnographic equation that each author in this volume equates in a unique and creative way, and which become consistently evocative of the field. The ethnographic text, as well as the verbal narrative on the experience of field research, ultimately runs the risk of implicit conditioning in the trajectory of the author and reflects his or her dispositions and availabilities to live and coexist with, and in, the world of the other. One may argue that this critical gaze upon our scholarly conventionalisms may somehow echo the proposal of the feminist and postmodern critiques. How can we then tackle the implications and unfolding of this self-critical gaze in the last forty years since these critiques were raised? How would this deconditioning work in practice and even differently in light of the current developments of the field? How can we avoid the risk of becoming asymmetrical in the opposite way? Indeed, another point those critiques of the approach of embodiment could raise is that we run the risk of falling into another type of reductionism by losing sight of the hierarchies, beliefs, and doctrines that condition our interlocutors’ experiences, whether spiritual or therapeutic or both. The works gathered here unfold in formulations of what the authors think the ethnographic text is. In the same sense, the authors’ positioning is articulated in a grammar that becomes substantive forms of treatment: “how and why they are, do, think, relate . . .”; “how and why I am, did, think, relate . . .”; “how and why we are, do, think, relate . . .” In the grammar we apply to the text, we communicate our relational position. And we may think of anthropology as an intercross between our own grammars that, in the text, are converted into new grammars, which in turn communicate relations and knowledge sharing. It is in the referentiality of the grammar of the text, when we choose to refer to “them,” or to “us,” whether these beings are incarnate or not, that we configure the embodied, incorporated epistemologies. Taking Talal Asad’s thought-provoking reading of Wittgenstein (Asad 2020) on the relevance of grammar and the “language games” embedded in forms of life, and which define the “limits of meaning,” we can cogitate that the limits of meaning are conditioned by—and condition—time, scale, and plausibility, and ultimately by the willingness/availability to devote oneself to something. This willingness/availability unfolds perhaps first in the timescale equation. The time to dedicate and the size of the task in turn condition the recognition of the consistency and pertinence of binding oneself to, or engaging with, someone or something. And it is even plausibility that directs attention and motivates engagement in incorporating—or becoming

24

Emily Pierini, Alberto Groisman, and Diana Espírito Santo

incorporated into—this something, when absorbed from experience, not rejecting or ignoring it. The disposition and availability to an epistemological autoreflexivity and effective ethnographic incorporation may then, in our view, broaden and expand the possibilities and limits of meaning, thus allowing a relativization of the mechanisms of domination and hierarchy, even if occulted in the dynamic of academic backstages. But the horizons that may open up the willingness and availability of scholars are, after all, also subjected to and conditioned by the spaces we have to disseminate what we might call their “ethnographic-anthropological effects.” And this seems to us to be the most relevant objective of this space of reflection that we are seeking to open with Other Worlds, Other Bodies. This space results from the discussions held at our EASA2020 Conference panel and the contribution of other authors willing to consolidate dialogue and reflection on field experiences, particularly those that challenge the conditioning and conventionality transmitted by a rationalist, evolutionist, and intransitive science/academia. Although with a great influence of phenomenology, particularly the conception of embodiment in this field of studies, we want to broaden the horizons to potentiate the presence of narratives about all field experiences that become relevant to our work. For us, and for the grammar of “we” who have taken up this challenge, with the consideration of the events proper to the person of the ethnographer in the field, the reflections we gather in this volume should be stimulated toward the deconditioning of another grammar that distances the ethnographer and restricts her/him to taking the life in the field, and the “data” s/he collects, as evocative of how “they” live, think, and do—not as if were “us,” that is, everyone who participates in this way of life configured in the equation that is field research and ethnography. Just as it can be inconsistent and inglorious to want to “cure anthropology,” so it may be a mistake to ignore dilemmas and dualisms, such as rational vs. mystical, or objectivity vs. subjectivity. What we attempt here is to set out some of the routes by which, as anthropologists/social scientists, we feel we can simultaneously recognize critically these dualisms and productively appropriate them in order to suggest a shift in analysis. The point here is not to go the route of classical anthropological treatments of similar ethnographic material—nor is it to “transcend” them, which would be an arrogant analytical move. It is to suggest that epistemological embodiment or ethnographic incorporation, or the role of the ethnographer’s experience in creating categorical analysis—which has not been treated well enough, particularly in the field of healing—might provide clues to these avenues.

Introduction

25

One of the strengths of this volume lies in the fact that it does not distinguish between or hierarchize “extraordinary” and “ordinary” experiences. In our view, there are a number of ways in which this dislocation can be done: from a highly pragmatic, William James–inspired, phenomenologically descriptive approach, or conceptual analyses, such as those that understand the experience of spirits as playful, or even ludic, in a crosscutting sense. Or, still, extensively clinical/narrative of the researcher’s own existential experience in the field, as well as its pertinent events, ethnographic relations, paradoxes, dilemmas, restlessness, and interrogations. In synthesis, in this collection the authors dedicate themselves to addressing various forms of anthropology, unfolding in a perspective not only of articulating medical anthropology and anthropology of health, but of converting lived ethnographic experiences into new horizons of reflection on the ethnography of healing and beyond. Emily Pierini is an assistant professor in anthropology and a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at Sapienza University of Rome, Italy. She has researched spirit mediumship and healing in Brazil and Europe, embodied knowledge and learning, body and self, spirituality and biomedicine, and transnational healing. She is the author of several journal articles and chapters, as well as the book Jaguars of the Dawn: Spirit Mediumship in the Brazilian Vale do Amanhecer. Alberto Groisman is a volunteer professor at the Federal University of Santa Catarina, Brazil. He has researched the psychoactive Daime using Amazonian religions and has been discussing the epistemological and ontological implications of the praxis of ethnography, with an emphasis on healing, self-reflexivity, ontological rigidity, and a critique of academic conventionalism. He coedited the book Theatrum Ethnographicum: Field, Experience, Agency, and the special issue Fieldwork in Religion: Bodily Experience and Ethnographic Knowledge published in the Journal for the Study of Religious Experience. He coordinates with Emily Pierini a Rede de Pesquisa Espiritualidade, Saúde, Incorporação, Etnografia, and HEAL Network for the Ethnography of Healing. Diana Espírito Santo is an associate professor at the Escuela de Antropología, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. She has researched Cuban espiritismo and the dead in Afro-Cuban religion, cosmological plasticity in Brazilian Umbanda, and more recently, technologies, historicity, and the paranormal in Chile. She is the author of three monographs and has coedited several volumes, including The Dynamic Cosmos: Movement, Paradox, and Experimentation in the Anthropology of Spirit Possession.

26

Emily Pierini, Alberto Groisman, and Diana Espírito Santo

NOTES 1. This chapter was coauthored by the editors as follows: Diana Espírito Santo is the author of the section “The ‘Really’ Real”; Emily Pierini is the author of the section “Transformative Engagements”; and Alberto Groisman is the author of the section “Anthropology in Trance.” Emily Pierini wishes to acknowledge funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 895395 for the project “THETRANCE—Transnational Healing: Therapeutic Trajectories in Spiritual Trance,” undertaken between Sapienza University of Rome, Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina (PPGAS-UFSC), and the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, University of Oxford. 2. If a man achieves or suffers change in premises that are deeply embedded in his mind, he will surely find that the results of that change will ramify throughout his whole universe. Such changes we may well call “epistemological” (Bateson 1972, 336). 3. The notion of devir, originally elaborated by Heraclitus of Ephesus, roughly may evoke the idea that nothing in the world is permanent except change and transformation. It has also been referred by the word “becomings.” Deleuze and Guattari (1995) return to the notion of devir, unfolding its contemporary implications. Changings in attitude, conduct, or behavior may express different devires.

REFERENCES Ackerknecht, Erwin H. 1942. “Primitive Medicine and Culture Pattern.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 12: 545–74. Addey, Crystal. 2010. “Divine Possession and Divination in the Graeco-Roman World: The Evidence from Iamblichus’ on the Mysteries.” In Spirit Possession and Trance: New Interdisciplinary Perspectives, edited by Bettina E. Schmidt and Lucy Huskinson, 171–85. London: Continuum. Asad, Talal. 1993. Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press. ———. 2020. “Thinking about Religion through Wittgenstein.” Critical Times 1(3): 403–42. Beliso-De Jesús, Aisha. 2015. Electric Santería: Racial and Sexual Assemblages of Transnational Religion. New York: Columbia University Press. Bateson, Gregory. 1972. Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology. Chicago: University of Chicago. Behar, Ruth. 1996. The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology That Breaks Your Heart. Boston: Beacon Press. Cannell, Fennella, ed. 2006. The Anthropology of Christianity. Durham: Duke University Press.

Introduction

27

Clements, Forest E. 1932. “Primitive Concepts of Disease.” University of California Publications in Archaeology and Ethnology 32(2): 185–252. Cole, Michael. 1996. Cultural Psychology: A Once and Future Discipline. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. Comaroff, Jean, and John Comaroff, eds. 1993. Modernity and Its Malcontents: Ritual and Power in Postcolonial Africa. Chicago: University Press of Chicago. Csordas, Thomas J. 1993. “Somatic Modes of Attention.” Cultural Anthropology 8(2): 135–56. ———. 1996. “Imaginal Performance and Memory in Ritual Healing.” In The Performance of Healing, edited by Carol Laderman and Marina Roseman, 91–113. New York: Routledge. ———. 1994. The Sacred Self: A Cultural Phenomenology of Charismatic Healing. Berkeley: University of California Press. Davies, James, and Dimitrina Spencer. 2010. Emotions in the Field: The Psychology and Anthropology of Fieldwork Experience. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Deleuze, Gilles. 1997. Crítica e Clínica. Rio de Janeiro: Editora 34. Deleuze, Gilles & Félix Guattari 1995. Mil Platôs. Capitalismo e Esquizofrenia. Rio de Janeiro: Editora 34. Desjarlais, Robert. 1992. Body and Emotion: The Aesthetic of Illness and Healing in Nepal Himalayas. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Desjarlais, Robert, and Jason Throop. 2011. “Phenomenological Approaches in Anthropology.” Annual Review of Anthropology 40: 87–102. Droogers, André. 2008. “As Close as a Scholar Can Get: Exploring a One-Field Approach to the Study of Religion.” In Religion: Beyond a Concept, edited by Hent De Vries, 448–63. New York: Fordham University Press. Eliade, Mircea. 1964. Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Espírito Santo, Diana. 2015. Developing the Dead: Mediumship and Selfhood in Cuban Espiritismo. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Fabian, Johannes, 2001. Anthropology with an Attitude: Critical Essays, Stanford, CA: Stanford: University Press. Favret-Saada, Jeanne. 1980. Deadly Words: Witchcraft in the Bocage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1990. “About Participation.” Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 14: 189–99. Geschiere, Peter. 1996. The Modernity of Witchcraft: Politics and the Occult in Postcolonial Africa. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Good, Byron. 1994. Medicine, Rationality and Experience: An Anthropological Perspective. Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goulet, Jean-Guy, and Bruce Granville Miller. 2007. “Embodied Knowledge: Towards a Radical Anthropology of Cross-Cultural Encounters.” In Extraordinary Anthropology: Transformations in the Field, edited by Jean-Guy Goulet and Bruce Granville Miller, 1–14. Lincoln: Nebraska University Press. Halloy, Arnaud. 2016. “Full Participation and Ethnographic Reflexivity: An AfroBrazilian Case Study.” Journal for the Study of Religious Experience 2: 7–24.

28

Emily Pierini, Alberto Groisman, and Diana Espírito Santo

Handelman, Don. 2021. Moebius Anthropology: Essays on the Forming of Form. Oxford: Berghahn. Handelman, Don. 2004. “Introduction: Why Ritual in Its Own Right? How So?” Social Analysis 48(2): 1–32. Holbraad, Martin, and Morten Pedersen. 2018. The Ontological Turn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ingold, Tim. 2006. “Rethinking the Animate, Re-Animating Thought.” Ethnos 71(1): 9–20. Johnson, Paul C. 2011. “An Atlantic Genealogy of ‘Spirit Possession.’” Comparative Studies in Society and History 53(2): 393–425. ———. 2014. “Spirits and Things in the Making of the Afro-Atlantic World.” In Spirited Things: The Work of “Possession” in Afro-Atlantic Religions, edited by Paul Christopher Johnson, 1–22. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kleinman, Arthur. 1980. Patients and Healers in the Context of Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press. Koss-Chioino, Joan, and Philip Hefner, eds. 2006. Spiritual Transformation and Healing: Anthropological, Theological, Neuroscientific, and Clinical Approaches. Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press. Kripal, Jeffrey. 2019. The Flip: Epiphanies of the Mind and the Future of Knowledge. New York: Bellevue Literary Press. Langdon, Jean E. 2001. “A Doença como Experiência: O Papel da Narrativa na Construção Sociocultural da Doença [Illness as experience: The role of narrative in the sociocultural construction of illness].” Etnográfica 2: 241–60. Ladermann, Carol, and Marina Roseman. 1996. “Introduction.” In The Performance of Healing, edited by Carol Laderman and Marina Roseman, 1–16. New York: Routledge. Luhrmann, Tanya. 2011. “Towards an Anthropological Theory of Mind.” Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society 36(4): 5–13. Luhrmann, Tanya M., Howard Nusbaum, and Ronald Thisted. 2010. “The Absorption Hypothesis: Learning to Hear God in Evangelic Christianity.” American Anthropologist 12(1): 66–78. Meintel, Deirdre, Véronique Beguet, and Jean-Guy Goulet, eds. 2020. Extraordinary Experience in Modern Contexts. Montréal: Kosmos. Nichter, Mark. 2008. “Coming to Our Senses: Appreciating the Sensorial in Medical Anthropology.” Transcultural Psychiatry 45: 163–97. Obeysekere, Gananath. 1990. The Work of Culture: Symbolic Transformation in Psychoanalysis and Anthropology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ochoa, Todd, Ramón. 2007. “Versions of the Dead: Kalunga, Cuban-Kongo Materiality, and Ethnography.” Cultural Anthropology 22(4): 473–50. Ong, Aiwa. 1987. Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline: Factory Women in Malaysia. New York: State University of New York Press. Palmié, Stephan. 2002. Wizards and Scientists: Explorations in Afro-Cuban Modernity and Tradition. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Introduction

29

Pedersen, Morten Axel. 2014. “Transitional Cosmologies: Shamanism and Postsocialism in Northern Mongolia.” In Framing Cosmologies: The Anthropology of Worlds, edited by Allen Abramson and Martin Holbraad, 164–81. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Pierini, Emily. 2020. Jaguars of the Dawn: Spirit Mediumship in the Brazilian Vale do Amanhecer. New York; Oxford: Berghahn Books. Pierini, Emily, and Alberto Groisman. 2016. “Introduction. Fieldwork in Religion: Bodily Experience and Ethnographic Knowledge.” Journal for the Study of Religious Experience 2: 1–6. Pink, Sarah. 2009. Doing Sensory Ethnography. London: Sage. Rivers, William H. R. 1924. Medicine, Magic, and Religion. New York: Harcourt Brace. Stodulka, Thomas, Nasima Selim, and Dominik Mattes. 2018. “Affective Scholarship: Doing Anthropology with Epistemic Affects.” Ethos 46(4): 519–36. Stoller, Paul. 1997. Sensuous Scholarship. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Strathern, Andrew. 1996. Body Thoughts. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Swancutt, Katherine. 2012. Fortune and the Cursed: The Sliding Scale of Time in Mongolian Divination. New York & Oxford: Berghahn. ———. 2022. “The Threshold of the Cosmos: Priestly Scriptures and the Shamanic Wilderness in Southwest China.” In The Dynamic Cosmos: Paradox, Movement, and Theoretical Experimentation in the Anthropology of Spirit Possession, edited by Diana Espírito Santo and Matan Shapiro, 119–32. London: Bloomsbury Swancutt, Katherine, and Meirelle Mazard, eds. 2018. Animism Beyond the Soul: Ontology, Reflexivity and Anthropological Knowledge. New York: Berghahn Books. Taylor, Charles. 2007. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Turner, Edith. 2010. “Discussion: Ethnography as a Transformative Experience.” Anthropology and Humanism 35(2): 218–26. Vasconcelos, João. 2009. “Learning to be a Proper Medium: Middle-Class Womanhood and Spirit Mediumship at Christian Rationalist Séances in Cape Verde.” In Learning Religion: Anthropological Approaches, edited by David Berliner and Ramon Sarró, 121–40. New York: Berghahn Books. Van de Port, Mattijs. 2005. “Circling around the Really Real: Spirit Possession Ceremonies and the Search for Authenticity in Bahian Candomblé.” Ethos 33(2): 149–79. Wafer, Jim. 1991. The Taste of Blood: Spirit Possession in Brazilian Candomblé. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Weber, Max. [1904] 2002. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Oxford: Blackwell. Young, David, and Jean-Guy Goulet, eds. 1994. Being Changed: The Anthropology of Extraordinary Experience. Ontario: Broadview Press.

Part I

‫ﱬﱫ‬ Paradoxes and Dilemmas

Chapter 1

Playing with Other Worlds Renegotiating Bodily Experience and Hierarchy in Afro-Brazilian Candomblé Giovanna Capponi

‫ﱬﱫ‬ Afro-Brazilian Candomblé is part of a cluster of Afro-diasporic religious and ritual practices, such as Vodou in Haiti, Santería in Cuba, and Umbanda in Brazil. These practices exist within a continuum of cultural and religious references across different geographical contexts. Indeed, localized differences make it difficult to provide a comprehensive and generic description. As most of my interlocutors identify with Candomblé Ketu, which has more obvious connections to the Yoruba world in West Africa, my description will focus on the terminology and ritual dynamics of this particular expression of the Afro-religious continuum. One of the main features of Candomblé is the worship of the orixás (literally meaning “guardian of the head”), who are deities connected to natural elements of the landscape, but who also possess human characteristics and temperaments. Membership to the religious community is acquired through initiation rituals that formalize a lifelong bond between the novice and one particular orixá to whom he or she will be dedicated. In the process of discovering one’s own personal orixá, the social and spiritual identity of the novice and his or her role is reshaped both by members of the religious community and by the invisible world. As rituals are performed to nurture the relationship between humans and deities, the latter respond by manifesting in the body of novices through trance possession. The bodily experience is a central feature of Afro-Brazilian religions, and it exposes the human body during all ritual phases. Outstanding fig-

34

Giovanna Capponi

ures such as artists and intellectuals, but also anthropologists, have often been included in Candomblé’s rigid social structures as legitimate initiates. However, in many notable examples in history, anthropologists were initiated as não-rodantes, people with a higher position in the hierarchy who do not experience trance possession and whose initiation is shorter and less invasive. These conditions were often negotiated with religious authorities as a win-win situation: anthropologists could add prestige to the Candomblé houses and have access to information while also maintaining the comfort and status of their position within both the religious and the academic environment (Silva 2000, 106–9). However, in other cases, these engagements are set in motion not by humans but by entities and spirits themselves who participate and interact with humans through a code of symbolic actions or by involving the ethnographer’s bodily experience. The data presented have been collected during my PhD fieldwork between 2014 and 2016, when I was looking at the perceptions of the environment in Candomblé within different religious communities located in São Paulo, Brazil, and northern Italy. During my research, not only humans, animals, plants, and places, but also spirits and invisible beings were part of this web of ecological relations (Capponi 2018). In order to incorporate spirit ecologies in the ethnography, the researcher must understand how different ontologies interact, and what materialities, forces, and senses they entail (Jensen et al. 2016, 163). In certain cases, this process implies a deeper restructuring of one’s worldview. However, reflecting solely in terms of perspectives poses an epistemological problem. Adopting an ontological approach means to investigate different realities, not only different perceptions (ibid., 154). How can the ethnographer experience different worlds without reproducing this dichotomy? Is it possible to abdicate completely to one’s worldview on a social fact? In this framework, my approach to the fieldwork could be ascribed to what some scholars have called “methodological ludism.” André Droogers (2008, 452–56) theorizes this method, trying to provide a methodological tool for the study of religious contexts while also escaping the epistemological dichotomy between fact and belief. This approach is based on the notion that participant observation is a ludic activity in itself, one relying on the researcher’s capability of balancing between and within two different worlds. It is a form of playful openness that enables the ethnographer to use his or her own body as a tool to grasp different religious experiences independently of one’s own personal convictions. However, this process often requires a shift in one’s positioning both on a personal and social level in the field.

Playing with Other Worlds

35

The aim of the ethnographer who uses full participation as a methodology is not ‘to go native’ or to ‘play pretend’ to have gone native, but rather to cultivate a form of openness to the affective intensities of the other culture—an empathic ability—as well as a form of self-observation and paying attention to the effect they have on him—an introspective ability. (Halloy 2016, 19)

Drawing upon personal and comparative ethnographic data, this chapter will discuss the challenges and dynamics of renegotiating one’s bodily involvement and positioning through and with different ontological worlds. Moreover, it will argue how the researcher’s bodily experience is a primary source of ethnographic data not only because of his or her ability to internalize social values but also as a central place of renegotiation of one’s power, status, and inclusion within a social group.

THE WORLD OF DOUBLES: SPIRITS, BODIES, AND INVISIBLE PERSONAS As it often occurs, choosing a particular term to describe an indigenous concept also reflects a specific methodological choice. By examining the anthropological literature concerning religious and animistic practices, an increasing number of scholars are criticizing the common usage of the word “spirit” or “god” to describe whichever sort of (possibly) immaterial and invisible beings are conceived, worshipped, or feared in a local context (Laugrand and Oosten 2007, xxxv). In most cases, the term “spirit” is referred to as something that the anthropologist did not encounter as easily as the natives do. Indeed, identifying or translating what those beings are and what makes them different from animals, humans, or objects can be a challenging task. Some authors tried to disentangle the notion of “spirit” from the commonly associated notions of “invisible” and “non-material” by coining new terms (Praet 2009, 738). While comfortable with the term “spirit,” authors such as Jack Hunter decided to investigate the ontological nature of supernatural beings by directly asking questions to one of the spirits evoked during a séance (2015, 77). Similarly, the word “entity,” as a literal translation of the Portuguese entidade, seems to work in Afro-Brazilian contexts because it recalls an existing “being” with its own individuality and specific agency (Espírito Santo and Blanes 2014, 13–15). Indeed, thinking about different ontologies and their material dimensions helps us better understand the possible effects these beings have on the world we experience. Ochoa de-

36

Giovanna Capponi

scribes the dead in Afro-Cuban Palo as material forces that affect sensorial bodies (2007, 484), which provides an idea not only of what spirits are but also of what they can do and how they affect us. As previously stated, the orixás manifest themselves especially in the body, and particularly in a multiplicity of bodies: the body/object of the assentamentos (the material objects or “fetishes” that condense the spiritual energy), the body of Candomblé practitioners in trance, the body of the correspondent elements in the landscape, and, finally, in the non-material and invisible world, called orun. According to a myth, the orun (sometimes translated as “the sky”) is to be understood as a world of “spiritual doubles.” This conception bears little resemblance to the Platonic “theory of Forms.” In fact, Plato considers the eidós (Form, idea) to be perfect and immutable while its material counterpart is just an imperfect and corruptible copy. To Plato, the true essence of everything lies in this timeless and spaceless world called hyperuranion (literally meaning “beyond heaven”) (Phaedrus, [247]c). Muniz Sodré (1983, 90–125) criticizes Plato’s philosophical theory—very influential in Western thought— of an ultimate “truth” to be achieved and puts it in opposition to the initiate “secret” of West African philosophy. He describes the orun as an “invisible space” that interpenetrates the aiyé, the visible space. Everything done in one of the two worlds is reflected in the other in a game of exchange and communication, where the two levels influence one another. This notion emerged several times during my fieldwork. For example, Tata Kajalacy, a Candomblé priest from the coastal area of the state of São Paulo, explains that the orixá, or nkisi, is an “invisible double” living in the orun, and he stresses that it is not a spirit but a living being. It is like this. I am looking at Giovanna, but there is another invisible Giovanna, there is a visible world and an invisible world . . . alive! Not a spirit! I am looking at Giovanna, but there is another Giovanna who is not visible, that is the nkisi!1 (Tata Kajalacy, Candomblé priest, São Sebastião, SP)2

In another example, I heard a more experienced Candomblé practitioner saying to a recently initiated one, “Now you are ‘made’ [feita, synonym for “initiated”], now you exist in the orun.”3 This statement illustrates not only that the orixás manifest themselves in multiple bodies, but also that humans, who appear self-evidently visible and material, start having a degree of invisibility once inserted in Candomblé social and ritual relations. This does not mean that one’s invisible double does not exist before the initiation, but it simply shows that the link between the two worlds has not yet been sealed.

Playing with Other Worlds

37

Interestingly, some objects are also included in this dimension. On another occasion, someone asked an erê (child entity who sometimes incorporates the body of the novices)—in the cheerful way someone would use while talking to children—where her dummy was. The erê’s answer was: “I have two of those: one is in her house [pointing at the person she was incorporating], one is up there [pointing at the sky].”4 Here the entity makes explicit that even a trivial object as a child’s dummy, if present in the material world, must exist in the realm of doubles. Indeed, Candomblé practitioners often describe the world of the orixás as full of enchantment and magic. As a priestess told me: “É um mundo mágico!” (“It is a magic world!”). This sentence implies not only a notion of beauty and captivation of Candomblé but, more importantly, the existence of a level of reality, a world in which the enchantment takes place. This peculiar feature reminds the story of a man, Walmir, as reported by Mattijs van de Port in the book Ecstatic Encounters (2011). When asked about his initial approach to Candomblé, to the author’s bewilderment, Walmir’s account does not start with exotic entities or spirit encounters but starts with the sighting of a flying saucer. Walmir, who is described as “a journalist, an academic, a man of facts,” considers the sighting of the flying saucer as a fundamental experience in his personal story since it broke the ground for the unveiling of other realms of possibility. All of this underscored the logic of the truth event: an unsolicited and out-of-theordinary event occurs—‘too weird to be true’—and yet, the sheer factuality of its occurrence, the undeniable reality of its having taken place, forces one to reconsider all definitions of the possible and the impossible. It was thus that Walmir’s capacity to believe was expanded: it was thus that he was made to accept the presence of an absent truth that brings the world to order. (Van de Port 2011, 195–96)

As Eduardo Viveiros de Castro puts it, “It is not a matter of imagining a form of experience, if you like, but of experiencing a form of imagination” (2013, 484). According to this author, the anthropologist needs to take into consideration the material consequences of indigenous concepts, not as mere worldviews but as alternative realities. This approach, which goes under the label of “ontological turn,” although considered problematic by many scholars, presents a new way of analysis that helps one escape from the notion of “social representation of reality.” Deriving his proposal from Deleuze’s thought, Viveiros de Castro dismisses the interpretation of social phenomena in favor of the multiplication of the world, “populating it with all those things expressed that do not exist outside of their expression” (Deleuze 1969, 335).

38

Giovanna Capponi

Indeed, it is important to highlight that interacting with the orixás does not correspond to a denial of scientific theories about the universe, the environment, and natural resources. On the contrary, I would like to describe these deities and their presence in the material world and the natural landscape through the notions of personhood. Alfred Irving Hallowell (1960) uses this concept to describe the different ontologies populating the world of the Ojibwa in southeastern Canada. According to the author, some animals, monsters, or spiritual beings, but also natural forces such as thunder or wind, fall under the classification of other-than-human persons due to their specific agency and ability to interact with humans. Following this thread, I would argue that the orixás could be considered “persons” in the etymological sense of persona (from Latin, meaning “mask” or “character”). This refers not only to their anthropomorphic representations in mythological accounts and to their status as immanent natural forces, but also to their capacity to negotiate their desires and actions with and through humans. In fact, as I will explain later in this chapter, the interactions with these other-than-human personas are not limited to those sharing the views and beliefs of Candomblé practitioners. Non-initiated people can, in certain cases, experience an uncontrolled form of trance possession, which is normally interpreted as a calling from the orixá itself for the person to become a yawó (person who can go into trance) and for the connection to be formalized through the initiation ritual. As part of contemporary Candomblé praxis, after this particular event the person is woken up and asked if he or she wants to accept the orixá’s invitation or not. However, according to the oral tradition and narrative about this phenomenon, only a few decades ago initiation was regarded as compulsory for the person who, as they say in Portuguese, bolou no santo or caiu no santo (literally “fell in the saint”): indeed, one world, the orun, seems to be far more sacred and authoritative than the other, the aiyé.

CLIMBING AND FALLING OFF THE HIERARCHY IN TERREIROS Candomblé terreiros (temples) are organized according to a rigid hierarchical structure that determines the nature of internal relationships among initiates. These extended families are built like a pyramid, at the head of which is the pai de santo or mãe de santo, also called babalorixá or yalorixá (literally “father/ mother of the orixá,”) the person who is entitled to initiate others. The sacred father/mother5 usually has many sacred sons and daughters who compose the religious family. Their status normally depends on their edade de santo (age in the saint, one’s years of experience within the religion) and

Playing with Other Worlds

39

the type of initiation they went through. There are two possible types of initiation: yawó, and ogãn or equede (respectively, for male or female novices who do not have the ability to go into trance). The difference lies both in the roles these initiates have in the religious community and in their social mobility. In fact, yawós start their journey at the lowest level of the hierarchy, but after at least seven years (the age of majority in Candomblé) they can become sacred fathers and mothers themselves and initiate other people. Conversely, ogãns and equedes (pronounced “ekedji”) are admitted into the higher ranks soon after their entrance in the religion, but they will never reach the top. The hierarchy is expressed through behavioral codes that constitute the etiquette inside the sacred space. Due to their status of juniority, yawós can be usually seen sitting on straw mats, eating with their hands, and performing tasks considered humble or unpleasant, such as cleaning the kitchen floor or plucking and eviscerating the sacrificial animals. After seven years and after undergoing a specific ritual of passage called obrigação (“obligation”, “duty”), yawós become egbomi (elders), at which point they are permitted to sit on chairs and use forks and spoons, and they could be assigned a cargo (a specific role of responsibility within the community). Due to their fundamental role as “horses” of the orixás,6 the initiation process of yawós is also longer and more intense than that of people who do not experience trance possession. During this period, the novice’s head is shaved for the deity to be “fixed” on the top of it so as to create a physical tie, a channel through which the orixá will take possession of the person’s body. Equedes, instead, are women who do not go into trance but have the role of helping and taking care of the orixá during trance possession. The ogãns, their masculine counterparts, are in charge of playing the drums (an activity that is forbidden to women in the sacred space) and slaughtering the animals during sacrificial practices. Equedes and ogãns undergo a simplified and shorter initiation process, their heads are not shaved, and they do not carry initiation symbols such as body paintings during the ritual. Since they retain certain privileges in the hierarchy, their position and prestige are also different from those of yawós. For these reasons, important figures, intellectuals, and sometimes anthropologists are likely to be initiated as ogãns or equedes. In this way they add prestige to the Candomblé houses and they have access to information and services provided by the terreiros while also maintaining a comfortable hierarchical position. This is the case of the writer Jorge Amado, the dancer Augusto Omolú, and of the French anthropologists Pierre Verger and Roger Bastide, among many others. The Argentinian anthropologist Juana Elbein dos Santos was also an equede of the Axé Opô Afonjá, one of the most important Candomblé temples

40

Giovanna Capponi

in Salvador, and she was the first scholar to theorize the methodological validity of the initiation for researchers. Historically, anthropologists and researchers have contributed to the shaping and legitimizing of Afro-Brazilian religious practices, privileging those considered more “authentic” and closer to an imagined African “purity” (Dantas 2009, 109–10). As Capone (2010, 25) argues, men and women of letters, academics, doctors, and people whose status is already high in society were often chosen as representatives of Candomblé religious communities, and some of them considered their roles within the terreiros as mere honorary titles. Ogãns and equedes also have the privilege of free and immediate access to the ritual secrets, which are only unveiled little by little to yawós. It should be noted that the fact of being initiated as yawó or equede/ ogãn is not a personal choice. It is normally determined through the cowrie shell divination together with the personal orixá to whom the person will be dedicated. However, there is a degree of negotiation in this respect. Although Candomblé is not explicitly proselytizing, anthropologists and researchers soon realize that their presence in the terreiro automatically triggers a slow and subtle seduction game (Silva 2000) whereby the outsider is gradually absorbed into the “native” universe. This movement toward some degree of integration is also a desirable trait for anthropologists, as verbalization and interviews are never sufficient to understand rituals, and participation is necessary in a context where secrecy and hierarchy are part of the social norm. This process of immersion into the Candomblé world normally starts with the detection of one’s personal orixá. As soon as the outsider passes the threshold of the terreiro, the members of the community start playfully guessing his or her orixá by asking questions, observing and making commentaries upon his or her clothes, appearance, personality traits, and manners. These guesses are a first attempt to draw similarities between the mythical archetypes of the orixás and human characteristics, but they are also a way for the outsider to start familiarizing and identifying with his or her potential personal deity. Once the jogo de búzios (literally “cast of the shells”, the typical divination technique used in Candomblé) unveils the actual patron orixá, the person, even if non-initiated, would be encouraged through jokes, references, and casual commentaries to comply with his or her new social and mythical identity. At the beginning of my fieldwork, my orixá had been initially identified as Oxum, the feminine goddess of love and fertility. As a result, I was encouraged to behave and appear accordingly. I was humorously reproached for not wearing makeup and for not displaying the typical traits of feminine beauty or vanity in the way I was dressed. When eventually a decisive jogo de búzios confirmed that I was indeed a daughter of Logunedé, the deity

Playing with Other Worlds

41

who retains the feminine characteristics of his mother, Oxum, but also the masculine traits of his father, Oxossi, the hunter god, I noticed the reaction of my interlocutors was one of surprise and relief, as finally the traits of my own personality and the ones of my patron orixá successfully overlapped. The Brazilian anthropologist Rita Amaral recounts a similar experience: initially identified with the orixá Obaluayé (god of illness and health), she was treated with some degree of annoying reverence due to the dreaded powers of her personal deity. When the jogo de búzios unveiled she was instead a daughter of Ogum, whose character is considered livelier, the relationships with her interlocutors turned friendlier (Silva 2000, 90). These ethnographic examples illustrate how important it is for outsiders to recognize themselves and to be recognized as part of a specific mythical universe (2000, 90). Moreover, they demonstrate that the characteristics of the different gods and goddesses can be often measured against human bodies, personalities, and features in a constant and layered renegotiation of sacred and profane identities. It should be noted that the gradual, partial, or full absorption of researchers into the religious community is also a common strategy for the sacred father or mother to gain some degree of control over the anthropologist by submitting him or her to the hierarchical relations already in place. Securing sacred and ritual ties with a particular community has the double effect of ensuring and legitimizing the researcher’s full access to the fieldwork but also subjecting him or her to the power relations, limitations, and politics of the terreiro. These are limitations that I personally experienced as I gradually gained the confidence and trust of my interlocutors, which prevented me, for example, from extending my research field to other Candomblé temples that, for different reasons, stood in a position of rivalry or antagonism with respect to those terreiros. Nevertheless, the ability to participate, be involved, and grasp the dynamics of one or a few connected communities is still more desirable than roaming superficially from terreiro to terreiro while maintaining the rather cold status of a simple “guest.” The aforementioned techniques of absorption also affect the ways in which anthropologists obtain their data and sometimes influence the content of the academic production. Direct questioning is not always welcome in the sacred space, and ritual knowledge is passed through experience and practical learning rather than oral transmission. As an egbomi said to me once: “When you will become initiated, I do not want to hear academic questions . . . children do not go to university!”7 Here the egbomi is making the point that my junior position in the sacred space is more relevant than my position as an academic. Mattijs van de Port beautifully explains the contraposition between the academic process of world-making—in which the researcher is the

42

Giovanna Capponi

undisputable “author of the world,” and the modalities of world-making (and self-making) of Afro-Brazilian religions: In other words, in Candomblé the idea is not to be the author of the world, but to let yourself be “written by” the world. Spirit possession, I would say, is a clear example of this mode: allowing the body to be invaded by an Other is allowing the self to be “written” by an agent that comes from beyond the world of one’s own making. (2011, 17)

For almost the whole the duration of my fieldwork, I was part of a terreiro in northern Italy as an abian, a preliminary status to the initiation in which the person has some degree of involvement while also maintaining a certain freedom and independence from the obligations of the hierarchical structure. Abians are effectively filhos da casa (sons or daughters of the house) and are welcome to participate in the public rituals but do not have access to secret features and performances. In order to obtain the status of abian, the person must go through a ritual called lavagem das contas (“washing of the beads”): his or her patron orixá is determined through divination and the beads of corresponding colors are prepared, strung in a long necklace, and washed in an herbal bath. The abian stays in a liminal position in which he or she overcomes the status of “guest” and outsider without bearing the commitment of the initiation. While technically maintaining all the interdictions of a non-initiated person, the abian is often able to grasp and see, due to the confidence gained and his or her pre-initiatory status, things that should remain in the sphere of secrecy. However, my approach to the fieldwork and my involvement in the community has never been opportunistic. My choice of becoming an abian was not a mere methodological choice but the result of a growing empathy toward Candomblé worldviews after a few years of research. These kinds of involvements are normally facilitated by the fact that the category of “believing” is almost inapplicable. In fact, in Candomblé terreiros, one’s willingness of doing something is far more valuable than one’s belief. I was never asked to recite a creed; however, I was asked if I had faith. Although these two words seem to express different nuances of the same concept, they seem to also convey a notion of membership, which has political implications. In Brazilian Portuguese, a crente (“believer”) is someone who attends a church, often referred to Evangelical churches, which represent the archenemies of Afro-Brazilian religions in the modern Brazilian sociopolitical landscape (Silva 2007). Conversely, the locution ter fé (“having faith”) represents, in this particular context, not one’s mere conviction of the existence of orixás and entities

Playing with Other Worlds

43

but the devotional and submissive aspect of the religious practice, as shown in the following interview excerpts. Here we prepare the food [offerings], we do everything with much love, much faith.8 (Sacred son, Axé Ilê Obá, São Paulo) You can bring beautiful clothes, you can bring some jewelry, some presents for your orixá, but do you know which is the thing he likes the most? Your faith.9 (Priestess, Ilê Axé Alaketu Aira, Arborio, Italy)

In these examples, “faith” appears to be the desirable state of mind for practitioners to come to the terreiro and perform the rituals. Similar issues have been studied by Rodney Needham (1976), who dedicated one of his most important works to the analysis of linguistic categories when referring to emotions. Describing his frustration and difficulties in accurately translating the sentence “I believe in God” in the language spoken by the Penan people of Borneo, he raised doubts as to the actual existence of this particular state for people who do not have a word to define it. As for Candomblé followers, the action of believing in the orixás seems to be a relatively trivial issue within the premises of the terreiro. Indeed, from an ontological perspective, what is there to believe in energies and entities that are already an active and interactive part of one’s landscape, with their own agency, in the form of thunder, river, or stone? As explained by Tim Ingold: “In the animic ontology . . . what is unthinkable is the very idea that life is played out upon the inanimate surface of a ready-made world” (2011, 17). Another phrase used to describe one’s personal involvement and devotion is the rather banal verb gostar, meaning “to like.” When one of my interlocutors, a Brazilian egbomi and sacred daughter of Pai Odé, found out I was carrying out research about Candomblé, she looked at me suspiciously and asked me “Yes, but do you like the religion?”10 This question struck me, as it was focusing not on whether I believed it but on whether I enjoyed it. I found other examples in which the phrase “to like” was used to describe one’s position and attachment toward the religion. [talking about the responsibilities of being a Candomblecist] It is a commitment, but not a very heavy one, because if you know why you do it and you do it because you like it, it is not a burden . . . 11 (Pai Mauro, Ilê Axé Alaketu Aira) Sometimes I feel like everything is going badly, but in the end I have friends, I am doing well with my job, I have a religion that I like . . . 12 (Ogãn, Ilê Axé Alaketu Odé Tolá)

44

Giovanna Capponi

Indeed, one’s enjoyment of the rituals and one’s appreciation of Candomblé aesthetics (clothes, chants, dances, etc.) seem to be of fundamental importance, and one’s willingness to enter this world must be driven by personal satisfaction. However, in certain cases the initiation is also seen as an unavoidable way to escape a state of mental or physical affliction. States of unease, malaise, and depression are sometimes “cured” through one’s initiation, as they are regarded to be originated in a sort of spiritual imbalance that the orixá will help resolve. A Brazilian sacred mother once told me how she was feeling extremely sick and decided to go to see a doctor. Once having visited her, the doctor said: “Madam, you have absolutely nothing! I will give you a piece of advice . . . go to see a pai de santo!” However, this process also works the other way around: a condition of sudden and mysterious sickness can be interpreted as a sign that the orixá is demanding someone’s “head.” Normally, the persuasive methods of the orixás in convincing someone to enter the religion involve strange symptoms, prolonged headaches, and unexpected trance possession. “Be careful, or they will start teasing you . . .” an egbomi said to me once, warning me about the possibility that the orixás could start pushing me in an unpleasant way. A Brazilian egbomi shared with me his experience of being induced to do the initiation because of illness. “I did my initiation when I was a child, I was very sick, my mother brought me to a terreiro and I “fell” [in trance] . . . I had to do it, I did not have any other option.”13 Once again, these examples reveal how the relationship between humans and orixás, far from indicating only one’s spiritual attachment and one’s social position in the religious hierarchy, is also inscribed in the human body, a place where deities and entities can manifest and communicate their intentions and desires. Humans and orixás negotiate different ways of creating a bond whose purpose can be opportunistic, necessary, strategic, devotional, or a mixture of these. A SERIOUS PLAY: THE RISKS OF INHABITING MULTIPLE WORLDS In the first section, I mentioned the necessity to approach fieldwork as a ludic activity as suggested by Droogers’s (2008, 452-456) “methodological ludism.” While methodological atheism has the effect of reducing everything to the social representation of reality, denying the importance of the religious experience, a methodological theism accepts the reality of these manifestations of the sacred without problematizing them. Similarly, an agnostic position avoids taking this problem into consideration. Droogers proposes a way in between based on the ability of human beings to play in and out of their role.

Playing with Other Worlds

45

However, as argued by Handelman (1992), this playful movement creates a paradox: within the boundaries of “play,” a different reality is enacted “as if” it is a serious one. While the ethnographer recognizes it as “play,” it cannot escape its effects. Engaging with fieldwork in a ludic way implies constant shifting and transformation, and this approach can have serious consequences. Kim Knibbe recounts that during her research among the followers of a Dutch spiritualist medium and healer called Jomanda, the immersive play led her to take on the religious habitus and to experience similar emotional turmoil, doubts, and excitement of her interlocutors during the healing sessions (Knibbe and Droogers 2011). This phase of deep immersion and learning is regarded as necessary in order to be able to subsequently switch back to the academic role. However, fieldwork can be a transformative experience that researchers are rarely, or perhaps never, trained to address. To take the game seriously means being open to the possibility that your life will change because of these sensations: it is no longer “as if,” but “what if this is really what is.” To take this existential risk is not something that can be expected lightly from a researcher, or that can be discussed in an annual evaluation as a plus or a minus point in the performance of a job. (Idem. 296)

These are instances and problems I personally experienced when I started showing the “symptoms” of trance possession during Candomblé rituals, feeling dizziness, heat, increasing heartbeat, heavy eyelids, and light shaking. These events forced me to reconsider my positioning of abian and eventually led me to undergo the initiation ritual at the end of my fieldwork, becoming a yawó and consequently starting again from a new position, at the bottom of the Candomblé social ladder. The situation in which a non-initiated person falls into trance, sometimes called bolar no santo (“falling in the saint”) is regarded to be a proper “calling,” in which the orixá him/herself demands someone’s initiation. This event immediately triggers a series of renegotiations both at a personal level and within the social sphere of the terreiro. Such an exceptional (although not that rare) event calls for a restructuring of one’s position in the hierarchy and degree of involvement. Once again, the fieldwork experience of the anthropologist Rita Amaral helps to understand these dynamics. She recounts how, during a Candomblé celebration, the orixá Ogum (who had taken possession of a devotee’s body) came to her and “suspended” (suspender) her as an equede. The so-called suspensão is when an incorporated (incorporado, who took someone’s body) orixá indicates someone among the non-initiated to become an equede or ogãn, and it is the equivalent of

46

Giovanna Capponi

the bolar no santo for people who cannot go into trance. When in trance, the orixá takes the hands of the person and makes him or her sit three times on a special chair reserved for people in the high ranks of the terreiro. Both events, the suspensão and the bolar no santo, are considered explicit manifestations of the orixá’s will and are characterized in a positive way, which makes them harder to resist. Rita Amaral: How to say no to an orixá, to a god that has just chosen you, even if he or she never saw you? . . . So that I argued to Ogum that I could not do anything for him. “I cannot do anything for you.” “But I want your heart,” he said to me, “You have a good heart.” If an orixá “suspends” you in the name of your heart, what do you do? There is nothing you can do. (Silva 2000, 95)14

It can be argued that both events are part of the widespread techniques of absorption of the researcher or outsider in the Candomblé world. Obviously, such requests are more difficult to decline—not only because they come directly from deities and entities who have more authority than humans, but also because they take place during the actual rituals or ceremonies. These requests are different from the subtle and seductive hints that I described among human peers precisely because of their explicit and public form as part of a sacred performance. Despite expressing a similar kind of meaning, these two modalities of interaction—the bolar no santo and the suspensão—between humans and gods have rather different outcomes in the social structure. While the suspensão results in an acknowledgment of the researcher’s presence in the religious community, giving him or her the privileges of full participation, high status, and immediate unveiling of all ritual secrets, the bolar no santo not only implies a new start from a lower hierarchical status but also involves the researcher’s bodily experience being exposed. For the ethnographer, as was my case, the emotional and social implications of these close contacts with different ontological worlds reverberated professionally and personally in many ways. While this certainly intensified the power dynamics in the terreiros I was working with, I was also confronted with the problem of explaining and rephrasing my involvement academically and methodologically. Moreover, these experiences (and their public exposure in a ritual context) triggered contrasting emotions such as shame, confusion, doubt, fulfillment, and awe, which I had to elaborate both on at an intimate level but also socially with my friends, family, and loved ones. Similar issues have been raised by Katharine L. Wiegele, who conducted fieldwork studying a charismatic Christian group in the Philippines. Wiegele recounts her struggle to elaborate on her personal experience when

Playing with Other Worlds

47

she was “slain in the spirit” by a priest (a situation in which devotees lie on the floor semiconscious as the power of God or the Holy Spirit is called upon them by a priest). She describes her sense of inadequacy and exposure, while at the same time the event increased the confidence of the young priest who slayed her (2012, 77–78). Moreover, she wonders if her position as a non-believer researcher could allow her to have the same experience of her interlocutors. While Wiegele struggles with evaluating her experience as an authentic methodological tool, I would like to stress how the researcher’s bodily experience is often a primary source of ethnographic data not only because of the ethnographer’s ability of internalizing social values but also because the body is a fundamental place of renegotiation of one’s power, status, and inclusion within a social group. As Maurice Merleau-Ponty states: Our bodily experience of movement is not a particular case of knowledge; it provides us with a way of access to the world and the object, with a “praktognosia,” which has to be recognised as original and perhaps as primary. My body has its world, or understands its world, without having to make use of my “symbolic” or “objectifying function.” (2005 [1962], 162)

When the bodily experience is validated by the context and by one’s ability of being-in-the-world, its authenticity should not be problematic. However, it should be taken into consideration as part of a learning process the anthropologist undergoes, whose achievements and outcomes have consequences on the way the researcher moves and is perceived within the social environment.

CONCLUSION Within Candomblé social and ecological environment, orixás are to be understood as invisible and nonhuman personas with their own agency and ability to engage with humans. This symmetrical exercise leads the ethnographer to pay attention not only to the social world, the aiyé, but also to the orun, the invisible world of “doubles,” and how these two worlds interact. Indeed, engaging methodologically with these ideas and “playing” with the possible existence of different realities is a way of lifting the limitations of the classic academic approach to the study of religious phenomena. In this way, the researcher is pushed to experience the religious and spiritual world not as a mere set of symbols or social constructs but as a place of interaction with different ontologies. However, this playful and experimental engagement can have serious consequences on the social and personal positioning of the ethnographer. In Afro-Brazilian Candomblé, the encounters with

48

Giovanna Capponi

invisible personas in some instances can help the researcher gain access and legitimization in the religious social structure. In other cases, when the researcher is exposed as a rodante (a person who can experience trance possession), this encounter can restructure the researcher’s social position as a junior member of the community. These events compel us to reconsider the body and bodily experience both as a primary research tool and as a place of renegotiation of power and hierarchy across different ontological worlds. Like in a game of snakes and ladders, the encounter with different entities has political implications and unpredictable outcomes. However, acknowledging the possibility of these uncanny interactions within the research setting is necessary in designing a new anthropological approach in which doubts, beliefs, engagements, and emotional responses to different realities are included and legitimated. Giovanna Capponi is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Roehampton. She is trained as a social anthropologist with a particular interest in environmental anthropology, human-animal studies, and more-than-human ontologies. She conducted multi-sited fieldwork in Italy and Brazil looking at animal sacrificial practices and perception of the environment in AfroBrazilian Candomblé, developing perspectives in the fields of anthropology of ritual and material culture. She is currently working on more-than-human ecologies in urban settings. She is the co-convenor of the Human and Other Living Beings EASA Network.

NOTES 1. Nkisi is a Bantu world to say orixá, and it is used mostly in Candomblé Angola. This Candomblé “nation” presents elements that originated in the Bantu and Central African area; however, nowadays in Brazil it also shows a very similar structure to the most widespread Candomblé Ketu of Yoruba origin. For a wider account and history of Candomblé Angola, see Capone 2010. 2. Tata Kajalacy: É assim, eu estou vendo a Giovanna, mas tem uma outra Giovanna invisível, tem um mundo visível e invisível . . . vivo! Não espírito. Eu estou vendo a Giovanna mas tem uma outra Giovanna que não é visível, esse é o Nkisi. 3. Agora você é feita, você existe no orun. 4. Tenho duas: uma na casa dela, outra lá em cima. 5. I propose this translation instead of the literal “father or mother of the saint” in use in the anglophone literature, as it better renders the existence of a whole set of relations within the realm of the sacred, which includes members of the religious family (sacred mother, sacred son, sacred brother, etc.), deities, artifacts, and spaces.

Playing with Other Worlds

49

6. This is a common metaphor used to describe trance possession, where the deity is said to “ride” the body of the devotee. 7. Quando você fizer a iniciação, não quero ouvir perguntas de universitário . . . i bambini non vanno all’università! 8. Filho de santo: “A gente aqui prepara a comida, faz tudo com muito cariño, com muita fé. 9. Mãe de santo: “Você pode levar uma roupa bonita, pode levar uma jóia, algum presente para o orixá, más sabe o que ele gosta mais de tudo? A sua fé. 10. Sim, mas você gosta da religião? 11. Pai Mauro: è un impegno, neanche poi più di tanto gravoso perché, se sai perché lo fai e lo fai perché ti piace, non è un impegno gravoso. 12. Ogãn: A volte penso che va tutto male, ma alla fine ho degli amici, il lavoro va bene, ho una religione che mi piace . . . 13. Eu me iniciei quando era criança, estava muito doente, minha mãe me levou num terreiro e eu bolei . . . e tive que fazer o santo, não tinha outra opção. 14. Rita Amaral: Como dizer não para um orixá, para um deus que acabou de te escolher, mesmo nunca tendo te visto na vida? . . . Tanto que eu argomentei com Ogum que eu não podia fazer nada. “Eu não posso fazer nada pelo senhor.” “Mas eu quero seu coração,” ele falou para mim, “Você tem coração bom.” Se um orixá te suspende em nome do seu coração, você vai fazer o que? Não tem o que fazer.

REFERENCES Bastide, Roger. 2005. O Candomblé da Bahia [The Candomblé of Bahia]. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras. Capone, Stefania. 2010. Searching for Africa in Brazil. Power and Tradition in Candomblé. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Capponi, Giovanna. 2018. “The Garden and the Market: Human-Environment Relations and Collective Imaginary in Afro-Brazilian Candomblé between Italy and Brazil. Studia Religiologica 51(3): 165–78. Dantas, Beatriz Góis, and Stephen Berg. 2009. “The Construction and Meaning of ‘Nagô Purity.’” In Nagô Grandma and White Papa: Candomblé and the Creation of Afro-Brazilian Identity, 85–133. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Deleuze, Gilles. 1969. Logique du Sens [Logic of sense]. Paris: Minuit. Droogers, André. 2008. “As Close as a Scholar Can Get: Exploring a One-Field Approach to the Study of Religion.” In Religion: Beyond a Concept, edited by Hent de Vries, 448–63. New York: Fordham University Press. Espírito Santo, Diana, and Ruy Blanes. 2014. “Introduction: On the Agency of Intangibles.” In The Social Life of Spirits, edited by Diana Espírito Santo and Ruy Blanes, 1–32. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Jensen, Casper Bruun, Miho Ishii, and Philip Swift. 2016. “Attuning to the Webs of en: Ontography, Japanese Spirit Worlds, and the ‘Tact’ of Minakata Kumagusu.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6(2): 149–72.

50

Giovanna Capponi

Halloy, Alloy. 2016. “Full Participation and Ethnographic Reflexivity: An AfroBrazilian Case Study.” Journal for the Study of Religious Experience 2: 7–24. Hallowell, Alfred Irving. 1960. “Ojibwa Ontology, Behavior and World View.” In Culture in History: Essays in Honor of Paul Radin, edited by Stanley Diamond, 19– 52. New York: Columbia University Press. Handelman, Don. 1992. “Passages to play: Paradox and process.” Play & Culture 5(1): 1–19. Hunter, Jack. 2015. “Spirits Are the Problem: Anthropology and Conceptualising Spiritual Beings.” Journal for the Study of Religious Experience 1(1): 76–86. Ingold, Tim. 2011. “Rethinking the animate, re-animating thought” Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology 7(1): 9–20. Laugrand, Frédéric B., and Jarich G. Oosten. 2007 “Introduction: The Nature of Spirits.” In La Nature des Esprits dans les Cosmologies Autochtones [The nature of spirits in Aboriginal cosmologies], edited by Frédéric B. Laugrand and Jarich G. Oosten, xxxiii–xlix. Laval: Les Presses de L’Université de Laval. Knibbe, Kim, and Droogers, André. 2011. “Methodological Ludism and the Study of Religion.” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 23: 283–303. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2005 [1962]. Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge. Needham, Rodney. 1976. Belief, Language and Experience. Oxford: Blackwell. Praet, Istvan. 2009. “Shamanism and Ritual in South America: An Inquiry into Amerindian Shape-Shifting.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 15(4): 737–54. dos Santos, Juana Elbein 2002 [1972]. Os Nagô e a Morte: Pàde, Àsèsè e o Culto Égun na Bahia [The Nagô and death: Pàde, Ásèsè and the Égun cult in Bahia]. Petrópolis: Vozes. Silva, Vagner Gonçalves da. 2000. O Antropólogo e sua Magia: Trabalho de Campo e Texto Etnográfico nas Pesquisas Antropológicas sobre as Religiões Afro-Brasileiras [The anthropologist and his magic: Fieldwork and ethnographic text in anthropological research on Afro-Brazilian religions]. São Paulo: Editora da Universidade de São Paulo. Silva, Vagner Gonçalves da. 2007. “Neopentecostalismo e Religiões Afro-Brasileiras: Significado do Ataque aos Símbolos da Herança Religiosa Africana no Brasil Contemporâneo [Neo-Pentecostalism and Afro-Brazilian religions: The meaning of the attack on the symbols of African religious heritage in contemporary Brazil].” Mana 13(1): 207–37. Sodré, Muniz. 2005. A Verdade Seduzida. Por um Conceito de Cultura no Brasil [The seduced truth: For a concept of culture in Brazil]. Rio de Janeiro: DP&A. Tooker, Deborah. E. 1992. “Identity Systems of Highland Burma: ‘Belief,’ Akha Zan, and a Critique of Interiorised Notions of Ethno-religious Identity.” Man 27(4): 799–819. Van de Port, Mattijs. 2011. Ecstatic Encounters: Bahian Candomblé and the Quest for the Really Real. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Verger, Pierre. 1981. Orixás: Deuses Iorubás na África e no Novo Mundo [Orixás: Yoruba gods in Africa and the New World]. Salvador: Corrupio.

Playing with Other Worlds

51

Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 2013. “The Relative Native.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 3(3): 473–502. Wiegele, Katharine L. 2012. “On Being a Participant and an Observer in Religious Ethnography: Silence, Betrayal and Becoming.” In Missionaries Impositions. Conversion, Resistance, and Other Challenges to Objectivity in Religious Ethnography, edited by H. K. Crane and D. L. Weibel, locations 1687–1884. Plymouth: Lexington Books. Kindle Edition.

Chapter 2

Embodied Knowledge and the Phenomenological Posture to Frame the Anthropology of “Extraordinary” Experiences Géraldine Mossière

‫ﱬﱫ‬ What I am attempting, then is to portray the objective world . . . built up from ‘the private plane of perceptual experiences’ of all those who hooted with praise at the emergence of Sakutoha’s ihamba, of the five doctors in Meru’s Ihamba, and also the experiences of many other Africans and, indeed, as far as one can estimate, of many ritual performers throughout humankind. — Ralph Burhoe, “The Phenomenon of Religion Seen Scientifically”

From the effervescence of Pentecostal rituals with Congolese migrant believers to narratives of ecstatic encounters with “God,” from Sufi converts to Sufism in Montreal, my ethnographic experience with the extraordinary has mirrored Edith Turner’s thought. As I participated in a large-scale research project aimed at documenting the religious diversity that developed in the province of Québec (Canada),1 after a long period of hegemony of the Catholic Church, I discovered that such phenomena had become common in the religious lives of many, as Stéphanie, a member of a Pentecostal church I had followed for years once told me: Actually, I did not want to speak in tongues, but I had been praying so much in that church [and] the communion was starting, and that’s when I started to 52

Embodied Knowledge and the Phenomenological Posture

53

speak in tongues. I mean, I was under the impression that God was talking to me, at any time. I could sit in my living room and then start to talk with God. I was obviously talking alone, but I knew he was present and he could hear me. And I was praying and praying. [Later on], I started to have the gift of prophecy. I could see things before they came true or at the same time as they were occurring. For instance, one day I dreamt that my sister was losing a lot of things in her stomach. I had the feeling they were taking out her intestines, this is what I could see in my vision, in my dream. When I called her, she told me: “I have been losing blood for an hour,” [and] then I knew: That’s why God woke me up with this dream. (Interview conducted by the author)

In the same research, a devotee of Sai Baba, the guru from India, reported: When I was six or seven, my parents had an altar at home with pictures of many holy figures from different traditions, especially from Hinduism, like Rama, Krishna, and so forth. One day, my father added the picture of Sai Baba even though [my dad] did not know much about him. Later on, [my dad] invited a special singer to the home; a lot of people were present and they sang bhajans [spiritual songs]. When the session was over, my mother went upstairs and discovered that ashes had appeared to cover Sai Baba’s picture. Everybody was astounded, because Sai Baba is supposed to have the power to materialize sacred ashes to cure people. People started to sing bhajans again. The following day, the altar was completely covered with ashes. Nobody knew what to do with it. Then people around came to ask for healing for particular pains. So the ash was diluted in water to be drunk by sick people. More and more people came to my house for this purpose and many of them were healed this way.

For the scholar, the content of these unanticipated experiences belongs in the realm of the extraordinary—that is, in a realm that cannot be intellectually grasped through the secular and rational lenses that feature academic milieu. The observation or report of such experiences then raises questions such as: Did those experiences really happen or are they the fruit of believers’ subjective perceptions? Where should the line be drawn between illusion and reality? May one speak of different levels of reality? It is as if we are in a twilight zone where the frontier between the explainable and the unexplainable is blurred, as no scientific field has yet satisfactorily understood such experiences. According to Birgit Meyer: “[Social scientists] have to come to terms with the mediated nature of experiences that are claimed to be immediate and authentic by the beholders, and authorized as such by the religious traditions of which they form part” (2006, 16). The issue, then, is not so much about what meaning and rationale we, as anthropologists, should give to those experiences that appear at first to

54

Géraldine Mossière

be beyond the reach of rational explanation, as it is about how to grasp and report them. Would these accounts have more empirical legitimacy if the ethnographer lived and reported similar experiences himself or herself? As Throop points out, “there is indeed a spectrum of possible articulations of experience in terms of coherent and disjunctive forms” (2003, 235). How, then, can we make those experiences coherent and conjunctive with those of the believers? And how to treat them when they are not coherent and conjunctive? In the following pages, I want to explore subtle levels of participation by examining different ways of sharing extraordinary experience that vary on a continuum between two poles, namely as a distant dialogue between the ethnographer and what has often been portrayed as Otherness on the one hand, and a phenomenological experience of co-presence (Fabian 2011) on the other. I will then look at how a phenomenological approach to religious experience may be an appropriate way to grasp the very nature of experience, notably by means of embodiment. In this respect, anthropologists seem well suited to achieve such analysis, as they are prone to embodying the experiences they observe by the fact of being physically present in the field, as well as by participating in the actions, rituals, more generally, and the social and symbolic practices that occur during fieldwork, be it voluntary or not. This observation relates to a paramount field of anthropology of experience that Turner and Edward Bruner (1986) initiated and that keeps unfolding (Schmidt 2016). While anthropologists who situate themselves this way invite ethnographers to tackle their own bodiliness in the process of knowing in the field (Pierini 2016a), I argue that the role of the anthropologist’s experience in fieldwork can best be grasped by considering this posture as phenomenological and by addressing the various implications of his/her subjectivity, namely his/her definitions of the self, including issues of affects, emotions, empathy, intimacy, einfühlung (feeling as one), and intersubjectivity. While this posture does not overcome the ontological turn that anthropology has known with Philippe Descola (2014) and Ernesto Viveiros de Castro’s (2004) call to explain human experience in their own terms, it also follows Tanya Luhrmann’s (2018) argument that the presence of the anthropologist in people’s social and spiritual world have an impact on their own. From this co-presence follows a dialogical process of co-construction of knowledge whose phenomenological premise may have a healing effect. As a matter of fact, literature has widely demonstrated that such lived experiences concern not only those we study but also ethnographers themselves who may experience the extraordinary in the course of fieldwork. Bruce Grindal (1983) was one of the pioneers of the current trend of ethnog-

Embodied Knowledge and the Phenomenological Posture

55

raphers’ reporting such experiences in his narrative of his participation in a death divination ritual that he attended fifteen years earlier in the town of Tumu (Ghana). Grindal recounts: I began to see the goka [the praise singer of the funeral] and the corpse [of the drummer of the chief of Tumu] tied together in the undulating rhythms of the singing, the beating of the iron hoes, and the movement of feet and bodies. Then I saw the corpse jolt and occasionally pulsate, in a counterpoint to the motions of the goka. At first, I thought that my mind was playing tricks with my eyes, so I cannot say when the experience first occurred; but it began with moments of anticipation and terror, as though I knew something unthinkable was about to happen. The anticipation left me breathless, gasping for air. In the pit of my stomach I felt a jolting and tightening sensation, which corresponded to moments of heightened visual awareness. What I saw in those moments was outside the realm of normal perception. From both the corpse and the goka came flashes of light so fleeting that I cannot say exactly where they originated. The hand of the goka would beat down on the iron hoe, the spirit would fly from his mouth, and suddenly the flashes of light flew like sparks from a fire. Then I felt my body become rigid. My jaws tightened and at the base of my skull I felt a jolt as though my head had been snapped off my spinal column. A terrible and beautiful sight burst upon me. Stretching from the amazingly delicate fingers and mouths of the goka, strands of fibrous light played upon the head, fingers, and toes of the dead man. The corpse, shaken by spasms, then rose to its feet, spinning and dancing in a frenzy. As I watched, convulsions in the pit of my stomach tied not only my eyes but also my whole being into this vortex of power. It seemed that the very floor and walls of the compound had come to life, radiating light and power, drawing the dancers in one direction and then another. Then a most wonderful thing happened. The talking drums on the roof of the dead man’s house began to glow with a light so strong that it drew the dancers to the rooftop. The corpse picked up the drumsticks and began to play. I cannot say whether what transpired took a matter of minutes or even an hour. Nor can I be sure about the sequence of events which I witnessed. But after a while the power which had filled the compound began to cool, and the body of the Tumukuoro’s drummer was once again sitting propped against the west wall of the compound. (1983, 68)

Grindal’s narrative is typical of many others, including some of the anthropological “fathers” who faced supernatural phenomena and considered the very possibility of divine human interaction (Evans-Pritchard 1962; Turner 1986; Jules-Rosette 1975). In 1984, Paul Stoller related his own apprenticeship among the Songhay of Niger and his experience of sorcery with his teacher. In Zambia, Edith Turner (1992) reported having been immersed in a drumming ritual to heal a woman with a devouring spirit, while Jeanne Favret-Saada (1977) gave an account of her personal entanglement

56

Géraldine Mossière

in the witchcraft universe that she studied in rural France. These narratives have nourished vivid debates over dominant scientific categories of thought, their fundamental assumptions, as well as the ethics and analytical changes needed to account for these experiences and phenomena. While FavretSaada argues that it is only by believing in witchcraft that she was able to witness the practice, Stoller (1984) proposes approaching such phenomena with a new philosophy, considering them as true and therefore as outside the category of rationality of Western thinking. For her part, while studying Balinese worldviews, Unni Wikan suggests that “feeling is more essential for intellectual comprehension for it spawns intuition, evaluation and moral judgment. From this perspective a Western epistemology based on intellectual reasoning and objective thought alone appears as an act of hubris” (1991, 229). These debates have perhaps paved the way to Tim Ingold’s (2006) and Philippe Descola’s (2014) more recent claims to rethink the binary articulation between nature and culture as an anthropological category and to include nonhuman entities into the realm of social worlds. Beyond the epistemological debates over anthropological principles, ethnographers also question the limits and nature of their participation during fieldwork. Overall, the very existence of extraordinary experiences emphasizes ontological questionings in terms of ways of being in the world and conceptions about its essence and definition. In this chapter, I draw on this current trend in anthropology to think about how to grasp and address such things as extraordinary experiences. In spite of the ongoing temptation to objectify these, I argue that the current focus on subjectivity allows for new possibilities for ethnographers to live such experiences as part of their methodological approach, what some of them call autoethnography. The empirical studies that I have conducted among Congolese Pentecostal ritual congregations and with women converts to Islam suggest that a phenomenological perspective that puts senses, emotions, and affect at the core of embodied knowledge (Scheper-Hughes and Lock 1987) may be the only feasible approach for grasping unexplainable experience. My sensorial and emotional experience in Pentecostal African congregation rituals lead me to propose that embodiment relates to experiences of empathy and einfühlung as compared to the Other’s lived reality. Following Julia Kristeva (in Nowak 2011, 318), I define einfühlung as “a feeling of oneness to the outside world with a loss of the subject’s identity.” As Anna Waldstein (2016) observed during Rastafari rituals she documented, such “heightened sensory awareness” (83-84) may give rise to intersubjective experiences that challenge the realm of Cartesian knowledge. I will discuss how these co-experiences impact the definition and boundaries between the self and otherness as well as their healing potential.

Embodied Knowledge and the Phenomenological Posture

57

Here, healing is more than the regulation of the body; it encompasses the transformation of the self, as Thomas Csordas puts it: “The object of healing is not elimination of a thing (an illness, a problem, a symptom, a disorder) but transformation of a person, a self that is a bodily being” (2002, 3). In this view, healing is a holistic endeavor that restores the body-mind-spirit unity ruptured by the processes of secularization (McGuire 2008; Meintel 2005). In this reading, empathy and einfülhung as an ethnographic method are framed as an ongoing conversation, fraught with differentiation as well as entanglement of the self and of the Other, which are produced in common practices and activities. Such a perspective brings the possibility of opening new avenues for the construction of knowledge that depart from the canons of positivist thinking whereby reality is limited to that which is rational, verifiable, and consensually validated. Rather, we follow Grindal who sees reality as “relative to one’s consciousness of it” (1983, 76), and Luhrmann who argues that the experience of the world is framed by one’s grid of interpretation of the world, or by one’s way of thinking about it (Luhrmann 2020, 9). Given that the experiences of the informant and of the ethnographer are intermingled in the process of producing knowledge, I will consider both in much the same way. This technique for producing knowledge, however, raises the issue of the relevance of the ethnographer’s experience as compared to the informant’s. I will argue that it requires the anthropologist to reach for a phenomenological perspective on his or her own experience as well as to negotiate his or her participation during fieldwork.

ANTHROPOLOGY OF EXPERIENCE OR EXPERIENTIAL ANTHROPOLOGY? Victor Turner is one of the first anthropologists to conceptualize experience. He referred to its etymology that implicates the idea of “peril” and indicates that “each of us has had certain ‘experiences’ which have been formative and transformative, that is, distinguishable, isolable sequences of external events and internal responses to them such as initiations into new lifeways (going to school, first jobs. . .)” (1986, 35). In this respect, experiences are events. A category sui generis, as proposed by Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911), experiences have a temporal or processual structure. During his fieldwork among the Ndembu in Zambia, Turner found that initiation rituals usually involve a deep personal experience that connects the individual to a group, leading him or her to a change of consciousness. This change of consciousness is achieved through a state of liminality that Turner defined more precisely as “a fructile chaos, a storehouse of possibilities, not a random as-

58

Géraldine Mossière

semblage but a striving after new forms and structures, a gestation process, a fetation of modes appropriate to postliminal existence” (1986, 42). In this stage of liminality, doors are opened to the spirits. For Turner, then, experience results in dissolution of the ordinary sense of time and space, leading the individual to perceive himself or herself as a whole more clearly than through the fragmentedness of his/her social identity and role. Still, these deep human emotional and ephemeral experiences may be co-experienced with a group within a state of ritual comradeship and fellowship that Turner (1972) calls communitas, which recalls in some ways Bronislaw Malinowski’s (1923) notion of “phatic communion.” As Edward Bruner (1986) notes, in the field of the anthropology of experience it is not quite clear whether experience is the object of study or whether it is the methodology. In any case, the creation of this novel realm of research meant to dissolve the separation between experience and theory, leading the ethnographer to a personal, participatory, reflexive, and sensual approach to fieldwork based on the sights, sounds, smells, and body as a perceptual device. Among Turner’s many successors (James Fernandez, Bruce Grindal, Paul Stoller, etc.), Bruner notes that “anthropology of experience deals with how individuals actually experience their culture that is how events are received by consciousness” (1986, 4). Such perception draws on Dilthey’s reading of experience as a form of erlebnis, a German concept that reads as “what has been lived through,” emphasizing the lived dimension of experience as well as its elementary, preconceptual, and sometimes ineffable aspects. This is opposed to the term Erfahrung, which refers to the realm of already interpreted fact. Edith Turner, Victor Turner’s widow, later exemplified this approach as she attended African rituals of healing in her studies of shamanism. As the Turners’ perspectives on the anthropology of experience draw on the supposedly universal biological ability of humans to experience spirituality, their body of work invites ethnographers to rethink their own tools for understanding realities that lie beyond the reach of the “ordinary” as an anthropological category. This raises new concerns regarding the extent to which we can really experience the extraordinary without necessarily sharing the symbolic and social settings that make it possible. Following Turners’ focus on the notion of experience, the stories we collected in our research project on religious diversity in Québec also describe encounters with sacred or supernatural beings, feelings of otherworldly transcendence, a sense of being united with all beings. Research participants report feelings of deep bliss, sensations of well-being and relief, and sometimes a sort of completeness or awe that remind one of Otto’s conception of the sacred. These inner experiences may be lived collectively and are likely to be catalyzed by the strength of the community. For instance, some

Embodied Knowledge and the Phenomenological Posture

59

yogis talk of an energy circulating between practitioners that helps them go deeper in their personal, inward experiences (Bouchard 2013). Distinguishing the realm of subjective experience from the system of normative beliefs puts severe restrictions on our ability to understand such phenomena by typical scientific means. If, as Favret-Saada (2012) proposes, we acknowledge that a somehow universal force is at the origin of extraordinary phenomena, what kind of methodological tools can we develop to grasp them? In this respect as for many others, fieldwork knows how and where to guide us. The construction of anthropological knowledge is based on fieldwork, that is, an inductive methodology that brings anthropologists into sometimes chaotic and uncomfortable encounters that may last for long periods of time. An example of potentially uncomfortable field activities is attending extended and noisy Pentecostal services, where participants display strong effervescence and seemingly deep contact with supernatural entities they view as visits from the Holy Spirit. At the same time, participation in these services allows the researcher to grasp fieldwork beyond words, by means of prelogical tools or what the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1971) would call “le corps propre,” that is, the bodily perceptual device through which individuals experience the world as a unit. In this reading, the meaning given to the world is not limited to what is said or thought by participants; it exists in the gestures and in what is accomplished through actions. This phenomenological perspective that puts senses, emotions, and affect at the core of one’s ability to comprehend the world engages a form of practice that induces new perceptions and convictions, where doing and meaning converge. Founded on the premise that the ability to reach otherworldly experiences draws on biological universals that feature human beings, a phenomenological perspective typically requires the anthropologist to temporarily put his or her own categories of understanding the world into brackets, to suspend disbelief.

A PHENOMENOLOGICAL APPROACH TO KNOWLEDGE For anthropologists who are physically present in the field for extended periods of time, phenomenology represents as much a methodological condition as a constraint. Indeed, experiences can generate sensations that directly affect the researcher’s body and perceptions, making it harder to maintain scholarly distance (Meyer 2006). Although some ethnographers seem thoroughly uncomfortable with writing about these experiences during fieldwork, others have called for taking them into consideration as a means of adjusting anthropological methodology:

60

Géraldine Mossière

What is needed for this kind of fieldwork is a technique of participation that demands total involvement of our whole being. Indeed it is perhaps only when we truly and fully participate in this way that we find this essentially subjective approach to be in no way incompatible with the more conventional rational, objective, scientific approach. On the contrary, they complement each other and that complementarity is an absolute requirement if we are to come to any full understanding of the social process. It provides a wealth of data that could never be acquired by any other means. (Turnbull 1990, 51)

Thus far, the idea of living experiences of fieldwork has generated varied and innovative methodologies, sometimes borrowing on the worldviews of those studied. Wikan sought to grasp the Balinese cosmology by means of an “experience-near” approach that would recognize the “feeling-thinking character” specific to Balinese views of the world (1991, 286). Csordas (1993) transposed the phenomenological understanding of the world to the realm of the social sciences with the seminal concept of “somatic mode of attention,” that links perceptual experience (Merleau-Ponty 1971) with socially informed attitudes (Bourdieu 1980). Following on her husband’s work, Edith Turner reported: “As for my function as ethnographer, I had had to relax the detached-observer imperative in order to see as the Africans saw, thus bridging the gap and entering the culture. This turned me around to the spirituality of religion, honing my sense of atmosphere and my understanding of spiritual healing.” The same year, she pioneered a phenomenological approach in anthropology without labeling it as such: “to study ordinary human changes of consciousness, certain of us have had to shift our own invisible, real spiritual life and what we know of that of others into a position to the front and have it working in us, so that we fully know the material of our fieldwork. We’ve then written this material, intimately.” (2006, 34) For anthropologists, experiencing fieldwork influences bodily sensations and perceptions in a way that may create prelogical knowledge, before the latter is attributed conventional meaning. The American ethnographer Charles Briggs (1993) writes about an “embodied discourse” that is based on “denotatively implicit” meaning (i.e., language that is lacking in semantic content), as opposed to “denotatively explicit” meaning (i.e., prevailing ideologies of language in the West). From this perspective, the senses stirred by music, tastes and rhythms are seen to have the authority of producing knowledge. Whether or not it allows one to consciously incorporate knowledge into the body, an experiential approach in fieldwork provides access to certain experiences of sensitive knowledge that other methods sometimes overlook or obscure (experiences of reflexivity, of interiority, etc.). In this respect, Don Kulick and Margaret Willson argue that “to experiential ethnographers, the self and especially experiences in the field, are epistemologically

Embodied Knowledge and the Phenomenological Posture

61

productive” (1995, 20). These arguments also promote the methodological benefits of a more participatory approach to fieldwork where the impact of the ethnographer’s presence and participation in actions, rituals, or practices in the field are acknowledged and integrated into analytical work. For example, to go back to Bruce Grindal’s experience of a death divination ritual in Ghana, the ethnographer does not explicitly interpret his experience in religious terms, but rather compares it to what people around him experienced, that is, the “passionate resurrection of the power of the ancestors” (1983, 75). Following this perspective, understanding extraordinary experiences can best be achieved by an embodied approach that transcends epistemological fields. In this reading, knowledge is stored in the body and is created by the practical execution of the act that prevails over the meaning attributed to it. The concept of embodied knowledge first emerged from medical anthropology with Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Margaret Lock’s (1987) contribution that draws on the relationship between mind, body, self, and society. The authors deconstruct the notion of the body into three dimensions: “the phenomenally experienced individual body-self,” the social body as a “natural symbol for thinking about relationships among nature, society and culture,” and a body politic as an “artifact of social and political control” (1987, 6). In this perspective, emotions are considered as “embodied thoughts” (Rosaldo 1984) that mediate between the three dimensions of the body, acting as a conduit between experience and getting involved in action. Over the course of my fieldwork in Congolese Pentecostal churches, I had the opportunity to experience how rituals articulate emotions, as well as imagination, memory, perception, and senses with the various dimensions of this “mindful” body, that are prone to facilitate personal holistic transformation of the self they see as healing experiences. As I regularly attended Sunday services, I gradually became more deeply involved in hymns, dances, melodies, and speeches, feeling intimately touched by the strong emotions that were evoked during rituals. Here are some notes that I wrote in my journal on 22 February 2004, after an observation in a Congolese Pentecostal service: I have been deeply moved by the joy that emerged from the cult. I surprised myself as I started to dance on my chair and to sing along with the lively rhythms. The atmosphere was so stirring that I even thought I would join the women who were dancing in circle at the front of the service space.

I eventually experienced states of true joy and grace, sometimes a feeling of communion with members of the church, as well as spontaneous sensations of love and bliss. Such feelings aroused by means of music, dances, and bodily gestures convey a new grid of perception of the self and of the

62

Géraldine Mossière

others—that is, a new sense of belonging and different relationships with participants. I could indeed observe their impact on my own subjectivity. Here are some personal notes from fieldwork in August 2012 after attending a “Christian party” organized by the young members of the church a few years later: All participants but one were of African or Haitian background. One after the other, they went on the stage to perform a personal song to the rhythm of rap music. The songs describe their personal encounter with Jesus, a sort of deep and unexplainable sense of being loved that came with bodily or visual sensations of his presence. The lyrics situate these experiences within the young members’ personal stories, which are often difficult trajectories that mix feelings of personal loss or of social rejection, mainly the hardships typical of teenager and immigrant pathways. The audience sings and dances to accompany each performer, the atmosphere is moving, filled with sadness and joy and a deep sense of cohesion. I feel moved by the party’s effervescence, by the intimacy generated by the sincerity of such personal narratives, as well as by the solidarity they arouse among participants. I can feel the emotions of those around me, a blend of hope and despair. At this point, I sense a deep feeling of communion with the others, a sort of affection for those young people who could all be my younger siblings. Regardless of the color of my skin, I feel as though I were one of them tonight, and I start loving Jesus myself for the sense of hope it gives to these people who worship and believe in him. I can feel the hope of my companions pouring over my life and my own personal challenges, as I share this special moment of common bliss. Now I understand how the religious life of these young people relates to all aspects of their social and personal stories, as it alleviates their personal drama by giving a meaning and a purpose to it all.

For ethnographers, experience can represent an implicit form of knowledge that is located in the body, giving them the possibility of grasping what is not visible to the external observer, and what cannot be verbally explained by the research participant. Through this awareness of one’s own experience and self-reflexivity, knowledge reaches a higher level of sensitivity to reality, one that lies beyond immediate perception. In his account of how he and his wife studied divination, Dennis Tedlock holds that this approach may sometimes be the only one possible: I have found myself expected to learn, however imperfectly, some of the skills I was observing. This happened when Barbara Tedlock and I reached a point in our questions about divinatory practices where the only workable answer was an offer to teach us those practices. . . . This information permitted me to rerun the divination in the very process of writing it. (1997, 82)

Embodied Knowledge and the Phenomenological Posture

63

Jean-Guy Goulet (1998) also found that radical participation and experiential knowledge was the only way to gain insights into the vision of the world among the Dene Tha group he was studying. In his reading, nonverbal communication and embodied thoughts represent new ways of building knowledge about the other’s experience that require ethnographers to open their perceptual apparatus to the full range of sensual and sensory experiences that arise from fieldwork. This raises questions about the authenticity and veracity of our perceptions, leading us to examine the level of subjectivity involved in fieldwork as an embodied process, an issue to which I now turn.

INTERSUBJECTIVITY AND EMPATHY AS CONDITIONS FOR ETHNOGRAPHIC FIELDWORK Proposing to consider anthropology as an embodied form of knowledge brings out the need for scholars to perform what they study in order to make their ethnographic comprehension as accurate as possible. However, it raises the question of the extent to which the anthropologist’s attention to embodiment may inform his or her understandings of the other’s experience. Thomas Csordas’s notion of “somatic modes of attention” that is meant to apply phenomenological theory to the social sciences refers to the experience of embodied presence as both “reflexive (as sensation of oneself) and relational (as presence to others)” (1993, 138). Bringing interactional experiences into the subjective realm has many implications regarding definitions and extent of the self while, in other respects, specific definitions of the self may also shape (inter)subjective experiences. For example, Edith Turner (1996, xxiii) explains that “coexperience” enables one to connect to some reality that lies beyond its cultural substrate and represents a common human condition. Michael Agar (2006) speaks of cooperation between the informant and the anthropologist, cooperation that depends on the adequacy of each one’s own perspective regarding the interests, visions of the world, and space and time configurations. Johannes Fabian (2001) emphasizes the coevalness of informant and ethnographer, since they share the same space, time, and contemporaneity. Their intersubjectivity, then, relies on their preconstructed mutual presence that may align during the encounter, though these do not always lead to consensus regarding cognitive translation. As these experiences on fieldwork bring into question the ethnographer’s own otherness, they follow “a movement by which a subject leaves her own condition through a relation of affections that she can establish with another condition” (Goldman 2003, 464, in Pierini 2016b).

64

Géraldine Mossière

All these approaches converge and focus on the idea of shared experience that conveys knowledge of its own and that is produced in the intersubjectivity of the ethnographer’s presence with the informant. Addressing the issue of intersubjectivity means questioning the ethnographer’s commitments during fieldwork, as far as her or his openness to others’ reality and their relationship to their own inner self are concerned. As one enters fieldwork, the researcher is challenged to negotiate an ethical stance, as well as a subjective openness to sharing the experiences of the others. For example, when examining sorcery among the Songhay of Niger, Paul Stoller realized that “anthropological writers should allow the events of the field to penetrate them” (1984, 110). Fieldwork, then, situates ethnographers in a liminal state that may engender different degrees of ambivalence with respect to the people studied. In my own research on Pentecostal rituals, mere observation would have hardly been possible without sharing the bodily language and enthusiasm of my companions. My study of religious effervescence as it is ritually organized would have been considerably constrained had I taken the stance of an ambivalent outsider. During interviews, it was not rare that my respondents felt short of words to report their ritual experience, which often led them to drop phrases such as “You cannot get it if you do not live it!” On the one hand, as I was not Pentecostal myself, I kept a neutral and distant attitude, which proved quite difficult to maintain in an atmosphere of strong collective emotions, where the expressivity of participants tended to emulate one another. On the other hand, the rituals deeply touched me, not only because of the moving narratives of believers, but above all because of the blissful and ecstatic atmosphere of their celebrations. The fellow ethnographers I invited on fieldwork also reported how hymns, dances, melodies, and expression of emotions emanating from participants moved them emotionally. During the limited time of the rituals, and within the ritual space, I shared such intimacy with the believers I was observing that I gradually felt we were all part of a community; in a sense, I had the feeling we were as one. Resisting such spontaneous actions and censoring my own feelings would probably have impeded me from entering the field setting. Therefore, I gradually positioned myself in a liminal state, suspended between the circumstantial feeling of Sameness that Pentecostal rituals mobilize by way of warm and endearing rituals, and the implacable awareness of my own Otherness that my religious identity as Catholic combined with yogic philosophy and practices involves. The sense of the self I developed resonates with the multiple dimensions of my subjectivity that may extend to and connect with various realms of sensitivity within a skewed matrix of space-time that some of my informants would label as the Holy Spirit.

Embodied Knowledge and the Phenomenological Posture

65

In a previous reflection on my stance during fieldwork among Pentecostals, I have shown that the possibility for anthropologists to share in ritual emotions with believers generates feelings of empathy, intimacy, and intersubjectivity that pave the way for the ethnographic process (Mossière 2007). For me, the empathic position that I embraced seemed the only way to grasp the embodied dimensions of religious behavior similar to the “empathic resonance” Arnaud Halloy (2016) experienced on Afro-Brazilian fieldwork. Following Catherine Lutz and Geoffrey White, I associate the notion of “empathy” with the universalistic premise whereby “all humans have the ability to understand another’s emotional state . . . through the channels of empathic (and usually nonverbal) communication and is conceptualized as either an intellectual understanding or a more direct emotional one” (1986, 415). Such empathic methodology leads to other ways of producing knowledge through nonverbal and unintentional communication, which replaces spoken communication. Ethnographic fieldwork then makes it possible to reach other types of knowledge and to grasp the distinction between communicable knowledge (informative) as well as kinds of knowledge only learned through tacit experience (formative). This formation of knowledge arises from these moments of openness that “Kirsten Hastrup (2010) calls ‘raw moments’ that is events that break through cognitive barriers of culturally trained expectation with explosive force” (in Luhrmann 2018, 80). Anthropologists Rane Willerslev and Christian Suhr (2018) deem these moments as “leaps of faith” (65) when the anthropologist’s conceptual grasp upon the world is lost, breaking open into new ways of seeing and feeling the world. Drawing on what they call Kierkegaard’s view of religious faith as “deeply paradoxical mode of knowing, whose paths bend and twist through glimpses of understanding, doubt, and existential resignation” (65), both authors emphasize the transformative impact of the anthropological project for the ethnographer. My own ethnographic practice leads me to argue that the holistic transformation of the ethnographer, and sometimes her healing experience, also stems from her empathetic stance toward her informants’ own experience. In fact, discussions over the notion of empathy as a mode of relationship to the Other date back to the German philosophical school of the late nineteenth century and were launched with Schleiermacher’s Romanticist theory founded in hermeneutics (Nowak 2011). According to its many critics, of which Gadamer was not the least, the concept of empathy involves the author’s own projection and identification with the Other, potentially reducing the work of interpretation to an intuitive process. In the social sciences, such critiques have been challenged by scholars such as Lutz and White (1986) and Beatty (1999), who describe empathy as an ability to understand phenomenologically that is not irreconcilable with emotional distance. In

66

Géraldine Mossière

this respect, anthropologists can be sympathetic and compassionate (in the Latin sense of “compassion,” to “suffer with”) by simply observing the reality of the Other, rather than entering into this reality. Following Dilthey’s premise, anthropologists argue that before anything, experiences are embedded in sociohistorical conditions that define their ordinary/extraordinary status. For example, in another study I conducted among converts to Islam in France and Québec, I decided to wear a veil to accompany one of my informants during a walk downtown in Montreal. I thought that trying to veil myself like my informants would shed a different light on my research and help me understand the way they live and perceive their reality. I intended thereby not only to get insights about the ethical modesty the converts experience as they adopt the veil, but also to experiment with this feeling of turning the gaze inward and perhaps get a chance to experience the sensation of connection to the divine that the converts had all told me about. However, I could not take on the heavy burden that wearing the veil represents for Muslim women in some secular public spaces. In the end, my embodiment methodology (literally) followed other paths, because throughout my investigation over the course of two years, I wore modest clothing and often chose to wear hooded jerseys. The latter not only hid my hair and body but also helped me experience the feeling of intimacy with an inner self that the converts I was studying called Allah. Along with other social and personal characteristics that converts and I shared and that created a space of intimacy (same age and on a same spiritual quest), I have often overstepped the limits of an empathic attitude, reaching a feeling of being as one (einfühlung). For the women whose choice of Islam sometimes involved experiences of scorn and discrimination, my empathetic behavior also yielded a sort of recognition that could play a healing role. At the end of the interviews, many of them expressed relief (and gratitude) for having the opportunity to report their life experiences and express emotions and feelings of social adversity in the safe and anonymous space I organized to create the ethnographic relationship (Mossière 2021). Empathy and einfülhung as an ethnographic method should be framed as a dialogic and ongoing process, fraught with differentiation as well as assertion of the self and the Other, which are produced in common practices and activities. Sharing embodiment makes the self and the Other coexist, interweaving each into an intimate space that does not necessarily mean mutual identification. And discrepancies might exist in the translation of these feelings into knowledge when shared experiences are not enough to convey shared understandings. In other words, if the ethnographer is able to think, act, and feel like the other, he or she does not ascribe the same meaning to the experiences he or she shares with other participants who, for their part, do not necessarily share the same interpretation of their lived

Embodied Knowledge and the Phenomenological Posture

67

experience (supposing that they both have the same experience, which is not likely). To conceptualize this process, Renato Rosaldo (1984) proposed the concept of “overlapping circles” that are shared responses to individual experiences, ones that overlap rather than coincide, but that also allow one to have insight into the meaning of another’s world. I then argue that since anthropology constitutes an embodied form of knowledge, co-presence during fieldwork paves the way for an empathic attitude that follows upon shared intimacy. It may culminate in feelings of oneness (einfühlung) but should nevertheless take into consideration contrast and difference. The anthropological method should involve a scholar’s awareness and reflexivity regarding his or her own stance and experience throughout fieldwork. While Pentecostal rituals deeply moved me in a way that created feelings of communion with the other believers, I decided to keep my distance from the dogmatic message of the church, as I often felt oppressed by the rigid normative framework and sermons that in my view were at times excessively conservative. As a result, I did not interpret the ritual ecstatic atmosphere and common feelings of bliss as manifestations of the Holy Spirit as did my interviewees, but rather as a common feeling of being in touch with the divine that is accessible to all human beings. I then framed this shared experience in my own vision of the world, focusing my research on the specific Pentecostal ritual techniques that made this common experience possible.

CONCLUSION This chapter draws on existing anthropological literature as well as on my own ethnographical fieldwork to discuss how ethnographers’ experiences of the extraordinary may raise new specific embodied understandings. In some ways, this argument draws from Max Weber’s sociological tradition of verstehen. Yet Weber advocated that we do not need to experience what others do in order to build knowledge around their activities. The phenomenologist Edmund Husserl agreed that it is possible to understand expressions and feelings that we cannot reproduce ourselves. In the social sciences, some scholars like Edith Turner consider that experiencing the extraordinary is part of the universal abilities shared by all human beings, while others like Renato Rosaldo argue that because human feelings are ineffable, they can only be captured by someone who has already and previously experienced such states. In fact, sharing feelings with the other does not necessarily mean full mimesis; in other words, reaching a point of intimacy does not require the ethnographer to “go native,” though some ethnographers have chosen to adopt this position (Jules-Rosette 1975; Hermansen 2006).

68

Géraldine Mossière

For the ethnographer, however, the issue lies elsewhere, as empathy often comes as a condition for doing fieldwork. For example, before agreeing to meet with me, most of the converts to Islam to whom I had proposed an interview wanted to know more about my religious identity and beliefs. The fact that I am a believer myself, though within another religious tradition, opened doors not only to their homes but also to their personal and subjective experiences with a sense of transcendence they deem as divine. In other words, building knowledge about the experiences of human beings requires the researcher to share a sense of humanity with the people one is trying to understand, who represent therefore more than a mere object of study. As Dilthey poses a distinction between understanding the experience of others and experiencing it oneself (Nowak 2011, 308), I suggest that for anthropologists, the conditions of fieldwork quite often blur the frontier between those two domains. In a context where the anthropological objective is not to feel like the Other but rather to understand what the Other feels, the issue of experience puts the fieldwork approach into question. After all, Favret-Saada (1990) points out that the anthropological method of participant observation forms an oxymoron. In the same vein, Barbara Tedlock argues that in the last decades, cultural anthropological method has shifted from participant observation toward the observation of participation where the ethnographer both observes and experiences her “own and others’ coparticipation within the ethnographic encounter” (1991, 69). In this manner, personal openness to experiences during fieldwork allows for the embodiment of knowledge that only seems possible with full personal participation. Although the scientific nature of such a subjective approach may be challenged, anthropology is now framed so as to mobilize the human assets of the ethnographer to build knowledge about the Other. In this endeavor, he or she is invited to put his or her own social and historical categories of understanding into brackets in order to understand the perception that the Other ascribes to a common experience, turning the anthropologist into a phenomenological subject. This indeed produces unique qualitative knowledge on the idiosyncrasy of human experiences, including on experiences culturally labeled extraordinary. These approaches to fieldwork lead to fundamental epistemological problems in social anthropology and in the new avenues opened by autoethnography, where through their own personal experience the anthropologist becomes her or his own informant. Géraldine Mossière is an anthropologist and associate professor at the Université de Montréal’s Institute of Religious Studies. Her more than sixty professional publications address contemporary religiosities including

Embodied Knowledge and the Phenomenological Posture

69

religious diversity in secular societies and the growing trend toward spirituality discourse and practices. She has also published and edited numerous books and special reviews on conversion processes and experiences (see reference). She now works on the healing dimension of spiritualities as well as spiritualities in public institutions. NOTE 1. This project was funded by the Fonds de recherche du Québec Société et Culture and by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Researchers included Deirdre Meintel (director), Claude Gélinas, Josiane Le Gall, Géraldine Mossière, Khadiyatoulah Fall, François Gauthier, and Fernand Ouellet.

REFERENCES Agar, Michael. 2006. “Culture: Can You Take It Anywhere?” International Journal of Qualitative Methods 5(2): 1–16. Beatty, Andrew. 1999. “On Ethnographic Experience: Formative and Informative.” In Being There: Fieldwork in Anthropology, edited by C. W. Watson, 74–98. London: Pluto Press. Bouchard, Marlène. 2013. Religiosité Moderne et Transformation Personnelle: Le Cas des Pratiquants de l’Ashtanga Yoga à Montréal [Modern religiosity and personal transformation: The case of ashtanga yoga practitioners in Montreal]. Master’s thesis, Département d’Anthropologie: Université de Montréal. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1980. Le Sens Pratique. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit. Briggs, Charles L. 1993. “Personal Sentiments and Polyphonic Voices in Warao Women’s Ritual Wailing: Music and Poetics in a Critical and Collective Discourse.” American Anthropologist 95(4): 929–57. Bruner, Edward M. 1986. “Introduction: Experience and Its Expressions.” In The Anthropology of Experience, edited by Edward M. Bruner and Victor W. Turner, 3–32. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Burhoe, Ralph W. 1974. “The Phenomenon of Religion Seen Scientifically.” In Changing Perspectives in the Scientific Study of Religion, edited by Allan Eister, 15–39. New York: Wiley. Csordas, Thomas. 1993. “Somatic Modes of Attention.” Cultural Anthropology 8(2): 135–56. ———. 2002. Body/Mind/Healing. New York: Palgrave. Descola, Philippe. 2014. Beyond Nature and Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Evans-Pritchard, Edward E. 1962. Essays in Social Anthropology. London: Faber and Faber.

70

Géraldine Mossière

Fabian, Johannes. 2001. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia University Press. Favret-Saada, Jeanne. 1977. Les Mots, la Mort, les Sorts: La Sorcellerie dans le Bocage [Words, death, spells: Witchcraft in the Bocage]. Paris: Gallimard. ———. 1990. “About Participation.” Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 14: 189–99. ———. 2012. “Death at Your Heels: When Ethnographic Writing Propagates the Force of Witchcraft.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 2(1): 45–53. Geertz, Clifford. 1972. “Religion as a Cultural System.” In Reader in Comparative Religion: An Anthropological Approach, edited by William A. Lessa and Evon Z. Vogt, 78–89. New York: Harper and Row. Goldman, Marcio. 2003. “Os Tambores dos Mortos e os Tambores dos Vivos: Etnografia, Antropologia e Política em Iléus, Bahia [The drums of the dead and the drums of the living: Ethnography, anthropology and politics in Iléus, Bahia].” Revista de Antropologia 46(2): 445–76. Goulet, Jean-Guy. 1998. Ways of Knowing: Experience, Knowledge, and Power among the Dene Tha. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. Grindal, Bruce. 1983. “Into the Heart of Sisala Experience: Witnessing Death Divination.” Journal of Anthropological Research 39(1): 60–80. Halloy, Arnaud. 2016. “Full Participation and Ethnographic Reflexivity. An AfroBrazilian Case Study.” Journal for the Study of Religious Experience 2(1): 7–24. Hermansen, Marcia. 2006. “Keeping the Faith: Convert Muslim Mothers and the Transmission of Female Identity in the West.” In Women Embracing Islam: Gender and Conversion in the West, edited by Karin Van Nieuwkerk, 250–74. Austin: University of Texas Press. Ingold, Tim. 2006. “Rethinking the Animate, Re-Animating Thought.” Ethnos 71(1): 9–20. Jules-Rosette, Benetta. 1975. African Apostles: Ritual and Conversion in the Church of John Maranke. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Kristeva, Julia. 1987. Tales of Love. New York: Columbia University Press. Kulick, Don, and Margaret Willson. 1995. Taboo: Sex, Identity and Erotic Subjectivity in Anthropological Fieldwork. London: Routledge. Luhrmann, Tanya M. 2018. “The Real Ontological Challenge.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 8(1–2): 79–82. ———. 2020. “Mind and Spirit: A Comparative Theory about Representation of Mind and the Experience of Spirit.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (n.s.): 9–27. Lutz, Catherine, and Geoffrey M. White. 1986. “The Anthropology of Emotions.” Annual Review of Anthropology 15: 405–36. Malinowski, Bronislaw. 1923. “The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Languages.” In The Meaning of Meaning Model, edited by Charles Kay Ogden and Ivor Armstrong Richards, 296–336. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. McGuire, Meredith B. 2008. Lived Religion: Faith and Practice in Everyday Life. New York: Oxford University Press. Meintel, Deirdre. 2005. “Les Croyances et le Croire chez des Spiritualists [Beliefs and believe among spiritualists].” Théologiques 13(1): 129–56.

Embodied Knowledge and the Phenomenological Posture

71

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1971. Phénoménologie de la Perception [Phenomenology of perception]. Paris: Gallimard. Meyer, Birgit. 2006. Religious Sensations: Why Media, Aesthetics and Power Matter in the Study of Contemporary Religion. Amsterdam: Vrije Universiteit. Mossière, Géraldine. 2007. “Sharing in Ritual Effervescence: Emotions and Empathy in Fieldwork.” Anthropology Matters Journal 9(1). https://www.anthropology matters.com/index.php/anth_matters. ———. 2013. Converties à l’islam. Parcours de femmes au Québec et en France. Montréal : Presses de l’Université de Montréal. ———. 2021. “Sens et Confidence dans les Guérisons Contemporaines: Quelques Moments ethnographiques thérapeutiques au Québec.” Parcours anthropologiques 16: 8–27. Nowak, Magdalena. 2011. “The Complicated History of Einfühlung.” Argument 1(2): 301–26. Pierini, Emily. 2016a. “Fieldwork and Embodied Knowledge: Researching the Experiences of Spirit Mediums in the Brazilian Vale do Amanhecer.” In The Study of Religious Experience, edited by Bettina E. Schmidt, 55–70. Sheffield: Equinox Publishing. ———. 2016b. “Embodied Encounters: Ethnographic Knowledge, Emotions and the Senses in the Vale do Amanhecer’s Spirit Mediumship.” Journal for the Study of Religious Experience 2(1): 25–49. Rosaldo, Renato. 1984. “Grief and a Headhunter’s Rage: On the Cultural Force of Emotions.” In Text, Play and Story, edited by Edward M. Bruner, 178–95. Washington, DC: Proceedings of the American Ethnological Society. Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. 1994. “Embodied Knowledge: Thinking with the Body in Critical Medical Anthropology.” In Assessing Cultural Anthropology, edited by Robert Borofsky, 229–42. New York: McGraw Hill. Scheper-Hughes, Nancy, and Margaret Lock. 1987. “The Mindful Body.” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 1(1): 6–41. Schmidt, Bettina E., ed. 2016. The Study of Religious Experience. Sheffield: Equinox Publishing. Stoller, Paul. 1984. “Mind, Eye, and Word in Anthropology.” L’Homme 24(3–4): 91–114. Tedlock, Barbara. 1991. “From Participant Observation to the Observation of Participation: The Emergence of Narrative Ethnography.” Journal of Anthropological Research 47(1): 69–94. Tedlock, Dennis. 1997. “The Poetics of Time in Mayan Divination.” In Poetry and Prophecy: The Anthropology of Inspiration, edited by John Leavitt, 77–92. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Throop, Jason C. 2003. “Articulating Experience.” Anthropological Theory 3(2): 219–41. Turnbull, Colin. 1990. “Liminality: A Synthesis of Subjective and Objective Experience.” In By Means of Performance, edited by Richard Schechner and Willa Appel, 50–81. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Turner, Edith. 1992. Experiencing Ritual: A New Interpretation of African Healing. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

72

Géraldine Mossière

———. 1996. The Hands Feel It: Healing and Spirit Presence among a Northern Alaskan People. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press. ———. 2006. “Advances in the Study of Spirit Experience: Drawing Together Many Threads.” Anthropology of Consciousness 17(2): 33–61. Turner, Victor. 1972. Les Tambours d’Affliction: Analyse des rituels chez les Ndembu de Zambie. Paris: Gallimard. ———. 1986. “Dewey, Dilthey, and Drama.” In The Anthropology of Experience, edited by Edward M. Bruner and Victor W. Turner, 33–44. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Turner, Victor, and Edward M. Bruner, ed. 1986. The Anthropology of Experience. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Viveiros de Castro, Ernesto. 2004. “Exchanging Perspectives: The Transformation of Objects into Subjects in American Ontologies.” Common Knowledge 10: 463–84. Waldstein, Anna. 2016. “Studying the Body in Rastafari Rituals: Spirituality, Embodiment and Ethnographic Knowledge.” Journal for the Study of Religious Experience 2(1): 71–86. Wikan, Unni. 1991. “Toward an Experience-near Anthropology.” Cultural Anthropology 6(3): 285–305. Willerslev, Rane, and Christian Suhr. 2018. “Is There a Place for Faith in Anthropology? Religion, Reason, and the Ethnographer’s Divine Revelation.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 8(1/2): 65–78.

Chapter 3

Living with Spirits Spirituality and Health in São Paulo, Brazil Bettina E. Schmidt

‫ﱬﱫ‬ On Borinquén the spirits were everywhere. They rose from the mist of rivers, blew in from the sea on the juracán winds. They sang in the voices of the coquís, the tiny tropical frogs in the hill. They hid in the dreams of the haunted suburbanites in the cities. And in the evenings they walked the ancient streets of Old San Juan so visible that one could almost see the spirits in the moody air where El Morro brooded by the harbor. . . . In death, the dead did not die. —Stan Steiner

INTRODUCTION These words of the Puerto Rican novelist Stan Steiner are a good introduction into the world of the spirits of the dead. The belief in the existence of this world and the possibility to communicate with the spirits is widespread. In Latin America it is integral part of espiritismo, a belief system that embraces a range of beliefs and practices and has developed in Puerto Rico, Brazil, and other Latin American countries a strong link to healing. I came across espiritismo for the first time in Puerto Rico in 1990. At the start of my doctoral research, I found numerous publications on Puerto Rican espiritismo from the beginning of the twentieth century in the library of the Universidad Nacional de Puerto Rico. They indicated vibrant Spiritist communities across the island around that time. Other articles confirmed the ongoing lively existence of Spiritist practices (e.g., Brignoni 1970, 11-G, Núñez Molina 1990). But I had problems finding people to speak about 73

74

Bettina E. Schmidt

Spiritism as over time hostilities toward Spiritism had pushed them into hiding (Schmidt 1995, 2009). Only with the support of a colleague whose aunt was the president of a small Spiritist center did I manage to enter the close community of Puerto Rican Spiritists. Since then, however, espiritismo stepped out of the shadows, encouraged to some degree by a growing number of academic studies. Twenty years later, when I began my research on mediumship in Brazil, I was surprised to see the vast number of Kardecist centers in Brazil openly advertising their meetings and Spiritist hospitals offering healing services across the country. Nevertheless, despite this widespread presence, there is still a reluctance to acknowledge the significance of espiritismo in supporting individual and collective wellness. I also noticed that people practicing it prefer the term espiritualidade, which has a wider understanding than espiritismo. While espiritismo is used for the teachings of Allan Kardec and highlights the communication with spirits, espiritualidade has a spiritual element that includes in addition to Spiritist teachings elements from Christianity and African-derived religions. In this chapter I use espiritismo in reference to Kardec’s teaching and espiritualidade to indicate the wider spiritual framework. The chapter is divided into three parts. The first part introduces espiritismo and some of the key literature on espiritismo and healing. The second part presents information from an interview and related conversations about the importance of espiritualidade for health and well-being in Brazil. One interviewee spoke about his struggle with health and other personal problems and his journey toward a sense of well-being. I use his case to stress the complexity of espiritualidade and healing on an individual level. I then move on to the transfer of positive energy (passe) at which I participated with him and reflect on my own (bodily) experience. Shifting the focus onto the researcher, the third part leads to a wider discussion about reality, other worlds, and the importance of our bodily experience for the understanding of a different ontology.

INTRODUCING ESPIRITISMO AND HEALING The term “Spiritism” (espiritismo) covers a range of different beliefs and practices, particularly when seen in combination with Spiritualism. Both are umbrella terms that have developed distinct traditions. The common aspect is a belief in the spirit world and a possibility of communicating with spirits. The practices that are the focus of this chapter are based on the ideas of Allan Kardec (1804–69). Born as Leon Hypolite Denizarth Rivail in Lyon, France, Kardec’s teachings codified the communication with spirits via me-

Living with Spirits

75

diums in a novel way. His books published in French in the middle of the nineteenth century (e.g., Kardec 1974, 2010, 2017) became popular in Latin America, where they instigated the development of local belief systems such as Puerto Rican and Brazilian espiritismo (Bacon 1910; Delanne 1909). These systems combined Kardec’s teachings with aspects of popular Catholicism and African and Amerindian religious ideas. Though Kardec was not the only Spiritistic figure, he is still one of the best known. His books translated into Spanish and Portuguese can be found in most, if not all, Spiritist centers across Latin America. Most centers follow similar patterns of weekly classes in which potential mediums learn to develop their skills and public sessions for the delivery of communications from the world of the spirits. However, different from Kardec’s original teaching, Latin American Spiritism gained a practical orientation and became known for its healing offers (Hajosy Benedetti 1991; Koss-Chioino 1996), though without official recognition. Inspired by Kardec’s teaching, Latin American Spiritists had initiated social projects early on, such as promotion of literacy, campaigning against the death penalty, and fighting for better social conditions (Rodríguez Escudero 1978). These projects were regarded as an attack against the government and met with prosecution. Spiritist practices were forbidden across Latin America in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and were shunned as illegal medical practices. The Catholic Church even excommunicated Spiritists, declining to marry or bury them (Hess 1991). Nevertheless, Spiritism flourished across Latin America and developed various local healing-oriented systems (Harwood 1977; Garrison 1977a; see also Schmidt 1995, 2009). While Kardec’s teaching was centered on the improvement of one’s future existence by doing good (as human as well as spirit), the new systems focused on improving living conditions and helping people here and now. This revised orientation led to the development of Spiritist hospitals in the middle of the twentieth century that from the outside look like any other hospital, but offer Spiritist treatments, often combined with other alternative therapies such as yoga and meditation (Araújo Aureliano 2011). In these hospitals and in other Spiritist centers, healers treat patients while channeling spirits of deceased medical doctors (Greenfield 1987, 2008; Kurz 2017). Other treatments are transfer of passe from the healer or from good spirits (or a combination of both) to the patients (Carneiro et al. 2017, 74); and disobsession (desobsessão), in which the healer persuades a spirit who is identified as causing a problem to leave the patient. In both cases, the patients will be cleansed from negative influences caused by spiritual entities perceived as interfering. Spiritist centers also offer wider support

76

Bettina E. Schmidt

via communication with spirits. An article in the British Journal of Psychiatry stated in 1990 that 36–60 percent of Puerto Ricans “have visited a Spiritist at some time in their lives” (Hohmann et al. 1990, 328). The psychologist Mario A. Núñez Molina (2001) even describes Puerto Rican espiritismo as an Indigenous healing system that people use as an alternative to the official health system. In Brazil, one can find several health professionals who are practicing Spiritism and are involved in the Associação Médico-Espírita (the Medical-Spiritist Association). One key feature of Spiritist healing is the diagnosis of the roots of the problem. Spiritists believe that spirits can influence the destiny of humans, though sometimes involuntarily. To find the correct treatment, one must discover why the spirits interfere with the human world. However, healing involves a lifelong commitment. Patients who visit a Spiritist center to resolve a problem are often instructed to change their lifestyle as a way to cope with their problems, whether they are physical, psychological, or social. Already in 1903, Puerto Rican Spiritists campaigned for the acceptance of Spiritism as a new psychiatry, however unsuccessfully (Bram 1972, 374– 75). In 1909, the Medical Society of Rio de Janeiro organized a conference about the dangers of Spiritism (Moreira-Almeida, Silva de Almeida, and Lotufo Neto 2005, 9). Decades later, Puerto Rican Spiritism became the focus of medical anthropological studies that studied mainly female Puerto Rican Spiritists in New York City who were described as mentally unstable. Spiritism became known as “Puerto Rican syndrome” and Spiritists were diagnosed with “paranoid schizophrenia” (Garrison 1972, 1977b; Comas-Díaz 1981; Koss 1970, 1972, 1977; Harwood 1977; Bradford 1978; Kuntz 1985; see also Schmidt 2009 for a critical discussion). These studies highlighted the double prejudice that lingered in the literature about Spiritism (see Schmidt 2000), in that gender appeared to play a curious role in the high rate of diagnoses. Spiritist surgery in Latin America also attracted interest among scholars (e.g., Greenfield 1987; Pollak-Eltz 1982). However, their focus remained on a biological approach to healing (Greenfield 2008; see also Kurz 2018). Recently, however, there has been a change among Western scholars influenced in part by Edith Turner (e.g., Turner 1993), Stanley Krippner (e.g., Krippner 2008), and others in consciousness studies (e.g., Emmons 2014, Young and Goulet 1994). Krippner’s work was influential due to his standing in psychology and his interest in Spiritism that led to several publications—often in collaboration with local researchers—on Spiritism in Brazil (e.g., Krippner 2008), the Philippines (e.g., Krippner and Taubold 2004), and elsewhere (e.g., Hageman and Krippner 2013). From a medical point of view, Alexander Moreira-Almeida’s research on Spiritism in Brazil is equally crucial (e.g., Moreira-Almeida and Lotufo Neto 2005, 2017). Under his lead-

Living with Spirits

77

ership, the section on “Spirituality, Religion and Psychiatry of the World Psychiatry Association” published a “Position Statement on Spirituality and Religion in Psychiatry” that gives guidance to health professionals on how to respond to phenomena they cannot understand without disrespecting the beliefs or practices of their patients (Moreira-Almeida et al. 2016). Following these changes, new anthropological studies on spiritual healing (e.g., Pierini 2020; Rocha 2017; Seligman 2014) present powerful insights into bodily experiences and their impact on health.

RESEARCH ON ESPIRITUALIDADE AND BEM ESTAR IN BRAZIL: MATEO’S LIFE STORY The following case study is part of an ongoing research about spirituality and well-being in Brazil. My previous study on spirit possession and trance (Schmidt 2016) introduced me to the diversity and availability of vernacular forms of spirituality and spiritual healing in Brazil (see Greenfield 2008; King 2014; Gomberg 2011; Rabelo 1993; Toniol 2018). The focus of these studies is often on healing, ignoring to some degree the perspective of the patients. I began my research in 2016 with two online surveys asking participants for information about the significance of spirituality for their own sense of well-being. While the first survey went out to people working in health care, the second one was sent to people identifying as spiritual or religious (Schmidt 2020). In 2018 I had the chance to return to Brazil and meet some of the survey participants who had expressed interest in further participation. In this chapter, I reflect on my conversations with one of them, Mateo (not his real name), who described how his involvement with two spiritual centers helped him cope with his depression and HIV as well as other medical conditions he developed over time. During my time in São Paulo, I was able to visit both centers and conduct additional interviews with other members, including the leaders and some of the healers. I participated in healing ceremonies in each of them and had informal conversations with a range of other participants, some regular members of the communities but also patients that came for the healing ceremony alone. At the time of the interview, Mateo was sixty-four years old, divorced, and employed as an administrator at a publishing company. Mateo used the term espiritualidade (usually translated as “spirituality”) as self-identification and not espiritismo, though one of spiritual centers he attended could be categorized as Spiritist while the other is close to African-derived spirituality. One of the reasons for his self-identification can be the secular orientation of Spiritism. Most Spiritists do not regard Spiritism as religious or even spiri-

78

Bettina E. Schmidt

tual unless they are member of a Spiritist church, because they regard Spiritism as a communication technique (Schmidt 2016, 118–27). This secular orientation is strong among people working in Spiritist hospitals in Brazil. When asked to identify their belief—for instance, in the national census— they would usually identify themselves as Christians, though recently Brazilians shifted to using espiritualidade as an umbrella term for all kinds of beliefs and practices (Schmidt 2014). For Mateo, the term espiritualidade captures a bricolage of ideas and practices, including aspects of Christianity located outside the religious (i.e., institutional) sphere. The term expresses a fluidity of practices and the reluctance to be restricted in any way. Mateo grew up as Catholic but stepped away from the church as adult. He did not like the church and stayed for years “without religion, with nothing.” He had his own beliefs. But, as he explained, at some moments in life, one needs something else. And at such a moment, he began to study different spiritual practices and tried various therapies. In the 2016 survey, Mateo wrote that espiritualidade helped him in his “understanding of life, the reasons of the things that are around us and happen during our life [lives].” When asked to describe the significance of espiritualidade for his well-being, he wrote: “definitely yes. To understand a little bit more about our former lives makes it easier to accept problems, sufferings but also good things such as successes and happiness, too.” He defined “well-being” as follows: “happiness is fundamental to it, but it is not the only factor. Health also counts a lot.” When asked how open he is when discussing his beliefs with healthcare professionals, he wrote that he mentioned it only if they signaled openness, but that “many do not accept it and mock.” Nevertheless, for him espiritualidade has great impact on health, in particular, as he clarified, when dealing with depression. After an email exchange, we met in person in 2018 in São Paulo. He also invited me to visit the spiritual center with him. Our conversations circulated around different moments of crisis that impacted his life and led him toward espiritualidade. At first he spoke about his two divorces, which led to an experience of loss and great suffering. He began to become involved in espiritualidade because he “needed something else.” The second divorce impacted him even more than the first one, and he described how he suffered for six or seven years until he “saw the light” and turned again toward espiritualidade. This time his journey took him to the spiritual center that he still attends. He described it as the place “that completely filled me, it opened the doors to my soul.” He discovered a new dimension that he did not know existed. His involvement with the spiritual center helped him when he developed depression with suicidal tendencies. He contracted HIV and even considered

Living with Spirits

79

asking someone to kill him. He said that he was in pain, that the pain was too great. In this time of crisis, the spiritual center became his stronghold, and he began to attend the weekly meetings regularly. Even the recent death of his father had not drawn him back into depression as he has learned to handle life (and death) better after attending meetings. He recalled, “I began to understand death very naturally when my dad left a month ago. I did not stay in a bad place for long. I understood that his time was gone, that he is now in another dimension where I also will go. We all leave this earth. I understand this now very clearly. I understand and am not afraid of death any longer. It does not hurt me, even when it happens to me.” The death of his father meant that he is now the sole carer for his elderly mother who has Alzheimer’s, though he has help from his siblings. He mentioned that he is in a new relationship (for three years) that provides further stability in his life. However, at the core of his life are the two spiritual centers. In one, which he describes as a “center of healing,” he attends a weekly course about espiritualidade while the other, which he labels as a “spiritual center,” is his spiritual home. When he first visited this center, he talked at length with the leader. “We talk about everything. I think he [the leader of the center] is an enlightened person because there is a moment when he spoke to me as if he knew everything, as if he was looking inside me, as if he knew everything that happened.” The center helped him “to live well,” to gain a purpose in his life: “people need to believe in something, something greater, and not only to believe but also to look for something so that we have a purpose, so that we can find a purpose in life.” In this way, the connection with the spiritual center gave him a life purpose and connected him with a greater community that included the spiritual realm. In the final section of the interview, Mateo spoke about a medical incident that highlighted the importance of Spiritism for him. He was diagnosed with a heart problem and needed heart surgery. While the procedure was covered by his health plan, the diagnosis upset him enormously. At that time, he had stopped visiting the spiritual center but returned to it after the diagnosis. He spoke with a member who worked in the healthcare sector and also consulted the spirits. He asked whether there was anything the spirits could do. “And they replied, ‘Yes, you will be fully taken care of. You can stay calm.’” He then checked the list of surgeons available on his health plan and saw one surgeon listed who he identified as a Spiritist. “The first time I met him, I stayed over two hours talking to him. He explained everything about the surgery and afterwards we kept talking, mostly about espiritualidade. I was absolutely delighted with the doctor. I was not afraid anymore.” The positive outcome of the surgery had a wider impact on his life. Mateo mentioned that he does not worry any longer. “I am more at ease

80

Bettina E. Schmidt

now. I put all my tensions and fears in the hands of someone who is looking after me.” Asked whether his life is now in harmony, Mateo confirmed that he feels more settled and not as stressed as before. Despite ongoing health problems as well as the responsibility to care for his elderly mother, he said he felt settled at the time of the interview. He had learned to cope with the situation but also learned that espiritualidade was not a one-off healing but an ongoing process. At various points in the interview, Mateo referred to the importance of self-improvement by attending courses and workshops, learning different therapies, and so on. Also important for Mateo was that he could discuss his medical condition freely with other members of the spiritual center. He described the members as his spiritual guides who were there for him in moments of crisis. By accepting him as he was, they helped him stabilize and cope, as Mateo said, with death and his own mortality. Mateo’s story illustrates the importance of espiritualidade for well-being in a wide, holistic way. His life story illustrates his continual self-improvement via self-study, attending workshops, and studying different therapies. It also demonstrates a notion of medical and spiritual mobility. While this tendency has been discussed for the United Kingdom (Carrette and King 2005) and other Western countries, Mateo’s case study and some of the other interviews show that the “spiritual market” in Brazil has headed in a similar direction. The significant difference is that Mateo and other participants placed espiritualidade with its many variations at the core of their search for wellness. Mateo mentioned that he became less afraid of dying due to the assurance given to him by the spirits that he would be fine, days before his surgery. This aspect is often overlooked in studies of espiritismo and healing, though the healing orientation of modern Spiritism was documented by the medical anthropologists studying Puerto Rican Spiritism in the 1970s and 1980s (e.g., Garrison 1972; Koss 1970, Figueroa 1981). Mateo’s case study illustrates his lived experience, which motivated or drove his search for selfimprovement and his personal search for espiritualidade. Kardec taught in the nineteenth century the need for constant learning. His books, such as The Spirits Book (1857), What Is Spiritism? (1859), and The Book on Mediums (1861), established the training programs that are still used by many centers today. But Kardec also highlighted the importance of selfstudy, which Mateo’s life journey illustrates. Not only did Mateo move away from the tradition he grew up with, but he also moved around in his search for help. He studied various therapies and practices, testing their efficiency before moving on to the next one while embedding all within the wider system of espiritualidade. Indeed, this kind of mobility was common among many people I encountered. While I initially struggled to understand why Mateo was studying courses in one center but referring to spiritual guidance

Living with Spirits

81

from another, this was not a contradiction for Mateo. Mateo even could not understand my misunderstanding as I initially thought he spoke about one center instead of two. In addition to self-study, Mateo’s case also affirms the importance of relationship, and not just among humans but between humans and the spiritual world as well. For Mateo, the weekly meetings in the spiritual center were even more important than the training courses, and he always tried to attend them, despite occasional problematic personal circumstances (e.g., needing to find someone to look after his mother). The meetings were more than gatherings of like-minded people for Mateo. He especially looked forward to the passe in which positive energy is transferred from the mediums to the participants and the aura is cleansed. As outlined above, healing starts, according to the teaching in espiritismo, with the identification of the roots of afflictions. The roots of afflictions can lie in deeds of previous incarnations or can be caused by harmful spirits. However, the reasons remain often hidden for the afflicted. Mateo had to learn that the things he saw were not dreams but visions, messages from the spirit world. However, these contacts can be disturbing. The transfer to positive energy will cleanse the participant’s aura so that harmful spirits move on and stop afflicting pain or causing other problems (Carneiro et al. 2017, 74). This flow of energy has become so important to Mateo that his life seems centered around the weekly meetings. It is also his connection to the world of the spirits as the positive energy is drawn from them. When attending with him one of these weekly meetings, I noticed that though he chatted with several members and listened to the reading, his attention increased when the leader announced the passe would start next. He became calm and relaxed by the transfer of positive energy that was for Mateo the highlight of the weekly meeting.

THE MATERIALITY OF ENERGY: REFLECTION OF ATTENDING PASSE At this point I will shift to my experience of participating at the passe with Mateo. While I had attended passe before, my experience changed after attending the meeting with Mateo. Upon our arrival he introduced me to the leader as well as some members, and I was able to speak with the leader for a while. Mateo and I sat down on one of the front rows of chairs and waited for the meeting to start as more and more people arrived. After a couple of speeches and readings, it was time for the passe. The light was dimmed and two sets of two chairs were put back-to-back at the front. During the next hour, attendees were invited to sit on one of the chairs while some of the

82

Bettina E. Schmidt

regular members were asked to conduct the passe for a group of four. After a while I was also invited to participate. Due to my previous experiences with passe, I sat down without hesitation on one of the front chairs. While I did not notice a change during the next minutes, I felt calm and relaxed. After everyone was given the opportunity to participate, the lights came up and the meeting ended. However, when returning home in the evening, I noticed something unexpected. For some years I have been wearing a watch that counts my steps and my heartbeat. I tend not to look at it much apart from checking my exercise regime in the evenings. On this Monday evening I noticed that during the passe my heartbeat has slowed so much that the watch categorized that period as sleep. While my mind was much engaged during the passe—my thoughts wandered from Mateo and his story to my other conversations on that day and more—my entire body relaxed, and my heartbeat slowed down. I felt calm and did not notice the time passing. While I had attended Spiritist meetings before with a similar feeling of calm, it was the first time I recorded a physical response. Even during yoga sessions, my watch had never recorded a slowing of my heartbeat. So, what was different this time? To answer this question, I will reflect on my prior involvement with the spirit world. I came into firsthand contact with espiritismo and African-derived religions a year into my doctoral research (Schmidt 1995). While originally, I planned to research traditional medicine in the Caribbean, I changed my topic to vernacular religions after my first visit to Puerto Rico. I spent my first research visit mainly in the National Archive and worked my way through numerous leaflets, papers, and newspaper articles on Puerto Rican espiritismo. During a visit to New York City and the Puerto Rican Studies collection at the City University of New York, I expanded my reading into medical anthropology and learned that Puerto Rican Spiritists were often classified as paranoid schizophrenic. I disagreed vehemently with this disrespect against a different ontology but kept my distance nevertheless. While I longed to gain ethnographic insights, I followed the core teaching in anthropology at that time and avoided becoming too involved. I learned that as scholars we should remain external to the experience because otherwise, as Edith Turner commented, “if a researcher ‘went native’ it doomed him academically” (1993, 9). While in Puerto Rico for another research visit, I was finally able to conduct interviews and participated in meetings. However, I stepped back as soon as it got too personal. I remember, for instance, that when I asked a babalowo (a priest of an African-derived religious community) for an oracle reading and he mentioned something about making peace with the dead,

Living with Spirits

83

something in me shut down. At that time, I was still grieving the death of my mother, who was a committed Lutheran and would have disapproved of my interest in mediumship religions. My anthropological training supported me in stepping away as I was taught the need to distance oneself from the field to remain objective. But I started to realize later that there are different forms of objectivity as well as different forms of subjectivity. During my postdoctoral research, I turned toward performative studies. Following Richard Schechner and Victor Turner but also the French school of ethnoscénologie (e.g., Pradier 1996; see also Schmidt 2008), I saw Performance Studies as alternative that enabled me to admire a performance while keeping my distance. While I am still reluctant to put myself in the center of my investigation and I tend to shy away from autoethnography, the ethnographic context is at the heart of my approach to the field. While doing research on the Caribbean diaspora in New York City, I became fascinated by the ceremonies I attended and admired the polyphonic bricolage. But when a mambo (a Vodou priestess) asked whether I wanted to become initiated, I declined with the explanation that my aim was to study all communities impartially. My response, as I understand now, was still influenced by a search for objectivity, forgetting that the lived experiences and the narratives emerging from the field can also develop a kind of objectivity, located in the lived context. My interview with Mateo and my visit to the spiritual center took place years later. While I had at that time lost both of my parents, I was no longer overwhelmed by grief. During my first research in Brazil in 2010, I had come in close contact with Brazilian mediumship religions. I had attended various Spiritist healing sessions as well as ceremonies of African-derived religious communities and had gained insight into the world of the spirits and orixás (African deities). This experience led me to develop this project on spirituality and well-being to study the positive impact of spiritual practices on health. Though I was unable to spend a long time in the field, my familiarity and experience had prepared me in such a way that my body responded. I became able to let go of my inner restrictions to keep distance and, in Edith Turner’s words, to sink in. As the introduction of this book outlines, anthropologists approach the existence of other worlds usually as symbolic, as aspects of the culture of the other world. This was also my approach, as my short reflection of past research experiences shows. While I was always arguing for the diversity of experiences and criticized the categorization of mediumship experience— or any other form of non-ordinary experience—as “irrational,” I frequently replied to questions about my own experience that as an anthropologist I was not interested in truth or judgment calls about the reality of spirits. My constant mantra was that it does not matter what we think about the spirits;

84

Bettina E. Schmidt

what matters is how the communities deal with them. My physical response during the passe in São Paulo shows, however, that my body challenged this reluctance to engage with a different reality. One could say, of course, that passe is not about spirits but is about transfer of energy (even though Spiritists argue that the energy derives from the spirits). Hence, while my body responded, it could have been a reaction to the energy and not a confirmation of the existence of spirits. My physical response is therefore not necessarily evidence to validate the existence of spirits (see Csordas 2004). Nevertheless, the way my heart slowed and my body relaxed can be seen as verification of the energy. The material dimension of the healing with energy was unexpected for me. But lowering blood pressure and easing tensions are definitely health improvements, and had I continued attending the meetings, I might have seen an improvement of my well-being. Reflecting about my experience reminded me of Edith Turner and her article about the reality of spirits as well as her last publication, “The Body and the Spirit,” derived from her presentation at the Esalen Institute in 2013 (Turner 1993, 2018). In her 1993 article Turner reflects on the different experiences among the Ndembu in Zambia when she attended a healing ceremony decades after her first visit. When she and her husband, Victor Turner, came to the Ndembu for the first time, in the 1950s, they distanced themselves from the Ndembu belief system. However, by putting a barrier between their way to see things and the Ndembu, according to Turner, they denied “the people’s equality with us, their ‘coevalness’, their common humanity as that humanity extended itself into the spirit world” (1993, 9). But when participating in a healing ceremony, they experienced a wave of curative energy. “We had been participating as fully as we knew how, thus opening ourselves to whatever entities that were about” (9). In 1985 she returned to Zambia and once again attended healing rituals. This time her experience went further, and she saw “with my own eyes a large grey blob of something like plasma emerge from the sick woman’s back. Then I knew the Africans were right, there is spirit stuff, there is spirit affliction, it isn’t a matter of metaphor and symbol, or even psychology” (9). Turner concludes that a peak experience in a ritual is only possible if the researcher sinks oneself fully in it. This seems to have happened with me while visiting the center with Mateo. While I did not see anything during the session, my body responded. It might have been that my mind was still too busy analyzing what had occurred while my body began sinking in. Hence, my reaction could reveal an ongoing division between my mind and body while the other participants live in a more holistic manner where mind and body are one. But I am a rather analytical, rational person. I am trained to observe, and I prefer

Living with Spirits

85

standing at the edge of a ceremony instead of dancing in front of the drums, despite my enjoyment of the music and performance. I am reluctant to accept the survival of the spirits of the dead, perhaps because I live with so many around me. It might be that the reason why my body was able to sink in was because a passe is not about seeing or communicating with spirits but about energy. However, this is my distinction, not one made by the participants who regard the energy in the passe as coming from the spirit world. Nevertheless, healing with energy is a core feature of spiritual healing worldwide (see Schmidt 2021) and, as Turner writes, part of various cultures—though under different terms such as “power,” “energy,” fei, or chi, which she describes as “the energy of life” and “the heat of one’s hands when healing” (2018, 99). Turner even mentions her own experience during passe rituals in Brazil and writes, “I have indeed sensed something very like electrical energy when submitting to the healing passes of women adepts in a mass meeting of Spiritists in Brazil” (1993, 11). Her sensing an electrical energy and my slowing of the heartbeat point to the materiality of the spiritual realm and the materiality of healing. However, we need to keep in mind, as Thomas Csordas points out, that ethnographic evidence is not evidence in a juridical way, but it is “marshaled in order to identify cultural patterns and social arrangements, and ethnological evidence in order to identify regularities across cultures” (2004, 474).

CONCLUSION “People actively seek for a connection to a spiritual realm. They sometimes feel as if they could enfold all things within their arms, they feel it with their body, with a shiver or an expansion of the heart” (Turner 2018, 99). The existence of the spiritual world is one of the cornerstones of espiritismo. It impacts decisions even about medical treatments and influences the sense of wellness. As Kardec’s teachings highlight the importance of selfimprovement and the need to lead a good life, espiritismo does not offer a quick therapy but involves a longtime, even lifelong, commitment to the world of the spirits. In addition, practices such as passe can initiate healing and improve health when practiced over a long period. The patients are cleansed from negative energy and receive positive energy from the spiritual realm, all while in communion with a group of like-minded people. In this sense there can be no doubt of the positive impact of espiritualidade on health, as Mateo’s story also demonstrated. His narrative provided the ethnographic evidence, to use Csordas’s term, for the intertwined relation between spirituality and healing.

86

Bettina E. Schmidt

However, my reflection of my own experience illustrates that espiritualidade can have a physical impact, whether one believes in the power of spirits or not. While participating at the passe, my heartbeat slowed. The energy that is usually perceived as formless and without materiality created a material reaction that could in the long term stimulate healing and recovery. As Turner and others pointed out before, the division between “our” rationality (as ethnographers) and “their” rationality (as participants) creates a barrier and prevents understanding. To present anthropology as a scientific discipline, anthropologists had warned students of the danger to go native. When researching matters of belief, scholars such as Edward Evans-Pritchard, who himself was religious—he converted to Roman Catholicism during World War II—took belief as a subjective matter out of the anthropological consideration. Reflecting on his own experience during his research among the Azande, Evans-Pritchard wrote in 1965 that “there is no possibility of [the anthropologist] knowing whether the spiritual beings of primitive religions or of any others have any existence or not, and since that is the case he cannot take the question into consideration” (17). Following to a certain degree in his footsteps, Matthew Engelke writes that an ethnography is richer if “the problem of belief is raised and left open” (2002, 3, my emphasis). However, Engelke makes a noteworthy comment about the materiality of belief. Reflecting on a study of witchcraft, Engelke praises the author for openly stating that he does not believe “in invisible forces or beings” and “neither does he claim that they do not exist” (Engelke 2002, 3, referring to Ashforth 2000, 249), but then Engelke adds that they “exist, that is, as physical manifestations” (ibid., my emphasis). Hence, while Engelke stresses the importance of subjective belief when doing research on religion, he rejects the physical dimension of the spiritual world. I want to take the debate beyond the questions whether spiritual beings exist on an immaterial or material level. I am not arguing here that one should ignore the foundations of our discipline. I still see the importance of objective distance, contextualization of the ethnographic narratives, and methodological reflection of the lived experience. Instead, my discussion about my experience has inspired me to accept the material dimension of the spiritual realm and its impact on healing. Consequently, I now argue against approaching the other worlds merely as symbolic but for accepting them with a material dimension. As my experience illustrates, it would open new ways of studying. I am not referring here to an expansion of cognitive research that already studies heartbeat, brain waves, and other physical responses of people in trance or other forms of non-ordinary experience; I am referring to a more embodied way of doing research. By monitoring our own body and reflecting on our own physical experience during healing rituals,

Living with Spirits

87

we can discover new ways of understanding other worlds. While reflection should be always at the core of any anthropological study, it is usually restricted to emotions, attitudes, and conscious and unconscious behavior. The aim is often to reflect on our bias during the research, hence directed toward our position. My point goes in a different direction. I argue that a reflection of our physical responses might open the avenue to a new understanding of other worlds and other bodies, and perhaps a new insight into our world. As the editors of this book have outlined in the introduction, embodiment is not the same everywhere. They encourage us therefore to reconceptualize “embodied experience” and ask whether we can move beyond the notion of different worlds. If we break down the barrier and reconceptualize other worlds as being part of the same world as our own, we might reach a new understanding of our experiences and those of other people. Understanding how our bodies respond when confronted with a non-ordinary experience is just the first step in this direction. Bettina E. Schmidt is professor in the study of religions and anthropology of religion at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David, UK. She is the director of the Religious Experience Research Centre at the same institution. Among her most significant publications are Spirit and Trance in Brazil: An Anthropology of Religious Experiences; Caribbean Diaspora in the USA: Diversity of Caribbean Religions in New York City; Handbook of Contemporary Brazilian Religions; and Spirituality and Wellbeing: Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Study of Religious Experience and Health.

REFERENCES Araújo Aureliano, Waleska de. 2011. Espiritualidade, Saúde e as Artes de Cura no Contemporâneo: Indefinição de Margens e busca de Fronteiras em um Centro terapêutico espírita no Sul do Brasil [Spirituality, health and the healing arts in the contemporary: Blurring of margins and the search for borders in a Spiritist therapeutic center in Southern Brazil]. PhD diss., Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina. Ashforth, Adam. 2000. Madumo: A Man Bewitched. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bacon, Hemeterio. 1910. Memorias de un Maniático: O Apuntes históricos del Espiritismo en Puerto Rico de los años 1872 al 1876 [Memories of a maniatico: The historical notes of espiritismo in Puerto Rico from 1872 to 1876]. Mayaguez: Imp. La Banderas Americana. Bradford, William Penn. 1978. “Puerto Rican Spiritism: Contrasts in the Sacred and the Profane.” Caribbean Quarterly 24(3–4): 48–55.

88

Bettina E. Schmidt

Bram, Joseph. 1972. “Spirits, Mediums and Believers in Contemporary Puerto Rico.” In Portrait of a Society: Readings on Puerto Rican Sociology, edited by Eugenio Fernández Méndez, 371–77. Rio Piedras: University of Puerto Rican Press. Brignoni, Bartolomé. 1970. “Declara 80 percent Puertorriqueños cree en Ciencia Espiritista [80 percent of Puerto Ricans declare they believe in Spiritualist science].” El Mundo 51(1970): 11-C. Carneiro, Élida Mar, et al. 2017. “Effectiveness of Spiritist ‘Passe’ (Spiritual Healing) for Anxiety Levels, Depression, Pain, Muscle Tension, Well-Being, and Physiological Parameters in Cardiovascular Inpatients: A Randomized Controlled Trial.” Complementary Therapies in Medicine 30: 73–78. Carrette, Jeremy, and Richard King. 2005. Selling Spirituality: The Silent Takeover of Religion. London: Routledge. Comas-Díaz, Lillian. 1981. “Puerto Rican Espiritismo and Psychotherapy.” American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 51(4): 636–45. Csordas, Thomas J. 2004. “Evidence of and for What?” Anthropological Theory 4(4): 473–80. Delanne, Gabriel. 1909. Consejos a los Mediums y a los Experimentadores [Advice to mediums and experimenters]. Mayaguez: Tipografia Aurora. Emmons, Charles F. 2014. “Spirit Mediums in Hong Kong and the United States.” In Talking with the Spirits: Ethnographies from between the Worlds, edited by Jack Hunter and David Luke, 301–23. Brisbane: Daily Grail. Engelke, Matthew. 2002. “The Problem of Belief: Evans-Pritchard and Victor Turner on ‘The Inner Life.’” Anthropology Today 18(6): 3–8. Evans-Pritchard, Edward E. 1965. Theories of Primitive Religion. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Figueroa, José E. 1981. “The cultural dynamics of Puerto Rican spiritism: class, nationality, and religion in a Brooklyn ghetto.” PhD diss, City University of New York. Garrison, Vivian E. 1972. “Social Networks, Social Change and Mental Health among Migrants in a New York City Slum.” PhD diss., Columbia University. ———. 1977a. “Doctor, Espiritista or Psychiatrist? Health-Seeking Behavior in a Puerto Rican Neighborhood of New York City.” Medical Anthropology 1(2): 65–180. ———. 1977b. “The ‘Puerto Rican Syndrome’ in Psychiatry and Espiritismo.” In Case Studies in Spirit Possession, edited by Vincent Crapanzano and Vivian Garrison, 383–449. New York: Wiley and Sons. Gomberg, Estélio. 2011. Hospital de Orixás: Encontros Terapêuticos em um Terreiro de Candomblé [Orixás hospital: Therapeutic encounters in a terreiro of Candomblé]. Salvador: Edufba. Greenfield, S. M. 1987. “The Return of Dr Fritz: Spiritist Healing and Patronage Networks in Urban, Industrial Brazil.” Social Science and Medicine 24(12): 1095–1108. ———. 2008. Spirits with Scalpels: The Cultural Biology of Religious Healing in Brazil. Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press. Hageman, Joan H. and Stanley Krippner 2013. „Cultural aspects of personality, beliefs and attentional strategies in mediumship”. In The survival hypothesis, edited by Adam J. Rock, 107-121. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

Living with Spirits

89

Hajosy Benedetti, M. D. 1991. !Hasta los Baños te curan! Remedios Caseros y mucho más de Puerto Rico [Even the baths heal you! Home remedies and much more from Puerto Rico]. Editorial Cultural. Harwood, Alan. 1977. Rx: Spiritist as Needed: A Study of a Puerto Rican Community Mental Health Resource. New York: John Wiley and Sons. Hess, David J. 1991. Spirits and Scientists: Ideology, Spiritism, and Brazilian Culture. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Hohmann, Ann A., et al. 1990. “Spiritism in Puerto Rico: Results of an Island-Wide Community Study.” British Journal of Psychiatry 156: 328–35. Kardec, Allan. 2017 [1857]. The Spirits Book. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform. ———. 1974 [1859]. Que es el Espiritismo? Introducción al Conocimiento del Mundo Invisible por las Manifestaciones de los Espiritos [What is spiritualism? Introduction to the knowledge of the invisible world through the manifestations of the spirits]. New York: Studium Corporation. ———. 2010 [1861]. The Book on Mediums. White Crow Books. ———. 2017 [1857]. The Spirits Book. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform. King, Lindsey. 2014. Spiritual Currency in Northeast Brazil. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Koss, Joan. 1970. “Therapeutica del Sistema de una Secta en Puerto Rico [Therapeutics of the system of a cult in Puerto Rico].” Revista de Ciencias Sociales XIV(2): 259–78. ———. 1972. “El Porque de los Cultos Religiosas: El Caso del Espiritismo en Puerto Rico [The why of religious cults: The case of spiritism in Puerto Rico].” Revista de Ciencias Sociales XVI(1): 61–72. ———. 1977. “Spirits as Socializing Agents: A Case Study of a Puerto Rican Girl Reared in a Matricentric Family.” In Case Studies in Spirit Possession, edited by Vincent Crapanzano and Vivian Garrison, 365–82. New York: Wiley and Sons. Koss-Chioino, Joan. 1996. “The Experience of Spirits: Ritual Healing as Transaction of Emotion (Puerto Rico).” In Jahrbuch für Transkuturelle Medizin und Psychotherapie [Yearbook of cross-cultural medicine and psychotherapy], edited by Walter W. Andritzky, 251–71. Berlin: VWB, Verlag für Wissenschaft und Bildung. Krippner, Stanley. 2008. “Learning from the Spirits: Candomblé, Umbanda, and Kardecismo in Recife, Brazil.” Anthropology of Consciousness 19(1): 1–32. Krippner, Stanley, and Scott Taubold. 2004. “Constructing A Model of Espiritista: Healing in the Philippines.” Anthropology of Consciousness 15(1): 42–51. Kuntz, Alan. 1985. “Systematic Theory in the Context of Puerto Rican Culture.” Thesis, Massachusetts University. Kurz, Helmar. 2017. “Diversification of Mental Health: Brazilian Kardecist Psychiatry and the Aesthetics of Healing.” Curare 40(3): 195–206. ———. 2018. “Transcultural and Transnational Transfer of Therapeutic Practice: Healing Cooperation of Spiritism, Biomedicine, and Psychiatry in Brazil and Germany.” Curare 41(1+2): 35–49. Moreira-Almeida, Alexander, and Francisco Lotufo Neto. 2005. “Spiritist Views of Mental Disorders in Brazil.” Transcultural Psychiatry 42(4): 570–95.

90

Bettina E. Schmidt

———. 2017. “Methodological Guidelines to Investigate Altered States of Consciousness and Anomalous Experiences.” International Review of Psychiatry 29(3): 283–92. Moreira-Almeida, Alexander, Angélica A. Silva de Almeida, and Francisco Lotufo Neto. 2005. “History of ‘Spiritist Madness’ in Brazil.” History of Psychiatry 16(1): 5–25. Moreira-Almeida, Alexander, et al. 2016. “WPA Position Statement on Spirituality and Religion in Psychiatry.” World Psychiatry 15(1). https://doi.org/10.1002/ wps.20304. Núñez Molina, Mario A. 1990. Therapeutic and preventive functions of Puerto Rican espiritismo. Homines: Revista de Ciencias Sociales 13 (2)-14 (1): 267-276. Núñez Molina, Mario A. 2001. “Community Healing among Puerto Ricans Espiritismo as a Therapy for the Soul.” In Healing Cultures: Art and Religion as Curative Practices in the Caribbean and Its Diaspora, edited by Margarite Fernández Olmo and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, 115–31. New York: Palgrave MacMillan. Pierini, Emily. 2020. Jaguars of the Dawn: Spirit Mediumship in the Brazilian Vale do Amanhecer. New York; Oxford: Berghahn Books. Pollak-Eltz, A. 1982. “Dr José Gregorio Hernández, der große venezolanische Wunderheiler [Dr. José Gregorio Hernández, the great Venezuelan faith healer].” Curare 5(3): 135–38. Pradier, Jean-Marie. 1996. “Ethnoscénologie: La Profondeur des Émergences [Ethnoscenology: The Depth of Emergences]. ” In La Scène et la Terre: Questions d’Ethnoscénologie, edited by Maison des Culture du Monde, 13–41. Paris: Babel. Rabelo, M. C. 1993. “Religião e Cura: Algumas Reflexões Sobre a Experiência Religiosa das Classes Populares Urbanas [Religion and healing: Some reflections on the religious experience of the urban popular classes].” Cad. Saúde Públ. 9(3): 316–25. Rocha, Cristina. 2017. John of God: The Globalization of Brazilian Faith Healing. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rodríguez Escudero, Nestor A. 1978. Historia del espiritismo en Puerto Rico [History of spiritism in Puerto Rico]. Aguadilla, PR. Schmidt, Bettina E. 1995. Von Geistern, Orichas und den Puertoricanern: zur Verbindung von Religion und Ethnizität [Of ghosts, Orichas, and the Puerto Ricans: Linking religion and ethnicity]. Marburg: Curupira. ———. 2000. “Religious Concepts in the Process of Migration: Puerto Rican Female Spiritists in the USA.” In Women and Migration: Anthropological Perspectives, edited by Jacqueline Knörr and Barbara Meier, 119–32. New York: Campus/St. Martin. ———. 2008. Caribbean Diaspora in the USA: Diversity of Caribbean Religions in New York City. Aldershot: Ashgate. ———. 2009. “Meeting the Spirits: Espiritismo as Source for Identity, Healing and Creativity.” Fieldwork in Religion 3(2): 178–95. ———. 2014. “The Problem with Numbers in Study of Religions: Introduction.” DISKUS, The Journal of the British Association for the Study of Religions 16(2): 1–4.

Living with Spirits

91

———. 2016. Spirits and Trance in Brazil: Anthropology of Religious Experiences. London: Bloomsbury. ———. 2020. “Narratives of Spirituality and Wellbeing: Cultural Differences and Similarities between Brazil and the UK.” In Spirituality and Wellbeing: Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Study of Religious Experience and Health, edited by Bettina Schmidt and Jeff Leonardi, 137–57. Sheffield: Equinox. ———. 2021. “Spiritual Healing in Latin America.” In Handbook of Religion, Medicine and Health, edited by Dorothea Lüddeckens, Pamela Klassen, Justin Stein, and Philipp Hetmanczyk, 113–25. London: Routledge. Seligman, Rebecca. 2014. Possessing Spirits and Healing Selves: Embodiment and Transformation in an Afro-Brazilian Religion. New York: Palgrave MacMillan. Steiner, Stan. 1975. The Islands: The World of the Puerto Ricans. New York: Harper Colophon Books. Toniol, Rodrigo. 2018. Do Espírito na Saúde: Oferta e uso de Terapias Alternativas / Complementares nos Serviços de Saúde Pública no Brasil [Of spirit in health: Offer and use of alternative/complementary therapies in public health services in Brazil]. São Paulo: Editora LiberArs. Turner, Edith. 1993. “The Reality of Spirits: A Tabooed or Permitted Field of Study.” Anthropology of Consciousness 4(1): 9–12. ———. 2018. “The Body and the Spirit.” Journal for the Study of Religions Experience 4: 99–101. Young, David E., and Jean-Guy Goulet, eds. 1994. Being Changed by Cross-Cultural Encounters: The Anthropology of Extraordinary Experience. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press.

Part II

‫ﱬﱫ‬ Transitions and Transformations

Chapter 4

The Ghosts That Haunt Me Feeling with Affective Technologies and Doing Ethnography about Spirit Possession in Contemporary Japan Andrea De Antoni

‫ﱬﱫ‬ It was the first time that Murakami-san,1 a woman in her early forties from Tokushima Prefecture, visited the shrine and underwent the exorcism. She defined herself as the type of person who “received [spirits] easily” (morai yasui), and as a worker in a daily care facility for the elderly, she would “receive a lot of them.” “Now my neck hurts!” she told me while laughing. “That’s because,” she had the kindness to explain, noticing that I was slightly perplexed, “they played tug of war . . . The priest pulling and that thing pulling back . . . That happened when . . . you go like this [bends her head down], right? When I raised my neck, my body . . . It hurt a lot. But my neck usually aches. The left side. It was the left side also today.” Shiratori-san was Murakami-san’s friend and the person who introduced her to the shrine. She was in her late thirties and used to visit because she lived relatively nearby. She worked in daycare for the elderly, too, and defined herself as the same “spirit-receiving type” as her friend. This time, she had decided to undergo the ritual because she quit her previous job and was getting ready to start a new one. When I asked her whether she felt anything during the ritual, she replied in a cheerful voice: “Me? All of a sudden, since before entering . . . like . . . saliva! It felt like it was constantly coming out. Soooo much of it. I lightly sucked it back in, but as the priest performed the ritual, it came up all together.” She was surprised by that

96

Andrea De Antoni

reaction because, she said, “I usually cry [bursts out laughing]. And once I even fell! I got pushed away!” Murakami-san and Shiratori-san are two examples of the people who visit Kenmi shrine (jinja) in the middle of the mountains in Tokushima Prefecture on the island of Shikoku, Japan. Despite the difficulties in accessing it, the shrine has witnessed an increase of visitors since the 2010s, mainly because it started being featured in television and radio programs, newspapers, magazines, and novels. Most of the people, as the main priest (gūji) told me, go there to undergo its ritual and specify that they want it to be performed to exorcise evil spirits. The two aforementioned accounts shed light on some elements and actors that have recurred very often during my fieldwork at Kenmi shrine. They fed back into an ontology that was shared, to a certain extent, both by specialists and visitors. The first aspect to this ontology is that there are spirits. The two women, the ways in which they explained, leaves no doubt that, at least to them, spirits existed as external subjects. They impacted Murakami-san’s and Shiratori-san’s lives and fought over their bodies during the ritual, eventually being exorcised. Second, the reality of such spirits was heavily based on experience. To the two women, spirits existed because they experienced them. They felt spirits through their bodily reactions and perceptions: the sensation of a hurting neck and being pushed away were experiential evidence of spirits as external agents. Spirit entities manifested themselves through their actions. Third, the two accounts point at “types” of people who can “easily receive” spirits. They suggest an ontology in which spirits pass from a person to another, but more importantly they suggest that this ontology allows individual characteristics, capabilities, and, arguably, bodily capacities and skills. Fourth, many of these perceptions revolved around and happened during the ritual. It was because certain perceptions emerged during the exorcism that they were linked to spirit actions. In other words, what happened during the ritual was central to the ontology. These accounts, however, might also raise some perplexities in a reader who is not familiar with spirit worlds. Did Murakami-san and Shiratori-san “simply” believe that they were in touch with spirit entities? Was it a matter of interpretation—that is, of epistemology? Assuming that their bodily experiences constituted the ground of their reality, was that reality subjective and confined to the two of them? Or was there something that gave some strength and thickness to that reality beyond their subjective perceptions? In other words, is what happens at Kenmi shrine a matter of epistemology, phenomenological experience, or ontology? Whatever the case, how can the ethnographer access spirit worlds, in order to “translate” them into analytics that do them justice, while also producing legitimate anthropological knowledge?

The Ghosts That Haunt Me

97

The aim of this chapter is to tackle these questions and to suggest possible answers. In order to do so, I will provide some reflections based on ethnographic data that I gathered through my fieldwork at Kenmi shrine. My suggestion is aiming at an understanding of processes of (spirit) ontogenesis as the result of attunements and “coming-togethers” of perceived actions. Instead of seeing agency-imbued self-standing objects and materialities that interact, I argue that it is necessary to understand how actors (spirits, in this case, but they could as well be humans or nonhumans) emerge through correspondences between feelings and (inter)actions. I will elaborate a methodology for understanding spirit worlds, arguing that through participation and “feeling with” humans and nonhumans in the field, the ethnographer can access other (spirit) ontologies and create legitimate anthropological knowledge. I will argue that this is possible because exorcism rituals can be seen as “affective technologies,” insofar as they elicit specific feelings through encounters between lived bodies and affordances (Gibson 1979). As I will show, such feelings became the evidence of spirit actions and the ground of ontogenesis beyond the participants’ “beliefs.”

SPIRITS, FEELING, ACTION The issue of “belief” has been thoroughly investigated in anthropological literature, and it has been equally criticized. For instance, in his analysis of Edward Evans-Pritchard’s work on the Azande, Martin Mills points out that while Evans-Pritchard “goes out of his way to demonstrate how ordinary witchcraft is, a categorical distinction is necessarily set up simply by the observer’s disbelief: belief in witches requires a special explanation . . . because we find it empirically objectionable” (2013, 23). Indeed, it has been argued that “classic” approaches on spirit-related beliefs and practices, which link them to sudden and drastic socioeconomic changes that followed colonialism, modernity, capitalism, or globalization (e.g., Comaroff and Comaroff 1999; McIntosh 2009; Ong 1987), have become so much of a standard that they have “come to form a deep-seated and seductive anthropological analytic” (Sanders 2008, 19). Similarly, Casper Bruun Jensen, Miho Ishii, and Philip Swift advocated for the need to find “new ways of getting spirit worlds . . . into view” by “repopulating the field of inquiry with more than beliefs, socioeconomic realities, and politics” (2016, 150, emphasis in the original). Foci on worldviews, epistemologies, and beliefs indeed end up creating a divide “between ‘native’ or ‘indigenous’ people, who live in cultures, and enlightened Westerners, who do not” (Ingold 2000, 15). The way to access the real world, in these views, is exclusively

98

Andrea De Antoni

through modern scientific thought, which relies on “the ascendancy of abstract or universal reason” (15). Thus, perhaps unsurprisingly, spirit possession and attachment have been under scrutiny of (medical) scientific approaches, which tend to interpret possession as related to traumatic experiences or dissociative symptoms (e.g., Hecker et al. 2016). More nuanced research based on cognitive science has focused on the cross-cultural dimensions of possession-related phenomena, describing possession as based on universal “pan-human cognitive processes” (Cohen 2008, 122). Similarly, recent studies have framed possession as based on bodily affordances that ground “the cultural kindling” of spiritual experiences (Cassaniti and Luhrmann 2014), or on sociocultural characteristics such as degrees of “porosity” in local understandings of the self in combination with individual skills such as “absorption” (Lifshitz, van Elk, and Luhrmann 2019). These studies do not try to “explain away” possession in reductionist or cognitive terms. By seeing cognition or bodily affordances as universal constraints to broader human experiences, though, they still reproduce a dichotomy between mind and body, as well as the aforementioned model that seeks a modern scientific truth underlying “cultural” phenomena such as spirit possession. Yet anthropology and social sciences have elaborated on ways to overcome such dichotomies. Science and technology studies have shed light on the social dimensions of the production of a variety of scientific practices (e.g., Latour 2005; Mol 2002). One of the characteristics of such approaches is the focus on agency and (inter)actions with nonhuman agents as fundamental components for the stabilization of “associations” or “networks” (Latour 2005) that constitute the ground for multiple ontologies. Such methods can also be applied beyond scientific practices to “tackle more difficult entities for which the question of reality has been simply squeezed out of existence by the weight of social explanations” (Latour 2005, 119). Furthermore, as Martin Holbraad and Morten Axel Pedersen argue in their elaboration of the “ontological turn,” “differently configured localized practices will have different ontological effects, bringing forth different kinds of entities, with no overall ontological scheme to sort them out in a unified way” (2017, 40). Thus, ontology-oriented approaches have, on the one hand, relativized the role of modern scientific practices as allegedly the only way to access a universal objective “reality.” On the other hand—and this is what I am mainly concerned with here—they argue that the construction of different realities is a matter of agency and (inter)action between humans and nonhumans. Investigating ontologies and their formations implies investigating how ontologies and realities emerge and “hold together” (Mol 2002, 42), not through discursive means related to beliefs but through practices and modes of ac-

The Ghosts That Haunt Me

99

tion. Therefore, what shapes and stabilizes difference between ontologies is difference in modalities of (inter)action. Furthermore, cultural phenomenological approaches have focused on the body as the existential ground of culture and self. Thomas Csordas posits self-processes as “orientational processes” that occur in a “culturally constituted world or milieu, and situational specificity or habitus” (1994, 5). He states that the starting point of investigation should be “the experience of perceiving in all its richness and indeterminacy, because in fact we do not have any phenomenologically real objects prior to perception” (7). Csordas goes on to explain how Catholic charismatic healing practices change the orientations of selves while intersubjectively creating indeterminate objective (spirit) realities. Although this approach barely takes interactions with material actors into consideration, as the self “orients” and perceives, and intersubjectivity implies interaction, it can be surmised that Csordas also suggests that anthropologists “orient” their analysis on actions rather than enclosed subjects and objects. In addition, especially the aforementioned approaches that “psychologize” possession, also tend “to presuppose a ‘disengaged’ self” in their analyses, “namely, one that must acquire a certain type of knowledge (or set of beliefs) in order to become possessed” (Espírito Santo 2012, 253). This contrasts with other anthropological research that has repeatedly highlighted the malleable and varied features of possession phenomena (e.g., Lambek 1993; Padmanabhan 2017) and that, in recent years, has begun to focus on possession in relation to learning processes and the acquisition of bodily skills. For instance, in her analysis of Cuban mediums (espiritistas), Diana Espírito Santo (2012) expands phenomenological approaches relying on Tim Ingold’s (2000) notion of “sentient ecology,” namely “knowledge not of a formal, authorised kind, transmissible in contexts outside those of its practical application,” but “based in feeling, consisting in the skills, sensitivities and orientations that have developed through long experience of conducting one’s life in a particular environment” (Ingold 2000, 25, cited in Espírito Santo 2012, 254). Espírito Santo relates mediumship to enskillment, pointing out that “the experience of human–spirit interaction is far from confined to ‘event’ formats.” It “is a normal extension of the development of a particular kind of self” that can become skilled at perceiving spirits, for “perception can be naturally educated over time to reveal what the world really is” (2012, 253–54). Such an approach bridges the phenomenology of perception with ontologies and ontogenesis. Through practice, people can become skilled in perceiving spirit entities and their actions, which “can come to be through their myriad traces, whether or not visible” (Espírito Santo and Blanes 2013,

100

Andrea De Antoni

6), so spirit entities become “manifest (and ultimately knowable) through their extensions . . . on a social and even historical plane, where extensions leave . . . ultimately, ‘evidence’” (6). It is the process of emergence of this experiential “evidence” not only of spirit realities but first and foremost of the immediacy of their actions that makes spirit ontologies “hold together” (Mol 2002, 42), and that needs to be understood in order to grasp spirit worlds beyond beliefs. Successful attempts in this direction have been made by relying on notions of affects and feelings (Cassaniti 2015; De Antoni 2017, 2020; Pierini 2020). “Affects” are precognitive, pre-symbolic, pre-linguistic, and pre-personal lived “intensities” that constitute the virtual and vital from which realities and subjects emerge. They are set in contrast to emotions, namely, “captures” of affect within structures of meaning that inevitably cannot give a complete account of affects (Massumi 2002).2 Paralleling this approach, it has been argued that “spirits . . . and their realities and subjectivities gradually emerge ‘in-between,’ among actors, as ‘captures’ . . . of a complex series of attunements and correspondences between the lived body and the environment” (De Antoni 2017, 146). Therefore, in this chapter I rely on ideas of “feeling with” in order to highlight the role that effects and bodily perceptions play in processes of the emergence of the social through practice or, more precisely, through situated correspondences with the environment (see also De Antoni and Dumouchel 2017). In this chapter, thus, my main purpose is to suggest that participation and “feeling with” humans and nonhumans in the field can allow the ethnographer to access other (spirit) ontologies. My main argument, based on ethnographic data about supplicants’ perceptions during the exorcism in Kenmi shrine, is that exorcism rituals and their dynamics can be seen as “affective technologies,” insofar as they elicit the emergence of specific feelings by enabling encounters between lived, perceiving bodies and certain affordances (Gibson 1979), part of the institutionalized ritual. It was this aspect of the exorcism that opened phenomenological possibilities for ontogenesis. My argument resonates with Bruce Kapferer’s broader suggestions about ritual dynamics “as a structuration of perception and of cognition in which particular human potentialities both of experience and of meaningful construction may be formed” (2004, 37), and follows Philip Swift’s (forthcoming) suggestion to focus on the “physics of ritual.” Yet I add a more empirical dimension related to the investigation of the dynamics and affordances through which certain feelings emerge as “evidence” of spirit presence and of the efficacy of ritual, thus allowing spirits to manifest themselves in between, through affective technologies. I will show that “belief” emerged as a result of such “evidence.” Belief was the consequence, not the principle, of ontogenesis. It was during and because of ritual practice that

The Ghosts That Haunt Me

101

feelings entangled with the “cultural,” discursive aspect of spirits. The first step of reality emergence and ontogenesis, and the subsequent stabilization of spirit ontologies, at Kenmi shrine occurred through the entanglement of those experiences within a broader “meshwork” (Ingold 2011), not only through an intersubjective dimension but also because the ritual—the “affective technology”—was perceived as something “out there,” unrelated to subjective experience. Most importantly, I will argue that it is exactly because of the affective technological dimension of the exorcism that anthropologists can access spirit worlds, at least to a certain extent, for experiential accounts such as those of Murakami-san and Shiratori-san were very common among the people visiting Kenmi shrine, including myself.

LETTING THE DOG-GOD OUT The following analysis is based on a sample of 102 people whom I interviewed at Kenmi shrine over repeated periods of fieldwork from 2016 to 2018. The shrine is situated in Shikoku, one of the four main islands of Japan. Administratively speaking, it is in Tokushima Prefecture, Miyoshi City, standing at the border among Tokushima, Ehime, and Kagawa Prefectures. It is located on the top of the mountains and therefore can be reached only by car or on foot. Given its relative inaccessibility, people who visited had no other reason to go there but to undergo its exorcism, (go-kitō or o-harai) and indeed nearly all the visitors undertook it. Among the people I met, there were more women (sixty, 59 percent) than men (forty-two, 41 percent), and the majority of people were in their forties and fifties, although different age groups were represented. The great majority of people visited the shrine from the neighboring prefectures, but I also met people who came from much further parts of Japan. The motives for visiting Kenmi shrine—in most cases after driving at least one and a half hours—were rather diverse and included its uniqueness as a shrine, the beauty of its environment, as well as family histories related to the shrine. The majority of visitors (59 percent) underwent the ritual for what could be summarized as the attainment of worldly benefits, including “to pass entrance examinations at the university,” hoping “to solve troubles at work,” or “to be protected by the god(s).’’ Yet the great majority explained that they were visiting to be relieved from some diseases that would not heal, or because they had some illness that was healed through the ritual in the past. Some explicitly stated that they were there “to be delivered from possessing entities” (tsukimono) or “evil spirits/energies” (jaki).

102

Andrea De Antoni

In fact, Kenmi shrine is known as a unique shrine, characterized by a particular ritual for deliverance from evil spirits and specifically from the dog-god (inugami). As the shrine’s website explains: The unique shrine in Japan (nihon issha)—Kenmi shrine, is the greatest shrine to deliver from inugami possession, and is renown as a shrine that favors recovery from illness, as well as safety and prosperity in the household. There are several features that differ from general shrines and exorcisms are carried out following a particular ritual style. (“Kenmi Jinja,” 2017)

The website explains that the peculiarities of the ritual reside in its unique prayers (norito) and the way in which they are chanted, as well as the use of a specific tool (kinpei). This tool is very similar to the ones usually employed in Shinto shrines for purification rituals, but is made in gold instead of paper, and has small bells attached at its ends (see figure 4.1). Before undergoing the ritual, people would fill in a form in which they indicated their names, age, address, and what they wanted the ritual to be performed for, as well as the amount of the offering they made to the shrine. This is standard practice at Shinto shrines. The kinds of wishes and prayers (negai goto) for which one could ask at the ritual to be performed were very common: safety for the family, for pregnancy, for protection against illness, or for business. Yet Kenmi shrine also explicitly offered “deliverance from evil spirits” (jaki taisan), which, according to the main priest, was what most supplicants required. During the ritual the officiant repeatedly touches the supplicant’s head and shoulders with the kinpei, thus making the bells ring with the rhythm of the movement (see figure 4.2). The website also relates the shrine with deliverance from dog-god possession, explaining its features. Particularly in the southeast part of Shikoku, from ancient times, there have been legends about possession and curses by the spirit of an animal called inugami. It is thought that it causes illnesses that are difficult to explain from a medical perspective, such as changes in one person’s character, shivering hands and legs, sudden fevers, and so on . . . The inugami cult still remains very strong in certain areas and Kenmi Jinja, that is the only shrine able to exorcise it, is related to that cult. (“Kenmi Jinja,” 2017)3

Another characteristic of Kenmi shrine was that the officiants were very wary not to mention possession or any kind of spirits in any way. The main priest in particular was remarkably conscious about his position, and although he was very open to talking in general terms about anything related to the shrine, possession, or healing, he purposely avoided mentioning any

The Ghosts That Haunt Me

103

Figure 4.1. The ritual tool (kinpei) used during the exorcism, 2018. © Andrea De Antoni.

spirit-related phenomena in a direct way. He claimed that this was because he had absolutely no ability to see or feel spirits (reikan) and that all that he was doing was “just” performing the ritual as he was taught to. The consequence of this is that he did not carry out any diagnostic process to identify the “illness.” This makes this case not only unusual but also very significant for an understanding of how spirits and possession emerged in relation to authority and discourse through diagnostics, for anthropological literature has given great importance to diagnosing as a process through which illness is intersubjectively constructed by the healer and the patient (e.g., Csordas 1994). This simply did not happen at Kenmi shrine and, nonetheless, it did not seem to impact the emergence of the reality of afflictive possession or healing. I have already analyzed elsewhere the features of possession phenomena and processes of emergence of “diagnoses” in Kenmi shrine, arguing that “possession” (hyōi) and “attachment” (tsuki) emerged over time as

104

Andrea De Antoni

Figure 4.2. The main priest performing the ritual with the kinpei, 2016. © Andrea De Antoni.

“meshworks” (Ingold 2011) through practice, whereby bodily symptoms and feelings tended to be central (De Antoni 2020).4 Most people reported very diverse “symptoms” of attachment and possession, but the great majority of visitors reported physical symptoms involving illness or pain that would not heal in spite of medical treatment. Going to Kenmi shrine was basically their last resort, as these people had already experienced other kinds of spiritual healing practices that were unsuccessful. Yet there were significant individual differences in the qualities of the feelings involved, and no specific symptoms were institutionalized or perceived as indicative of conditions of possession or any possessing entity. Moreover, most supplicants were not concerned with the identification of the entity that possessed them (De Antoni 2020). Here I will provide an overview of the range of feelings that emerged during the ritual, for it was those feelings that became the “evidence” of spirit presence and reality, as well as the ground for ontogenesis. In fact, similar to the accounts above, most people (68 percent) experienced particular feelings during the ritual the first time they underwent it.

The Ghosts That Haunt Me

105

For instance, Minato-san, a woman in her thirties with very evident and thick scars from wrist-cutting covering both of her forearms, was visiting for the first time. She told me very openly, “As you understand, I have pretty strong suicidal tendencies.” She had recently experienced some internetbased harassment that deeply influenced her mood, so she decided to try the exorcism in the hope “to lighten my heart.” As I asked her whether she had any particular feelings during the ritual, she explained, in a slightly surprised tone: You know . . . For some reason, I felt that I wanted to cry. [Shyly smiling] Well, I have no idea why. And then my head gradually started going down and down like this [mimics the movement with her head, until the lowest possible position] . . . I wonder what happened. It was probably . . . How is it called, kinpei? With its jingling . . . It felt strange (fushigi). And I felt that I wanted to cry. Maybe there is something going on [laughs]. It was a very, very strong urge.

Minato-san experienced feelings of relatively uncontrolled movements: her head “started going down and down,” independently of her will. This paralleled Shiratori-san having been “pushed away,” or to Murakami-san feeling the “tug of war” between the spirit and the priest. Minato-san also experienced her strong urge to cry as ego-dystonic, independent from her conscious will and as the consequence of an action performed by an external agent. This became the evidence of “something” that possibly was there. This urge resonates with the sensation of having a lot of saliva that Shiratorisan struggled to keep under control; the two women also shared the urge to start crying, although Shiratori-san “usually” cried, whereas Minato-san managed to keep her urge under control. Bodily perceptions related to pressure, involuntary movements, as well as something “going out” from the body (including air, in the form of burping, flatulence, coughing, or yawning) were very common. Generally speaking, mentions of bodily perceptions were the most numerous. The ritual was generally perceived as a pleasant (kimochi ga yoku naru), relieving experience, and in fact most of the people were in a cheerful mood when we talked, as is evident in the accounts above. Other perceptions people mentioned were temperature change (feeling warm or cold, depending on the person), shivering, feeling something “going away,” relief from the head or shoulders, or drowsiness. There were similarities and recurrences among the reported feelings (see table 4.1).5 A range of possible feelings emerged during the ritual and became “evidence” of spirit action, that there was “something going on.” Despite the range of possible feelings, though, personal experiences varied. From an experiential perspective, it was the entanglement of dif-

106

Andrea De Antoni

Table 4.1. Bodily feelings during the ritual breakdown. © Andrea De Antoni. Number of Mentions

Feelings

7

Pleasant feeling (kimochi ga yoku naru)

5

Feeling warm/hot, feeling of relief from the head

4

Shivering

3

Weeping/shedding tears, hearing sounds (dog, drum), fear, feeling of pressure

2

Feeling that something leaves the body, feeling embraced/ protected (by the mother, by god), feeling sleepy, losing control of body parts (head, hand)

1

Feeling cold, yawning, neck pain, saliva surge, feeling light, coughing, seeing “white smoke” going out from the shoulders

ferent feelings, not the individual feelings, that became the ground for the evidence of spirit actions. Spirits emerged as “meshworks” (Ingold 2011) of feelings. Furthermore, there was one particular actor that was central to the emergence of such feelings, as pointed out also by Minato-san: the jingling sound of bells. FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS Effects related to the sound of bells were mentioned twelve times, often in direct relationship to other bodily evidence of spirit presence. I report below an excerpt of the conversation I had with Tomohida-san, a woman in her fifties visiting with two daughters, both in their twenties, from Kagawa Prefecture. When I met them, it was their fifth time visiting the shrine in slightly more than six months. They all experienced health issues, including stomach aches and headaches, as well as generalized weariness. Tomohida-san: The first time we came here it felt as though . . . a dog was howling. Elder daughter: Like a dog, or a wolf. Tomohida-san: He [the priest] carries out the ritual with the bells . . . That experience, that time, was so scary . . . I knew that there was something inside me and thought that I’d probably better come here periodically. And here we are . . . It seems that feelings given by the sound vary according to the person, but that was how I felt the sound that time.

The Ghosts That Haunt Me

107

Younger daughter: I do not understand such experiences, but what I can say is that I do have the experience of feeling better after the ritual. Tomohida-san: Yes, she has very strong vertigo. We all have different experiences and sensations (taikan), but we all feel better after coming here . . . So I guess that maybe there are some positive effects. Elder daughter: I understand that there was something attached . . . That it goes away. Tomohida-san: Yes, you get lighter. Your body gets lighter. The back, the head . . . I have the feeling of a pressure that, phewww, goes away . . . It starts when he begins the prayer. I get the chills. I actually start getting the chills on the way to here. Elder daughter: I do not get that kind of feeling, but I do feel lighter. And when the priest does the ritual with the kinpei, gradually . . . At the beginning I was afraid, but that has gradually disappeared and now it has started feeling like a comfortable (kokochi ii) time. At the beginning I was so scared that I shivered [when she was touched by the kinpei and when she heard the sound], but the shivering has gradually faded out.

This conversation shows that the bells affected the women through a synesthetic entanglement of sounds and haptic feelings. Some of these feelings—such as the “pressure” that “goes away”—also appeared in the previous accounts, but in this case shivering and fear played a major role. It could be hypothesized that the affect, the shivering, was captured as the emotion of fear, but it would be difficult to prove, and the task of understanding spirit worlds and experiences needs to go beyond conjecture. I would rather argue that the sounds of the bells and prayers afforded and elicited synesthetic affects in this case, thus becoming the evidence of spirit presence. According to philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, synesthetic experiences can be understood in relation to “potential movement,” which “forms the basis for the unity of the senses” (1962, 272). In this case, movement (shivering) was entangled with auditory perceptions elicited by the sounds of bells. Other people also pointed to the sound of the bells and the prayers as something “otherworldly” or viewed the jingling as a “refreshing” sound. Therefore, even though not everyone had the same quality of experience, for some people the sonic dimension of the ritual contributed to the orientation of supplicants’ attentions, thus also contributing to the emergence of evidence of spirit presence. In other words, for these people, “feeling with” the sound of the bells was key to the emergence of ego-dystonic feelings that in turn became the evidence of spirit actions. In affect theory terms, the sound elicited movement and bodily “intensities” (Massumi 2002) perceived as external actions, which paved the way to the capturing of “spirits.” Such

108

Andrea De Antoni

feelings and actions happened through the encounters between lived bodies and the affordances (Gibson 1979) of the bells. Moreover, the three women, although acknowledging the differences in their experiences, affectively attuned to one another, intersubjectively constructing their conditions of “having been possessed.” Their attentions were oriented toward the similarities among experiences (shivering, fear, and, more importantly, feeling better after the ritual) rather than differences (e.g., the quality of their perception of sounds). As a result of such correspondences, their experiences became the evidence of spirit presence and entangled into one single meshwork, which led to “capturing” their condition as “attachment” (tsuki). Such intersubjective processes of entanglement were exactly what made the meshwork “hold together” (Mol 2002, 42), stabilizing as one condition that did not multiply into three different possible “illnesses.” Similar processes were common at Kenmi shrine. Groups of people would rarely talk with one another unless they were longtime repeat visitors. Nevertheless, people assumed that all the others were there for the ritual, which, as I stated above, tended to be true. People would pay attention to how long the ritual lasted for others and tended to understand the length as a measure of the seriousness of the supplicant’s condition: the longer the ritual, the worse the condition. This was aimed at understanding one’s own condition by comparison, given that the priest would not talk about spirits at all. Yet the priest explained to me that the length of the ritual depended exclusively on supplicants’ requests. If two different people requested deliverance but one also added, say, safety for the household, the second person’s ritual would be longer simply because the priest would chant two different prayers. Therefore, the connection between length and seriousness of the condition was a misguided assumption that compensated for the lack of a “diagnosis” by the specialist. I hope that, to this point, my analysis has sufficiently eliminated the trope of “belief” and showed that a focus on intersubjective dynamics is fundamental to understanding the shift from reality as a result of bodily perceptions to the process of creation of an objective reality “out there”—namely, from phenomenology to ontology. Csordas (2002) argues that “beginning with embodiment leads not to the irreducible objective reality of a biological body, nor to the indeterminacy of endlessly iterated subjectivity, but to a necessarily indeterminate objective reality” (5). Yet the case of Kenmi jinja shows that such a perceived and intersubjectively shared phenomenological reality can be understood as a stabilized full-fledged ontology because most of what was shared were not only (inter)subjective feelings but actions carried out by spirit agents perceived as “out there,” external to the body, that made the spirit world in Kenmi shrine “hold together” (Mol 2002, 42).

The Ghosts That Haunt Me

109

To this point, a skeptical reader might still counterargue that such reality, although shared, was only the product of the practitioners’ minds, if not delusions. Weren’t spirits just in the eye of the beholder, so to say? My answer to this question is no, because of the dimension of the ritual as an affective technology—one that was doubtlessly “out there”—as I will articulate in the next section. If, considering the previous accounts, we suppose that spirit actions emerged through “feeling with” the ritual and its elements rather than because of the sufferers’ beliefs or expectations, then the spirit world at Kenmi shrine should be accessible even to someone who did not go to the shrine for the purpose of being exorcised. That would be me. An analysis of my own account will also provide an answer to the question of whether the ethnographer can access spirit ontologies by undergoing the same practices as practitioners.

AFFECTIVE TECHNOLOGIES AND ETHNOGRAPHY AS FEELING WITH THE WORLD The first time I underwent the ritual, I was taken by surprise. It was my first day at Kenmi shrine. I had no idea what was going on, but the main priest kindly offered to perform the ritual for me. He asked me whether there was anything I wanted it to be performed for, besides deliverance, but I was unsure of what the possibilities were. He decided to add “safety in the household.” He invited me into the main hall where he carries out all the rituals, and he asked me whether I was fine with sitting in seiza—the formal Japanese way, with the heels tucked under the buttocks—or if I wanted a small chair. Sitting in seiza is infamously uncomfortable, according to many contemporary Japanese, but I opted for it anyway, for all the chairs were piled up on the side, so I assumed that they were not utilized often. Later on, it turned out that I was right: nearly everyone in attendance sat in seiza. I sat on my calves in front of the stage where the altar was, and I waited. I focused on understanding what the priest was doing and the prayer that he chanted. My eyes were constantly open, and I tended to raise my head to observe the priest’s movements. I had no particular feelings, neither during nor after the ritual. A week later, toward the end of my stay, I asked the priest whether I could undergo the ritual again. I wanted to repay the shrine’s hospitality, and the only way I could do so was through an offering for the ritual. Furthermore, I had noticed some difference between how I underwent the ritual at the beginning and how supplicants did. The first time, I had my hair tied up, as I usually do when I enter some formal context. Yet I noticed

110

Andrea De Antoni

that every person with long hair underwent the ritual with their hair loose. Moreover, most practitioners, while sitting in seiza, kept their heads down, nearly bowing, also in sign of respect, and their eyes were closed. I wanted to try this myself. I filled in the form and asked for deliverance from evil spirits or energies, improvement of human relationships, and success in study and work. I sat in seiza, loosened my hair, and, mimicking the supplicants, bowed my head and kept my eyes closed. This time, the exorcism turned out to be a pleasant experience for me too. While the priest was praying, even before he started using the kinpei on my head, I began feeling my heartbeat and the upper part of my body started wavering slightly, along with its rhythm. After a while, I started feeling the weight of my head and I had to use some strength not to let it go down. When the priest moved to pick up the kinpei, a gust of cold wind reached me from the altar. I realized that I was shivering slightly. The priest shook the kinpei over my head and shoulders three times: right, left, right, making the bells jingle. It was a loud, acute sound, which produced some contraction inside my ears. The priest touched the back of my head with the bells and stopped for a moment, before starting to move the kinpei up and down. At the beginning, the sound of the bells was overwhelming. After a few seconds, the chains linking the bells to the staff began undulating back and forth, with the ones on the left and the ones on the right moving in opposite directions. The sound became quieter and the movement felt like a light massage on the back of my head and neck, as though someone were caressing me and at times pulling my hair. I started feeling slightly warmer and realized that I was not shivering anymore. I began feeling sleepy, also because I kept my eyes closed most of the time. When the ritual finished, I was extremely weary and could not stop yawning. It was time to leave, so I headed back to my room, and as I arrived I could not help falling asleep. I had set an alarm to go off twenty minutes later but woke up two and a half hours later, feeling completely refreshed. Although my experience was as unique as everybody else’s, by undergoing the ritual and having attuned my posture, orientation, and attention to what the others did, I found myself feeling what many of my interlocutors had mentioned (see table 4.1).6 Those sensations were elicited by the lived body “feeling with” affordances (Gibson 1979) of the tool and the ritual environment: the moving bells’ surface, shape, and sound, as well as the blowing wind and the cold, elicited feelings through which spirit actions and realities could emerge. Mimicking the actions of others made me more “open” to experiencing the feelings elicited by the ritual. In the case of other supplicants, this “openness” to “feeling with” the ritual was possibly enhanced by their hopes and expectations, especially because in many cases the exorcism was their last resort. Nevertheless, those feelings were not the product of

The Ghosts That Haunt Me

111

supplicants’ minds; they were the result of actions enmeshed in a specific kind of affective technology that implied a specific bodily posture taken for granted by supplicants but not by me. Mimicking the supplicants’ posture allowed me to access that affective dimension that opened me up to those feelings—elicited by “feeling with” the ritual environment—that the supplicants perceived as spirit actions and becomings. The differences in experiences (including not feeling anything) may relate to individual bodily capacities, sensitivities, and skills of feeling not taken into consideration in this chapter. Here, I have expanded on Kapferer’s suggestion to “reconceive ritual performance as a dynamic field of force in whose virtual space human psychological, cognitive, and social realities are forged anew” (Kapferer 2004, 51). My argument is that the exorcism, the affective technology, was what allowed participants to get literally in touch with spirit realities, experiencing spirits’ actions and becomings through their own bodies. An analysis of lived bodies “feeling with” affective technologies can be a productive way to understand the dynamics through which such realities emerge and, possibly, through which “ritual participants are both reoriented to their ordinary realities and embodied with potencies to restore or reconstruct their lived worlds” (Kapferer 2004, 51), thus potentially leading to healing and the reorienting of selves (Csordas 1994). Furthermore, the affective technology was “out there,” as the feelings were there. I will not go to the extreme suggested by Edith Turner (1993), who famously stated that “the Africans were right, there is spirit stuff, there is spirit affliction, it isn’t a matter of metaphor and symbol, or even psychology” (9), claiming that the only possible understanding of spirit worlds is going native. But I will suggest that an understanding of spirit worlds that does justice to lived and experienced spirit ontologies requires the anthropologist’s bodily perceptions to engage in practices, to “feel with” both humans and nonhumans in the field. In other words, “feeling with” the affective technologies in the field is a way to allow ethnographers to access spirit ontologies. It is by “feeling with” the field, by being affected by spirit actions, that the anthropologist’s perceptions and affects can become the existential ground for legitimate anthropological knowledge through “affective ethnographies” that can evoke and elicit spirit realities also in the readers’ material world. Andrea De Antoni is associate professor of sociocultural anthropology at Kyoto University. He specialized in the anthropology of Japan and more recently has carried out ethnographic research in Italy. He has published extensively in English and Japanese on topics related to the anthropology of space and place, death, experiences with spirits, spirit possession, and religious healing, with a focus on perception and affect.

112

Andrea De Antoni

NOTES 1. I am grateful to the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science for making this research possible through a Grant-in-Aid for Young Scientists (Project Number 15K16905). My deepest gratitude goes to all the people who collaborated with me during my research period at Kenmi shrine. Special thanks to Dr. Emma Cook and Dr. Daniel White for their great help in reviewing this article. All names in this chapter are pseudonyms. 2. The total autonomy of affects from any form of discourse, cognition, and—quite simply—context has been criticized in favor of approaches that take broader configurations of humans and nonhumans, broader assemblages, into consideration (see, for example, Leys 2011; Wetherell 2012). 3. For a more detailed explanation of inugami possession, including its history, see De Antoni (2020). 4. The terms “possession” and “attachment” were often used interchangeably by people at the shrine. Yet, in general, “possession” (hyōi) tends to imply changes in the personality of the sufferer, whereas “attachment” (tsuki) is a broader term that encompasses more variegated “symptoms.” 5. People reported also “entering a condition of empty-mindedness” (mu ni naru), entering some state of concentration, supplication, or gratefulness, or feeling a state of connection with god. In this chapter I focus only on bodily perceptions. 6. Since I underwent the exorcism at the end of my first period of fieldwork, I had interviewed only a few of the people included in this chapter and therefore knew only some of the possible feelings involved.

REFERENCES Cassaniti, Julia L. 2015. “Intersubjective Affect and Embodied Emotion: Feeling the Supernatural in Thailand.” Anthropology of Consciousness 26(2): 132–42. Cassaniti, Julia L., and Tanya M. Luhrmann. 2014. “The Cultural Kindling of Spiritual Experiences.” Current Anthropology 55(S10): S333–43. Cohen, Emma. 2008. “What Is Spirit Possession? Defining, Comparing, and Explaining Two Possession Forms.” Ethnos 73(1): 101–26. Comaroff, Jean, and John L. Comaroff. 1999. “Occult Economies and the Violence of Abstraction: Notes from the South African Postcolony.” American Ethnologist 26(2): 279–303. Csordas, Thomas J. 1994. The Sacred Self: A Cultural Phenomenology of Charismatic Healing. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 2002. Body, Meaning, Healing. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. De Antoni, Andrea. 2017. “Sympathy from the Devil: Experiences, Movement and Affective Correspondences during a Roman Catholic Exorcism in Contemporary Italy.” Japanese Review of Cultural Anthropology 18(1): 143–57.

The Ghosts That Haunt Me

113

———. 2019. “Came Back Hounded: A Spectrum of Experiences with Spirits and Inugami Possession in Contemporary Japan.” In Spirits and Animism in Contemporary Japan: The Invisible Empire, edited by Fabio Rambelli, 109–25. London: Bloomsbury. ———. 2020. “Call Me a Dog: Feeling (Inugami) Possession in Contemporary Tokushima Prefecture.” In Forms of the Body in Contemporary Japanese Society, Literature, and Culture, edited by Irina Holca and Carmen Sa ˇpunaru Tămaș, 23–48. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. De Antoni, Andrea, and Paul Dumouchel. 2017. “The Practices of Feeling with the World: Towards an Anthropology of Affect, the Senses and Materiality—Introduction.” Japanese Review of Cultural Anthropology 18(1): 91–98. Espírito Santo, Diana. 2012. “Imagination, Sensation and the Education of Attention Among Cuban Spirit Mediums.” Ethnos 77(2): 252–71. Espírito Santo, Diana, and Ruy Blanes. 2013. “Introduction: On the Agency of Intangibles.” In The Social Life of Spirits, edited by Ruy Blanes and Diana Espírito Santo, 1–32. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gibson, James J. 1979. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. New York: Psychology Press. Hecker, Tobias, Eva Barnewitz, Hakon Stenmark, and Valentina Iversen. 2016. “Pathological Spirit Possession as a Cultural Interpretation of Trauma-Related Symptoms.” Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice and Policy 8(4): 468–76. Holbraad, Martin, and Morten Axel Pedersen. 2017. The Ontological Turn: An Anthropological Exposition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ingold, Tim. 2000. The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. Reissued with new pref. London: Routledge. ———. 2011. Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. Oxford: Routledge. Jensen, Casper Bruun, Miho Ishii, and Philip Swift. 2016. “Attuning to the Webs of En: Ontography, Japanese Spirit Worlds and the “Tact” of Minakata Kumagusu.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6(2): 149–72. Kapferer, Bruce. 2004. “Ritual Dynamics and Virtual Practice: Beyond Representation and Meaning.” In Ritual in Its Own Right: Exploring the Dynamics of Transformation, edited by Don Handelman and Galina Lindquist, 35–54. New York: Berghahn Books. “Kenmi Jinja.” 2017. Retrieved from http://kenmi-shrine.s1.bindsite.jp/. Lambek, Michael. 1993. Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte: Local Discourses of Islam, Sorcery and Spirit Possession. Anthropological Horizons. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Latour, Bruno. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Leys, Ruth. 2011. “The Turn to Affect: A Critique.” Critical Inquiry 37(3): 434–72. Lifshitz, Michael, Michiel van Elk, and Tanya M. Luhrmann. 2019. “Absorption and Spiritual Experience: A Review of Evidence and Potential Mechanisms.” Consciousness and Cognition 73(August): 102760.

114

Andrea De Antoni

Massumi, Brian. 2002. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. McIntosh, Janet. 2009. The Edge of Islam: Power, Personhood, and Ethnoreligious Boundaries on the Kenya Coast. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1962. Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge. Mills, Martin A. 2013. “The Opposite of Witchcraft: Evans-Pritchard and the Problem of the Person: The Opposite of Witchcraft.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 19(1): 18–33. Mol, Annemarie. 2002. The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ong, Aihwa. 1987. Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline: Factory Women in Malaysia. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Padmanabhan, Divya. 2017. “From Distress to Disease: A Critique of the Medicalisation of Possession in DSM-5.” Anthropology & Medicine 24(3): 261–75. Pierini, Emily. 2020. Jaguars of the Dawn: Spirit Mediumship in the Brazilian Vale Do Amanhecer. New York: Berghahn Books. Sanders, Todd. 2008. “Buses in Bongoland Seductive Analytics and the Occult.” Anthropological Theory 8(2): 107–32. Swift, Philip. Forthcoming. “The Physics of Ritual: Spirit Mediation and Sensational Form in a Japanese New Religion.” Ethnos. Turner, Edith B. 1993. “The Reality of Spirits: A Tabooed or Permitted Field of Study?” Anthropology of Consciousness 4(1): 9–12. Wetherell, Margaret. 2012. Affect and Emotion: A New Social Science Understanding. Los Angeles: SAGE.

Chapter 5

“Try Feeding the Ghost More” Illness Experience and Understanding the Unseen in a Tamang Village, Nepal Paula Bronson

‫ﱬﱫ‬ The July monsoon rains had come and gone, leaving a soft humidity in the air as I crossed the swaying steel footbridge with Maila, my Tamang Nepali doctoral research assistant.1 We often enjoyed stopping midway to view the river below. That day it was swift and coursed over the large boulders, covering most that were visible just days before. We traversed slowly, holding onto the fraying metal threaded railing, and stepped into a clearing where more large rocks lay. I pointed and said, “aram dungha” (my Nepali term for “rest rocks”), signaling it was time for a break before we pushed up the steep riverbank through the thick forest. Maila found a dry spot, took out a pack of biscuits, broke off a piece, and quietly said “shoota” (Tamang expression of offering to the ghost) as she scattered the crumbs. She noticed my expression and explained, “My grandfather, the Bompo [Tamang: shaman], would always do this to feed the ghosts.”2 This was the first I had heard directly about the ghosts (Tamang: Mung) in the region. She continued to describe the practice. “He always said it if he ate outside, but not inside the house. Bompos also say it when they eat at other people’s homes. We can do it too. There are ghosts that are near the rivers, and they like to come out at dusk and through the night. They are the spirits of the dead. Most people will not come down here in the evenings.” This chapter is an ethnographic description detailing personal experiences of healing practices with the local Tamang Bompo for a recalcitrant 115

116

Paula Bronson

common gastrointestinal illness.3 The aims are to demonstrate how my insights developed and informed my understanding of my own healing, as well as others’ in the community, through the shared spaces of Tamang spirit realms and the everyday. This epistemological embodiment (how these sensory/bodily experiences impacted ways of knowing and how this knowledge was produced) created by mutable perspectives and direct experience opened boundaries that may have been otherwise closed or inaccessible during my fieldwork. I recount an experience of one of my doctoral research interlocutors, a man living with chronic pain. Through our in-depth conversations, I learned he felt it caused him to be vulnerable to haunting by a ghost.4 I detail his journey as he initially lived with persistent bodily pain and how this created a physical and mental “weakness” that allowed a ghost to torment him, deepening and perpetuating his suffering. Through this chapter, I follow the progression of my way of knowing gained through my senses, my discomfort and anxiety, and their resolution, brought to life through time spent with the Bompos. When I became ill, I sought the care of the local shamans, and through this participation my impressions and perceptions evolved to inform my research. Through this unfolding of trust, acceptance, and bodily participation, I became more aware of my interlocutors’ personal struggles with illness and fear. The International Society for Study of Pain’s definition of pain states: “An unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with, or resembling that associated with, actual or potential tissue damage” (IASP 2021). The meaning given to those experiences is essential to the individual experience, emotions, and expression (Ahmed 2014). As suggested by Kim Knibbe and Peter Veerstag, I attempted to avoid overrepresentation of the villagers’ spirit worlds. However, I aimed to remain mindful that this chapter is, and can only be, my interpretation of others’ experiences as well as my own (Knibbe and Veerstag 2008, 60). In framing my journey, I draw on Robert Desjarlais, who, in his long-term fieldwork with the Yolmo Sherpa in a nearby region to my field site, describes embodied values that weave through Nepali village life and asks how these emotions impose on the body and illness. From Body and Emotion, Desjarlais further defines this concept of intertwining as aesthetics. “I use the term ‘aesthetics’ . . . to grasp (and tie together) leitmotivs that shape cultural constructions of bodily and social interactions . . . which include for the Yolmo wa values of harmony, purity, and wholeness—as embodied through the visceral experience of cultural actors rather than articulated through concrete artistic or philosophic tenets” (1992, 65). Maila’s sister, with whom I was living, had told me in passing several weeks before that their grandfather had been a prominent shaman healer

Try Feeding the Ghost More

117

and that he had died the previous year. At the time, I was not aware of just how much the Bompos and their healing practices would feature in my research and time spent in the community. When a neighbor whom I had met very briefly previously invited a local Bompo to conduct a puja (Sanskrit: homage, worship; in this context used for a healing ritual; Tamang: Yalmo Kyonda), my host suggested to me that I might be interested in observing. I was in Nepal for a year for my doctoral research studying how the villagers coped with and developed resilience to living with chronic pain. My host family knew I sought out villagers living with long-standing pain to talk to them and get to know their stories. Earlier that week I walked out onto the family’s front porch, a loose gravel-covered strip of earth shielded by a lightweight corrugated awning that had been widely distributed after the earthquakes in 2015. Sitting on a plastic chair, wearing a winter coat and wool beanie despite the humid July weather, was a middle-aged man named Pasang who quietly said “Namaste” (Nepali: hello) to me when Maila introduced us. She told me that Pasang had long-term neck pain. He sat looking very small, covered by his unseasonal heavy clothes, perhaps wearing them to cover the significant curvature of his spine. This man would go on to be one of my central research participants. I visited him every week until I departed from Nepal; his neck pain was only one of the many struggles he was experiencing. Lawrence Kirmayer discusses body posture as metaphor, and suffering displayed and embodied. A type of postural mirroring, often unknown to the observer, may occur (2008, 323). Sitting briefly with this man on the porch, I felt a drawing down, curling up in my upper body, my chest caving in on my heart.

SCARE THE FRIGHT AWAY I had heard the drumming while sitting on a steep set of worn granite slab steps a short walk from my room. This spot was my favorite place to sit and view the handful of village homes surrounded by the newly sown rice paddies bordered by the much-less-ordered soybean crop planted to retain the soil. The tall trees could be seen in the distance closely following the banks of the ever-expanding river. The drumming was loud and showed no signs of abating after about half an hour. My Buddhist puja experiences told me that this was different, but I was not clear what it could be. Following the sound led me up an uneven path through two terraces of swollen rice paddies to a single-room cement dwelling. I did not go in. Half an hour later, back home with the family, I asked about the drumming. Maila’s sister told

118

Paula Bronson

me that there was a puja for their neighbor to “scare the fright away.” She continued, “You can go up there now, but it will not be interesting until later tonight. Now the Bompo is just calling his guru” (Sanskrit: teacher; in this instance “inner guru” or “spirit guide,” usually from a deceased relative). I asked why it would become interesting; she looked at me and drew her index finger across her throat. “They kill the chicken.” I spent the next nine hours sitting on a well-worn straw mat on the floor of the one-room house I had peeked into earlier in the afternoon, crouched among a changing group of ten villagers with the loud thudding of the Bompo’s ritual drum, the dhyangro (Nepali: flat ritual drum with a carved handle; Nga in Tamang) beating continuously. The Bompo wore a set of heavy brass bells across his shoulders, and with a sudden jerk and twist at his waist, they sounded with the drums. Crossing his shoulder was also a chain of rudracche nuts. In the corner of the room was the ill man. His eyes were wide, and he sat patiently, sometimes leaning his frail frame against the wall for support. Another elder Bompo was present, as was a younger man, who appeared to be an apprentice. The drumming interspersed with bells clanging continued well into the early morning hours. As I was told by a villager sitting next to me, the Ngaa (Tamang: chants, prayers) that accompanied the sounds were “calling the guru,” in a unique language only known to the Bompos. Various white torma (Tibetan: cone-shaped figures twelve centimeters high made of rice dough used for offerings) were displayed on a flat basket typically used to separate rice husks. There was rice scattered on one side, with an egg and an object wrapped in cloth alongside it. A bowl fashioned by large leaves held hibiscus flowers and long white feathers, which stood upright with the quills poking through the bowl as a base. A teenager blew on the smoldering dry juniper incense, which burned in a small brass pot near his feet. There was a geometrical layered star pattern drawn with various light and dark grains and white flour on another flat basket. Placed atop this was a bent tripod of branches affixed together like a tent with thread at the apex. The white thread was wound around the propped leafy assemblage.5 Beneath this branch canopy was a group of smaller brown tormas and another egg. A middle-aged man sitting next to me told me that the brown tormas were the ghosts situated in their “world.” The apprentice gently shook a twig dipped in a liquid in time with the drums over the bound tripod. The Bompo continued to follow instructions given to him during his trance state by his guru to scare away the ghost. I watched as a succession of activities took place, enacting a performance of the magical duels fought against the ghost (Nicoletti 2008, 34). The Bompo chanted over a clump of thick bladed grass that he held tightly; later he gripped a carved wooden dagger called a phurba (Tibetan), displaying a

Try Feeding the Ghost More

119

chopping movement, all while the singing continued. Outside, a chicken was sacrificed by hanging by its beak. Well after midnight, quite suddenly the Bompo stood up and bolted from the door. Everyone scrambled to follow as he ran from the house down toward the village, still drumming and singing the Nga. We kept close behind him through the darkness and the puddles along the paths, scrambling through the nearby trees, tripping over branches along the way to keep up. Again, quite abruptly, the Bompo moved quickly, and still in a trance listening only to his guru for instructions, he stopped on a slippery path over a small stream. Someone placed the leaf bowl with the flowers and feathers on the ground. We gathered around, and some villagers held burning branches while the younger ones held their mobile phones toward the offering bowl for illumination. Two men leaned forward with their lighters and set it alight. We watched the offerings burn. The Bompo stomped on the bowl to extinguish the flames, and we returned to the house. The frail man was still sitting on the floor when we returned. The elder Bompo beat his drum and danced with a skip step around him. Later, an egg was centered on the floor and spun, the resulting direction indicating whether the ghost had gone. It was nearly three in the morning when the puja ended with the white torma passed around for us to eat. Martino Nicoletti understands the Bompo, as a living presence, to be the conduit to the ghost, “a living body that itself forms and imbues the entire spatial context of the séance . . . without a specific bodily dimension, shamanism has no other way of coming alive” (2008, 15). The Bompo’s shaking, twisting, and sudden jerking is controlled.6 This physical demonstration is a means of communication to the possessed and audience that the Bompo meets with the spirit realm and has control and power over it (Miller 1997, 261). Nicoletti continues to describe the Bompo as the embodiment of the divine. This fully fledged body results from the apprentice/neophyte process of successfully curing their initiate sickness, which was bestowed on the young man’s body by the gods’ realm. The healing identifies the source of power as from the divine. Accepting the calling and overcoming the somatic (both mental and physical) inflictions qualifies him for the vocation. Four days later, the neighbor’s family arranged another puja. A different group of Bompos was there, and it started much the same way as the previous one. The white torma figured prominently, as did the canopy of branches covering the brown torma, the white thread encircling the green tripod. However, that night I recognized the frail man to be the same one I had met on the porch. I had not connected the two previously. His name was Pasang, and he sat in the corner of the room with a man aged about forty years behind him. The man’s back was against the wall, and his outstretched

120

Paula Bronson

legs encircled Pasang’s crossed legs while his arms were draped around his shoulders in a loose hug. The expression on Pasang’s face showed fear, with his eyes wide and darting from side to side. The Bompo wore a woven grass hoodlike hat while he chanted over a live chicken. Pasang was handed one end of the white thread and held it close to him for what seemed like hours while the chanting and drumming continued. Later, another man was sitting behind Pasang and embraced him as, after several hours, he abruptly tightened and extended his legs and attempted to flail his arms. With his head bent back, from across the room I could see the whites of his eyes as he clenched his jaw, and froth gathered on his lips. Pasang jerked his body, and the man behind him closed his grip to prevent him from hurting himself. Pasang looked terrified. The Bompo stood up to dart out the door, as before, beating the drum as he left. The small room’s entourage quickly followed, leaving Pasang behind. A local teenager carried the chicken as we went down another rocky path toward the river. Another teenager took the flat basket with the branches. We stopped on a trail behind a rice paddy in the darkness, mobile phones lighting the way. Without warning, the teenager killed the chicken with a swift pull to its neck; its decapitated head was placed on the flat basket with the branches and burned on a slanted slab of granite surrounded by tall grass. During the exorcism, the possessed’s body, Nicoletti expresses as “a passive object in the shaman’s hands, manipulated, struck, beaten, lifted, made to move and dance, according to the specific requirements of the therapy applied” (2008, 36). Pasang had to entrust his body to the Bompo to permit the relationship between his and the Bompo’s body. Again, the Bompo’s physicality, his senses, and experiences form the interchange between his and his guru’s. His dreams are also pathways from the spirit world to this embodied knowledge. Rather than the ritual objects and performance seen as symbols, they are part of the Bompo’s visualization faculties (Miller 1997, 260). To Pasang, his dreams and his waking world melded. He later told me that the evidence that he had a ghost was the recurring visitations haunting his nighttime world, plaguing his waking world with physical and mental symptoms. The next day after the second puja, I paid a visit to Pasang. He described having widespread chronic pain for many years. He said that he had fallen from a tree about thirty meters high and broken his upper back. I wondered where a tree that tall would be in the Himalayan foothills, so I was confused by this story. I was later to hear elsewhere that he had been assaulted. Ten years later, his upper back was severely curved. Pasang then told me a harrowing story of how his roof collapsed on top of him during the

Try Feeding the Ghost More

121

25 April 2015 earthquake. A beam fell on his thigh and fractured his femur, and the pain persisted, although the bone had healed. He also described having nightmares for a long time in which a dead friend’s ghost came to him. He had witnessed the man die suddenly in the middle of the road. I asked him why he thought the ghost had come to him, and he said that it was because he was in pain, weak, and vulnerable. He said that he continued to have the dreams after the first puja, so Pasang knew the ghost was not gone, and he requested the second ritual. This account was the first I had heard of any subjective experience of ghosts. I was especially interested in how it had chosen Pasang due to his perceived vulnerability he experienced living with his chronic pain. Pasang’s fear had been palpable at the second puja especially. At the first puja, I focused on my acceptance as a researcher in the room. By the second, I was more comfortable. However, looking back, my awareness was still mostly on which ritual objects were used and the procedural details. Nonetheless, naturally I found myself looking for any evidence of the ghost’s presence and how that may have affected me. But I was more drawn to Pasang and his visible distress, not feeling any of my own. Two weeks after the second puja, I met with Pasang for a much longer interview at his home. He was visibly more relaxed, and I told him he looked ten years younger than when I saw him last. He divulged to me that the dreams had ceased and that the ghost was gone. He said that his hungsa (Tamang: mind/life force) was back. Belief in ghosts was pervasive in the Tamang community with which I worked. I knew from Nepali monastics that there were six realms, one of which was the realm of the hungry ghosts. The villagers did not speak of the various realms but did have a strong sense of the plane where ghosts prevailed. The monks and nuns also often “fed the hungry ghosts” by leaving a bit of food on their plates after a meal. The villagers understood that ghosts were everywhere but preferred certain spots near rivers, in forests, under bridges, to name a few, as well as individual people, they told me. Pasang continued to describe what had happened to him since his last puja. He was optimistic about his life, and he confided he felt that he could get better and that his pain would lessen. Pasang also spoke of his nightmares, which had since entirely disappeared: “The ghost, after taking my hungsa, he tried to take my whole body.” He recounted that, although he still had the pain, his appetite and sleep were much better, and he felt like doing more everyday activities. He said the first puja did not change things, and the second was more effective. He was no longer shivering all the time. Previously, with his lost hungsa, “I was trapped . . . my nerves had shrunk.” Pasang described it as his mind being gone, leading him to do things he wouldn’t normally do,

122

Paula Bronson

such as having “a restless urge to run to the jungle . . . or eat dirt.” He continued, “It’s like getting scared if people are around.” He further explained that if your hungsa is completely gone, you will die; he said, “It is deep in your heart.” If you feel tense, it makes it worse as well, he elaborated. Everyone told him not to worry. If he did, he would not get better. In looking back, he thought he should not have worried, and he should have thought that it would resolve. Now that his hungsa was back, he could think more positively. The Bompos brought back the hungsa from the ghost, he explained further. “The ghost took it and played with it [his hungsa]. The ghost must be killed or tricked so that it [the hungsa] can be returned into my body . . . The Bompos gave the chicken’s body to the ghost instead of me, in exchange for my body.”

BLOWING IT AWAY My host family noticed that I was not eating as much, and I confided that I had some troublesome and recalcitrant gastrointestinal problems for the past week. They arranged that I meet with their uncle, a Bompo, for a healing ritual called Ngaba in Tamang (chanting and blowing healing ritual). They did not explain further. This practice was very different from the two pujas I observed for Pasang. Here I was the patient, and I thought it an excellent opportunity to learn more as a researcher, again focusing on the process. Not knowing what to expect initially, I walked quickly down the muddy path, dodging the debris-filled streamlets of water runoff from the daily rains. The Bompo’s house was still under construction. The earthquakes of 2015 had decimated the village, and many of the buildings were only partially reconstructed. Entering the nearly completed ground floor, I was shown into a bedroom and sat on a small cushion on the cold floor. The Bompo came in, dressed in his very worn daura (Nepali: men’s shirt), fitted cotton trousers, and dhaka topi (Nepali: traditional men’s hat), and sat close to me. He smelled strongly of the local beer, and his bare feet tucked loosely under his crossed legs had deep cracks in the thick, calloused skin. As was typical, the electricity was off, and we sat in the semidarkness; I looked at his weathered face for clues as to what may happen next. He did not acknowledge me but closed his eyes. I was shivering, and my abdominal pain from my illness wrenched through my body. The Bompo took his mala (Sanskrit: prayer beads) out from the folds of the two-meter-long white cloth wrapped around his waist and began to chant Nga. I listened to the words; I could not catch familiar

Try Feeding the Ghost More

123

words with my limited understanding of Nepali and Tibetan. What language was it? I felt detached, subject watching object, overthinking, the chanting just a din in my ears. Realizing the expectation for a cure was not here, I watched and listened more acutely as he blew quick puffs of air into my face and then toward my abdomen. Intrusive thoughts broke my observation, “How did he remember all of these words?” I felt a sense of responsibility to be there since he was a family member of my host family. I remembered that Maila said I would go for a ritual “where they would blow,” a Ngaba. I was going through the motions, and I was aware of it at the time, but I did not know how to change that. I sensed at the time, and in retrospect, that I was somehow judging the “quality” of the healing because I could smell alcohol on his breath. I was a Buddhist practitioner myself, and I was intensely aware that this was the first time I had allowed my previous expectations of familiar practices and rituals to impede my nonjudgmental observation in my fieldwork. For example, I was accustomed to a particular “decorum” (a sober Lama) and to “feel” a sense of equanimity and nonjudgment due to trust and familiarity. I had not witnessed a Buddhist healing practice in the past, so I was uncertain if the Bompo’s was similar. I felt skeptical. It was paradoxical that I expected to feel something but did not think I could be cured. Working with chronic pain patients in physiotherapy, we take a holistic approach according to the understanding of pain as “experience,” cited by the IASP 2021. Although beyond the scope of this chapter, this aligns somewhat with the Buddhist tenets of acceptance of ever-present change and acknowledgment of pervasive suffering. However, how could chants and blowing fix giardiasis? Was I sick enough to deserve this attention, ask that a busy, tired farmer take time from his day? I felt a bit of a fraud. Was I taking advantage of the situation to observe the ritual as a researcher? The issue of deserving care and how that informs our work crossed my mind. Our positionality is movable in this context. “Openness” to the healing process, the placebo effect came to mind. The relatively uneventful, in my estimation, ritual ended abruptly after about fifteen minutes of the same. The Bompo nodded his head and got up slowly from his crossed-legged position on the floor. Did I anticipate a change in my daily abdominal symptoms following this first ritual? This episode was the first bout of this illness that would persist for at least another eight months until I departed Nepal. In retrospect, perhaps I was not so invested simply because I thought that it would be self-limiting after a few days regardless. After five days without change, I did not want to admit to my hosts that this ritual did not work. My thoughts, assessing the situation from a scientific “rational” standpoint, most certainly turned to a type of food poisoning or contamination. However, I was the

124

Paula Bronson

only one in the household who was ill, and I did not recall any overtly suspect food. Surprisingly, at this point, it did not occur to me that it may be the water. . . The weekly visits to Pasang continued. My illness also continued. It was tedious and a nuisance, but I did not feel overwhelmed by it. Pasang remained optimistic and very confident that the ghost had gone. However, he struggled with the daily life that followed the unrelenting nightmares and fear and thirteen years of living with persistent pain.

PILGRIMAGES AND MORE NGABA With the full moon in the month of Shrawan (the fourth month in the Bikram Sambat, the Nepali calendar), it was Janai Purnima (Sanskrit: full moon sacred thread festival).7 My Nepali hosts had arranged that I travel to Panch Pokhari (Nepali: festival place name meaning “five lakes”) with a group of local Bompos and their friends and family. Their houses surrounded a pond twenty minutes’ walking distance from my house. Gabriele Tautscher explains that the Tamang people choose to locate their homes around a ritual center, a mountain top, or a lake. The deities inhabit these spaces and protect the village (2007, 44). This trip would be the first of two pilgrimages I made as a guest of the Bompos. I felt that by accompanying them I could gain more insight into their healing practices. Additionally, by traveling with them and embodying the physical and mental hardship expected on a pilgrimage, I hoped to have a fuller understanding of their approach to coping with these challenges. Before embarking, one of the group apprentices explained that the local Bompos made this pilgrimage every year to go to the holy lakes to “recharge their powers.” It was a Hindu festival; however, it also held significance as it was a sacred site for Mahadev (Sanskrit: Hindu deity also known as Shiva), who the Bompos revered. At one edge of our local pond, there was a shrine to Mahadev and his consort Parvati (Tautscher 2007, 47). The trip would take two nights and three days of arduous walking to the sacred place. En route the Bompos danced and spun, beating their drums as they walked up the steep paths. The clothing they wore was specific for the dancing. Their headdresses, made of red, white, and green two-meter-long swaths of cotton wrapped around their heads, trailed down the length of their backs with a pheasant feather on the top. They wore full white cotton skirts that flapped and billowed in a complete circle around their thighs during the dance. Heavy bells hung across one shoulder and clanged with the constant movement and drumming. As they danced, the Bompos jumped

Try Feeding the Ghost More

125

over small streams and through wet grass and rocky tracks. The entire journey was made barefoot. We progressed slowly to the next village, stopping to make offerings along the way as the local families had requested. Mid-morning, I met the lead Bompo from the first puja, Karsang, who had joined the group. He intended to join the procession for the day, which included stops averaging about every ten minutes. This pilgrimage was several strenuous days long, often walking for hours at altitudes over 3,500 meters with heavy rains. However, I was able to form bonds with the Bompos, leading to many more discussions about their healing practices. What followed for the next two months was a cycle of ten days of antibiotics obtained by the local health clinic, which relieved my symptoms for one week. I lost count after seven courses in total for my ten months of fieldwork. I sought out another Ngaba healing ritual about two months following the first. I had told my host family that I was still ill, and at their suggestion I decided to give it another try. I returned to the house where I had received the first treatment. I returned to the same small bedroom and again sat on the floor. The Bompo who followed me looked very similar in stature and facial features to the previous one, but I had known beforehand that they were indeed brothers. It is common for families to have several Bompos in their ranks. He looked into my eyes, and I felt reassured immediately. Sitting crossed-legged as everyone sat on the floor, perched on a very thin cushion, he turned to face me directly and took out his mala. By this time, I had spent more time with the local Bompos and had a more broad-based understanding of what to expect. Rather than observing, I genuinely wished that this ritual would help me, as the antibiotics had not. I was steadily losing weight. Overall, I was feeling much more defenseless and weaker than when I underwent the first ritual. My symptoms did subside for a few weeks, longer than they had following a course of antibiotics. My host family was anxious that I was improving under their father’s care. Their open-ended trust was developing. As the Bompo chanted and blew on me, I experienced a tickling sensation in my stomach, unlike the first time when I did not feel anything. It was too easy to read into this as some sort of response; avoiding overanalyzing, I tried to stay in the present moment. I accompanied the Bompos on another pilgrimage during the month of Poush (Nepali: December equivalent) leading up to the full moon at a site in the district of Nuwakot called Karejung, led by Karsang. This trek was longer and more challenging than Panch Pokhari. When Maila first told me about Pasang’s puja, she described it as where the Bompos would “scare the fright away.” Following my second pilgrimage, I began to see much more clearly where fear was situated in Pasang’s life, living with the ghost for

126

Paula Bronson

so long, and how the Bompos had brought him back to safety, much as I experienced in my journey to Karejung. The following vignette recalls my own experience with fear and anxiety in traveling with the Bompos and the parallels I saw with the journey of Pasang’s healing.8 I had developed a trust in the Bompos’ healing knowledge and felt an overarching sense of security in their presence that was hard to describe. We had been walking all day through the forest for at least ten hours and well into the night. We had finally reached even ground after the strenuous trek up through thick brush and winding slippery tracks. It was misty and cold as we sat down in the open grass two nights before the full moon. The clouds dimmed its light. I was so relieved to be sitting. Initially, I did not realize the hushed tones were the Bompos saying we had taken a wrong turn. What I felt was a stillness and calmness, almost like the mist that enveloped the group. I believe what I experienced was the Bompos’ strength and power. I stopped looking for signs and realized that this was it. This sense of serenity was as real and solid as the trees surrounding us. I reflected on the Karejung pilgrimage and the notion of fear. Several times after the experience when we were lost, I checked in with myself to see whether I was afraid, as I thought I should have been, and I was not. I began to use the presence and context of fear in relating and understanding Pasang’s experiences. His life was fraught with fear. This connection was central to my understanding of how his healing emerged and was enacted. In Nepali society, there is the concept of rta (Sanskrit/Nepali: order). Casper Miller (1997) explains that this view extends to a healthy body and to a smooth-functioning society as a whole. The role of the Bompo is to restore order to the body, whereas the Lama (Tibetan: honorific title for a monk, usually a teacher; one who has completed a three-year retreat) is concerned with the social order (1997, 260). The Lama bestows offerings to the spirit realm, but the Bompo meets them head-on. I had been living with gastrointestinal symptoms for many months and was persistently weak and tired. It was winter, and despite the sun shining during the day, the nights were cold. Boiling my drinking water had not made a difference. I contacted the lead Bompo, Karsang, who had performed Pasang’s first puja and became a close interlocutor. Karsang arrived at my door with his usual Namaste greeting, placing his folded hands on top of his head, a display of high respect. We sat down on the cushions on my floor as I felt my sense of weariness sink into the ground beneath me. I told him that I was fearful that I might never recover from this illness, that it may have done something permanent to my system. My head mildly swirled while I spoke. There was an inner tremor through my core as I asked him hesitantly, believing and not believing what I was

Try Feeding the Ghost More

127

saying at the same time, “Do I have a ghost?” Without hesitation, he said, “Try feeding the ghost more; it is coming around you.” I felt relief at that point that I had some direction, some reassurance that there was something I could do; I knew exactly what he meant—I had to leave a tiny pile of food on my plate at the end of a meal like my monastic friends did, and when outside feed them as Maila had shown me months before. The ritual began with Karsang taking out his mala as the others had. The sonorous sounding of the chanting buzzed through my head and put me at ease. After about ten minutes, I settled into the rhythm. My breathing slowed down without anticipating the next steps. Karsang reached into his shirt, took out a yellow powder from a pouch, and mixed it into the small metal bowl filled with water I had been asked to bring. He took his khukuri (Nepali: curved knife) he had tucked into his cotton waistband and placed the tip into the base of the bowl as the chanting continued to resonate. He motioned for me to turn my palm upward. Taking the khukuri from the ocher water, he dripped a few drops on my hand. A sense of stillness pervaded. Karsang then took out a small folded piece of worn paper and slowly unwrapped it. Inside were several tiny brown seeds, which he handed me to chew. I asked cautiously. “Piro xa? Tito xa?” (Nepali: Are they spicy? Are they bitter?) The taste was bland, unlike what I had expected. The ritual came to an end as I drank some hot water from the flask I kept in my room.

CONCLUSION In retrospect, was the relief and dispelling of anxiety I experienced during the rituals from a sense of validation, regardless of etiology: either from the Tamang world of the unseen Amrang Ba (Tamang), or from common intestinal parasites? There is fear and anxiety that come with a long-term condition, the future unknown and uncertain. Would I be cured? My vulnerability emerged, was co-created, and enacted from my illness. It was from a place of bodily and emotional weakness; vulnerability was movable throughout the healing journey. Moreover, the levels and boundaries of the dichotomy of belief/experience were changeable and uncertain. This synchronous movement allowed the research to develop a greater awareness of the experiences and suffering of Pasang. Consequently, a level of knowledge through the notion of enskillment emerged in this way. What I maintained objectively as awareness of my cognitive process as the discerning researcher, together with my healing process, and then through Pasang’s, melded with my embodied knowledge of both. Insofar as the culturally specific ritual process acted through my body

128

Paula Bronson

as a conduit and through the pujas and pilgrimages’ physicality and practice, I developed reassurance that healing could occur. I was not aware of my fear until Karsang described it as a ghost, an invader. It was a parasite on both counts, microscopic protozoa or an entity from another realm, both “unseen.” Nonetheless, another body in one’s own. Through my experiences with mine and Pasang’s healing rituals and my travels with the Bompos on pilgrimage, I saw how the role of the Bompo was to identify and provide a form, a manifestation, that is, to embodied fear. This fear Pasang carried with him every day, everywhere. To quote Desjarlais regarding his work with the Hyolmo in Nepal, “I felt that my body developed a partial, experiential understanding of their world, from the ways in which they held their bodies to how they felt, hurt, and healed” (1992, 13). Michael Jackson (2017) recounts his post-fieldwork reflections on witnessing séances in West Africa by explaining that he felt a lifting of anxiety. In their desperate circumstance, the client’s impasse in their lived experience that surrounded it was also allowed to change (2017, 193). My vulnerability felt from weakness with the persistent illness allowed openness to expectations and trust from the healing. I searched for out-of-body and extrasensory experiences with the Ngaba, during the puja, and on the pilgrimages. Instead, there was an overreaching sense of calm, stability, and security. The influence these experiences had on my work was tangible. I will describe several observations on how my illness proved a rich source for embodied knowledge in the field. This interplay was complex and multilayered, and I pose several questions surrounding it. The most significant initial shift in my understanding was when I realized that the villagers understood my illness to be from the spirit world. I had the impression that they did not consider that I would not accept this explanation. This awareness garnered a sort of leveling of the playing field, so to speak, a commonality with my interlocutors, the community, and me. My research topic was chronic pain, commonly associated with ghosts, as Pasang had told me. It picked him because, in his words, he was disabled and vulnerable. This illness experience showed me how I viewed my interlocutors, my gaze in seeing their illness and how that informed my epistemological embodiment. I felt at some point that I expected them to accept their pain, ghosts, and infestation because they lived surrounded by the “unseen.” It came to mind to question whether the villagers had more or less to overcome than I did, regardless of the etiology of their illnesses and pain. The associated omnipresent fear, that emotion which resulted as a response to a perceived threat, “real” or not to those not Tamang, appeared to be the perpetrator of harm, both mentally and physically, with Pasang. The Bompo’s role was to name it, objectify the threat, make it tangible and real

Try Feeding the Ghost More

129

for him. With biomedical knowledge and treatment, such as antibiotics for giardiasis, my background would lend itself to trust in this treatment. However, I did not improve. I often asked Karsang if he was afraid when he performed the rituals. He said he was not, and it was his role to confront the ghost and chase it away. He further explained that it did not possess him; he lured it and chased it away or killed it. He embodied resoluteness; I felt this very clearly in the jungle to Karejung. Who or what is the body of a Bompo? My sense of having my body infested/possessed translated to how I viewed their bodies. As infested or different from my infestation? I felt mine was different because I had not lived with ghosts. Having a spirit world that was living and tangible to them also meant that they were safe when ghosts were scared away by the Bompo. I felt that working in tandem with the Bompo, him doing the puja and giving me the task to feed the ghost, gave me the agency I needed. The act of “doing something” assisted in my healing, a ritual that I continue now, as the ghosts are sentient beings/actants that need to eat. If no longer hungry, the ghost will “go away.” That is, we are helping others through this compassionate act. Helping oneself and others becomes one and the same in this cosmology. However, if one is overwhelmed by pain and hardship, such as Pasang, the ghost senses this and invades nightmares and waking life. Viewing this notion through the aesthetics of personhood, Pasang’s sense of self had “fragmented” along with his body, and in this vulnerable state the ghost was able to intrude (Desjarlais 1992, 66). His hungsa was taken and left him more exposed and in jeopardy. Feeding it would not bring this back. Why is Pasang’s health important to him? How does the concept of aesthetics of illness delve into the layers of complexities of the cultural constructions surrounding suffering and pain? In the Tamang village, the value placed on a healthy body rather than its meaning was social. As I saw it, Pasang wanted to be whole, healthy, and strong so that he could work. The safety the Bompo provided to Pasang by conquering the ghost and retrieving his hungsa allowed him to sleep, eat, and gradually become more robust. Witnessing Pasang’s healing with the Bompos and experiencing my own while living with a minor illness allowed me to shape my positionality in the field. To end, the complex web of my and the Tamang community’s different worlds of existence and everyday worlds crossed over in small multilayered spaces, informing my ways of knowing and understanding within my research. As I aimed to demonstrate through my and Pasang’s illness experiences, these layers were porous. They were embodied; they were social, intertwined, expansive, and ultimately transformative.

130

Paula Bronson

Paula Bronson is a PhD candidate in social anthropology at University College London (UCL). She completed her fieldwork in early 2020 among the Tamang in a Sindupalchok village in Nepal, where she worked closely with the local shamans. Her research examines those living with chronic pain and their methods of coping after the 2015 earthquakes. Paula has been a chartered physiotherapist for over thirty years, and her doctoral work utilized her training to develop a clinical ethnography methodology in the field.

NOTES 1. My fieldwork was ten months in Sindhupalchok, Nepal, spent predominantly with the Tamang ethnic group. See Gabriele Tautscher (2007, 21–54) for a brief history of the Tamang people. Kathryn March’s (2002) ethnography brings to life Tamang women’s everyday stories. My principal method was clinical ethnography, defined by Joseph Calabrese “as culturally and clinically informed self-reflective immersion in local worlds of suffering, healing, and well-being to produce data that is of clinical as well as anthropological value” (2013, 18). I work as a specialist pain physiotherapist in the United Kingdom, and in the field I developed eclectic treatment approaches to researching experiences of coping among villagers living with chronic pain after the 2015 earthquakes. 2. Angela Sumegi (2008) describes the blending of Bompo and Buddhist practices as a “third place.” 3. My illness was giardiasis, common in Nepal, caused by a protozoan infection usually from contaminated water. Maire Casey Stapleton’s (1989) study categorized beliefs surrounding the etiology of diarrhea in Nepal. Results showed that rather than supernatural causes, beliefs from natural causes prevailed. Babies teething was the most common; 38 percent of respondents listed dirty water. 4. Asha Lal Tamang and Alex Broom (2010) researched health-seeking behavior of rural Eastern Nepalis. My field site was in another district, but I found similar views. Their interviews with villagers and spiritual healers found that the majority seek traditional medicine and carry beliefs that their illnesses originate from the spirit realm. 5. Nicoletti (2008, 76) details the “geography” of the branch shrine, which represents the three realms where entities reside: the underworld: basket with rice and tormas; the earth: where humankind lives is shown by the vertical sticks as the four cardinal points; and the white thread: the celestial realm. 6. The Bompos explained how they “were chosen.” It commonly runs along family lines. One said that a deceased relative’s (a Bompo) spirit began to visit him in his dreams at age eighteen. During the day, he experienced uncontrolled shaking and behaved erratically. See Peters (2007, 77). On the pilgrimages I saw novices in this shaking phase; the entourage was patient and slowed down as they regained control of the involuntary movements.

Try Feeding the Ghost More

131

7. Refer to Tautscher (2007) for a recount of Janai Purnima in a nearby district. Like Gosaikund, this Panch Pokhari pilgrimage is primarily a Hindu festival to sacred lakes of the deity Shiva. It is customary to exchange a red thread on the wrist, worn for protection (2007, 136). My Bompo interlocutors explained their journey simply as a means to travel to “recharge their powers from the gods.” 8. Refer to Desjarlais (1992) for a rich and extensive ethnography of “soul loss” within the Helambu region, across the valley from Pasang’s village.

REFERENCES Ahmed, Sara. 2014. “The Contingency of Pain.” In The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 20–39. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Calabrese, Joseph D. 2013. “Ethnographic Approaches to Health Experiences Research.” In Understanding and Using Health Experience: Improving Patient Care, edited by Sue Zeibland, Angela Coulter, Joseph D. Calabrese, and Louise Locock, 16–25. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Desjarlais, Robert R. 1992. Body and Emotion: The Aesthetics of Illness and Healing in the Nepal Himalayas. University of Pennsylvania. IASP (International Association for the Study of Pain). Retrieved 3 March 2021 from https://www.iasp-pain.org/publications/iasp-news/iasp-announces-reviseddefinition-of-pain/. Jackson, Michael. 2017. How Lifeworlds Work: Emotionality, Sociality, and the Ambiguity of Being. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kirmayer, Lawrence. 2008. “Culture and the Metaphoric Mediation of Pain.” Transcultural Psychiatry 45(2): 318–38. Knibbe, Kim, and Veerstag, Peter. 2008. “Assessing Phenomenology in Anthropology: Lessons from the Study of Religion and Experience.” Critique of Anthropology 28(47): 47–62. March, Kathryn S. 2002. “Each Comes Halfway”: Meeting Tamang Women in Nepal. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University. Miller, Casper J. 1997. Faith Healers in the Himalayas. 2nd ed. Delhi: Book Faith India. Nicoletti, Martino. 2004. Shamanic Solitudes: Ecstasy, Madness and Spirit Possession in the Nepal Himalayas. Translated from Italian by Ken Hurry. Kathmandu: Vajra Publications. ———. 2008. The Ecstatic Body: Notes on Shamanism and Corporeity in Nepal. 2nd ed. Translated from Italian by Ken Hurry. Kathmandu: Vajra Publications. Peters, Larry. 2007. Tamang Shamans: An Ethnopsychiatric Study of Ecstacy and Healing in Nepal. 2nd ed. New Delhi: Nirala. ———. 2016. Trance, Initiation and Psychotherapy in Nepalese Shamanism: Essays on Tamang and Tibetan Shamanism. 2nd ed. New Delhi: Nirala. Stapleton, Maire Casey. 1989. “Diarrhoeal Diseases: Perceptions and Practices in Nepal.” Social Science & Medicine 28(6): 593–604.

132

Paula Bronson

Sumegi, Angela. 2008. Dreamworlds of Shamanism and Tibetan Buddhism: The Third Place. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Tamang, Asha Lal, and Broom, Alex. 2010. “The Practice and Meanings of Spiritual Healing in Nepal.” South Asian History and Culture 1(2): 328–40. Tautscher, Gabriele. 2007. Himalayan Mountain Cults: Sailung, Kalingchok, Gosakind: Territorial Rituals and Tamang Histories. Kathmandu: Vajra Publications.

Chapter 6

Encountering Other Worlds through “Transreligiosity” A Comparative Account of Healing, Embodiment, and Transformation in the Field Eugenia Roussou and Anastasios Panagiotopoulos

‫ﱬﱫ‬ The ethnographic field, especially for those anthropologists who adopt a more autoethnographic approach within it, can be perceived as a fluid space of embodied and sensory interactions where the identity boundaries between the researcher and his/her interlocutors are ever shifting.1 The ethnographer is often required to confront personal transformations while conducting fieldwork, which can arise unexpectedly. It is in those ethnographic moments that a call for epistemological, ontological, perceptual, and embodied transgression arises. The ethnographer who studies religion and spirituality—namely religiosity—more specifically,2 encounters the affective necessity to pursue novel spiritual trajectories in the field, which cut across distinct scientific, analytical, as well as personal frontiers. Through experiencing the field in a sensorially creative way and embodying religiosity transgressively, the epistemological, ethnographic, and ontological self becomes transformed and ultimately “transreligious.” Generally speaking, we identify “transreligiosity” as a sensibility or attitude, and not so much a condition, even less a rigid precondition, in which borders are either transgressed or not even posed. Borders might exist or be ignored within what might otherwise be considered as distinct religiospiritual constellations (traditions, cults, domains of relative orthodoxy and orthopraxis), as well as among matters of “religion” and “non-religion.” 133

134

Eugenia Roussou and Anastasios Panagiotopoulos

Parting from this general and minimal definition of transreligiosity, the purpose of this chapter is not to fully engage with what a transreligious self, praxis, or phenomenon might involve (for this, see Panagiotopoulos and Roussou, 2022). Instead, we wish to highlight here certain aspects of transreligiosity and the affordances we might gain when we seek to engage with the transgressiveness of religiosity. Two are the main ethnographic and analytical aspects of such trangressiveness. First, the element of unpremeditated instances that involve a sense and an experience of transformation; second, the more intimate dialogues between ethnographic subjects or contexts and the ethnographer. These two aspects, we argue, are core elements of the transgression between borders, or different “worlds,” and we seek a theoretical perspective that does not lead to rigid constructions of either sameness or difference. The glue between these two aspects is experiences of affliction and well-being, which hit, so to speak, both ethnographers and ethnographic subjects in an unpremeditated and not necessarily “culturally” or “ontologically” established way. What follows is a comparative account of those transreligious encounters between Greece and Brazil (Roussou) and between Spain and Cuba (Panagiotopoulos), which can unexpectedly intrude and transform our personal and ethnographic biographies, just as they intrude and transform those of our interlocutors. After presenting separately our autoethnographic accounts of personal, anthropological, healing, and spiritual transformation as experienced in the field, while offering some insights on transreligiosity, epistemological embodiment, and our encounter with other worlds, we will attempt to bring our analyses together and examine them through a comparative lens. And by placing the epistemological embodiment of healing at the center of the analysis, our aim is to provide an account of how a transreligious space is formulated, which renegotiates, and potentially transgresses, epistemological and ethnographic knowledge in relation to religion, spirituality, and healing.

TRANSRELIGIOUS ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN GREECE AND BRAZIL I first met Fani, a spiritual healer in her late sixties in 2014, when I went to Athens to conduct fieldwork for my postdoctoral research project.3 Fani’s practice is twofold: on the one hand, it involves small groups of up to seven people, who meet weekly and actively engage with lian gong and qi gong, Hindu-inspired yoga positions, New Age bioenergetic exercises to open the chakras and the spiritual self, as well as Buddhist types of meditation and

Encountering Other Worlds through “Transreligiosity”

135

shamanic-like journeys. On the other hand, she holds one-on-one healing sessions of energetic spiritual healing, which is based on the perhaps most important healing method of Brazilian Kardecist Spiritism, the “fluid therapy or passe, that is, the clearing of low or negative energies. . . . It is believed that in the passe good spirits, through mediums, balance people’s chakras” (Rocha 2017, 51). During the healing of passe, Fani uses her body as a medium to provide therapy through the help of spirits, which she combines with color therapy and the cleansing of the aura, chakras, and the etheric and spiritual self.4 Fani was a psychologist who began to introduce New Age spirituality5 in her therapeutic practice back in the 1990s. A short while later, after a visit to Brazil, she was introduced to Kardecist Spiritism and, especially, to the healing practices of passe, color therapy, as well as lian gong and qi gong, through a Greek-Brazilian couple who were and still are the spiritual “leaders” at a Spiritist center in a small Brazilian city. When Fani returned to Greece, she created a transreligious therapeutic route, which cuts across different forms of religiosity, by combining Brazilian Spiritist, Hindu, Buddhist, New Age, shamanic, and eastern spiritual elements, while creating a transnational symbolic spiritual and therapeutic itinerary between Greece and Brazil. And, through its practice, it also criticizes the mono-religious stereotype that follows Greek religious identity, which is predominantly considered as synonymous to the institutionalized religion of the country, namely Orthodox Christianity (see Alivizatos 1999; Stewart 2004), pointing to a transformation of religious identity that is spiritually creative, fluid, and dynamic. When the Ethnographer Talks with Spirits It was in the autumn of 2014, and I had already had the passe performed on me by Fani a couple of times. I was feeling dizzy for some days, experiencing one of my long-lasting panic attacks, and Fani suggested it was time we did another energetic cleansing. I sat in the chair; she put some meditation music to play in the background, lit an oil burner, and cleansed herself with a blue light, before she began to pass her hands over different parts of my body, focusing on points where my energy was blocked and working on my etheric self. “No wonder why you feel dizzy,” she told me after a while, “you always carry too much ectoplasm around you, and you attract spirits that feed off your energy.” She went on to explain that she believes this is the reason why I could not get rid of my panic attacks all these years: I was very sensitive to the spiritual world and this was affecting my physical body, which was too weak to handle the extrasensory encounters and used the panic attacks as a pro-

136

Eugenia Roussou and Anastasios Panagiotopoulos

tection mechanism against them. I was taken aback. Although I had already known at a theoretical level how passe worked, this was the first time Fani had explicitly mentioned the role of the spirits in her healing. It was the first time I was offered a convincing explanation of the etiology of my personal wellbeing crisis that made a lot more sense. More importantly, however, I came to realize that, through my personal bodily, sensorial, and perceptual experience in communicating with other worlds, I was beginning to understand ethnographically how the boundaries between the anthropological categories of the personal and the professional, the epistemological and the empirical, the physical and the spiritual, the embodied and the imaginary, the ordinary and the extraordinary had already begun to blur. At the end of our healing session that day, Fani asked me to join her Monday group, a special group where healing was experienced through deep meditation and spiritual traveling. Many times, affective, emotive, and somatic reactions would occur (crying, laughing, expressing anger, trembling, feeling cold, shaking, and so on); afterward, we would frequently share our spiritual travels to other worlds, embodied reactions, and healing effects. It was then that my own communication with the spiritual cosmos was fortified and I began to regularly perceive spirits, during the group meetings and, especially, during my individual passe sessions. One of the most important dimensions in Fani’s healing practice is the fact that she provides a symbolic, therapeutic, and actual space where some of her students see clearly and/or feel strongly the presence of spirits. For Fani, these extrasensory encounters are something that simply happen, just like physical reality and everyday experience, and Fani considers the presence of spirits during her classes “a normal experience,” as she has told me many times during both our ethnographic and therapeutic encounters. For many of “us,” Fani’s students, that is, it is through these extrasensory communications and encounters with a spiritual cosmos that healing is achieved. Resisting Epistemology: Experiential Ethnography through Radical Participation At first, I was very hesitant to believe in my own perceptual and embodied experiences; I thought it might even be an imaginary anthropological construction, being too keen to participate ethnographically in all aspects of Fani’s spiritual healing practices. When I began to share my travels and experiences with Fani and the other members of the group, and we opened up about the details of our spiritual journeys, as we called them, I discovered that sometimes we encountered the same spirits or spirit guides that were around to protect us and aid Fani with her practice. It was those shared spiritual transgressions that convinced me that my ethnographic, embod-

Encountering Other Worlds through “Transreligiosity”

137

ied, spiritual, perceptual, and social scientific self had entered a stage of at many times confusing spiritual fluidity, experiencing and traveling between different spiritual cosmologies and cutting across boundaries. At the same time, I approached my ethnographic and spiritual experiences with Fani as yet another one of her “students,” trying to block the stricter “scientific” and epistemological side of my anthropological curiosity that was arising frequently. For the first time in my many years of studying contemporary spirituality, I had decided to fully immerse myself somatically into the experience rather than simply participating in the field, leaving, in a certain sense, my ethnographic self aside. Yet, this intense and transformative experience I had encountered has had an impact on my professional self, as well, since it has helped me replace “anthropological detachment with engagement and embrace the understanding that comes through surrendering to the unknown” (Glass-Coffin 2010, 215). As Jean-Guy Goulet and Bruce Granville Miller have argued: Radical participation as a process becomes intrinsic to our search for knowledge and understanding of the human experience. Through radical participation or experience of the ecstatic side of fieldwork, we are confronted with the realization that . . . we have transcended the academically defined boundaries of the knowable and are therefore in relatively new territory. We are then confronted with an alternative: either repress the experience, or express it in an intelligible form for colleagues and the public at large to grasp. (2007, 11–12)

I consider my involvement with Fani’s practice as a form of radical ethnographic participation, which helped me understand more profoundly spirituality, religiosity, and the fluidity of cosmological belonging, both at an emic and at an etic level. The epistemologies of knowledge do not require sturdy—social or otherwise—scientific rules to be “proven” analytically and theoretically “valid.” Especially within the context of recent years, where, up to a degree at least, there is a tendency for anthropologists to justify their production of knowledge through more positivist models of/or objectified methodologies of research, the need to adopt experiential forms of ethnography in the study of the spiritual—however this spiritual may be defined— appears to be even more urgent. The Transreligious Reality of Spirits Agni has been a fellow participant in Monday’s group sessions, with whom we have experienced shared visions in our encounters with the spiritual worlds and have “seen” spirits in common. She is also a strong Christian believer and, until she encountered Fani, her relationship and communi-

138

Eugenia Roussou and Anastasios Panagiotopoulos

cation with the spiritual was more distant, through praying and attending Mass. She is also the one, out of Fani’s students, to see and talk with spirits in a more direct manner, as if they are in front of her, and considers such communication to be part of her vernacular religiosity. As she has told me: You know, I don’t think there is anything strange in this. This is all normal to me. I never doubted this [communication with spirits], they appear and I talk to them as I talk to you right now. It is just when I began to have my health issues that Fani told me I should try and block them, as this required much of my energy that I couldn’t give. I had to focus on my body.

A few months after I met her, Agni faced a life-threatening health problem, which required emergency hospitalization. The first night of her being at the hospital, I perceived an older woman, dressed in a brown long robe, her head covered by a same-color scarf, resembling an Orthodox saint icon. She told me that her name was Maria and that I “should not worry,” for she said, “I will take care of your friend who is now very ill and keep her company at the hospital.” As visitors outside the family were not allowed at the hospital, I only saw Agni more than a week later, when she finally returned to her house to recuperate, escaping death “because of a miracle,” as the doctors had said. That day, Agni confided in me that during her hospitalization she kept seeing a woman who kept her company throughout her health crisis, reassuring her that everything was going to be all right: a woman, as Agni told me, whose name was Maria, wore a long brown robe with her head covered by a scarf, and resembled a female Orthodox Christian saint. Agni, as many others of Fani’s students, have not abandoned their religious heritage of Orthodox Christianity and, in that sense, communicating with transcendental forces directly, without the mediation of the “official” religious expert, that of a priest, would seem paradoxical for them. However, they make a spiritual leap, and transcend the boundaries between religion and spirituality, adopting a more open religiosity whereby they are “allowed” to transgress their “ontological old” and creatively immerse themselves into an ontologically novel transreligious space; a space where the material and the spiritual cosmos becomes one, as the frontiers between them collapse, through an active and creative intercommunication of approaching the spiritual through somatic engagement and (extra)sensory perception. The spirits who make their presence felt in Fani’s therapeutic sessions but also beyond them are transnational. The Brazilian spirit master of Fani frequently pays her a visit. There are Greek spirits of the dead, relatives and/or protectors of her students. There are spirit guides of Indian shamans, Christian saint-like spirits, angel-like presences, Buddhist monks, and also spirits of various backgrounds and nationalities that come to seek help. The presence of spirits is critical since it transforms the spiritual healing

Encountering Other Worlds through “Transreligiosity”

139

experience into a transreligious experience. And this is where the concept of transreligiosity becomes crucial in understanding the fluidity that permeates the ontological perception of cosmological and religious belonging, through perceptual creativity and experiential embodiment. As Meredith McGuire has insightfully put it, “through the bodies we see, feel, hear, perceive, touch, smell, possess our everyday worlds” (1990, 285). Furthermore, in Fani’s case, performances of spiritual healing require a “pneumopsychosomatic” synthesis, to use Csordas’s analytical term (Csordas 1997[1994], 40). It is this interaction between spirit/mind-soul and body that leads to the creation of a “sacred self,” through healing (24). Through their spiritually active embodiment and sensory perception, Fani and her students possess their material and spiritual world as ontologically unified. By participating in performances of spiritual healing, they create a sacred self, where they experience a “reality of spirits” (Turner 1993) that is transreligious. I have definitely approached my fieldwork in an experiential way, following Edith Turner (1993), who has eloquently shown that an ethnographer can only fully understand the “reality of spirits” she studies if she dives into that reality. I therefore allowed both my ethnographic and non-ethnographic self to “be changed by extraordinary experience,” to paraphrase the title of the well-known and innovative book by David Young and Jean-Guy Goulet (1994). However, neither myself nor my interlocutors have considered our encounters with spirits, our spiritual trajectories, and our engagement with nonmaterial spheres of existence as “extraordinary.” The experience of seeing, perceiving, sensing, and talking with spirits can only be understood and interpreted as a “reality.” It is an “ordinary” experience, which, in this particular ethnographic case study I presented, is transreligious, since it involves transnational spirits (cf. Saraiva 2008), transcends religious boundaries, and amalgamates various religiosities in its core, ranging from Buddhism to Shamanism and from Spiritism to New Age spirituality. Moreover, it is articulated through spiritual healing and transgresses symbolic geographic frontiers, creating a spiritual route between Greece and Brazil, Athens and Campinas. Ultimately, it collapses the stereotypical dualities that are often linked to the study of contemporary religiosity that involves transcendental beings, between natural and supernatural, normal and paranormal, material and spiritual, belief and experience, scientific epistemology and empirical knowledge.

TRANSRELIGIOUS ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN SPAIN AND CUBA The general practitioner of the Spanish national health system said calmly but decisively: “Your research has to do with your problem. It has affected you too much.” My “problem” had violently arisen on 30 December 2017,

140

Eugenia Roussou and Anastasios Panagiotopoulos

a couple of weeks before the consultation, when that night a wild and completely novel to me sense of panic hit me as soon as I lay in bed to sleep. Sweat, rapid heartbeats, sense of suffocation and of extreme fear, pessimism, and desperation made me jump out of bed with an impulse to escape from the bedroom, my house, the city, and the planet. That was the first and most intense experience of “my problem,” followed by a chain of similar events that were able to upset my everyday life radically. The visit to the general practitioner was initiated by a relatively brief description of the events and symptoms just mentioned. Soon after this, the doctor asked me: “What is your job?” “I am an anthropologist,” I replied, expecting a commonly received mixed reaction between puzzlement and indifference. To the contrary and to my surprise, he went straight to the point: “What is your research about?” “The religions of African origin of Cuba,” I answered laconically, still expecting that the subject would end there. Even more surprisingly and almost as if affirming, he asked: “You mean Santería. . .” I said “yes” and, in all my bafflement, as if I had before me not a general practitioner but a diviner of Santería, I received that preposterous, as I then deemed it, diagnostic exclamation that opened the current presentation: “Your research has to do with your problem. . .” Far from Cuba, and far from those Afro-Cuban religious enclaves of the Iberian Peninsula that I had been researching the last few years, I was met with my research topic in an uncanny and not in the least premeditated way. Two apparently distinct ethnographic contexts, that of Afro-Cuban religiosity in Spain and that of the anthropologist’s personal crisis, are brought into dialogue. I shall be comparing the ethnography of an Afro-Cuban doll and the unplanned autoethnography of another doll prescribed for myself by a psychiatrist, as part of the solution to my “problem,” extending, in an indirect way, the initial diagnosis of that general practitioner, that is, of the transgressiveness between my topic of research and my personal situation. The Afro-Cuban Doll Lidia is a Spanish woman in her sixties. When she was fifty years old, Lidia passed through a difficult psychological and emotional problem because her then husband, after twenty-five years of being together, suddenly told her that he was no longer in love with her and that he was leaving their home.

Encountering Other Worlds through “Transreligiosity”

141

Lidia was shocked by the abruptness of the decision. She recounted, “The ground disappeared under my feet. I completely lost any meaning in life, I felt a void of loneliness and of orientation.” In that period, Lidia had already met a Cuban couple, neighbors of hers, with whom she would cross paths spontaneously, since they so frequently coincided in the common spaces of the neighborhood. Their frequent but accidental meetings started solidifying into friendship after Lidia’s husband abandoned her. Lidia found in the Cuban couple warmness and a fresh sensation of excitement. This warmth made a contrast with her up-to-then sorry state: “Well into the age of fifty and having been abandoned by my husband, I realized that in reality I didn’t have any friends, I was alone in my own city,” she tells me. But apart from and besides her newly acquired friendship, the presence of another person started emerging. His name was Julián and he was an elder man, with white hair, but “very attractive, who liked being dressed elegantly, in beige-colored suits and hats and a dark brown scarf,” Lidia explained. Although present, Julián was never seen by Lidia herself, but only by the Cuban couple. He told the latter that he had never fallen in love before in that way as with Lidia. As it occurs with many a sudden crush, when hatched only from one of the two sides, Lidia, in the beginning, completely ignored Julián’s presence, for the additional reason that he had ceased to be a living entity since almost a century ago. Julián appeared as a voice, an image, a motion, and even an emotion in the perceptive sensibility of the Cuban couple. Julián let them know that, while in life, he had been a bachelor, with numerous lovers, but never with a stable couple. With Lidia it was the first time that an intense desire, beyond a merely sexual one, had awoken, a “profound connection,” as Lidia tells me the Cuban couple told her. Another piece of information that came to light by Julián was that he himself was the reason for which Lidia’s husband had abandoned her. Falling so wildly in love with her, he jealously wove his plotting tangle so that the husband, by getting to know and, in his turn, falling in love with another woman, would leave Lidia. She highlights that, as soon as all this information along with the unconventional appearance of Julián was brought to the surface, she felt a great transformation in her mood. She affirms that she felt at ease; another wave of warmth flooded her, both metaphorically and physically speaking (she tells me that every time Julián was mentioned, she blushed). Beyond this, the pain of abandonment, void, and loneliness atoned radically. She comments, “It is a weird kind of relationship and conviviality. I can’t say I ever got to perceive Julián’s presence, as my Cuban friends seemed to do so, but, even like this, I felt less lonely and sad.” A key moment to all this, according to Lidia, was also the fact that

142

Eugenia Roussou and Anastasios Panagiotopoulos

the Cuban couple told her that they had to “prepare” (preparar; in the AfroCuban religious idiom, the verb signifies the consecration of an object) a “representation” (representación) of Julián, so that the “profound connection” was “materialized” (materializarse). As it happens in many cases in AfroCuban religiosity, the object that got “prepared” was a plastic doll. It went through a consecration process. In such a process, the object gets “charged” (cargado) with ritual substances, under ceremonial invocations, so the spirit in question gets “attached” (apegado) to the doll (see Panagiotopoulos 2017). Julián the doll was placed in Lidia’s living room, which is meant to “materialize” the presence of Julián with more intensity, in his “profound connection” with Lidia. The Cuban couple, whom I had the opportunity to talk to directly, comments that, contrary to the rest of the “accompanying” spirits of Lidia, Julián was part of her affliction (her husband’s abandonment) and that only a more proactive interaction with him would be able to find a solution to the problem, in constant and intimate dialogue with Julián himself. The doll, in its “preparation,” was dressed as Julián appeared visually to the couple, in a beige suit and hat and a dark brown scarf. Next to the doll a shot of sweet anise was placed as, according to Julián’s utterances, he so much liked while in life. Even though she dislikes alcohol, Lidia came to the point of drinking a few sips from the shot once a month. She must change the anise as part of a periodic “refreshing” (refrescamiento). At the same time and before refilling the shot with the spiritual (!) drink, Lidia fills the shot with water and leaves it like this for a couple of days. She says, “I drink the alcohol, which I normally detest, and Julián puts off his alcoholic thirst with the water I so much prefer. In that way, we have both learned to live together and move on.” The Psychiatrist’s Doll The enchanted oracular Afro-Cuban cosmos would not have obtained its present (and past) attraction without the proliferation of “non-incidental coincidences,” as my friend Armando, an intellectual and initiate in AfroCuban religiosity, once told me back in Cuba, in 2007. Here I will recount a coincidence that perhaps Armando would have included to the “nonincidental” kind of coincidences. At around the same time Lidia was sharing with me her peculiar friendship with the Cuban couple and, by extension, with Julián and the “preparation” of the doll, I went through my personal crisis. After having visited the general practitioner, whose only prescription was that of anti-anxiety pills to alleviate the extreme and uncontrollable effects of my crisis, I decided to visit a private psychiatrist.

Encountering Other Worlds through “Transreligiosity”

143

The visits to her were different from that to the general practitioner. To begin with, they were numerous and lasted much longer, and they lacked absolute and quick (economic?) diagnoses such as “Your research has to do with your problem. . .” One of the many “exercises” the psychiatrist prescribed was for me to make a doll out of a moldable material, something like plasticine, which she offered to me and of which I chose a phosphorescent yellow color. Her instructions were for me to create a doll in the image of how I would visualize my own self in those peak moments of crisis. I gave shape to a yellow phosphorescent creature, a caricature representation of myself, with an unusually big and somewhat compressed head, indicating a state of mental explosion. My doll-body was disproportionately thin and on the hydrocephalous head were carved closed eyes, nose, and mouth, creating an expression of panic. The result looked like a perplexed alien, perplexed perhaps from the sudden realization of its own alienation. Every time I felt the surging of a new manifestation of panic, following the secular psychiatric voodoo instructions, I would grab the doll, and, with an attitude of combined hostility and contempt, I would stick to it pins and talk to it provocatively. My psychiatrist comments in relation to this: The idea behind this is that you start identifying your situation with the doll and not consider it as something that belongs deeply to yourself. In that way, you de-identify with it. Furthermore, by talking to it in a contemptuous or ironic tone, you will start devaluing it so that you don’t feel weak before it.

The psychiatrist’s doll was one of the many “exercises” I performed, either at home or at the time of the consultations, in which all had this general and explicitly stated “idea behind” them: to “de-identify” with my crisis by first putting it in front of me through material representations, and second by treating it in terms that I would gain a sort of control rather than the other way around. Such exercises included putting my thoughts on paper, usually writing imaginary letters to my crisis as if it were a person, trying to imagine it as a person with a certain voice, gait, and looks. I even named it, choosing the name “Charon,” the Gatekeeper of the Underworld in the ancient Greek world. The image visualized was the typical one of the Grim Reaper, with an exaggerated spooky voice that treaded on the ridiculous, closely resembling that of Death in the last sketch of Monty Python’s film The Meaning of Life (1983). Also, during the consultations, my psychiatrist often made me personify various “characters,” my crisis acquiring a protagonist role, with Playmobil figurines. A sort of role-playing game would then commence, in which, again, the personification of my crisis and its consequent exteriorization and relative trivialization were the main objectives.

144

Eugenia Roussou and Anastasios Panagiotopoulos

My immediate priority, which was the alleviation of my crisis, was soon accompanied by curiosity for the methodology of my psychiatrist, something that I think created the grounds for a quasi-ethnographic exploration of the “idea behind” the various prescriptions and “exercises” of hers. I cannot tell with certainty if my anthropological stance made my psychiatrist become more explicit than usual as to the “idea behind,” nor if the stance itself helped me “de-identify” with my crisis. It definitely got alleviated to the point, first, of quickly abandoning the anti-anxiety pills and, second, after half a year of consultations deeming that they were no longer necessary. As the consultations coincided with my ethnographic acquaintance with Lidia and her doll, I once mentioned it to my psychiatrist, as a point of curiosity that two apparently rather distinct worlds, the Afro-Cuban religious one and the psychiatric, were both prescribing dolls as part of the healing process of their client-patients. Her comments were the following: It is indeed interesting! Whatever the personal beliefs in spirits of the dead of your friend and the Cuban couple, I think there is a curious point of convergence, apart from the obvious fact of the doll. This is that there is an effort to exteriorize something that previously was intensely experienced as something internal. It is as if this something was trapped inside, without being able to find a way out. The doll helps in this as it creates a concrete and tangible point with which one speaks and expulses his or her preoccupations out.

A Transgressive Comparison I take as a point of departure the temporal coincidence between my personal crisis and my ethnographic acquaintance of Lidia, the Cuban couple, and the spirit-doll Julián. The coincidence of the two dolls, appearing almost simultaneously, transgressed the borders between researcher and researched, and converted the personal crisis of the former into an unplanned ethnographic exploration and point of comparison with the latter. Just like my personal crisis becomes part of my ethnography, the comparison itself arises ethnographically, in the sense that it becomes a matter of reflection in my conversation with the psychiatrist. She recognizes differences, which are framed as “personal beliefs in spirits of the dead,” but her curiosity is concentrated on the “point of convergence.” What I find interesting in this kind of psychiatric perspective is that even if it makes mention of matters of belief, it boldly goes beyond them. The perspective is not dependent on matters of belief, meaning that it is valid with or without belief. Belief as a symbolic process of indirectly or unconsciously achieving an end is not the case here. It is also a perspective that proposes an ontological dimension which does not refer to necessarily

Encountering Other Worlds through “Transreligiosity”

145

taking seriously the constitution of entities, spirits of the dead and dolls (cf. Holbraad and Pedersen 2017). The ontological irrelevance of the constitution of the entities does not subtract their importance, which is their vital role of becoming heuristic materials to “exteriorize” something that was experienced as interior. In that sense, the ontological dimension mostly resides in an exhaustive examination not of the nature of the entities but of the effects that take place when something is detached from oneself. The affliction is deontologized from the self, and it gets ontologized—first as an external material “representation,” and second, and more importantly, as the ontological transformation from an afflicted self into a healed one. This heuristic process of “exteriorization” does not perform a radical detachment from the self, but a relative one, which preserves the referentiality to the self but as a plastic and moldable (as the materiality of both dolls is) relational element and not a rigidly constitutive one. It is about ontological transformability rather than ontological cementation. Afro-Cuban religiosity, in the case of Lidia, a Spanish middle-aged woman who did not have any previous familiarity with it, did not present itself as a total religious tradition to be smoothly inherited. Neither did it present itself as an official, institutionalized, and dogmatic Religion, to be accepted as a rigid whole by way of conversion. It presented itself as part of an exciting friendship (part of the excitement being its spiritual dimension), as an unfamiliar but attractive “idiom” of Julián, his biography, his relation to Lidia, extending to an equally unfamiliar but attractive object of the doll. The interaction ignited thereof among the relational triangle of Lidia, the Cuban couple, and Julián the doll was perceived by Lidia herself as part of her healing process. Lidia, unlike the Cuban couple, hesitates to defend an unconditional acceptance of the vast and complex Afro-Cuban cosmos of spirits of the dead and deities. Nevertheless, she follows those ritual paths the Cuban couple has suggested, at least to the extent that they are not incompatible with her way of life. In this sense, both Lidia and the anthropologist have much in common: that of coming from the same (southern) European context, and neither aprioristically and totally letting the transreligious encounter overwhelm them nor similarly discarding it altogether as superstitious nonsense, more experientially for people like Lidia and more reflectively, perhaps, for the anthropologist. For the latter, the transreligious attitude emerges and is highlighted through the psychoanalytic perspective, which, instead of creating rigid and oppositional barriers, say between “religiosity” and “science,” brings into an interesting dialogue the two perspectives through the idiom and experience of “healing” dolls, more like affects and effects, rather than a priori and rigid beliefs and ontological cementations.

146

Eugenia Roussou and Anastasios Panagiotopoulos

Parallels can be drawn with the anthropological literature on exorcism as a dynamic process, involving performance and aesthetics, and as integral part of an effort to “heal” by redefining the self in relation to the non-self or the other(s), without absolute divisions between the two, but without merging them either into a suffocating oneness or into an equally afflicting collective anonymity (see Kapferer 2010). One should note an important difference with a more monotheistic and dogmatic approach, in which the “devil,” that is, the affliction, is sought to be exorcised strictly, ideally once and for all, both from the body-spirit of the afflicted and from the whole cosmos that is meant to instantiate the “divine.” Whereas the latter places emphasis on total expulsion, even if desperately, and on an absolute ontological division between “good” and “evil,” fathoming what should be incorporated and what expulsed—the former by way of “homeopathic,” “holistic,” or inclusive endorsement—it exorcises the affliction and simultaneously “endorcises” it in its cosmos (Cantón-Delgado and Panagiotopoulos 2021). Transformations, in this case, occur on the experience of affliction and well-being and not on the ontological status and cosmological place of the “divine” and the “demonical”; they are thus more open to affect one, without the precondition of a formal “conversion.”

COMPARING TWO TRANSRELIGIOUS AUTOETHNOGRAPHIC EXPERIENCES We understand anthropological and ethnographic comparison as a complex effort that goes beyond a rigid construction, as if it were an existential dilemma, of either radical heterogeneity or radical homogeneity. Radical heterogeneity presents us with the peril to construct homogeneity on a “monadological” level—that is, among the different units compared and perceived as different. Radical homogeneity presents us with the same peril on a “global” and total scale. To compare is to be open to any direction toward alterity and identity, radical or not—that is, not constructing an a priori framework. In the end, it becomes an ethnographic question and effort to try to engage with the what, how, where, and when of both alterity and identity. Comparison, we argue, goes hand in hand with transgression, but not for the pure sake of it. If the latter was the case, we would be faced with permanent fluidity, transformation, and relativism, and with no need for future and novel transgressions. The core element that is present in both ethnographic accounts is the upsetting and transformational experience of affliction and well-being, equally for the ethnographic subjects and the anthropologists, and the

Encountering Other Worlds through “Transreligiosity”

147

“provisional” or “heuristic” (see more on this later) involvement in such an experience of something perceived as ontologically (but not necessarily radically) different, even less radically and permanently detached, from a living human being and, in particular, the person whose affliction and well-being is at stake. As this is a common ethnographic term in both accounts, without necessarily any purist connotations, we stick to the term “spirit.” Within this commonality in both accounts, a chain of commonalities follows. The sense of affliction and well-being is not experienced as a familiar condition in which it is easily classified into square boxes of “biological,” “somatic,” “mental,” “psychological,” “social,” or “individual” nature. The afflicted/ healed person is in “need,” and within this pressing need, what accompanies it is the simultaneous need to ignore square boxes just as to be open to all of them, because it is the sense of affliction and well-being that most counts: the will and effort to get out of a suffocating dead-end. Here we venture a quasisociological and even philosophical claim, that both a bounded and closed self and an unbounded and open sociality can be hostile to the subjects of our accounts, including ourselves. Senses of suffocation, fear, disorientation, stagnation, loneliness, meaninglessness, or pain crop up within a context where both the bounded individual and the anonymous collectivity are sides of the same afflictive coin. To find oneself is to open it up, to a certain extent, toward the others, but to other selves, too, who find themselves in yourself, with no one sacrificing themselves nor the others for that. Sacrifice as annihilation or utter surrender is not the point here (see also Panagiotopoulos 2018). Neither strict boundedness nor amorphous collectivities can offer this. What they do offer is the damage and loss of personality (alienation, in more Marxist terms), and perhaps this is a vital (and contextual) affliction that participates in a million other afflictions or different manifestations of them. But how do “spirits” participate in all this? Here the two accounts offer different angles or perspectives, and this can be mostly evinced in their autoethnographic element, that is, the participation of the anthropologist in the ethnographic context. For Eugenia Roussou, it has unfolded more as “radical participation,” while for Anastasios Panagiotopoulos in a more comparative and unexpected sense. Roussou loosens her previously observational role as an anthropologist and fully emerges in the experiences of her interlocutors by transforming them into her own and, symmetrically, transforming herself. She even perceives spirits in similar ways as some of her interlocutors do, leading to the “peak” ethnographic moment of perceiving the same spirits as one of them (Agni). We could say that the ethnographic context expands and “intrudes” into Roussou. For Panagiotopoulos, the ethnographic context also expands, not only to intrude but within his experience of affliction and healing, to include

148

Eugenia Roussou and Anastasios Panagiotopoulos

instances that were not related to his up-to-then “officially” recognized research. And this led him to comparison between contexts, more particularly condensed into the Afro-Cuban spirit-doll and the psychiatric one, to the point of becoming one and the same context, up to an extent. The question arises, what kinds of “worlds” and, consequently, ethnographic knowledge emerge through these distinct but related “epistemological embodiments,” and how are these related to the contexts themselves? To begin with, experiences of transformation radically condense seemingly opposing categories. For instance, affliction and well-being come to the fore as a central pressing “need.” Lack of choice is equally manifest just as much as choice. Affliction hits unexpectedly and involuntarily in the beginning. Then choice enters due to this sense of lack of choice but, consequently, as an equally pressing need to overcome it. The self opens to an experimentation that might seem utterly fluid, between national territories, traditions, or disciplines, but has as its non-relative objective the desire to feel healed. In both Roussou’s and Panagiotopoulos’s accounts, spirits are the potential sources of both affliction and healing, resembling more of a “homeopathy” of sorts, rather than annihilating completely the source or the “entity” of affliction. Instead, the effort is to transform the relationality between the spirit and the affected person; this also transforms the sense of oneself in relation to the affliction itself. In this respect, what comes to the fore is not so much the prerogative to strictly take seriously spirits as ontological categories (as this is often expressed in the so-called “ontological turn” in anthropology; see Holbraad and Pedersen 2017) but to play with the potentialities of them—the potentialities of transformation, of dealing in a concrete but open way with affliction and healing. It is these potentialities that count, as a transgressive process and not ontological cementation as a final product. It is here where the “provisional” or “heuristic” nature of spirits, spirit-dolls, or even psychiatric dolls reside. This is particularly the case when an affliction is not understood as strictly pertaining to the biomedical field. And which affliction does, after all? All afflictions have effects far beyond the strict reasons of their manifestations and beyond the (de)limited target of their “attack.” The whole self is sensitive to affliction, too much to square it into a single box of life, just as affliction is too sensitive to square it into a single and immutable self-body or, even less so, a part of it. This is inextricably linked to a wider context wherein a boxed self feels suffocation from both the bounded individual and the unbounded sociality that damage its personality. This context goes also beyond any strictly demarcated context that can satisfy the literal sense of ethno-graphy. Do we still have to do with preexisting ethnographic boundaries in the old classical sense of “cultural” borders, whether these are bodily, national, or col-

Encountering Other Worlds through “Transreligiosity”

149

lective in any other sense? Do affliction and well-being predetermine them or, rather, transform them and reconfigure selves, collectivities, and, by extension, ethnographic contexts, even in unexpected ways? We do not wish to claim that this context of transformation, of choice and unchoice, is, by definition, healed by spirits, by their dolls, or by their uncanny resemblances with psychiatric dolls. This is an ethnographic matter of contingency and not of axiomatic instrumentalism. But exactly because instrumentalism is not the pure case here, as it is also transgressed by the more encompassing sense of confronting affliction and well-being, we might argue that this is precisely the context. It is too late to pretend that borders do not exist, borders between what is considered distinct religio-spiritual constellations or between what is considered “religious” and what is not. But it is also too early to preempt that, even if these borders exist and are not ignored, they are faithfully respected and not transgressed. It cannot be easily fathomed whom the context hits unexpectedly. This is its transformational element, and it does not have to be dealt necessarily with “spirits.” But we do find in its core the simultaneous expression and effort to overcome it, by recuperating a sense of personality that the context itself has afflicted by both pushing it into the dark depths of the individual and exiling it to the anonymous sea of an abstract sociality. If depersonalization is the affliction, re-personalization is the desired sense of well-being and the playfulness of transreligiosity is the apparent elastic means with no relative ends.

CONCLUSION Encounters with other worlds, especially those that involve the presence of spirits, through the perceptive instances that have been variably described in this chapter, are heuristic means and affective constellations from which healing experiences pass through and transform. On the one hand, the transformation is intimately felt and overcome through the ethnographer’s body and through the intimacy of the enclaves it finds itself in, but, on the other, with its socialization and its passing through other “bodies” (of other fellow humans, spirit-bodies, dreams, visions, or dolls), strict borders are rendered unbound. To a large extent, a transreligious space is created, where transformations occur through (extra)ordinary experience and through affliction and well-being, pointing toward our ethnographic interlocutors’ but also the anthropologists’ involvement with an open, experimental, and dynamic (that is, transreligious) spiritual cosmos. It is people’s affective and therapeutic confrontation with and, ideally, overcoming of the obstacles presented and felt as transformative encounters with other worlds just as well as the

150

Eugenia Roussou and Anastasios Panagiotopoulos

sense of being healed, which creates a transreligiosity by moving in-between borders. It is also the ethnographers themselves who, out of encounters with other worlds and other “bodies,” adopt a fluid transreligious epistemological identity. And this fluidity breaks and expands beyond rigidly constructed frontiers, while forming transformative ethnographic, epistemological, and ontological transreligious spaces and selves. Eugenia Roussou (PhD, 2010, University College London) is a senior researcher at Centro em Rede de Investigação em Antropologia (CRIA), Instituto Universitário de Lisboa (ISCTE-IUL), Lisbon, Portugal. She is currently working on her project on transnational religiosity, spiritual fluidity, creativity and transformation in Portugal and Greece. She is the author of Orthodox Christianity, New Age Spirituality and Vernacular Religion: The Evil Eye in Greece, coeditor of Expressions of Religion: Ethnography, Performance and the Senses, and has published extensively on contemporary southern European religiosity, with a special focus on so-called alternative spirituality and healing. Anastasios Panagiotopoulos (PhD 2011, University of Edinburgh) is a senior researcher at Centro em Rede de Investigação em Antropologia (CRIA), FCSH, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal. His has conducted anthropological research on Afro-Cuban religiosity and divination in Cuba and the Iberian Peninsula, with particular interest in oracles, death, spirit possession, the historical imagination, and theories of religion and secularization. He has authored numerous peer-reviewed articles in journals, such as Ethnos and Hau, and chapters in edited volumes. He is the coeditor (with Diana Espírito Santo) of Articulate Necrographies: Comparative Perspectives on the Voices and Silences of the Dead.

NOTES 1. The writing of this paper was made possible through our position as researchers at the Centro em Rede de Investigação em Antropologia (CRIA), and under the financial support from the Portuguese Foundation of Science and Technology (FCT) in the context of the strategic plan of CRIA (UIDB/ANT/04038/2020), to which we are grateful. We wish to extend our gratitude to the editors and the anonymous reviewers for their engaging comments and criticisms. 2. For the needs of the present argument, we utilize the concept of “religiosity” in order to refer to (beliefs and practices of) both religion and spirituality. 3. The project entitled “Religion in/of Crisis: Pluralism, Spiritual Creativity and Healing in Portugal and Greece” was conducted between 2014 and 2017 and funded by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT).

Encountering Other Worlds through “Transreligiosity”

151

4. It is worth clarifying that the “ethnographic present” here is between 2014 and 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic began to influence Fani’s practice. 5. “New Age spirituality” can be problematic. However, as argued elsewhere (Roussou 2021, 7–9), the term can still be analytically useful when used “in order to signify non-institutional and more subjectivized New Age practices that have recently entered the spiritual field of contemporary Greece” (7).

REFERENCES Alivizatos, Nikos. 1999. “A New Role for the Greek Church?” Journal of Modern Greek Studies 17: 23–40. Cantón-Delgado, Manuela, and Anastasios Panagiotopoulos. 2021. “Pentecostal Exorcism and Afro-Cuban Endorcism: ‘Radical Participation’ and the Proliferation of Symmetries.” Social Compass 68(4): 582–99. Csordas, Thomas. 1997 [1994]. The Sacred Self: A Cultural Phenomenology of Charismatic Healing. Berkeley: University of California Press. Faber, Roland. 2019. The Ocean of God: On the Transreligious Future of Religions. London: Anthem Press. 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): 204–17. Goulet, Jean-Guy A., and Bruce Granville Miller. 2007. Extraordinary Anthropology: Transformations in the Field. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Holbraad, Martin, and Morten Axel Pedersen. 2017. The Anthropological Turn: An Anthropological Exposition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kapferer, Bruce. 2010. “Sexuality and the Art of Seduction in Sinhalese Exorcism.” Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology 65(1): 5–32. Kling, Hans. 2016. A Process Spirituality: Christian and Transreligious Resources of Transformation. Lanham, MD: Lexington Press. Martin, Jerry L. 2016. “Introduction to the Topical Issue ‘Is Transreligious Theology Possible?’” Open Theology 2(1): 261. McGuire, Meredith. 1990. “Religion and the Body: Rematerializing the Human Body in the Social Sciences of Religion.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 29(3): 283–97. Panagiotopoulos, Anastasios. 2017. “When Biographies Cross Necrographies: The Exchange of ‘Affinity’ in Cuba.” Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology 82(5): 946–70. ———. 2018. “Food-for-Words: Sacrificial Counterpoint and Oracular Articulacy in Cuba.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 8(3): 474–87. Panagiotopoulos, Anastasios, and Eugenia Roussou. 2022. “We Have Always Been Transreligious: An Introduction to Transreligiosity.” Social Compass (published online: https://doi.org/10.1177%2F00377686221103713): 1-17. Rocha, Cristina. 2017. John of God: The Globalization of Brazilian Faith Healing. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

152

Eugenia Roussou and Anastasios Panagiotopoulos

Roussou, Eugenia. 2021. Orthodox Christianity, New Age Spirituality and Vernacular Religion: The Evil Eye in Greece. London: Bloomsbury. Saraiva, Clara. 2008. “Transnational Migrants and Transnational Spirits: An African Religion in Lisbon.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 34(2): 253–69. Stewart, Charles. 2004. “Relocating Syncretism in Social Science Discourse.” In Syncretism in Religion: A Reader, edited by Anita Maria Leopold and Jeppe Sinding Jensen, 264–85. London: Routledge. Turner, Edith. 1993. “The Reality of Spirits: A Tabooed or Permitted Field of Study?” Anthropology of Consciousness 4(1): 9–12. Young, David E., and Jean-Guy Goulet, eds. 1994. Being Changed: The Anthropology of Extraordinary Experience. Ontario: Broadview Press.

Chapter 7

Learning to Trance The Affective Grounding of Becoming Another Body in Another Place Tamara Dee Turner

‫ﱬﱫ‬ GIVING UP CONTROL When I first had the chance to sit down for an extended interview with the septuagenarian, dīwān ritual singer ʿAbd el-Qādr Guellāl, otherwise known as ʿAbdāqa, he had seen me around for some time, attending and documenting rituals around the western corridor of Algeria. After catching up on news and sharing tea and cakes, ʿAbdāqa turned to me, open to what I would like to ask. Wanting to properly situate the conversation, I asked him whether the friends who had arranged the meeting, Noureddine and Muhammad, had explained to him what I was doing there. “Yes, they told me that you’re doing research,” he offered. “I’m doing a doctorate on dīwān [the ritual], and—” “I know,” he interrupted, with an uninterested tone. Before I could say more, he jumped in: “But! You’re no longer doing research! That’s it, you’re caught up in it [it has taken you].” The Arabic word he used was mamlūka, which can mean “owned,” as in being the property of something or someone else; depending on the context, it can also potentially mean “inhabited by spirits.”1 I started to agree that my work was more than “just research,” as I had long felt a strong affinity for the music, but he interrupted again, repeating “That’s it!,” meaning “you’re not in control anymore”: “Ça y est! Ntīa mamlūka! Ça y est!”

153

154

Tamara Dee Turner

Noureddine followed ʿAbdāqa’s lead and began to recount a story of a dīwān he held at his family’s home in 2013 during which he watched me “trance” (tejdeb) with unusual familiarity and skill for an outsider. While I did not call the experience “trance” because I felt “in control,” in his view trance was precisely what was happening. This discursive way of wrapping my subjectivity—as a foreigner, white, non-Muslim, American woman—and my “research” into the mysterious workings of dīwān meant that I was entangled with issues around transmission, on how embodied dīwān knowledge moves in and between and through people, teaching them things with or without their control, consent, or official association. Indeed, in more ways than one, my research was out of my hands. Some of my dīwān friends confided that the relative ease with which I was able to access dīwān communities was evidence that my research was divinely guided and that I had the favor of the spirits who could have otherwise made my work impossible. Thus, the question of my own agency and power (or lack thereof) was particularly important at every turn. The conversation continued with my audio recorder running. ʿAbdāqa delved into why certain dīwān were “warm” (ḥāmī), even “hot,” calling this phenomenon, a “secret” (serr), a common euphemism for the unseen world of the jnūn (plural: sing jinn), supernatural beings widespread in Islam. Although jnūn are mentioned throughout the Qur’ān as being highly diverse in moral intent, religion, disposition, hierarchy, and powers, the musical calling (aʿīt) of jnūn in rituals is highly contentious. Indeed, while there are “good ones” and “bad ones,” the jnūn are usually feared. Few ritual experts speak of them, much less elaborate, because like music, spoken words as vibrations have the power to call them. ʿAbdāqa was remarkably candid in our conversation, but he let me know when he could not say more and when to turn off the recorder. As we talked through the nuances of “secrets,” ʿAbdāqa’s adult daughter, Khaira, joined us. ʿAbdāqa explained that she had clairvoyant skills, an ability to understand the supernatural dynamics of dīwān. The conversation turned back to me: she believed that I was having interactions with nonhuman agents that either I did not realize or that I was denying. She interrupted her father, conveying that she could sense what was going on with me and the men were missing the point: “She [Tamara] is trying to understand but you [the men] didn’t explain it to her. She’s trying to understand the jinn. What dīwān is.” ʿAbdāqa clarifies, “What dīwān is?” “She’s trying to understand the jinn. Tell her! Explain it to her [tfahmha]. Explain to her everything about the jinn. It’s difficult for her” [ṣʿaib ʿalīha].

Learning to Trance

155

I am a little puzzled but fascinated by the daughter’s insistence and what might be going on here. I don’t say anything, wondering where this is going. ʿAbdāqa, holding back a bit, starts to explain more about the nuances of the spirits, how some of the jnūn are particular (khāṣ) and can hurt a person. He is addressing the other men present, as if seeking some reassurance about why he’s holding back. Khaira jumps in again: “Her, her! [Tamara] has [something] in her spirit [fīha rūḥ-ha].” Khaira explains the time she saw me “trance” dance to a song during a ritual six months earlier. I did not have any recollection of this particular “trance”—but I had been to dozens of rituals by this point. Speaking of me in the third person again, she turns back to the men: “[Tamara] keeps saying, ‘I don’t trance’ but then she trances. ‘I don’t trance’ but then she trances.” The men collectively mutter “hmm” in understanding. Khaira continues. “She knows what’s going on. And now she’s asking about the jinn.” What Khaira means here is that when she brought up my trancing, I had responded by describing it as “light,” or “no big deal”; I was just experimenting with movement. Multiple registers of trance exist in dīwān, both light and heavy. While spirit or jinn inhabitation trance occurs, it is only one form. Sometimes I felt emotionally stirred by the music and allowed myself to approach the ritual space and participate, utilizing the gestures I had seen so many others use, exploring how it felt to move with different songs. Yet I never had the feeling that something unusual was happening. I always felt that I was choosing to engage the way I did. In fact, I feared that I was probably too “in control” to learn trance: I never could silence the observing voice in my head, always second-guessing myself. Since everyone present during these conversations had also witnessed and remembered this particular “trance” of mine, I was curious to know which type they felt it was: jedba (literally, “attraction”) trance, brought on by strong emotions; or ḥāl, a potentially more heavy and dissociative mode of trance that can involve interaction with nonhuman agents, such as a jinn or spirit (rūḥ, singular; arwāḥ, plural). “That was ḥāl.” Khaira says. The guys ask me again, “Don’t you remember that time?” and offer more details about the location and time of year of the ritual. It starts coming back to me. “OK, now that I think about it, it was probably [during the song] ‘Sīdī ʿAlī.’ But it was ‘light’ [trance], not something serious. . .” “Sīdī ʿAlī” was a favorite song of mine. “No,” Khaira tells me. “The song you tranced to was hot.”

156

Tamara Dee Turner

She means that it is a song for a jinn. Heat references the presence of the jnūn. Noureddine then joins in again, recalling that my trance that night was to the song “Jamangaru,” a song unanimously understood to be “intense” and to elicit powerful feelings that send people into deeper states of trance. I couldn’t remember. The next day, I would check my field notes. Noureddine was correct. Khaira elaborates, “[Jamangaru] also has a secret. The one you tranced to has a secret.” The recording picks up my soft, uneasy chuckle. “So does that mean that a jinn took ahold of me?” I reach for one last clarification. Khaira lowers her voice. “Yes.” This conversation stands out as a witness to one of the few recorded moments of my epistemic struggle at the time to “understand” myself in the world I was newly inhabiting. Throughout my fieldwork, multiple ritual experts expressed that I was “not in control” as I thought I was when we discussed the topic of my learning dīwān, particularly the relationship between music and trance. Did we have different notions of “control”? I never wanted to claim to myself or others that I was trancing, even the light forms. First, I saw this commitment as basic humility, especially because trance here is connected to intimate ancestral pain, trauma, and suffering. This was not my history (Turner 2020a, 181). Moreover, Algerian cultural norms prioritize humility and deference, particularly in the presence of elders. I was anxious about crossing a line but I did not know where that line was according to them or according to myself. While I never doubted their descriptions of their own experiences, the possibility of being engaged myself with nonhuman entities, particularly without sensing it, unnerved me.2 I was distinctly preoccupied by “control” because, for so long, trancers had reported “I cannot control myself” (mā ḥakemsh fī rūḥī). Particularly at first, my experiments in “trance dancing” felt like curious corporeal exploration that could have occurred in any context. Yet I did not know what it was “supposed to feel like” to be interacting with these invisible agents. I always considered the inter-relationality of fieldwork and understanding my own affects as critical to ethnography (Stodulka, Selim, and Mattes 2018; Davies and Stodulka 2019), and yet these were not always straightforward. There had been clues already that Khaira was on to something—clues I put into a category of “undecided” in the first month of my fieldwork. The first instance that shook my outlook was in May 2013: as I filmed musicians in a nonritual setting, my hand begun shaking uncontrollably and tears flooded my eyes, without my understanding why. In the coming months,

Learning to Trance

157

Figure 7.1. ʿAbdāqa (black-and-white tunic) singing in a dīwān ritual. © Tamara Dee Turner.

I noted that I increasingly lost the ability to control my emotions in ritual. Emotionality can be both the evidence of and the opening for invisible agents, and given that some of these invisible agents could have wished me harm, I wrestled with the possible implications of “being caught,” of “being affected” (Favret-Saada 2012) even while it was the only genuine way to “participate” (Favret-Saada 1990; see also Halloy 2016). In other words, from this point, I started to doubt my ability to know my own experience. Considering the colonial history of anthropology and the long tradition of invalidating the experience of the “native,” as “something else going on,” claiming their beliefs but our knowledge (Good 2012, 516), the tables were rightly turned here. I was being corrected on my interpretation of my own experience. I was engaged in things I could not perceive. Moreover, as time went on, I reflected on past events and strange sensations I felt but “wrote off” as multi-day ritual fatigue. Increasingly, I began to experience odd and strong sensations in my body during trance dancing—knots in the solar plexus, icy dread, whirring in my head. I took note of these sensations—in fact, they were so unpleasant that they were unforgettable—and afterward I compared them with my interlocutors’ descriptions of “typical” trance affects. I wondered in my field journal whether this was simple suggestibility. If so,

158

Tamara Dee Turner

was there not a way to recuperate the dignity of “suggestibility” as a research skill to affectively “put yourself there”? At stake here in embodied learning was the necessary reeducation of not only my senses and affects (cf. Pierini 2016, 25) but also of my moving, kinesthetic, and phenomenological body. Since detailed talk about trance is rare and normally socially discouraged, my body was the tool that really mattered. Ultimately, in questioning my ability to know my own “experience” in words and concepts like “control,” I had no choice but to “go beyond . . . presumptions” (Bowie 2013, 711) and turn to my body with openness. After all, why did I think that I could learn to communicate in a language that was not my native tongue yet questioned that my body might also need to learn how to be a body in another place— and that it could be?

AFFECTIVE GROUNDING Echoing the themes of this volume, I aim to highlight in this chapter how interrogating and attending to one’s own bodily movements and affects in fieldwork affords a fundamental process of learning about possible states of human and beyond-human consciousness. Specifically, one intervention I wish to make is drawing attention to the felt body, phenomenological body or one’s own dynamic kinesthetic-tactile corporeality as part of an affective epistemology. I draw from long-term fieldwork on the Algerian “Dīwān of Sīdī Bilāl,” a nocturnal, music and trance ritual that emerged out of the trans-Saharan slave trade. Over centuries of trans-Saharan traffic, multiple displaced and segregated sub-Saharan communities and their descendants gradually built a cohesive music ritual tradition imbricated with the local context of popular Islam and Sufism in North Africa. Most notably, like other Sufi orders, dīwān established the musical cultivation of trance states to serve as a means for release, expression, and what we insufficiently label as “mental-emotional health” care in English. In dīwān, one (trance) “dances one’s dis-ease” (cf. Friedson 1996). Critical here is that trance in dīwān primarily relates to pain and suffering, contrary to modes of ecstatic trance (see Bourgignon 2001; Rouget 1985; Turner 2020b) or rapture (notably Racy 1991). Moreover, rather than originating in some cranial space, “consciousness” and its many renderings through trance modes are constituted by affects, both those embodied and disembodied in the atmosphere (Turner 2019). That is, registers and qualities of consciousness are known and differentiated by how they are felt in bodily affective ways; “consciousness begins as a feeling” (Damasio 1999). Similarly, as Crapanzano reminds us, “Much

Learning to Trance

159

of what we in the West call psychological and locate in some sort of internal space (‘in the head,’ ‘in the mind,’ ‘in the brain,’ ‘in consciousness,’ ‘in the psyche’) is understood in many cultures in manifestly nonpsychological terms and located in other ‘spaces’” (Crapanzano 1992, 142; see also Strathern 2010). Still today, dīwān functions as community space to allow for the opening of painful pasts that take over and inhabit bodies. Throughout the robust anthropological and ethnomusicological canons on music and trance, the embodying of memory through trance is well documented (Jankowsky 2010; Kapchan 2007; Emoff 2002; Norton 2009; Stoller 1995, 1989; Boddy 1989). Pasts course through flesh with events never lived by the person being inhabited. History haunts though the body by way of seizing, disorienting, heavy, and writhing affects. Dīwān experts attest that such affects must be “worked out” through the body in trance dancing (see Turner 2020b). With possible registers of dissociation and amnesia involving tenuousness of “self,” talk about trance skirts the edge of the knowable or the sayable. Thus, observation and questions only got me so far. Most importantly, the therapeutic affordance of bodily movement is prioritized over talk or discourse. Rather than serving as “healing,” these rituals attend to that which resists closure. “After all, dīwān is not a cure . . . suffering always comes back in some form” (Turner 2020a, 182). Neither is the goal to cultivate transcendence (Engelhardt and Bohlman 2016). Dīwān rituals are, rather, an embodied, community practice of ongoing restorative self-maintenance. On that note, Asad (2003, 69) underscores pain as “a kind of action,” noting that its endurance is central to virtue acquisition: indeed, ritual elders spoke of ṣabr (perseverance, patience) as fundamental to strength of character. Thus, important here is the particular way in which consciousness and the body relate to approaches to pain and suffering; purposeful suffering has long played an important role in Sufism (Ayoub 1978, 15): ritual serves the function of managing and engaging with it. The music paves the ritual path in a predictable order from dusk until dawn and involves upwards of eighty to one hundred songs. The key ritual instrument is the bass-register lute, the ginbrī, which delivers the identifying melodic themes of every song, accompanied by a chorus of calland-response singers who simultaneously beat metal clappers to anchor the rhythmic cycles. The songs have no composers—they arrived with different sub-Saharan ancestors—and are cyclical, meaning that musical time spirals and expands outward rather than mapping a linear trajectory. Each song attaches to a category of spirit, jinn, saint, prophet, or historical figure. Multiple registers and qualities of trance map on to these personages so that, for example, trances for saints are “lighter” and involve minimal loss of

160

Tamara Dee Turner

agency on the part of the trancer compared with trance that engages spirits or the jnūn. Both men and women trance, and although most processes are individual, both sexes share the ritual space. No such single term as “trance” exists in Arabic. Precisely, while three main nouns index trance “states” (jedba, ḥāl, and bori), dozens of adjectives and verbs dominate trance discourse to describe the affective texture of trance: for example, to be enwinded, to travel, to be mounted by something, to be hit, or to be tossed about. What manifests corporally is key to all of these registers.

AFFECTIVE EPISTEMOLOGIES THROUGH AND BETWEEN BODIES Dīwān experts seem to unanimously agree that “the body is key.” Not only does it provide the “fundamental resource [for] the creation of rituals” (Strathern and Stewart 2014, 93), but it is the site of pain and suffering, the site of release and relief, and the site of felt knowledge, memories, and histories. Trance, as the raison d’être of dīwān, is a bodily process. All trance begins with an affective unsettling: many adepts told me that as soon as they hear “their” song, they “don’t feel right” or “don’t feel well.” This unsettling often manifests as emotional release, such as tears or moaning, or through bodily affect such as clenching, shaking, paralysis, or chills. In order to release and unlock bodies in these states, the affects must be “worked” (yekhdem) through the sonically structured labor of trance dancing. As trance develops, gripping affects and bodily states like paralysis may increase or decrease. Some describe the feeling of being tossed by waves, or terror as they feel the heavy and “cruel” energy of some nonhuman agent invade their thresholds of self. Bodily movement is almost always the antidote. The importance of movement cannot be overstated, including not just corporal “motor” movements of material bodies but affective movement, affective stirrings, and emotions as movements. As Maxine Sheets-Johnstone puts it, “Movement is at the core of life. . . . The chronological epistemological development of all humans, their learning on all fronts, is first by movement, and then by word of mouth. . . . Language is post-kinetic” (2010, 2, emphasis in original). Precisely, the physical process of undertaking, feeling, and physically engaging trance is not discussed in dīwān. That is, nobody receives instructions on how to trance nor do they receive formal learning such as an apprenticeship. Trance dancing is either “picked up” through years of attendance, through ancestry (having dīwān “in the blood”), or through fate or natural talent: in other words, primarily via embodied mimesis (cf. Taussig 1993). Writing on capoeira, Greg Downey’s insights on intersubjective mimetic

Learning to Trance

161

learning “without theory” resonate particularly well, noting that we “‘read’ other people’s actions at least in part with our own sense of movement” (2010, 528). Despite the lack of verbal instruction, however, trancers might be advised to get up (noḍ/noḍī, masc./fem.) and move if they appear to be reacting emotionally and physically. Elders might shout at trancers or ask them to leave for moving inappropriately (e.g., crawling on the ground), dominating the space in front of the musicians, or “showing off.” That is, bodily comportment in trance possesses affective and even moral significance (Geurts 2002); inappropriate behavior weakens the ritual’s atmosphere and efficacy for everyone. Thus, trance involves right and wrong approaches, skill, talent, and is constituted by a semi-codified repertoire of possible movements and gestures. Through years of observation, imitation, repetition, and correction, by learning how to physically do what others do, the body becomes a way of understanding not only how to move but how to feel. The notion of “learning to trance,” itself, helps upset stereotypes of automaticity and spontaneous gnosis. Arnaud Halloy and Vlad Naumescu (2012) helpfully introduce “learning spirit possession” from various cultural contexts. Critical to dīwān is that multiple modes of trance, including but not limited to “spirit possession,” exist along a spectrum in which adepts can move in and out of modes. Moreover, many ritual experts and adepts cared little for determining the “cause” of trance (jinn versus overpowering emotions) and invested their energy into the working and releasing of the affects gripping bodies. “Learning” trance here thus involves managing the nuances within and between these stages. Precisely, trance is arduous, exhausting physical work. Some episodes last for upwards of a half hour or longer, and most end in physical collapse. Moreover, because trance can involve the potentially risky and semiconscious “play” (lʿab) of knives, fire, spears, and whips, trance dancing is highly regulated, refereed by the ritual director (moqeddem) and his helper (shawsh). Expert trancers receive musical priority to amateur ones, reflecting a hierarchy of experience, skill, and age. Even in the deepest states of trance, an expert trancer can be spotted for his or her fluid mastery of physically taxing movements such as the vigorous side-to-side flinging of the torso from a kneeling position on the ground. Musicians respond, adapting the shape of melodies, tempo, and flourishes to the gestural qualities of the trancers. Such musical skill is a felt skill, an ability to intuit what the trancer needs musically. Fundamental to discussing the body as an epistemological tool is the question of how the embodied anthropologist learns to relate differently to herself and others, and to move in a distinct world—in other words, how

162

Tamara Dee Turner

one approaches “epistemological deconditioning” (Groisman 2016, 55; see also Bowie 2013) and, in this case study, particularly such deconditioning, dislocating, and disorientation of the body (cf. Mol 2002; Silverstein 2019). Moroccan scholar Farid Al-Zahi (1999) helpfully delineates four modes of corporeal relationality in Islam that echo dīwān approaches: being with the body in rapture or suffused consciousness of certain trance states; being against the body as in resisting urges; being through the body as in bodily labor; and being in the body, at rest, where the ego is suffused into the body’s being (see also Kugle 2007). In these formulations, Al-Zahi gestures at not only the material, physical body but also at what phenomenological philosophers have discussed as the “felt body,” “phenomenological body,” or simply “corporeality” (Slaby 2019)—in other words, the felt experience of being a body that may or may not align with one’s flesh body. Think phantom pains, for example. Trance is full of such phenomena, like the sense of being mounted by something. I myself experienced an “imaginary” hole in the undersides of my feet, aching as if the flesh were being pulled up from the inside, imploding on itself. Jedba trance is defined a kind of “attraction,” a sense of being pulled on: some describe it as physical pulling (such as a tug on the legs); others describe it as a pulling in the gut. We might also ask: what kind of body is feeling this and where is this body in relation to one’s experience of self? New phenomenology philosopher Hermann Schmitz has influenced a wave of scholars taking up the “felt body” (Leib) and its spaciousness (Schmitz et al. 2011). In fact, he directly relates music, emotion, atmosphere (Schmitz et al. 2011), and Leib through expansive, surfaceless space or, elsewhere, as “intensive magnitudes” of which other notable examples are heat and time (2004/2019) (see Riedel and Torvinen 2019). However, Schmitz’s and Al-Zahi’s helpful frameworks for the “individual” physical body and phenomenological body miss one key relation pertinent to dīwān dynamics: that of intercorporeality (cf. Fuchs 2017). Indeed, because affects circulate between bodies in ritual—like picking up someone else’s grief—and because human material bodies can be inhabited by immaterial bodies of foreign agents, interaffectivity and intercorporeality precisely constitute what it means to feel oneself as a body, in relation to other material and immaterial bodies. Thomas Csordas (2008) proposes intercorporality as a dimension of intersubjectivity while Fuchs (2017, 4) attends to interaffectivity as bodies “intertwined in a process of bodily resonance.” Dozens of trancers may crowd the ritual space and many of them will trance with eyes closed. Moving side to side, backward and forward, tossing their bodies and despite sometimes flinging knives, whips, and spears, they rarely bumped into or struck one another. In other words, trance exceeds the

Learning to Trance

163

individual: it assumes intercorporeality with a built-in “we-proprioception.” Notions of feeling in Algeria—the very notion of “working” affects in a ritual setting through musically directed trance dancing—already fundamentally assume intercorporeal, spatially dispersed, and entangled affects, effecting not just certain individuals but the collective ritual atmosphere so critical to an efficacious release (see Turner 2019). What this means is that learning to trance is a reeducation not only of the individual senses but also of how one inhabits one’s body, kinesthetically and dynamically, in relation to one’s own affects as well as to others. With the felt body so key to the entranced body, one must reorient proprioception, interoception, and tactile and motor skills. Moreover, when the physical body becomes detached from or lost to the person in question, such as in cases of extreme dissociation, the felt dynamics of corporeality take center stage. In the case of total amnesia, trancers cannot recall anything they did or said during trance. Thus, trance precisely questions what it means to have an “experience” when cohesive narration, a stable “self,” and temporality are no longer givens. Robert Desjarlais critiques “experience” for the ways it is assumed to involve interiority, depth, and authenticity (1997, 17) and argues that, unlike Heidegger who takes it as a given, “experience is not a primordial existential given but rather a historically and culturally constituted process predicated on certain ways of being in the world” (Desjarlais 1997, 13). Critique of experience, then, unsettles presumptions about trance because the agency of the person having that “experience”—and, therefore, also the integrity of the trancer’s memory and cohesive narrative—is already in question. Is it possible to have an “experience” when one is not consciously present for it? Is not the process somehow etched into the body’s fleshy memory? (Turner 2020a). As we saw in the opening vignette, one must learn how to rethink “experience” as well as a notion of “my” experience as owned by a stable self, as internal, narratable, intact, and, even more basically, “understandable” through language and signifiers. For in moments of aporia or epistemological crisis—when one asks, “How do I know what I know?”—one meets the most productive openings.

LEARNING TO BECOME A BODY IN ANOTHER PLACE Methodologically, I did not set out to learn how to trance. But then, no one chooses it in this community. As ʿAbdāqa implied, the process took ahold of me. In fact, it was not until I rose and entered the ritual space in front of the musicians to “trance” that I really began to comprehend—in more ways

164

Tamara Dee Turner

than just cognitive—what the affective labor of trance affords. As Andrew Strathern puts it, “embodiment is what makes the knowledge experientially real” (2010, 164). Guided by elders who covered me in colored cloaks that, while tying me to the social, transmitted the energetic potency of the associated personage (Seligman 2018; Espírito Santo 2016; Halloy 2012, 2013), I moved self-consciously in front of the musicians who played to my steps, however “correct” they were or not. Or, prodded by others when my body froze, I felt what it meant to be there, standing empty in front of everyone, waiting for something to rise in me that would move my legs and arms. Most of what I learned about the relationship between music, affect, and trance was through my own body, by succeeding and failing to let my body lead rather than my mind. Learning by movement was, after all, the way insiders learned. In kind, like other scholars (notably Silverstein 2019; Sklar 2001), I take seriously embodied knowledge accumulated through the ethnographer’s own “tactilekinaesthetic body,” to use Sheets-Johnstone’s (2018) phrase, particularly at the affective nexus of music and the body. That said, I never mistook my own process as representative of my interlocutors’; it merely opened up a certain kind of possibility for communication, even involuntary forms (Favret-Saada 2012, 442). Desjarlais eloquently captures this stance, reflecting on his own trance learning in the field: “my trances did not involve a template that recorded, like a photograph, what Yolmo shamans experience of trance. Instead, my memory of the trances should be taken as a sensory transcript of a conversation between cultures, with my experiences marking the crossover between American and Himalayan ways of being” (1992, 17–18). No one “explained” to me how to trance, how to move, and especially how to engage with the intense and strange affects arising in me. Just like with the children who accompany their parents to rituals, my education began by observation. With a shoulder bag full of recording equipment and spare food for the eight hours ahead, I tucked myself into the corners of packed rooms or outdoor tents, photographing and recording audio and video while taking copious notes, carefully watching bodily dynamics and intercorporeal communication between trancers. Usually sitting in the women’s section or at the border between where the musicians (men) joined the women’s section, I learned how to care for women who had passed out near me just after completing their trances—fanning their faces, stroking their backs, giving them cold water to drink or sugar cubes to restore them. Being near to and caring for the trancing-out of pain and suffering constitutes critical affective labor in ritual. I would eventually receive this care myself. Sometimes, during the many hours of rituals, one or two songs would move me to tears or I would feel an overwhelming urge to move. The first

Learning to Trance

165

time this happened and an older man noticed, he called over the ritual leader to bring incense (known to aid in the shifting between conscious states) and I was called up to the ṭaraḥ (the ritual space in front of the musicians) to move. Indeed, those songs that most affected me became public knowledge. If I did not approach the ṭaraḥ myself during “my songs,” my friends would encourage me and, occasionally, physically pull me to the ṭaraḥ. Starting out at the back of the room to be as unobtrusive as possible, I tried out steps and gestures I had observed. I was quite struck by how tiring it was to move elegantly and correctly on the ṭaraḥ. Sometimes when I lacked energy, those who knew me best would rise and physically move my arms for me in certain ways, or put their arms around me to push me back and forth. Like he did with the others, the shawsh (ritual helper) shouted at me that my turn was up if I stayed too long in front of the musicians. Because the sound was everywhere, I was alarmed that when I closed my eyes I sometimes lost my orientation to the direction of its source and would end up turned the wrong way around, facing the audience. I struggled to move gracefully while covered in long cloaks without adequate air flow and that hindered physical mobility and obscured my vision. The more I improved at somatic attention (Csordas 1993) and explored how to move those affects in my body, the more my body opened to highdefinition affective textures. It reminded me of a period in my twenties when I had studied pulse reading in Chinese medicine: what was never perceivable to me before suddenly became ubiquitous simply by knowing to “listen” for it—listening there, too, was about feeling. Similarly, in dīwān, I was learning to feel through my body, to feel sound there. Sound was no longer “just” activating my ears but activated flesh as also heat, cold, grief, dread, aching, and pulling. My solar plexus, my legs, and my palms were listening. Particularly concerning that all of this trance is musically engendered, Charles Hirschkind’s (2006) work on ethical listening in Egypt is helpful in pointing out the way in which persons listen with the whole body, not simply with the ears (see also Eidsheim 2015). Indeed, the Muslim world privileges listening, particularly in religious and spiritual matters. No better example is that the Qur’ān is meant to be heard. Deborah Kapchan (2015) illuminates the body as we might think of an instrument, a “sound body” (emphasis in original) and Patrick Eisenlohr (2018) highlights bodily transduction of sound in Muslim religious contexts. The same approach undergirds my interlocutors’ statements that “the body is key” to the sonic cultivation of trance states, even as non-cochlear sound (Schrimshaw 2013). The important thing was to treat my own bodily experience with an ethos of nonjudgmental curiosity, even if it meant remaining in the not-knowing with “unfamiliar phenomenon.”

166

Tamara Dee Turner

Uncanny bodily experience in dīwān helped me understand and connect to my interlocutors. Rather than continually inquiring into their private worlds, I led with my own unfolding process and asked for their thoughts and analyses. I had a growing inventory of brief but potent trance descriptions from interlocutors that I drew from and compared with—for example, “hit by something,” “touched lightly,” or “filled with wind”—but not all of these descriptions echoed my own. Despite the general reticence to talk too much about trance, my own (unpleasant) bodily investment built trust and opened new threads of conversation, feeding into the constant transformation of my “understanding” (Fabian 2001, 49). Connecting with Ian Hacking (1995), Rebecca Seligman (2018, 399)) emphasizes that embodied learning is a loop, in “that bodily experience and cognitive meaning making are fundamentally linked to one another through circular and reinforcing patterns of influence.” As Emily Pierini and Alberto Groisman (2016) show, embodied learning is often a requisite of anthropological inquiry among spiritual healing and therapeutic contexts. Yet both parties understood the limits of comparison; we defaulted to the common adage “it is different for everyone” (kūl wāḥed ū kīfesh ydīr). I resolved to catalog my uncanny corporal niche, going back to my first experience of my shaking hand while filming, even if I needed to hold its meaning in a space of “not deciding.” The notes of the ginbrī never failed to agitate me: my insides swirled, leaving me dizzy. A rather unpleasant pulling sensation would develop in my solar plexus, pulling outward. Could this be the “knot” in the stomach described by women when they began to feel trance coming on? Later, in longer rituals, I noted a repertoire of sensations that hurt, ached, and buzzed. Heat prickled up my legs, and my skull went hollow, followed by a feathery whirr. During other dīwān, I noted a deafening grief crashing over me, leaving me flattened, but without knowing why. I thought of a friend in Algiers who once told me that sometimes he was overcome with grief that belonged to someone else. In the most dramatic cases, my legs went out from underneath me and I was helped to the women’s section to be pampered with fanning and rose water. Only once did I feel myself to “lose” a portion of my consciousness, very much like the halfawake groggy sensation in the morning. Even then, I still had some control. Eventually—and this is the clincher—I realized that my notion of being “in control” was not a consistent or effective barometer for trance or its quality. The more I tuned in, the more I began to think in terms of graduated agencies, plays of agency: a conceptual shift offering a dynamic spectrum of possibilities. A plasticity of self, a plasticity of body. Trance here was not an all-or-nothing state, of no control or total control. As I improved in my observation, carefully noting the qualitative bodily markers of certain states

Learning to Trance

167

such as the movement or stasis of the eyes, the jerkiness of the arms, and the hunch in the back, I distinctly noticed that trancers fluctuated between states of agency, going in and out of trance registers of varying intensity. Even in bori trance, which involves the presence of nonhuman agents, I watched trancers navigate the process, “coming back to themselves,” as I saw it, and then return to incorporating the nonhuman agent.3 Reflecting on my own process of learning trance—moving rather than talking—it struck me that despite all my “research” agendas of my prefrontal cortex, other corporal becomings were emerging. The body can know things that the rest of the self does not or cannot know. Just as anthropology is accepting the critical role of ethnographers’ affects, we cannot help but involve and employ our own bodies as both epistemological and communicative tools. With a robust, growing canon on these concerns, I posit the importance of including both material and immaterial “body,” physical, felt, and in motion. Moreover, attending to multiple notions of the body necessitates a consideration of relationality with ourselves and others through interaffectivity, intercorporeality, and the many dimensions of what a “body” can possibly accomplish. Thinking back on my own confusion around bodily “control,” I recall Spinoza’s proclamation, much adored by affect theorists, that no one has yet determined what the body can do. Precisely, to become a body in another place, we rely on the epistemological elasticity between both material and immaterial horizons. Tamara Turner is currently based at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development. She is an interdisciplinary anthropologist and ethnomusicologist working at the intersection of psychological and medical anthropology, sound/music studies, affect/emotion and expressive arts. She is particularly engaged with relationships between the arts and mental-emotional health, race, religion, and postcolonialism in North Africa and its diasporas. Her award-winning doctoral thesis was the first ethnomusicological research to thoroughly document the musical repertoire, practice, and history of Algerian dīwān, a nocturnal trance ritual of the Bilaliyya Sufi Order that emerged out of the trans-Saharan slave trade.

NOTES 1. I expressly resist the word “possession” for its colonial legacy of pathologization. Moreover, “inhabitation” is a more accurate term from the Arabic, and, as I will show, even in cases of inhabitation trance, adepts often have the ability to

168

Tamara Dee Turner

stop their trance if needed or to move between different modes of trance, upsetting the stereotype of “possession trance.” 2. From the first time I had heard the music nearly a decade earlier, it moved me profoundly, and I had learned to play the ginbrī while memorizing the songs and their place in ritual. Being the first non-Algerian to attend, deeply study, and participate in the rituals over years, much less “trance” to them, I wondered in my journal whether some of my interlocutors mistook my musically attuned ability with supernatural intervention. 3. Those of my interlocutors who disbelieved that nonhuman agents were present considered this fraud.

REFERENCES Al-Zahi, Farid. 1999. The Body, the Image, and the Sacred in Islam. Casablanca, Morocco: Ifriqiyya Al-Sharq. Asad, Talal. 2003. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Ayoub, Mahmoud M. 1978. Redemptive Suffering in Islam: A Study of the Devotional Aspects of Ashura in Twelver Shi’ism. Vol. 10. Walter de Gruyter. Boddy, Janice. 1989. Wombs and Alien Spirits: Women, Men, and the Zār Cult in Northern Sudan. Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press. Bourgignon, Erika. 2001. “Trance and Ecstatic Dance.” In Moving History/Dancing Cultures: A Dance History Reader, edited by Ann Dils and Ann Cooper Albright, 97–102. Wesleyan University Press. Bowie, Fiona. 2013. “Building Bridges, Dissolving Boundaries: Toward a Methodology for the Ethnographic Study of the Afterlife, Mediumship, and Spiritual Beings.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 81(3): 698–733. Crapanzano, Vincent. 1992. Hermes’ Dilemma and Hamlet’s Desire: On the Epistemology of Interpretation. Harvard University Press. Csordas, Thomas J. 1993. “Somatic Modes of Attention.” Cultural Anthropology 8(2): 135–56. ———. 2008. “Intersubjectivity and Intercorporeality.” Subjectivity 22(1): 110–21. Damasio, Antonio R. 1999. The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness. New York: Harcourt Brace and Company. Davies, James, and Thomas Stodulka. 2019. “Foreword: Pathways of Affective Scholarship.” In Affective Dimensions of Fieldwork and Ethnography, edited by Thomas Stodulka, Samia Dinkelaker, and Ferdiansyah Thajib, 1–6. Springer. Desjarlais, Robert R. 1992. Body and Emotion: The Aesthetics of Illness and Healing in the Nepal Himalayas. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. ———. 1997. Shelter Blues: Sanity and Selfhood among the Homeless. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Downey, Greg. 2010. “‘Practice without Theory’: A Neuroanthropological Perspective on Embodied Learning.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 16: S22–40.

Learning to Trance

169

Eidsheim, Nina Sun. 2015. Sensing Sound: Singing and Listening as Vibrational Practice. Durham; London: Duke University Press. Eisenlohr, Patrick. 2018. Sounding Islam. University of California Press. Emoff, Ron. 2002. Recollecting from the Past: Musical Practice and Spirit Possession on the East Coast of Madagascar. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press. Engelhardt, Jeffers, and Philip Bohlman, eds. 2016. Resounding Transcendence: Transitions in Music, Religion, and Ritual. New York: Oxford University Press. Espírito Santo, Diana. 2016. “Spirits, Spies and Lies in Havana: Unwitting and Paranoid Entanglements between the Ethnographer and the Field.” Journal for the Study of Religious Experience 2(1): 87–104. Evans, Jules. 2017. The Art of Losing Control: A Philosopher’s Search for Ecstatic Experience. Canongate Books. Fabian, Johannes. 2001. Anthropology with an Attitude: Critical Essays. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Favret-Saada, Jeanne. 1990. “About Participation.” Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 14(2): 189–99. ———. 2012. “Being Affected.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 2(1): 435–45. Friedson, Steven M. 1996. Dancing Prophets: Musical Experience in Tumbuka Healing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Fuchs, T. 2017. Intercorporeality: Emerging Socialities in Interaction. New York: Oxford University Press. Geurts, Kathryn Linn. 2002. Culture and the Senses: Bodily Ways of Knowing in an African Community. Berkeley: University of California Press. Good, Byron J. 2012. “Theorizing the ‘Subject’ of Medical and Psychiatric Anthropology.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 18(3): 515–35. Groisman, Alberto. 2016. “Daime Religions, Mediumship and Religious Agency: Health and the Fluency of Social Relations.” Journal for the Study of Religious Experience 2(1): 50–70. Hacking, Ian. 1995. “The Looping Effect of Human Kinds. I: D. Sperber, D. Premack D, & AJ Premack (Red.) Causal Cognition: An Interdisciplinary Approach.” Oxford: Oxford University Press. Halloy, Arnaud. 2013. “Objects, Bodies and Gods: A Cognitive Ethnography of an Ontological Dynamic in the Xangô Cult (Recife, Brazil).” In Making Spirits: Materiality and Transcendence in Contemporary Religions, edited by Diana Espírito Santo and Nico Tassi, 133–58. London: I.B. Tauris. ———. 2016. “Full Participation and Ethnographic Reflexivity: An Afro-Brazilian Case Study.” Journal for the Study of Religious Experience 2(1): 7–24. Halloy, Arnaud, and Vlad Naumescu. 2012. “Learning Spirit Possession: An Introduction.” Ethnos 77(2): 155–76. Hirschkind, Charles. 2006. The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics. Columbia University Press. Jankowsky, Richard C. 2010. Stambeli: Music, Trance, and Alterity in Tunisia. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kapchan, Deborah. 2007. Traveling Spirit Masters: Moroccan Gnawa Trance and Music in the Global Marketplace. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.

170

Tamara Dee Turner

———. 2015. “Body.” In Keywords in Sound, edited by David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny. Duke University Press. Kugle, Scott. 2007. Sufis and Saints’ Bodies: Mysticism, Corporeality, and Sacred Power in Islam. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Mol, Annemarie. 2002. The Body Multiple. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Norton, Barley. 2009. Songs for the Spirits: Music and Mediums in Modern Vietnam. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Pierini, Emily. 2016. “Embodied Encounters: Ethnographic Knowledge, Emotion and Senses in the Vale do Amanhecer’s Spirit Mediumship.” Journal for the Study of Religious Experience 2(1): 25–49. Pierini, Emily, and Alberto Groisman. 2016. “Introduction. Fieldwork in Religion: Bodily Experience and Ethnographic Knowledge.” Journal for the Study of Religious Experience 2(1): 1–6. Racy, Ali Jihad. 1991. “Creativity and Ambience: An Ecstatic Feedback Model from Arab Music.” The World of Music 33(3): 7–28. Riedel, Friedlind, and Juha Torvinen. 2019. Music as Atmosphere: Collective Feelings and Affective Sounds. Routledge. Rouget, Gilbert. 1985. Music and Trance: A Theory of the Relations between Music and Possession. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Schmitz, Hermnn et al. 2011. “Emotions Outside the Box: The New Phenomenology of Feeling and Corporeality.” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 10(2): 241-59. Schrimshaw, Will. 2013. “Non-Cochlear Sound: On Affect and Exteriority.” In Sound, Music, Affect: Theorizing Sonic Experience, edited by Marie Thompson and Ian Biddle, 27–43. Bloomsbury Academic. Seligman, Rebecca. 2018. “Mind, Body, Brain and the Conditions of Meaning.” Ethos 46(3): 397–417. Sheets-Johnstone, Maxine. 2010. “Why Is Movement Therapeutic?” American Journal of Dance Therapy 31(1): 2-15. Silverstein, Shayna. 2019. “Disorienting Sounds: A Sensory Ethnography of Syrian Dance Music.” In Remapping Sound Studies, 241–60. Duke University Press. Sklar, Deidre. 2001. Dancing with the Virgin: Body and Faith in the Fiesta of Tortugas, New Mexico. University of California Press. Slaby, Jan. 2019. “Atmospheres – Schmitz, Massumi and Beyond.” In Music as Atmosphere: Collective Feelings and Affective Sounds, edited by Friedlind Riedel and Juha Torvinen, 274–85. Routledge. Stodulka, Thomas, Nasima Selim, and Dominik Mattes. 2018. “Affective Scholarship: Doing Anthropology with Epistemic Affects.” Ethos 46(4): 519–36. Stoller, Paul. 1989. Fusion of the Worlds: An Ethnography of Possession Among the Songhay of Niger. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1995. Embodying Colonial Memories: Spirit Possession, Power, and the Hauka in West Africa. New York: Routledge. Strathern, Andrew J. 2010. Body Thoughts. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Learning to Trance

171

Strathern, Andrew, and Pamela J. Stewart. 2014. “Comment: Bodies Unbound: Creativity, Ritual, and the Mindful Body.” Journal of Ritual Studies 28(2): 93–95. Taussig, Michael. 1993. Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses. Routledge. Turner, Tamara. 2019. “The Right Kind of Ḥāl: Feeling and Foregrounding Atmospheric Identity in an Algerian Music Ritual.” In Music as Atmosphere: Collective Feelings and Affective Sounds, edited by Friedlind Riedel and Juha Torvinen, 113– 30. Abingdon: Routledge. Turner, Tamara Dee. 2020a. “Affective Temporalities of Presence and Absence: Musical Haunting and Embodied Political Histories in an Algerian Religious Community.” Culture, Theory and Critique 61(2–3): 169–86. https://doi.org/https:// doi.org/10.1080/14735784.2020.1856700. ———. 2020b. “Music and Trance as Methods for Engaging with Suffering.” Ethos 48(1): 69–87. https://doi.org/https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/ full/10.1111/etho.12265.

Part III

‫ﱬﱫ‬ Engagements

Chapter 8

Ways of Knowing and Healing Mediumistic and Ethnographic Epiphanies in the Vale do Amanhecer Emily Pierini

‫ﱬﱫ‬ This chapter deals with movement, not between opposing concepts but along entangled dimensions that are constantly defined through it: spirit worlds, mediums, and the ethnographer.1 This movement undermines notions of bounded bodies and selves to unveil their extended and multidimensional possibilities. While ideas of bounded bodies and selves have inspired a variety of reductions of mediumistic and possession phenomena to pathologies, an exploration of their extensions may rather illuminate the processes, relationships, and ways of knowing that engender both spiritual and ethnographic knowledge. Within this movement, healing emerges as a process that involves an intervention on a human-spirit ecology made of invisible substances and vibrations, which may affect in many ways the physical body, including that of the ethnographer. The spiritual healing that I am addressing here is based upon mediumistic trance; it involves mediums incorporating spirits in order to assist patients who approach this spiritual therapy for a variety of reasons, whether it be physical, emotional, or related to substance addiction, but also to relational issues causing concerns in the person’s daily life. This specific mediumistic practice is developed and performed daily in the temples of the Christian Spiritualism of Vale do Amanhecer (Valley of the Dawn), which was founded in 1959 in Brazil by the clairvoyant Neiva Chaves Zelaya, known as Tia Neiva. Its main temple is constituted as a spiritual town near Brasília, which is a renowned spiritual healing destination for visitors

176

Emily Pierini

from all over Brazil and around the world, even attracting tourists visiting the unique ritual spaces of this spiritual center on the outskirts of the capital. One thousand and two hundred other temples are spread across Brazil and the world, each working as a “spiritual first aid” (pronto soccorro spiritual) where mediums volunteer to provide patients with spiritual healing for free. Exploring the entanglements between tangible and intangible worlds in the practice of mediumistic trance healing, I examine how the relationship between ways of knowing and healing becomes significant when the body is placed at the center of the process of knowing. Therefore, I propose to move beyond the idea of propositional knowledge to embrace the dimension of affect and feeling and to explore a specific kind of knowledge that is generated through experience, engaging with a field of relations between humans and spirits. In my discussion I focus upon the process of knowing at three levels: first, I propose that the Vale do Amanhecer is the outcome of the materialization of the spiritual experience of its founder, Tia Neiva. I address her ways of knowing as spiritual epiphanies that are fragmented and transformative. Second, I propose the term “trance-formative” when this way of knowing occurs in mediumistic trance, forging bodies and selves. Therefore, I approach the process of learning mediumship as learning a way of knowing, in which the experience of other worlds and other selves is materialized through bodies—more precisely, bodies that extend presences—so that spiritual substances and visions are made tangible. In doing so, I also tackle the process of ethnographic knowing by addressing my own bodily experience in the field, understood as being immersed in a fluidic entanglement between human and nonhuman selves, an ecology of tangible and intangible substances. I discuss in particular an experience of learning a way of knowing through the body that allows to experience the immediacy of the field where presence is also intended as co-presence, promoting a common ground with interlocutors, and so that it engenders and transforms ethnographic knowledge. The entanglement between insight, skill, and craft, I argue, is transversal to these three levels of knowing, so that epiphanies and co-presences are constitutive of both mediumistic and ethnographic knowledge.

SPIRITUAL EPIPHANIES: MEDIUMISTIC WAYS OF KNOWING AND HEALING The Vale do Amanhecer and its healing practices are rooted in the mediumistic experiences of its founder. Tia Neiva (1925–85) was a thirty-threeyear-old widow mother of four, working as a truck driver in the construction

Ways of Knowing and Healing

177

of the new capital Brasília in 1959, when she suddenly began to experience some mediumistic phenomena that turned her into one of the most renowned clairvoyant mediums in Brazil, attracting followers who then became mediums themselves. Her mediumship is described in her biography and by the Vale’s mediums as a distinctive kind of clairvoyance, which involved phenomena such as “seeing,” communicating with and incorporating spirits; seeing past, present, and future events; being simultaneously aware of or able to inhabit different dimensions, both spiritual and earthly; and a variety of out-of-body experiences called “conscious transportation” (or “astral travels”) that would lead her to learn with both master spirits and a Tibetan monk (Sassi 1999; Zelaya 1985). The knowledge gathered from these spiritual experiences was welcomed by those around her as being of a revelatory kind. These revelations addressed the types of relationship and exchanges between the earth plane and the spirit worlds, and thus humans and spirits. Her main spirit guides were Pai Seta Branca (Father White Arrow) and Mãe Yara (Mother Yara), who claimed to have had an incarnation as Saint Francis of Assisi and Saint Clare. These guides, working under the aegis of Jesus Christ, lead other groups of spirits manifesting as pretos velhos (“old black”; spirits of African slaves), caboclos (Amerindians), doctors, ciganos (gypsies), ministries of God, Amerindian princesses, mermaids, and spirits of the waters. Spirit guides are described by mediums as having had a pivotal pedagogic role in the creation and development of the Vale. That is, spirits would either instruct Tia Neiva or manifest through her to pass teachings and instructions to the other mediums in order to develop the ritualistic, doctrinal, and physical aspects of the Vale do Amanhecer, with its philanthropic aim to help human beings through the troubled times of transition and disincarnated spirits through their transition toward the spiritual worlds. In order to facilitate these transitions, a complex ritual healing system was developed over two decades under the guidance of Tia Neiva until her passing in 1985. The attempts and experimentations that featured the creation of the Vale do Amanhecer followed the essence of spiritual knowing through mediumistic phenomena, which is processual, sudden, fragmented, intuitive, and transformative for those who experience it directly and indirectly. When mediums in the Vale used to tell me that “Tia Neiva used to see things in the spiritual worlds and make them here on Earth,” they did not mean that she experienced the Vale as a ready-made thing in the spirit world. Rather, their stories insisted on the partial and sudden information she would receive. “She heard the hymns from the spirit world,” and those who could sing and play would compose the music for rituals. A medium told me that Tia Neiva had him called in the middle of the night to ask him to draw the symbols

178

Emily Pierini

she was seeing, which would be used in the mediums’ uniforms. One day, I was following the work of one of the tailors who make ritual uniforms in the shops by the temple, who used to be Tia Neiva’s tailor. While he was making a ritual cloak, he explained to me that those uniforms were not just a representation of the spirit of a knight of whom the male medium is representative on Earth, but they actually embed that spiritual force consisting in its continuity and protect the medium from other forces. In describing how ritual uniforms and vestments were initially created, he said that Tia Neiva would see the spirit guides from various perspectives at different times and she would describe to him their clothes, with cloaks and veils. She would come up with partial drawings until the full image was completed and the tailors could reproduce it to make uniforms. They also experimented with different materials until she confirmed that they could reproduce the sparkle and lights of those clothes in the spirit worlds. In his words: We made a lot of dresses that we then had to change or readapt according to her visions. . . . She used to tell us that seeing a missionary guide straight away was not an easy task. It is a spontaneous phenomenon; there are times when you want to see and you just can’t, and times when you don’t expect it and it simply happens! You don’t always see them closely. Sometimes they appear far away as if beyond a screen. Moreover, she used to see the guide sometimes turned on her side, sometimes on her back, so that she couldn’t see whether she had any symbol on the front, until the entity manifested in a straightforward way.

As from the construction of sacred spaces, all of a sudden Tia Neiva incorporated spirit guides who instructed the other mediums on the disposition and dimensions of the different areas of the temple, including the pyramid on the shores of an artificial lake build for ritual purposes. Ritual spaces were therefore involved in an ongoing process of making, adapting, reshaping, and co-crafting between spirits and mediums. These spaces legitimized Tia Neiva’s mediumistic phenomena until her passing, developing a system of transition of spirits between the world that is at the core of the healing rituals of the Vale. Thus, the systematization of her teachings by her partner, Mário Sassi, underwent the legitimizing “the eye of the clairvoyant” (Sassi 1974). Tia Neiva’s phenomena were transformative also in the sense of making the intangibility of spiritual visions, energies, and substances tangible for those around her who would join her endeavor engaging their skills and experimenting with the materials available at hand. And so, they were able to participate in this shared process of crafting the ritual, doctrinal, and material foundations of the Vale do Amanhecer. Such an infusion of revelatory knowledge fueled the development of a community in the sense

Ways of Knowing and Healing

179

that Ann Taves (2016) has described as the outcome of the experiences that she addresses as “revelation events”: events through which one materializes the knowledge attributed to a superhuman source, in a creative act in which one expands the self to include nonhuman selves, hence generalizing one’s experience so as to engender new spiritual movements.2 Openness and expansion of the self into the other selves are often associated to sudden moments of creative insight. Scholars have pointed to the relation between knowing and inventing, crafting, or making as being of a processual kind, but one that is often intermittent and without a clear destination. Ramon Sarró (2018) has highlighted that revelatory knowledge and inventions share the feature of being both sudden and slow processes. Tim Ingold (2000, 2013) has built upon the idea of a shared, relational movement or flow led by active intuition as a key feature of “knowledge” and “making”: Knowledge, from a relational point of view, is not merely applied but generated in the course of lived experience, through a series of encounters in which the contribution of other persons is to orient one’s attention—whether by means of revelation, demonstration or ostention—along the same lines as their own, so that one can begin to apprehend the world for oneself in the ways, and from the positions, that they do. In every such encounter, each party enters into the experience of the other and makes that experience his or her own as well. One shares in the process of knowing, rather than taking on board a pre-established body of knowledge. Indeed, in this education of attention, nothing, strictly speaking, is “handed down” at all. (2000, 145–46)

The entanglement between insight, skill, and craft is constitutive of the Vale do Amanhecer, as much as of the process of learning mediumship and of ethnographic knowledge, for the process of knowing is interspersed by moments of epiphany and the ongoing development of specific skills that lead to co-crafting new forms of knowledge. At a perceptive level, Tia Neiva was able to make the relationships with spirits be felt through bodies, by developing two specific and complementary forms of mediumship that involve the semiconscious trance of the medium apará, who incorporates spirits, and the conscious trance of the medium doutrinador, who summons spiritual forces and indoctrinates disincarnated spirits. Both modalities allow mediums to maintain their bodily awareness. Bodily experience is indeed at the core of the development of new mediums who come to know the doctrine of the Amanhecer primarily through a process of learning by doing, rather than the transmission of a corpus of propositional knowledge. Patients, who attend the healing rituals in the temples of the Vale do Amanhecer for a variety of reasons, may be advised by the guides upon their need to develop their mediumship.

180

Emily Pierini

Mediumship is considered to be a property of all human bodies, as mediums explained, for it is an energy produced by means of the blood flow—namely, ectoplasm—that if produced in excess may cause disturbances in the person’s health. This idea finds parallels in humoral medicine and twentieth-century European Spiritualism, which postulated that healing would be subject to the balance of the spiritual substances that are constitutive of the human body. These substances have been variably addressed as “ectoplasm” by Charles Richet, “magnetic fluid” or “animal magnetism” by Franz Anton Mesmer, “odic force” or “od” by Johannes Gerber. The interest in “ectoplasm” is also at the center of contemporary approaches seeking to understand its functioning and possible therapeutic uses through laboratory research (see Chiesa in this volume). These invisible substances may flow between persons independently from physical distance, may be influenced by thoughts, or may determine different kinds of relationship with spiritual beings. Relationships may be of a healing kind, which sees spirit guides using human ectoplasm as a means to vehiculate their healing forces, or of an obsessive kind, such as disincarnated spirits feeding themselves with human magnetism, creating a relationship of dependence and affecting the person’s well-being, and thus requiring “disobsessive healing” as a form of treatment. Humans are therefore entangled in these fluidic relations with spirits and also with other humans, as through thoughts and emotions they may affect or be affected by other people’s energies. While these ideas share many commonalities with mesmerism, Spiritism, and occultism, the Vale has developed its distinctive physical and ritual expression of the management of these human-spirit ecologies, as well as its own modalities of development of mediumship. Considering that the accumulation of this substance in the body may cause diseases, and its overproduction may make human beings more inclined to the perception of spirits, putting ectoplasm into motion across the body and distributing it to others through healing is one of the purposes of the development of mediumship. The way ectoplasm moves around the body may also determine the different forms in which mediumship may be developed. According to Tia Neiva, the “semiconscious” mediums of incorporation, aparás, have higher concentrations of ectoplasm in the solar plexus, whereas in the mediums doutrinadores, ectoplasm is concentrated in the head, and thus the increase in blood circulation in this area can be associated to a “conscious mediumistic trance.” Furthermore, some mediums I spoke to said that when they first attended rituals in the Vale’s temple as patients, it was a revelation for them to hear from the spirit guides that they were potentially mediums. Once they decided to develop their mediumship in the Vale, such a revelation was followed by the shift of their role from patients to mediums. While it has been

Ways of Knowing and Healing

181

argued that shifts from the phenomenological reality of illness to the one of healing among Spiritists and Charismatics are rhetorical transitions (Csordas 1983; Greenfield 2008), in the case of my interlocutors in the Vale this transition was especially a bodily and experiential one. Differently from Spiritism, in which those who train as mediums undergo doctrinal classes involving the study of the writings of Allan Kardec and other key figures, mediumistic development in the Vale is focused upon practice since the first class. The centrality of the body in mediumistic development in the Vale implies increased attention to emotions, feelings, and sensory perceptions. While these bodily reactions help mediums discern between the energies of highly evolved spirit guides and disincarnated spirits in need of help, mediums are aided in turn by instructors to express these forces according to the repertoire of gestures and expressions of a particular category of spirit guides. Spirits act through the materiality of the body; they become tangible through emotions and the senses. In so doing, mediums craft their mediumistic bodies and learn a new way of knowing through intuition, feeling, and expanded perception. In the current transnational spread of the Vale do Amanhecer in countries where there is still no translation available of Tia Neiva’s teachings, this process of learning based upon firsthand experience is emphasized even further (Pierini 2021). Therefore, rather than being taught to believe in spirits, spirits become real as people learn to experience them through their bodies and in their everyday lives, and the individual manifestation of spirit guides as persons gains sophistication along the practice and the cultivation of a relationship with them. Reflecting on the materiality of the invisible, Diana Espírito Santo and Jack Hunter refer to “feelings of ‘presence’ through things, such as televisions and bodies” (2021, 3) in an attempt to overcome the limits of normative perspectives of mediation by recognizing their productive affordances. Espírito Santo and Hunter suggest that material organization—in the form of technologies, machines, apparatuses, media, and bodies—participates in the generation of cosmologies of actants, and not just in their affirmation or registry. . . . But contrary to Gell, for whom there was a “real” world—to be contrasted with the “enchanted” one—we believe that worlds are performed and enacted through different forms of relationality and thus become real. . . . Media here does not mediate but rather multiplies and transgresses its condition as mere matter; it extends presences. (2021, 3–4)

In this sense the mediumistic body of the Vale’s mediums may extend presences and, in so doing, it may also be transformed by them. The process of transformation that mediums undergo during the development is indeed deeply felt at a bodily level; in this sense it is transformative or, I suggest,

182

Emily Pierini

even “trance-formative” when the learning process occurs during mediumistic trance states. Thus, this specific mode of knowing shapes their lived experience and articulates bodies and selves.

FLUIDIC ENTANGLEMENTS AND EMBODIED KNOWLEDGE In many ways during fieldwork, I was reminded by my interlocutors of how entangled I was in the fluidic, vibrational space, dynamics, and ecologies of the Vale do Amanhecer by simply being there. Mediums suggested that I had to learn to feel how energy moves in conversations on mediumship and spirits in order to learn how and when to ask questions, as well as how a certain topic may or may not be developed. I had considered this invitation as an additional skill to be added to the ethnographic work, but I have realized how this was an essential skill when sharing the interlocutional space with people, especially in the field, which is another level of listening to others and to the movements of the knowledge that it is thereby engendered. Knowledge could therefore be felt, and so insight emerges. My body was seen by my interlocutors as being responsive to the field of vibrations generated by the temple rituals, which encompasses the whole town of the Vale do Amanhecer. There was a time in which I was affected by fever every two weeks, a fever that kept me in bed for almost twentyfour hours to then disappeared when waking up in the morning. Then a friend noticed that the recurring fever was concurrent with the happening of the initiation ritual that took place every two weeks during the night in the temple, and she made her point that it was my bodily reaction to the forces of the initiation that pervade the Vale’s town. She said that the forces of the initiation ritual could be felt also by visitors, especially if they have not developed their mediumship, and that, in the long term, my body was being reshaped by these forces. Her point resonated with most descriptions I had heard from mediums related to their physical reactions during the development, which included headaches, fevers, back pain, or disturbances of the digestive system. These bodily reactions seemed to reinforce their idea of the reshaping of the body of the initiates. Hence, I asked Nicolas,3 a medium doutrinador, what he thought about this similarity in the bodily changes during the preparation for the initiations, and he said: As the medium progresses, he reaches his consecrations, he acquires more strength, his mediumship gains more power, and the field of consciousness increases, and so his molecules, his cells, undergo an alteration at each initiation. . . . Everyone has his own reactions depending on the amount of

Ways of Knowing and Healing

183

energy that one receives. The week before my initiation, I felt I could not move, I had abdominal pains and fever, which was unusual for me. When I reported it to my instructor, he said I was “in the ritual” because it is a process, as there is going to be a change and thus it should stir something, so you may not feel very well. This happens to all mediums because they will never be the same again; I am not the same of yesterday, nor will I be the same tomorrow. We are in a constant development. . . . The body, the mind, and the spirit are all involved in this process.

The felt transformation of the development through these bodily reactions to different forces and the feeling of an expansion of consciousness were particularly acting upon the mediums’ sense of the body and the self, which has implications in cases where a patient was invited to develop mediumship for therapeutic reasons, including for physical illness, emotional and psychological issues, as well as addiction recovery. Other kind of pains and bodily reactions may be those related to the action of disincarnate spirits—sufferer spirits (sofredores) trapped on the earth after death; obsessing spirits in need of magnetic fluid (obsessores); or spirits from past lives (cobradores) with unresolved issues hindering the domains of relationships, health, work, and finances—and are addressed by disobsessive healing. In this case the medium apará incorporates the spirit and the medium doutrinador indoctrinates the spirit, explaining its condition of disincarnate spirit and the need to move further in its evolution in the spiritual planes, and eventually releasing the spirit. Most rituals happening often simultaneously in the temple are directed toward the release of disincarnate spirits of all kinds. In participating in one of these rituals, namely, the Tronos (Thrones), where spirit guides communicate with patients, the spirit of a preta velha (“old black”; spirit of an African slave), was performing a disobsessive healing when a disincarnated spirit was given the opportunity to be incorporated by the medium, indoctrinated, and then released. All of a sudden, I felt a sharp pain on the right side of my abdomen. Even after the ritual the pain reappeared intermittently; I talked with Diego, who was with me in the temple, and he suggested that I pass again in the ritual of Tronos to confer with a spirit guide to assess what was happening and to get a spiritual cleansing. Another preta velha incorporated in the medium apará and welcomed me in the ritual. I explained what had been occurring since the previous ritual. She then began to pass her hands around my body, invoking different forces and snapping her fingers to release the negative charges as part of the cleansing (limpeza). However, she did not give passage to disincarnated spirits to be incorporated by the medium, unlike the process of most

184

Emily Pierini

cleansings. After the cleansing, she straightforwardly stated that my pain had been caused by an obsessor spirit, and although it had been elevated to the spiritual planes in the previous ritual, it had left an “impregnation” in my physical body. For the spiritual side, she advised me to take some water from the temple and drink it in order to continue to cleanse the body from those energies and reestablish its balance. The temple water, known as “fluidified water” (água fluidificada), is indeed the only “material” treatment given to patients by spirits, and it is considered to be infused by spirit guides with healing fluids from the spiritual planes. For the physical side, she suggested to consult an “Earth doctor.” Indeed, as mediums in the Vale do Amanhecer explain, spirit guides cannot enter the sphere of biomedical advice; mediums say that their spirit guides treat the spiritual side in order to identify and remove the spiritual causes and facilitate the work of doctors. The day after, as I could still feel some pain, I decided to visit a medical center in downtown Brasília, following somehow also the spirit’s advice, and Diego offered to accompany me. I went through all the relevant medical exams until the afternoon, at which point I was called to wait for the doctor in a room. Diego came in with me. As the doctor walked in with the results, Diego noticed that the name on his badge was Dr. Ralph. He looked at me and said ironically: “See, Dr. Ralph is here with us.” But he didn’t mean the doctor in front of us—what he meant was the homonymous spirit of Dr. Ralph, the spirit of a German doctor who incorporates in mediums in the Vale do Amanhecer’s healing rituals. As the “Earth doctor” introduced himself to us, Diego asked him about his German name, which was not a common first name in the area, and the doctor mentioned his family’s German origins. Then the doctor moved to my situation and concluded that nothing relevant came up from the exams, so he reckoned that the pain was probably due to a “residue” of a virus, but that the virus had already left my body. His eventual suggestion was to drink a lot of water to help with the recovery from pain. Interestingly, the name correspondence and the resonance of his words with those of the preta velha were seen by Diego not as a mere synchronicity but as a “confirmation” of the spiritual diagnosis. My bodily experience and particularly the way my interlocutors reacted to it had mobilized different and interrelated concepts both in the temple and in the medical center, such as invisible entities and residues that move through, in, and out of the body (may they be spirits or viruses); cleansing fluids; and ecologies of substances. It shed light on how, from the standpoint of the Vale, spiritual and biomedical domains of action may have been kept separate in practice and scope, but they are conceived as complementary in the therapeutic process and interwoven at a spiritual level. While my body was immersed in these fluidic entanglements, I was also navigating these

Ways of Knowing and Healing

185

complementary epistemologies of healing, with their mutual references and correspondences. Tia Neiva’s position toward science, which was further developed by Mário Sassi in his writings (1974b, 2003), envisioned an interpenetration between science and mediumship that is also quite vivid in the ritual vocabulary used by mediums. Indeed, the temple is presented as a “spiritual first aid” (pronto soccorro spiritual) where in the first ritual of Tronos “patients” are “assisted” by the pretos velhos in what is described as a “triage.” The spirit “examines” the “patient’s condition” from a spiritual point of view, and then indicates which rituals the patient should participate in. Each ritual then involves the incorporation of a “specialized” category of spirits prepared to intervene on a specific domain, with some rituals involving invisible spiritual “surgeries” performed by spirits of “doctors” (médicos de cura). The recurrence of biomedical terminology in the mediumistic practice is a common feature with Brazilian Spiritism—also known as Kardecism—although in Spiritism these references to biomedical discourse are more clearly defined, or materialized, also in the spaces, often set up as clinics and surgeries, that are likely to function in collaboration with biomedical professionals (Hess 1987; Aureliano 2013; Chiesa 2016; Chiesa in this volume; Kurz in this volume; Greenfield 2018). In the many conversations I had with my interlocutors in the field upon the relationship between mediums and other professionals in the understanding of mediumship and healing, they often brought up my approach as a professional researcher. My interlocutors—and here I include both the mediums and the spirit guides I have met in rituals—would move the idea of learning to see things through their categories beyond the intellectual exercise. The kind of exercise they were suggesting was rather bodily, emotional, affective. In our conversations about knowledge in the Vale do Amanhecer, the mediums would usually refer to “feeling.” Their point was that felt knowledge gains far more centrality than transmitted knowledge in the doctrine of the Amanhecer; therefore, if I wanted to understand the Vale do Amanhecer I had to learn this way of knowing. On a few occasions, this view upon my work as researcher was brought up also by spirit guides when I was participating as a patient in rituals. In a ritual of Tronos, a preta velha called Vovó Catarina das Cachoeiras (Grandma Catherine of the Waterfalls), who was incorporated by a female apará, told me: Researchers think that they have explained possession to the wide public, but all they have explained is its technique. Only the medium can have such knowledge through their bodies, through what they experience in mediumship. Being

186

Emily Pierini

a medium is receiving the knowledge of what the Vale do Amanhecer is, not the one that you have seen physically on Earth, I mean the Vale do Amanhecer in the spiritual plane. It is something that should be felt. Do you understand “feel”? If you read one of Tia Neiva’s letters, you can analyze it word by word. A medium will feel the message. A medium before initiation will understand and find meaning in a sentence, but it is not the same meaning that a medium after the Centúria [higher grade of initiation] will find in it. . . . You have to feel. This is how knowledge is transmitted to mediums from the spiritual planes. I am not telling you to become a medium. All mediums are researchers as well. But I am telling you that you should understand mediumship beyond the technique: how people’s lives change when they become a medium, and what knowledge they gain from the energy they work with.

Her words resonated with what one of my first interlocutors had told me. He said that “intellectuals” were good at listening and writing down the information passed on to them by mediums, but what made the difference was understanding that listening (escutar) was different from sensing and feeling (sentir). He advised me, “So be careful in paying attention to your own bodily and inner feelings, as this is the only way to get in touch with this phenomenon and to understand its meaning for us, even if you don’t incorporate spirits.” Both of my interlocutors seemed to imply an idea of cognition that extends beyond what cognitive scientists understand as being the “mind,” and a practice of education of perception that is key to the mediumistic development of the Vale do Amanhecer. I began to reeducate my body and perception by participating in healing rituals while trying to focus my attention on the difference in my bodily feelings from one ritual to the other. I discussed my perceptions with mediums, uncovering with them different layers in this process of learning. I perceived a subtle sensation of comfort and warmth with the pretos velhos in the ritual of Tronos. My hands began to feel like magnets in the ritual of Cura (Healing) when the medium incorporating the spirits of doctors (médicos de cura) placed his hands on top of my head. Then Victor, a medium apará, described to me his sensation of incorporating the spirit of a doctor in the ritual of Cura as feeling a concentration of energy in his hands as though he was “holding light bulbs warming up in the hands while moving them on top of the patient, a change in the blood flow in the hands by means of the action of an energy channeled for this purpose.” In another ritual, I felt a new vitality running in my body through the sound of chants of the caboclo, the Amerindian spirit incorporated by a medium, cleansing my body from the heavy charges through the energies of the forests. In discussing this sensation with Pedro, an apará, he told me that the incorporation of the caboclo for him was one of the most physically engaging, involving

Ways of Knowing and Healing

187

a sensation of his body transforming when banging his chest in order to increase the heart rate and thus the ectoplasm produced by the blood circulation to be used by the spirit to cleanse the patient. When closing my eyes in some rituals, I could see different colors, which I attributed to the feeling of changing temperature. The sounds emitted through the mediums’ voices vary widely according to the spirits they incorporate, from the African accent of the pretos velhos, to the screaming and chanting of the caboclos, from the whispering of the médicos de cura, to the sounds of creatures of the water, winds, and flowing waters of the povo das cachoeiras (people of the waterfalls). According to mediums, by means of sounds a magnetic fluid is emitted and used by the spirit, which acts as an energy operating to cleanse the patients’ bodies. I was perceiving the sounds acting upon my body as waves that were expanding and contracting intermittently. While I do not assume in any way that our experiences were identical, since even each medium’s experience is unique, sharing my experiences in my conversations with the mediums did, however, help us built a common ground. Discussing our experiences, sensations, and even the lack thereof opened up the possibility of unpacking together different layers of these multidimensional and multisensory ways of knowing in mediumship and healing, which has also unveiled multidimensional views within my own ways of knowing.

CONCLUDING REMARKS: EMBODIED KNOWING AND ETHNOGRAPHIC EPIPHANIES In this chapter, I have examined the processual, embodied, and often unexpected character of knowing in the Vale do Amanhecer’s mediumistic healing, whereby knowledge, rather than being a representation of a disembodied mind, is generated through experience as engagement with a field of relations between humans and spirits. The physical body of the medium, as the physical temple, is the center of the manifestation and transformation of forces, where matter is affected and reshaped by spiritual forces, energies, and substances, as well as constantly made and remade by their movement and relations. I argue that it is this movement that we need to acknowledge in our ethnographic knowing, which undermines fixed categories, labels, and beliefs in favor of the exploration of processes, experiences, and fields of relations that engender and ground the material and conceptual aspects of religions. In fact, just as mediums, the ethnographer is also engaged in this process in learning a way of knowing through the body, with feelings and emotions, expanding perception in a field of interactions and “co-presence”4

188

Emily Pierini

with other human and nonhuman selves, materializing the intangible in and through their bodies, which become cartographies of zones of encounter and transition between worlds, where ethnographic knowledge is engendered and transmitted. In the process of learning mediumistic ways of knowing, one should become aware of the entanglements between the worlds and become skilled in the management of these relations. This means learning a way of knowing through the senses, intuition, and extended perception, which demands an increased attention to the body and self. A prominent example of an ethnographer who has paid attention to his body as embedded in a system of invisible relations is Paul Stoller. Engaging himself as an apprentice sorcerer, he considered his illness in the field through the categories of the Songhai of Niger as embedded in a system of sorcery (Stoller and Olkes 1987; Stoller 1997). Others have followed suit in reflecting upon the transformative potential of their experiences of participation in the field (e.g., Young and Goulet 1994; Goulet and Granville Miller 2007; Meintel, Beguet, and Goulet 2020). Goulet and Granville Miller, drawing upon Malinowski (1953) and Johannes Fabian (2000), point to the value of an experiential approach through “radical participation” in bringing into our ethnographies the immediacy and presence of other cultures: “In this experiential perspective, reliable ethnographic knowledge is generated through radical participation and vulnerability, not distance and detachment. How else are we to grasp a ‘people’s point of view, their relation to life, to realize their vision of their world?’ (Malinowski 1953, 25, emphasis in original)” (2007, 11). The ethnographer’s participation in the field, however, has often been hindered by the fear of “going native,” which, as Judith Okely has suggested, is a “legacy of the colonial discourse” (2012, 78). Elsewhere, I have questioned the concept of “going native,” a concept that is inherently asymmetrical, as it reproduces a hierarchy of categories and knowledge, and presupposes a homogenous, static, and unchangeable “native”—which is unlikely to be so given the diversity of personal trajectories and social backgrounds of religious participants in particular (Pierini 2016) and of bodies, understood as multiple bodies, particularly when it concerns illness (Mol 2002; Vásquez 2011). In the anthropological practice, that of “going native” is a concept that implies an unrealistic metaphor if we look at our ongoing ethnographic movement along the experiential and the analytical, which are not mutually exclusive—that is, a movement in which religious participants learning the practice are involved, who themselves analyze the ways they are affected by spiritual phenomena as well as the ways in which their lives are being

Ways of Knowing and Healing

189

transformed by these relationships with the spiritual realms. In considering these movements—of the ethnographer and participants—as intertwined, we may reconfigure our ethnographic encounters in a more symmetrical and inclusive perspective, involving ethnographers, participants, and other nonhuman selves. In this way, we may be able to explore how both ethnographic and spiritual knowledges are made through such encounters. And so, in response to a reductionism that prompts hierarchies of meanings, knowledge, exclusivity, and pathologies, the boundaries of our categories of knowledge should be so porous to become evanescent or even dissolve, allowing our notions to be fluid and lived through, and thus able to explore new connections and symmetrical relations. Jeffrey Kripal (2019) suggests that new scientific ideas and technologies were often engendered by sudden life-changing experiences, often linked to spiritual experiences, that brought about a “reversal of perspective” in the life of the scientist. Kripal mentions, among others, Hans Berger, who had experienced mental telepathy with his sister who, at miles away from him, had sensed his fear during a horse accident; Berger then decided to study psychiatry to understand this psychic energy emitted by the brain and eventually discovered a technology, the electroencephalogram (EEG), to record brain waves. Kripal (2019) refers to these experiences as “Epiphanies of the Mind” (2019). If we consider the different ways in which the ethnographer “can be affected in the field by the alterations that affect” their interlocutors—as Goldman (2003, 465) quoting Favret-Saada (1990) elaborated extensively as “becoming”—or if we consider some of our own “ethnographic incorporations” or “embodied epistemologies,” can we think of “ethnographic epiphanies” as particular modes of knowing in the field? These kinds of insights in the field need to be inserted and analyzed precisely in a field of interactions and co-presence with others. Learning ways of knowing and perceiving with our interlocutors enables the construction of a common ground where our epiphanies and insights, as well as those of our interlocutors, can be shared in exploring how categories, concepts, and knowledge are engendered and lived through. Emily Pierini is an assistant professor in anthropology and a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at Sapienza University of Rome, Italy. She has researched spirit mediumship and healing in Brazil and Europe, embodied knowledge and learning, body and self, spirituality and biomedicine, and transnational healing. She is the author of several journal articles and chapters, as well as the book Jaguars of the Dawn: Spirit Mediumship in the Brazilian Vale do Amanhecer (Berghahn 2020).

190

Emily Pierini

NOTES 1. This chapter is part of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie project THETRANCE – Transnational Healing: Therapeutic Trajectories in Spiritual Trance, undertaken between Sapienza University of Rome, Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina (PPGAS-UFSC), and the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, University of Oxford. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 895395. 2. Taves (2016) refers to Mormonism, Alcoholics Anonymous, and the network of A Course in Miracles. 3. Pseudonyms are used for all participants. 4. I refer to the concept of “co-presence” as used by Beliso de Jesus (2015).

REFERENCES Aureliano, Waleska. 2013. “Terapias Espirituais e Complementares no Tratamento do Câncer: A Experiência de Pacientes Oncológicos em Florianópolis (SC) [Spiritual and complementary therapies in cancer treatment: The experience of cancer patients in Florianópolis (SC)].” Caderno Saúde Coletiva 21(1): 18–24. Beliso De-Jesús, Aisha M. 2015. Electric Santería: Racial and Sexual Assemblages of Transnational Religion. New York: Columbia University Press. Chiesa, Gustavo Ruiz. 2016. Além do que se vê: Magnetismos, Ectoplasmas e Paracirurgias [Beyond what you can see: Magnetisms, ectoplasms and parasurgeries]. Porto Alegre: Multifoco. Csordas, Thomas J. 1983. “The Rhetoric of Transformation in Ritual Healing.” Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 7: 333–75. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 2004. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London: Continuum. Espírito Santo, Diana. 2016. “Clothes for the Spirits: Opening and Closing the Cosmos in Brazilian Umbanda.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6(3): 85–106. Espírito Santo, Diana, and Jack Hunter. 2021. “Introduction: On the Materiality of Unseen Things.” In Mattering the Invisible: Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo and Jack Hunter, 1–21. New York: Berghahn Books. Fabian, Johannes. 2000. Out of Our Minds: Reason and Madness in the Exploration of Central Africa. Berkeley: University of California Press. Favret-Saada, Jeanne. 1990. “About Participation.” Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 14: 189–99. Goldman, Márcio. 2003. “Os Tambores dos Vivos e os Tambores dos Mortos: Etnografia, Antropologia e Política em Ilhéus, Bahia [The drums of the living and the drums of the dead: Ethnography, anthropology and politics in Ilhéus, Bahia].” Revista de Antropologia 46(2): 446–76.

Ways of Knowing and Healing

191

———. 2005. “Jeanne Favret-Saada, os Afetos, a Etnografia [Jeanne Favret-Saada, affections, ethnography].” Cadernos de Campo 13: 149–53. Goulet, Jean-Guy, and Bruce Granville Miller. 2007. “Embodied Knowledge: Towards a Radical Anthropology of Cross-Cultural Encounters.” In Extraordinary Anthropology: Transformations in the Field, edited by Jean-Guy Goulet and Bruce Granville Miller, 1–14, Lincoln: Nebraska University Press. Greenfield, Sidney. 2008. Spirits with Scalpels: The Cultural Biology of Religious Healing in Brazil. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press. Groisman, Alberto. 2016. “Daime Religions, Mediumship and Religious Agency: Health and the Fluency of Social Relations.” Journal for the Study of Religious Experience 2: 50–70. Hess, David J. 1987. “The Many Rooms of Spiritism in Brazil.” Luso-Brazilian Review 24(2): 15–34. Ingold, Tim. 2000. The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. London: Routledge. ———. 2013. Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture. Abingdon: Routledge. Kripal, Jeffrey J. 2019. The Flip: Epiphanies of the Mind and the Future of Knowledge. New York: Bellevue Literary Press. Meintel, Deirdre, Véronique Beguet, and J.-G. Goulet, eds. 2020. Extraordinary Experience in Modern Contexts. Montréal: Kosmos. Mol, Annemarie. 2002. The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Okely, Judith. 2012. Anthropological Practice: Fieldwork and the Ethnographic Method. London: Berg. Pierini, Emily. 2016. “Becoming a Spirit Medium: Initiatory Learning and the Self in the Vale do Amanhecer.” Ethnos 81(2): 290–314. ———. 2020. Jaguars of the Dawn: Spirit Mediumship in the Brazilian Vale do Amanhecer. New York; Oxford: Berghahn Books ———. 2021. “Transnational Mediumship and the Development of a Transhistorical Self in the Vale do Amanhecer.” Social Compass 68(2): 218–30. Sarró, Ramon. 2018. “Between Writing and Art: The Invention of Mandombe.” Terrain 70, DOI: 10.4000/terrain.17289. Sassi, Mário. 1974. Sob os Olhos da Clarividente, 2a Edição [Under the eyes of the clairvoyant, 2nd edition]. Brasília: Editora Vale do Amanhecer. ———. 1974b. No Limiar do Terceiro Milênio [On the edge of the third millennium]. Brasília: Editora Vale do Amanhecer. ———. 1999. Vale do Amanhecer: Sob os Olhos da Clarividente [Valley of the Dawn: Under the clairvoyant eyes]. Brasília: Editora Vale do Amanhecer. ———. 2003. 2000 a Conjunção de Dois Palnos [2000 the conjunction of two planes]. Brasília: Editora Vale do Amanhecer. Stoller, Paul. 1997. Sensuous Scholarship. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Stoller, Paul, and Cheryl Olkes. 1987. In Sorcery’s Shadow: A Memoir of Apprenticeship among the Songhai of Niger. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

192

Emily Pierini

Taves, Ann. 2016. Revelatory Events: Three Case Studies of the Emergence of New Spiritual Paths. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Vásquez, Manuel A. 2011. More Than Belief: A Materialist Theory of Religion. New York: Oxford University Press. Young, David E., and Jean-Guy Goulet, eds. 1994. Being Changed: The Anthropology of Extraordinary Experience. Ontario: Broadview Press. Zelaya, Neiva Chaves. 1985. Minha Vida, Meus Amores [My life, my loved ones]. Brasília: Editora Vale do Amanhecer.

Chapter 9

Learning to Read the World Education of Attention and Parapsychic Perception of the Environment Gustavo R. Chiesa

‫ﱬﱫ‬ Located in the Brazilian city of Foz do Iguaçu, ECTOLAB: The International Association of Laboratory Research in Ectoplasmy and Parasurgery consists of a nonprofit research institution formed by doctors, psychologists, engineers, biologists, and neuroscientists interested in deepening their reflections and experiments around the ideas of health, healing, and wellbeing, as well as physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual balance, whose focus is on trying to understand, measure, and identify “ectoplasm” and the effects that such a substance causes on living organisms and the environment. Such a “substance,” “fluid,” “energy,” “thing,” “semi-material,” or “material-spiritual” would be found in all living beings and supposedly presents therapeutic and healing properties. The first studies on ectoplasm were conducted by researchers—chemists, physicists, biologists, physicians, psychiatrists—renowned in science and were established and practiced in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with emphasis on the Nobel Prize winner in 1913, Charles Richet, author of the term “ectoplasm” (from the Greek: ektos, meaning “out,” and plasma, meaning “mold” or “substance”). Other researchers of different nationalities, such as Albert von Schrenck-Notzing, Alexander Aksakof, Alfred Russel Wallace, Camille Flammarion, Cesare Lombroso, Ernesto Bozzano, Gustave Geley, and William Crookes, have also studied this “substance” in an extensive and detailed way, observing, through numerous experiments, its characteristics as well as its different uses and effects on the beings that 193

194

Gustavo R. Chiesa

produce it. Directly influenced by emotional factors and very sensitive to luminosity, ectoplasm moves in a sinuous way and can take the form of wires, sticks, spirals, webs, vapors, or smoke, presenting easy decomposition and dematerialization (Palhano 1996). It is important to say, however, that in this chapter I do not wish to present these scientific researches or the historical course and the controversies that involved this substance, but wish to describe some of the activities developed by the researchers who created ECTOLAB and were interested in making science of the so-called religious or spiritual things, without leaving aside the therapeutic effects of such practices (and the “substances” involved). I also want to reflect briefly on the effects and sensations that this substance causes on the bodies (including myself) and the environment. Such attention to the effects and sensations provoked helps us understand a central aspect of the worldview or way of knowing of this group of people. It is the idea of “experiencing.” More than simply believing, one must “have one’s own experiences,” the ECTOLAB researchers emphasize. In this way, the “subject” of research becomes first and foremost the “object” of investigation. Such subjectively lived experiences will be registered and compared with other personal experiences, aiming at the construction of objective facts from the shared intersubjectivity. The idea that these phenomena or subjective experiences should be experienced in the controlled space of a laboratory somehow resumes Richet’s concerns in investigating the mediums responsible for the materialization process based on strict control protocols (Chiesa 2016). However, as we will see, the emphasis on a science of the laboratory to account for phenomena not at all usual to this type of environment can work as a real “trap” since it is not known exactly what ectoplasm is, nor how it can be measured. Despite this lack of definition, ECTOLAB researchers are clear in asserting its existence and recognizing its effects as well as its therapeutic potential.

THE INTERASSISTENTIAL DYNAMICS OF PARASURGERY A group of people dressed in white clothes works on the preparation of a salon by organizing the arrangement of a series of chairs in order to form something similar to two concentric circles composed of twelve people in each of them. Sitting in front of these circles is a person responsible for conducting the activity and sustaining the “energy field” of that space. Around these circles, mattresses are placed for those who prefer to remain lying down donating their “energies” during the activity that is about to begin. This is the Interassistencial Dynamics of Parasurgery promoted weekly by ECTOLAB.

Learning to Read the World

195

On average, about fifty people, among ECTOLAB volunteers and occasional visitors, participate in the dynamic that always occurs on Fridays, from 7 p.m., in a hall located in the city of Foz do Iguaçu. Before accessing the interior of the hall, the visitors go through a quick presentation made by one of the volunteers, explaining how the dynamic works. Warm clothes and blankets are offered to those who are bothered by the low temperature of the environment (around 18°C/64.4°F), necessary, according to the volunteers, to stimulate the production of “bioenergies” or, more exactly, the “ectoplasm.” As visitors enter the cold and dark room (because the low light would also supposedly facilitate energy production), they are able to choose between sitting on the second row of chairs or lying on the mattresses. In both cases, their role will be to donate energies in order to help sustain the “energy field” established in that environment. The dynamic begins with a work of energetic mobilization: first through the technique of the “vibrational state,”1 then through the exteriorization of the energies to the whole environment, and finally through the assimilation of these energies in order to establish an “energetic field” that ensures the full realization of the assistential activity of “parasurgery” (or “spiritual surgery”). Of all the characters in the scene, the protagonists are the twelve volunteers who go, one after the other, every nine minutes, to the center of the circle (while all the others remain seated and silent), so that the extraphysical consciousnesses (or spirits) connect or couple themselves (in a kind of mediumistic trance or discoincidence of the bodies, but without losing their lucidity) and use the psychic and energetic bodies of the volunteer as an energetic mold for the realization of parasurgery.2 The procedure therefore takes place on a purely energetic or spiritual level, without any physical intervention. With the support of a spiritual (or extraphysical) team of doctors and other specialists connected to the institution, during the coupling period, the healthy volunteer will donate his energies to the sick extraphysical consciousness (spirit), which will have its own spiritual (psychic and energetic) body restored, reenergized, and unblocked (especially in the regions or chakras that were sick, paralyzed, blocked). Such energies used for the benefit of the disincarnated spirit are nothing more, say the volunteers, than the ectoplasm itself in its most subtle form, invisible to human eyes but somehow perceived or felt by those who are there. The assistance offered in the dynamic is not limited to those who have already died. Living beings can also be assisted through the same energies and techniques with some minor differences. In this case, sick people are not taken to the salon where the activity takes place, but rather they must remain in their homes and will be assisted at a distance by the intraphysical and extraphysical teams of ECTOLAB. Part of the extraphysical team

196

Gustavo R. Chiesa

will go to the location of the person who requested the assistance (via the ECTOLAB website) and will perform the energetic and spiritual care at the individual’s home using the ectoplasm donated by the participants of the activity. The volunteers should go to the hall only with the intention of donating and assisting, and not being assisted, which makes that environment “an optimized energy field.” This field will serve as raw material for the extraphysical team to perform the parasurgery in the living and the dead beings, acting energetically in their spiritual bodies. In the course of the activity, between one and the other coupling, a one-minute break is given for all present to note, on clipboards given at the entrance of the room, their perceptions (or “paraperceptions”) during those nine minutes in which a certain volunteer remained seated in the center of the circle. After the last giver’s passage, a work of “energetic desassimilation” begins, similar to the one carried out at the beginning of the activity, with the realization of a kind of “fluidic cleaning” of the possible evil energies that were brought in and remained contaminating the environment. During the activity the participant, be it an experienced volunteer or an occasional visitor, is expected to maintain a posture of alert passivity, always being attentive to everything that happens in the field and within himself. During the two hours he is sitting there (or lying on the mattress), and especially at the moment he goes to the center of the circle to perform the coupling, he should avoid performing any body movements and try to maintain silence and concentration, focusing his thoughts on the extraphysical team or on the group of helpers (protective spirits) who assist that environment and those people. The fundamental thing is to be connected: “to feel the extraphysical team, feel the field, relax, and let the thing happen. . . . Millions of things are happening around us, and you feel. . . you feel chills, you have insights, ideas, emotions. . . . So, you should write down everything you’ve noticed, no matter how absurd it may seem.” Don’t try to control the environment; “the most important thing is your body feeling. This is your main machine,” says one of the volunteers. The debate about the perceptions noted during the dynamics then begins. This is perhaps, especially for novice visitors, the highlight of all the activity. The numerous coincidences between people’s perceptions are something really impressive. Scenes of accidents, disasters, surgeries, organs or parts of the human body, clinical procedures, people with mental disorders— all often described in rich detail (containing dates, addresses, names, physical characteristics, etc.)—attract attention, especially when these descriptions are perceived and noted at the same time by several people located at distant points in the hall. Even if the perceptions are coincidental, the way each

Learning to Read the World

197

individual perceives the environment can vary. Thus, while most people visualize images or flashes of a scene happening, others perceive clippings or fragments (a kind of photograph) of that situation, or just hear someone describing a scene or a certain illness, or even feel physical repercussions on their own body indicating in which region or organ the parasurgery was performed. For example, if the person assisted has a liver problem, the “energy giver” might feel some sensation in his liver, demonstrating some correspondence between the physical and extraphysical organs. These perceptions are collected and filed to be later analyzed by the ECTOLAB researchers. In the first dynamic I participated in, I was invited to sit in the “giver position,” staying, therefore, in the second row of chairs, precisely in the farthest chair so that I could have a better overall view. Despite the silence, the monotony, and the darkness that tend to provoke a certain state of sleepiness, I stayed there the whole time, watching the scene and taking some notes in my field notebook. I tried to keep some distance from what was happening there, without letting myself get involved and without knowing what was really happening—until, at a certain moment of the dynamic, a curious image came to my mind. I started to visualize the scene of a car accident, a rollover that left the driver seriously injured, especially in the head region. Then I saw this same driver lying on what looked like a hospital stretcher and surrounded by a medical team performing a surgical procedure on his head. The scene disappeared and I turned my attention again to the person who was at that moment sitting on the armchair located in the center of the circle. I then began to feel a discomfort at the height of my stomach, with a sensation similar to the desire to vomit and an uncontrollable desire to yawn and cough. I felt my eyes filling with tears, my ears and nose itching, as if something wanted to come out of me. The sensation, however, diminished, the person got up, and I noted the sensations that I just described. A few moments passed and I saw another scene, a flash, in reality, of a stomach surgery. I couldn’t identify the person receiving the surgery, nor the place; I just quickly visualized the surgical procedure and soon the image disappeared from my mind. A few more minutes passed and I began to visualize the scene of a shipwreck, with several lifeboats rescuing the victims of a ship that had just sunk. The dynamic finally closes, the lights come on, and the debate begins about the perceptions of those who are there. Besides me, three other people have noted on their clipboards, during the dynamic, having seen situations involving car accidents and head surgery. Two people reported a shipwreck scene and six others said they had visualized a stomach surgery. As noted, these reports will be collected by volunteers to be analyzed and compared with the requests for parasurgery performed during that week. For example, regarding the four perceptions

198

Gustavo R. Chiesa

of surgery on the cerebellum, it was found that in the same week there was a request for parasurgery for someone who had a tumor on the cerebellum. It is worth mentioning that the people who participate in the dynamics and record their perceptions have no previous access to the requests precisely so that their perceptions do not run the risk of being biased by information outside the dynamics. The similarity of such perceptions is something that impresses, especially because of the frequency with which it occurs. Every Friday the coinciding reports are repeated, even if the audience varies. And even though I try to stay distant and disconnected, the fact is that somehow I was “captured” and ended up falling into the web (or entanglement) of beings and energies that make up that environment. In short, I was affected by the same forces that affected (and still affect) my natives (Favret-Saada 1990). Such an methodological-epistemological gesture does not coincide with the well-known and often controversial process of “becoming native,” either, not only because of the problematic “native” category—which presupposes the existence of a homogeneity of experiences, worldviews, and life trajectories—but also because “participation does not automatically entail the researcher closing the ‘ethnographic eye’” (Pierini 2020, 11), ceasing to reflect critically on his personal experience or to talk about it with his interlocutors. In a similar way to Jeanne Favret-Saada, the process of being affected transformed me not into a dewitcher, as in her case, but into an ectoplast. The possibility of being affected arose when I actively participated in that environment and related to all the “beings” and “forces” that were present there. This whole-body involvement somehow allowed me to be captured by the native experience. In this sense, being affected, participating, and subjectively experiencing what I had been observing at a distance allowed me not only to know and understand those people, their sensations, perceptions, and experiences a little more, but also to develop or at least initiate the development of my “parapsychic” abilities. In this case, it is an attempt to make participation or affections a (somatic) way of producing knowledge about the world, derived from a methodological approach based on the cognitive, empathic, and also corporal engagement of the researcher (Bowie 2013; Pierini 2020), which will result in learning a unique way of being, knowing, and perceiving the world. Further on, in the research on these perceptions occurs, first, the compilation of all the requests for parasurgery performed in the last week through the ECTOLAB website. In this cataloging, a series of data will be analyzed, compared, and separated by motivations (of the requests) and medical specialties (including not only traditional areas of medicine such as oncology but also psychic, parapsychic, or extraphysical disorders such as so-called

Learning to Read the World

199

extraphysical harassment or obsession). The researcher will collate the requests with the perceptions noted during the dynamics, approximating what is understood as “objective” data and separating it from the “subjective” variables. Thus, the more information and contextualization the perception offers, the more objectively presented the data will be. Saying, for example, that a person who has already died was assisted is subjective information that will become objective when we know, through the perception of one or more participants of that dynamic, that this person was a blonde, thirty-fiveyear-old woman named Helen who died in an automobile accident. Data can also become objective from the sum of different perceptions that at first appeared subjective. For example, we have the case of people who visualized the shipwreck; two of them (including myself) noticed lifeboats and another had, at the same time and without having access to other people’s information, the sensation of drowning. Such perceptions combined can compose objective data. Physical diseases in general are always treated as objective information. The role of researchers is to establish, from these cases, a pattern of marking or definition about what is subjective data and what is objective data. Such data will be approximated and will form a spreadsheet with graphics and statistics, presenting all these perceptions and sensations, aiming at finding coincidences and establishing approximations. Despite all the analytical and statistical work, there is a consensus among researchers that the central objective of all the activities developed by ECTOLAB, especially the dynamics, is assistance. In this sense, the researchers aim specifically to qualify this assistance work seeking to better understand the parapsychic abilities of its participants (especially clairvoyance and clairaudience) and the ectoplasm because these are, according to them, respectively the “working tool” and the energetic “raw material” of the parasurgery technique. If at the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries the ectoplasm could be seen, touched, and photographed by researchers (Chiesa 2016), now, in this other context, it is made present mainly through its symptoms— that is, through the way it affects the bodies of those who produce it. Among the sensations reported by ectoplasts along the dynamics, the most common are lumping and itching sensation in the throat, coughing, choking, yawning, abdominal contraction, lacrimation, nasal discharge sensation, urge to sneeze, as well as buzzing and itching in the ears. It can be seen that all the sensations described refer to the idea that something needs to come out, or rather that something “leaks” from their bodies in an uncontrollable way. Such symptoms, in the view of ECTOLAB researchers, are strong indications that the energetic field created in the Interassistential Dynamics of Parasurgery stimulates the production of phenomena related to the presence (even if invisible) of ectoplasm in that environment.

200

Gustavo R. Chiesa

Still with regard to the perceptions and sensations that occur in the dynamics, through the participants’ notes the researchers found that most of these experiences happen at the beginning of the activity, during the first couplings (or “individual fields”). This occurs according to the degree of “energetic conditioning” of the participants in the dynamic. As time goes by, and with the greater assiduousness and commitment of its participants, the amount of objective and coincident perceptions tends to increase. Perceptions become more refined, with more informative and detailed contents, which contributes to the development of the research. As one of the dynamic volunteers points out, It’s not that perception has improved much, but sometimes a perception that is a flash has a greater wealth than one with a very large impact and may not be very rich. A flash can have a very accurate acuity. . . And then you realize that details can be more important than something more impacting such as a materialization. This is a nineteenth-century thing. The very ideal, which will scientifically develop the thing, is the detail. What makes a difference in science is detail. The reading of the world gets better the more we increase the resolution of details. Parapsychism increases this condition of understanding the world. It is important to know how to differentiate between a reverie and a parapsychic perception because in the latter you do not lose your lucidity, you do not lose your clarity. But a correct perception can become a reverie if you don’t control yourself, [if you] don’t fix your thought. You take something, a perception, for a moment, but if you lose yourself, you let yourself go. You do the right reading, but then you embark on an onyrism. Onyrism is the margin of the parapsychic process. You have to work. The threshold of onirism is the parapsychic process. That is discernment: pushing the frontier of onirism a little bit there. But knowing how to deal with it is a challenge. You have to know how to balance yourself in order not to get lost. You have to have a divided attention. You can leave that and continue with lucidity. You must have two elements working. The divided attention with deep concentration, without loss of quality. (Testimony of an ECTOLAB volunteer)

There are two points I wish to emphasize here. The first refers to the attention given to detail or, more precisely, to the very fact of being attentive and making a “correct” reading of the environment. Parapsychic perception enables this better understanding or reading of the world precisely because it allows one to see what no one sees or beyond what is normally seen. Paraphrasing Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1981, 30), it enables the constitution of new regions in the world, revealing “what was until then presented as no more than an indeterminate horizon.” But it is necessary to know how to see without losing oneself, which implies a process of education of attention (Ingold 2018). This is the second point. We must be attentive, let ourselves

Learning to Read the World

201

be taken (or captured) and affected by everything that involves us, but with the ability to maintain control, lucidity, and discernment of all this involvement. In other words, we must follow the flow of perceptions and affections with “divided attention”—it means being attentive to the body and with the body (Csordas 2002)—and the necessary concentration to interrupt the flow and stabilize it at the moment it is needed. After all, what is at stake in this process is the systematization of a series of experiments aiming at the production of a scientific (and not oneiric) knowledge about reality. What is at stake is precisely the definition of what is real and, consequently, its distinction in relation to what is considered fantasy, reverie, dream, or imagination. It is not a question, therefore, of discarding or hiding the imagination, but of stimulating it in a balanced, conscious, and attentive way to its possible effects. The fundamental element that enables the increase of perceptions (or paraperceptions) of the environment is the ectoplasm, since it is that which makes the connection or mediation between the material and spiritual planes. Inspired by Tim Ingold (2011), we would say that just as a spider depends on its web to perceive, capture, and interact with its environment, the ectoplast medium makes use of its ectoplasm to perceive the environment in addition to all beings and forces around it. Understanding how this relationship between (para)perception and ectoplasm is established is one of the main objectives of ECTOLAB. The hypothesis, raised by the researchers of this institution, is that the presence of ectoplasm makes the environment more “dense” and therefore more likely to be felt, perceived, and affected by it. Yes—alert such researchers—the environment affects us in different ways, and the ideal is precisely to know how to be affected in a positive and healthy way, amplifying and qualifying the connection with or attention (because to be attentive is to be connected) to everything that involves us. In this sense, it is about bringing the extraphysical dimension to the immanent plane, to everyday life, trying to insert this “multidimensionality” in the folds of daily life. For example, when we meet a person on the street, we must consider this extraphysical or multidimensional dimension that goes beyond the five senses. “We must be aware that energetic exchanges can take place; we must be aware of the energetic pattern that person or that environment possesses,” the ECTOLAB researchers recommend, which justifies the importance of learning to read the world and everything that surrounds us. To be affected by the environment and other beings is not perceived as something negative by the participants of the dynamics. On the contrary, such capacity, if well balanced, is one of the main sources of knowledge about the other and about oneself. To be affected, in this sense, means to be available, receptive, and open—or, in a native language or emic view, it

202

Gustavo R. Chiesa

means to be an intraphysical consciousness willing to face and let oneself be wisely affected by the experiences that life provides. And perhaps for this reason, some of the volunteers have shown such an interest in the anthropological research method. The radical dive into a singular cultural universe, the immersion and engagement as a possibility of knowledge, the learning from one’s own body, and the need to transmit this set of lived experiences in the most intelligible way are elements that are somehow aligned with their ethos and worldviews. One of the central elements defining this cosmovision is the idea of self-experimentation. For the researcher interested in studying in detail the repercussions experienced in the dynamics and originating from the exteriorization of the ectoplasm, it is possible, through self-research and selfexperimentation, to give up the figure of the medium—which, as pointed out in several researches (Lachapelle 2005; Sharp 2006; Chiesa 2016), was the central character of the researches carried out by Charles Richet, Gustave Geley, William Crookes, and numerous other researchers of the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century—and make himself the “guinea pig” of his own investigations. Following this argument, it is about the difference between that subject who does research with the ectoplasm, on the condition of being himself an ectoplast (and therefore his own “object” of investigation), and that who does research on the ectoplasm and its givers (the ectoplast mediums). Thus, the volunteers who participate in the dynamics and donate their energies for the realization of parasurgery are, above all, their own researchers, their own objects of study, their own laboratories. It is the deepening of this knowledge about oneself that will enable, for example, the increase in the precision of (para)perceptions as well as the improvement of the connection established with extraphysical helpers (who help the manipulation of ectoplasm for therapeutic purposes) and with the very people to be assisted. This deepening will allow volunteers to qualify the assistance to the extent that the giver (and self-researcher) will be able to better understand the needs and deficiencies of a person who is sick. Finally, in the long run, such continual improvement of oneself will result in the expansion of the assistance work to all moments of life, no longer being restricted to the time limits of the Interassistance Dynamics of Parasurgery.

THE ECTOPLASM RESEARCH LABORATORY At the end of 2013, ECTOLAB inaugurated the ectoplasm research laboratory proposing to investigate its origin and composition, its form of manifestation, and its possible physiological and environmental effects. Coordinated

Learning to Read the World

203

by a volunteer team of doctors, neuroscientists, and electronic engineers, the place was built around a green area (a small forest, because it is believed that plants stimulate the production of ectoplasm) and designed according to the criteria required by “conventional” science, including a control room (where the observers stay) and an experiment room. Both rooms were prepared with a conductive ink that reduces the incidence of contamination by electromagnetic waves, shielding the internal environment. In addition, a source of running water was installed inside the experiment room in order to humidify the environment (which is also supposed to favor the production of ectoplasm) and work as a kind of “energy grounding” (because it is believed that running water helps in the cleaning and circulation of energy). In this room, the ectoplasm should exteriorize its energies and remains seated for thirty minutes in a comfortable armchair placed on a high-precision weighing scale. During the experiment, besides having his body mass measured by this scale, he will also have his cerebral and cardiac activities analyzed, respectively, through an electroencephalogram (EEG) and an electrocardiogram (ECG), his temperature measured by a sensor placed on his wrist, and his image recorded in three infrared cameras and one in high definition. Other sensors that detect the temperature and humidity of the environment as well as the variations of the electromagnetic field during the process of exteriorization of energies were also installed in the room. These sensors, including the EEG, ECG, and cameras, are connected to the computers located in the control room monitored by the researchers. The fundamental idea is to try to better understand the ectoplasm—understood as the raw material of parasurgery, or the primary tool of energy assistance—and to find out whether this substance produces any alteration or affects any of these measured variables. If so, the goal is to determine whether there is any variation between its different givers. Such experiments are performed once a week, on Wednesdays, usually with an ectoplast that regularly participates in the Interassistance Dynamics of Parasurgery and has its performance evaluated through the individual records of participants’ (para)perceptions collected at the end of each dynamic and analyzed by ECTOLAB researchers. Before starting the experiment, the ectoplast medium must sign a written agreement with the research and answer a brief questionnaire about his physiological and psychological data (related, for example, to any physical and/or psychic health problems that the subject presents or has presented at some point in his life). He must also answer questions related to his parapsychic and energetic dimension. (“Have you ever identified personal parapsychic energetic signals associated with the release of ectoplasmy? Which ones?”; “Have you identified personal parapsychic energetic signals associ-

204

Gustavo R. Chiesa

ated with connection with helpers? Which ones?”; “Have you identified any other personal parapsychic energetic signals that you consider important? Which ones?”) Additional information about the current state of the ectoplast is also requested, through questions such as “How many hours did you sleep last night?”; “Do you feel rested?”; “Did you drink alcohol yesterday?”; “Did you take any medication today or yesterday?”; “Did you eat anything before coming to the laboratory?”; “In your opinion, did any intercurrence happen that could affect your energetic performance in the experiment?” After answering the questionnaire, the ectoplast goes to the experiment room where his performance will be assessed. The room is cold, silent, and totally dark. Keeping a relaxed posture, and with the armchair recumbent, the ectoplast should remain motionless (because the EEG is extremely sensitive to any movement), with closed eyes and quiet breathing throughout the experiment. During the first five minutes he should just relax, without performing any energetic movement or “donation.” According to the protocol elaborated by the researchers, this is the “basal register of physiological and environmental variables.” After this preliminary stage, the experiment itself begins. At this moment, which will last twenty minutes, the ectoplast must voluntarily exteriorize his energies in an intense manner, with the purpose of releasing ectoplasm, and be attentive to the energetic signals that indicate the release of ectoplasm or some parapsychic manifestation (a clairvoyance, for example). With each sensation that indicates the intense release of ectoplasm (e.g., pressure in the stomach, desire to vomit, itching in the ear, runny nose, tearing, yawning, coughing, etc.), the subject must register this perception by pressing a button located under his right hand only once. If the ectoplast has any parapsychic perception (visualizing, for example, the presence of a helper or any other extraphysical consciousness), he must press the same button twice. Such actions, however, should be made only at the end of each sensation or perception precisely so that researchers can have control of the variables analyzed during these occurrences. The idea is to determine whether at the precise moment of intensification of the exteriorization of the ectoplasm (or of a parapsychic perception) some significant alteration occurs in the body and, especially, in the brain of the ectoplast. This is a methodology analogous to the so-called evoked potential test, quite common in medical and neurological procedures, in which certain devices (electrodes) connected to the patient’s body provoke certain stimuli (which can be visual, auditory, motor, cognitive, etc.) that produce a specific brain response. This response will be captured, translated into graphs, and later analyzed and compared by researchers. However, in the case in question, the stimulus will be provoked not by an external factor but by the own body of the patient responsible for the production and exterior-

Learning to Read the World

205

ization of the ectoplasm. After the first twenty minutes, the ectoplast should again relax his body for five minutes, still keeping his eyes closed, his body immobile, and his breathing calm. Finally, at the end of the experiment, he should respond to the following prompts: “With reference to the ectoplasmic markings, what sensations did you notice? Give a brief account of the markings you remember”; “With reference to the parapsychism markings, what sensations did you perceive? Give a brief account of the markings you remember”; “Would you like to comment on the experiment? Any other interesting insights? Any ideas or suggestions?” I closely followed the experiments performed with five subjects, including myself. After my reports on the perceptions I presented during the dynamics, I was elevated to the condition of ectoplast. And right at the beginning, I could see that one of the greatest difficulties in “bringing” the ectoplasm to the laboratory consists precisely in controlling who produces it. For example, every time one of the ectoplasts analysed indicated (on the sensor placed in his hand) the perception of ectoplasm or some other parapsychic phenomenon, the graph related to the EEG (attached to his head) varied considerably, which at first would indicate a possible correlation between that perception and his brain activity, if it weren’t for the fact that he moved in the chair every time he perceived something (hence the importance of immobility throughout the experiment). Thus, the ability to register the phenomenon in isolation is lost. The ectoplast itself has reported yawning many times, which also interferes with undistorted measurement, even though yawning is one of the typical signs (or symptoms) of ectoplasm production. Another ectoplast claimed to have lost his lucidity and therefore his dominion over his own body during the experiment, entering a kind of tunnel with several distinct visions, but without presenting any recollection of these perceptions after returning to consciousness. Such an account, the researchers affirm, points to the difficulty in producing and registering a phenomenon of this nature (fluid, unstable, and subjective) in a laboratory environment. These are extremely subjective experiences that require a degree of concentration and relaxation that is often difficult to achieve. There are many variables, says one of the coordinators of the laboratory: “It’s like having an experiment, a measurement, and your device is good one time, bad another time. How will you do an experiment like this? And we are the devices. . . That is the great difficulty of doing an experiment with subjectivity.” Such instability makes the analysis of the experiment difficult, because linked to the energetic dimension are other variables of a physical, mental, emotional, and environmental order that are inseparable and directly affect the production of ectoplasm. In this sense, it is noted that the study of this substance, like anthropological research, depends on (inter)subjectivity

206

Gustavo R. Chiesa

to happen; in other words, they bet on the encounter (or, perhaps, on the mixture) of beings, things, forces, ideas, affections, experiences, and environments as the main (and perhaps only) tool capable of realizing (in the sense of gaining existence, making “real,” “presenting”) a creative knowledge about life as well as the world and its inhabitants. Finally, when it was my turn to be a “guinea pig” and go through the experiment, not only did I have the sensations related to the exteriorization of ectoplasm, but I also had the clear perception of extraphysical assistance to two people: a sick child and a woman who seemed to have some mental disorder (however, I could not identify whether these people were dead or alive). The most interesting thing about this last perception is that it allows us to understand one of the primary aspects of all the research work developed by ECTOLAB: therapeutic assistance. Even in an environment that seeks to “mimetize” (or emulate) a conventional laboratory of scientific research, the assistance is present mainly because of the extraphysical dimension that fills that place, making it suitable, at the same time, for research on the ectoplasm (and the ectoplast) and for therapeutic assistance through parasurgery, under the support of the extraphysical helpers. In this sense, it is noted that there is no ambiguity or even a clear separation between “producing science” and “doing therapy”; on the contrary, it appropriates a scientific language with a therapeutic purpose. Thus, if for ECTOLAB researchers there is no ambiguity or separation between doing science and therapy, there is, on the other hand, a clear prevalence of the latter over the former, which will certainly affect the researchers’ practices as well as their ways of engaging with scientific and academic knowledge. In fact, they seem to appropriate a certain hegemonic model of science (based on experiments and laboratory procedures) to partly “discard” it and produce a difference. Just as the idea of mimesis, in the meaning given by Michael Taussig (1993), may suggest to us, what seems to be at stake here is precisely a creative process of copying and altering that rejects, in the words of such researchers, the fruitless, materialistic, narrow, reduced, and limited to the intraphysical dimension academicism while at the same time valuing a certain academic or scientific aesthetics perceived, for example, through their laboratories and research protocols. However, there is no concern in receiving the acceptance or legitimization of academic science, nor in scientifically proving the phenomena experienced. The goal, says one of the volunteers, “is to study the ectoplasm that we have already experienced. I have no doubt at all. Something happens. I feel it. The question is: what is this thing? That’s what I want to know.” In order to know what “this thing” is, and to try to control and quantify it in some way, certain mediators will be triggered. The EEG, ECG,

Learning to Read the World

207

temperature and humidity sensors, video cameras, and the high-precision weighing scale work as devices or traps that try to capture the ectoplasm. The problem is that it is not known for sure if it can be captured or measured through these variables (temperature, humidity, body mass, brain and heart activity). The great difficulty lies, therefore, in the ability to frame this substance from the technologies and instruments offered by conventional science. This results in the need to invent new devices and tools to observe a phenomenon that, despite all the difficulty in capturing it, will never have its existence questioned by ECTOLAB researchers: “the ectoplasm exists, because I, you, we all experience it”, they say. What does not (yet) exist are the appropriate instruments that can precisely identify it. It seems to escape these capture devices: first, because, although lived, felt, and experienced, the phenomenon is not objectively known; second, because of its fluid, immaterial (or semimaterial), subtle, unstable, and slippery nature, which makes its control difficult; and third, because of the great difficulty in reading the ectoplasm in the graphics and data produced in the laboratory. Did the measurements vary? If the answer is positive, what caused such variation? How does one find out what caused such variation? How do we know whether it is really ectoplasm if we can only feel it, without understanding exactly what it is or even where it is? “We are here inside the laboratory and it may be that the ectoplasm, the materializations, and everything else, is happening outside,” suggests one of the researchers. The ectoplasm passes and the researchers try to follow (measure, quantify, codify, freeze, etc.) its tracks. It seems that ectoplasm, like life, never lets itself be controlled or captured. It is pure rhizome, pure flow, pure movement. If it is captured (by the devices used in conventional science), it will probably become another “thing,” ceasing to be ectoplasm. It freezes, and it loses its life. It becomes perhaps data or even a symptom of some pathology already identified by conventional science.

CONCLUSION One researcher at ECTOLAB questions conventional scientific experiments that seek the phenomenon’s reproducibility and exclude any variation. “In life, things are not like that,” he says. In this sense, one can see the difficulty in dealing with life beyond the laboratory control protocols. Acting as a neuroscience researcher at a Brazilian public university, he was often accused by his academic colleagues of doing participatory research in which the researcher interacts with the researched object, blurring the boundaries between subject and object. In fact, in ECTOLAB experiments the researcher

208

Gustavo R. Chiesa

is also the main “object” to be researched. There is no neutrality, but a “reasonableness” around the experiences is perceived in the research laboratory. Because of this dilution of the boundaries between the subject and the object of research, this scientific approach inevitably implies a kind of “behavioral recycling” of the researcher himself, because he knows that his perception, thinking, and values directly affect what he studies. The conventional neuroscientist who studies, for example, sleep and memory is not necessarily concerned with improving his own sleep or stimulating his own memory. He feels that this does not affect the results and the development of the research itself. An ECTOLAB researcher, on the other hand, believes that his change of posture, his commitment, and his affectation around what he studies are fundamental to the research. In my case, following this reasoning, in order to understand ectoplasm it will be fundamental to have my own experiences with it, to be affected by it, to realize that I also produce it. Thus, in some way, the ECTOLAB researcher becomes the subject of research, and I become the object of my own reflection. Boundaries are blurred, roles are changed. The ethnographic field is also, at least in this case, a laboratory of self-research to the extent that I am also part of the phenomenon that I study, affect, and am affected by, which implies the need for self-research (and not only research)—that is, to be attentive to all that I feel, think, and perceive. In fact, the idea of apprehending something of the “native” experience through the body itself is largely based on a set of ideas and formulations that are very dear to the “experiential turnaround” in anthropology (Pierini 2020, 10), such as, for example, the concepts of embodiment by Thomas Csordas (2002) and the être affecté (to be affected) by Jeanne Favret-Saada (1990). Paraphrasing another important reference in this field of reflection, it can be said that these concepts, together with a critical attitude toward the idea of scientific neutrality, contributed to “conferring dignity” (Goldman 2003, 450) to the experience lived by the anthropologist during his fieldwork, enabling the elaboration of an anthropological investigation that is neither a strictly native perspective nor a cold and distant analysis (Halloy 2016, 8). My desire to know and feel a little more about the experiences lived by ECTOLAB volunteers allowed me to establish a approximation between anthropology and the ways of knowing that I found during my fieldwork with these people. Thus, my interest in being affected by the same “forces” that affect my “natives,” or in producing some knowledge from the relation— that is, from the intersubjective exchanges established and shared during the field—ended up turning the period of time I lived with them into a very pleasant and productive experience. During that period, I tried not only to

Learning to Read the World

209

participate intensely in their research activities but also to feel or experience in my own body certain phenomena that, although invisible, were perfectly perceived or felt by all those who were willing to see a little more or to see beyond what is typically seen. After all, I was my first and main object of research, they said. Doing a kind of “autoanthropology,” I could see, in this process of immersion, that I (and everything I felt during the field) was also part of my research (or now “self-research”); I affected and was affected by what I observed. Because of this, the research was also about me or was with me in the sense, perhaps evident, of also being “with myself” and not only with (and not about, it is worth stressing) the other subjects who were involved in this work. In this process, I experienced diving into the different ways of knowing life, perceiving the environment, and doing science while bringing out my way of seeing, thinking, and doing anthropology. Thus, the anthropological immersion became for me an education of attention that, far from being a simple acquisition of content and information transmitted by someone, was characterized by the development of certain modes of perception, attention, and engagement with the world. Seeking to perceive the body itself as an instrument of ethnographic knowledge, this “embodied epistemology” invites a type of commitment for the anthropologist in the field that goes beyond a simple cognitive or rational dimension. It is, in short, the development of a way of knowing and doing science that considers the body and sensory experiences as essential elements not only for the production of a creative dialogue with the other and a plunge into the “unknown,” but also for the (de)construction of the set of theoretical and conceptual formulations that constitute anthropological knowledge itself, making it more sensitive, empathetic, and engaged. Gustavo R. Chiesa is an anthropologist and professor at the Federal University of Rio Grande (Brazil). He received a PhD in human sciences at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. His research interests include ecological epistemologies, learning processes, material religion, and sensory ethnography.

NOTES 1. The technique for obtaining the “vibrational state” utilizes the following process: with the attention focused exclusively on his body, the individual must (preferably) stand, with eyes closed and arms relaxed, and direct, with the power of his will, the flow of his “bioenergy,” propelling it from head to toe and bringing it back to the head, performing a kind of sweeping throughout the

210

Gustavo R. Chiesa

body, with special attention to those parts where he feels some kind of blockage or difficulty in the passage of energy. This circuit must be carried out countless times, traversing the energies and gradually increasing the speed and volume of this energetic movement until it reaches the so-called vibrational state, where the flow of energy disappears and the whole body is enveloped by incessant radiation or vibration. Such a state, when reached, would have a prophylactic effect on the individual, affecting his health positively. 2. In this ontology, besides the physical body or “soma,” the consciousness also manifests itself in a concomitant (and interconnected) way through the “energosoma” (energetic body that enables organic life), the “psychosoma” (body responsible for storing the emotions of the consciousness), and the “mentalsoma” (body of ideas, thoughts, and reason).

REFERENCES Bowie, Fiona. 2013. “Building Bridges, Crossing Boundaries: Towards a Methodology for the Study of the Afterlife, Mediumship, and Spiritual Beings.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 81(3): 698–733. Chiesa, Gustavo. 2016. Além do que se vê: Magnetismos, Ectoplasmas e Paracirurgias [Beyond what is seen: Magnetisms, ectoplasms and parasurgeries]. Porto Alegre: Multifoco. Csordas, Thomas. 2002. Body/Meaning/Healing. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Favret-Saada, Jeanne. 1990. “Être Affecté [Being affected].” Gradhiva: Revue d’Histoire et d’Archives de l’Anthropologie 8: 3–9. Goldman, Marcio. 2003. “Os Tambores dos Mortos e os Tambores dos Vivos [The drums of the dead and the drums of the living].” Revista de Antropologia 46(2): 445–76. Halloy, Arnaud. 2016. “Full Participation and Ethnographic Reflexivity.” Journal for the Study of Religious Experience 2: 7–24. Ingold, Tim. 2011. Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. London: Routledge. ———. 2018. Anthropology and/as Education. London: Routledge. Lachapelle, Sofie. 2005. “Attempting Science: The Creation and Early Development of the Institut Métapsychique International in Paris.” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 41(1): 1–24. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1981. Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge. Palhano, Lamartine. 1996. Experimentações Mediúnicas. Rio de Janeiro: CELD. Pierini, Emily. 2020. Jaguars of the Dawn: Spirit Mediumship in the Brazilian Vale do Amanhecer. New York: Berghahn Books. Sharp, Lynn. 2006. Secular Spirituality. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Taussig, Michael. 1993. Mimesis and Alterity. London: Routledge.

Chapter 10

Sensory Ethnography and Anthropology of Mediumship Exploring Brazilian Spiritist Practices in (Mental) Well-Being and Health/Care Helmar Kurz

‫ﱬﱫ‬ In Sociocultural Anthropology, when we study culture, we often study form and not content. —Tanya Luhrmann, “What Counts as Data?”

MEDIUMSHIP AND THE SENSES Wondering “what counts as data,” Tanya Luhrmann (2010, 212) illustrates the gap between practices of ethnographic description and anthropological analysis that may be particularly relevant for the interpretation of mediumship practices: we refer to these practices in terms of scientific models that deduce them to performative acts, altered states of consciousness, and saluto- or pathogenic capacities. Narrating their experiences in interviews, participants of mediumship practices do provide insights into their lifeworlds, but overall, anthropologists’ explorations remain relating to second- or thirdhand accounts on related practices, experiences, and meanings in terms of communicating and engaging with distress, affliction, and disease (see Kleinman 1988; Nichter 1981). The purpose of this contribution is to discuss the methodological challenge of integrating the researchers’ 211

212

Helmar Kurz

reflection of (sensory) experience with their anthropological investigation of mediumship practices. It will discuss the scopes and pitfalls of such an approach and argues for the implementation of the researchers’ experience as an important tool of anthropological work. I have conducted various field trips to Brazilian Spiritist settings to explore sensory modalities of healing practices, investigating experiences and practices of mediumship as resources for (mental) health/care. My interest in this research topic has somewhat developed a life of its own: based on former investigations on performativity and modernity in Brazilian Candomblé (Kurz 2013), I intended to explore sensory aspects of healing in Brazilian Umbanda and Candomblé as well as how they are transculturally negotiated and transformed. However, developing an increasing interest in transcultural psychiatry, I discovered Kardecism as a resource for (mental) health/care in Brazil. Originally being a European model of integrating religion, philosophy, and science with the rational spirit of Enlightenment in the nineteenth century, its transfer to Brazil at the beginning of the twentieth century and its negotiation with Indigenous and Afro-Brazilian spiritual practices developed a particular approach to (mental) health that has influenced the Brazilian health care sector at the intersection of anti-psychiatry and psychiatry reform movements and is recently being (re)distributed to the world as a holistic, bio-psycho-medicospiritual model (see Kurz 2015, 2017, 2018a, 2018b, 2022). From 2015 to 2016, I performed research within a Kardecist psychiatric hospital and affiliated Spiritist centers in the interior of the Brazilian state of São Paulo, implementing participant observation and qualitative interviews with patients, therapists, and other persons involved, particularly participants in mediumship practices. Even though it usually requires at least three years of studying Spiritist knowledge and at least two more years of practical training to engage with spirits, I was allowed to participate because several responsible persons in individual interviews came to the conclusion that I would fulfill the minimal requirements of spiritual knowledge due to my intense study of Spiritist literature. However, my former engagement with Candomblé and Umbanda practices had been deemed somewhat problematic, as Kardecists perceive related spirits as less developed and therefore potentially disturbing their spiritual work. Accordingly, my connection to these “lower spiritual energies” would soon play a major role in the negotiation of human-spirit relationships in an experience that would also become crucial for my understanding of mediumship, well-being, and health care in (Brazilian/Kardecist) Spiritism. I still recount one of my first mediumship sessions, accompanied by my wife, who used to attend Umbanda but never did engage in medium-

Sensory Ethnography and Anthropology of Mediumship

213

ship practices. Usually, in these séances, obsessors (afflicting spirits of deceased people) and, more rarely, spiritual guides different from those in Candomblé and Umbanda are addressed. However, this night, Jurema, an Indigenous caboclo spirit well known in the realms of Umbanda introduced herself as my “protector” through an elder female medium and blessed my “very important” endeavor. She also wanted to sing a ponto (common chant in Umbanda) but was not allowed to by the supervisor of this meeting who argued that “this is not the right space for it.” Later, I learned that this medium had previously engaged with Umbanda, and I could have taken the whole episode as a “performance” solely enacted for me were it not for two observations: before, throughout, and after this “appearance,” my wife had bodily compulsions understood as typical for spirit “incorporations” in Umbanda. She never had been in this town and hardly ever engaged with Kardecism, and only ever since this day would she have similar reactions in Umbanda centers. The same is true for me, and this is my second observation: I have always been fascinated by Brazilian spirits (caboclos) and orixás (Afro-Brazilian deities) and already did envision some of them after hours of drumming and dancing. However, I was always kind of aware of what I was supposed to perceive, that is, having been informed in advance about which spirits would appear and how they usually would do so. This time, my whole body was shaking and shivering, too, and afterward I experienced a soothing feeling of happiness, calmness, and relaxation I had hardly ever felt before (but would feel again in the course of my research). In this chapter, I will reflect on these experiences. I will introduce Brazilian Kardecist Spiritism and my approach to it in terms of sensory ethnography/anthropology of the senses. I will discuss different models of a reflective ethnography that integrate the researchers’ bodily, emotional, and sensory reactions as data before diving deeper into this whirl of confusing experiences by examining more autoethnographic case studies. My guiding question is how to, in ethnographic and anthropological terms, “make sense” of my sensory experiences in Brazilian Spiritist mediumship practices. Brazilian Spiritists address contested realms of healing at the intersection of scientific and spiritual knowledge, postulating holistic approaches to health, care, and well-being. For over a decade, I have explored and investigated related Brazilian Spiritist practices in (mental) health care with regard to performative, sensory, and aesthetic aspects of health and healing (see Kurz 2015, 2017, 2018a, 2018b, 2019, 2022). My main interest has been to facilitate comprehension, communication, and appreciation toward alternate explanatory models of health and healing as aligned with certain sociocultural frames, dynamics, and negotiations. However, I have also been interested in effectiveness as related to experience.

214

Helmar Kurz

Medical anthropologists increasingly explore the production of sensory experience in therapeutic settings (see Nichter 2008; Kurz 2019). Similarly, scholars in the study of religion address religious experience as aesthetic engagement (see Münster 2001; Wilke and Traut 2015; Schmidt 2016). From this perspective, I have investigated how healing addresses illness and affliction by working with the senses and creating diversified spaces of care, especially regarding mediumship practices in Brazilian Spiritism. Such a perspective considers bodily experience and practice as crucial factors and, accordingly, fancies a debate on “embodiment” and “habitus” as conceptional tools (see Bourdieu 1991; Csordas 1993). It also gives space to divergent and contested cosmologies on body, mind, and spirit/soul as opposed or complementary to the Cartesian dichotomy of mind and body and related explanatory models or diagnostic systems. Related theoretical concepts of a mindful (Scheper-Hughes and Lock 1987) or sacred body (Csordas 1993) extrapolate the dichotomy of body and mind within Western cosmologies and scientific approaches as grounded in a fundamental distinction between rationality and emotion, or, in other words, cognitive and sensory perception. Contemporary research in the cultural and social sciences transcends this dichotomy through an extended focus on social and cultural foundations of aesthetics and sensory experience. Accordingly, an increasingly influential anthropology of the senses produces innovative approaches, concepts, and tools: they imply the idea of the human sensorium as socially and culturally produced and constructed (see Classen 2005; Hsu 2008). Other approaches focus on the medial quality of the senses (see Pink 2009; Stoller 1989). David Howes (2005) regards the senses as media that produce and represent sociocultural meaning of, for instance, medical or spiritual phenomena. The focus is on social implications and intersubjective interaction as foundations of sensuality and sociality in so far as social experience is construed by sensory perception and attachment (cf. Chau 2008; Hsu 2012; Vannini, Vaskul, and Gottschalk 2012). Mark Nichter (2008, 163), in a further step, explores “the sensorial in medical anthropology” in terms of transformative experiences of healing and health-seeking behavior in diversified therapeutic markets as related to sensory modalities (cf. Desjarlais 1992; Halliburton 2009). It includes questioning constructions of normal and anormal sensory experience (cf. Luhrmann 2012; McCarthy-Jones 2012), and the intersection of religion and medicine (see Basu, Littlewood, and Steinforth 2017) is of special interest here: religious-spiritual approaches toward health implicate continuous and long-term processes of learning and cultivating (self-)perception in terms of shifting attention to sensorybodily experiences and expressions (see Espírito Santo 2015; Schmidt 2016; Seligman 2014). Related explanatory models, idioms of distress, and cop-

Sensory Ethnography and Anthropology of Mediumship

215

ing strategies are negotiated not on a cognitive-rational level but instead in corporeal-sensory terms. Whereas Marcel Mauss (1975) and Michel Foucault (1988) would address it as “technologies of self/the body,” and Tim Ingold (2013) as “enskillment/education of attention,” Lydia Arantes and Elisa Rieger (2014) speak of related “techniques of perception” and “interoception.” Accordingly, neuroscientists, too, have developed a certain interest in religious practices as technologies of self-transformation, self-regulation, and social interaction that would resonate with brain activities (see McNamara 2009). Sebastian Schüler (2012), for example, investigates how in religious settings “synchronized ritual behavior” shapes bodily awareness and perception by repeating postures and related somatic modes of attention (cf. Csordas 1993). Accordingly, certain body techniques shape sensory perception and may address spiritual imbalances as gateways to work with the self. Donnalee Dox (2016) explores this kind of (internal) sense of self that is cultivated in spiritual practices and postulates a turn to the body as a main source of knowledge. Accordingly, Nichter (2008, 163) discusses research strategies focusing on modalities of healing practices, asking who addresses which senses in which way as well as how healing spaces and experiences are aesthetically and sensually patterned. This approach defines the senses as a resource to receive, process, and react to information from the outside world and the inner organism, both being central to perception and interaction. With these aspects in mind, I intend to explore alleged “deviant” perceptional formations such as mediumship and related therapy models as sensory practices that aim not at the extinction of perturbing perceptions but at their transformation in terms of an adjustment of inner and outer sensory stimuli (see Howes 2006). This approach implies a certain methodology of understanding.

(SELF-)REFLECTIVE AND SENSORY ANTHROPOLOGICAL METHODOLOGY The anthropological crisis of representation (see Marcus and Fischer 1986) in the social sciences and humanities questions the positionality and engagement of researchers in the field. Andrew Beatty (1999), in this regard, contests constructions of subjectivity and objectivity in addition to their methodological impacts as being located between bias, sympathy, and empathy. Ethnographic encounters involve all our senses and transform our perception, and we must reflect on their impact on our perception (cf. Etherington 2004; Turner 2010).

216

Helmar Kurz

Reflectivity is a skill to react to our personal responses to experiences as related to personal, social, and cultural frames. Halstead (2008) considers it an ongoing engagement of anthropologists with their environments as transformative spaces for them and their research partners. James Davies (2010) and Dimitrina Spencer (2010) have initiated a respective discussion on how to integrate emotions into research methodology and data analysis: as anthropologists are affected by and affect others through emotional engagement, they either “manage” emotions or allow them to unfold as vehicles of understanding (Spencer 2010, 2). Ethnographers therefore must take seriously the role of emotions in the research process as integral parts of cognition and knowledge. One task would be to investigate how certain emotions evoked during fieldwork inform our understanding of situations, people, and interactions (Davies and Spencer 2010), developing “radical empiricism” that values subjective perception as integral to knowledge construction and epistemology (Davies 2010, 1–2). James Davies (2010, 20), in this regard, mentions “non-cognitive modes” as bodily, emotional, or imaginal ways of learning and knowing. They evoke sudden experiences that transgress the limits of cognitive understanding. Non-cognitive experiences are visceral, emotional, highly unpredictable and depend on a methodology of “deep participation” (21). Emily Pierini and Alberto Groisman stress the importance of this approach “especially when dealing with other intangible worlds and selves involved in . . . spiritual practices” (2016, 1), suggesting the cultivation of cognitive and bodily skills in anthropological methodology and accordingly understanding practices of mediumship as “ways of knowing” in terms of affection and the (re)education of perception (3). They communicate the “need to cultivate epistemological attitude and skills for ‘empathic resonance’ and ‘introspective expertise’ through techniques of self-observation” (4). Accordingly, the encounter with our own “otherness” remains a challenge to perception as well as our tasks of ethnographic and anthropological endeavor. Half a century ago, Clifford Geertz (1973, 3) promoted “thick description” as a method of thinking, interpreting, and reflecting for the sake of contextualizing behavior and its meaning within certain cultural frames. I argue that the same is true for our positionality in the field and, to stick to our example, the exploration of mediumship practices. The request for a more experience-based anthropology (see Turner and Bruner 1986) and related approaches toward the researchers’ bodies as mediums of knowing and their engagement with “the field” as a way of “feel-think” (Wikan 1991) is not new. Still, only throughout the last decades has it been systematically explored and described as sensory ethnography, that is, a methodological approach within the discipline of the anthropology of the senses. Sarah Pink

Sensory Ethnography and Anthropology of Mediumship

217

has been one of the most influential scholars addressing both the realm of sensory practice and experience as a research field and as a methodological approach in terms of reflecting and rethinking our participatory research techniques (2009, 8–11) toward what she calls “embodied knowing” (15). Accordingly, experience relates to the environment, and our attempts to integrate in social, behavioral, emotional, and sensory terms may oppose our strategies to cognitively grasp it; our wish to deduct structures and impose categories is constantly disturbed by particular configurations and performative interactions that are bodily experienced (33). Therefore, we should investigate how both our research partners and we learn through sensory embodied experiences and memories (34), or, referencing Samudra (2008, 665), “thick participation.” Pink differentiates three interconnected levels of “sensory memory” (2009, 38), which researchers might apply to: 1) exploring meanings and natures of memories that research participants recount, enact, define, and reflect to the researcher; 2) generating shared experience by joint emplacement to stimulate ethnographic insight; and 3) using individual memories in autoethnographic accounts to reflectively reconstruct fieldwork experiences. Here, I will mainly refer to the third category as my priority is not so much a systematic survey of sensory categories within a certain “culture,” but the impact of the ethnographer’s own sensorial experiences as a means of apprehending and comprehending other people’s experiences, ways of knowing, sensory categories, meanings and practices (Pink 2009, 46). I follow Pink in her definition of participant observation as a task with particular attention to the multisensory and emplaced aspects of other people’s and the researcher’s experience and in general of ethnography as a participatory embodied, emplaced, empathetic and sensory practice—that is, active and attentive engagement in terms of “participant sensing” and “walking with others” (63–79).

MEDIUMSHIP EXPERIENCE AND TRAINING Spiritist movements have been a global and translocal phenomenon since the nineteenth century, coinciding with the ascension of the scientific discipline of psychiatry. Both have roots in the era of Enlightenment and related processes of rationalization, and both address human behavior in terms of normality, morality, and conduct. However, whereas psychiatry has mainly addressed cognitive or pharmaceutical modes of adaption to certain environments and extraordinary perceptions, Spiritists, especially in terms of mediumship practice, address these extraordinary sensory experiences

218

Helmar Kurz

and their integration into health and healing, referring to Mesmer’s animal magnetism in terms of fluids and energies to be treated. I will focus here on the example of Kardecism and its application in Brazil that integrates concepts of reincarnation, karma, and spiritual progress throughout many lifetimes with experiences of illness, healing, and well-being. With Allan Kardec (1986, 1996, 2008, 2015), this progress implies human discipline and moral behavior. Immoral behavior would attract obsessors, whereas moral behavior would encourage the support of benevolent spirits, that is, those who already have reached a certain grade of spiritual progress and help overcome the impact of afflicting spirits by resolving their attachment for both the spirits’ and humans’ benefit. In this context, mediumship is understood as a general human capacity to—when properly trained and developed—perceive these spiritual influences and to communicate with the spirits. Throughout the twentieth century, Kardecism in Brazil gained a quite strong impact on mental health care as many health professionals have engaged with Spiritism and concluded that psychiatric disorders may have organic and spiritual causes, the latter being based on obsession or undeveloped mediumship. Even though the overall relationship of Kardecism with biomedicine and psychiatry in Brazil is far from being symmetric, in many settings healing cooperation shapes complementary spiritual, psychosocial, and pharmaceutic treatments (see Kurz 2018a). I conducted research within a Spiritist psychiatric hospital that has existed since the 1950s and provides (temporary) shelter and treatment for up to two hundred fifty patients in emergency, long-term, and day-clinic units. It is affiliated with the Brazilian public health care system but is administrated by members of the local Spiritist community. Conventional treatment complements practices of Spiritist volunteers who engage in lectures of the Spiritist doctrine and its discussion with patients but also in so-called disobsession meetings. Those are implemented as mediumistic sessions without the presence of the patients but for the sake of dealing with afflicting spirits in the spiritual orbit of the hospital. The idea is that afflicting spirits are simultaneously causing (mental) distress and are attracted by the weakness of patients, thus intruding on the space and impeding therapeutic progress. These spirits embody in mediums and are engaged in a conversation about their affliction and their harmful behavior to themselves and others. As a result, many acknowledge their failure and accept guidance by benevolent spirits to a hospital in the spiritual realm where they may recover and receive treatment (see Kurz 2017, 2018b).1 Patients can visit a nearby Spiritist center that offers “fraternal care” for people in acute social, emotional, mental, or spiritual distress. They may discuss their problems with a Spiritist volunteer and receive a mediumis-

Sensory Ethnography and Anthropology of Mediumship

219

tic message that sheds some light on spiritual causes of the affliction and how to resolve them. Supplicants are invited to participate at least for two months in weekly lectures and energetic/fluid treatments (passe) to initiate spiritual progress, self-transformation, and, therefore, healing. Many report unusual perceptions like hearing voices or seeing things that scare them, and some will then engage in mediumship training to seek attendance by benevolent spirits as well as to gain control and agency in their relation to and perception of afflicting spirits with their sometimes revengeful or hateful attitude toward the living. Experiences of obsession and mediumship are central features in Brazilian Kardecist explanatory models on health and illness, constructions of self (see Eller 2019), and idioms of distress, and they manifest as extraordinary sensory perceptions like hearing voices, seeing anthropomorphic features, sensing “something weird” in the environment, or having unexplainable emotional outbursts and somatic effects. However, mediumship is not deemed a pathological experience but is a therapeutic mechanism to negotiate these experiences. Not every psychiatric patient is perceived as an undeveloped medium, but any form of suffering is also related to spiritual causes, like, for example, obsession. Not all afflicted persons become mediums, but those who do so complete a veritable training in shifting their attention to engage with these extraordinary sensory perceptions. As I have mentioned at the start of this chapter, to be accepted as a participant in mediumship and disobsession meetings, individuals must study Spiritist literature for at least three years before completing several practical mediumship training courses. One of these courses was directed by Maria,2 and one session I participated in lasted about two hours and comprised fifteen persons between twenty-five and fifty-five years old, mainly but not exclusively women. Participants concentrated in silence while listening to New Age music. For the next forty-five minutes, they read out, commented, discussed, and reflected on Spiritist literature in a very quiet and relaxed way. Then, one person directed a prayer to God, Jesus, and the benevolent spirits; the doors and windows were closed, and light was extinguished. Somebody recited the Lord’s Prayer, while others performed a brief and silent passe (fluidic treatment) on the energetic body of each participant. Instantly, spiritual communication began: different voices of participants overlapped, and it was impossible to follow up with all of them. I observed Maria walking from one person to another, asking whether everything would be all right, and providing instructions to “let it out.” A young woman was crying but was told that this sadness is not hers and that she must pray the Lord’s Prayer to recover while Maria performed another passe on her. I listened to screams like: “My daughter, I must return!” or yells for “Help!” Suddenly, I felt pain

220

Helmar Kurz

in my left shoulder, arm, and around my heart, envisioning a man who falls to the floor, suffers a heart attack, and cries out for help. Not knowing what to do, I also started to pray (for the first time in ages) until I felt some relief. Strong emotions were channeled, and many felt sickness or pain. Maria did not stop to walk around, asking if everything is “ok?” and if not, to recite the Lord’s prayer. Several of these enactments occurred, the most disturbing being a simultaneous experience of several participants witnessing the slaughtering of pregnant women and their unborn babies somewhere in Africa. Many started to weep and cry, and it was hard to bear. It took some time until people observably became exhausted, but finally prayers were said, silence returned, and participants left. A week later, Maria expressed her conviction that I am a medium. Responding to my experiences, she stated: “You must train: all these experiences, all these feelings—you have to learn how to deal with it. Many people go through difficult experiences, and the only way to cope with it is to study and learn how to control it.” It has never been my intention to become a medium, but my experiences triggered my interest in what has happened to me, and so I started to attend various subsequent mediumship sessions, including disobsession meetings. Disobsession is sometimes referred to as a “gentle exorcism” in terms of liberating humans from that spiritual influence; however, it does not aim at the expulsion of spirits “back to hell” or to the purgatory (umbral) but, quite the opposite, it aims at their guidance and support toward recovery and progress to prepare for future incarnations. It has been performed within various weekly one-hour meetings of relatively closed groups of eight to twenty persons, including mediums, assistants, and an organizing chairperson—in this case, Walter. Following similar procedures as outlined previously, at some point the voice of a medium transmits messages of a discarnate spirit suffering from anger, fear, sadness, and confusion. This spirit has been held responsible for a patient’s or participant’s affliction as the result of obsession, and disobsession would then always reproduce a certain pattern: one or two assistants engage in a conversation with the spirits by addressing their death and afterlife experiences. They discuss the harmful effects of their behavior and offer the aid of benevolent spirits within a hospital on a higher spiritual level. Those appear to act as primary care assistants and are always accompanied by spirits of deceased family members, friends, or other persons that might trigger feelings of love and remorse instead of hate and revenge in the obsessors. On some occasions, I “felt” the afflicted and afflicting spirits before they came: sudden feelings of anger, sadness, or pain would indicate to me their presence, and right after, one or another medium would transmit messages that resembled my feelings.

Sensory Ethnography and Anthropology of Mediumship

221

These sessions provided a repeated structure framed by lectures, prayers, invocations, and comments. With time, I perceived certain patterns and rhythms of different voices and phases of silence that started to blur my observer’s (or better: listener’s) mind and left me feeling dizzy. As a participant, I was not always able to listen to everything, but I was very much aware of what I would label a murmuring of mixing voices, and sometimes I dove into the buzzing and bubbling of these voices. I liked that feeling, and it would have carried me away were it not for Walter sharing messages reminding us of the discipline, charity, and love provided by Jesus. Everybody had to repeat these “insights,” and from one moment to the other, the weird feelings and spiritual communications would end, having the session finished with thanksgiving and the Lord’s Prayer. Every week, I participated in these sessions, and over time they did something to me. Several weeks after my first disobsession meeting, I stayed with my eyes closed for the majority of the session. Even though I had to sit in an uncomfortable chair and position, I perceived a soothing relaxation within me, followed by waves of heaviness and lightness streaming through my body. I had to support my head to not crash on the table, even though I had not been tired; it just felt as though my senses would go crazy. With my “inner eye,” I perceived a blue field that disappeared in a black hole, to be then substituted by a white light that was pulsating for several minutes. It was beautiful, and it came to my mind that this must be some sort of energetic field and transmission of healing vibrations. I watched the big blue field again before it slowly dissolved while I simultaneously “woke up.” I had hardly perceived what had been said during the session, but others now started to comment on similar experiences. Finally, one of the mediums declared that this had been a collective passe for all of us by some “higher” benevolent spirits.

DISCUSSION: MAKING SENSE Being back home and scanning through my diaries, I am wondering how I will ever be able to discuss my experiences with other scientists. However, without these very intimate experiences I have shared here, I would have never come to my insights and conclusions that treat mediumship in Brazilian Kardecist Spiritism as a sensory (re)adjustment, enskillment, manipulation, education, and somatic mode of attention (cf. Csordas 1993; Ingold 2013). Sharing these experiences with fellow participants in mediumship practices, I learned that they had similar perceptions, and thus I am convinced that they “verify” my perceptions as valid data.

222

Helmar Kurz

My vignettes emphasize an interpretation of mediumship training and practice in sensory terms where “listening to voices” is predominant and somehow influences a shift in attention and perception. I do not refer here to voices that mediums and patients listen to, but to the voices of lecturers, mediums, and other participants that appear to attract attention while other sensory stimuli are minimized. I experienced the exclusive focus on voices in lectures, prayers, or mediumistic messages as a body technique or somatic mode of attention to trigger a “sixth sense” (cf. Howes 2006), that is, a different form of perceiving myself and my environment. It appeared to me that it was not even so much about the content shared, seeing that most messages would resemble a lot, but about the practice of active listening as being opposed to daily practices of communication.3 I have not been socialized in a Spiritist context and remain critical of certain performed inherent power relations (see Theissen 2009), and thus it is redundant to discuss my experience as an embodiment of a certain social habitus. Neither can I treat it as a personal experience or imagination since many of my interlocutors did report similar experiences. Contrary to my aforementioned experiences with Candomblé and Umbanda, I did not even have a clue what I was supposed to perceive and how to react to it. Therefore, I take these sensory perceptions very seriously and refer to them as ethnographic data on a cultural body technique that nonetheless also may affect a gringo (here to be understood as the “cultural other”). Many researchers have had similar experiences around the world and have struggled with their own skepticism and “scientific” criticism (see Sjørslev 1994; Stoller 2004; Daniel 2005; Wreford 2007; Koss-Chioino 2010, among others). However, it is undeniable that our reflection of related field experiences helps us learn about content beyond form. They may not display an “objective” truth but help us understand “subjective” engagement and experience. Some have rejected this idea of deep ethnographic participation as biased and “going native” (see Tresch 2001), but would it not be even more biased to stick to Western scholarly epistemologies that tend to ignore the importance of such practices of experience-production and defy analytic approaches comprising reflective attention to the ethnographer’s perception “as a way of becoming skilled in local ways of knowing and communicating, producing common grounds of interaction in the field” (Pierini and Groisman 2016, 4)? Joan Koss-Chioino addresses similar problems at the interface between mental illness as defined by psychiatry and spirit healing. She raises the following question: “If spirit healing is effective with some emotional disorders . . . , how does it work?” (2005, 409). She acknowledges the “many ways of knowing” regarding the existence of spirits and states that studies in and beyond

Sensory Ethnography and Anthropology of Mediumship

223

anthropology treat spirits and extraordinary beings as products of mind, culture, and physiology whereas her aim “is to entertain a different stance and to examine how we might know that spirits exist” (131). In reference to Edith Turner (2010), she addresses “the meaning of encounters with spirits, other extraordinary beings, and hidden views of the world, including the dilemmas these experiences may raise” (Koss-Chioino 2010, 131). She was torn between relativistic notions (e.g., in the Spiritists’ “view of the world”) and the idea that spirits really might be “inhabitants of the universe as were incarnate beings” (131–32). She states that mental health professionals “suffered a similar dilemma, or discrepancy between academic stance and true belief” (131–32), and over the years, she “had accumulated so many experiences with spirits that I could no longer play the game of hiding behind someone else’s belief. I began to appreciate spirits as part of my world, although I remained very cautious regarding those with whom I shared this idea” (132). I have to admit that I have shared her reluctance until now, even though my concern does not so much regard the reality of spirits but our engagement with them. As an anthropologist, I do not seek a truth in terms of a rationalizing cultural knowledge but ways of understanding related practices and their impact on people beyond artificial boundaries of “us” and “them” or “selves” and “others” (cf. Eller 2019).

CONCLUSION My last encounter with mediumship practices in the aforementioned context took place on a Friday morning in January 2016: members of the administration of the psychiatric hospital and the affiliated Spiritist center gathered for a mediumistic session to receive messages from the “spiritual mentors” as guidelines for their practice. The course and structure of the meeting did not differ much from disobsession and other meetings, but participants seemed to be more relaxed and the spirits’ communications through mediums appeared to be calmer. The session started with a lecture on love, charity, belief, and the importance of prayer before absolute silence captured the space for several minutes. Even though it was not a sunny day, and all windows were shut and shielded with curtains, the room seemed to somehow shine. Usually, throughout these intervals in disobsession meetings, I would hear distant cars, motorbikes, barking dogs, or some distorted pitch of a nearby television, but on that day, there were only birdsongs and some screeching parrots passing by. It was a feeling of total peace and harmony, and I almost fell asleep. When finally medium Bernardo started to communicate

224

Helmar Kurz

a spiritual message, knocks on the door would interrupt him; a delivery boy was bringing cake for the group to enjoy with coffee after the session. Nobody showed their irritation, but I experienced it as a total disruption of “the spirit” of this meeting. The lad left, closing the door behind him, but twice it would open again for no evident reason. Being already so intimate with a discourse on spirits’ agency, I wondered if perhaps some spirits might be mocking us to disturb this event. When Otavio finally managed to keep the door closed, somebody else decided to look for the coffee that should have come with the cake. In that instant, Waldimar arrived twenty minutes late, leaving me confused: throughout the last months, I had been told by him how essential skills of discipline and punctuality would be because the spirits also have their obligations and appointments. I understand that many Brazilians have a different idea of discipline and punctuality than I do as the son of a German military officer. However, I felt so distorted and torn out of my comfort zone that I developed negative, if not aggressive, feelings about the whole situation. There, I really started to believe that an evil spirit was haunting the place, and simultaneously I did question my sanity for allowing myself to develop such thoughts. Afterward, some participants confessed that they had similar experiences but that they did not want to give power to these negative feelings. I do not remember in detail what the subsequent mediumistic messages were because even my voice recorder had refused to work on that day and only produced distorted fragments. I recall that I had been thinking of my good friend Franklyn who had suffered from incurable cancer and would actually die a few days later. I was crying and silently started to pray, a practice I (re)learned here. A medium transmitted a message of the cofounder and spiritual mentor of the hospital, communicating images of light and positive energy. The whole room suddenly appeared to shine with bright golden sunbeams even though the curtains were closed. My sadness transformed into something joyful, and in front of my “inner eye,” I “saw” what I can best describe as pulsating and transforming energy fields: first blue and green, then subsequently they became violet, red, orange, yellow, and finally bright white. I perceived human-shaped shadows passing by, and twice I even saw face contours coming close to me. I am not capable of describing their features, but I felt their gaze. It was a very soothing and comfortable experience. As mentioned previously, I had a similar experience in an Umbanda ceremony but ascribed it to trance-induced imagination after sleepless hours of dance, ritual engagement, and certain knowledge of what I was expected to perceive. Today, it seemed to be different: nobody told me what would happen or in any other way would shape my imagination to produce an experience that, independent from each other, participants

Sensory Ethnography and Anthropology of Mediumship

225

afterward relayed that they shared: the room was shining white and golden, and everybody took it as a blessing. I felt connected, at ease with myself and the world. Moreover, I was convinced that my friend would be protected— at least now I could hope so and pray for Franklyn. This encounter made me understand more about mediumship practices and their impact on participants than any description of observations or analysis of interviews would do. I experienced it. Helmar Kurz studied social anthropology, study of religion, and archaeology at the University of Muenster, Germany. Since 2011, he has been a lecturer for medical anthropology, anthropology of religion, and transcultural psychiatry in the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology in Muenster, Germany. He investigates sensory and affective aspects of healing and translocal networks and practices of cooperation between biomedical, psychiatric, and religious-spiritual agencies and institutions. Since 2015, he has been a research fellow of Prof. Helene Basu within the project “Diversification of Mental Health: Therapeutic Spaces of Brazilian Spiritism,” granted by the German Research Foundation DFG. In 2021, he developed his PhD thesis on “Voices of Good Sense: Diversification of Mental Health and the Aesthetics of Healing in Brazilian Spiritism.” He is a board member of the Association of Anthropology and Medicine (AGEM) and coeditor of the related journal Curare. Further, he co-coordinates the master program “Visual Anthropology, Media & Documentary Practices” at WWU Weiterbildung in Muenster, Germany.

NOTES 1. This idea of a hospital in the spiritual realm is introduced by Francisco “Chico” Xavier’s (1944) account on the medical doctor André Luiz who after biological death finds spiritual support and later engages in a hospital in the afterworld that compares to earthly hospitals but attends to the afflictions of spirits that suffer from their death experiences, attachments to the world of the living, and feelings of guilt, hate, and revenge. The main idea is that to help patients, one must help the obsessing spirits. Xavier’s alleged psychographic account of Luiz’s experiences, among other contributions, became a national bestseller and is central to Spiritist healthcare in Brazil. Further, the related movie Nosso Lar (Our Home; Assis 2010) became a blockbuster, indicating the relevance of related concepts within the Brazilian population. 2. Names of interlocutors have been changed for the sake of anonymity. 3. Throughout many years of living in Brazil, I have witnessed that it is quite impossible to share a story, narrative, or observation without being interrupted

226

Helmar Kurz

by someone who wants to add to the story. I perceive it as one of many markers that shape the vitality of Brazilian lifeworlds and practices, but it also somewhat reflects the idea that “whoever is louder is right,” something I also observe when comparing Evangelical and Spiritist practices. Whereas the former yell, the latter listen, and they are trained to do so. I deem this aspect crucial for consideration when discussing the aesthetics of healing as a tool to analyze and compare divergent healing practices.

REFERENCES Arantes, Lydia M., and Elisa Rieger, eds. 2014. Ethnographien der Sinne: Wahrnehmung und Methode in empirisch-kulturwissenschaftlichen Forschungen [Sensory ethnography: Perception and method in empirical cultural studies-based research]. Bielefeld: Transcript. Assis, Wagner de. 2010. Nosso Lar (Astral City). Brazil. Film. 103 min. Basu, Helene, Roland Littlewood, and Arne S. Steinforth, eds. 2017. Spirit & Mind: Mental Health at the Intersection of Religion & Psychiatry. Berlin: LIT. Beatty, Andrew. 1999. “On Ethnographic Experience: Formative and Informative (Nias, Indonesia).” In Being There, edited by C. W. Watson, 74–97. London: Pluto Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1991. Language and Symbolic Power, edited and introduced by John B. Thompson. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Chau, Adam Y. 2008. “The Sensorial Production of the Social.” Ethnos 73(4): 485–504. Classen, Constance, ed. 2005. The Book of Touch. Oxford: Berg. Csordas, Thomas J. 1993. “Somatic Modes of Attention.” Cultural Anthropology 8(2): 135–56. Daniel, Yvonne. 2005. Dancing Wisdom: Embodied Knowledge in Haitian Vodou, Cuban Yoruba, and Bahian Candomblé. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Davies, James. 2010. “Introduction: Emotions in the Field.” In Emotions in the Field: The Psychology and Anthropology of Fieldwork Experience, edited by James Davies and Dimitrina Spencer, 1–31. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Davies, James, and Dimitrina Spencer, eds. 2010. Emotions in the Field: The Psychology and Anthropology of Fieldwork Experience. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Desjarlais, Robert R. 1992. Body and Emotion: The Aesthetics of Illness and Healing in the Nepal Himalayas. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Dox, Donnalee. 2016. Reckoning with Spirit in the Paradigm of Performance. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Eller, Jack D. 2019. Psychological Anthropology for the 21st Century. London: Routledge. Espírito Santo, Diana. 2015. Developing the Dead: Mediumship and Selfhood in Cuban Espiritismo. Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press. Etherington, Kim. 2004. Becoming a Reflexive Researcher: Using Our Selves in Research. London: Kingsley.

Sensory Ethnography and Anthropology of Mediumship

227

Foucault, Michel. 1988. “Technologies of Self.” In Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, edited by Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutmann, and Patrick H. Hutton, 16–49. London: Tavistock. Geertz, Clifford. 1973 [1966]. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books. Halliburton, Murphy. 2009. Mudpacks and Prozac: Experiencing Ayurvedic, Biomedical and Religious Healing. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast. Halstead, Narmala. 2008. “Introduction: Experiencing the Ethnographic Present. Knowing through ‘Crisis.’” In Knowing How to Know: Fieldwork and the Ethnographic Present, edited by Narmala Halstead, Eric Hirsch, and Judith Okely, 1–20. New York: Berghahn Books. Howes, David, ed. 2005. Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader. Oxford: Berg. ———. 2006. The Sixth Sense Reader. Oxford: Berg. Hsu, Elisabeth. 2008. “The Senses and the Social: An Introduction.” Ethnos 73(4): 433–43. ———. 2012. “Medical Anthropology in Europe: Quo Vadis?” Anthropology & Medicine 19(1): 51–61. Ingold, Tim. 2013. “Religious Perception and the Education of Attention.” Religion, Brain & Behavior 4(2): 156–58. Kardec, Allan. 1986 (1861). The Mediums’ Book. Rio de Janeiro: FEB. ———. 1996 [1857]. The Spirits’ Book. Rio de Janeiro: FEB. ———. 2008 [1864]. The Gospel according to Spiritism. Brasilia: ISC. ———. 2015 [1858]. The Spiritist Review: Journal of Psychological Studies 1858. US Spiritist Council. Kleinman, Arthur. 1988. The Illness Narratives: Suffering, Healing, and the Human Condition. New York: Basic Books. Koss-Chioino, Joan. 2005. “Spirit Healing, Mental Health, and Emotion Regulation.” Zygon 40(2): 409–21. ———. 2010. “Introduction to ‘Do Spirits Exist? Ways to Know.’” Anthropology & Humanism 35(2): 131–41. Kurz, Helmar. 2013. Performanz und Modernität im brasilianischen Candomblé: Eine Interpretation [Performance and Modernity in Brazilian Candomblé: An Interpretation]. Hamburg: Kovač. ———. 2015. “‘Depression Is Not a Disease. It Is a Spiritual Problem’: Performance and Hybridization of Religion and Science within Brazilian Spiritist Healing Practices.” Curare 38(3): 173–91. ———. 2017. “Diversification of Mental Health Care: Brazilian Kardecist Psychiatry and the Aesthetics of Healing.” Curare 40(3): 195–206. ———. 2018a. “Trans-Cultural and Transnational Transfer of Therapeutic Practice: Healing Cooperation of Spiritism, Biomedicine, and Psychiatry in Brazil and Germany.” Curare 41(1+2): 39–53. ———. 2018b. “Affliction and Consolation: Mediumship and Spirit Obsession as Explanatory Models within Brazilian Kardecist Mental Health-Care.” In Legitimidades da Loucura: Sofrimento, Luta, Criatividade e Pertença, edited by Mônica Nunes and Tiago P. Marques, 129–54. Salvador: EDUFBA.

228

Helmar Kurz

———. ed. 2019. “Aesthetics of Healing: Working with the Senses in Therapeutic Contexts.” Curare 42(3+4). ———. 2022. “Politics and Aesthetics of Care: Chronic Affliction & Spiritual Healing in Brazilian Kardecism.” In Spiritual, Religious, and Faith-Based Practices in Chronicity: An Exploration of Mental Wellness in Global Context, edited by Andrew R. Hatala and Kerstin Roger, 76–99. London: Routledge. Luhrmann, Tanya M. 2010. “What Counts as Data?” In Emotions in the Field: The Psychology and Anthropology of Fieldwork Experience, edited by James Davies and Dimitrina Spencer, 212–38. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. ———. 2012. “When God Talks Back”: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God. New York: Knopf. Marcus, George E., and Michael M. J. Fischer. 1986. Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. Mauss, Marcel 1975. Soziologie und Anthropologie: Band 2 [Sociology and anthropology: Part 2]. München: Hanser. McCarthy-Jones, Simon. 2012. Hearing Voices: The Histories, Causes and Meanings of Auditory Verbal Hallucinations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McNamara, Patrick. 2009. The Neuroscience of Religious Experience. New York: Cambridge University Press. Münster, Daniel. 2001. Religionsästhetik und Anthropologie der Sinne [Aesthetics of religion and anthropology of the senses]. München: Akademischer Verlag. Nichter, Mark. 1981. “Idioms of Distress: Alternatives in the Expression of Psychosocial Distress. A Case Study from South India.” Culture, Medicine & Psychiatry 5: 379–408. ———. 2008. “Coming to Our Senses: Appreciating the Sensorial in Medical Anthropology.” Transcultural Psychiatry 45: 163–97. Pierini, Emily, and Alberto Groisman. 2016. “Introduction: Fieldwork in Religion. Bodily Experience and Ethnographic Knowledge.” Journal for the Study of Religious Experience 2: 1–6. Pink, Sarah. 2009. Doing Sensory Ethnography. London: SAGE. Samudra, Jaida K. 2008. “Memory in our Body: Thick Participation and the Translation of Kinaesthetic experience.” American Ethnologist 35(4): 665–81. Scheper-Hughes, Nancy, and Margaret M. Lock. 1987. “The Mindful Body: A Prolegomenon to Future Work in Medical Anthropology.” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 1(1): 7–41. Schmidt, Bettina E. 2016. Spirits and Trance in Brazil: An Anthropology of Religious Experience. London: Bloomsbury. Schüler, Sebastian. 2012. “Synchronized Ritual Behaviour: Religion, Cognition and the Dynamics of Embodiment.” In Cave, David, and Rebecca S. Norris, eds. 2012. Religion and the Body: Modern Science and the Construction of Religious Meaning, edited by David Cave and Rebecca S. Norris, 81–101. Leiden: Brill. Seligman, Rebecca. 2014. Possessing Spirits and Healing Selves: Embodiment and Transformation in an Afro-Brazilian Religion. New York: Palgrave MacMillan.

Sensory Ethnography and Anthropology of Mediumship

229

Sjørslev, Inger. 1994. Glaube und Besessenheit: Ein Bericht über die Candomblé-Religion in Brasilien [Belief and possession: A report on the Candomblé religion of Brazil]. Gifkendorf: Merlin. Spencer, Dimitrina. 2010. “Introduction: Emotional Labour and Relational Observation in Anthropological Fieldwork.” In Anthropological Fieldwork: A Relational Process, edited by Dimitrina Spencer and James Davies, 1–47. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars. Stoller, Paul. 1989. The Taste of Ethnographic Things: The Senses in Anthropology. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. ———. 2004. Stranger in the Village of the Sick: A Memoir of Cancer, Sorcery and Healing. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Theissen, Anna J. 2009. The Location of Madness: Spiritist Psychiatry and the Meaning of Mental Illness in Contemporary Brazil. Ann Arbor, MI: ProQuest. Tresch, John. 2001. “On Going Native: Thomas Kuhn and Anthropological Method.” Philosophy of Social Sciences 31(3): 302–22. Turner, Edith. 2010. “Discussion: Ethnography as Transformative Experience.” Anthropology & Humanism 35(2): 218–26. Turner, Victor W., and Edward M. Bruner, eds. 1986. The Anthropology of Experience. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Vannini, Phillip, Dennis Vaskul, and Simon Gottschalk, eds. 2012. The Senses in Self, Society and Culture. New York: Routledge. Wikan, Unni. 1991. “Towards an Experience-Near Anthropology.” Cultural Anthropology 6(3): 285–305. Wilke, Annette, and Lucia Traut, eds. 2015. Religion-Imagination-Ästhetik: Vorstellungsund Sinneswelten in Religion and Kultur [Religion-imagination-aesthetics: Imaginative and sensory worlds in religion and culture]. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Wreford, Joanne T. 2007. “‘Long-Nosed’ Hybrids? Sharing the Experience of White Izangoma in Contemporary South Africa.” Journal of Southern African Studies 33(4): 829–43. Xavier, Francisco C. 1944. Nosso Lar [Our home]. FEB.

Chapter 11

Channeling an Archangel An Apprenticeship in Metatronic Life and Healing® Fiona Bowie

‫ﱬﱫ‬ The title of this chapter references a story told by Richard Farmer, a senior Metatronic teacher. When traveling through passport control between the United Kingdom and the United States, Richard was asked the routine question about his line of work. His answer was “I channel an archangel.”1 This reply apparently led to some interesting conversations with the American customs and border control officers. Richard recounted this incident during a Metatronic class as a way of encouraging students to “speak their own truth.” In writing about Metatronic Life and Healing® I am taking to heart the injunction to share, as simply and honestly as I know how, my experience of and reflections upon participation in this particular energetic healing pathway.2 Spiritual technologies, like other forms of physical and technical learning, require an apprenticeship in order to become a skilled practitioner. Psychological, social, and neurobiological tools can be useful in offering comparative insights and understandings of healing phenomena, but they can also leave an epistemological deficit for which embodied experience partially compensates. Based on autoethnography, participant observation, the available literature, and numerous conversations, this chapter describes an ongoing apprenticeship in a new form of spiritual (angelic) energy healing. While the history of Metatronic Life as a healing pathway is relatively short (starting around 2007 in the United Kingdom), it draws on many wellestablished elements of spiritual healing and teaching, from Gnosticism to 230

Channeling an Archangel

231

chakras, crystals to astrology, taking in many other healing modalities along the way. What can appear a rather random assortment of phenomena are linked through the personal story of Metatronic Life and Healing’s founder, Philippa (known as Pippa) Merivale, and the two current Senior Metatronic Teachers, Clare Glennon and Richard Farmer. Direct experience of the Metatronic Pathway helps bridge the divide between esoteric practices and rational inquiry, particularly in a system that relies heavily on somatic and spiritual rather than intellectual learning.3 In this chapter I explore the idea of “epistemological embodiment” through a contemporary Western practice that blurs the boundaries between “the field” and the researcher, and between the ethnographer’s experience and that of her interlocutors. The field does not constitute an established cultural space, geographical location, ideology, or set of practices. It is a fluid, developing, and experiential form of praxis, with little specific doctrinal or ideological teaching. There are some ideas based on what may loosely be referred to as “New Age Western esotericism”—a clumsy phrase I use as a shorthand to describe a set of assumptions and knowledge common to many, if not all, Metatronic students, healers, and teachers. These include ideas of the reality of energy healing and subtle bodies; the existence of chakras and energy centers in the body; the interconnection of mind, body, and environment; the power of love as a divine, all-encompassing, omnipresent energy in the world and in individuals; the possibility of conscious existence outside our current physical embodiment, including before and after this incarnation; and the existence of angels as well as other divine and ascended beings who can communicate with us and who care about us as individuals and about the current (Aquarian) transformation taking place on planet Earth. The Metatronic classes are based on the reception of a series of divine energy Transmissions. There is no test of knowledge or of adherence to specific concepts, and certification is based solely on attendance. Those attracted to the Metatronic Pathway are self-selected, and most students are already on a journey in alternative healing and esoteric beliefs and practices that encompass some or all of this particular way of seeing and understanding the world. In Children of the New Age, Steven Sutcliffe (2002) describes a shift among New Age seekers from the 1970s onward from public, well-defined groups (such as the Rosicrucian Order) setting up new enclaves (such as the Findhorn settlement), to private gnosis and self-realization, with a fragmentation of unified ideologies and emblems. The hermeneutical floodgates were flung open and the term “New Age” came to encompass just about anything. Sutcliffe notes that “holistic” health care became intertwined with other spiritual ideas and practices, and that health food shops and alterna-

232

Fiona Bowie

tive healing clinics became primary proponents and advertisers of the New Age message. The largely private, individual, and eclectic mix of beliefs and practices we see among Metatronic students in the 2020s, with a strong emphasis on alternative healing and self-development, represents a continuation of the process described by Sutcliffe. I start with a brief account of the origin of the Metatronic Pathway as it entered the life of its founder, and my own encounter with Pippa Merivale’s teaching while working in Bristol, England, as it was passed onto me by Richard Farmer and Clare Glennon. I then describe my own continuing role as a student of the Metatronic Pathway and as an apprentice Metatronic healer. For some practitioners the Metatronic Pathway is a form of religious expression and a spiritual quest. I am sidestepping definitions of religion and spirituality but note that relationships with nonphysical beings are foundational to the Metatronic Pathway and to Metatronic Healing. The ultimate goal of the Metatronic Pathway is to recognize and manifest one’s own divinity. Although I will discuss this further, these teachings are not the focus of the current chapter, which has at its core an autoethnographic account of an apprenticeship in energy healing.4

PHILIPPA MERIVALE AND THE FOUNDING OF THE METATRONIC HEALING PATHWAY In various books and interviews, Pippa Merivale has described a series of dramatic encounters and incidents along a path of personal hardship and struggle, leading to recognition of her role as an energy healer and channel for the “Archangel Metatron,” and to the foundation of the Metatronic Healing Pathway.5 A single mother to three young children, she escaped from a violent marriage and found herself homeless and penniless. Pippa met some people who were teaching color therapy, using the energetic vibrations of color to rebalance and heal the physical and energetic body. They encouraged her to train and subsequently teach this method of healing. This took Pippa to Japan, the United States, and South Africa, and established her as a color healer in the United Kingdom. Disaster struck when her youngest daughter Magdalen, then age six, was hit by a car and left for dead. One night, while Magdalen lay in a hospital intensive care unit, Pippa found herself asking the existential question “Why this now? Why this child?” when she had come so far and was turning her life around. She became aware that Jesus was in the room with her. Although she had left behind her Roman Catholic upbringing and conditioning, Pippa recognized Jesus as a familiar friend and felt his overwhelming love for her. Rather than being awestruck,

Channeling an Archangel

233

she continued to complain to Jesus as he sat on the bed next to her and took her hand. She was told that this experience was about learning to trust, and that Magdalen would survive and go on to help others. When this very physical apparition disappeared, Pippa knew that something had fundamentally changed and that more would be demanded of her and of Magdalen. As Pippa went to be with her daughter, she was met by the intensive care staff coming to find her. They asked her what had just happened. Magdalen’s condition had turned the corner and it was clear that she would live, and a few weeks later she was able to leave the hospital, broken but alive.6 A second significant encounter occurred sometime later when Pippa took her children to a theme park. Pippa was nervous that her badly injured daughter might have an epileptic fit, when, in the midst of her anxiety, she heard a voice say very clearly that it would be as if the accident had never happened. She looked around and could not see anyone, but the impression the voice made was profound. Pippa later identified this as the voice of the Archangel Metatron. The ability to “lift the story” and return to an original template was Metatron’s first promise to her. It seemed absurd to imagine that one could turn back time, but over the course of many years Magdalen continued to heal, even though the process is not complete. The search for healing and wholeness for Magdalen was a key fundamental drive in Pippa’s openness and receptivity to the energies of Metatronic healing. The accident is presented in Pippa’s writing as a traumatic but key factor in preparing her to receive the high-energy frequencies of love and the message of hope and renewal that came through Metatron. So, who is this Archangel Metatron? In the Jewish Talmud and mystical Kabbalistic texts, Metatron is identified as the Prince or Angel of God’s Presence, as the archangel Michael or as Enoch, mentioned in Genesis 5:18– 24, as a man who walked faithfully with God after his bodily ascent into heaven. In Jewish as well as some Christian, Islamic, and occult traditions, Metatron is mediator between divinity and humanity and the created order. Another phrase for Metatron is “God’s architect,” responsible for the form and sacred geometry of the universe. In much New Age and occult teaching, Metatron is the archangel who has the capacity to help us realize our true divine nature (Metatron’s second promise to Pippa). The name “Metatron” is not personal, like that of the archangels Gabriel, Raphael, or Michael. Its origin is two Greek words, Meta (meaning “greater,” “beyond,” or “transcending”) and tron (meaning “form,” “tool,” or “instrument”), indicating a divine being who is beyond form, mediating the material and immaterial realms. An important “twin” to Metatron is Sandalphon, an archangel featured in Jewish Kabbalistic and early Christian literature as an ascended form of the prophet Elijah.7 If Metatron’s energy brings the divine presence to earth,

234

Fiona Bowie

Sandalphon’s is grounded in the earth and brings its gifts and frequencies, along with the wishes and prayers of men and women, to the heavens. Sandalphon is also in some traditions the angel of music, helping people communicate with the divine. The energy of Sandalphon understood by and channeled through Pippa Merivale is associated with recognition, seeing the person for who and what they are, and giving permission to expand into a full and purposeful life. In Rescued by Angels, Pippa relates how she started to receive downloads from the angels,8 “packages of energy and ancient knowledge” that came “as words, or as bodily sensations, randomly—sometimes by day, in meditation, sometimes by night when I expect to be asleep” (2009, 194). She goes on to describe the intensely physical nature of these downloads: “They come as surges of immense heat, or waves of energy pulsing from the center of my heart right through my arms and hands and out, or images of crystals implanted in my heart, or the purest pearly colors, shimmering, ardent and soft” (194). The process is described as often sudden and intense, at other times warm and gentle. “I feel something like quantum packs of color—of energy and information—entering my crown or my heart, and filtering through to the cells even of my fingers and toes. And I trust to time: the quantum packs will release their energy and information piece by piece, as the need arises though the months ahead” (195). The process was shared with close friends and colleagues, and very early on Pippa started giving workshops to pass these energies on to others, including her younger friend and colleague Clare Glennon, who would go on to become one of the two current Senior Metatronic Teachers. As the workshops and downloads continued, Pippa envisaged a specific pathway with seven courses, each with a series of Transmissions of energy and Attunements that “reset” the physical and energetic body. At the beginning of the Metatronic journey, Pippa described seeing the energies flowing into and through her and into the workshop participants in a vivid, colorful way. She began to tour, including to the United States, and South Africa, attracting students, many of whom were already complementary healers, as well as spiritual seekers and the curious attracted by these gentle but powerful Metatronic energies. The Metatronic system and energies that Pippa Merivale anchored have been handed over gradually to Clare Glennon and Richard Farmer, and since 2020 Clare Glennon has been the official director of Metatronic Life and Healing. In Harps of Gold, Pippa describes Clare as her “Metatronic partner” as well as her “shepherd and anchor” (2011, 201). Pippa said that Clare “got it from day one” and “hung in through years of building and delivered on every level, no matter what the cost.” Clare describes a feeling of

Channeling an Archangel

235

recognition and knowing, a sense that whatever it was being transmitted it was “the real thing.” Richard Farmer had spent many years following spiritual paths, developing skills, and teaching in various lineages, including tai chi, Reiki (noncontact energy healing), and VortexHealing® (energy healing using divine light and consciousness, working particularly with emotional issues). It was through VortexHealing9 that Pippa and Clare met Richard. Richard also describes feeling that the energies bridged by Pippa were genuine and powerful. He had a level of preparation that enabled him to progress quickly. As he expresses it, his “energetic spine” was able to hold the download of the Metatronic Transmissions in one go, and he began teaching while still undergoing the training. Richard’s particular role has been to systematize the Metatronic Pathway and to develop it further—such as through the “Awakening Stream” that, as the name suggests, focuses on the energies that align people to their divine nature. There has also been a shift from a focus on the colors of the Metatronic energies, which was an important part of Pippa’s own background and training, to the qualities they convey. For example, in the Foundation class the energies “cool fire” and “warm fire” are now described as “divine simplicity” and “divine safety.” The Transmissions of “turquoise” and “Wedgewood blue”, with Attunements to the heart and throat chakra respectively, have become “original heart” and “original mind.” The energies remain the same, but the way of presenting the system to students is continually reassessed and developed.10

AN ENCOUNTER WITH METATRON My own encounter with the Metatronic Pathway was considerably less dramatic than Pippa’s. It was so far from being a life-changing event that I don’t remember how or when I came across it, only that it was while I was teaching anthropology at Bristol University. As a full-time working mother, my life was very full. I did not have the leisure to attend courses or the monthly evening meditations Richard Farmer held in the Quaker Meeting House in Bristol. By whatever means, I found myself on Pippa’s mailing list. I have a vague idea that I picked up a leaflet in which she described the miraculous healing of her daughter with the help of an archangel. I stored the information away as a potential resource in bringing up children who also faced challenges in their lives. I used to receive regular emails from Pippa, often with very short mediations attached, just two or three minutes of audio material. I generally opened the messages and sometimes listened to the meditations before deleting them. Whenever I opened an email from Pippa and glanced at the words, my body would heave a sigh and release tension. Two

236

Fiona Bowie

adjectives very often used to describe Metatronic energy are “powerful” and “gentle.” It is so quiet that one could miss or dismiss it, but nevertheless the energy held a great attraction for me—not one I thought about or rationalized, but one to which my body simply responded. In 2017 I had a weekend free of childcare and took the opportunity to attend a Saturday Metatronic workshop held by Richard Farmer in a therapy center just outside Bristol. There were about a dozen people present, male and female, but as in all Metatronic classes the women outnumbered the men by a ratio of three or four to one. The demographic appeared socially, and to a lesser extent ethnically, representative but heavily skewed toward people in their forties or fifties and above. After a short talk and some warm-up exercises (physical and meditative), we were invited to sit or lie on the floor (mats and cushions were provided for those who had not brought their own) and receive two “Transmissions” and two “Attunements” representing masculine and feminine energy—symbolized or identified with the energy of particular crystals. The Metatronic Life website11 describes Attunements as a means of “retuning the body back to its original balance” and Transmissions as “the healing tools or energetic templates that resonate with your higher and more creative vision.” Both the terms and concepts were new to me, but they are also found in Reiki and other alternative healing modalities, as I later discovered. In Rescued by Angels, the workshops, now referred to as classes, are described by Pippa as being all about “activating the heart center” (2009, 214). The angels “attune different stations of your body to pick up the energy that Metatron sends through, then they use their light rays to open up people’s hearts and pour the power in—the divine power.” Attunement is given through a light touch with the thumb of one hand directed toward a particular part of the body for a few seconds. It is described as like “adjusting the radio to receive certain wavelengths.”12 Having received the Attunement the participants lie or sit back and simply receive the Transmission which, according to Pippa, “transmits a pure, potent energy straight into your heart” (2009, 214). In moments of feedback after each session, some participants described seeing or hearing vivid colors or images, or feeling deeply moved, perhaps connecting with old emotions and events. One or two simply fell asleep and started snoring; others described being in a deep trance state. One woman would receive tunes from popular songs or hymns with lyrics relating to her emotional state. I struggled to stay awake, and if I felt or saw anything it was more like a hypnagogic hallucination that seemed to have little connection to the content of the session. This continued to be my pattern through the first two of the following Pathway classes—although I found the process relaxing and pleasant and the company excellent. I had

Channeling an Archangel

237

not realized until the talks and feedback that there was a particular theme to that first day. I was not particularly interested in balancing masculine and feminine energies—what I most needed was some means of relaxation and de-stressing. Neither had I realized that this class was a prerequisite to the Metatronic Pathway classes, but I signed up for the Foundation class at the end of the day. Something in me was excited by the idea, and although it felt as if nothing had happened I had a deeper knowing that there was something important here for me and that I would probably continue along this path. I was open to the adventure and curious just to see where it led.

THE METATRONIC PATHWAY As the various energy Transmissions came into or through Pippa Merivale, she understood that they had a particular order and that each one built on what had gone before, although Clare Glennon described the Metatronic Pathway as more of a jigsaw than a system in the way that it first arrived.13 There has been some playing around with the names for these seven stages and the order and number of Transmissions, but the basic pattern has remained the same. It is still the case that each step has to be taken in a particular order and that if you miss a Transmission you have to drop out and repeat the class at a later date before progressing. The one-day workshop I attended with the Transmissions of masculine and feminine energy has now become a two-day class, “Sacred Ground,” with the Transmission of grace added. The Foundation class is seen as a summary of the whole system and is in some ways complete in itself. The subsequent classes move from a focus on the emotional to mental and spiritual frequencies through the series of Transmissions. Parallel to the Metatronic Life Pathway as established by Pippa Merivale, a two-step Healing Pathway has been added for those who want to practice Metatronic Healing for themselves and others. Most recently (around 2020), an “Awakening Stream,” pioneered by Richard Farmer, which I have taken twice, was also added. The Metatronic Life website includes a table that provides an overview of these concepts (see figure 11.1). A decision to follow the Metatronic Pathway represents a long-term financial and time commitment for students. The development of online classes and healings as a result of the coronavirus pandemic has rapidly increased their reach. In order to deepen the experience, students are encouraged to repeat (at a discount) the Pathway steps they have already taken. With the physical constraints on the number of participants having been removed, and rising numbers taking part in Pathway classes, healings, and

238

Fiona Bowie

Figure 11.1. Visual map of the Metatronic Pathway. Retrieved 5 September 2021 from https://www.metatronic-life.com/metatronic-course-map/. © Clare Glennon.

meditations, the profitability of running the program has increased considerably—although some sessions, such as COVID-19 and COVID-19 vaccine support, and earth healing meditations, remain free. At every point along the Metatronic Pathway, I have internal conversations with myself as to whether this is a way for those who set themselves up as gurus to make money, or a divine gift, a bit of both, or something else altogether. After the three-day Foundation class in 2017, I expressed such thoughts to one of the other participants as we left. It had been relaxing and pleasant to spend several hours a day for three days lying on a yoga mat looking up at the beautiful, old, beamed ceiling of Yanley Court barn, allowing not much at all to happen (or so it seemed). His response was, “Well, there are worse ways to spend one’s time.” As just having time to my-

Channeling an Archangel

239

self was a treat at that point in my life, I was inclined to agree. The course booklets originally written by Pippa Merivale are not particularly easy to follow, thanks to their discursive, eclectic discussions, often drawing heavily on New Age jargon and channeled material.14 While some of the contents strike me as sensible and insightful, they were apparently written quickly and uncritically. A reading list at the end of the Foundation booklet, first issued by Pippa in 2010, includes her own books, channeled information on the Essene life of Jesus, Mary Magdalene, and other biblical figures written by Stuart Wilson and Joanna Prentis (2005, 2008), and Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth (a very popular self-help book first published in 2005). These reading lists have been left out of later editions (with Pippa’s blessing) but give an interesting insight into the kind of material that stimulated her thinking. It is only after four of five years of Metatronic practice that I am reading some of these recommended books—although it was never actually suggested that we engage with them. Many Metatronic students clearly have read and absorbed many of the ideas presented in these and similar books, and have incorporated them into their lives and consciousness, but the classes allow little time for more general discussion, remaining focused on the practical “work” of the various energetic Transmissions. As an autoethnographic exercise, taking part in Metatronic classes has convinced me of the value of firsthand, embodied, participative fieldwork (or, better, “lifework”). An approach based on formal interviews and recommended readings, without participating in the meditations and healings— which are what the Metatronic pathway is all about—would certainly have been less satisfying. It would also have put an almost insuperable barrier between me and my interlocutors. In his provocative book Anthropology and the Will to Meaning, Vassos Argyrou (2002) argues that anthropologists seek “Sameness” in their descriptions of other worlds and societies. The term “Sameness” is rather misleading, but for Argyrou it describes an attempt to see all cultures as of equal value. If one accepts Argyrou’s original premise, the task is, he claims, doomed to failure, as differences between societies, or ways of seeing and understanding the world, are viewed through an ethnocentric lens in which “the native” is always on the receiving end of the ethnographer’s discourse. Argyrou’s assertion prompts the question, how do I react as an academic studying an “other” who is very like me, in my own country and culture, when nevertheless differences of style and content confront one another? As someone on a “hermeneutic slide” (cf. Luhrmann 1989), simultaneously insider and outsider, “native” and ethnographer, one can ask Argyrou’s rhetorical question: “What am I to do to defend myself against the symbolic violence exercised over me by Western definitions of the world, whether these are humanistic and progressive, enlightened and

240

Fiona Bowie

tolerant or otherwise?” (2002, 2). There are two answers to this. Methodologically, I can share in the experience of transformation with my fellow students while retaining an open, critical, questioning, and, hopefully, respectful attitude toward the ways in which the Metatronic Pathway is explained and understood by its founder, the teachers, and many of the other participants.15 This includes questioning my own conditioning, whether academic or religious, so as to allow the sources, stories, experiences, and energies that I encounter through Metatronic healing to speak to me. The second part of the response is to continue to question and test what I learn in the process. Fabian Graham (2020) demonstrates this kind of participative engagement, in a creative dialogue with recent trends in ontological anthropology, in his study of spirit mediums in Singapore and Malaysia. I can also refuse to choose between fidelity to the tribe of academia in opposition to the tribe of Metatronic students and teachers. Each of us in our lives plays many roles and we remain capable of changing ourselves and others along the way. Argyrou’s anxiety stems in part from an acknowledgment of the hegemonic nature of academic discourse for those whose careers are beholden to its gatekeepers. As someone no longer subject to the administrative and increasingly narrow agenda of academic anthropology, I am also free to follow a more discursive path and, in Dipesh Chakrabarty’s terms, to understand that the world and our experiences of it are often fragmentary and “irreducibly not-one” (2000, 249). I have now taken the first six steps of the Metatronic Pathway and am about to embark on the final seventh step. I also completed the “Metatronic Healing Foundation Practitioner” course in Abingdon, Oxfordshire, in March 2020 just before the COVID-19 lockdown took effect, and the “Metatronic Healing Advanced Practitioner” course online in December 2021. Each step has had a different focus and resonance. Some classes are more interactive than others. The third class, “Ancestral Songlines,” involved a certain amount of homework, including looking at blockages and issues in one’s past (in this life or family traditions) before releasing them. While I “felt” little, I enjoyed the relaxation of the first two Pathway classes. I did consciously learn something about myself in “Songlines,” although probably nothing my husband and other family members could not have told me. Knowing something intellectually is, however, very different from feeling its energy and seeing how it has worked through my life. It introduced the crucial step of “lifting the story,” the Metatronic promise to release the energy that no longer serves us, stored in the cells of the physical body and the energetic body. One of the take-home realizations I had was the extent to which I am a “rescuer,” as were many members of my family on both my mother’s and father’s side. We accumulate people and animals, or causes, around us

Channeling an Archangel

241

that we feel need rescuing. There is nothing wrong with rescuing per se, but it can have many unanticipated and undesirable consequences. The other main lesson from the “Ancestral Songlines” class, which is probably related to a desire to rescue others, is a hesitancy to “take hold of my own power.” If you are busy saving the world, you do not focus on your own needs or capacity for creative action, which almost invariably takes a back seat. The fifth course, known as the “Cosmic” (bridging planetary energies), taught jointly by Clare and Richard, was the first one I took online, in August 2020, and it was extraordinarily powerful. It was a time of personal change. We were in the process of leaving our home of nearly two decades and moving to France. Our daughter suddenly decided to move out and did so overnight. I felt in a way that I had not previously that my physical and energetic bodies were being reconfigured. I had sat in many meditation groups over the years in which people referred to the Shakti energy rising like a serpent through the spine,16 and was aware that Pippa and the Metatronic teachers made use of their “energetic spine” to channel the various energy frequencies that came to rest and were stored in the energetic heart chakra. During the “Cosmic” class the sense of energy both descending and rising through the energetic spine and being channeled from there to other parts of the body and out to the world beyond was powerful and undeniable. It was a force that other members of my household were also noticing. My husband described how when we were in bed one night, he had a strong image of a column of light running vertically through my body. The Metatronic teachers speak of the “night class” as the time when the energy received during the day continues to integrate with the body (physical and energetic). The energies also unexpectedly attracted other people into my orbit, some beneficial but some less so. The intensity of the experience was exciting but with hindsight also made me vulnerable. Changes were taking place within and around me without the time and space to integrate them properly. The sixth step, “The Masters,” brought me face-to-face with New Age, neo-Gnostic traditions, and to that extent had a different resonance again as I let these teachings and energies sit alongside those familiar from a lifetime of Christian practices and teachings. For Pippa a universal Christ is at the core of Metatronic energies.17 Jesus, one of the “Masters” transmitted in the class, is identified as key figure within the Essene community, along with Mary Magdalene and members of his family. Reflecting on some of this material has helped me realize the extent to which my (Western Protestant) background has informed my hitherto rather limited understanding of Jesus, critiqued by the American Franciscan Richard Rohr (2019:11) for its narrow understanding of the cosmic Christ and tendency to use “Christ” as Jesus’s

242

Fiona Bowie

surname. In addition to Scriptural sources, Pippa draws on channeled material and narratives from past-life regression in her understanding of Biblical “Masters”. While I remain open to such narratives, there is a lack of critical curiosity that I find challenging. One way to approach the issue of accuracy when looking at source material that is sensitive and potentially contentious is suggested by Angela Voss, who argues for the importance of the imaginal in academic study and observes that we can only glimpse the place “beyond” in the terms of this one, and since we live in an age of literalization, of academic, scientific and religious fundamentalism which has no room for imaginal modes of knowledge, spiritual entities are now required to present themselves literally; to be believed, to be photographed, videoed and recorded to “prove” their existence. (2010, 239)

Voss is wary of the removal of access to the spiritual realm from the domain of sacred ritual, and this immediacy is part of the New Age package. It includes the belief that we are in a time of planetary transition with the cosmos moving to a new and more direct form of communication. The earth’s magnetic frequency is rising and there is an acceleration in the process of human awakening (to our divine nature). Metatronic Transmissions are but one aspect of this quickening—or so the story goes. Voss cites Carol Zaleski (1987), who argues for an approach to “contemporary otherworld vision that is based on a pragmatic attention to individuals’ experience and a re-location of such experience within an imaginal framework” (Zaleski 1987, cited in Voss 2010, 240). Maintaining a balance between rational and experiential understandings of phenomena is invariably a challenge, particularly if we have a binary “true/ false” view of the world. The “empathetic” element of my ethnographic methodology is important here (Bowie 2013). We cannot “hear” the resonance of channeled or “remembered” past-life stories unless we allow them to speak to us and can hear the ways in which they speak to our informants, understanding the role they have played in informants’ lives. Whether or not past events took place, they can reveal information about present-day relationships and perhaps suggest lessons that need to be learned or relearned, released, or experienced in this life; as such, these stories can have tremendous power. In the case of the Gnostic and Essene “heresies,” there is a long history of persecution by those in authority against those who propound beliefs such as reincarnation or the essential divine nature of the individual soul. The third part of my methodology is “engagement”. As stated earlier, when dealing with a system that relies heavily on praxis rather than doctrinal or intellectual engagement, there is little to be gained without firsthand, somatic participation. My apprenticeship with Metatronic energies has been transformative and in

Channeling an Archangel

243

ways that I and those close to me interpret (largely) positively. I have also seen changes in other students—often slow and gentle rather than dramatic, but nevertheless real and profound—and it is this process of gradual transformation that attracts and keeps people engaged in the process.

ENGAGING WITH METATRONIC HEALING I have written at some length on the Metatronic Pathway, my experience of it and some of the methodological challenges and questions it poses. Healing, in particular “lifting the story,” is at the heart of the Metatronic Pathway. As we change, those around us also benefit, and students describe transformed relationships as a result. I often felt an energetic connection with a particular family member when participating in the classes, and my intention to help and heal this person was a strong motivation for me to continue the along the Pathway. In terms of direct hands-on energy healing, my prior experience was limited primarily to family pets. The animals seemed to enjoy the attention and it appeared to have a calming effect, but I couldn’t judge whether there was more to it than that. I certainly never saw myself as a “healer” or contemplated training in either conventional allopathic or alternative therapies. I surprised myself, therefore, when I signed up for the Metatronic Healing Foundation Practitioner course, which was held in March 2020 in St Ethelwold’s House, a beautiful old building used as a retreat centre in the center of Abingdon in Oxfordshire. The focus was more practical than the Pathway steps, with plenty of time given to paired exercises or receiving group healings, and time for discussion and feedback. Most of those present already worked as healers in a variety of “modalities,” including VortexHealing, Reiki, and Feldenkrais (which centers on movement, posture, and breathing). Others were just wanting to gain confidence in giving healing to family and friends on a nonprofit basis. The only Transmission was the energy of sugilite, which is a beautiful purple crystal specifically associated with healers. It is said to repair and protect the energy of the auric field and to teach you to become more loving, patient, caring, and forgiving. I found receiving this Transmission and Attunement an unexpectedly moving experience and it felt like an initiation. I began to find that while family members remained reluctant to ask for healing or to let me practice on them, others did start to ask for healing, including people I had not seen for years. I also started to offer healing when I felt those concerned might find it helpful. After completing the “Cosmic” course, students are said to have the energetic capacity to offer

244

Fiona Bowie

distant or online healing, which under the circumstances of COVID-19 lockdowns certainly expands the number of potential recipients. I found that some individuals, whether in person or online, are extremely sensitive to the Metatronic energies. They seem to sense when I send distant healing and sometimes give feedback indicating that quite unexpected and profound changes were taking place. I have found Metatronic healing more effective for removing the emotional blocks that affect physical, emotional, and mental health (“lifting the story”) than in the direct relief of physical pain. One of the beauties of Metatronic healing is that although one is told that all the transmissions one has received are stored in the energetic heart and can be utilized for the benefit of others, one does not actually need to know what the issue with a patient is or which energies to use. The role of the healer is to “bridge” the divine energies through intention and compassion, and to allow “Metatron and the team” to do the work. Anxious students are often reassured that “you can’t get it wrong” as Metatron is a divine intelligence and knows exactly what is needed. With a patient present, the normal procedure is to make light physical contact, generally but not necessarily by sitting or standing behind them and putting one’s hands on their shoulders, or, if at a distance, to make mental/energetic contact with the person. There is then a set routine to follow, but the task of the healer is simply to be that bridge and facilitate the contact between the patient and the divine (Metatronic) energies. With experience, the sense of the flow of energies can become very direct and powerful, and there is often a surprising degree of coherence between the experience of the healer and that of the client/recipient. A typical healing session will last between twenty and forty minutes, with a period of preparation and feedback. Metatronic healing is sometimes used in conjunction with other forms of energy healing, although those who combine modalities often claim that Metatron “can reach the parts that other healing modalities can’t reach.”

IS ENERGY HEALING REAL? There is considerable skepticism in scientific and medical quarters concerning the whole concept of energy healing, but research into intention, meditation, prayer, and spiritual healing is giving us a greater understanding of the relationship between mind, body, and spirit. Asking whether something is “real” is not generally an ethnographic question. Argyou is concerned that it immediately reintroduces hierarchies of knowledge in which scientific (or scientistic) paradigms will examine “native views” and find them wanting by comparison. There is little evidence that even scientifically trained Meta-

Channeling an Archangel

245

tronic students spend much time worrying about the “unscientific” nature of Metatronic healing. If it “feels right” and it works, the practice generally takes precedence over other considerations. This does not mean that some practitioners are not interested in the science of healing, and there is a growing body popular and specialist literature for reference.18

THE ROAD AHEAD I do not have a conclusion as such. I am still a beginner in the field of Metatronic Healing and am curious to see how it will develop. I am about to take the final step of the Pathway (the Vitruvian Bridge). I could leave the field at any time by simply not signing up for classes, disconnecting from my Metatronic WhatsApp support group, and turning to other forms of spiritual practice or giving them up altogether. It would be harder to undo the changes that have taken place over the last four of five years as they feel hardwired into my cells and energy field. I am calmer, more centered, and more at peace with myself and those around me than I was before I started—which could well be the effect of regular daily meditation and of having found a form of practice that suits me energetically. What I hope to avoid is a facile conclusion in which I seek to distance myself from the ethnographic experience, or to give a voice-over in which Metatronic healing is “explained” rather than simply described and contextualized. The blurred boundaries of field and researcher, of apprentice and academic, of one’s own biography and the experiences of others are realities in all participative ethnography, however much we may seek the comfort and security of our disciplinary tribal boundaries. What I have sought to achieve is to “speak my truth” as I currently understand and interpret it, both to myself and others. Fiona Bowie is an anthropologist of religion and a research affiliate of the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography at Oxford University.

NOTES 1. Technically the Metatronic energies are “bridged” rather than “channeled,” which will be discussed later. It is worth noting that many thousands of people claim to channel angels and archangels, ascended masters, and other spiritual beings, including Metatron — all referred to rather disparagingly by the founder of the Theosophical Society, Helena Blavatsky, as nothing more than “the reemergence of tribal gods” (1987, 301–302).

246

Fiona Bowie

2. The terminology has changed slightly over the years. According to a statement on the website in 2021 (https://www.metatronic-life.com), both Metatronic Life® and Metatronic Healing® (singly or combined) are the formally registered trademark names of this system and distinguish this particular current of divine energetic transmissions from other practitioners who also use the energy from or channel the Archangel Metatron. Metatronic Life is used for the Pathway, consisting of the preparatory “Sacred Ground” class and the seven steps, as well as the newer “Awakening Stream.” Metatronic Healing is a sharing of the energetic gifts received through transmissions of Metatronic energies (bridged by a trained Metatronic teacher). The Metatronic Healing training consists of “Foundation” and “Advanced Practitioners” classes. Students who have completed a Metatronic Healing training and have the necessary registration are permitted to advertise and practice as Metatronic healers. Healing can be given to oneself or others (or to places and other animals), either physically present or, once a student has sufficient energy (achieved though completing the requisite Pathway steps with their energetic transmissions), at a distance. The first five of these pathways are described in some detail by Pippa Merivale in her book Harps of Gold (2011). As of August 2021 there are five Metatronic teachers (two senior) and three apprentice teachers. Apart from Richard Farmer, currently all the teachers are women. The Metatronic Times database has over eight hundred names of students who have completed at least one Pathway step, and over four thousand people have participated in an online healing or meditation. Some fifty students have completed all seven Pathway steps, and there is demand for more opportunities to complete the various Pathway steps. The carry-on rate is high, at around 50–60 percent of those who have started out on the Pathway. 3. As Emily Pierini (2020) also found during her own apprenticeship as a mediumistic healer in her study of the Vale do Amanhecer in Brazil. 4. In the sixth out of seven steps, there is an introduction to various “Masters”, not unlike nineteenth-century Theosophical ideas of adepts or masters who retain physical form and more particularly the New Age “Ascended Masters” propounded by Theosophical student Guy Ballard in the 1930s, and Mark and Elizabeth Clare Prophet in the 1950s. The Metatronic pathway adds to the mix various teachings based on texts such as the Gospel of Thomas and other early Gnostic Christian manuscripts, and Neo-Gnostic (Essene) texts based on pastlife memories and channeled sources that regard Jesus, an anointed master (“Christ”) as a pivotal figure in the history of humanity and of the universe, and the Christ energy as a key component in the development of global consciousness. The differences between Theosophical ideas and those of the New Age are described by Pablo Sender (2011). 5. Pippa has published three books that touch on the Metatronic Pathway, the first of which, Rescued by Angels (2009), is an autobiographical account of her life and journey, from working as a teacher of color therapy, to becoming a vehicle through which the high-energy frequencies of a divine being identified as the Archangel Metatron were “downloaded.” Pippa also authored the seven course

Channeling an Archangel

6. 7.

8.

9.

10.

11. 12.

13. 14.

15.

16. 17. 18.

247

books for the Metatronic Pathway classes—which have subsequently been reedited with additions by current Senior Metatronic Teachers Clare Glennon and Richard Farmer. At one time Pippa had a weekly broadcast with the World Puja Network, which brought Metatronic healing and energies to a wider audience (Harps of Gold, 2011, “About the Author”). There are several written and audio accounts of this incident. One of the most complete is in Rescued by Angels (2009, 75–81). Both Enoch and Elijah are associated with the imagery of the Merkaba (or Merkava/Merkabah), a “chariot” that is believed to have carried them bodily into heaven. In the Book of Ezekiel 1:4–26, the Merkaba is both the throne of God and a four-wheeled vehicle consisting of angels (Cherubim) with the faces of a man, lion, ox, and eagle. Angels are also described by Pippa Merivale as “high-frequency energies,” different vibrations of consciousness and power sent to help us accomplish what we need to do on Earth (2009, 204). Richard Farmer was training as a VortexHealing teacher at the time he met Pippa and Clare. It is described as a holistic system of healing and inner awakening, founded by Ric Weinman in 1994, that has many parallels with Metatronic healing (2015). Some of the Metatronic students are also students or practitioners of VortexHealing. See https://vortex-healers.info for more information. My thanks to Clare and Richard for giving their time to read drafts of this chapter and to correct errors and explain many aspects of the foundations and development of Metatronic teaching. https://www.metatronic-life.com/shop/sacred-ground-a-metatronic-beginningsaturday-26th-sunday-27th-june-2021/ With restrictions on physical meetings from the spring of 2020 onward as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, courses largely moved online and the attunements have been given to oneself. Richard and Clare are considering (consulting with Metatron) whether this form of self-attunement will continue when face-to-face classes resume. Personal communication, 8 April 2021. I have nothing against using channeled material as data and do so myself (see Bowie 2020); it is sometimes the uncritical manner in which it is used that I find frustrating. Elsewhere I explain my general methodological approach to fieldwork as a “cognitive, empathetic engagement” (Bowie 2013). In this case the discursive elements are largely internal and my focus is on allowing the energetic work to unfold on somatic, mental, and spiritual levels. In Hindu tradition Shakti is a sacred divine, cosmic force, often conceived of in its feminine aspect, that underlies the creation of the universe. This view of a perennial, universal Christ energy is also found within more orthodox Christian teaching, see, for example Rohr 2019. See, for example, Dean Radin’s (2013) work with Buddhist monks and ESP; Gary Schwartz (2007) on intention, spirit, and energy; as well as the earlier

248

Fiona Bowie

work of biologist Cleve Backster in the 1960s; and Tomkins and Bird (1973) on plant communication, all of which suggest the close links between energy and healing, as well as the importance of intention and compassion in this process.

REFERENCES Argyrou, Vassos. 2002. Anthropology and the Will to Meaning. London: Pluto Press. Backster, Cleve. 2003. Primary Perception. Anza, CA: White Rose Millennium Press. Blavatsky, Helena. 1987 [1889]. The Key to Theosophy. London: Theosophical Publishing House. https://www.helenablavatsky.org/2018/06/the-key-to-theosophy. html. Bowie, Fiona. 2013. “Building Bridges, Dissolving Boundaries: Towards a Methodology for the Ethnographic Study of the Afterlife, Mediumship and Spiritual Beings.” J Am Acad Relig 81(3): 698–733. ———. 2020. “Mountains as Sources of Power in Seen and Unseen Worlds.” In Space, Place, and Religious Landscapes, edited by Darrelyn Gunzburg and Bernadette Brady, 123–268. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2000. Provincializing Europe. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Graham, Fabian. 2020. Voices from the Underworld. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Heartsong, Claire. 2017. Anna, Grandmother of Jesus. London: Hay House. Luhrmann, Tanya. 1989. Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft. London: Wiley-Blackwell. Merivale, Philippa. 2009. Rescued by Angels. Winchester: O Books. ———. 2010. The Wisdom of Oz. Winchester: O Books. ———. 2011. Harps of Gold. Winchester: O Books. Pierini, Emily. 2020. Jaguars of the Dawn: Spirit Mediumship in the Brazilian Vale do Amanhecer. New York: Berghahn Books. Radin, Dean. 2013. Supernormal. New York: Deepak Chopra Books/Random House. Rohr, Richard. 2019. The Universal Christ. New York: Convergent Books, London: SPCK. Sender, Pablo D. 2011. “Mahatmas versus Ascended Masters.” Quest 99, no. 3 (Summer): 107–11. Sutcliffe, Steven. 2002. Children of the New Age. London: Routledge. Tomkins, Peter, and Christopher Bird. 1973. The Secret Life of Plants. New York: Harper Perennial. Tolle, Eckhart. 2005. A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose. Harmondsworth: Michael Joseph Ltd./Penguin. Voss, Angela. 2010. “Life between Lives Therapy: A Mystery Ritual for Modern Times?” In Divination: Perspectives for the New Millennium, edited by Patrick Curry, 212–41. London: Routledge. Weinman, Ric. 2015. VortexHealing® Divine Energy Healing. Bloomington, IN: Balboa Press.

Channeling an Archangel

249

Wilson, Stuart, and Joanna Prentis. 2005. The Essenes. Huntsville, AR: Ozark Mountain Publishing. ———. 2008. The Power of the Magdalene. Huntsville, AR: Ozark Mountain Publishing. Zaleski, Carol. 1987. Otherworld Journeys. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Epilogue Healing, Images, and Trust Roger Canals

‫ﱬﱫ‬ Other Worlds, Other Bodies: Embodied Epistemologies and Ethnographies of Healing is an original, provocative, and plural work that questions some of the fundamental premises of anthropology of health and anthropology in general.1 The chapters that comprise this volume examine from different perspectives three closely related questions. First, they discuss the concepts of “representation” and “belief” as understood in much of the history of anthropology (and Western thought); second, they defend the importance of the researcher’s body as a means of anthropological knowledge, that is, as an epistemological interface; and finally, they question the ontological and analytical distance that presumably separates the anthropologist from the “others” about whom (or rather with whom) she/he does the research. This last point is addressed through accounts and analyses of a series of fieldwork experiences in which the anthropologists state that they participated, to a greater or lesser extent, in local conceptualizations and experiences associated with health and disease. In some cases, this participation is equivalent to what we could call a “somatic affinity”: the researchers assert that they felt in their body sensations or emotions that are analogous to those experienced by patients or healers during processes of disease or healing (e.g., cold, shaking, heart palpitations). The researchers take advantage of this presumed perceptual continuity to reflect in general on other ways of conceiving health. Thus, they transform their body into a device for activating theoretical imagination, understood as an activity aimed at generating new concepts and modes of explanation about how people live in the world and relate to the beings that inhabit it.

250

Epilogue

251

However, in other cases, this participation takes on a more literal meaning: based on fieldwork experiences, researchers accept the plausibility of local interpretations of healing processes. In other words, they accept that the healers or patients with whom they do fieldwork may “be right” and, therefore, that what they say in relation to what they feel, hear or see during healing processes is really true. This leads many researchers in this volume (trained in the Western, biomedical health paradigm) to give credit, at least potentially, to the possible existence of agents that are not directly visible that are involved in healing processes, such as hidden forces of nature (ectoplasms) or spiritual beings (spirits of ancestors), among many others. Thus, in an exercise of honesty and trust (trust in relation to the research participants and in relation to the readers), many of the authors recognize that they have questioned their initial ideas during the fieldwork. In some cases, they even explain how they have ended up abandoning these ideas through a process of epistemic and personal conversion that was often difficult but in some cases liberating. In general terms, the book argues that anthropology of health is a particularly fertile field, not only to understand local conceptualizations of health and disease, but also, at a more fundamental level, to reassess the cognitive potential of the bodily experiences that the anthropologist and the others have during fieldwork. In this way, the anthropology of health can again lay on the table the ethical, epistemological, and even personal implications that are derived from “taking others seriously” to the greatest extent. What I propose in the following pages is to discuss the topics addressed in this volume based on some of the contemporary debates in the anthropology of images. This area appears to be far removed from anthropology of health, but, as I will show, it has continuity with many of the themes addressed in this book. In the last part of this text, I will briefly refer to the concept of “trust.”

THERAPEUTIC IMAGES In the summer of 2021, a technology company specialized in virtual reality and high-resolution projection systems presented in Barcelona a new project “of therapeutic images.”2 The initiative consists of projecting moving images of high quality in the rooms of patients or elderly people who have cognitive and mobility problems. These are immersive 360° images that encompass the viewer. The company maintains that this system offers patients the opportunity to feel a set of sensory and emotional experiences that are

252

Roger Canals

different from those experienced in their everyday life, which could be beneficial for their physical or mental health. This treatment, which has already been adopted by various health centers and senior living facilities, is often used to treat mild anxiety disorders. For this kind of problem, relaxing, calming images tend to be projected such as views of the sea, images of the natural world, or photographs of wild landscapes. The images could also depict abstract visual motifs, such as monochromatic backgrounds or geometric figures (e.g., circles, triangles, wavy lines). However, therapeutic images could also be used to treat acute mental illnesses such as obsessive disorders, bipolar disorders, traumatic shocks or degenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s. In these cases, the content of the images is personalized according to the characteristics of each patient. In terms of “physical” health, the program of therapeutic images offers a set of visual contents that are specifically designed for the neurostimulation of motor organs, such as arms or hands. In this case, the patient is asked to use their body to interact with the image (for example, to “catch” with their hands some luminous points that “float” in the space). There are two important elements in these therapeutic images: the color—this treatment has many points in common with what is generally known as chromotherapy— and the music, which usually accompanies the visual projections. From the perspective of visual anthropology, what is interesting about these therapeutic images is that they are situated in what has been called a post-representational paradigm of the image—they are an example of what Andrea Pinotti (2017) has called an “an-iconology.” The representational theory of the image defines images essentially in terms of referentiality: it assumes that images are visual signs that have a meaning to the extent that they refer to or denote something or someone that they are not and that is necessarily beyond the images themselves. In the representational paradigm, it is considered that images are mainly governed by the semiotic principle of mimesis: the images copy or imitate a transcendent reality, whether it is nature, social life, or the domain of the sacred. In other words, the representational paradigm assumes that the essential function of images is to make visible what they are not through a set of historically and culturally determined visual codes and conventions. The problem with the representational paradigm of images is not that it is false but rather that it is incomplete. It is undeniable that (certain) images have a representational value: photographs, for example, enable us to see people who are not physically near us; maps help orient us in unknown territories; depictions of religious icons give form to supernatural beings that can only be perceived in extraordinary situations, such as dreams or ap-

Epilogue

253

paritions. However, conceiving images only (and permanently) as copies or representations of the world has various disadvantages. The first is that it establishes a separation between the images and the world that these presumably represent and thus reproduces Plato’s classic duality between the area of essences and that of their presumably weakened copies. However, from a phenomenological perspective, we have to accept that this opposition between the world and images does not exist. Images, as “vital signs” (Mitchell 2004: 6), do not reflect the world but form a part of it and transform it. The representative function that certain images bear is inseparable from their value as social agents. The case of these therapeutic images is an extreme example of the performative dimension of images and the limitations of the representational paradigm to which I refer here. It is clear that the objective of this program of visual experiences is not to denote the “real” world but to intervene in it. These images do not represent anything—neither the patient’s illness nor the remedy that can be used to cure them; in any case, they should be considered an act of healing. Therapeutic images are actions, not representations. Even the images that are taken by ethnographic filmmakers during fieldwork have this performative dimension, as they alter the reality by filming it. It is in this respect that Jean Rouch stated that the act of filming is a ritual act in itself (Henley 2009). All the authors of this book start with a similar premise to approach their studies: the ways in which other people understand the world cannot be reduced to mere representations. This would imply considering them only as more or less accurate interpretations of an external world that we understand to be unique and about which we maintain an epistemic hegemony, as Western scientists (“they” would have “representations” while “we” would have “knowledge”). As some of the authors suggest, it is much more radical from an analytical perspective (and humbler from an ethical point of view) to consider that there are “other” worlds in which health and disease have other meanings, worlds as true as “ours.” Yet this assumption has to be taken not in a literal sense but rather in a methodological one. It does not aim at describing a state of things (as if there were or could be two separate worlds, standing one in front of the other). Its objective is rather to redefine the epistemological basis according to which we engage with others during the fieldwork (and in life in general) in order to make this encounter meaningful and transformative. Furthermore, one of the ideas to be drawn from this volume is that local forms of understanding disease and healing should not be considered representations (that is, mere symbolic constructions or “mental contents”) but rather modes of intervention on the world—in other words, actions and

254

Roger Canals

bodily affections. These modes of intervention are only objectified as theoretical discourses and are thus disassociated from the specific experience, on very specific occasions—such as in response to an anthropologist’s questions. The authors propose starting from this pragmatic and performative dimension of disease and the act of healing to do ethnographic research. As some of the authors point out, it is not very productive from an anthropological perspective to ask whether the representations of others are “true.” Instead, it is much more productive, they argue, to focus on the actions caused by these representations and the impacts they have on the bodies of others and on our bodies. Based on these experiences and effects, we can carry out an act of theoretical imagination on what “the world of others” is or could be. However, let us return to the criticism of the representational paradigm of images. One of the other limitations of this position is that it assumes that our relationship with images is governed essentially by what we could call “the model of the distant gaze.” This model establishes that the relation with the images takes place only through the eyes, and that we interact with and conceptualize images as external objects that are disconnected from ourselves. Therefore, the relation with the images would obey the principle of the relation between a subject that looks and an object that is looked at. In addition, in this paradigm it is often understood that this visual experience with images is influenced by a judgment of beauty (that is, by an assessment in terms of “taste”), which would occupy a central place in the experience of the images. However, this idea is again limiting as it does not account for most of the interactions we establish with images. Again, if we adopt a phenomenological and relational perspective when we study images and focus on how people interact with and through them in specific historical and cultural contexts, we must accept that our relationship with images goes far beyond the model of the distant gaze. This is because looking at images is in itself a multisensory experience that mobilizes in one way or another all the senses of the body, not just sight. In addition, in our everyday lives we do many things with images beyond simply looking at them: we touch them, smell them,3 and sometimes listen to them (GPS, for example, “speaks” to us and gives us directions). Images could be eaten,4 kissed, or engraved on our skin (tattoos). We destroy images, and sometimes images make us cry. Images can excite us and there are people who maintain sexual relations with them. All this leads us to conclude that the relation we have with images rarely obeys the principle of the subject that sees and the object that is simply seen. Images often gain a high degree of autonomy and subjectivity: they do not only mean or do things; rather, to use Mitchell’s (2004) terms, they “want” things and they often wants things from us. We look at images but often they also look at us. They are a

Epilogue

255

particular type of object that is close to what Paul Johnson aptly calls “nearhumans” (2021: 199). All of this can also be seen in the case of the therapeutic images that I mentioned previously. Clearly, these images have been conceived not to be seen at a distance but to be experienced in a broad, multisensory way. They are not images aimed at our intellect, whether it is our faculty of judgment or our perception of taste, but basically at our body, considered in an organic and holistic sense (which obviously includes this part of our body that we usually call “the mind”). We may find these images beautiful and even pleasant, but this does not alter the fact that their main objective is to be effective—and this effectiveness involves activating a series of sensations within the viewer. Therefore, the projection of these images can be conceived as a ritual device. Therapeutic images are not so far removed from the icons used on religious altars, Shamanic chants or prayers, and “traditional” methods of divination—which alter the future in the very act of prediction. None of these material and aesthetic resources are representations. Instead, they are technologies aimed at defining and transforming reality. In this line, one of the main ideas of this book is that, like images, all knowledge is always embodied: whether it is knowledge we generate within the context of ethnographic research (especially if it is on the topic of health and healing) or that which is gained in our everyday experience. Therefore, another thesis of this book is that anthropological knowledge is not on a different plane to that of our ordinary life—it is inseparable from it. Many authors describe in their chapters how ethnographic research has changed their everyday and personal life (and even in some cases their innermost convictions) and vice versa—how their personal concerns have guided and influenced their ethnographic research. In cinematographic terms, the idea of an embodied epistemology is very familiar for those who have made ethnographic films in ritual contexts (Canals 2017). Filming a ritual involves participating with the body within the ceremony. In this respect, the film experience of the ritual is different from what is experienced if you witness it “from outside”—for example, when you observe it with a notebook in your hands. It is true that there are many ways of filming a ritual. An objectivist trend maintains that the most suitable way to film a ritual would be to set up a fixed camera with a general view and try to integrate in a sequence shot all the elements that are involved. In contrast, filmmakers such as Jean Rouch and Maya Deren were pioneers in understanding that filming a ritual involves physically following the bodies, getting close to the sacred objects, filming close-ups of faces, immersing oneself in the dances. By filming a ritual from within, we establish physical

256

Roger Canals

proximity with the people and the ritual artifacts that are involved: we are part of a shared choreography. Thus, to a certain extent, when we “imitate” with our body the movements of other bodies, we become the “shadows” of those we are filming5. This is perhaps one of the most interesting aspects of ethnographic film: the act of filming (which is both a physical and intellectual experience) is in itself an act of knowledge, and not only a process of representing (that is, “putting into images”) the alleged representations of others. We learn by filming, not just through watching film. The relationship between cinema and the body is so close that it is even transferred in the moment of the film screening: the viewers of a film on rituals do not see abstract concepts that are to a certain extent disconnected from the ethnographic experience. Instead, they see bodies, objects, and sounds—that is, life in movement. Cinematographic images affect us on a very basic sensory level: they foster knowledge through a set of sensory stimuli and experiences. Cinema captures movement and moves us. Finally, the example of therapeutic images is relevant and thoughtprovoking because it challenges the distinction between what is commonly known as a religious image, a scientific image, and an artistic image. From a historical perspective, this classification, which is closely linked to the representational paradigm of the image, started to take shape during the Renaissance in Europe with the emergence of the figure of the artist-scientist6 (in contrast to the traditional model of craftsperson) and the progressive emancipation of art and science in relation to the religious sphere. However, it was not until the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that the distinction between these three spheres (art, science, and religion) was articulated clearly. That said, the classification between religious image, scientific image, and artistic image has only been operative in discursive terms, not in practical terms. Again, if we adopt a relational and phenomenological perspective in the study of the images, we must acknowledge that the distinctions between these three types of images (and the spheres within which they situate themselves) are and have been constantly blurred. For many, art has become a type of modern religion while scientific images are, at least partially, a product of imagination and visual creativity—they are, to a certain extent, artistic. Likewise, any “believer” will accept that an altar, as a cosmological artifact, has a value in terms of knowledge that is similar to the value of what we usually call “science.” To clarify this point, we can explain how the religious image, the scientific image, and the artistic image have been defined historically. The religious image has been defined as a visual representation that gives material and tangible form to a supernatural or spiritual being. The problem with this definition, focused on the idea of representation, is that

Epilogue

257

it does not sufficiently account for practices associated with the use of the image or the ways in which people who interact with the images conceptualize and use them. In relational terms, we can state that a religious image, from the perspective of a believer, functions as a mediator with the deity and thus enables a relationship of contact between this world and the “sacred world.” Therefore, the main objective of the religious image is not so much to show the “real” appearance of supernatural beings (a representational paradigm based on the idea of mimesis) as to make possible a situation of copresence between these spiritual beings and their devotees. The ambiguity of religious images (and, to a certain extent, of images in general) lies in the fact that they can only act as mediators if they are partially identified with what they represent—that is, with the deity itself. This partial identification occurs in the ritual context, when the image is intensified through a set of material, aesthetic, and bodily strategies (e.g., offerings, songs, dances). The religious image is the paradigmatic example of the object-person that is and is not what it represents: it is a sign that is confused, in certain situations, with its own referent. Unlike religious images, artistic and scientific images would not aspire to be confused with what they represent. Instead, they would be conceived as an independent sign, as a pure, visible form. The development of photography and other inventions for the mechanical reproduction of reality (e.g., X-rays, seismographs, ultrasound) at the end of the nineteenth century was decisive in the process of separating the scientific image from the artistic. At that time, it was assumed that the origin of the artistic image lay in the creative faculty of the artist while the scientific image (a presumably “true” and “objective” outline of the external reality) was the result of correct application of a data extraction method through the use of technological instruments. This triple distinction between religious, artistic, and scientific images is still operative in our daily ways of conceptualizing images. Today, we still take for granted, not without some reason, that the image of a deity (Buddha, Shango, or a Catholic saint), the painting or sculpture of an artist, and a scientific image (such as photography of another planet) are images that belong to different domains. The first would refer to the area of belief, the second to the area of imagination, and the third to the area of knowledge. However, this distinction, which I have simplified here, is not suitable for all our everyday experience with images. Let us return to the example of therapeutic images: are they scientific, artistic, or religious? In fact, they are a bit of everything7: as their creators state, these images are designed to have a healing function. To achieve this purpose, they have been made based on scientific parameters. Yet these images are also artistic in the sense that they have an aesthetic or sensory dimension. Furthermore, many of them

258

Roger Canals

are intended to heal patients through the experience of beauty. Finally, in the religious domain, these images are aimed at intervening in the world and altering it by producing a sense of presence. In fact, therapeutic images often play with the power of resemblance, as does ritual. Take, for example, people who are scared of water and are shown images of the sea. The sight of water is what overcomes the fear of water. Similarly, in many of the rituals studied in anthropology, it is the recreation of the world of the dead that allows one to overcome the fear of death.8 We can take this idea even further. There is a clear analogy between one’s visual experience of these images and the experiences that mediums have during rituals of spirit possession, that certain shamans describe during their journeys to the world of doubles, or that patients who undertake therapeutic treatments that involve contact with some type of supernatural beings encounter. In all the cases, the ritual technologies are focused on producing an effect of depersonalization (that is, of detachment of the ordinary Self) in the medium or the patient that can transport them momentarily to an alternative world (a virtual world, we might say, or a kind of augmented reality) that is nothing more than an extension of the “real” world. In this “other world,” the medium or patient can do, feel, and see a set of things that are normally beyond their ordinary experience. In this world of doubles, aspects of the real that are incomprehensible in the everyday world are revealed clearly. This is the concept that operates in therapeutic images, which enable the patient to travel to an alternate world through a visual, and therefore multisensory, experience. However, according to the designers of these images and to the hegemonic scientific discourse, this world is not the world of the dead or the gods, but that which in psychoanalytical terms we could call the opaque corners of consciousness where traumas, fears, and repressed desires remain hidden. Similarly, what can be garnered from the chapters in this volume is that ethnographies of healing cannot be understood just as intellectual (that is, purely “rational” or “scientific”) exercises. Instead, they often involve an experience that is, to a certain extent, artistic and even religious. Fieldwork on healing (as in any other area) has an artistic dimension in at least two ways: first because it involves the domain of the body, emotions, and sensations; and second because the researcher must apply a set of creative and communicative skills when she/he conceptualizes and communicate this knowledge. Writing an article, making an ethnographic film, or conceiving of an exhibition project is an act of creation, even though the standard academic language (based on what has been called “the style of no style”) seems to nullify this act of personal expression. We will return to this concept later.

Epilogue

259

Likewise, fieldwork on healing has a religious dimension in the sense that when researchers are in a ritual context, whatever we believe, we are driven to act as if the spiritual agents that are presumably involved in the processes of creation were real. When we do fieldwork in areas associated with “the sacred,” we are often asked to respect the requirements of the spirits of the ancestors or to adapt our behavior to the “forces” or “energies” that are involved in the ritual. Out of respect, we usually follow these rules, to the extent that an external observer might find it hard sometimes to determine whether the anthropologist who is analyzing a certain situation is a “believer” or not. We “practice” the religion to be able to study it. What these studies show is that in this act of imitation, the anthropologist may end up getting confused with her/his own “referent,” at least partly. Thus, the anthropologist would end up embodying the ambiguity of images (especially religious images)—that is, that of being and at the same time not being what they represent. All of this reveals the paradoxical nature of the ethnographic situation. Up to this point, I have offered some reflections based on three main ideas: criticism of the representational model; the importance of the body when we interact with and through images; and the questioning of the distinction between scientific, religious, and artistic images. I have discussed these aspects, all of which are present in this book, taking as a basis criticism of the representational model of images and the example of new projects of therapeutic images. In the next section, I would like to address two of the most controversial and problematic aspects of the book: first, what I call “somatic essentialism,” and second, the question of ethnographic writing.

THE BODY AS A HEURISTIC DEVICE As I have said, one of the foundations of this volume is criticism of the concept of representation. This criticism operates on two levels. First, the authors question that the ideas “of the others” can be described as mere “representations” of the world (that is, as beliefs or interpretations of reality). If we give them ontological consistency, we must consider them as legitimate (and therefore true) forms of “being in the world.” Second, the authors call into question the idea that the type of knowledge that anthropologists generate during fieldwork ought to be thought of as “representations of representations,” that is, as “ideas about the ideas of others.” This model runs the risk of essentializing the alleged “world of others” and turning it into a mere mental state or symbolic apparatus. What the authors reveal is that, during fieldwork, we have much more than thoughts or mental states:

260

Roger Canals

much of what is learned during fieldwork is the result of sensory experience and a type of knowledge that is hard to fit into the model of Western rationalism that we tend to objectify in academic texts and lectures. Often, the way we learn during ethnographic encounters is more similar to what we could call emotional intuition—that is, an act of imagination based on alterations at the level of the body and emotion. Most any anthropologist would admit that theoretical ideas have occurred to them based on a sensation of temperature, a smell, or as a result of physical contact with other bodies. Other theoretical ideas are the product of feelings or states of mind such as anxiety, fear, happiness, or pleasure. In a nutshell: if we accept that any intellectual activity is in itself a corporeal or sensitive experience, we must also come to terms with the idea that the body is much more than a material surface aimed at nourishing the intellect with impressions or emotions of the outside world. Feeling, sensing, and experiencing are acts of imagination and modes of signification in themselves. They are the ways in which we connect with others and co-create a shared, although profoundly heterogeneous, world. It is true that this debate is not new—actually, it is as old as anthropology itself. Anthropology has always highlighted participative observation, where “participate” means doing and, therefore, to a certain extent, feeling what others do and feel. However, it is assumed, often implicitly, that this participation has a limit: the world of “the others” constitutes a separate and separable world from ours, a world that is in itself inaccessible (although it can potentially be understood by the anthropologist). What the authors propose is to radicalize this paradigm: what if this limit has been the great epistemological barrier of anthropology as discipline? This raises some questions in relation to the very concept of participation. What exactly does “participate” in the world of “the others” mean? What if participation were to imply, as in the case of the religious image, establishing a certain form of continuity and epistemic contact with those with whom we do the research? What if the possibility of full anthropological knowledge lies in this area? Some of the authors of this volume establish this affective homology with “the others” as a starting point to consider alternative models of health and healing. But this may be a problematic theory. The question is: what status should we give to this supposed somatic continuity? For example, it is not clear that what we feel during fieldwork is really analogous (or at least comparable) to what the others feel. We may feel nervous and break into a cold sweat when we attend a ritual of possession for the first time. This does not mean that the other participants in the ritual feel the same. Consider therapeutic images. Imagine that we are in a room viewing these images with some patients who suffer from a specific phobia. Clearly, we all see the

Epilogue

261

same images. Does this mean that we feel and interpret them in the same way? Or that they have the same effect on our body? Obviously, they do not. However, even more importantly, it is not clear that our affective experiences could be considered evidence of the existence of the world of the others. For example, is the cold sensation we feel when we attend a ritual a “sign” of the presence of a dead person’s spirit, as argued in many rituals of spirit possession? It depends on the “semiotic ideology” (Keane 2018: 64) that we hold. In relation to this question, the authors adopt a range of positions. Some opt for total identification with the forms of understanding of the others. I call this position “somatic essentialism.” Others limit themselves to considering that what we feel could be analogous to what others feel and, consequently, could serve as a basis for imagining what it means for others to be part of a healing process. This attitude would correspond to a kind of “heuristic somatism.” The first model is clearly the most controversial. Authors who hold this position often justify their “conversion” to the world of “the others” based on extraordinary experiences during fieldwork that made them change their way of conceiving things. These experiences include “perceptions of energies,” “premonitory dreams,” or cures that would be “inexplicable” from the Western paradigm of health. We could argue that these experiences are only possible because of a certain, more or less conscious, previously held epistemic predisposition. In other words: we can only “feel the spirits” if we are “open” to doing so in advance. Yet this argument can also be used the other way around—in other words, to criticize the predominant epistemological position of anthropology: what if the history of anthropology had been based precisely on the predisposition to not accept or feel what others say or experience? Personally, I believe it is stimulating to conceive of our bodies as a “testing ground,” that is, as a heuristic terrain from which we can imagine the world of others. Yet, as the authors of the book aptly point out, this is not to say that the somatic alterations felt by the anthropologist during fieldwork ought to be considered as a kind of device capable of “verifying” the existence of an alleged world of others. First, as I have already stated, because the fact that we feel “something” does not necessarily mean that the others feel the same thing or at least something similar. Second, because every ethnographic situation is a situation that is, to a greater or lesser extent, cocreated by all those who participate in it, including the anthropologist—what Stephan Palmié calls the “ethnographic interface” (2013: 11). In other words, what the anthropologist studies is never the world of others (a kind of world in itself) but rather the relationship that the anthropologist and the others forge mutually in a specific historical and cultural context. This is a unique

262

Roger Canals

world that is brought into being together. In this respect, it is difficult to argue that our sensations and emotions can be evidence of other worlds, as we never perceive these other worlds as disconnected from ours. The relationship between what we, as anthropologists, feel and think and that which the others feel and think cannot be understood in terms of identity (as they are not fully equivalent) or in terms of absolute difference (as we share and create the same situation). The set of perceptions, emotions, and thoughts that all those who participate in the ethnographic situation experience and generate should be understood as different positions, intensities, or angles within the same continuum of experience—that is, within the framework of the same relational network that is historically and culturally determined and always being transformed. For this reason, in all ethnographic situations a process of “epistemological overlapping” occurs. For example, some authors of this book state that they were “possessed” by spirits during fieldwork. If we look at this from the other side, is it not also true that the people with whom we carry out research are in a certain sense “possessed” by what we could call the “spirit of anthropology”? It is common that, as a result of living with an anthropologist, people end up incorporating the attitude of the “researcher about cultures.” For this reason, during fieldwork, anthropologists are often asked about their country and culture. After some months of conviviality, others tend to adopt an academic language to talk to us (often to our most desperation). In conclusion, if there is a “conversion” during the fieldwork, it is a mutual one. At this point, I would again like to establish a link with images, and with therapeutic images in particular. In anthropology, we understand images as relational devices in several ways. First, in phenomenological terms, they are not images until they are perceived and conceptualized as such by someone. Therefore, there are no images “in themselves” in the abstract; only specific, historically situated ways of perceiving images, that is, ways of relating to them. Second, in genetic terms, all images refer to some kind of initial encounter. A photograph is the footprint of an encounter between the person who took the image and those who appear in it. The origin of religious images can often be found in an initial encounter with the deity. Even self-generated images are defined as a gift from the deity, that is, as a relational act. Artistic images are described by their authors based on an initial encounter with someone or something (it could be the external world, but it could also be the realm of dreams or the unconscious). In general terms, any visual sign, in relation to the act of communication, is the result of some kind of primordial relationship. The therapeutic images that I have referred to also have this relational dimension in genetic terms as they have

Epilogue

263

been made by a diverse network of people such as doctors, programmers, and artists. This relational dimension of the image is clear in one of the classic themes of ethnographic film: looking at the camera. For a long time, ethnographic film aspired to objectivity: the aim was to film a world that was conceived of as independent from the anthropologist’s gaze. In formal terms, this approach led to a film language based on the principle of a camera that films without being seen. Looking at the camera was one of the forbidden shots in ethnographic film (it still is in most fiction) because it made explicit the ethnographic situation. But even avoiding looking at the camera is a way of recognizing that the camera is present. To a certain extent, looking at the camera is the most genuine shot in ethnographic film as it reveals the dialogic dimension of the act of filming: the fact that all films are, to a certain extent, the result of a process of co-creation. Finally, many chapters of this volume describe, more or less explicitly, the problem of ethnographic writing—a problem that is again as old as anthropology itself. How can we write about the body and, above all, about the body of the others? Anyone who has tried this would have to admit that it is not easy or evident to articulate somatic and emotional states. In the world of fiction, writers have to use considerable resources to say or evoke the nuances of bodily experience or the ambiguities of states of mind. It is even more difficult to describe and analyze in words ways of conceiving the world that are far from our everyday experience. Authors of the volume often seem hesitant when they refer to the phenomena that are described and presumably felt by the others. For example, someone writes that a spirit “intervened” in their body. What do the quotation marks mean here? Do they mean “intervened” from the perspective of the others (but not the author’s perspective)? Or perhaps “intervened” in a way that is different from what we usually understand by “intervention”? It is not always clear. In other cases, italics are used, for example when it is stated that a ritual had a real effect. The italics give importance to the concept of “real” but at the same time they lead us to consider that the word is being used in a way that is different from usual. Film and image can contribute to these debates on ethnographic writing referring to the body, emotions, and sensory experience. Film is the art of the moving image. The camera does not capture abstract ideas or concepts, but specific situations. Therefore, film addresses “the ritual” by showing specific rituals, and film refers to the body by showing specific bodies. The cinematographic image is consubstantially associated with the ethnographic situation in which it was generated. This does not mean that cinema cannot evoke abstract ideas. In fact, that is what it is doing constantly. What

264

Roger Canals

happens is that it does this by assembling fragments of reality, defined as a situation that has been experienced, like a shared process that occurs in a certain place and time and among specific people. For a long time, influenced by the dominance of the written text, ethnographic cinema tried to emulate the nature of written text to conform to the canons of anthropology. Therefore, through voice-over or interviews, it aimed to make images “talk” by converting them into examples of an external discourse. New trends in ethnographic film have highlighted the epistemological autonomy of images and have urged an exploration of new forms of relating word, image, and sound (Cox et al. 2016). What these initiatives show is that images and words enable us to “say” different things (or evoke different aspects of the same events). So why not use them in a complementary way? I believe that ethnographies of healing of the future should include, for example, a range of modes of writing, combining images, texts, and sounds (and even smells or tactile experiences). Reading an essay on the body is different from seeing a specific body on the screen. Our studies as anthropologists of rituals could be presented through what I have called an “eclectic assemblage” (Canals 2018) of ethnographic results,9 along the lines of what is known as a “multimodal turn.” This approach would lend nuances to our reflections and reaffirm the importance of the presence of the body when we talk about bodies. We should consider that, as I mentioned before, cinema enables the viewer to have a kind of embodied knowledge. Seeing images is a complex sensory experience. By using them to reflect on the body and disease, we give the viewer the opportunity to “feel” (although indirectly) the ethnographic situation and thus to explore the potentialities of what I called heuristic somatism. In other words: we invite the viewer to become an anthropologist of images.

FINAL NOTE: A QUESTION OF TRUST Trust is a question that emerges throughout the book, even though none of the authors address it directly. We can define trust as a feeling, belief, or expectation that someone or something is good, reliable and honest, and capable of meeting expectations. Trust, as an ethical position, is present in these texts in different ways. At an ethnographic level, the first question that the authors ask is: do we really trust in the other people during fieldwork? And do they trust in us? For example, when healers from another culture state that they can cure us of an illness that affects us, are we willing to trust them or do we only agree to submit ourselves to their treatment to maintain the ethnographic relationship? And the other way around: when others reveal

Epilogue

265

the secrets of their lives, do they really trust that we will use this knowledge responsibly? The epistemic predisposition that I spoke about before (that is, the prior expectation that a certain phenomenon that the others describe as real could occur in our body) can be understood as an act of trust in the other. However, there is no need to go that far: we can also trust that during fieldwork, the others tell us “the truth” (or, in any case, their truth) without assuming that this truth should necessarily be ours. We should also consider that in all fieldwork there are times when those involved (including the anthropologist) hide or exaggerate certain aspects of their culture strategically, often moved by a feeling of mistrust. In fact, this should not necessarily be considered a negative or reprehensible act: certain authors have shown how distrust in others could be considered positively, that is, as an exercise of respect for their sovereignty and freedom (Carey 2017: 52). Trust also operates in this book at the level of the relationship that the authors establish with their readers (which we could call the “narrative pact”). In the pages of this volume, very intimate personal experiences are described using first-person narration. Some of these experiences are related to the researchers’ physical and mental health. Many of the authors have dared to describe their physical pains or disorders or episodes of obsessions, depressions, and anxiety. Some have even revealed the medical treatments that they have decided to follow, whether through the Western biomedical system or through “traditional” healing techniques. Notably, from a recursive perspective, many authors refer to the therapeutic dimension of ethnographic research. There are chapters in which this dimension has a literal meaning: the anthropologist describes how in the context of the fieldwork she/he have undergone healing processes that have enabled her/him to overcome previous diseases (for example, through the “intervention of spirits”). In other chapters, this healing dimension of anthropology is considered in a more metaphorical sense: the authors argue that what they learned during the research enabled them to face with more serenity and wisdom the infinite range of obstacles that life presents. This leads me to consider that, because of their transformative power, all images, including those created by anthropologists during research, are at, least potentially, therapeutic images —even though their healing power is, like poison, inseparable from their inner capacity for aggression. We should not forget in this respect that images can also be a mode of violence, either in an organic sense (images may hurt us physically and mentally) or at a “political” or “ideological” level: the apparent objectivity of images (especially photographic and cinematic ones) understood as mere representations of others has often acted as a strategy to denigrate those who appear on the screen (as in racist photography). So, we do not always have to trust in im-

266

Roger Canals

ages; we need to learn to look at them closely, since sometimes their epistemological and relational power—that is, their capacity for helping us better understand the world and act upon it—lies not in what they show but rather in what they conceal. Roger Canals works as an associate professor at the University of Barcelona. He is a specialist in visual anthropology and African American religions, and the author of many articles published in international journals as well as of the book A Goddess in Motion: Visual Creativity in the Cult of María Lionza (Berghahn Books, 2017). As a filmmaker, he has made many internationally awarded films. In 2015 he received the Fejos Postdoctoral Fellowship of the Wenner-Gren Foundation. He is currently the principal Investigator of the European Research Council-Consolidator Grant Visual Trust. Reliability, accountability and forgery in scientific, religious and social images (2021–26, www.visualtrust.ub.edu). His works can be accessed at the following websites: www.rogercanals.cat and www.va-marialionza.com.

NOTES 1. This text forms part of the project Visual Trust. Reliability, accountability and forgery in scientific, religious and social images. This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No. 101002897). 2. See https://broomx.com (accessed 15 September 2022). 3. Indeed, material and corporeal images have always a particular smell or are associated to a specific environmental smelling. For instance, with the time, the teddy bear of a child acquires a very intense and personal smell, to the extent that when we clean it children find it difficult to recognize it and tend to reject it. Old photographs have a smell, as well as oil paintings, plastic toys or homemade cakes cooked in figurative molds (a star, a house, the moon). In a more general sense, images are linked to particular smells. For example, for many people images of some films watched initially in cinemas are still associated to the smell of the dark room and of the old seats in red velvet. Even the photograph of someone may be associated with the smell of the person depicted -in a kind of inversion of the “Proust effect”. 4. See Koering 2021 for a detailed account of the ingestion of images within religion, art or in ordinary activities, like the eating of home-made cakes abovementioned. 5. I draw this idea from my filmic experience shooting the film “Chasing Shadows” (2019), based on an original research by Ramon Sarró and Marina Temudo. The films explores the practice of a prophetic movement in Guinea-Bissau called Kyangyang (literally “the shadows” or “the shades”’).

Epilogue

267

6. The separation between the artistic and scientific image was not fully operative until the end of the nineteenth century, basically as a result of the emergence of photography and other technological devices for visualizing the external world, such as seismographs. 7. Therapeutic images also have a political and ideological dimension in addition to an economic value. 8. The famous Día de los Muertos in Mexico or the Dansa de la Mort (Dance of the Death) in Catalonia are good instances of this phenomenon. One may also think of the countless examples of ceremonial masks depicting the spirits of ancestors in Africa or Oceania. 9. This is precisely what I attempted with the website www.va-marialionza.com, in which I gathered different outcomes of long-term research in the cult of María Lionza in Venezuela, Barcelona, and on the internet.

REFERENCES Canals, Roger. 2017. A Goddess in Motion: Visual Creativity in the Cult of María Lionza (Vol. 42). New York: Berghahn Books. ———. 2018. “Studying Multi-Modal Religions: Migration and Mediation in the Cult of María Lionza (Venezuela, Barcelona, Internet).” Visual Anthropology Review 34(2): 124–35. Carey, Matthew. 2017. Mistrust. An Ethnographic Theory. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Cox, Rupert, Andrew Irving, and Christopher Wright, eds. 2016. Beyond Text?: Critical Practices and Sensory Anthropology. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Henley, Paul. 2009. The Adventure of the Real. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Johnson, Paul C. 2021. Automatic Religion: Nearhuman Agents in Brazil and France. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Keane, Webb. 2018. “On Semiotic Ideology.” Signs and Society 6(1): 64–87. Koering, Jérémie. 2021. Les iconophages. Une histoire de l’ingestion des images. Arles: Actes Sud. Mitchell, William J. T. 2004. What Do Pictures Want?: The Lives and Loves of Images. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Palmié, Stephan. 2013. The Cooking of History: How Not to Study Afro-Cuban Religion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Pinotti, Andrea. 2017. “Self-Negating Images: Towards An-Iconology.” In Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute Proceedings (Vol. 1, No. 9, 856). https://doi.org/ 10.3390/proceedings1090856.

Index

‫ﱬﱫ‬ ʿAbdāqa (ʿAbd el-Qādr Guellāl), 153– 55, 157, 163 absorption hypothesis, 7 Ackerknecht, Erwin H., 20 activism, epistemological, 20, 21 Addey, Crystal, 3–4 affect: comprehension of the world and, 59; in definitions of self, 54; in dīwān rituals, 158, 159, 162; embodied knowledge and, 56; epistemic, 9–10; in healing experiences, 10–11; intersubjective embodiment and, 16; reeducation of, 158; spirit ontologies and, 100; synesthetic experiences and, 107; total autonomy of, 112n2; trance modes and, 158, 160. See also being affected; emotions affective epistemology, 158, 160–63 affective ethnography, 111 affective grounding, 158–60 affective technologies, 11, 97, 100–1, 109, 111 affective turn, 9 affliction: in Afro-Cuban religions, 142; Candomblé initiation as escape from, 44; deontologization from the self, 145; identification of roots of, 81; spirit-related, 84, 111, 148; transformational experiences and, 134, 146–49. See also illness

Afro-Brazilian religions, 11, 33–36, 42. See also Candomblé Afro-Cuban religions, 12, 36, 140–42, 144–45, 148 Agar, Michael, 63 Al-Zahi, Farid, 162 Amado, Jorge, 39 Amaral, Rita, 41, 45–46 animism, 4, 35, 43 anthropology: affective turn in, 9; of experience, 54, 58–59; of health, 20, 25, 250, 251; misinterpretations within, 2–3; ontological turn in, 8, 37, 54, 98, 148; paradoxical nature of, 19, 259; participant observation in, 7, 34–35, 68, 212, 217, 260; reflective turn in, 9; representation crisis in, 215; of the senses, 213, 214, 216; transition in, 18, 21; visual, 252–58. See also medical anthropology anti-representationalism, 7 anxiety: Bompo healers and, 116, 126; from illness, 127; lifting of, 128; medications for, 142, 144; panic attacks and, 12, 135–36, 140; therapeutic images in treatment of, 252 apprenticeships: for Bompo healers, 118, 119, 124; extraordinary experiences during, 55; in 269

270

Index

Metatronic Life and Healing®, 17, 230, 242–43 Arantes, Lydia, 215 Argyrou, Vassos, 239, 240, 244 artistic images, 256–58, 262, 266–67n6 Asad, Talal, 23, 159 attention: divided, 200, 201; education of, 179, 200–1, 209, 215; to embodiment, 63; to epistemic affect, 10; to feelings and emotions, 181; to perceptions, 14, 208, 219; somatic modes of, 11, 16, 60, 63, 165, 215, 221–22; to subjective experiences, 14 attunement: to exorcism rituals, 11, 110; intersubjectivity and, 108; in Metatronic Life and Healing®, 234–36, 243, 247n12; spirit ontologies and, 97, 100 autoethnography: challenges posed by, 68; fluidity of boundaries in, 133; on Metatronic Life and Healing®, 17, 239; panic attack treatments in, 12; sensory memory in, 217; subjectivity in, 56; transreligiosity in, 146–49 Bastide, Roger, 39 Bateson, Gregory, 19, 20 Beatty, Andrew, 65, 215 Behar, Ruth, 12 being affected: access to spirit ontologies and, 111; by ectoplasm, 208–9; entanglements and, 14, 198; by environment, 14, 201–2; ethnographer experiences of, 11, 189, 198; fluidic relationships and, 180; negative implications of, 157 belief: criticisms of, 97; epistemological dichotomy between fact and, 34; in ghosts, 121; materiality of, 6, 86; mind-body divide perpetuated by, 11; in spirits, 11, 17, 73, 74, 97, 144; subjectivity of, 86

Berger, Hans, 189 biomedicine, 13–14, 20, 129, 184, 185 body: in Candomblé, 33–34, 44–46; dissociation as emptying of, 3; as epistemological tool, 161, 167; during exorcisms, 95–96, 105–7, 110; as heuristic device, 259–64; materiality of, 181; in mediumistic development, 181–83; mind and, 11, 57, 61, 84, 98, 139, 214, 231, 244; in passe, 17, 74, 82, 84, 86; as perceptual device, 58, 59, 111; phenomenological, 158, 162; plasticity of, 166; postural mirroring and, 117; reeducation of, 158, 163, 186; as research tool, 35, 47, 48, 209; in sessions of disobsession, 15; of shamans, 4; spirit possession and impact on, 104; in trance, 13, 16, 45, 157, 160–63, 166–67; transformations of, 13. See also movement of body; pain; somatic entries Bompo healers, 115–31; apprenticeships for, 118, 119, 124; embodied knowledge of, 120, 127; exorcisms performed by, 120; offerings to ghosts by, 115; pilgrimages made by, 124–26, 128, 131n7; rituals performed by, 117–23, 125–29; scaring away of ghosts by, 118–19, 125, 129; selection of, 130n6; in trance state, 118, 119; trust in, 116, 120, 125, 126, 128 Bowie, Fiona, 17, 230, 245 Brazil: espiritualidade in, 77–81; mental health care in, 14, 212, 218; Spiritism in, 12, 14, 17, 73–76, 85; transreligious encounters between Greece and, 134–39. See also Afro-Brazilian religions; Vale do Amanhecer Briggs, Charles, 60 Bronson, Paula, 11–12, 115, 130

Index

Bruner, Edward M., 54, 58 Buddhism, 117, 123, 134, 135, 138, 139 Burhoe, Ralph W., 52 Calabrese, Joseph, 130n1 Canals, Roger, 250, 266 Candomblé, 33–48; bodily experiences in, 33–34, 44–46; ecology of, 34, 47; engagement in, 34, 47–48; faith of practitioners in, 42–43; hierarchical structure of, 13, 34, 38–42, 46; initiatory call in, 13, 38, 44, 45; invisible personas in, 36, 47, 48; localized differences in, 33, 48n1; orixás in, 33, 36–47; outsider absorption into, 13, 34, 39–42, 46; ritual dynamics of, 33, 36, 38–45; spiritual doubles in, 36–38, 47; terminology considerations, 35–36; trance in, 13, 38, 39, 44–46; worldand self-making within, 42 Cannell, Fennella, 2 Capone, Stefania, 40 Capponi, Giovanna, 12–13, 33, 48 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 240 channeling: of emotions, 220; of energy, 186, 241, 245n1; of Metatron, 232, 245–46nn1–2; of past-life stories, 242, 246n4; of Sandalphon, 234; of spirits, 75 Charismatics, 5, 14, 46–47, 99, 181 Chiesa, Gustavo R., 14, 193, 209 Christianity: charismatic, 5, 14, 46–47, 99, 181; espiritualidade in relation to, 78; Orthodox, 135, 138; Pentecostals, 16, 52–53, 56, 59, 61–62, 64–65, 67; spirits within framework of, 2, 3 chromotherapy. See color therapy cinematographic images, 255–56, 263–64 classical theory of mind, 5 Clements, Forrest E., 20 clinical ethnography, 18, 130n1

271

cognitive approaches: to empathetic engagement, 17, 247n15; objective awareness of, 127; to science, 98, 186; to social research, 9; somatosensory approaches intertwined with, 11; to spirit possession, 98 cognitive development, 5 color therapy, 135, 232, 252 control: of Bompo healers, 119; of crisis situations, 143; of emotions, 157; in exorcism rituals, 105; giving up, 153–58; mind control theory, 5–6; of researchers by research subjects, 13, 41; social and political, 61; in trance, 15, 16, 154–56, 166 co-presence, 3, 10–11, 17, 54, 67, 176, 187–89, 257 Crapanzano, Vincent, 158–59 crises: epistemological, 163; espiritualidade during, 78–80; health-related, 136, 138; psychiatrist-prescribed doll for, 12, 142–44; of representation, 215 Csordas, Thomas J.: on embodiment, 108, 208; on ethnographic evidence, 85; on imaginal performance, 14; on intercorporeality, 162; on orientation of self, 7, 99; on pneumopsychosomatic synthesis, 139; on somatic modes of attention, 60, 63; on transformation of self, 57 Cuba: making and remaking of self in, 6; mediumship practices in, 6, 99; transreligious encounters between Spain and, 139–46. See also AfroCuban religions cultural representation, 6 Davies, James, 9, 216 De Antoni, Andrea, 11, 95, 111 deep participation, 216, 222

272

Index

Deleuze, Gilles, 26n3, 37 depression, 44, 77–79, 265 Deren, Maya, 255 Descola, Philippe, 54, 56 Desjarlais, Robert, 116, 128, 163, 164 devir, use of term, 22, 26n3 diagnosis: biomedical model of, 20; in intersubjective construction of illness, 103; by mediums, 184; in Spiritism, 76, 79 dilemmas, 12, 13, 16, 24, 146, 223 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 57, 58, 66, 68 disease. See illness disincarnated spirits, 177, 179–81, 183, 195, 220 disobsession, 14–15, 75, 180, 183, 218–21, 223 dissociation, 3, 98, 155, 159, 163 distant gaze model, 254 divided attention, 200, 201 dīwān rituals: affect in, 158, 159, 162; embodied knowledge of, 15, 154, 164; feeling in, 156, 160–65; jinn in, 15, 154–56, 159, 160, 161; music and instrumentation in, 159, 161; trance in, 15–16, 154–67 dog-god (inugami), 102 dos Santos, Juana Elbein, 39–40 Downey, Greg, 160–61 Dox, Donnalee, 215 Droogers, André, 12–13, 34, 44 ecology: of Candomblé, 34, 47; humanspirit, 175, 180; sentient, 99; of substances, 16, 17, 176, 184 ECTOLAB. See International Association of Laboratory Research in Ectoplasm and Parasurgery ectoplasm: exteriorization of, 202–6; health and well-being affected by, 14, 180; laboratory for study of, 202–7; mediumship and, 180; panic attacks and, 135;

paraperceptions and, 201; as raw material of parasurgery, 196, 199, 203; stimulation of production of, 195, 199, 203; therapeutic use of, 180, 187, 193, 194, 202. See also International Association of Laboratory Research in Ectoplasm and Parasurgery einfühlung (feeling as one), 54, 56, 66, 67 Eisenlohr, Patrick, 165 Eliade, Mircea, 3–4 embodied experiences, 4, 7–8, 87, 136, 217, 230 embodied knowledge: of Bompo healers, 120, 127; cinematographic images and, 264; core elements of, 56; of dīwān rituals, 15, 154, 164; epistemic affect and, 9; extraordinary experiences and, 61, 63, 67, 68; illness as source for, 128; in medical anthropology, 61; mediumship and, 185–87; radical empiricism and, 10; sensory ethnography and, 217 embodied learning, 158, 166 embodiment: attention to, 63; of cultural habitus, 15; experiential, 139; of fear, 128; imaginal performances and, 14; intersubjective, 16; of invisible entities, 22; of memory, 14, 159; of pain and suffering, 117; phenomenology and, 24, 54; sharing of, 66. See also epistemological embodiment emotional intuition, 260 emotions: in Candomblé, 46; channeling of, 220; collective, 64; comprehension of the world and, 59; control of, 157; in definitions of self, 54; embodied knowledge and, 56; integration into research methodology, 216; intersubjective embodiment and, 16; linguistic

Index

categories for, 43; in mediumistic development, 181; in narratives of healing, 11; in radical empiricism, 9; rituals in articulation of, 61, 65; spirit ontologies and, 100; in theories of mind, 5, 6. See also affect; feeling empathic engagement, 17, 198, 247n15 empathic resonance, 10, 65, 216, 242 empathy: in classical theory of mind, 5; as condition for fieldwork, 63–68; in definitions of self, 54; embodied knowledge and, 56; in entanglement of self and other, 57; in methodological ludism, 35; as mode of relationship to the other, 65–66 energy grounding, 203 engagement: aesthetic, 214; in Candomblé, 34, 47–48; cognitive empathic, 17, 198, 247n15; emotional, 216; empirical, 18–19; knowledge of spirits achieved through, 11; with Metatronic Life and Healing®, 17, 242–44; with nonhuman entities, 156; of senses, 14, 16; somatic, 138; in trance, 160, 164; transformative, 8–18, 137, 242 Engelke, Matthew, 86 enskillment, 99, 127, 215, 221 entanglements: being affected and, 14, 198; in dīwān rituals, 163; embodied knowledge and, 154; ethnographic knowledge and, 16, 176, 179; in exorcism rituals, 101, 105–8; with extraordinary experiences, 55–56; fluidic, 176, 180, 182–87; intersubjective processes of, 108; in mediumistic trance healing, 176; in parasurgery dynamics, 198; of self and other, 57 epiphanies, 16–18, 176–82, 189 epistemic affect, 9–10 epistemological activism, 20, 21

273

epistemological crises, 163 epistemological deconditioning, 19–21, 23, 162 epistemological embodiment: boundaries opened by, 116; characteristics of, 7, 209; critiques of, 23; ethnographic knowledge and, 17, 134, 148; in filming of rituals, 255–56; of healing, 17, 134; illness experiences and, 128; Metatronic Life and Healing® and, 231; in transition movement in anthropology, 18 epistemological incorporation, 19, 21, 23 epistemological overlapping, 262 espiritismo. See Spiritism Espírito Santo, Diana, 25, 99, 181 espiritualidade (spirituality), 74, 77–81, 85–86 essentialism, somatic, 259, 261 ethnocentrism, 20, 239 ethnographic epiphanies, 18, 189 ethnographic incorporation, 18, 24, 189 ethnographic knowledge: body as instrument of, 209; in clinical ethnography, 18; entanglements and, 16, 176, 179; epistemological embodiment and, 17, 134, 148; radical participation and, 10, 188; transformation of, 13, 176, 187 ethnographic writing, 263–64 ethnography: affective, 111; clinical, 18, 130n1; experiential, 60–61, 137, 139; methodological ludism and, 12–13, 34–35, 44–45; objectivity in, 10, 83; reflective, 213, 216; sensory, 10, 17, 213–14, 216–17; subjectivity in, 12, 54, 56, 83. See also autoethnography Evans-Pritchard, Edward, 86, 97 exorcisms: as affective technologies, 11, 97, 100–1, 109, 111; bodily experiences during, 95–96, 105–7,

274

Index

110; by Bompo healers, 120; as dynamic process, 146; feelings experienced during, 101, 104–8, 110–11, 112n5; at Kenmi shrine, 11, 95–96, 100–11; monotheistic approach to, 146; for pain and illness, 11, 95, 101, 104; perceptions of supplicants during, 100, 105; for spirit possession, 101–4; synesthetic experiences during, 107 experiential embodiment, 139 experiential ethnography, 60–61, 137, 139 extraordinary experiences: collective nature of, 58–59; conditions for fieldwork involving, 63–68; embodied knowledge and, 61, 63, 67, 68; narratives of, 52–56, 62, 64; ordinary nature of, 7, 139; phenomenological approach to, 54, 56, 59; researcher participation in, 54–57, 59, 63; sociohistorical conditions of, 66; Spiritist views of, 217–19; transformative potential of, 17–18, 139, 149; transreligiosity and, 15. See also specific experiences Fabian, Johannes, 10, 63, 188 faith, 11, 42–43, 65 Farmer, Richard, 230–32, 234–37, 247n9 Favret-Saada, Jeanne, 55–56, 59, 68, 189, 198, 208 fear: daily life impacted by, 124, 125; embodiment of, 128; exorcism rituals and, 107, 108; from illness, 80, 126–28; during puja, 120, 121; vulnerability and, 11–12 feeling: of afflicted spirits, 15, 220; in comprehension of extraordinary experiences, 56, 67; consciousness and, 158; in dīwān rituals, 156, 160–65; ethnographic objectivity and, 10; during exorcism rituals,

101, 104–8, 110–11, 112n5; imagination and, 14, 260; intersubjective embodiment and, 16; knowledge of spirits achieved through, 11; in mediumship, 181, 183, 185–86; of presence, 181, 220; sentient ecology and, 99. See also emotions “feeling with,” 97, 100, 107, 109–11 fluidic entanglements, 176, 180, 182–87 fluidity: of beliefs and practices in espiritualidade, 78; of embodied experiences of healing, 4; of ethnographic field, 13, 15, 133; of religiosity, 135, 137, 139, 150; of trance dancers, 161 Foucault, Michel, 215 Fuchs, T., 162 Geertz, Clifford, 216 Gerber, Johannes, 180 ghosts: belief in, 121; Bompos as conduits to, 119; hauntings by, 116, 120, 121; healing rituals and, 11; in mind control theory, 6; offerings made to, 115, 121, 122, 127; scaring away of, 118–19, 125, 129. See also spirits giardiasis, 123, 129, 130n3 Glennon, Clare, 231, 232, 234–35, 237 Gnosticism, 230, 241, 242, 246n4 going native, 35, 67, 82, 86, 111, 188, 222 Goldman, Márcio, 189 Good, Byron, 6 Goulet, Jean-Guy, 63, 137, 188 Graham, Fabian, 240 Granville Miller, Bruce, 137, 188 Greece, transreligious encounters between Brazil and, 134–39 Grindal, Bruce, 54–55, 57, 61 Groisman, Alberto, 25, 166, 216 grounding, 158–60, 203 Guattari, Félix, 26n3

Index

Hacking, Ian, 166 Hallowell, Alfred Irving, 38 Halloy, Arnaud, 10, 65, 161 Halstead, Narmala, 216 Handelman, Don, 45 Hastrup, Kirsten, 65 healing: affect in, 10–11; in anthropology of health, 20; charismatic practices of, 14, 99; embodied, 4; with energy, 84–85; epistemological embodiment of, 17, 134; materiality of, 17, 85, 86; by mediumistic trance, 175, 176, 180, 182, 195; narratives of, 11; sensory ethnography of, 17, 213–14; Spiritist, 73–77, 79–81, 83, 213; transformation in, 13–14, 57; in Vale do Amanhecer, 16–17, 175–79, 184; VortexHealing®, 235, 243, 247n9. See also Bompo healers; Metatronic Life and Healing®; therapy and therapeutic mechanisms health: anthropology of, 20, 25, 250, 251; crises involving, 136, 138; cultural systems of, 20; ectoplasm effects on, 14, 180; holisitic approaches to, 213; mental, 14, 158, 212, 213, 218, 223; social value of, 129; spirituality and, 74, 78, 83, 85. See also medical anthropology Hefner, Philip, 13–14 Heraclitus of Ephesus, 26n3 heuristics, 9, 145, 147–49, 259–64 hierarchies: in Candomblé, 13, 34, 38–42, 46; of knowledge, 17, 18, 188, 189, 244; renegotiation of, 48; in trance dancing, 161 Hinduism, 53, 124, 131n7, 134, 135, 247n16 Hirschkind, Charles, 165 Holbraad, Martin, 98 Howes, David, 214

275

Hunter, Jack, 35, 181 Husserl, Edmund, 67 Iamblichus (philosopher), 3–4 IASP. See International Society for Study of Pain illness: in anthropology of health, 20; anxiety resulting from, 127; biomedical model of, 20; dīwān rituals for release of, 15; exorcisms for recovery from, 11, 101, 104; fear resulting from, 80, 126–28; intersubjective construction of, 103; narratives of experience with, 6; phenomenology of, 6, 181; as source for embodied knowledge, 128; spirits as cause of, 12, 14, 104. See also specific conditions images: artistic, 256–58, 262, 266– 67n6; cinematographic, 255–56, 263–64; as relational devices, 262–63; religious, 256–58, 262; representational paradigm of, 252– 54, 256; scientific, 256, 257, 266– 67n6; in sessions of disobsession, 15; shared, 8, 14, 16; subjectivity of, 254; therapeutic, 251–63, 265, 267n7; transformative power of, 265; trust in, 265–66; visualization of, 197 imagination: in Candomblé, 37; emotional intuition and, 260; feeling and, 14, 260; in narratives of healing, 11; rituals in articulation of, 61; sensory engagement through, 14; stimulation of, 201; theoretical, 250, 254; in theories of mind, 5, 6; trance-induced, 224 incorporation: epistemological, 19, 21, 23; ethnographic, 18, 24, 189; healing experiences as, 4; mediums of, 180; of spirits, 183, 185–87, 213 Ingold, Tim, 43, 56, 99, 179, 201

276

Index

insight: affect in fostering of, 10; from embodied experiences, 87; entanglements involving, 16, 176, 179; on healing practices, 116, 124; on intersubjective mimetic learning, 160–61; on mediumship practices, 211; into spirit world, 83; strategies for gaining, 63, 66, 67; from transformative experiences, 13 intangible substances, 16, 176, 178 intercorporeality, 16, 162–64, 167 International Association of Laboratory Research in Ectoplasm and Parasurgery (ECTOLAB), 14, 193–203, 206–8 International Society for Study of Pain (IASP), 116, 123 intersubjectivity: attunement and, 108; in charismatic healing practices, 99; as condition for fieldwork, 63–67; in ectoplasm studies, 205–6; entanglement processes and, 108; ethnographic objectivity and, 10; exorcism rituals and, 101; extraordinary experiences and, 54, 56; in illness construction, 103; intercorporality as dimension of, 162; of mimetic learning, 160–61; objective facts constructed from, 14, 194; researcher participation and, 16; sensory perceptions and, 214 inugami (dog-god), 102 invisible entities: anti-representational view of, 7; in Candomblé, 36, 47, 48; embodiment of, 22; emotionality as evidence of and opening for, 157; in healing experiences, 16–17, 175; materiality of, 181; in web of ecological relations, 34. See also spirits Ishii, Miho, 97 Islam: converts to, 56, 66, 68; corporeal relationality in, 162; jinn in, 154;

listening in, 165; Metatron in, 233. See also Sufism Jackson, Michael, 128 James, William, 9, 25 Jensen, Casper Bruun, 97 jinn, 15, 154–56, 159, 160, 161 Johnson, Paul C., 2, 255 Kapchan, Deborah, 165 Kapferer, Bruce, 100, 111 Kardec, Allan, 74–75, 80, 85, 181, 218. See also Spiritism Kenmi shrine (Japan): demographics of visitors to, 101; exorcisms at, 11, 95– 96, 100–11; geographic location of, 96, 101; motivations for visiting, 101 Kierkegaard, Søren, 65 kinpei (exorcism tool), 102–4, 107, 110 Kirmayer, Lawrence, 117 Kleinman, Arthur, 20 Knibbe, Kim, 45, 116 knowledge: construction of, 54, 57, 59–63, 68, 97; empirical, 15, 139; epistemologies of, 137; formative vs. informative, 16, 65; hierarchies of, 17, 18, 188, 189, 244; phenomenological approach to, 59–63; revelatory, 178–79; spiritual, 11, 189, 212, 213. See also embodied knowledge; ethnographic knowledge; learning; modes of knowing Koss-Chioino, Joan, 13–14, 222–23 Kripal, Jeffrey, 17, 189 Krippner, Stanley, 76 Kristeva, Julia, 56 Kulick, Don, 60–61 Kurz, Helmar, 14–15, 211, 225 learning: bodily experiences as element of, 47; embodied, 158, 166; of mediumship, 176, 177, 179, 181–83, 219–20; mimetic, 160–61; modes

Index

of, 5, 9; to read the world, 198, 201–2; of ritual knowledge, 41; in Spiritism, 80–81; spirit possession and, 99; to trance, 16, 155, 160–61, 163–64; from transformative experiences, 13, 15; to trust, 233. See also knowledge liminality, 42, 57–58, 64 Lock, Margaret, 61 Luhrmann, Tanya M., 5–7, 54, 57, 211 Luiz, André, 225n1 Lutz, Catherine, 65 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 58, 188 materiality: of belief, 6, 86; of body, 181; of energy transfer in passe, 84–86; of healing, 17, 85, 86; of invisible entities, 181; of ontologies, 34, 35, 37 material representation, 12, 143, 145 Mattes, Dominik, 9–10 Mauss, Marcel, 215 Mazard, Meirelle, 4 McGuire, Meredith, 139 medical anthropology: embodied knowledge in, 61; history and development of, 20; sensorial experiences in, 14, 214; Spiritism in, 76, 80, 82 mediums and mediumship: ectoplasm and, 180; embodied knowledge and, 185–87; feeling in, 181, 183, 185–86; of incorporation, 180; learning of, 176, 177, 179, 181–83, 219–20; making and remaking of self by, 6; modes of knowing in, 176–82, 187, 216; ritual uniforms and vestments for, 178; science and, 185; senses and, 211–15; skill development for, 75, 99; in Spiritism, 14–15, 74–75, 181, 185, 217–25; as therapeutic mechanism, 14–15, 219; trance and, 175, 176, 179, 180, 182, 195

277

memory: embodiment of, 14, 159; rituals in articulation of, 61; sensory memory, 217; trance and, 159, 160, 163, 164 mental health, 14, 158, 212, 213, 218, 223 Merivale, Philippa “Pippa,” 231–37, 239, 241–42, 246–47n5, 247n8 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 47, 59, 107, 200 Mesmer, Franz Anton, 180, 218 Metatron (archangel), 232, 233, 236, 244, 245–46nn1–2 Metatronic Life and Healing®, 230–48; apprenticeships in, 17, 230, 242– 43; Attunements in, 234–36, 243, 247n12; description of, 230–31, 246n2, 246n4; engagement with, 17, 242–44; Gnosticism and, 230, 241, 242, 246n4; New Age spirituality and, 231–33, 239, 241–42; origins and founding of, 231–33; skepticism regarding, 244– 45; steps in Metatronic Pathway, 237–43; Transmissions in, 231, 234–37, 242, 243 methodological ludism, 12–13, 34–35, 44–45 Meyer, Birgit, 53 Miller, Casper, 126 Mills, Martin, 97 mimetic learning, 160–61 mind: body and, 11, 57, 61, 84, 98, 139, 214, 231, 244; in cognitive science, 186; epiphanies of the, 17, 189; in mediumistic development, 183; spirits as products of, 223; state of, 43, 260, 263; theories of, 5–6 mind control theory, 5–6 Mitchell, William J. T., 254 modes of knowing: embodied, 10; healing in relation to, 176; mediumistic, 176–82, 187, 216; in Metatronic Life and Healing®

278

Index

apprenticeship, 17; non-cognitive, 216; religious faith as, 65; somatic, 11, 198; trance-formative, 176, 182; transformative engagement and, 8–9. See also epiphanies Moreira-Almeida, Alexander, 76–77 Mossière, Géraldine, 16, 52, 68–69 movement of body: in dīwān rituals, 15, 155, 160, 161; in exorcism rituals, 105, 107, 110; in extraordinary experiences, 55; during pujas, 118–20; in therapeutic models, 159, 252 narratives: in anthropology of health, 20; in Candomblé, 38; contextualization of, 86; of extraordinary experiences, 52–56, 62, 64; of healing, 11; of illness, 6; objectivity of, 83; from past-life regression, 242 Naumescu, Vlad, 161 Needham, Rodney, 43 New Age spirituality: bioenergetic exercises in, 134; Metatronic Life and Healing® and, 231–33, 239, 241–42; supernaturalist theory of mind and, 5; in therapeutic practice, 135; use of term, 151n5, 231 Ngaba (healing ritual), 122–23, 125, 128 Nichter, Mark, 214, 215 Nicoletti, Martino, 119, 120, 130n5 non-cognitive modes of knowing, 216 nonhuman entities: engagement with, 156; epistemic affect and, 9; “feeling with,” 97, 100, 111; jinn, 15, 154–56, 159, 160, 161; ontological turn and, 98; orixás, 33, 36–47, 83, 213; in social worlds, 56; in trance, 167. See also invisible entities; spirits Núñez Molina, Mario A., 76 Nusbaum, Howard, 7

objectivity: of cognitive approaches, 127; distancing as a criterion for, 19, 21–22; ethnographic, 10, 83; illness experiences and, 6; of images, 255, 263, 265; methodological impacts of, 215; of narratives, 83; of paraperceptions, 199, 200 obsession, 199, 218–20. See also disobsession obsessor spirits, 183, 184, 213, 218, 220 Ochoa, Todd Ramón, 35–36 Okely, Judith, 188 Omolú, Augusto, 39 ontological transformation, 12, 145 ontological turn, 8, 37, 54, 98, 148 ontologies: animistic, 4, 43; extraordinary experiences and, 56; interactions among, 34, 46, 47; materiality of, 34, 35, 37; modes of action in, 98–99; personhood and, 38; spirit, 11, 96–97, 100, 101, 109, 111; of supernatural beings, 35; in transreligiosity, 138, 150 opacity of mind theory, 5 orixás, 33, 36–47, 83, 213 Orthodox Christianity, 135, 138 others and otherness: affective experiences of, 22, 260–61; boundaries between self and, 16, 56; as challenge to perception, 216; empathy as mode of relationship to, 65–66; entanglement of self and, 57; epistemological incorporation of, 21; in extraordinary experiences, 54, 63, 64; in hierarchies of knowledge, 17, 18; ontological and analytical distance from, 250; spiritual doubles as, 36–38 pain: chronic, 11, 116–17, 120–21, 123, 128; dīwān rituals and, 15, 158–60; exorcisms for relief from,

Index

95, 104; IASP definition of, 116, 123; mediumistic development and, 182, 183; obsessor spirits as cause of, 184; phantom, 162; in sessions of disobsession, 15, 220; Spiritist treatment of, 79; Vale do Amanhecer healing ritual for, 16–17 Palmié, Stephan, 2, 261 Panagiotopoulos, Anastasios, 12, 13, 133, 147–48, 150 panic attacks, 12, 135–36, 140 paradoxes: of anthropology, 19, 259; in Bompo healing rituals, 123; of methodological ludism, 45; of modes of knowing, 65; of “the real,” 8; transreligiosity and, 138 paraperceptions, 196–204 parasurgery: compilation of requests for, 197–99; ectoplasm as raw material of, 196, 199, 203; interassistencial dynamics of, 194–203; therapeutic assistance through, 206. See also International Association of Laboratory Research in Ectoplasm and Parasurgery participant observation, 7, 34–35, 68, 212, 217, 260 participation: in Candomblé, 40–42, 46; challenges posed by, 12; coparticipation, 68; deep participation, 216, 222; in extraordinary experiences, 54–57, 59, 63; knowledge construction through, 97; radical participation, 10, 15, 63, 137, 147, 188; somatic modes of knowing and, 198; spirit ontologies and, 100; thick participation, 15, 217 passe (transfer of positive energy): bodily experiences during, 17, 74, 82, 84, 86; description of, 12, 74, 75, 81–82, 135; materiality of energy

279

transfer in, 84–86; perception of spirits during, 136, 219 Pedersen, Morten Axel, 98 Pentecostals, 16, 52–53, 56, 59, 61–62, 64–65, 67 perceptions: in anthropology of experience, 58; attention to, 14, 208, 219; authenticity and veracity of, 63; bodily, 58, 59, 111; of environment in Candomblé, 34; as ethnographic data, 15, 221, 222; during exorcism rituals, 100, 105; in mediumistic development, 181, 186; ontological, 139; paraperceptions, 196–204; phenomenology of, 99; reeducation of, 186, 216; rituals in articulation of, 61; sensory, 138, 139, 181, 214, 215, 219, 222; of spirits, 96, 99, 136, 180, 219; of trance in dīwān rituals, 15–16 personhood, 2, 4, 38, 129 perspectivism, 6 phenomenology: body and, 158, 162; descriptive approach to, 25; embodiment and, 24, 54; of extraordinary experiences, 54, 56, 59; of illness, 6, 181; knowledge construction and, 59–63; of perception, 99; transformative engagements and, 8 Pierini, Emily, 10, 16–17, 25, 166, 175, 189, 216 pilgrimages, 124–26, 128, 131n7 Pink, Sarah, 216–17 Pinotti, Andrea, 252 plasticity, 145, 166 Plato, 36, 253 positionality, 9, 123, 129, 215, 216 positivism, 19, 22, 57, 137 possession. See spirit possession postural mirroring, 117 prayer: communication with spiritual world through, 138; in exorcism

280

Index

rituals, 11, 102, 107–9; mind-body experiences affected by, 7; in Pentecostal churches, 52–53; in shamanic practice, 255 presence: of ectoplasm, 199, 201; feelings of, 181, 220; of nonhuman entities in trance, 156, 167; of researchers, 40, 46, 54, 61, 63–64; of spirits, 15, 38, 100, 104, 106–8, 136, 138–39; therapeutic images and sense of, 258. See also copresence Puerto Rico, Spiritism in, 73–76, 80, 82 puja (healing ritual), 117–22, 125, 126, 128–29 radical empiricism, 9–10, 216 radical participation, 10, 15, 63, 137, 147, 188 reflective ethnography, 213, 216 reflective turn, 9 religiosity: fluidity of, 135, 137, 139, 150; as mode of knowing, 65; science and, 145, 194, 256; sensorial experiences of, 133; technologies of self and, 215; vernacular, 82, 138. See also spirituality; transreligiosity; specific religions religious images, 256–58, 262 representation: in Afro-Cuban religions, 12, 142; anthropological crisis of, 215; anthropomorphic, 38; antirepresentationalism, 7; criticisms of, 259; cultural, 6; material, 12, 143, 145; overrepresentation, 116; social, 37, 44 representational paradigm of images, 252–54, 256 revelations, 11, 14, 177–80 Richet, Charles, 180, 193, 194, 202 Rieger, Elisa, 215 Rivers, William H. R., 20 Rohr, Richard, 241–42 Rosaldo, Renato, 67

Rouch, Jean, 253, 255 Roussou, Eugenia, 12, 13, 15, 133, 147, 148, 150 Sai Baba (Indian guru), 53 Samudra, Jaida K., 217 Sandalphon (archangel), 233–34 Sarró, Ramon, 179 Sassi, Mário, 178, 185 Schechner, Richard, 83 Scheper-Hughes, Nancy, 61 Schmidt, Bettina E., 10, 17, 73, 87 Schmitz, Hermann, 162 Schüler, Sebastian, 215 science: cognitive, 98, 186; conventional, 203, 206, 207; hegemonic model of, 206, 258; mediumship and, 185; rationalist, 18–22, 24; religiosity and, 145, 194, 256; secular theory of mind and, 5 scientific images, 256, 257, 266–67n6 secular theory of mind, 5 self: boundaries between otherness and, 16, 56; deontologization of afflictions from, 145; dissociation from, 3, 98, 155, 159, 163; entanglement of other and, 57; ethnographic, 15, 137, 139; fragmentation of, 129; improvement of, 80, 85; making and remaking of, 6; orientation of, 7, 99; plasticity of, 145, 166; porosity of, 10–11, 15, 98; technologies of, 215; transformation of, 57, 61, 133, 215, 219 Seligman, Rebecca, 166 Selim, Nasima, 9–10 senses and sensorial experiences: anthropology of the, 213, 214, 216; comprehension of the world and, 59; embodied knowledge and, 56, 217; engagement of, 14, 16; of extraordinary phenomena, 56, 63; knowledge production through,

Index

60; in medical anthropology, 14, 214; mediumship and, 211–15; as perceptual device, 58, 136; reeducation of, 158, 163; rituals in articulation of, 61; as sources of information, 6; therapeutic images and, 251–52, 255; transreligiosity and, 13, 133 sensory ethnography, 10, 17, 213–14, 216–17 sensory memory, 217 sensory perceptions, 138, 139, 181, 214, 215, 219, 222 sentient ecology, 99 shamans and shamanism: distantiation in, 10; misinterpretations within anthropology, 3; prayer utilized in, 255; trance experiences of, 164; world of doubles in, 258. See also Bompo healers Sheets-Johnstone, Maxine, 160, 164 sickness. See illness skills: clairvoyant, 154; of dīwān musicians, 161; enskillment, 99, 127, 215, 221; entanglements involving, 16, 176, 179; in interlocutional space, 182; for mediumship, 75, 99; of radical participation, 10; spirit possession and, 98, 99 social representation, 37, 44 Sodré, Muniz, 36 somatic affinity, 250 somatic engagement, 138 somatic essentialism, 259, 261 somatic modes of attention, 11, 16, 60, 63, 165, 215, 221–22 somatic modes of knowing, 11, 198 Spain, transreligious encounters between Cuba and, 139–46 Spencer, Dimitrina, 216 Spinoza, Baruch, 167 spirit guides, 118, 136, 138, 177–78, 180, 181, 183–85

281

Spiritism: on extraordinary experiences, 217–19; healing in, 73–77, 79–81, 83, 213; hostilities toward, 74–76; learning in, 80–81; in medical anthropology, 76, 80, 82; mediumship in, 14–15, 74–75, 181, 185, 217–25; mental health care in, 14, 212, 213, 218; rhetorical transitions in, 181; secular orientation of, 77–78. See also passe spirit ontologies, 11, 96–97, 100, 101, 109, 111 spirit possession: bodily symptoms of, 104; cognitive approaches to, 98; dissociation from self in, 3, 98; by dog-god (inugami), 102; exorcisms for relief from, 101–4; genealogy of term, 2; in Greco-Roman world, 3–4; learning processes related to, 99; misinterpretations within anthropology, 2–3; in Pentecostal churches, 52–53; psychologization of, 99 spirits: anti-representational view of, 7; belief in, 11, 17, 73, 74, 97, 144; channeling of, 75; in Christian framework, 2, 3; disincarnated, 177, 179–81, 183, 195, 220; as external agents, 96, 105, 108; hospital in spiritual realm, 218, 225n1; illness caused by, 12, 14, 104; incorporation of, 183, 185–87, 213; in mind control theory, 5–6; obsessor, 183, 184, 213, 218, 220; perception of, 96, 99, 136, 180, 219; presence of, 15, 38, 100, 104, 106– 8, 136, 138–39; in supernaturalist theory of mind, 5; transition of, 177, 178; transreligious reality of, 137–39; use of term, 35–36; in web of ecological relations, 34. See also ghosts; spirit possession spiritual epiphanies, 176–82 Spiritualism, 6, 11, 74, 175, 180

282

Index

spirituality: espiritualidade, 74, 77–81, 85–86; health and, 74, 78, 83, 85; universal biological ability to experience, 58; vernacular forms of, 77; well-being and, 74, 77, 78, 80, 83. See also New Age spirituality; religiosity Steiner, Stan, 73 Stodulka, Thomas, 9–10 Stoller, Paul, 55, 56, 64, 188 Strathern, Andrew, 164 subjectivity: of belief, 86; entanglements and, 154; ethnographic, 12, 54, 56, 83; extraordinary experiences and, 62; illness experiences and, 6; of images, 254; methodological impacts of, 215; of paraperceptions, 199. See also intersubjectivity substances: in Afro-Cuban doll consecration, 142; ecology of, 16, 17, 176, 184; spiritual, 176, 180. See also ectoplasm Sufism, 15, 52, 158, 159. See also dīwān rituals Suhr, Christian, 65 supernaturalist theory of mind, 5 Sutcliffe, Steven, 231–32 Swancutt, Katherine, 4 Swift, Philip, 97, 100 tangible substances, 16, 176, 178 Taussig, Michael, 206 Tautscher, Gabriele, 124 Taves, Ann, 179 Taylor, Charles, 3 technologies: affective, 11, 97, 100–1, 109, 111; epiphanies of the mind and, 17, 189; of self, 215; spiritual, 230 Tedlock, Barbara, 62, 68 Tedlock, Dennis, 62 theoretical imagination, 250, 254 therapeutic images, 251–63, 265, 267n7 therapy and therapeutic mechanisms: by Bompo healers, 120; color

therapy, 135, 232, 252; ectoplasm in, 180, 187, 193, 194, 202; epistemological deconditioning and, 20; mediumship and, 14–15, 219; movement of body and, 159, 252; in New Age spirituality, 135; psychiatric dolls, 12, 142–44, 148, 149; Spiritist, 14–15, 75, 80, 85 thick participation, 15, 217 Thisted, Ronald, 7 Throop, Jason C., 54 Tia Neiva. See Zelaya, Neiva Chaves trance: bodily experiences during, 13, 16, 45, 157, 160–63, 166–67; Bompo healers in, 118, 119; in Candomblé, 13, 38, 39, 44–46; control in, 15, 16, 154–56, 166; in dīwān rituals, 15–16, 154–67; learning to, 16, 155, 160–61, 163– 64; mediumistic, 175, 176, 179, 180, 182, 195; metaphorical description of, 49n6 trance-formative mode of knowing, 176, 182 transcendence, 4, 58, 68, 159 transformation: affliction and, 134, 146– 49; of ethnographic knowledge, 13, 176, 187; from extraordinary experiences, 17–18, 139, 149; in healing experiences, 13–14, 57; in mediumistic development, 181–83; in Metatronic Life and Healing®, 17, 240, 242–43; ontological, 12, 145; planetary, 231; researcher experiences of, 45, 65; of self, 57, 61, 133, 215, 219; spiritual, 13–15, 134; well-being and, 134, 146–49 transformative engagement, 8–18, 137, 242 transition: in anthropology, 18, 21; planetary, 242; in radical empiricism, 10; rhetorical, 181; of spirits, 177, 178 transparency of language theory, 5

Index

transreligiosity, 133–50; in autoethnography, 146–49; comparative account of, 146–49; cross-cultural encounters of, 134– 46; epistemological identity and, 150; extraordinary experiences and, 15; reality of spirits and, 137–39; sensorial experiences and, 13, 133 trust: in biomedicine, 129; in Bompo healers, 116, 120, 125, 126, 128; in images, 265–66; of interlocutors, 41, 166, 251, 264; learning to, 233; mistrust, 19, 265; narrative pact and, 265 Turner, Edith: on coexperience, 63; on extraordinary experiences, 52, 55, 58, 67; on going native, 82, 111; on passe rituals, 85; phenomenological approach of, 60; on sinking in, 83, 84, 139; Spiritism influenced by, 76 Turner, Tamara Dee, 15–16, 153, 167 Turner, Victor, 54, 57–58, 83, 84 Tylor, E. B., 2 Vale do Amanhecer (Valley of the Dawn): creation of, 175–79; healing in, 16–17, 175–79, 184; humanspirit ecologies and, 180; initiation rituals in, 182, 183; mediumistic development in, 181–83, 186; transnational spread of, 176, 181

283

Van de Port, Mattijs, 8, 37, 41–42 Veerstag, Peter, 116 Verger, Pierre, 39 vibrational state, 195, 209–10n1 visual anthropology, 252–58 Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo, 37, 54 VortexHealing®, 235, 243, 247n9 Voss, Angela, 242 vulnerability, 11–12, 116, 121, 127–29, 188, 241 Waldstein, Anna, 56 Weber, Max, 67 well-being: ectoplasm effects on, 14; extraordinary experiences and, 58; holisitic approaches to, 213; spirituality and, 74, 77, 78, 80, 83; transformational experiences and, 134, 146–49 White, Geoffrey, 65 Wiegele, Katharine L., 46–47 Wikan, Unni, 56, 60 Willerslev, Rane, 65 Willson, Margaret, 60–61 Xavier, Francisco “Chico,” 225n1 Zaleski, Carol, 242 Zelaya, Neiva Chaves, 175–81, 185 Žižek, Slavoj, 8