Trance Mediums and New Media: Spirit Possession in the Age of Technical Reproduction 9780823253838

Citation preview

Trance Mediums and New Media Spirit Possession in the Age of Technical Reproduction

Edited by

Heike Behrend, Anja Dreschke, and Martin Zillinger

fordham university press New York 2015

Copyright 䉷 2015 Fordham University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Visit us online at www.fordhampress.com Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Trance mediums and new media : spirit possession in the age of technical reproduction / edited by Heike Behrend, Anja Dreschke, and Martin Zillinger.—First edition. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8232-5380-7 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-8232-5381-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Channeling (Spiritualism)—Congresses. 2. Mass media and anthropology—Congresses. 3. Technology—Congresses. 4. Globalization—Congresses. I. Behrend, Heike, editor of compilation. BF1286.T73 2014 133.9⬘1—dc23 2013044139 Printed in the United States of America 17 16 15 5 4 3 2 1 First edition

contents

List of Illustrations

vii

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction: Trance Mediums and New Media heike behrend and martin zillinger

1

On the Subject of Spirit Mediumship in the Age of New Media rosalind c. morris Trance Mediums and New Media: The Heritage of a European Term erhard schu¨ ttpelz Absence and the Mediation of the Audiovisual Unconscious martin zillinger

25

56 77

New Media and Traveling Spirits: Pentecostals in the Vietnamese Diaspora and the Disaster of the Titanic gertrud hu¨ welmeier

100

Numinous Dress/Iconic Costume: Korean Shamans Dressed for the Gods and for the Camera laurel kendall

116

Rites of Reception: Mass-Mediated Trance and Public Order in Morocco emilio spadola

137

Media and Manifestation: The Aesthetics and Politics of Plenitude in Central India christopher pinney

156

Media Transformations: Music, Goddess Embodiment, and Politics in Western Orissa/India lidia guzy

171

Transmitting Divine Grace: On the Materiality of Charismatic Mediation in Mali dorothea e. schulz

183

v

vi Spaces of Refusal: Photophobic Spirits and the Technical Medium of Photography heike behrend ‘‘Look with Your Own Eyes!’’: Visualizations of Spirit Mediums and Their Viewing Techniques in Tanzanian Video Films claudia bo¨ hme Possession Play: On Cinema, Reenactment, and Trance in the Cologne Tribes anja dreschke Trance Techniques, Cinema, and Cybernetics ute holl

Contents

201

221

241 264

Notes

283

Works Cited List of Contributors Index

317 353 357

illustrations

1a–c

Ritual media: introduction with fertile landscapes and supplications (film stills)

84–85

2

Ritual media: sacrificial basket with photo (video still)

87

3

Camera fa¯th.a

88

4

The ritual space of exchange of the camera fa¯th.a

91

5

A hela¯l sings his laments for a client using a mobile phone

95

6

Medial public realms of the ritual space of exchange

97

7

The Mountain God arrives, May 30, 2009

119

8

Hyewon’s painting

124

9

‘‘Natives in their Superstitious Service’’

126

10

1985 Korean stamp portraying a shaman in familiar costume and pose

129

Shaman website. Streaming of moving images will appear in the black rectangle

131

Laurel Kendall receives a bundle of costume at a kut she sponsored in 2009

135

13

Shooting a mganga scene for the film Popobawa (2009)

222

14

Signboard of Dr. Manyaunyau: ‘‘I am fetching bad things for you out of houses and streets, whip of witches. He treats: potency, hookworms, heart, diabetes, scrotal hernia, bad omen’’

230

15

TV asilia in Shumileta I

237

16

TV asilia in Shumileta II

238

17

German cinema guide to the film Sign of the Pagan, 1955

242

18

Group portrait of the First Hun Horde of Cologne, ca. 1970

243

11 12

vii

viii

Illustrations

19

Summer camp

254

20

Shaman performing a ritual during a summer camp

255

21

Painting of a drum and an ovoo, a Mongolian shamanistic cairn

258

Shaman cleansing my photo camera with incense before a trance ritual

262

22

acknowledgments

This volume grew out of two conferences exploring the manifold relationships between trance mediums and new technical media. The first took place in July 2008 in Siegen, Germany, and focused on the relationship in debates about modernity and modernization around 1900 between trance mediums and what was then the new analogue media. (See Hahn and Schu¨ttpelz 2009.) The second conference, which took place one year later, in June 2009, in Cologne, extended the topic to the present and discussed new ethnographic studies that have emerged in the field of media anthropology. This volume presents the contributions of the second conference. We would like to express our gratitude to the contributors for sharing their ideas, as well as to Maria Jose´ Alves de Abreu, Johannes Harnischfeger, and Tobias Wendl, who presented inspiring papers at the conference. We are grateful to Cora Bender for joining the conference and providing thoughtful comments on the topic as a discussant. And in particular, we thank Erhard Schu¨ttpelz for his characteristically generous support for this project, which has been his initiative as much as ours from the start. We would like to thank the Academy of Media Arts Cologne, the Institute for African Studies at the University of Cologne, and the Institute for Media Studies at the University of Siegen for supporting this conference. Together with the research initiative Cultural Theory and Theory of the Political Imaginary at the University of Constance, the German Research Foundation provided the financial means for convening the conference as part of the research project Trance Mediums and New Media at two Threshold of Globalization (1900 and Today). We would like to thank both institutions for their generous support. At the University of Constance, we wish particularly to thank Albrecht Koschorke and Alexander Schmitz for their helpful cooperation. We are allso indebted to the former Collaborative Research Center ‘‘Media Upheavals’’ at the University of Siegen for supporting the publication of the conference. We are especially grateful to Mohamed Amjahid and Jiannis Giatagantzidis for helping to organize the event, to Sonja Scho¨pfel and David Sittler

ix

x

Acknowledgments

for their thoughtful and thorough assistance in the editing process of this book, and to David in particular for the creation of the index. In addition, we would like to thank Tom Lay and Helen Tartar of Fordham University Press for their nearly unending patience and for the kind and professional assistance we were given. And last but not least, we thank the two anonymous reviewers whose critical comments enabled us to improve this volume.

Tr a n c e M e d i u m s a n d N e w M e d i a

Introduction: Trance Mediums and New Media Heike Behrend and Martin Zillinger

For more than two decades, scholars have discussed the ‘‘return of the religious,’’ a development that has taken place on a global level and that deeply questions the narratives of modernity and its disenchantment (De Vries and Weber 2001). Responding to the forces of globalization, the neoliberal elimination of restraints on market forces, the decline of states, and the rise of new media, political theologies have emerged that intensely counter the Western idea of the separation of church and state and the concept of religion as a private individual matter. The return of the religious opened up an intense debate among academics of different disciplines, including philosophy, religious studies, anthropology, and political science, about the quality and substance of religion, its mediation in new technical media, and the experiences of alterity induced through new media in the context of the processes of globalization. At the same time, new light has been shed on media and mediation by dealing with religion as media (Meyer 2009; Stolow 2005). By introducing religion into the study of media and media into the study of religion, mediation comes into focus as process and form of making meaning (Morgan 2008) and therefore deepens our insight into the configuration of media as media practices (Klassen 2008), drawing from and developing further ethnographic inquiries into situated media use. (See Spitulnik 2002.)

1

2

Heike Behrend and Martin Zillinger

What has been largely neglected in the debates about the return of the religious, however, is the ‘‘orgiastic’’ or enthusiastic quality that characterizes many of its practices. The use of mediumship, techniques of trance and possession, exorcism, and the invocation of spirits and otherworldly beings flourish not only among new religious movements, but also among the old monotheistic religions that center on the book. (See, for example, Behrend 2011, Bilu 2003, and Boissevain 2006.) Although in 1972, Pope Paul VI removed the authority to perform exorcism as one of the standard ‘‘minor orders’’ with which all priests were endowed at ordination, in 1999, a revised rite of exorcism was formulated, and in 2005, Pope Benedict XVI declared that every diocese should appoint an exorcist. At the same time, a pontifical university in Rome instituted a training course for exorcists that has been conducted annually (Csordas 2012). Likewise, Islamic reform movements try to promote Quranic healing practices to counter the trance elements of Sufi practices, while public performances of spirit mediumship and divination in ultraorthodox Jewish communities strive to provide an all-embracing metaphysical account of extraordinary phenomena in the borderland of scientific inquiry. By putting divination performances of autistic children publicly ‘‘to test,’’ they rearticulate traditional forms of dybbuk possession in a modernist idiom (Bilu and Goodman 1997). Various forms of spirituality have resurfaced in healing practices all over the world and have become commodified as ‘‘local traditions’’ in festivals in order to participate in the local and the global. Paradoxically, the idioms of trance and possession have gained such an enormous importance for understanding our present time that on a superficial level, this resurgence of mediumship could be taken as a specific moment in the history of capitalistic societies, where the ‘‘spirit of possession’’ seems to have taken possession of those who increasingly attempt to escape a highly technological (post)modernity. Far from being marginal or on the verge of disappearance, since the 1980s, with the new religious revival on a global level, the power of trance circulates globally, and trance has become a transnational category (Kapchan 2007). The term ‘‘trance’’ (from Latin trans-ire, to go across, to pass over) denotes a range of different phenomena all of which are characterized by embodiment and an experience of alterity (Crapanzano 1977a, Lewis 2003). It may culminate in the dissociation of the subject, during which the subject experiences the source of agency as an ‘‘other’’ that takes its form in the medium of the subject. Coming under the influence of or

3

Introduction

engaging with disembodied powers can take various forms and is interpreted and responded to in a variety of ways that vary according to local politics of religion, social context, and the personal circumstances of the patient (Lambek 2002). We prefer the term ‘‘trance’’ to the rather narrow alternative term ‘‘spirit possession,’’ because the latter identifies the source of this experience without taking sufficiently into account that we are dealing with an essentially unstable phenomenon with shifting interpretations. Spirits can be rather ill-defined—as, for example, the Holy Spirit, oscillating between personification as the spirit of God the Father and a more depersonalized force or power—or absent from local conceptualizations in trance cults at all, as among certain Sufi brotherhoods in Islam (Zillinger 2010) or mystic movements in Judaism (Garb 2011).

Trance Mediums, Technical Media, and Mediation The prominence of trance and other ‘‘orgiastic’’ phenomena in the return of the religious cannot be understood without taking into account processes of globalization and localization shaped by new mass media and technologies. The existence of spirit possession as a recognized fact is established through public procedures, enacted and communicated between a patient or client, a ritual expert, and an observer, as Claude Le´viStrauss taught us (Le´vi-Strauss 1967; see Taussig 2003). Ritual procedures produce, shape, and code particular images in an ongoing process of mediation that makes subjective states observable and reportable to others. (See Kramer 2001.) Ritual practices mediate between the visible and the invisible, between inner images and their visualization in the outer, bodily movements of the possessed person, between subjective experiences and the social codification of these experiences. Le´vi-Strauss insisted that the ‘‘gravitational field’’ of the ritual consists of heterogeneous claims and perspectives, including radical skepticism, that are processed in the process of mediation done by rituals. Rituals transform signs, persons, and things by establishing a referentiality of their own, as many scholars have noted (see, for example, Rappaport 1979), but this referentiality is established in an ongoing translation between the ritual medium, the clients, and the public—that is, in the process of ritual mediation. In order to invoke the transcendental, to make otherworldly beings and powers appear (from Latin, apparere), trance mediums need to make dispositions (in Latin, apparare) and take great care in preparing a setting conducive to their work of mediation. Their equipment (Latin, apparatus)

4

Heike Behrend and Martin Zillinger

includes technical media, or what we call an ‘‘apparatus’’ in the narrow sense of a set of technical devices. It is for this reason that trance mediumship and technical media cannot be separated. Inquiry into the first forms an interpretative key to the latter, and vice versa. They implicate each other and are implicated in each other. Apparition and apparatus are linked through ritual techniques. Despite the common parlance that ghostly apparitions carry with them the sense of unexpectedness, religious mediumship is produced—and judged—by the skillful procedures of ritual mediation, the techne¯ of ritual work. Trance mediums bring together practitioners, acolytes, and skeptics alike, and accordingly, they need to craft a trading zone of ritual mediation. They need to account for, reconcile, and translate the different concerns, interests, and perspectives of patients and observers in ways conducive to their ritual endeavors. This volume asks what happens when the spaces of ritual mediation are restructured and expanded through technical reproduction. By focusing on trance mediumship, perhaps one of the oldest forms of mediation and communication with the divine, as Marcel Mauss noted (Mauss[1935] 1973), the contributions to this volume not only fill a gap where the fields of religious studies and media studies overlap, they also contribute to a better general understanding of media as Kulturtechniken— techniques of culture (see Schu¨ ttpelz 2006)—and elaborate further the mutual constitution of ritual mediumship and technological mediation at different times and in different places. Trance mediumship and technological mediation are coextensive. They interact and reinforce each other. (See Hahn and Schu¨ttpelz 2009.) This mutual imbrication goes beyond the claim that media events are fashioned from ritual occasions (Dayan and Katz 1992, Couldry 2003) and demands that we scrutinize in detail what Jacques Derrida has called the ‘‘ghostly quality of mediation.’’ Derrida suggests that mediation implies a structure that likens it to spirit— ‘‘the remote dispatching of bodies that are nonbodies, nonsensible sensations, incorporeal’’—and produces spectralization (Derrida 2001, 61). Along these lines, various scholars have suggested that spirit mediums and technical media have provided each other with metaphors: the discourses of spirit and the imaginary of the Spiritualist movement of the ‘‘long nineteenth century’’ powerfully anticipated and shaped technical media such as photography, cinema, the telephone, and television. Spirits and their mediums served as the ‘‘media a priori’’ for the ‘‘invention’’ of these technical media: spirits were able to ‘‘telesee’’ and ‘‘telehear’’ long before television and the telephone existed. (See Behrend’s essay in this volume and Andriopoulos 2013.) In fact, spirits themselves have reflected

Introduction

5

on their extraordinary capabilities, and in 1871 in Cincinnati, for instance, claimed to have invented telegraphy and/or to have given unseen encouragement to its inventors and developers (Connor 1999, 211). Yet the inverse holds, as well: the imaginary of spirits and Spiritualism was also strongly shaped by technical media. To commandeer the telegraph instrument placed in the center of the circle during a se´ance, spirits had to materialize a battery to power it (Connor 1999, ibid.). Not only in the West, but also in Uganda and other parts of the world, spirit mediums have compared themselves to and associated themselves with batteries filled with electric power or have identified themselves with radios, socalled ‘‘voice boxes’’ (Behrend 2001, 2003a). And in Morocco, women who have had visions have compared this experience to film, because it allowed them to see themselves as if from outside (Kapchan 2007, 98). Spirits mediums also have inserted technical media directly into their ritual practices. While mediums offered their bodies as vessel or containers to be inhabited by their spirits, technical media have served as prostheses to expand and enforce their voices, sight, image, energy, and spirituality (Behrend 2003a, 2005b). In complicated ways, as some of the contributions in this volume show, technical media have empowered the spirits, while the spirit medium was turned into an apparatus, an object, disempowered and bereft of his or her consciousness. In addition, technical media themselves have become ‘‘spiritualized,’’ a subject we will take up again below. Various advocates for nationalist projects and reform movements in the monotheistic religions have accused trance mediumship of preventing selfknowledge and self-improvement and therefore have fought trance mediumship as an obstacle on the way to progress. (See, for example, Behrend 2013, Crapanzano 1973, Gilsenan 1990, Kendall 1985, Meyer 1999, Morris 2000, Sanchez 2001, Spadola 2008, and Taussig 1987.) But since the early 1980s, ethnographic reports abound of nation-states instead endorsing trance mediumship in their quest for origins. As several essays in this volume testify, trance mediums have become ‘‘heritage transmitters’’ (Kendall, in this volume) vis a` vis national and international publics, archaized and, at the same time, renewed by a globalizing commodity economy, as Rosalind Morris aptly puts it in her contribution here. (See also the essays by Guzy and Spadola in this volume.) Not only was trance mediumship reinterpreted as the essence of (national) traditions, but also, trance mediums ‘‘modernized’’ themselves through various alliances with technical media that allowed them to become more ‘‘responsible’’ actors within various religious formations.

6

Heike Behrend and Martin Zillinger

Thus, the return of the orgiastic via the human body and new technical media in the return of the religious not only opens up important questions about the construction of ‘‘return,’’ presence, immediacy, and alterity. (Again, see the contribution of Rosalind Morris in this volume.) It also makes us inquire into the formation of subjectivities in the present. Mediumship, trance, and possession provide possibilities for a subject to be not self-identical, to be an Other, divided or even manifold, forgetful and irresponsible—possibilities that operate against the ideal of a unified and sovereign individual. Do practices of trance and possession facilitate an escape from ‘‘responsibility’’ and from a subjectivity that constantly attempts to master itself? Does the domination of technology encourage this form of irresponsibility, as some philosophers have suggested (Derrida 1994, 50–51)? What sorts of subjectivities and objectifications are produced when, for example, spirit mediums who by definition suffer a loss of consciousness and cannot remember what they do and say in the state of possession are enabled to watch themselves in a video when in a trance? For example, nowadays in Senegalese rab spirit-possession rituals, as Andras Zempleni has observed, each congregation has its own cameraman who records all the sessions, and when the chief priestess orders a break, the film is screened for the participants to watch and comment on their trances and the ways they become an Other (Zempleni 2012). While mediumship has tended to theatricalize forgetting, the new possibilities of recording the possession ritual by writing, photography, and video give mediums the chance to view their own performances and to enter into a mediated feedback loop that may promote critical self-awareness and transform them from an object into a more judgmental, self-responsible subject. Under which circumstances do technical media strengthen the state of a trance and promote the ‘‘escape of responsibility,’’ and when do they counteract and create more self-reflective, ‘‘responsible’’ subjectivities? (See the essays by Guzy, Pinney, and Zillinger in this volume.) As Matthew Engelke remarks, the ‘‘media turners’’ in the study of religion have often used the resurgence of the religious as a ‘‘rhetorical launching pad’’ to criticize the post-Enlightenment modernist metanarrative (Engelke 2010, 377) without substantiating their claim that ‘‘the religious’’ to which there supposedly was a return actually ever had been abandoned and without elaborating the modality of the return to it, now as an object of critical attention. It is important to stress that the relationship between trance mediums and new media should not be understood as the persistence of premodern thought in early Western modernity. Such an interpretation would fall prey to the purification work of modernity by

Introduction

7

insisting on a clear-cut differentiation between technology (science), religion (discourse), and social worlds (society). (See Latour 1993.) It fails to take into account that debates about the ‘‘modernization’’ of technological media have always triggered debates about the modernization of trance mediums and vice versa—debates that characterized the introduction of new technologies in the nineteenth century just as much as they have in the twentieth and twenty-first. (See the Schu¨ttpelz essay in this volume.) As this volume shows, these controversies proceed in different and unforeseeable ways worldwide. Conceiving of these interlinked processes uncritically as the return of the religious may willy-nilly reinforce what Johannes Fabian calls the ‘‘allochronie’’ that divides the allegedly modern from the premodern world (Fabian 1983). Narratives of modernity claim an unfolding of progressive events along the vector of technological developments—and more often than not, these claims go hand in hand with modernization movements in spiritual matters, as well. (See Keane 2007.) All narratives of modernization differentiate between places that are included in and places that are excluded from this development. (See Degele and Dries 2005.) Therefore, neither the persistence nor the return of an undifferentiated, premodern past impinges on the teleology of modernization narratives. (See Koschorke 2010, cited in Schu¨ttpelz 2013, 52.) In a way, spirits themselves provide a critique of this teleological narrative of modernity because they haunt and disturb the linearity of time and history as a chain of successive events by bringing in presences from other times and spaces. They provide the possibility of uncoevalness, of the coexistence and interaction of different temporalities. They dissolve the boundaries between the past and the present, allowing even the reversal of temporalities, and they permit temporal loops that may recapture what has been lost. (See Derrida 1995.) What has been archaized as ‘‘survivals’’ and premodern practices since the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, localized on the peripheries of ‘‘modernity,’’ and personified by women, strangers, and children has gained new ground in the trading zones of globalization. As several contributions to this volume testify, more often than not, trance mediumship advances claims to a shared modernity and, as a modernizing strategy, evolves along nationalizing, folklorizing, and missionizing practices that expand and circulate in networks of migration and in transnational media networks. (See the essays by Kendall, Pinney, and Morris in this volume.) Yet we should not forget that there may also be disentanglement, rejection, and withdrawal from global media, arising from either long traditions of visual discretion and the ordering of public and private or from the very

8

Heike Behrend and Martin Zillinger

experience of being transfixed as the Other in ongoing tropes of visibility (Behrend 2013b).

Old and New Media When we explore histories of media practices in different parts of the world, we have to keep in mind that it is some particular (new) medium as it has already evolved that determines our perspective on older media. Media, Niklas Luhmann wrote, open up the perspective on the world (Luhmann 1996). Yet this opening at the same time closes the access to the media’s own historicity. Media are always already there and not only create their cultural milieus, but also reorganize our senses and our perceptions before we can attempt to understand them. Through media, we constantly are being caught in our own traps (Innis 1951, cited in Hagen 2002, 220). For instance, by creating the illusion of presence, photographs hide the fact that the medium itself has fundamentally shaped the habit of looking that we employ to establish an event’s veracity (Baer 2005, 3). Against this background, the question of the relationship between old and new media, between, for example, the (old) human body as a medium and (new) technical media, presents itself in all its epistemological astuteness and unsolvability. When a ‘‘new’’ medium is introduced, a highly contradictory process begins: on the one hand, the new medium may be celebrated as radically new, as something that has not been there before. Often this newness is grasped in positive terms celebrating the new possibilities and capabilities that are imagined to go along with the new medium. Yet the creative possibilities of the new, as Walter Benjamin suggested, are mostly discovered slowly, through old forms, old instruments, and old structures that are fundamentally injured by the appearance of new things, but that, under the pressure of the new, emerging media, are themselves transformed and sometimes driven into a last euphoric flourishing (Benjamin [1931] 1980). At the same time, old media are also reinterpreted and absorb attributes that have been ascribed to the new medium and thereby lose or gain new assets. Thus, the question of what is new and what is old, what disappears and what endures, needs to be explored in the open-ended histories of media and mediumship. By giving this volume the title ‘‘Trance Mediums and New Media,’’ we attempt to problematize the ‘‘new.’’ We do not address only digitally based information and communication technologies as ‘‘new media,’’ but instead

9

Introduction

endeavor to open up the question of what exactly is new in new and old media. As Erhard Schu¨ttpelz shows in his contribution, Western media theory itself is haunted by the figure of the return of ‘‘old media.’’ The lack of agency ascribed to personal mediums migrated into mass psychology, and the suggestion of suggestibility and contagion became the shared interpretive basis for media effects in Europe, the United States, and beyond. The allochronism that has been ascribed to European and nonEuropean trance mediums—the archaization of trance practices, their irreconcilability with the European understanding of modernism from the late nineteenth century on—made every mass-medial ‘‘hypnotization’’ appear potentially ‘‘archaic.’’ Schu¨ttpelz describes how each of the new mass media (cinema, radio, even television) loomed as the figure of a return of the archaic in the cloak of modern technology and contemporary social forms—including, and in a special manner, in the emergence of media theory in the writings of Edmund Carpenter and Marshall McLuhan. Therefore, the different essays collected in this volume not only problematize the relationship between the ‘‘new’’ and the ‘‘old,’’ but also open up a space in which the diverse and contradictory temporalities and spaces created by media and mediumship and their insertion into not necessarily uninterrupted and sequential histories may provide more satisfactory— though more complicated—answers to the question of what constitutes new media.

(De)Materialization and (De)Spiritualization As some anthropologists have come to realize, in some areas of Africa during colonial times it was not only the forces of the wilderness (thunder, rivers, rain), people (the living, as well as the dead) and sudden, terrifying events (epidemics such as smallpox or the plague), but also Western technology (airplanes, bulldozers, tanks, locomotives, bicycles) that were ‘‘spiritualized’’ and as spirits inserted into new local cults of affliction (Beattie and Middleton 1969). As Elizabeth Colson and John Beattie observed, in complex processes, personal mediums were forced by the spirits of Western technologies to embody those spirits mimetically in rituals of spirit possession. When embodied, the spirits of airplanes and locomotives regained materiality until their presence resolved again into an absence. Visual media such as the camera or film images also could become ‘‘spiritualized’’ and oscillate between the immaterial and the material. The

10

Heike Behrend and Martin Zillinger

‘‘spiritualization’’ of technical media seems to have been one way to accommodate the foreign and strange and to negotiate their presence without, however, disempowering them. Instead, transforming the materiality of technical media into spirits (re)gained another form of power—the kind of power with which spirit mediums were able to deal in their rituals. In 1954, as Elizabeth Colson reported, the new spirit of an airplane made its appearance. When a plane flew over a village, a woman became possessed by it. In dreams or visions, the spirit informed her how it wished to materialize: accompanied by drum rhythms, songs, dance steps, dressed in a certain way with paraphernalia and with the plants required for healing (Colson 1969, 79). Mediumship in such contexts thus is a theater in which the technical media of colonial power are translated into spirits and made to oscillate between spirituality and materiality. By focusing on the mutual constitution of trance mediums and new technical media, we are interested in matter and spirit as relational terms, in the various configurations of interdependence and interaction of the two terms and in the processes of spiritualizing and materializing through media. Mediating the material and the immaterial, spirits are characterized by their coming into presence and leaving it again, that is, by their materializing and dematerializing. In fact, it is this form of movement, from the immaterial to the material and back again, from the latent to the manifest to the latent, and from the concealed to the unconcealed and back that is at stake when thinking about spirit mediumship and technical media. (See Lambek 2010, 28.) While in some parts of Africa technical media were spiritualized and rematerialized by their mediums, in Hanoi, for instance, a whole industry has been established for creating offerings of modern consumer goods and media made out of paper for the spirits of the dead. As Gertrud Hu¨welmeier suggests, in Vietnam and the Vietnamese diaspora, not only the living, but also the spirits of the dead long for the latest media, such as mobile phones and computer laptops (Hu¨welmeier 2013). As sacrificial offerings reproduced in paper, they are burned, transformed into smoke to please and appease the spirits of the dead. Here the mutuality of the relationship between spirits and media is transposed to the order of gifts and sacrifices mediating between the material and the immaterial, between this world and the next and past and present. The spirits in Vietnam consume the media of their interaction with the human world. However, the contributions to this volume also provide ample examples of more persistent materialities of mediation. As Bruno Latour remarked and popularized in the slogan ‘‘technology is society

11

Introduction

made durable’’ (Latour 1991), the persistence of certain things and inscriptions has to be taken into account. Certain expectations are invoked by and enmeshed with things and inscriptions that are produced, circulated, and kept by trance mediums, their followers, and their critics.

Mediated Publics With the help of cheaply reproducible ‘‘small media’’ such as photography and video cameras, trance mediums have not only produced, stored, exchanged, and consumed recordings of their rituals and ceremonies, but also have addressed new publics in national arenas, as well as along the transnational circuits of migration. Worldwide, trance mediums use photos and films in order to build and foster networks of clients and potential partners for cooperation. For the mediums, creating demand of their ritual capabilities is crucial for their standing with their clients and fellow trance adepts, on the one hand, and with the spirits, on the other. The circulation of the signs, persons, and things that they can generate and that can be used as resources for their practices indicates their success as a medium, which is ‘‘increasingly a function of their transnational networks,’’ as Michael Lambek emphasizes (Lambek 2010, 26). It thus is not only the practices of trance mediumship that are changing with new means of mediation, but also the self-representations and public perception of the practices of trance mediums. The claims made for these practices differ greatly, depending on whether they are carried out in public spaces (be it in the streets or the mass media), in the intimate spaces of various social (media) networks, in rites of passage such as weddings or rituals for a delimited public, or performed in (or as a public) secret, as are, for example, the publicly condemned veneration of Sabbath spirits in Morocco, during which the recording and circulation of images is tightly controlled. (See Welte 1990.) Whereas the transition between public and intimate spaces is constantly negotiated, an abrupt translation of concealed practices into the public domain is likely to cause scandals and sometimes violent struggles. (See Zillinger 2008 and Behrend in this volume.) Consequently, the ‘‘staging’’ of trance mediumship, its going public, is a sensitive issue. The public circulation, consumption, and (re)production of images depicting trances, spirit possession, and/or ritual efficacy can cause controversies. These occur as much within a religious community (see, for example, Daswani 2010) and between competing ritual experts and religious groups (see the

12

Heike Behrend and Martin Zillinger

essays by Guzy and Pinney this volume) as with a skeptical public or representatives of state power. As Hu¨welmeier shows in her contribution, for example, throughout the last decades, religious practices of all kinds have been regarded as superstitious by the Communist Party and the government in Vietnam. However, due to processes of globalization and the country’s integration into the global market economy, a growing number of people have been participating in spirit mediumship, soul calling, divination, and faith healing. While Vietnamese living abroad take part in these processes of religious revitalization, mainly by using and circulating modern media in public spaces such as the Lorelei Cliff on the Rhine River in Germany, in Hanoi, members of Vietnamese Pentecostal churches gather in underground congregations, restricted to the private sphere of house churches due to repression and persecution by local authorities. Several contributions to this volume show that the mutual constitution of trance mediums and new media today is rooted in and shaped by the ways in which technical media and trance mediums were mutually constituted in the past. As Erhard Schu¨ttpelz elucidates in this volume, around 1900, the transatlantic debate about the practices of mediums had been made possible because it served as a ‘‘boundary object’’ (Star and Griesemer 1989), or, to use another concept that we have been employing from the field of the social study of science, a ‘‘trading zone’’ for different claims and interests (Galison 1997). This trading zone extended over the Atlantic and included the colonial encounter with different belief systems, different forms of religious mediation, and different activities by mediums. In his illuminating analysis of a contest between French magicians and North African trance experts staged by the French colonial administration in the middle of the nineteenth century, Graham Jones recounts the competing claims to modernity, scientific knowledge, and ritual/magical efficacy that were brought to bear in and negotiated around magical fairs, world expositions, and cultural performances in Algeria and France (Graham Jones 2010). Not unlike the ‘‘heritage transmitters’’ of today, religious brotherhoods were eager to stage their ritual skills for Europeans at home and— during extended travels—in Europe. To be sure, the French colonial masters had an interest in demonstrating the superiority of French culture by denouncing the skills of the brotherhoods as trickery. The latter, however, used these events to enhance their local prestige and soon attracted a European audience on their own terms. Members of French esoteric movements—Mesmerists, Spiritists, and Occultists—‘‘hailed them as

Introduction

13

veritable scientific marvels and aggressively challenged allegations of trickery’’ (ibid, 68). The encounter between magical skills and ritual techniques took place in a trading zone that centered on the question of agency, as Schu¨ttpelz and Jones show in their analyses of the practices and claims of mediums in Europe and North Africa, respectively. All parties were able to ascribe agency according to their interests and cosmologies: illusionists to the subjective skills of the performer, who then ceases to be a medium, while magical agency ‘‘is transferred to the psyche of the one who suffers its effect,’’ as Rosalind Morris aptly remarks (Morris 2000, 234); Mesmerists, who attributed agency to cosmological forces, revealed through the instrumental, scientific ability of the medium to detect, prove, and lead these forces for treatment of patients; and Spiritists and Occultists, who credited the spirits of the dead or extra-European spirits with agency. Sometimes, it was the technical media themselves, for example, the camera, to which agency was attributed in attracting the spirits, whose presence then was imprinted on the photographs that resulted. Historically and still today, for the different actors and the wider public, the meanings attributed to the practices of mediums were negotiated in various spaces—scientific laboratories, churches, private homes and entertainment businesses—to advance specific agendas, but also to explore new opportunities and arenas for action. In his essay, Emilio Spadola, too, puts in historical perspective the emergence of trance as a ‘‘transnational category’’ (Kapchan 2007). He shows that underclass rituals have become a ‘‘sign of Morocco’s capacity for ‘modernity’ .’’ In tune with the Sharifian politics of the Moroccan king, those possessed by spirits were turned into possessors of culture as a market value, controlled and fostered by the ruling elite. In Morocco, the staging of spirit mediumship ensured a social order based on the hierarchical control of the ‘‘masses.’’ The proliferation of trance as a rite of reception across a mass-mediated social and political space, Spadola argues, has its roots in the new technological systems at the beginning of the twentieth century, such as railroads and telegraphy, and is closely tied to the techniques and processes that made the nation imaginable. The orgiastic, however, does not ‘‘return’’ on stage in Moroccan cultural politics as it does in other nation-states. As Ernest Gellner emphasized early on in his work, in the Islamic world, the figure of return is claimed by reform movements advocating a return to the original message of the Prophet, imagined as a ‘‘puritan, scripturalist, unitarian, mediation-free, sober Islam of the High Tradition’’ distinguished from the beliefs of the ‘‘untutored rural and

14

Heike Behrend and Martin Zillinger

urban masses’’ and transcending nationalism (Gellner 1997, 82). Whether claiming underclass trance practices as a cultural heritage and as upperclass entertainment, as analyzed by Spadola, successfully will uphold l’exception marocaine and whether it will suffice (along with political terror) to keep the political aspirations of the growing Islamic reform movement at bay remains to be seen. The ‘‘scandal of ecstasy’’ that used to be invoked by nationalist modernizers against the French protectorate (Spadola 2008) has become a political issue in recent years again precisely through the circulation of film clips on the World Wide Web, which exposed possession performances directed at the delimited public of the ritual to national and international audiences. If trance mediums ever were mere objects of an ethnographic gaze, today, they increasingly use technical media to become agents of their own representation, as Laurel Kendall shows in her essay. Korean shamans deploy all available media, and in particular the Internet, to reach out to potential clients. Paradoxically, she argues, their increasing visibility enables them to pursue their practices in a ‘‘discreet, highly controlled, and visually effective way,’’ appealing to and connecting with potential clients through new media, but actually performing out of sight of the general public. Drawing on a tradition of pictorial representations reaching back into the eighteenth century, shamans employ the shamanic robe—itself a mediatic device to transmit a deity—to make themselves legible as shamans in media representations. To be sure, self-declared cybershamans also present themselves in the emblematic costume in order to partake in a proliferating folklore business. But overall, these new, virtual spaces of mediumship transmit a new importance to the haptic experience of the garment and the overall sensory order of the ritual. In fact, the expanding public of Korean shamanism reemphasizes the ritual intimacy of actual performances of kut, which build a shaman’s reputation: the promise of a sensory ritual experience makes traditional shamanism modern. (Compare Sant Cassia 2000.)

Ritual Efficacies, Intensities, and New Magic in the Age of Technical Reproduction As the contributions to this volume attempt to show, technical media restructure agency in ritual settings and function as ‘‘technical objects . . . through which elements of the actors’ interests are reshaped and translated, while nonhuman competences are upgraded, shifted, folded, or

Introduction

15

merged’’ (Latour 1993, 22). By making media practices appear and disappear, the ritual experts and actors frame their actions in particular ways and account for ritual efficacy by stressing the ritual distribution, circulation, and delegation of agency between spirits and humans—that is, by emphasizing their work of ritual mediation. As Rosalind Morris has suggested, instead of proving the nonefficacy and impotence of magical techniques by converting bodily and ritual practices into representational knowledge and meaning, modern mass media brought about a reinvestment in the power of appearances and produced new forms of magic. Although in the context of technical mediation, spirit mediumship has been imagined as a sign of pastness and as a representation of tradition, modernity in fact also produced a new fusion of media and magic. Mass mediation seems not to have entailed a destruction of auras so much as it has incited a reformed sense of magic. Spirit mediums provide the exemplary instance of a technology of the uncanny, newly enhanced and indeed revivified by technology itself (Morris 2000, 195). Through their alliances with technical media such as photography and video, trance mediums have not only been ‘‘modernized,’’ but have also become the bearers of strange new powers. Through media chains and networks into which they have placed their own bodies, they have gained new efficacies, new capacities to diagnose, harm and kill, protect, and even cure at a distance. In Thailand, where there is a public sermon, individuals will often link themselves, via threads of cotton, to the monk who is delivering it, or, if that is not possible, to the amplifier through which his voice is being broadcast. Some people bind themselves in this manner to television sets on which services are being broadcast (Morris 2000, 133). Just as the number of mediatic robes worn by the Korean shaman adds to the ritual efficacy of the performance of kut, the number of technical mediators may add to the efficacy of ritual mediation work. In Morocco, Martin Zillinger encountered potent seers who used technical media in order to shape, increase, expand, and stabilize their magical activities through time and space, not unlike those Kendall encountered in Korea. Their mediation work aimed at enlisting spirits and other otherworldly beings, clients, experts, and observers to create a community of ritual cooperation, and increasingly, they did so in expanding transnational networks. Verbal techniques (song), material techniques (the use of incense), and ritual techniques (music, dance instruction) served to transpose an often disordered, painful encounter with transcendent forces into a ritual process. Whereas in many readings, technical media in the religious

16

Heike Behrend and Martin Zillinger

sphere are perceived as part of the transcendental, operating beyond mediation and promising an unmediated experience of another world or some kind of divine presence (see Meyer 2009), Zillinger argues that the ritual unfolds its efficacy precisely by emphasizing the mediation and the media employed: vestments, photos, and cell phones are held up to a VHS video camera and comment on the ritual work in the absence of a client, who may see and reexperience the ritual treatment in the future. Technical mediation, therefore, is constitutive of the ritual’s efficacy, and the fact that media ‘‘appear’’ is neither a result of their disturbing inappropriateness to the work of ritual mediation (as Meyer indicates, Meyer 2011, 32), nor does it interfere with what Ze´ de Abreu has aptly called the ritual’s ‘‘affective directness’’ (De Abreu 2009). And in western Uganda, to give another example of the manifold ways in which spiritual intensity and efficacy can be produced, Catholics developed a complex technology to concentrate and intensify the powers of the Holy Spirit. By ‘‘loading’’ objects, rosaries, crucifixes, and Bibles with the Holy Spirit and by combining these objects with songs and prayers, Catholics attempted to intensify the Holy Spirit’s power for exorcising satanic spirits and for healing (Behrend 2011, 115). The transmission of efficacious healing and protecting powers and the production of new fields of intensities occur via complex media chains and networks, not unlike the transmission of electric current. In fact, in Thailand, as well as in many parts of Africa, the medium of electricity provides images for the flow (and blockage) of spirituality and for various practices that attempt to concentrate and intensify spiritual power. Yet these media chains and newly created fields of intensities—including the human body—are seen as highly fragile, prone to ruptures and discontinuities that endangered the flow of the powers that they conduct. Media produce visualizations that are themselves mystery-mongering processes whose main source of mystery is their being taken for granted (see Taussig 1999, 190), and new video industries have exploited the visualizations of spirits and occult forces to provide the raw material for new magic and new secrets. Therefore it is hardly surprising to find trance mediums involved in film production, as Claudia Bo¨hme recounts from Tanzania. Employed as actors, waganga spirit mediums play the role of diviners who appropriate technical media on-screen and transform television into ‘‘African TV,’’ which allows their clients to telesee into their past and future lives. The videos dissolve not only the weak boundary between acting and possession as actors succumb to possession from time to time (see the Dreschke essay in this volume), but they also visualize the poiesis

17

Introduction

of the past into the present of film time. By inserting divinatory knowledge as a TV film into a video, they provide the technical medium of television with a new sense of magic while at the same time asserting that spirits and their mediums everywhere in the world have always practiced teleseeing and telehearing, long before TV had been invented. Once again, spirits and media thus enter into a circular relationship in which they provide each other with more reality and credibility. The arrival of the video medium in Tanzania created a new arena for the representation and negotiation of spirit mediumship in the public sphere, providing another valid example for the renewal of medium practices in the course of their archaization as ‘‘traditional.’’ In her essay, Bo¨hme explores how technical media are put on display in the video productions and visualize ‘‘techniques of make believe’’ that travel from the film set to the sites where waganga practice their craft. There, the ritual experts are expected to deploy media in ways similar to those seen in the videos, and they need to authenticate the efficacy of their practices against the background of the media techniques they are represented as employing on-screen. While this process is seen critically by most of Bo¨hme’s waganga interlocutors, reality shows on television help some of them gaining enormous popularity. In her contribution, Dorothea Schulz draws our attention to the fact that most technical media rely not on one exclusive mode (such as the visual), but on several, intertwining modes of perception for the transmission of the powers invoked. She explores in detail how followers of a charismatic preacher in Mali sit upright facing a tape recorder in order to perceive the transformative power that emanates from the preacher’s voice. For the acolytes, maintaining a ‘‘bodily openness’’ also includes the tactile experience of divinely ‘‘charged’’ prayer shawls, which previously had been exposed to the preacher’s presence and are passed around, and visual engagement with the portrait of the religious leader. Visual, aural, and tactile sensations combine to intensify the experience of divine transmittance.

Contesting Media Although new media frequently have been adopted in religious settings, insecurities about the legitimacy of new religious conventions are on the rise and become part of the trading zone of ‘‘ever-changing, tensionridden . . . controversies over how to render God’s presence immanent,’’

18

Heike Behrend and Martin Zillinger

as Schulz puts it in this volume. This volume seeks to explore not only the making, circulation, and consumption of mediumship and technical media, but also the other side of their mutual constitution—the refusal and obliteration of such a relationship, an essential aspect of a medium’s history that should not be neglected. It consequently deals with various social spaces in which the presence and operation of media are contested in different and creative ways, thereby transcending the simple divide between appropriation and refusal. While the adaption and creative use of visual media technologies by local actors in the context of the processes of globalization have been extensively explored, we focus also on the opposite processes of disentanglement, refusal, and withdrawal from global media and the creation of new opacities and secrecies. These processes have largely been ignored by scholars. We consequently attempt to complement existing theories of mediation by dealing also with the discontinuous and disruptive role of media technologies in processes of localization and globalization. In fact, the questions arising from a negative relation to visual media open the way of what cannot be narrated within the now familiar rhetoric of the hegemony of photographic vision (Morris 2009,14). As Behrend and Morris argue in their respective contributions, an interpretative framing of the encounter of trance mediums and new technical media in terms of an encounter with ‘‘tradition and modernity’’ or in terms of a cultural ‘‘inside and outside’’ may reinscribe the ancient binary of ‘‘the West versus the rest’’ and falls short of explaining the various processes and debates that shape the mutual imbrication of mediumship and new media. In her contribution, Behrend stresses that the relation of photography and spirit mediumship has always been characterized by ambiguity. Though largely forgotten because of the ubiquity of photography today, its introduction caused panics and disturbances in many parts of the world. But while specific instances can be documented in which photography is shunned as part of a general resistance to a surrounding world and its media, which are experienced as threatening and violent (see Spyer 2009), the working of photography seems to constitute peculiar ‘‘discursive elaboration[s] of a technological relationship to difference’’ (Morris 2009, 9) that distinguishes it from other modes of mediation. These modes of difference, both emanating from and addressing the camera, shape the relationship of spirit mediumship and photography in rather paradoxical ways. It should be noted, first, that spirit mediumship and photography share

19

Introduction

structural similarities: They produce an interface between different temporalities by presencing, in the image and during the ritual, somebody of the past or of another world. Both thus create a certain uncanniness by bringing into the present something that belongs to the past, disturbing simultaneity through the interaction of two different temporalities. Both bridge the spheres of life and death, and both spirit mediums and the person photographed experience some sort of radical dispossession and radical self-estrangement by becoming an Other. Although in Europe, Japan, and the United States, spirits and photography formed a hybrid alliance that produced a new photographic genre— spirit photography—(see the contribution of Schu¨ttpelz to this volume), in Africa, this genre has not evolved, at least not until now. Instead, as Behrend shows in her contribution, in many parts of Africa, spirit mediums have shunned the presence of the camera. In fact, video has appeared to be more suitable to mediate spiritual power expressed in an excess of movement, unlike the fixation, serialization, and reduction to a visual trace in a ‘‘still’’ photograph. Consequently, videomakers in Africa have embraced the technical medium of video to represent spirits in motion, unfolding their transformational powers. As Behrend concludes, because video is a medium more adequate to the representation of what spirit mediums actually do, and because part of what they do is understood as bringing what was stilled in death back to life, video offers the possibility of intermediating the problematic temporalities of photography and embracing the reasons for its rejection within this new way of technologizing spirit possession. The discourses emanating from and addressing the use of certain media and the spaces of refusal that are generated in various places thus have to be read as part of an open-ended history of trance mediums and technical media. The impossibility of photography to mediate the ritual work of spirit mediums is being translated into a possibility in new settings, wrenching performances from context and creating new feedback mechanisms between practitioners, their acolytes and skeptics, and their ever-changing media and mediation work in the trading zone of ritual mediation.

Technical Mediation, Power, and Political Becoming Mediumship has often been treated as a mechanism for giving subaltern figures the voice that they do not otherwise possess and hence the opportunity to enter into the public sphere, albeit on a temporary basis (Boddy

20

Heike Behrend and Martin Zillinger

1989; Comaroff 1985; see also the critical position of Morris in this volume). It has been suggested that the promise of more or less direct access to the divine has the potential to disturb and transform established structures of dominance by spiritual subversion. And indeed, for example, in the history of Christianity, the Holy Spirit was characterized as an unruly, innovative, and sometimes even revolutionary element in various movements that, however, became routinized and domesticated by the established churches, but never completely so, as the recent upsurge of Pentecostal charismatic churches shows. The techniques of religious mediation and the mechanical apparatuses in which religious practices and modes of experience solidify may become a ‘‘key political vector,’’ as Christopher Pinney points out in his essay on Chamar low-caste shamans [ghorlas] in central India. In recent years, his interlocutors, villagers of the lower occupational caste known as Chamars, have adopted an agenda of political becoming in the Indian public sphere, an agenda that is advanced via the visual register of mass-produced paper images of goddesses and, lately, via the filmic documentation of possession performances. Solidified presences in the form of paper chromolithographs, films, and the fluid, undecided, ever-changing manifestation of shamans in different states of trance relate in a network of distributed agency to formulate the political claims of low-caste people. Different modes of authority claim different forms of access to the spiritual or divine and align themselves with different media. Thus, for the devotees of divine personas, chromolithography continues to be more adequate to impress quasi-divine power in the intimate and tactile space between them and the surface of the image than does the ‘‘underachieved . . . indexicality’’ of the photograph. With the circulation of these mass-produced images, the spaces of divine manifestation multiply in a ‘‘mass ‘corpothetics’ ’’ and enhance the status of the ‘‘untouchable’’ Dalit communities as loci for Hindu practices. The capacity of the visual to solidify presence allows claims to authority on the part of low-caste practitioners that in their linguistic form, of high-caste Brahmans would not be inclined to credit. The Chamar shamans find their own bookish culture within their own bodies, as Pinney recounts, in which the superabundance of the divine is indexed through performance and affect. Shamans create a space in which chromolithographs of goddesses interact with the performative images of embodied deities that by far exceed the chromolithographs. In claiming the ineluctable presence of a body before the camera, the camera thus is mobilized as agent in the contest about low-caste and high-caste authority.

21

Introduction

In her contribution to this volume, Lydia Guzy likewise scrutinizes how Dalit trance mediumship is translated to new fields of action in Western Orissa. In its migration to an urban culture as folklore, ganda baja village music has become increasingly enmeshed in competing political claims and commercial interests. ‘‘Traditional’’ spiritual patronage by local notables is translated into regional identity politics by the ruling classes, while secondgeneration and third-generation rural migrants to the city reinvent the village sound for urban and international audiences. At the same time, ganda baja musicians in the villages reclaim their intellectual property rights and denounce the entertainment character of the city bands usurping the lucrative performances at marriage ceremonies. By stressing the ritual efficacy of their music, the villagers try to turn their marginal position into social empowerment. As Guzy is able to show, the transformation of ganda baja music into folklore and a marker of regional identity by city dwellers goes hand in hand with the reclaiming of ritual expertise by members of the ‘‘marginalized, ‘untouchable’ Ganda community’’ in the villages and cities alike. Stressing the feedback loops between musical techniques and religious worship, a marginalized people invoke the possibility of ritual becoming as part of a political awakening of Dalit consciousness situated in the ongoing struggle for regional, political recognition in Western Orissa. New technical media play a role in reshaping the scope of the performances and establish the soundscape of trance mediumship as a marker of regional identity. The crucial change, however, pertains to the drum in which ‘‘the goddess resides,’’ as an informant of Guzy puts it, by which the musician controls the possession trance of the priest. This power formerly could not be separated from the socially marginalized position of someone who touches the impure cow skin of the drum. In the culture of the city, however, industrially produced plastic drumheads have increasingly replaced cow skin and have thus weakened the link between impurity and ritual efficacy that has characterized the craft of these musicians. Such changes in ritual mediators in the urban setting have been used by Dalit activists to overcome the social stigmatization and devaluation of the communities to which the music originally belonged. By stressing their musical expertise for a wider public, but reclaiming the religious significance of their music, they, like the Chamars that Pinney describes, attempt to transform their former stigma into social power.

Anthropologists, Spirit Mediums, and Media In traversing the topics and issues that we have discussed here, anthropologists speak in a variety of ways to issues concerning the nature of media

22

Heike Behrend and Martin Zillinger

and mediation in general. Ethnography is currently conducted in a globalized world that is increasingly mediated by technical media. The ubiquity and globalization of technical media and media practices have radically changed the relationship between the ethnographer and his or her subjects of ethnography. While in the old days, Malinowski among the Trobiand Islanders or Evans-Pritchard among the Azande were the only ones who owned a camera and took pictures, today, most subjects of ethnography also have access to modern media and make use of camera phones, radio, television, video, and the Internet. Ethnographers and the subjects of their research share the same media and participate in a reality that is created by them. Both are confronted with situations, sites, and social relations that are technically mediated. Spatial and social distance or closeness, presence, absence, and immediacy often are organized by technical media, and anthropologists have to reflect on these mediations and how they influence and transform ethnographic knowledge (Behrend 2013; Bender and Zillinger 2014). Besides exploring the interactions of trance mediums and new technical media, their circulation in local as well as in transnational religious fields, and their role in creating new publics and new forms of mediation as well as new boundaries and exclusions, we think it necessary to also reflect on the epistemological issues raised by the use of new media. In the case of the ethnographer, this involves his or her media use in the course of generating ethnographic knowledge. It was anthropologists and filmmakers such as Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, Maya Deren, and Jean Rouch who experimented with mediumship and technical media. They all became ‘‘possessed by possession’’ and experimented and worked with trance techniques by filming se´ances in Bali, West Africa, and Haiti, as Ute Holl has so brilliantly shown (2002 and the essay in this volume). Jean Rouch, for example, when filming Holey spirit mediums in Niger, experienced what he called ‘‘cine´-trance,’’ a state of possession (by the spirit of the camera) that allowed him to share in the trance and to participate in the ritual of spirit possession and thereby to dissolve the boundary between him as film maker/ethnographer and the spirit mediums he filmed. However, by declaring ‘‘cine´-trance’’ to be his methodological principle of ethnographic film making, he confined his devotion to alterity to a more controlled rapture that still left a space for critical reflection. In addition, he practiced some sort of transcultural feedback by bringing back to Niger the films he had taken there and by showing them to the people he had filmed. Some Holey spirit mediums when viewing themselves on the film screen immediately fell into a trance and

Introduction

23

became possessed by the film images. Film images and camera acted as the new ‘‘spirits of technology’’ who took possession of the filmmaker and the mediums alike. Camera, film images, spirits, spirit mediums, and the ethnographer became connected in complicated networks in which they gained or lost various degrees of agency (or patienthood) and power. As Holl (2002) has shown in detail, cinema thus is a Western trance technique. Cinema belongs to the techniques of trance, because it induces a process of transformation in the spectator that can be described as a circulation between depersonalization and identification. Cinema intensely reworks and shifts the normative and imaginary spaces and times of everyday life and produces a state of dispersion (Zerstreuung) that can be translated as ‘‘trance.’’ The extraordinary power of cinema is also exemplified by the contribution of Anja Dreschke in this volume about the new practices of mediumship explored by members of Cologne Carnival societies. After having seen Jack Palance as Attila, the king of the Huns, in a film by Douglas Sirk, members of the Carnival clubs felt a strange compulsion to imitate Attila and embody him during Carnival processions. They became possessed in a cine´-trance. Dreschke approaches the mutual constitution of media and trance in a twofold way. Drawing on Holl’s (2002) influential interpretation of cinema as a trance-inducing machine, she takes the local enthusiasm for Hollywood historical dramas as a starting point for investigating forms of the performative appropriation of media, exploring the entanglement and interactions of fascination with films and mimetic practices of alterity that she observed among the Cologne Tribes. Embodiment for them becomes a means to experience otherness, which is described by the locals of Cologne in terms of possession. Dreschke also examines how ecstatic practices associated with the cultures emulated by the Cologne Tribes are appropriated and transformed in reenactments. Through training in these practices, club members learn how to relate to things in a new way and gradually change their perception of the world until they finally undergo an ‘‘interpretive drift’’ (Luhrman 1989). However, the sensual experience of estrangement and trance in film perception seems to interact with altered states of (un)consciousness familiar to the members of the Cologne Tribes from the local Carnival traditions. The power of cinema as a trance machine was not experienced only by the Holey spirit mediums falling in trance when viewing themselves in the ethnographic films made by Jean Rouch or by members of the Cologne Tribes after having seen Hollywood movies. The filmmaker Maya Deren

24

Heike Behrend and Martin Zillinger

experienced some sort of ecstasy when viewing the recording of Balinese dances and trances by Gregory Bateson. In her contribution here, Ute Holl examines the example of Bateson and Margaret Mead, who as anthropologists made use of photography and film to record Balinese characters and culture. They took pictures and shot films of dances and trances and, as Holl suggests, became exposed to a magic that was the consequence not so much of Balinese trance techniques as of cinematographic technologies that they themselves had brought to Bali. In fact, they ignored not only the cinematographic time structure that creates an imaginary effect through the conversion of discrete pictures into movement perception, but also the illusionary and trance-producing aspects of film. They experienced the difficulties (perhaps the impossibility) of achieving a balance between scientific self-mastery and abandoning selfcontrol. Here again, the volume thus raises larger questions concerning the epistemological effects of media and the forms of subjectivities that are created by the manifold interactions with new technical media. Where are we to locate agency in the interface between humans, spirits, and media? Should we consider subjectivity a given, or a variable that emerges from cultural technologies and practices?

On the Subject of Spirit Mediumship in the Age of New Media Rosalind C. Morris

Across the world, traversing myriad social and historical traditions, in nationally recognized or socially marginalized cults, from the mountains of Venezuela to the backstreets of Bangkok, from Central Africa to New Orleans, spirit mediumship offers a potent dramaturgy of representation—at once enigmatic and carnal. Emerging from the shadow and sound of ethnography’s archives, it appears to us as a theater of nearly primordial dimensions, yet one relentlessly transformed by the material and symbolic technologies of contemporaneity. The ambivalence of the practice is perhaps best attested by the fact that anthropologists have been as likely to find in it allegories of conformity as of resistance to power, whether these be of patriarchy in acephalous societies or rank and class in state-based regimes. Thus, we have mediums interpreted both as state fetishists (Taussig 1997) and as unconsciously insurgent laborers seeking the subjectivity that capital reserves for itself (Ong 1987). In the tremulous bodies of its disparate vehicles, spirit mediumship—or, to use the idiom of the volume editors, trance possession—seems to stage for its audiences the simultaneous, but also conflicted aspiration to ‘‘return,’’ to presence, and, at the same time, an endless play with and exposure to radical alterity, to the Other. By virtue of this double structure, mediumship shares something

25

26

Rosalind C. Morris

with other phenomena that have been remarked in recent decades, phenomena that are often construed as religious revivalism. Indeed, this double structure has been described by Gianni Vattimo as the definitive characteristic of all religio-philosophical reflection today, in the era that may be most accurately described as the era of a post-Enlightenment skepticism of skepticism. Yet according to Vattimo, the modernity of this revivalism may also be the mere form of appearance of something more perduring. In an essay on the return of the religious in the modern world, he poses the exceptionally insightful question of whether ‘‘return may be an (or the) essential aspect of religious experience itself,’’ albeit one that is constantly displaced in gestures of empiricization and in messianic or suicidal fantasies of escape from historicity (Vattimo 1998, 80). If I understand him correctly, Vattimo is insisting that the modernity of revivalism lies not in the return of religion, but in the construal of return as itself modern. The student of spirit mediumship is struck by the apparent fecundity of this observation for an understanding of that other technology of represencing, mediumship. For is not every occurrence of spirit possession a literalization of this return, perhaps even a hypostatization of return? And is it not, at the same time, a display of the constant eruption of the foreign, the strange, the ineluctable—despite every gesture of attempted containment in naming, figuration, and stylistic codification? The archive of mediumship, as we will discuss, provides ample evidence of both dimensions, and more often than not, they occur within the same tradition and in the same historical moment, indeed, in the same performance. So, too, are these traditions renewed in the moment that they become archaized under the pressure of commodity economies for which authenticity has become the general value form of culture as economy. It is nonetheless not at all clear that spirit mediumship should be understood as religion, at least not if we accept Jacques Derrida’s admonition— also articulated by Talal Asad (and many of his students)—that the term ‘‘religion’’ is already a Latinization, even a ‘‘globalatinization,’’ and hence inseparable from a Christian form of universalism (Derrida 1998, 29–30; Asad 1993). We can hold this question open without fully agreeing with the claims on which basis Derrida and Asad, in their distinct ways, posit the special solidarity between Christianity and media technology and the inherent Christian bias in all discourse on religion. For among other definitive factors more familiar to Durkheimian scholars of religion, mediumship is rarely associated with doctrine—what he termed a ‘‘unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things’’ (Durkheim

Spirit Mediumship in the Age of New Media

27

[1915]1965, 62). Yet the very qualities that Derrida draws out (in a conversation with Asad) as the marks of ‘‘religion’s’’ Christianity are also evident in mediumship, namely, a radical privileging of the image and iconicity (Derrida 2001, 84). It is for this reason that a reconsideration of mediumship may also illuminate the debate on religion and media that has, thus far, generally been confined to a duel within the so-called Abrahamic traditions. The privileging of iconicity is allied for Derrida to what we might term a politics of visual recognition and hence to the desire for an escape from commentary and indecipherability in general. He counterposes Christianity to both Judaism and Islam on these grounds (ignoring, we might add, the other—non-Abrahamic—traditions that also go under the name of religion). It is also on these grounds that he posits a structural affinity between Christianity and televisual media, one that renders the proliferation of teletechnologically mediated ‘‘religions’’ around the world a matter of Christianity’s globalization and infiltration of all other theologies and systems of ritual and belief. (And this applies to everything from the videographically inscribed and Internet-distributed sermons of Muslim clerics to the televangelism of Christian megachurches and Buddhist megawats or Hindu megatemples, as well to as the televised healing practices of New Age shamans.) The affinity lies in the shared valorization of presence, which in Christianity takes the form of messianism realized in the incarnation of Christ and which in television takes the form of the illusion of presence. This illusion, asserts Derrida, in what seems to me an unassailable argument, cannot be eliminated by critique. In watching television, we feel, even when we know otherwise, the effect of the thing itself; indeed, we feel that we are in its presence (Derrida 2001, 85). This is to believe without believing, he says, and as he does so, we realize that we are in the domain of faith as understood in a largely Kierkegaardian manner. But there is another element to this iconology for Derrida, namely, a tendency to internalize, spiritualize, and virtualize what has otherwise been made literal. His example is the Eucharist. And he poses as its opposite the Abrahamic moment in which the communication between Abraham and his God remains utterly unknown, as secret as that same God’s appearance, which Moses himself glimpsed only after God had passed by, and thus from behind. This linkage between spiritualization and virtualization should alert us to the fact that Derrida’s argument conceives of the new media primarily as extensions of the televisual, though the illusion of presence is also integral to the photographic in general. Belying his refusal to historicize media

28

Rosalind C. Morris

technology, except in the most general terms, he mobilizes the literal signification of the word, tele-visual and asserts that ‘‘digital culture, jet and TV’’ are the powers ‘‘without which there can be no religious manifestation today’’ (Derrida 1998, 24, original italics). Not surprisingly, then, the force of that illusion or presence guarantees nothing at the level of practice. The having been there of the real, which Roland Barthes (1981) inscribed at the core of photography, is perhaps nowhere more clearly demonstrated than in the account of Kenyan antisorcery provided by Heike Behrend. In the 1940s, among some Balokole (whom Behrend describes as Christian fundamentalists), a photograph of a Bible (and not only a Bible) could be used to ward off sorcery: ‘‘The medium in the medium, the book in the photograph, prevented photo-sorcery’’ (Behrend 2003a, 135). But it also ensured the reestablishment of a hierarchy in which the book, among the most ancient of the mass media, came to be privileged over the photograph—through its very insertion into photography (ibid.). In this case, the reality effect did not redound to the new medium, despite being enabled by it. However, the presence supposedly incarnated in the book was achieved less because of the ontological properties of photography per se than by its particular conceptualization. Through remediation, that is, by virtue of its conceptual appropriation and, indeed, by the metaphorization with which it was taken up, an older medium was enabled to absorb attributes that are often ascribed to a newer medium’s technological being. We will return below to the question of the ontological versus the merely functional concept of new media posed for us by Behrend’s example. Before proceeding, however, let me linger a bit on the question of presence and the iconology with which Derrida associates Christianity and thus religion. Though it is undoubtedly true that the illusion of presence will not be dissipated by critique and that the affinity, if not analogy, between the logic of incarnation monopolized by Christianity and televisual presencing is a powerful one, there is something in Derrida’s argument, and in the Asadian versions thereof, that poses a further question. I will begin by observing that this rendition of religious iconicity as inimical to the traditions of commentary is premised on a double elision. It must first assume that all iconologies seek a reduction in the instability of the signifier—a tendency that may be present in the early life of new media and perhaps especially analogue media, but that is invariably dissipated over time and that is, moreover, radically destabilized by digitization. It must also preclude from the traditions of true commentary the forms of ritualized representational practice that we term ‘‘spirit mediumship.’’ Islam (for

Spirit Mediumship in the Age of New Media

29

example) can be construed as aniconic, if not iconoclastic, only by excluding the well-documented, vibrant, and ongoing traditions of possession that are to be found throughout Muslim Africa, Southeast Asia, and, perhaps to a lesser extent, the Middle East. (See, for example, the contributions of Zillinger and Spadola in this volume.) To be sure, there are efforts internal to Islam that would perform such an excision, such a purification. But I am interested here in what exists and persists and in the questions that this persisting existence demand and make us capable of asking. These questions were implicitly imposed in the juxtaposition of the terms ‘‘trance mediums’’ and ‘‘new media’’ in the title of the conference from which this volume emerged. They concern not only the split and doubled relation between the aspiration to return and the exposure to radical alterity, what we might call, following Rafael Sanchez’s (2001) brilliant reading of the Maria´ Lionza cult in Venezuela, the vacillation between identity and dispersion. They also relate to the possibility that changes in local possession practices may be associated with specific, but not properly ‘‘local’’ media technologies as these are taken up, hierarchized, and, often enough, subject to remediation. How, then, are we to understand the relationship between mediums and media, between mediums and ‘‘new media’’? Was the manner in which mediums, at least during the twentieth century, everywhere incorporated signs of modernity and figures of the foreign into their symbolic repertoires altered by mass media, by broadcast media, by televisuality, and again by digital media? Do the histories of the arrival of new media, such as we may reconstruct them, make themselves felt in new epistemologies, new relations to signification? And do they do so by virtue of the materialities of technology, or by virtue of the transformations they enable in the metaphorization of psychic processes, of the relation between psychic and social life? How durable are these? What are the conditions of their displacement? Is the history of mediumship—its recurrent efflorescence around the world—to be written into the history that has otherwise been grasped in terms of the ‘‘return of religion,’’ or does it call that history into question? By way of anticipating the fuller exposition of this essay, I want to argue that the oppositional structure on which is grounded much of the debate about (the return of ) religion today is itself an artifact of the ideologically invested conflict between one or another iconology and one or another iconoclasm and that the textuality of the image—its signifying excess, its escape from narrative closure—rises or recedes from the analytic horizon (whether scholarly or informal) in relation to transformations in media

30

Rosalind C. Morris

technology. I want to argue further that this fact, namely, the recognition or effacement of that textuality, is linked to the political sphere and has concrete, if not always direct political effects. This linkage and these effects are shaped partly by the materialities of the media, but they are equally profoundly conditioned by the ways in which media technology is grasped and more specifically by the ways in which media technology enters into the (historically specific) metaphorization of the relationship between subjectivity and sociality, between the psyche and language. As will be seen, this depends on how the psyche is itself conceived as much as on how media are understood. In what follows, I will suggest that the temporalities of mediatic innovation are such that new media tend to be received, initially, as instruments of relative fixity, of relative immediacy, and hence as vehicles of relative connectivity. The more closely that any medium can appear (in a given moment) to realize the asymptotically receding ideal of pure transparency, the more resistant it is to the operations of reading and the more amenable it is to narratives of unity and thus, perhaps, to authoritarian coalescence. The singular claim of a qualitative rupture effected by digitization lies in the recognition, internal to its own discourse, that it is permanently and essentially subject to manipulation. In other words, it demands to be read, rather than recognized (Rodowick 2001). The temptation to ontologize this discourse, however, must be tempered by an acknowledgment that for most people, and probably for most mediums, at least today, the digital is apprehended in terms of the analogue. Perhaps, in the end, we will learn to transfer the sagacity of this ‘‘misreading’’ to our own domain. For even though the reading of the digital in terms of the analogue can permit or reaffirm (without guaranteeing) the recognition that even photography entails processes of signification and not merely of transcription, the technological determinists nevertheless frequently reduce the question of reading in the digital domain to structures of information. All too often, the instability of the image—its radical manipulability and autonomy visa`-vis any referent—and the excess that stems from that instability are frequently reduced to a question of code: to the informational structure that generates the image, rather than the concept metaphors that enable the very appearance of the image itself. Of course, we can speak only of tendencies, and even within a single, provisionally circumscribed field—such as mediumship in Northern Thailand—there are many differing assessments of, levels of comfort with, and uses of every media technology. Dominant discourses invariably have their insurgencies. And like all rituals, the rituals of mediumship are permanently amenable to events. Having

Spirit Mediumship in the Age of New Media

31

said as much, I want now try to respond to these general questions in the particular by returning to my own earlier writing and thinking about spirit mediumship in Northern Thailand before considering anew, and in a more comparative vein, the question of technology and mediumship in the age of new media.

First Return: Reflections on Fieldwork in Northern Thailand My first turn, and indeed, return, is to the arguments made, more than a decade ago, in In the Place of Origins: Modernity and Its Mediums in Northern Thailand (2000). There, I remarked that in Northern Thailand, spirit mediumship commences, as it does in so many places in the world, as unregulated possession, and if it is not to remain a condition of mere madness, it must ultimately be socialized such that the medium is entered into a lineage of mediums and becomes a vehicle for identifiable, named spirits—of ancient princes, Buddhist heroes, heroes of local legend, and figures both military and mercantile from foreign lands. Each spirit manifests itself through the assumption of specific attire, a particular quality of voice, and sensuous tendencies expressed in the consumption of one or another brand of alcohol and cigarettes, a fondness for certain colors, and a sexual predilection for men or women of one or another type. In In the Place of Origins, I claimed that the transformation of practices and institutions associated with the tradition of spirit mediumship in and around Chiang Mai could be best understood as the function of a complex dialectic. Until the 1970s, the heterodox practices of spirit mediums had come to assume a stigmatized place within the space of modernist, nationally oriented Buddhism. By the 1990s, however, mediumship had been revalorized as a sign of tradition in a historical discourse that effectively worked to preserve tradition by reifying it—cutting it off from a future as the means by which its persistence in an eternal present would be effected. In this newly valorized form, as a sign of tradition, rather than as a medium of historicity, mediumship reentered the public sphere in the mode of spectacle, attracting less marginal practitioners and offering itself as one of several instances of traditional theater in a commodified Lanna (Northern Thai) revival movement. This new structural predicament did not entirely determine the ambitions and practices of individual mediums, who continued to offer therapeutic and advisory services to clients—albeit in a wider and more lucrative market. Within this overall history, a few developments struck

32

Rosalind C. Morris

me as especially remarkable. The first concerned the changing status of mediatic technology within the performance repertoires of mediums. Thus, what had been, in the 1970s, a virtual ban on photographs of possessed mediums had, by the late 1980s, been displaced by a desire for and willingness to be photographed, such that images of possessed mediums had become as ubiquitous as those of deceased ancestors and Thai monarchs in the homes and businesses of mediums, their acolytes, clients, and audience members. Moreover, some mediums had commenced to document and archive their own performances using new digital technology, even going so far as to have the tapes of their trance sessions professionally edited, dubbed, and accompanied by music in the tradition of Bollywood cinema. Ten years ago, I believed that this new will to self-archival practice could be understood as the result of a convergence between old and new media and of the fact that the newest media of the moment (which included both analogue and digital technologies) redoubled and thematized the practice of mediumship itself. Rather than conceiving of this relationship (between an ancient form of mediation and a newly technologized one) as one of necessary displacement, the mediums with whom I spoke saw in the fact of reduplication a new opportunity for augmentation. Their appropriation of these technologies represented a transformation in their conceptions of power, as well—with renown, or recognition, partially displacing effectivity as the central mark of potency. What were the newest media at the time, namely, small cameras and especially lightweight digital video cameras, offered a powerful new metaphor (transparent transmission or broadcast) for what had previously been construed in the very different idiom of writing, which had been narrowly understood as the graphic exteriorization of force. In order for this to happen, I believed, writing itself had to be reconceived as a representational practice, a technology for reproducing the world, rather than one of symbolic effectiveness, which is to say, magic. So while some mediums continued to write indecipherable, but magically potent letters and glyphs and to offer them to clients in apotropaic amulets, the more celebrated mediums of Chiang Mai were beginning to abandon the theater of writing for a spectacle of improbable and superhuman gesture—importing fire walking, piercing, and the like from other traditions of ecstatic possession (particularly in southern parts of Thailand) and competing with each other for recognition not merely by other mediums (measured through attendance at calendrical rituals hosted by one or another ‘‘spirit’’), but by public audiences at home and abroad, especially in Japan. Thus, while in many Southeast Asian traditions, the traveler

Spirit Mediumship in the Age of New Media

33

acquires power through claims to worldliness acquired in sojourns elsewhere, the spirit mediums of Chiang Mai were beginning, by the early 1990s, to assess their own power by its capacity to be perceived from afar. There is an extent to which Northern Thai mediums appear to have been enacting a transition predicted for us by Marshall McLuhan. In The Gutenberg Galaxy and then again in Understanding Media, McLuhan argued that electronic media would displace the visual hegemony associated with the culture of the book and restore us to a reintegrated sensorium like what preceded the rise of widespread textual literacy, but newly augmented in scope and range by virtue of being integrated into a globalized circuitry. Among the marks of this renewed sensorium, he claimed, would be the apparent rise of the ‘‘voice’’ and of ‘‘audition,’’ which, having receded in the era of vision’s hegemony, would return with a vengeance as important loci of experience and perceptual knowledge. The rumor that circulated in Chiang Mai in the early 1990s of a spirit so powerful that its voice could become manifest without having to make use of a human medium’s body seemed to incarnate this principle in a delirious fantasy of communication without mediation, what we will come to think of as presence without transcription. This imageless image suggests, indeed, an abandonment of the iconological tendency that seems otherwise so central to spirit mediumship, especially in an age when renown and recognizability are paramount values. Permanently escaping the containment of any corporeal instantiation, only partially localized by the architecture of a room in which it could be heard, this bodiless phantasm suggests an exteriority more profound than anything that might otherwise go by the name of ‘‘spirit’’ and by the idea of spirit as what can be named. But does it testify to the teleology of technomediatic transformation? For the most part, digital media were used by mediums and their acolytes as analogies of analog media. Digital photography and video, even when edited using the principles of off-line editing and digital rendering, were not fundamentally different from what might have been accomplished, in an earlier moment, by nondigital photography and eightmillimeter and super 8 home movies, except at the level of ease and extent of reproducibility, which were not only sutured to the value of renown, but facilitated its achievement. This latter dimension is, of course, not incidental; it lies at the heart of the new cults, at least in Northern Thailand, and especially in the changing dialectic between the power that comes from afar and the power of being seen from afar. Moreover, it is this changing relation between distance and proximity, what Roland Barthes (1981) called the great ‘‘disturbance’’ of photography, that lies at

34

Rosalind C. Morris

the heart of photography and the other media of mass reproducibility. I will thus defer for a moment the question of what constitutes new media, what I referred to above as the ontological versus the functional definition of new media, to pursue a more comparative and historical understanding of mediumship’s relationship to this problematic of distance and proximity and the related questions of presence and alterity with which I commenced this mediation. I do so in order to demonstrate the recurrent, but historically idiomatic function of technological media—old and new—in metaphorizing the relationship between subjectivization and socialization under various political circumstances. For it is in this latter relation that mediumship—and not just religion, as Vattimo would have it—thematizes the idea of return.

The Old New Media: Spirits of the Times The story of the new is an old one—in many ways. The literature on spirit mediumship, trance possession, and curing rites has been central to anthropology for nearly a century, but it began to proliferate anew in the 1980s in the moment at which various new technologies of electronic communication were beginning to enable the realization of an ancient dream of proximity without delay. ‘‘Postmodernism,’’ ‘‘globalization,’’ ‘‘the information explosion’’—these are the terms for which the era marks a beginning. Much of the reportage on spirit possession during this time sought to identify in it forms of resistance to the globalizing economic order, whether by noting the modern industrial contexts in which it was occurring (as in Aiwa Ong’s 1987 account of Malay possession among factory works), the anticolonial movements into which it fed (recounted by Lan 1985 and Morsy 1991 among others), or the appropriation of and resistance to commodity forms that it incorporated into performance repertoires (as Luig 1999; Krings 1999; Masquelier 1999; and Werbner 1989 describe). It was in this context that Jean Comaroff posited a global subculture, ‘‘lying in the shadow of the first’’ (Comaroff 1985, 254). The newness to which Comaroff was alluding, which encompassed spirit possession, Pentecostalism, and Zionism (among other movements), was for her a function of the globality of the cultures, both dominant and subordinate, under discussion. The amenability of trance possession to technological change was not new in itself. Indeed, as early as 1969, John Beattie and John Middleton had described the ‘‘role of mediumship in situations of rapid social change [as] two-fold. First, it provides a means by which the

Spirit Mediumship in the Age of New Media

35

people concerned can comprehend the agents of change, and can incorporate these and their consequences into their system of mythological beliefs. Secondly, it can provide a basis for the legitimization of new patterns of power and authority where they have come into being’’ (Beattie and Middleton 1969, xxviii–xxix; see also Firth, 1969). We should not imagine these processes of incorporation as ones of uniform or easy domestication—they often entailed enormous violence, as Behrend (1999a and 1999b), describing the role of spirit possession in wartime Uganda, makes poignantly clear—but if there is a recurrent theme in the accounts of spirit mediumship and trance possession over the past century and a half, it is one of relentless transformation in the form and idiomaticity of practice and in the relationships to other religious, political, and therapeutic discourses. In the Euro-American world, demonic possession gave way to Mesmerism and Spiritualism, the latter embracing telegraphy, telephony, photography, cinema, and typographic technology as both instruments and metaphors for its own practice. (See, for example, Aber [1906] 1990 and Lockwood [1895] 1990.) In the nomenclature of status and rank by which possessing spirits around the world have been represented, we have ample evidence that the colonial bureaucracy and policing structures associated with new state formations were incorporated both as structuring principles in the societies of spirits and as objects of violent burlesques. One has only to think here of Jean Rouch’s masterpiece, Les maitres fous, to have an image of the ecstasy and agony of colonial power when expressed as possession. (See also Krings 1999 and Masquelier 1999.) Here, I want to remark two specific instances by way of demonstrating that the history of trance possession is one of simultaneously promiscuous and critical relation to the technologies of modernity, social and material. The ‘‘heirs,’’ so to speak, of the spirits who animated the Hauka cults made cinematically famous by Rouch’s work have been traced into contemporaneity by Matthias Krings, who describes a group of European spirits called Turawa as originating with the Hauka movement when it arose in 1925. These spirits, which appear in northern Nigeria, formerly a British colony, speak a creole composed of both English and French elements (Krings 1999, 58), thanks to the distant influence of the Hauka cult, which migrated from Niger via the journeys of laborers who collected in Ghana (ibid., 59). According to Krings, these spirits are mainly ‘‘male soldiers’’ who are ‘‘related to each other according to their military rank’’ (ibid., 56). Their paraphernalia includes not only items of fashionable consumption—sunglasses, cigarettes (in red packaging), and alcohol—but also

36

Rosalind C. Morris

the instruments of writing and technologized violence: ballpoint pens, notebooks, toy guns, whips. The Tuwara seem, indeed, to display perfectly the indissolubility of writing, bureaucracy, state power, and imperial violence that Le´vi-Strauss associated with the Western part of the world. The earliest references to the European spirits to which Krings can point us suggest their appearance in the mid-1940s—at the height and end of colonial power—when infrastructural penetration of previously remote hinterlands was permitting the consolidation of territoriality as the basis of national sovereignty, a process that would underwrite the modernization programs of developmentalist states during the decolonizing process, as well. By the mid-1990s, when Krings undertook the extraordinary task of interviewing spirits about their own sense of origin, he was struck by the fact that they often referred to the violence of war (World War II) and narrated a shared experience of that trauma—shared, that is, with the European interviewer. It is possible, though Krings does not pursue the matter, that this privileging of trauma as the locus of identification can be more generalized. To speak of an intergenerationally shared trauma, an event that exceeds the capacity for symbolization, is to insist on the identity of the ones who would claim—or rather, who could not claim (Caruth 1996)—an experience that, properly speaking, exceeded both of their capacities for memory. But in this case, the spirit can recall what neither the medium nor a deeply traumatized subject can fully recount. It can also recall what the recipient of historical knowledge several decades distant from the event can never know on an experiential basis. And its very recall, sequestered in the (un)consciousness of a being that is radically distinct from that of the medium, threatens with dispersal or radical splitting the identity of the medium. Although, as Krings makes clear, some traditions of mediumship are premised on the assumption that the qualities of the medium affect the spirit who is incarnated in her or in him, the medium is never one with the spirit. That would imply death. I will return to the issue of psychic processes and their relationship to memory below, but here it is important to note the texture and form of the more recently emergent spirits, those who did not tell Krings that they shared the trauma of ‘‘uproar’’ in the cities with him. Among these, he describes Jamus ‘bata k’asa (meaning, in German, destroyer of land). Also a soldier, this spirit is a builder of roads, which he accomplishes with heavy machinery, including Caterpillar bulldozers (Krings 1999, 61). As Krings notes, German corporations were involved in road construction in Nigeria at the time, and the ethnicizing of the spirit’s name and its conflation with

Spirit Mediumship in the Age of New Media

37

an engineering function seems relatively transparent to historical fact. But Jamus travels to and from his destinations and work sites via airplane. He is, in other words, an emphatically modern spirit, encompassing within his own identity the principles of both military and infrastructural extension and hence of temporal and spatial overcoming. Readers familiar with Marshall McLuhan will recognize in the apposition of pen and paper, road and airplane, the nearly pure form of McLuhan’s mediatic trinity, each unit of which marks a qualitative transformation in the logic of extension that McLuhan defined as the essence of all media. Recalling the ballpoint pens common to all the spirits, Jamus’s repertoire encompasses the communicative, the spatial, and the violent means for exceeding the self. Yet—and this is the point of spirit mediumship—the self that is exceeded in trance is, to borrow Luce Irigaray’s (1985) formulation, not one. Nor for nothing did Krings interview spirits, rather than mediums, in order to solicit the tales of their origins. The hypertrophy of the discourse of identity materialized in these genealogies covers over another, more deep-seated nonidentity. It is, we can say, the form through which that nonidentity is forgotten. Let me clarify with another example from the work of Elizabeth Colson that documents a moment not distant from the one in which the European spirits (spirits of European modernity) made their first arrival in the Bori cults described by Krings. Colson recounts a tradition of masabe possession among the Tonga not unlike that in Northern Thailand, insofar as it involves groups of mediums dancing in public, the purpose of the dance being curative. In masabe possession dances, the spirits descend upon hearing particular musical and percussive compositions and may move between mediums; the arrival of each new spirit discloses itself in the medium’s assumption of a stereotypically identifying gesture (Colson 1969, 79). Possession may commence by virtue of contact with the possessing phenomenon, and there appear to be no a priori criteria for determining whether a phenomenon could generate possession or not, spirits being thought to inhere in all perceptible elements of the object world. Indeed, Colson describes a medium who, in 1954, following a plane’s flight over her village, experienced the first possession by an airplane. Nor was the new spirit of transportation unique. Among the relatively recent spirits entering the Tongan possession repertoire, Colson names indeki (airplane), kanamenda (motor boat), siacilipwe (bush clearer), and kandimu (boat engine), along with guitar, European dancing, and accordion. Already healed into the ‘‘tradition’’ in 1957, when

38

Rosalind C. Morris

Colson did her fieldwork, were mapolis (the police), matobela Injanji (railroad followers), citima (train), and incinga (bicycle) (ibid., 84). Colson’s meticulous ethnography also notes that spirits expressed longings in dreams that visited mediums and that by the late 1950s, luxury goods constituted a crucial point of reference and a vehicle through which the generalizing commodity economy of Zambia was registered as a transformation of desire. She cites a song used by the spirit mangelo (Angel, appropriated from Christian mythology) as follows: ‘‘The Americans sent the drum. My blouse and skirt are very expensive. They come from England. Go! America! Go!’’ (ibid., 85–86). One can hardly imagine a more demonstrative expression of the changing material landscape in Zambia than what concatenates American popular music, British fashion, the accouterments of a moralized commodity economy, and the sloganeering of a sports culture that at the time functioned as a theater for the rehearsal of the competitive ethos so integral to capitalist cultures everywhere. Lest these images of encounter and historical transformation themselves be dehistoricized, it is important to note how much these discourses and the particular forms and idioms in which they were inscribed a half century ago changed. Krings notes that what were represented as spirits from Europe among the members of the Bori cult became, over time, Africanized. Thus, their origins were gradually renarrated in terms that suggest the colonization of consciousness, so that those bearing European names or indulging European tastes and predilections were explained as Africans who had learned foreign customs in military barracks established in Africa by Europeans. The internalization that makes itself visible here has profound consequences: an alienation from tradition, a splitting of cultural identity, and a contamination from within by forces that emanate from elsewhere (Krings 1999, 63–64). Similarly, Ute Luig describes metamorphoses in the masabe tradition recounted by Colson that in many ways parallel those I encountered in Thailand, including the increasing legitimacy of the masabe healing cults, albeit within a hierarchy that privileged the more local basangu mediums. Like Krings, she also narrates a resignification of those figures once associated with European colonial presence, including the metamorphosis of ma-soldier. A figure associated with the colonial army when Colson encountered it, ma-soldier had become a character associated with Zimbabwean guerilla forces or, when Luig undertook her fieldwork, the Rhodesian army. In some cases, he had converted to Christianity and militant antisorcery (Luig 1999, 133). Mangelo had also been Africanized. Luig also notes the quite remarkable fact that in the mid-1990s, at least, the spirits

Spirit Mediumship in the Age of New Media

39

of indeki, kanamenda, and matingatinga (the airplane, the carrier, and the motor boat) were no longer being danced, whereas spirits with tribal names, particularly from the increasingly dominant northern regions, had become more prominent in the preceding decade. She attributes this displacement to changed territorial and politico-economic structures in the Gwembe valley (ibid., 136). For Luig (citing Arjun Appadurai), the masabe cults ‘‘reflect the ‘locality-producing capabilities of larger scale social formation,’ ’’ but subjected them to ‘‘local knowledge and local identity.’’ It is thus that ‘‘masabe cult leaders absorb and accumulate new ideas, objects and methods to empower themselves’’ (ibid., 137). And they do so in a dialectic with more localist basangu cults. But who, precisely, is interpreting these new powers? Is it the medium? She or he is certainly the beneficiary of such powers in an oblique fashion. But in the idiom spoken by mediums themselves, the medium may also be understood as merely the vehicle for registering the transformations wrought by such foreign (political and technological) powers. The question of subjectivity now demands to be posed. For if it is true, as both Krings and Luig attest, that the traditions of mediumship are marked and transformed by the particular material and political developments of their environments, it is also true that mediums acquire power only by being disavowed by it—that they receive foreign potencies in a manner that disperses their own, that the past reappears or becomes present in them only in a state of radical forgetfulness. We cannot simply disavow the claims to such forgetfulness made by mediums everywhere, any more than we can dismiss the references to political and economic aspects of the social field incarnated in their possession performances. To answer the question of subjectivity, however, requires a momentary displacement of the immediate political signification of mediumship in order to grasp a critical potential within mediumship that is not entirely determined by the binarity of the West versus the rest.

Foreign Correspondents: Communications from Afar Let me briefly recapitulate. For over a century, but especially during the past six decades, Western commodities, social forms, and technologies have entered into the possession idioms and practices of mediums in Africa and Asia (among other places), whether as objects of desire or of taboo, as welcome possessing spirits or as feared ensorcelling forces. It is tempting to read these histories in the idiom of domestication, as Krings and Luig

40

Rosalind C. Morris

do: as processes through which the power of the foreign, especially as metonymized in foreign technology, was recognized and either disavowed or mimetically incorporated. Yet such a reading risks reinscribing an ancient binarity centered on and organized by the West in opposition to all the rest. There is no reason to presume that new technologies emanating from the West function uniquely as signs of ‘‘the foreign,’’ and one must be careful not to imagine them in opposition to an indigenous set of possessing forces that are, by contrast, unproblematically familiar, local, or immediate because prior. Possession is always a theater of relation to the foreign; it is, indeed, a theater in which foreignness or otherness approaches its absolute, its apotheosis as the Other in the form of death, both in the sense that spirits are often the specters of the deceased and in the sense that it is an invariably mortally threatening practice. It matters not, for example, whether the spirits who ‘‘descend into’’ (long maa) Northern Thai mediums are those of the Lanna heroine, Queen Camadevi, or the founding monarch of Sukhothai, King Ramkamhaeng, whether they are Buddhist saints from northern India or unnamed risiis from southern India—all are radically foreign to the body in which they make their place. These figures of the foreign are, of course, just that: figurations of more general, but also elusive structural principles. In fact, I would argue that beyond everything else, possession is a staging of the foreignness of language, of the improbable and ultimately inexplicable crossing by which language and textuality, though utterly transindividual, appear to emanate from an otherwise discrete, if opaque body. What mediums share with everyone is that, though it comes from within each of us, none of us is the author of language. Neither we nor the possessed medium retains consciousness of this fact in the moment of speaking, but where this forgetting is repressed as a condition of everyday life for the ordinary mortal, it is often explicitly remarked in possession performances. This is, I think, why possession performances in Chiang Mai and many other places so frequently theatricalize a speaking in tongues or the acquisition of foreign and/or archaic languages during possession. When this is not the case, changes in pitch and timbre function as the mark of a speaking that comes from elsewhere and that passes through the larynx of the medium without emanating from her or his consciousness. Among the Tonga, airplane possessions produce vocalizations that conjure the mechanical sounds of engines and propellers, implying a link between the form of utterance and the nature of the spirit, even as they call into question the category of language and the possibility of translation.

Spirit Mediumship in the Age of New Media

41

In Northern Thailand, the translation of possessing spirits’ speech is a highly elaborated part of the drama. Acolytes must learn the languages and codes of possessing spirits over a period of years, and it is to them, rather than to the possessed medium, that clients turn for clarifications of meaning. Clients’ belief and commitment to the possessing spirits’ authority are often tested with questions about whether they understand the language being spoken or not. They are not expected to understand it, but their recognition of the speech as what could be understood by some—as a language—is imperative. Here then, the fundamental distinction between language and a language (langage and la langue, in Lacan’s idiom), a distinction necessary for every act of communication, makes itself visible. The sociality of the drama is materialized in the same way as it was for the possessed nuns of Loudun, whose Latin confessions damned them, though here it validates them (De Certeau 1986, 41). Like the nuns, Northern Thai mediums inhabit the paradox of speaking a language they do not know for others who do know it, making the extraordinariness of their possession and the foreignness of language a matter of possessing what has not been learned in normal social circumstances. The point here is that if all possession is possession by foreignness, there can be no easy recourse to an oppositional structure between globality and locality as the explanatory frame for understanding the modernity of mediumship. In this context, technologies of Western modernity become but one set of signifiers in a series of signifiers, all of which come from elsewhere, though some are assuredly granted positions of relative force and influence, and this relative hierarchy bespeaks the geopolitical logic borne by technology. But let us not forget that the foreignness that possesses mediums also always verges on becoming absolute in the form of death. The possessing spirits, if not dead, are nonetheless not alive in the same manner as is the medium and her or his auditors. Much of the biomedical literature on spirit possession that has sought to reduce it to a curative function has, in its obsession with the performance of rites to restore wellness, neglected the profound truth, implicitly acknowledged in every possession tradition of which I am aware, that wellness is, in a very real sense, merely resistance to death. Again, total death would be an absolute disappearance, and mediumship offers something other than that. I would like to think of it as a theater of the trace, which is to say, a theater of communication itself. This is why it is so apt a venue to observe the transformations wrought by what we call, colloquially speaking, ‘‘communications technologies.’’ I do not mean to invoke the concept of theater as it has been classically used in studies of spirit possession, where it has been

42

Rosalind C. Morris

invoked to describe forms of cathartic self-representation aimed at the resolution of social contradiction. (See, for example Firth 1969.) I mean, instead, to think of it as a putting into play, a productive staging of the scene of communication as a relentless enigma and a necessary repetition, but also as the ground for an always already political metaphorization of consciousness itself. Let me explain what I mean. We must recognize, as I have already suggested with regard to the foreignness of language, that possession is also a theater of forgetting. This fact has obvious corollaries in many traditions of trance, where the most emphatic assertion of mediums is that they have no recall of their possessed states. Though not a universal attribute of possession, it is so widely elaborated as to make some generalizations possible. But what, precisely, is the work of forgetting in possession? In 1912, the American Spiritualist Reverend E. W. Sprague conjoined the question of foreign languages with that of forgetting in his self-help manual, Spirit Mediumship: Its Various Phases, How Developed, and Safely Practiced (Sprague 1912). There, he argued that the spirit’s use of a different language would ensure that the medium could neither access nor interfere with the activities of the spirit and that the medium’s apparent ‘‘speaking’’ of a foreign tongue would function as both evidence and instrument in the separation of psyches, purifying the space from which audience members would have to draw their truth. The foreignness of the spirit’s language was thus imagined as a kind of buffer, one that prohibited its content from entering the medium’s own consciousness. The model here is one of radical linguistic separation, revealing language to be at once a medium of self-surpassing and the fact of its containment, its finitude. This finitude is expressed as the need for translation. Sprague’s conception is remarkably close to that expressed by mediums elsewhere in the world. Nonetheless, if it opens onto the question of why noninterference is necessary for pure presence, it does not yet explain why the medium must forget. In my own experience, the medium’s forgetting of what her body communicates is always linked, through opposition, to the fact that the spirit has exceptional knowledge, as though an inverse relationship between spiritual knowing and mediatic retention were in place. Such an essentially economistic model of the relationship between knowledge and retention, which states that all recollection depends on partial forgetting, is paralleled in Freud’s theory of the psyche as developed in his ‘‘Note on a Mystic Writing Pad.’’ The mystic writing pad, of course, is a wax slate overlaid with a cellophane sheet. Using a stylus, one can make marks that appear on the surface of the sheet, but that in fact

Spirit Mediumship in the Age of New Media

43

emerge by virtue of the contact between the wax surface and the sheet. The surface mark arises from below, as it were, but only after having passed through the upper level of the sheet. Resistance and contact are thus both necessary for the production of traces. Freud emphasized that a periodic clearing of the sheet was essential if the nearly infinite capacities of the wax slate were to be actualized. He also noted that though the sheet be raised, the traces could be detected in the wax under certain lights, constituting something of a latent reservoir. In his luminous reading of this text, Jacques Derrida reminds us that in his efforts to model the psyche, Freud came to the metaphors of text and machine at different moments, but that in the ‘‘Note on a Mystic Writing Pad,’’ he embraced the simultaneity of the two in the idea of a writing machine, thereby answering a question that he himself never posed. Derrida frames it as follows: ‘‘what is a text and what must a psyche be if it can be represented by a text? . . . What must be the relationship between psyche, writing, and spacing for such metaphoric transition to be possible, not only, nor primarily, within theoretical discourse, but within the history of psyche, text, and technology?’’ (Derrida 1978, 198). What prepares the way for Freud’s embrace of the writing machine as metaphor for the psyche is, first, his abandonment (never fully completed) of neurological metaphors for graphological ones, and second, his realization that ‘‘consciousness and memory are mutually exclusive’’ (Freud [1925] 1961, 235; Derrida 1978, 206). Through an elaborate theory of breaching and tracing, Freud imagines the psyche as a machine that produces memory only through the transcription of perception. This is necessary because ‘‘perception forms no permanent traces’’ of its own (Freud [1925] 1961, 230). It needs a supplementary apparatus—in a word, a medium. Like the cellophane paper, traces appear on its surface only after they have been passed through to the unconscious. Here is a crucial moment of deferral, on the basis of which Derrida elaborates a more thoroughgoing theory of the necessary spacing in all writing. It is not possible to pursue that complex argumentation here, but I would like to note two crucial elements of Derrida’s text, each of which casts light on a problem of mediumship. The first concerns the temporality of the writing pad, which ‘‘includes in its structure what Kant describes as the three modes of time in the three analogies of experience: permanence, succession, simultaneity’’ (Derrida 1978, 225 ). The second is his brief fantasia on the excluded possibility: ‘‘If there were only perception, pure permeability to breaching, there would be no breaches. We would be written, but nothing would be recorded, no writing would be produced,

44

Rosalind C. Morris

retained, repeated as legibility. But pure perception does not exist: we are written only as we write, by the agency within us which always already keeps watch over perception, be it internal or external’’ (ibid., 226). Derrida goes on to insist that the ‘‘subject of writing’’ as conceived in the metaphor of the psyche as writing machine is not a sovereign author, but is a ‘‘system of relations between strata,’’ and he calls for a recognition of the ‘‘sociality of writing as drama’’ (ibid., 226–27). Such a drama is staged in spirit possession. And the medium’s body becomes the tracing that would otherwise make consciousness possible, but that merely makes it visible to others and, in cases such as those in Northern Thailand, remains forever secret to the medium. Possession might even be thought here as kind of carnal unconsciousness. In any case, mediumship demonstrates the necessity of being read, of nonidentity, which is to say the sociality intrinsic to all consciousness. But this leads us back to Freud’s unasked question: What must a psyche be thought to be that the writing machine can function as metaphor for it? We could ask an analogous, but relativizing question in the context of trance possession and spirit mediumship: What must the psyche be considered to be for the camera, the radio, the rifle, to function as a metaphor within which the transition between psyche and technology can be thought? Freud acknowledged that his machine failed as metaphor insofar as it could not explain the spontaneous generation of traces (the emergence of memory from latency), and he needed the exterior force of two hands to explain its ‘‘working.’’ As Derrida puts it, ‘‘The machine is dead. It is death. Not because we risk death in playing with machines, but because the origin of machines is the relation to death’’ (Derrida 1978, 227). Now, what is dead can make no traces of its own, and is vulnerable to disappearance, or forgetting. ‘‘Forgetting’’ is here a term for the apparent vanishing of something. In making present what is otherwise absent, mediumship endlessly displays both the vulnerability of existence to vanishing and the desire for persistence. Insofar as it stages the full presencing of past personae, of course, it opens onto the fantasy of a plenitude immune to time. But possession is finite, if it is not to become madness or death. It entails an oscillation between the fantasy of permanence and the fact of succession—principles integral to the very formation of the social. In this sense, mediumship exhibits all of those elements of time as Kant conceived it and that are also to be found in the mystic pad: permanence, succession, simultaneity. In the spirit who possesses, there is the figure of possible permanence. In the coming and going of spirits—sometimes being passed between individual

Spirit Mediumship in the Age of New Media

45

mediums—there is the spectacle of succession. In the copresence of the medium’s body and the spirit’s consciousness, there is simultaneity. As I suggested above, this is a carnal philosophical system, but one that works as much to stage the aporetic nature of communication as to attempt its resolution. Of course, the ambition to transcendence is also operative. As for forgetting, which is constitutive of memory if only because the psyche must select from the infinity of perceptual stimulation what can be retained, it is useful to recall the political origin of the metaphorics within which Freud spoke of it: censorship, disguise, deletion (Derrida 1978, 226). Freud did not theorize the particular metaphor of censorship or the general concept of metaphor as ‘‘the analogy between two apparatuses and the possibility of this representational relation’’ (ibid., 228). But in Derrida’s terms, this metaphor does the work of techne¯, of putting life and death into relation. Mediumship, we must insist, is equally eligible for the term techne¯. But we now return to the more difficult terrain of understanding how and why historically particular technologies may or may not be embraced and placed in analogous relations of metaphoricity with the psyche. It is here, where the historicity of mediumship must give way to its history, that the possibility of generalization falters . . . and returns. So let me return to my earlier question: What must the psyche be imagined to be for it be metaphorized in one or another technomediatic metaphor? In the electronified and anglicized world of PCs and Macs, we hardly know any longer whether we speak of the psyche or the technological apparatus: ‘‘memory,’’ ‘‘storage,’’ ‘‘archive,’’ ‘‘database’’ and the inverse: ‘‘forget,’’ ‘‘fragment,’’ ‘‘delete,’’ ‘‘erase.’’ Between the two, encompassing both eros and thanatos, hangs the word ‘‘drive’’: the hard drive as memory device, analog of consciousness, permanently under threat of erasure or fragmentation, amenable to splitting for more efficient storage. Such are the metaphors of the last millennium, already being displaced by an ethereal language of air, clouds, and ethers. In Northern Thailand during the mid1990s, both political activists and trance adepts spoke of themselves as media—mediums as cameras, agitators as media more generally. But what of language itself, that permanently resistant phenomenon?

Back to the Future For Freud, the utility of the mystic writing pad as metaphor lay in its archival function. This is what, for him, permits the formation of a subject

46

Rosalind C. Morris

in language. By contrast, Tom Gunning has suggested that during the same period, the camera offered itself to Anglo-American Spiritualists because it staged repetition and doubling as intrinsic properties of both the mechanical and the psychical apparatus—a doubling recognized by Freud’s notion of the uncanny, which Gunning sees as symptomatic of modernity in general. He notes further that it was a mode of communication dominated by iconicity, rather than by symbolization (or linguistic signification) and that its practitioners believed it was immune to the finitude of individual languages. As advocates of a new scientism, Spiritualists sought a universal language, which is to say, no language in particular. Indeed, Gunning argues that although early Spiritualists initially sought photographs produced in the absence of technology (with neither lens nor camera), once the camera was established as an evidentiary supplement, Spiritualism itself changed, with its conception of manifestation as a form of prophesy giving way to a demand for visible evidence (Gunning 1995, 51). The metaphoric instantiation of this change could be seen in the development of a technique by which Spiritualist mediums exuded ectoplasmic manifestations that themselves bore images of spirits, thereby communicating by something like a ‘‘picture language’’ (ibid., 58). In the process, the spirit photographers put the image in the place of language, in the mouth, as it were. This would be, perhaps, the first return of media to mediums (which we may defer describing as the first return of religion), a return made possible only by virtue of the apparent autonomization of mediation in technology. It is tempting to extrapolate this moment in which the newest of the then new media appeared to offer instantaneity and identity as an answer to the enigma of language inscribed in the metaphor of writing. Indeed, I have been tempted to posit this ideology of recognition at the heart of contemporary mediumship in Thailand, particularly when noting the embrace of photo technologies by mediums during the latter decades of the twentieth century. Such an extrapolation now seems to me to require some further clarification and emendation. Certainly, the emphatic and narrow iconicities that enable the recognizability of one or another spirit suggest the aspiration to a relatively pure code, one in which signifiers are fixed in relation to their significations and interpretive instability is kept to a minimum. And yet the secret remains a crucial dimension of mediumship, not only the secret knowledge that is the mechanism for maintaining hierarchy in all societies where knowledge is power, but the absolute secret of death. For at least in Thailand, the spirits have contact with the dead and emanate from that realm, though their eternal returns

Spirit Mediumship in the Age of New Media

47

also promise to overcome the utter alterity of that category. The fact of the medium’s forgetfulness signifies this fact—this persisting, unalterable secret. It may appear to us that the medium is the vehicle, the carriage or mount, for the overcoming of that secret and that her or his possession constitutes a containment of what is otherwise staged as inaccessible to ordinary human beings, though no less influential, as a result. What determines everyday life is in mediumship shown to be invisible, beyond the ken of mortals. For their part, mortals are given advice on how to cope with the forces affecting them, but the secret rationale of the world beyond visibility remains unspoken. What incarnates itself in the everyday world is then merely the figure of one who knows that opaque realm, who can cross that great chasm. The structure is not unlike what Derrida attributes to Christianity—and suggests hostility to commentary, to the playing out of interpretive instability in debate and narrative elaboration. Is mediumship, then, the antecedent structure in terms of which Christianity is to be understood? Or by contrast, has it, too, been subject to globalatinization? To respond to those questions (it is not possible to answer them in any definitive manner) depends less on extending Derrida’s concept of televisuality backward and forward to encompass all imagistic reproducibility (including all photography) than on reposing the question of the relations between the image, the politics of recognition, and interpretive instability. Let us recall, then, that at least in Northern Thailand, the question of what the spirit is saying is never finally resolved. Translators offer glosses or convert the spirit’s discourse into commandments, thereby implying the possibility of fixing meaning. But they are always necessary, and the labor of translation is as specularized as the message is extracted from inscrutable mumblings. When people go to mediums and when they leave, they have a sense of having had contact with something ineffable, as is testified in the constant remarks about the exceptional powers of the spirit and the dismay expressed at her or his physical capacities. In Northern Thailand, as in Venezuela and the Gwembe Valley, these spirits are constantly proliferating, and their many and remote origins partially mitigate against their subsumption into single narratives of identity. Rafael Sanchez’s description of the Maria´ Lionza cult’s fantastic array of possessing spirits, whose multiplicity reminds him of the foreign figures who flicker past on the television screen and whose images are reproduced in the wax figures adorning her shrines (Sanchez 2001), resonates strongly with the scenes one encounters in Northern Thailand. So, too, does Ute Luig’s account of the changing pantheon of foreign possessing figures in the Gwembe Valley.

48

Rosalind C. Morris

If the enigma that is momentarily contained in the claim to translatability of the spirit’s speech is often a source of terror, manifested in a quick obedience to the letter of the spirits’ commandments, and if this fearful obedience is often allied to authoritarian political tendencies, we must yet account for the central place that mediumship often gives to the dramaturgy of interpretation, of reading. I do not, however, wish to argue that mediumship always and completely exceeds the politics of recognition or that it is simply (like all religions, in Vattimo’s sense) doubled, being both concerned with presence and riven by alterity. That would be to defuse any possibility of historicizing it in relation to technological developments—and the changing, reflexively commented upon engagement of mediums with media technologies begs us to undertake such a historicization. Rather, a comparative analysis of mediumship reveals that the understanding of the relationship between iconicity and textuality is structured and restructured by (a constantly mutating category called) new media and that new digital technologies do not so much displace or qualitatively transform mediumship by displacing analog technologies as reinflect this problematic by making visible, once again, the textuality of the icon itself. What occurs in the moment that a new medium becomes an old one—a process always partial and provisional—is, it seems to me, a return to language. Just as the camera transformed writing, which functioned in a largely illiterate context as the magical image of power, rather than as signs to be deciphered, so, too, the fantastic mobility and indeed manipulability of digital media encourages the restoration of narrative and the retrospective explosion of photography’s claim to negate the need for reading. I am not referring here only to processes of remediation by which earlier media are encompassed by new ones, as in the photograph of a Bible described by Behrend. Nor am I making an ontological claim about the nature of digital media. To the contrary, and without disavowing the relative capacities and velocities of digitization, I am suggesting that the question of the new media is one of relation, a relation in which what is new seems to enable the return to presence by casting into the space of undecidability what preceded it. This is another way of saying that the new always claims magic. With digital technology, of course, the name of magic is ‘‘technology,’’ and if the image itself comes into question because of its alterability and its independence of any referent, the medium itself claims to move beyond language, being merely the principle of code. But as already remarked, that is only from the perspective of those who know the discourse of information technology. For others, including mediums in Northern Thailand (and no

Spirit Mediumship in the Age of New Media

49

doubt those elsewhere), the magic of the digital is to be construed only in relative terms, along the axes of speed and transmissibility. For now, at least, it is photography extended and hastened; it is the televisual renewed.

More Returns: Mediums and New Media, or the Restoration of the Televisual What are the consequences of this particular metaphorization? Let us recall here that at least since Freud, the reality effect of a medium, as well as its metaphoric utility, are partly functions of its perceived adequacy to stand in as an image of the psyche’s operations. What is foreclosed in the moment that these two objects are made the doubles of each other— uncanny or not—is precisely the particular structuring of the social, which cannot be adequately addressed through reference to ‘‘the sociality of writing.’’ This is why Derrida draws our attention to the terms by which Freud understood the psychic operations that make consciousness and memory possible: censorship, disguise, deletion. Nearly a century later, Paul Virilio (1994) has extended the transferential drama to the human/machine relation, suggesting that computers and memory are mutually exclusive, that technology is parasitic upon and ultimately substitutes for both perceptual consciousness and memory. The question for me is not whether there is an inexorable relationship of leaching by which technology absorbs into itself what was once merely metaphorized in its terms, but rather what happens when a medium is understood as an instrument of transparency and connectivity, rather than, for example, censorship. What happens when what makes censorship possible is construed as the means of its overcoming? What kind of political subject does it enable, summon, and promise to consolidate? What kind of political system does it underwrite? To pursue this question, I want to return briefly to Thailand. I have written elsewhere about the reciprocally referring discourses of political activists and spirit mediums in Thailand during the democracy protests of 1992. On that occasion, self-appointed political pedagogues referred to themselves as ‘‘media,’’ putting themselves in the place of a statecontrolled mass-communications infrastructure that was rigorously censoring news of police and military violence against protestors. Activists also called upon professional spirit mediums to perform public rites of ensorcellment against the junta, though most mediums in the north espoused support for the military. Some even received the generals in their own practices and provided them with protective magic. Newspapers were

50

Rosalind C. Morris

full of cartoons ridiculing that fact. Thailand had gone cellular, and on any given day, some two hundred thousand calls where made by cellular telephone from the protest’s major venue at Sanam Luang Park in Bangkok. Nonetheless, Thailand’s mediascape was dominated by television. The Internet was a fledgling apparatus, and YouTube had not yet appeared. Nor had the idea of interactivity arisen on the imaginative horizon of the new political technicians. The form of media fantasized and emulated by the activists was in fact that of the television, and even when taking videotapes of the crackdown into rural areas, these were screened on television sets in traveling vans mounted with multiple car batteries, the reedited footage often bearing the logos of the television stations from which the material had been pirated: mainly CNN, ITT, and the BBC. Television has changed since then, of course. It is anything but the low-definition medium that McLuhan had in mind when he imagined it as the technology most apt to restore tribalism, by which he meant the responsivity to and capacity to be affected by others. But even in the age of lower resolution, the deployment of media by Thailand’s self-appointed democracy mediums entailed a recognition that even television images are subject to reading, rereading, and misreading—subject, that is, to the demands of textuality and not only to recognition. Hence, these same mediums had to accompany the electronic media, to offer commentary. If that commentary sought to authorize and monopolize the imagery for one or another purpose, it did so in the face and full recognition of the impossibility of terminating that endless process. In other words, they sought the televisual, but in something like a dialectical inversion, they brought to bear upon it a consciousness that others would associate with digital media. The media were to provide access to the truth, which had been secreted from the populace, and the televisual and photographic media were to guarantee that truth, but the truth would always exceed the medium, and an interpretive process would always have to supplement what would otherwise appear all too evident. One might say that these democratic mediums were seeking to mitigate the force of recognition that they feared also lay within the medium of television. I am attributing to these media properties that have been identified by David Rodowick (2001), who argues that digital technology summons a reading of the visual text as a multiply signifying series of signs, rather than as an iconically apprehensible image. Rodowick in fact sees new digital technologies as entailing a return to linguistic models of reading, rather than the surpassing of these models, and thereby suggests that McLuhan’s

Spirit Mediumship in the Age of New Media

51

analysis was grossly premature in its conclusion. I have been arguing that the democracy mediums were operating with television at least partially with a consciousness like that described by Rodowick. But it would be wrong to imagine that everyone shared their understanding. As Derrida has already told us, the illusion of presence is not so easily nullified by critique. And the fantasy of transparency, for which the spirit medium is perhaps the purest, but also a carnal metaphor, relentlessly haunts the televisual world. It haunts it in a truly uncanny sense, for the televisual here entails the rediscovery of the photographic. Another return. There would be others. Immediacy, or the technological fantasy of immediacy, acquired special value during the democracy protests, just as it had done a century earlier in the United States, where, as Frank Podmore had already observed in 1902, the fantasies of electricity, Spiritualism, and democracy were closely related. For Podmore, this was a function of ‘‘the special conditions of the times . . . the general diffusion of education combined with an absence of authoritative standards of thought and the want of critical training; in the democratic genius of the American people; in their liability to be carried away by various humanitarian enthusiasms; in the geographical conditions incident to a rapidly expanding civilization’’ (Podmore 1902, 287). And he adds a lack of social hierarchy, particularly that structured by ecclesiastical institutions, to the mix. Podmore’s linkage of these elements leads one to ask what it is about electronification, a relative lack of social hierarchy, and a fantasy of immediate communication that makes democracy a proper scene for Spiritualism or indeed for any kind of possession. The ideal representative in a democratic polity, as we should note, would be one who merely ventriloquizes the will of the people. But whether on the level of the nation or that of more local constituencies, this demands the formation of a collective subject, of an identity, whose exteriorization could then be accomplished by one designated for that purpose. In the United States and in many other places, this notion of the people is a nationalized one formed in a revolutionary insurgency that sublated class conflict in discourses of territorial sovereignty. The ideal representative of such a formation would be something like a medium. And this would be especially true in nationalist contexts that eschew plurality and that fantasize themselves to be without class conflict. Invariably, this means that they are dominated by the idea of the middle class. And in this sense, possession is a concept that far exceeds the question of trance and mediumship, as already demonstrated by James Siegel (2000) in his remarkable ethnography of Aceh after the end of the Suharto

52

Rosalind C. Morris

era, but we would do well to remember its more seemingly metaphysical dimensions. They disclose something of the politico-theologic of democratic rhetoric, which hypostatizes communication without considering the facticity or the historicity of languages. In the United States, as well as in Thailand, this materializes itself in a radical monolingualism. It also has materialized itself in forms of politics in which contact with those who have power is as important as the articulation of abstract categories or the deployment of rationalized standards in the interest of values such as ‘‘equality before the law’’ or ‘‘right.’’ In the end, we can think the relationship between mediumship in its stricter, ritual sense and this kind of aspiration to power through connectivity only in the mode of analogy. To say that the politician is like a medium is to mobilize the metaphor for a reason, and it requires the elision of that most important difference, the question of consciousness. Consciousness, including unconsciousness, is the locus of ideology. Whether we grasp it in terms of censorship or of disguise, it is structured by the deep concept metaphors of a given order: those that sustain patriarchy, or heteronormative reproductivity, class, and ethnicity through reference to nature—or to automation. And yet, in Thailand, on the stage where democracy activists laid claim to being media, flirting with iconicity and insisting on textuality, spirit mediums also performed their rites, summoned death, and introduced the specter of a power beyond containment. This, too, must be understood as part of the televisuality of the moment.

The Medium Is the Message? In the years since these events, the terms of debate in Thailand have shifted considerably. A media mogul, Thaksin Shinawatra, has come and gone from power, embodying the extravagant power of the telecommunications industry in the moment that it can, by virtue of digitization, integrate all media. (And we must note that this convergence of technological possibility with the tendency to monopoly internal to capital gives rise to possible mutations. Such mutations are among the most profound effects of digitization, but they are also the renewal of older possibilities.) Media protests and the use of specular display in anticipation of international media coverage now structure political life a priori. No longer are people merely using media images produced of their events; they anticipate their appearance in the mediascape and strategize their use of those images at a later stage in the development of their movements. The rural poor, who

Spirit Mediumship in the Age of New Media

53

ostensibly had to be educated about the content of the televisual images that democracy activists broadcast for them, later produced those images, seeking to out coup leaders in favor of their own disgraced populist mogul (Thaksin Shinawatra), who, though elected, was driven from office amid corruption allegations. For three years, they repeated and inverted the 1992 protestors’ efforts to oust an unelected general from the office of prime minister. And of course, both sides laid claim to the category of representative Thainess, though class rends the body politic. What now shines out from this slowly metamorphosing spectacle of popular politics is the increasing tendency of all electronic media to autonomize the parties to the gaze. As Raymond Williams (1974) has shown us, the development of television as a broadcast medium was a function of politico-economic as much as technological factors. But the result was the extension of a property internal to all media of technological reproducibility, namely, a severing of seer and seen (Benjamin [1938] 1969). As a result, both structure communication in nonreciprocal, vectoral ways. Equally important has been the valorization of this autonomized visibility, a valorization accomplished by celebrity culture as it leaks out into the substratum of unfamous lives, producing there an aspiration to recognizability. Perhaps, we could say, the media have, together, released an aspiration to the iconological in everyone and in this way have incited in ordinary people the extraordinary capacities that are marked as spirit mediumship. I have thus returned to our beginning. Is this tendency to the iconological to be understood in terms of a return, or is the discourse of return the misrecognition of something more perduring? And is the return, or the misrecognition of return, to be understood in terms of religion, of globalatinization, of Christianity’s monopoly of the mediatic and its universalization of itself in the mode of iconology? It seems to me that the archive of mediumship mitigates against the postulation of a special affinity between Christianity and the technologies of the icon, and I have tried to demonstrate the degree to which the opposition between the iconological and the textual is a function of historical circumstances. Rather, we would have to reread the apparently relative solidarity between Christianity and the iconological through the lens made available by a reading of spirit mediumship, more ancient and recursive than any other discourse of incarnation. Let me then rephrase Vattimo to say that mediumship is the form of appearance of the question of return. We cannot yet forget forgetting, however. Both total exteriorization and total receptivity entail a kind of death. Another way of saying this is that both assume an absolutely forgetful subject. That this hallucinatory

54

Rosalind C. Morris

possibility is overcome in mediumship itself, which is by definition socialized, even when it does not thematize that socialization in the dramaturgy of translation, does not change the fact that what mediums claim, at least in Northern Thailand, is the absolute presence of alterity and the absolute amnesia of self. When the spirit speaks, then, what is repressed or censored is the forgetting that consciousness and memory are mutually exclusive, a forgetting that is constitutive of all communication. A different kind of forgetting occurs, however, in the emergent aspiration for the broadcasting of possession performances, for this new broadcasting, which, as I said earlier, has mediums producing archives of their own rites and submitting to the fantasy of celebrity via an international documentary circuit, does not attach itself to reciprocal communications at all. Recent YouTube broadcasts of Chiang Mai mediums distill and extend the tendency that I was already observing almost twenty years ago for the intimate public sphere of the therapeutic relation to be increasingly overwhelmed by the spectacle of public performances. And this development mirrors developments in the formal political sphere, as well, where discourses of transparency and rituals of popular sovereignty, whether in elections or in street protests, are increasingly intended to be seen from afar at the same time that they are increasingly presumed to be without effect. Democracy in Thailand, as in so many nations of the Global South, is radically in question, and it is in question because it has been reduced to the question of technique at the expense of a theory of social justice. This is where mediumship returns, its modeling of the psyche now offering itself as a paradigm for thinking the political. Indeed, while mediumship has always been undertaken in the idiom of the political, it now provides us with the means for identifying what, in Thailand, at least, may be the ghost in the machine of democracy. Devolving into expressivity, rather than communicativity, overwhelmed by a vectoral structure, and in thrall to the image and the politics or recognition, mediumship in Northern Thailand is becoming at once bloated and meaningless. This is what it means to become a sign of tradition, rather than a medium of historicity. The season of public rituals now extends across the months, with the consequence being less time to devote to curative and prophetic tasks. The ideal subject of democracy is one who speaks and whose voice is heard, whose speaking and being heard are, indeed, the mark of his or her political subjectivity. Mediumship has, of course, often been treated as a mechanism for giving subaltern figures the voice that they do not otherwise possess and hence the opportunity to enter into the public sphere, albeit on a temporary basis (Boddy 1989; Comaroff 1985). But what recent

Spirit Mediumship in the Age of New Media

55

transformations in the practice suggest is that mere visibility is insufficient to the tasks of the political, that the aspiration to communication without mediation so potently exhibited in the fantasy of a voice without an organ of speech runs aground in the face of linguistic difference. This, for example, is the case in southern Thailand, where a long-suppressed ethnolinguistic nationalism has erupted into a virtual, if low-level civil war. If the medium is the message, then it is not, as McLuhan too glibly concluded, because electronification is the answer to fragmentation or the origin of a new globality in which everyone is affected by everyone else—though this has come to pass. Nor is it because everyone believes they have the opportunity for celebrity, though this, too, has come to pass. It is, for me at least, rather because in mediumship, the fantasies attending the newest media are also counterposed by a persisting model of the psyche, partly because the newest media reinflect the possibilities attendant upon older ones. In Northern Thailand, the exceptionality of the spirit medium (rather than of the democratic media) shows via counterpoint that the subject cannot be absolutely receptive; total receptivity is a state of exception, dangerous and magically powerful, but constantly threatening to the subject who is otherwise divided, forgetful, and for this reason, capable of judgment.

Trance Mediums and New Media: The Heritage of a European Term Erhard Schu¨ttpelz

In 1872, Edward Tylor, one of the founding figures in social and cultural anthropology, traveled to London to spend several weeks meeting Spiritualists and investigating Spiritualism, following out the premises developed in his chief work of cultural anthropology, Primitive Culture, published the previous year (Pels 2000). ‘‘In November 1872, I went up to London to look into the alleged manifestations. My previous connexion with the subject had been mostly by way of tracing its ethnology, & I had commented somewhat severely on the absurdities shown by examining the published evidence’’ (Tylor [1872] 1971, 92). It remains striking how open the Spiritualist ‘‘mediums’’ were to examinations aimed at assessing the truthfulness or the deceit of their manifestations. Concerning his encounter with Stainton Moses, one of the most prominent British Spiritualists of his time, Tylor reports: ‘‘At our first talk he jumped at the idea of experimental tests’’ (99). And the first Spiritualist medium Tylor met and examined together with other academics invited skeptical observers and researchers to do so in thoroughly direct fashion—with the help of a newspaper announcement Tylor cut out and pasted into his diary: Mrs. Jennie Holmes (late of New Orleans, La., U.S.A.) SEANCES, for Musical, Physical, Trance, Inspirational, and Materialisation Manifestations, will be held every MONDAY, TUESDAY, WEDNESDAY, and

56

Trance Mediums and New Media

57

THURSDAY Evenings, at her reception rooms, No. 16, Old Quebec Street (two doors from Oxford Street), Marble Arch, W., at Eight o’clock; fee, 5 s. Private Sittings, for Business and Medical Consultations, from One to Four o’clock p.m. same days; fee, One Guinea. Strangers, investigators, and non-believers especially, are invited to attend, to ‘prove all things and hold fast to that which is good.’—Her powers as a Medium have been the subject of wonder and comment throughout the United States, Canada, and Central America. Her endorsements are from some of the most prominent gentlemen of the States. (Tylor 1872, November 4)

In this way, Jennie Holmes and, above all, Stainton Moses were mediums who readily welcomed scrutiny of their manifestations of spirits and their practices as mediums. At least provisionally, their skeptical observers entered into this testing situation in order to confirm or question their own scientific, religious, or cosmological premises through a manifestation of the medium’s very different premises. Because of the intimate situation of these events, they often could turn into efforts of mutual scrutiny by the medium and the observers. A historical question thus emerges: What was the historical starting point for this sort of inspection, and when did it begin to involve a mutual process engaged in by researchers as ambitious as Edward Tylor and mediums who were often just as prominent? It seems that a single, very long series of inspections of the practices of mediums was at play here: a series, lasting a little more than a century, from 1784 until the 1890s, that was centered on fundamental scientific, religious, and cosmological concerns—and on the word ‘‘medium’’ itself. The cosmological claims at work in this series of investigations fluctuated, but especially in respect to the practices of the mediums, these claims surfaced in something like a continuous relay of techniques, publics, and events. As liminal as the qualities and events tied to the mediums doubtlessly were, they in no way represented a marginal development in the Western world. At least a selected group of these inspections had the potential either to play itself out in one of the political or scientific centers of the Western countries—cities such as Paris, Vienna, Berlin, London, New York, and Washington—or to address itself directly to such a center. The most succinct demonstration of this addressing of a center and the response to it was the creation of state and scientific commissions, from the French royal commission to assess mesmerism formed in 1784 to the international scientific commissions to research hypnosis in the 1880s

58

Erhard Schu¨ttpelz

(Darnton 1983). Although the sequence of these official inquiries into Spiritualist mediums was too sporadic and their results too provisional to allow us to characterize them as Western institutions, what was at stake in the periodic recourse to such commissions was a steady testing of the possibility of institutionalizing the practices of mediums, an issue that was negotiated between various scientific, religious, and state authorities in the period from 1784 to 1890.

1. Why are the mediums who were engaged in Spiritualist practices in that period—and ever since—called ‘‘mediums’’? And what is their connection with ‘‘the media’’? The answer to this question has a double dimension. On the one hand, the concept at play here is irreducibly modern. Before they were conceptualized and popularized as mesmerism in the late eighteenth century, the manifestations of an ‘‘altered state of consciousness’’ do not seem to have been anchored in the word ‘‘medium.’’ The word, together with the later concepts of technical and mass media, as well as the linkage of the word to trances and trancelike conditions, is a modern development. It is inconceivable without its coinage to denote the ‘‘medium’’ in Spiritualist practices between 1800 and 1900. But at the same time, this word has a long preliminary history, a longue dure´e, both physical and metaphysical, that was described for the first time by Stefan Hoffmann (2002). Without this history, it would not be understandable why mesmerism, Spiritualism, work in hypnosis, and, extended from this, the trance mediums of all religions categorized as such continue to be referred to as ‘‘mediums’’ and ‘‘trance mediums.’’ The word ‘‘medium’’ originated in a long-neglected text by Aristotle concerned with perception. Air, he explains, breaks the light received through it; it is a translucent ‘‘middle,’’ a medium diaphane, that can be a cause for optical distortion, for instance in the presence of heat. Air, water, and crystals are ‘‘media of refraction.’’ This insight would eventually be extended past optical phenomena to the perception and cognition of all elements of nature. Particularly between 1600 and 1800, the demonstration and the more persuasive axiom of the mechanization of all natural forces (following Descartes and Newton) led to the assumption of yet undetected refractive media composed of subtle materials, so-called ‘‘imponderables,’’ especially under the guise of old venerable ether and in

Trance Mediums and New Media

59

the form of all-permeating forces and fluids: forces penetrating both physical and psychic processes because of their ethereal composition. The axiom and the continuing discovery of the world’s mechanization thus in no way led to a separation of res extensa from res cogitans, but rather to the scientific assumption of their mutual permeability, indeed, often to their necessary interpenetration. At the same time, highly concrete refractive media, optical lenses, and new optical instruments became the technical basis of scientific research. In telescopes, magnifying glasses, and microscopes, nature’s version of such media, which is to say previously invisible and ‘‘imponderable’’ forces and substances, were being researched with instruments incorporating refraction. Between 1600 and 1800, refraction was thus transformed into a comprehensive cognitive paradigm along this double path: on the one hand, an extension of the concept of refraction to all natural elements, on the other, the technical-scientific exploration of certain mechanized forms of these phenomena. The paradigm was manifest in the emerging natural sciences and philosophies of nature, and through techniques of mechanical visualization, it also took the form of new popular media: that of the camera obscura, meant to show ‘‘how the eye sees,’’ and that of the closely related laterna magica, the magic lantern, made use of for educational instruction, on religious missions, for entertainment, and as proof of ‘‘natural magic’’ (Hoffmann 2002). Notwithstanding all the evident efforts in the period from 1600 to 1800 at an ‘‘atheistic,’’ materialistic, and ‘‘pantheistic’’ application of mechanized forces, and notwithstanding all the suspicions of those efforts during the same period, these developments in Europe, especially in northwestern Europe, unfolded in the framework of an officially Christian world view. The imponderable forces and substances were seen as forming a zone between human beings and God and therefore as possible manifestations of divine omnipotence—in other words, of revelation. Creation, understood as the ‘‘book of nature,’’ thus was seen as a medium—and was called a ‘‘medium’’—between the divine and the human. And because the refractive concept in principle covered all natural elements, proper knowledge of refraction—in particular, knowledge of the ‘‘imponderable’’ forces and substances that could be either technically generated or only guessed at from the world’s mechanization—formed a possible and potentially privileged means to know God or God’s will. Between human beings and the Divine there hovered the still-unexplained and imponderable, but nevertheless researchable ‘‘medium,’’ whether conceptualized as ether, as electricity, as magnetism, or as subtle fluids.

60

Erhard Schu¨ttpelz

Since the mid-eighteenth century, the study of these forces and substances thus stood on both sides of transcendence and immanence: they promised revelation of the world’s transcendent constitution, and they promised insight into the world’s immanent materiality (Hoffmann 2002). The word ‘‘medium’’ arrived on the modern scene along this still widely unknown path, and it remained a successful candidate for epistemological proofs and speculations, at least until modern physics had abolished ether, which is only after acceptance of Einstein’s relativity theory in the twentieth century.

2. Consequently, when, in the 1780s, the Austrian doctor Franz Anton Mesmer based his procedure for healing on a new imponderable fluid and called it ‘‘animal magnetism,’’ using magnets to generate it, capturing the fluid in a kind of battery, and setting the psychosomatic blockages of his patients ‘‘in flux’’ by way of his own person, nothing involved in the process was unusual. Contemporaries of Mesmer saw little or no originality in his medical and scientific doctrine, but rather a bringing together of older elements into a new practice. And because ‘‘animal magnetism’’ was conceived as a natural force and hence as a new medium, it is plausible that the modern word ‘‘medium’’ made its way into Spiritualist practices from the late eighteenth century’s mesmerist debates (Ego 1991), although it remains unclear when and where exactly this happened. The year 1784 was a double turning point. For one thing, a French royal commission, supplied with the best researchers the country had to offer, investigated claims that a mesmerist natural force exists and came to broadly negative conclusions (Azouvi 1976; Darnton 1983). At the same time, a follower of Mesmer, the Marquis de Puyse´gur, working on his country estate with magnetized patients, discovered an entire series of capabilities in them, for instance, the ability of a patient clairvoyantly to diagnose his own illness and to do so after having entered an ‘‘altered,’’ ‘‘sleep-walking’’ or ‘‘somnambulistic’’ state. This connection between animal magnetism and somnambulism, ‘‘medium’’ and ‘‘trance’’ (with clairvoyant and other occult manifestations) had not been among Mesmer’s concerns. But because mesmerism had sparked a storm of controversy and of publications since its emergence in France in the 1780s, ‘‘somnambulant’’ manifestations and conjurations were themselves recorded and understood as a test of mesmerism and of its scientific claim to truth, meant to be recorded and published for a potential tribunal—scientific, public, but also perhaps organized by the state.

Trance Mediums and New Media

61

Thus the stage was set for the practices of mediums as they developed between the 1780s and 1880s, and the modern word ‘‘medium’’ was constituted in its present sense at this time, as well. From the start, interpretations of spirit manifestations were ambiguous, and the ambiguity was never resolved (Schott 2008). On the one hand, at issue here was the existence of previously unknown, imponderable natural forces (or etherealfluid substances). But on the other, the issue was the human capacity of the magnetizer (in healing, conjuration, or in initiating somnambulant manifestations) to accumulate this force, to distribute it, and to address it. Accordingly, this capacity was seen as either an aspect of the natural force itself, with ‘‘medium’’ understood as merely a passive channel for that force, or as an aspect of the character of the magnetizer, that is, as a special human capacity to handle imponderable natural forces, a capacity distributed in either an elitist or an egalitarian way. Since Puyse´ gur’s initial research on somnambulism, there had been a focus on the capabilities and characteristics of the magnetized individual. In apparently demonstrating a new (and very old) capacity for knowledge, they raised the question how to categorize them and the ‘‘forces’’ and ‘‘substances’’ involved in what they did. Were the capacities that mediums exhibited natural qualities immanent to the mediums themselves, or manifestations of a nonhuman power, that is, a transcendent ‘‘private revelation’’ of forms of ‘‘higher knowledge’’? These diverging interpretations of the practices of mesmerist and somnambulist mediums were already exaggerated, recorded, and published in the late eighteenth century. The emergence of mediums as a cultural phenomenon during this period did not begin with a decision to embrace any one of the possible interpretations of the practice, but with the establishment of a common space for unceasing debate in which all these interpretations could stake and mutually contest their claims, loudly and publicly, over the course of a century. For this reason, the role played by mediums in the long nineteenth century offers a confusing picture to all those wishing to reconstruct it historically. We find a steady series of tests, often crucial ones, of the proper interpretation of a chaotic series and constantly wavering fashion-dependent concepts and assertions, but also a continuous series of tests of the possible ways in which the practices of mediums might be institutionalized including, especially, the practices of trance mediums. This long and confusing process had three or four major nodes (Wolf-Braun 1999): controversies over mesmerism, over Spiritualism, over hypnosis, and a smaller controversy over hysteria that was nevertheless important for the development of psychotherapy and psychology,

62

Erhard Schu¨ttpelz

including the emergence of psychoanalysis. But when we assess these in separate episodes, we can see that none could ever determine the entire field of debates over the practices of mediums. Their history proceeds nonlinearly, with no recognizable closure until the late nineteenth century. The following typology therefore can be offered only with a large degree of caution. Mesmerism had its discursive starting point in the discovery of a new, imponderable natural force called ‘‘animal magnetism,’’ moving, by way of the perception of ‘‘somnambulist’’ conditions, to a range of new manifestations and the speculations of Naturphilosophie, on the one hand, and occult conjurations, on the other. By contrast, Spiritualism was concerned with a decisive testing of modern cosmology, with mediation between this world and the beyond by necromantic practices— communication with the dead (Sawicki 2002)—called into doubt by persistent questioning of the ‘‘authenticity’’ of the presented manifestations. Again, the concept of and technical training for hypnosis was grounded in a reinterpretation of mesmerist practices, in particular, the special relationship between the magnetizer and the magnetized. The focus here was on a new categorization and especially a scientific reduction of the fundamental force, which, however, could neither lessen nor reduce the impact and multitude of hypnotic practices and the interpretations of them. Finally, for its part, research on hysteria in the 1880s was aimed at naturalizing the examined phenomenon—a medical typology of its symptoms seemed to be nearing perfection—but through its scientific efforts, it, too, ended up resuscitating an entire series of mesmerist, magical, and clairvoyant practices in the medical institutions, consequences that it could not stave off and indeed actually induced.

3. However it is reconstructed in the future, the history of the debates about the practices of mediums between 1780 and 1890 thus will remain a nonlinear, chaotic history or an account of a series of ‘‘fashions’’—one that on close inspection repeatedly falls apart into a mere chronicle of individual events. And seen from the perspective of individual locations, controversies, and persons, these events remain irreducible: there is no ‘‘telos’’ that can absorb them (Sawicki 2002). But there are some superficial, for instance geographical, indications of their continuity: the history of these

Trance Mediums and New Media

63

controversies passes through both Spiritualism’s and imperialism’s interconnections throughout the world. Although the movement’s global entanglement is already evident in mesmerism, it begins in Vienna and Paris with Mesmer and finds a provisional end there, as well, in Paris with Charcot and in Vienna with Freud. The proximity of each debate to the political and scientific centers of power in northwestern Europe and the United States thus remains striking. Likewise, despite its chaotic and fashion-dependent quality, the phenomenon of the cultural prominence of mediums was intensely concerned with central questions of modern cosmology: what to make out of the imponderable forces and substances, for instance, ether and electricity. What is the ‘‘unconscious,’’ and how can it be categorized cosmologically and scientifically? And what is the status of heaven and hell, and of revelation itself in the modern world? Nineteenth-century Spiritualist mediums, in particular, did not stem from the modern world’s ideological margins. As described by Bernhard Lang and Colleen McDannell (1988), the turn from a theocentric heaven circling around praise of God and eternal bliss to an anthropocentric heaven where emphasis is laid on sympathy between the living and the dead and on the immortal soul’s constant self-improvement through work and love characterizes the development of modern cosmology in general, and this heaven was a Spiritualist innovation, following the lead of the arch Spiritualist and Protestant visionary Swedenborg. The historian Michael Hochgeschwender has aptly summarized how the mass-media marketing of religious revivals had already taken highly potent and well-honed forms by the 1840s in the United States (Hochgeschwender 2009). Once the North American Spiritualist debates had begun and spread—with the rapping noises and transcriptions of the Fox sisters, for example—their mutual promulgation by trance mediums and mass media undoubtedly belonged to the modern world. The tours of the Fox sisters and the writings of Andrew Jackson Davis raised a claim to refashioning modern cosmology that could be popularized and that indeed was successful in Christian churches (Lang and McDannell 1988). In the nineteenth century’s second half, American Spiritualism thus emerged as a movement radically aligned with all the period’s progressive inclinations. In this light, it is all the more remarkable that in its transatlantic debates, Spiritualism is presently considered a movement running counter to modernism. To some scholars of media and communications, the evident affinity between Spiritualist trance mediums between 1850 and 1900 and the modern media has seemed to be a cognitive misunderstanding.

64

Erhard Schu¨ttpelz

This is despite the early comparison between Spiritualists’ telepathic practices and the telegraph (which is to say the idea of the ‘‘spiritual telegraph’’ (Sollors 1983; Stolow 2006), the vogue for Spiritualist photography (Che´roux 2005), the steady search for empirical evidence of imponderable and telecommunicative forces and fluids, and the search’s contribution to the invention of radio technology by the physicist Oliver Lodge (Rowlands and Wilson 1994), to cite a few examples. The misunderstanding is presumably on our part—on the part of those who came after. Although transatlantic Spiritualism was a modernizing movement and wished to be nothing else, according to all appearances, this was not the modernism we retrospectively expect from the nineteenth century. What are the reasons for this misunderstanding? We need to take several steps in order to make a diagnosis of our own historical blindness, the first consisting in asking a historical question: After 1900, what developed as a result of the long scrutiny of the possibilities for institutionalizing the practices of (trance) mediums? This long period of testing, or better, this long series of tests, produced no modern institution to inherit it as a whole. However, in the period of the great controversies about mesmerism, Spiritualism, hypnosis, and hysteria, a large group of modern institutions and institutionalized concepts emerged that have staked a continuous claim to stability. And in certain respects, these modern institutions and their concepts stem from byproducts of the old controversies. That is, they were forged in the course of the dissolving and reshaping of elements in the old series of tests directed at the practices of spirit mediums. These byproducts are familiar to us in various ways because they have remained part of our world, even if their common origin is no longer practically or theoretically evident, but can be recovered only via an archeology of alternative modernisms. First, in the 1890s, both the modern concept of psychotherapy and the very word ‘‘psychotherapy’’ itself emerged from the debate between the schools of Hippolyte Bernheim and Jean-Martin Charcot over the proper treatment and categorizing of hysteria and hypnosis. In Bernheim’s school and in the course of the same debate, the concepts of ‘‘suggestion’’ und ‘‘suggestibility’’ also came to the forefront, and they continue to be considered evident in both scientific and daily argumentation (Wolf-Braun 1999). As early as the late nineteenth century, this vocabulary of ‘‘suggestibility’’ found its way into modern mass psychology, where it continues to have a descriptive function—including in the effects of the mass media— and it also wandered into modern sociology and social anthropology (for instance by way of Marcel Mauss and E´mile Durkheim), where it is used

Trance Mediums and New Media

65

to categorize social and psychosocial effects, including those of ecstatic and ‘‘charismatic’’ movements and institutions. Starting with the acceptance of Bernheim’s suggestibility doctrine, there also has been continuous inquiry into the placebo effects of medications, therapies, and social forms, and drawing on this doctrine for social-psychological explanations of trance phenomena remains a possibility (Mauss and Hubert 1902; Le´viStrauss [1949] 1967; Lewis [1971] 2003). Furthermore, there are both myths of and research into media effects that ground their assumptions about manipulation on this vocabulary of suggestion and epidemic suggestibility. Second, the 1890s saw the emergence of the most successful modern form of psychotherapy, Freud’s psychoanalysis, which developed both its form and theory explicitly as a turning away from the nineteenth century’s focus on the phenomena of unknown forces, whether transcendent or immanent, and the practices of Spiritualism—away from Charcot’s hysteria and research on hypnosis—establishing an autobiographical cure out of the far more everyday phenomena of dreaming, neurotic symptoms, and Freudian slips. In this manner, Freud succeeded in domesticating the concept of the ‘‘unconscious’’ that was discussed ever since Romantic natural philosophy as a category aligned with somnambulism, trance, and trancelike conditions. Freud did not discover the unconscious; he made it habitable—albeit with lurking or consciously provoked openings to the long nineteenth century’s ‘‘wild unconscious’’ and the esotericisms of the twentieth century, especially via Carl G. Jung. Third, between 1890 and 1910, an artistic—and at times art-historical —embrace of what might be called the epistemological claims of mediums developed within the modernist avant-gardes. Eclectically chosen concepts and techniques of inspiration from the old Spiritualist debates now served as models for the self-images, working procedures, and cosmological claims of avant-garde artists. Without a doubt, these claims were just as fashion-dependent and chaotic as those made in the old nineteenthcentury debates, but in any case, the works created in this context were already recognized as belonging to modern art. That is, they were not only integrated into a chain of avant-garde circles, but remained uninterruptedly part of the art market and of art history and after World War I were already institutionalized in museums. Fourth, with the founding of the Society of Psychical Research in 1884, modern parapsychology inherited the search for truth from the debates over the practices of mediums, but it did so through a conscious reduction:

66

Erhard Schu¨ttpelz

a concentration on locating empirical evidence of an ‘‘extrasensory’’ capacity on the part of the studied mediums. This form of an often quite precarious institutionalization was nevertheless successful and itself presumed that the old debates were no longer viable. And finally, there is modern esotericism (whether we accept this imprecise term or prefer another), emerging since the advent of Theosophy from a deliberate dissolving of the debates about mesmerism, Spiritualism, hypnosis, and hysteria, from a decision against the claims extending from Puyse´gur to Charcot regarding the scientific assessment of the phenomena of spirit mediums, and from a self-aware effort to legitimate the old practices through a new ‘‘hermeneutic turn’’ (Zander 2009), erecting a new claim to a philosophia perennis meant to be constantly synthesized and tested anew, under whose protection elementary practices of trance induction and medial healing have ever since been possible.

4. It is very clear that at least these five byproducts of the great nineteenthcentury debates about the practices of mediums have had more of an impact on us—indeed, are far more firmly anchored institutionally—than the forms of legitimation brought into play in the institutionalizing struggles unfolding between the 1780s and the 1890s. This can be proved by a simple bibliographical observation. For each of these institutions and their institutionalized concepts, the history of spirit mediums can be treated as equal to or part of a ‘‘prehistory.’’ And such prehistories have already been and will continue to be written. Nineteenth-century Spiritualist practices are thus understood as part of the prehistory of modern art and, very concretely, of highly specific avant-garde circles and techniques (Fauchereau 2005; Loers 1995, Pytlik 2006). It is also described as part of the prehistory of psychoanalysis and of forms of modern therapy (Ellenberger 1970; Crabtree 1993), of mass psychology and, through it, of the theory of (mass) media (Van Ginneken 1992; Peters 1999); and of modern esotericism (Hanegraaff 2005) and parapsychology. This prehistory motif, both highly popular and scientific at once, underscores the extent to which our own institutions and scholarly disciplines—anthropology included—see themselves as part of an unbroken continuity with the late nineteenth century, the ‘‘Belle E´poque’’ of modernism. And the preunderstanding of a prehistory emerges as both a fundamental hermeneutic help and as a conceptual obstacle. Research in

Trance Mediums and New Media

67

science and technology studies (STS) from the 1970s on was marked by a maxim known as the ‘‘principle of symmetry’’ that can be traced back to the work of David Bloor (1976): failed and collapsing scientific, cultural, and technical ideas, efforts at innovation, and other projects have to be explained and historicized using the same categories as those used to deal with successful efforts. Otherwise, we will end up ascribing to successful, consolidated developments a cognitive gain that remains valid for us and ascribing the failure of now obsolete projects to both cognitive errors and extracognitive causes—in particular, social interests and group structure— that no longer concern us. The authors of the prehistories mentioned above have no choice but to acknowledge such a teleology and its cognitive gains (for example, aesthetic gains in art history, psychotherapeutic gains in psychoanalysis, scientific gains in parapsychology) and to date its origins to the period around 1900. That would not be a mistake as long as the prehistories can be countered by ‘‘symmetry’’—that is, as long as we approach the consolidation of the institutionalized concepts as itself a ‘‘posthistory’’ of the debates about mediums. The consolidation of later byproducts, of ‘‘our world,’’ needs to be derived from the chaotic, highly turbulent debates and fashions unfolding between the 1780s and 1890s. because some of the practices of our world (for example, the practice of automatic writing) and some of its conceptual possibilities (for example, the reality of an ‘‘unconscious’’) emerged from these debates. As far as I can tell, at least in the Germanlanguage realm, there is only one full-length study doing justice to this criterion: Karl Baier’s history of modern meditation (2009), which moves from the 1780s to the present, from mesmerism and hypnosis to modern meditation and back to Christian and Buddhist techniques of contemplation, step by step, in just such a symmetrical framework. So how would we frame the debates about spirit mediums within such a symmetrical history? And how would we frame their posthistory, that is, the history of our five institutions? As emphasized, the interpretation of manifestations of mediumship was open from the start and remained so until the closure or abandonment of one or another debate. These practices and phenomena did not begin with a decision about their correct interpretation, but through the establishment of a common space of unceasing debate within which all interpretations could stake their claims and take issue with each other. To use Susan Leigh Star’s term (Star and Griesemer 1989), in the debates taking place in the long nineteenth century, these practices and the phenomena constituted a ‘‘boundary object’’ robust enough to remain stable between various claims and contexts. At

68

Erhard Schu¨ttpelz

the same time, they remained so underdetermined that they could satisfy highly different practical and theoretical claims—especially the claim to be the catalyst of a quarrel over the proper way of institutionalizing this boundary object. In the newspaper notice that Edward Tylor cut out and pasted into his diary, we thus read as follows: ‘‘Strangers, investigators, and non-believers especially, are invited to attend, to ‘prove all things and hold fast to that which is good.’ ’’ Since 1784 and at least until the end of the heyday of hypnosis research, the practices of mediums served as a spur to such debates. In particular, the continuity of mesmeric practices formed an underdetermined, but very stable ensemble, gathering together those motivated by various sorts of curiosity, readiness to believe, disbelief, and skeptical investigation. From the beginning and extending over a century, underdetermination also characterized the conceptualization of the agency involved in what spirit mediums did: it was something that could be ascribed to unknown, imponderable natural forces (ethereal or fluid substances) or to human capacities such as a passivity on the initiator’s part, capacities that would allow these forces to accumulate and be contacted. In turn, these capacities could be identified either with a force of nature or with an elitist or egalitarian ability to interact with such forces, an ability to manifest immanent entities, nonhuman and otherworldly powers, and extrahuman persons bound to the person of the medium, all in the form of either transcendent private revelation or of ‘‘higher knowledge’’ (Zander 2009). And as was already evident at the start of the mesmerist debates, such capacities could be ascribed to fraud, or to the self-deceit of the medium, her or his impresario, or his scientific observers, or to an excitation of the imaginative faculties, considered as a source of error.

5. If we can describe the (boundary) object’s continuity with such deceptively simple words, how can we describe the loss of that continuity, the end of the great debates? One possibility for reconstruction would involve emphasizing its falling apart into the artistic, psychological, psychotherapeutic, parapsychological, and esoteric byproducts that succeeded it. But as suggested, this would certainly merely end up explaining teleologically the consolidation of each byproduct. It is no doubt possible to underscore a single explanatory factor meant to be stronger than the others, for example the vanishing from late nineteenth-century physics of ‘‘imponderables’’ such as ether and their reinterpretation in other terms. But as can be

Trance Mediums and New Media

69

easily seen in this case, isolating such a factor is usually bad historical advice: this particular example cannot be tied to the waning of debate about the practices of mediums in any definitive way. Presumably, then, we need to proceed in another way: through an effort to define what held the boundary object together through all the groupings involved in the period from 1784 to 1890 and what was cast into doubt when the shared boundary object dissolved, when it was consciously dissolved, not by all participating groups, but at least by some of the central contenders. As we have seen, what was steadily debated was the agency of the mediums, but despite all the differences between the parties, one thing was held in common: not a response to the question of how to conceptualize the relationship between human and nonhuman, natural and nonnatural causes, but rather an underscoring of the passivity and ego estrangement of mediums and their techniques. If these characteristics were disputed either principally or in specific cases—something that occurred in the Spiritualist debates through both the constant accusations of deceit and a detectivelike hardening of skepticism about Spiritualist claims—then for those participating, no authentic medium was supposed to be present, because an authentic medium was supposed to be passive, and the practices of mediums were supposed to be alien to the ego. The late apogee of this conceptual form and its practical execution was the controversy between Bernheim and Charcot about the correct categorization of ‘‘hysteria’’ and hence about Charcot’s hysterical women in the Salpetrie`re. When the justified suspicion emerged that to a considerable extent Charcot and his patients had engaged in a process of shaping the occurrences and mutually training for them in an interplay between unconscious activity and provoked passivity, other researchers (such as Bernheim) claimed that Charcot’s work had been refuted in practice and theory, rather than being confirmed, which would have been just as conceivable. This decision—‘‘hysteria cannot be researched in such a manner,’’ instead of ‘‘hysteria needs to be studied in this way, because it allows an empirical investigation of hysteria’’—was grounded in the unquestioned assumption of will-less passivity on the part of the subjects being studied. Spirit manifestations were supposed to emerge at a remove from the medium’s own will, rather than as the result of an interplay between impresario and medium, or from a no longer ego-distant, but still largely unconscious action by someone with special capacities to access unknown forces. As the example of the controversy between Bernheim and Charcot shows—and it surely will have to be restudied—until the end of the hysteria debates (and of the boom in research on hypnosis), the boundary object

70

Erhard Schu¨ttpelz

was defined by an emphasis on the passivity of mediums, an emphasis shared by all parties participating—believers, skeptics, mediums, impresarios, and researchers alike. Put more precisely, the passivity of the mediums involved a demonstration of the deepening of the gulf between action and receptivity, presenting this gulf on a stage or in a se´ance for study and interpretation. Only this deepening between action and receptivity appeared to guarantee the authenticity of the phenomenon, which is to say the ego-estranged state of the medium. In the world of show business and theater and within scientific investigations and mass-media legends of hypnotic suggestion alike, research on hypnosis seemed to guarantee such a deepening of the gulf.1 When we consider the extent to which later mediumistic sequels departed from these terms of the great debates, we can clearly see how many people were dissatisfied with this emphasis on passivity—at first without endangering the boundary object as a whole. The emergence of later esotericism is presently traced back to three Spiritualist mediums in particular, Helena P. Blavatsky, Paschal B. Randolph, and Emma Hardinge Britten. All three of these figures publicly announced their dissatisfaction with official Spiritualism’s passive orientation very early on, emphasizing instead the role of an imagination that was personally answered for, hence a new interchange between passive manifestation and medial activation that ended up exploding Spiritualism’s official egodistant stance (Hanegraaff 2006: s.v. ‘‘Blavatsky,’’ ‘‘Randolph,’’ and ‘‘Britten’’). The road thus taken led to according the imagination autonomous power, to personal magic, to the invocation of new cosmological world empires, and to shared sexual magic—all processes and operations that played no role in the debates of official transatlantic Spiritualism. And some of the most successful approaches to reinterpreting the old mesmerist practices laid emphasis on the medium’s self-activation, especially the capacity for self-healing and self-control in the ‘‘new thought’’ movement of the nineteenth century’s second half (Baier 2009, 429–40). The preconditions for this emphasis on activity—or to be more precise, on an interplay between passive manifestation and activation—were very old. Early on, magnetism had generated a category of ‘‘self-magnetization’’ (and later self-hypnotization) in which activity and passivity coincided. Subsequently, initially without affecting the shared orientation toward the passivity of the medium, this conceptual possibility became a basis for new practical and theoretical movements whose greatest success revealed itself toward the end of the nineteenth century.

71

Trance Mediums and New Media

Following the end of the great debates, a new world was present, albeit in the shadow of the old. The mediums investigated by parapsychologists were expected to continue producing evidence of the gap between their daily activity and their passivity as mediums, an expectation that was thus retained and remains unremedied in such investigations. But to a large extent, the psychoanalytic procedures following upon Bernheim’s concept of suggestibility closed the gap—a development that allowed modern psychotherapy to emerge. In contrast to what the unfortunate Charcot assumed, symptoms here no longer needed to demonstrate authentic passivity to be recognized and treated as symptoms. Psychoanalysis announced the shift that characterized the following period in a formulation both untranslatable and often translated: ‘‘Wo Es war, soll Ich werden.’’ Manifestations of an ego-alien force were meant to lose that quality through the patient’s biographical activation and self-activation, through a mutual ‘‘relation of suggestibility’’ between doctor and patient called ‘‘transference’’ and ‘‘countertransference,’’ and through an interchange of passive manifestation and verbal activation. (With Jung, this process also involved the activation of the imagination, a procedure itself resting, unmistakably, on the late nineteenth century’s esoteric activation of the imagination and consciously brought into life as the part of a philosophia perennis.) Without a doubt, too, the conception of artistic inspiration in the European avant-gardes no longer rested on the old orientation toward mesmerist, Spiritualist, hypnotic, and hysterical passivity, but rather, in line with the above, on an interchange between the provoked manifestation of an ego-estranged force or power and the activation of one’s own individual artistic imagination. This comparison suggests a general observation, tentative in nature and awaiting more precise historical scrutiny: Does the distinction laid out here apply to all earlier justifications and inspections of the practices of mediums and to all later byproducts? Did the deepening of passivity shape the common ground of the great debates, and did its gradual dissolving lead to the abandonment of the shared boundary object? In that case, a quite straightforward symmetrical history of the many prehistories and posthistories of trance mediums and their practices in the long nineteenth century would be possible. Or maybe this symmetry will turn out to be one of the many illusions to which we are subject through our retrospective ignorance.

6. At this point, at least a provisional summary is possible. In the epoch between 1784 and 1890, trance mediums and their practices formed a

72

Erhard Schu¨ttpelz

boundary object between scientific and philosophical, religious and secular, medical and aesthetic interests and group formations. This object inherited the medium’s conceptual history, from the Aristotelian cognitive medium, the medium diaphane, and its extension to all refractive media and potentially all natural elements between 1600 and 1800 and onward by way of its generalization of the basic questions of modern cosmology: What becomes of the imponderables in the philosophy of nature and the natural sciences? And what becomes of the ‘‘middle’’ (and the possibilities of communication) that mediates between human beings and God? And what is the human being that he or she may know the ‘‘unconscious’’? In several controversies, these coextensional questions addressed a shared boundary object: the claims and practices of trance mediums. After the end of the great debates on these topics, the magnitude and the very existence of the shared boundary object became disputed. It could no longer be constituted as a way to bring a series of diametrically opposing parties together for debate. Therefore, in later boundary cases, the erstwhile stability of the recognized boundary object, as manifest between 1784 and 1890, which no institution could assimilate and which indeed had sparked a comprehensive testing of its institutionalizability, corresponds to an essential instability and perplexity enduring until the present, a problem that emerges as soon as not one, but several forms of the modern reduction of the boundary object are considered together. In the long nineteenth century, secular, religious, scientific, philosophical, and therapeutic experts and amateurs could meet—especially in a ‘‘se´ance’’—around a trance medium to discuss their terms of consent and dissent. In the long twentieth century, when they do meet around a trance medium, there is not much left to define their common stakes or even their terms of debate. For this reason, the age of the great debates was not ended by progress in knowledge, but rather by a double incapacity in the era after 1890: the incapacity to establish the former boundary object under new institutional circumstances and the incapacity to embed the practices of mediums in a new authoritative scientific or epistemological synthesis (Wolf-Braun 2009). The modern concept of media has itself inherited this double incapacity, together with, idiosyncratically, the European metaphysics of the ‘‘medium.’’ Initially, this appears improbable, since the final coinage and generalization of the concept of ‘‘media’’ occurred very late—apparently only after the 1940s, as a series of terminological abbreviations along the following lines: ‘‘the media of mass communication,’’ ‘‘the mass communication media,’’ ‘‘the mass media,’’ ‘‘the media.’’ Very clearly, the meaning

Trance Mediums and New Media

73

of ‘‘media’’ was functionalistic: a ‘‘means for mass communication’’ and did not imply any metaphysical and physical ‘‘middle’’ (Hoffmann 2002, 151). In addition, starting in the late nineteenth century, trance mediums and new technical media increasingly landed on different sides of the evolutionist distribution of time, at least when a colonial confrontation between ‘‘primitive’’ religions and Western technical superiority was in play. In the wake of Edward Tylor’s ‘‘survivals,’’ trance mediums were repeatedly defined as ‘‘archaic,’’ new media as the manifestation of modern inventive power. This meant that in the course of the twentieth century, unlike the case with the practices of spirit mediums during the long nineteenth century, from mesmerism to hypnotism, any interference between trance mediums and new media was perceived not only as something composed of heterogeneous elements, but even as a hybridity of temporal orders—as the unavoidable manifestation of what Johannes Fabian has called ‘‘allochrony’’ (Fabian 1983).2 But European terminology is a stubborn matter. Between 1890 and 1940, the semantics of medium practices had by no means disappeared, even from the realm of what we now know as mass media and technical media. Considered over the entire twentieth century, the motifs of mass psychology, especially those of suggestibility and contagious suggestion, remained the sole shared interpretive basis for the impact of media in Europe and the United States (and from there, in universities worldwide). The use of these motifs has hovered between contempt and appreciation, functionalization and the representation of media effects in the popular media. Interestingly, these motifs found their first generalization in the waning period of research on hypnosis: as a mythological and categorical generalization of the practices of mediums for ‘‘the crowd’’ or ‘‘the masses,’’ the bugbear of the bourgeois epoch (Van Ginneken 1992). Even the assessment of what constituted the technology of the new (technical) media was affected by these ideas in a basic way. It was connected in this manner to the suggestible popular ‘‘masses,’’ but also to the anonymous effects of movies, of the press, eventually of radio, and of every form of technical innovation. In this regard, it may be helpful to cite from one succinct summary of the ‘‘media theory before media theory’’: Hypnosis delimits a field upon which modern science, technology, and magic meet and blend, but also mutually differentiate themselves. Simultaneously a trance technique within and outside of Europe, a favorite carnival attraction, and a scientifically authorized measure, the discursive repertoire of the hypnotic, extending from suggestion to somnambulism, advances to a universal cultural interpretive model of media effects.

74

Erhard Schu¨ttpelz

Closely tied to it is the magic of technology, which ubiquitously . . . spreads outward. All rhetorical registers of the wondrous are brought into play in the occasionally slightly anxious hymns to new technical achievements. Also, in those places where manifestations of cliche´d exhaustion are clearly apparent within this discourse, it preserves an inkling of the split in human personality between subjective power and the asubjective forces conjured in the se´ances of Spiritualism. . . . Technology and magic rather operate on the same side: as efforts at empowerment and admission of impotence. This impotence is most apparent where technology itself rises from a communicative instrument with asubjective powers to an autonomous and, in the worst case, incalculable force. (Ku¨mmel and Lo¨ffler 2002, 556, my translation)

In the United States as elsewhere, when the means and techniques of mass communication were generalized into ‘‘media,’’ they found themselves in a discourse, already honed for over fifty years, of crowd effects and media effects and in a network of basic ideas concerning manipulability and suggestibility (Peters and Simonson 2004). In his conceptual history of mediums and media, Stefan Hoffmann has posed the question, regarding the imponderable forces represented as fluids, such as magnetism, of ‘‘the whereabouts of the suppressed semantic aspects connected with the fluid medium. Have they disappeared together with the ether medium, or has the word medium looked for new referents for this semantic field?’’ (Hoffmann 2002, 136, my translation). A possible answer concerning these modern ‘‘whereabouts’’ might be: Starting in the nineteenth century, the medium’s physical and physiological conceptualization of these forces and substances migrated to a sociopsychological register where they were categorized as mass-medial phenomena from the start. Between Europe and North America, we can trace a continuity in the modern discussion of media effects with origins in the epoch of hypnotism and its byproducts. And the ‘‘allochronism’’ of European and nonEuropean trance mediums—the archaization of trance practices, their irreconcilability with the European understanding of modernism from the late nineteenth century onward—led to every mass-medial ‘‘hypnotization’’ appearing to be potentially ‘‘archaic.’’ In this way, each of the new mass media (cinema, radio, even television) loomed as the figure of a return of the archaic—and of the repressed—in the cloak of modern technology and contemporary social forms, including, in a special manner, the emergence of media theory in the writings of Edmund Carpenter and Marshall McLuhan (Carpenter et al. 1953–57).

Trance Mediums and New Media

75

But in other respects, as well, the actual breakthrough of media theory in the 1950s and 1960s, the insistence that ‘‘the medium is the message,’’ reveals itself as a downright uncanny cryptomnestic achievement, comprehensible only against the foil of the concept of the medium in the old metaphysical tradition. McLuhan is presumably the only remaining media theorist read throughout the different domains of cultural studies (McLuhan [1964] 1994), and apparently because his theoretical motifs have always been treated with a mix of denigration and secret adaptation. As a result of this polemical reception process, the question has rarely been posed of why McLuhan’s intentionally chaotic texts have revealed so much consistency and had so strong an impact. Leading us back to the epoch of spirit mediums, the history of its concepts and of mass-psychological media helps us better assess this consistency. For McLuhan, the technical media are above all ‘‘extensions of the senses’’ and of the nervous system: they are technical media of perception. In McLuhan’s worldview, new media and artistic and journalistic medial work alter sense perception. Media are all-pervasive human environments and have been since the nineteenth century, constituting an ‘‘electric’’ environment first made possible through the modern ‘‘medium without content,’’ artificial electric light. Media run through the human body; they ‘‘massage’’ it—imponderably, one could say. They are not ‘‘means,’’ but rather the message itself. And as analyzed by media theory, human beings become hypnotized through a sundering from and extension of their own persons by the new technological forms. They are in a state of ‘‘narcosis’’ (McLuhan [1964] 1994). Without wanting to be repetitive: the slogan ‘‘the medium is the message’’ and its media inherited the medium’s conceptual history, from the Aristotelian medium of perception, the light of the medium diaphane, and its extension to all refractive media and potentially all natural elements between 1600 and 1800—in this case, especially electricity—and onward by way of its generalization to the basic questions of modern cosmology. McLuhan’s media theory (and his Catholicism) placed all these elements within a new kaleidoscope, where they were, however, thoroughly concretized in the technical artifacts and new media of the twentieth century. They were understood as media of perception, as ‘‘refractions’’ of previous perceptions and their medial practices, capable of again serving as a means of cognition through, above all, a conscious combination of medial ‘‘hybridizations.’’ They were understood as the totalization of an old eighteenth-century imponderable, electricity, as an imponderable environment or an all-pervasive sphere composed of several environments, as

76

Erhard Schu¨ttpelz

a cognitive means of illumination (appropriating an old emblem in the new electric light), and as a new theory of (media) hypnosis and its ‘‘narcosis,’’ a phenomenon subsuming all of us in our daily use of the media and especially in our confrontation with the new media, as long as we are not granted the artistic or epistemological means to objectify its powers. The present concept of media thus not only has its prehistory in an old metaphysical tradition, but to a remarkable degree, it is tied to that tradition’s aftermath—as we have seen, to a cluster of practices and theories involving an intersection between trance mediums and imponderable media unfolding over the long nineteenth century. With more knowledge of the prehistory and posthistory of mediums, the historical sequences at work could be treated symmetrically, that is, beyond the treacherous assumptions of success and failure. In this way, both the practices of nineteenth-century mediums and the present-day interchange between trance mediums and new media could be embedded in a longer longue dure´e, and maybe we could escape what was for a long time considered ‘‘the history of an error’’ (Peters 1999, 63). Translated by Joel Golb

Absence and the Mediation of the Audiovisual Unconscious Martin Zillinger

Part of the basic inventory of most concepts of media is that media overcome time and space. In the context of religion, this is true in two ways: first, the ritual shaping of agency is restructured (see Stolow 2005); and second, religion, as mediation (De Vries 2001), ties the use of technological media back to existing cultural, ritual, and body techniques. Technical media are integrated into established chains of media and media practices (Behrend 2003a). Many scholars note that in this process, media seem to move into the background. Although constitutive of the conveyed experience, they are nevertheless perceived as becoming part of the transcendental, operating beyond mediation, promising unmediated experience of an other world or some kind of divine presence. (See Meyer 2009.) Even if this movement of mediatization and immediacy can be convincingly depicted in many ethnographic examples and also finds a theological reference as kenotic mediation in the Christian context (De Abreu 2009), the technological fantasy and fabric of immediacy (see Morris, ‘‘On the Subject of Spirit Mediumship in the Age of New Media,’’ in this volume) does not seem to be applicable to all religious media practices. In various contexts, not only can we note a marked ambivalence toward the creation of new public realms that are perceived as distorting the intimacy of immediate experiences (see Behrend, ‘‘Spaces of Refusal: Iconoclastic Spirits

77

78

Martin Zillinger

and the Technical Medium of Photography,’’ in this volume and Van den Port 2006), but beyond that, fundamental theological assumptions appear to play a role in how transcendence and immanence can be shaped and translated with the aid of technical media. (See Eisenlohr 2009.) In their comparative research on media practices among participants of Pentecostal churches and traditional religious groups in Ghana, Birgit Meyer and Marleen de Witte describe how technical media are used to invoke and produce the transcendental for ‘‘binding and bonding’’ believers across time and space (Meyer 2006b, De Witte 2009). As they convincingly describe, the successful staging of charismatic personae and religious power in (mass) media in the Christian churches relies on producing an ‘‘immediate’’ experience of divine forces. The representatives of ‘‘traditional’’ African religions, however, find it difficult to mediate and mediatize their practices of spirit worship, although these are based on a great deal of religious mediation work (De Witte 2009, 204). This clearly shows that a media theory growing out of the self-abnegating transcendence of the Christian revelatory religion and its theological theorizations cannot be applied unproblematically in all contexts. Although the notion of immediacy was brought productively into play to investigate the ‘‘aisthetics’’1 of media practices (see Meyer 2008) and to open the view for media techniques that operate less through representation (print media) than through presentation (audiovisual media) (see Eisenlohr 2009), in this essay, I would like to draw attention once again to the mediators and operations involved in audiovisual mediation techniques. To this end and as an example, I have chosen a ritual that has to bridge the spatial and temporal separation between the implementers and the recipients of the ritual in order to enable ritual interaction and the conveyance of ritual efficacy. According to any theory of immediacy, mediation would have to move into the background to intensify ritual presence. According to my informants from the Moroccan trance networks however, mediation techniques are in the forefront as the transnational ritual of the Moroccan seer (sˇu¯wa¯f ) unfolds through the circulation of persons, signs, and things. In this healing ritual, a space of ritual exchange between the world of demons (gˇinn) and that of humans is created and shaped by means of the exchange of sacrificial gifts and the power of blessing. With the aid of technological media, this space expands across spatiotemporal boundaries and includes trance adepts, family members, and people suffering from possession who are not present in the time and space of the ritual itself. These absentees may have migrated from Morocco, but may have

Absence and the Audiovisual Unconscious

79

need of the healing rituals or may want to invoke ties of closeness by contributing in various ways to the ritual arrangements. Even if different ontological and social worlds are indeed mediated here and the corporeal reactions of absent patients are anticipated and may (in my observation) also be effected, it is not initially and solely transcendence that is induced and that becomes ‘‘immediately’’ experienced through media. (See Meyer 2006b and 2009, 12 and 26 n. 13.) Rather, for migrants and stay-at-homes alike, the point of their media ritual is the mediation of absence—biographical absence that finds a correspondence in both ritual dissociation and spatial distance.

Trance Rituals, Possession, and Healing in Morocco Among the many forms of religious practice in Morocco, there are three brotherhoods that are in great demand to heal states of possession: the ‘Isa¯wa, the H . amadsˇa and the Gna¯wa.2 They work on the demons (gˇinn) who cause these crisislike states and on the possessed people alike by bringing about ecstatic states (h.a¯l / ah.wa¯l), and to do so, they use the methods of Islamic mysticism, Sufism:3 d.ikr, raqs, and sama¯’. Although in the tradition of Sufism the communal intonation of the name of God (d.ikr), communal dancing (raqs), and musically shaped and accompanied praising of God, the Prophet, and the saints (sama¯’) bring about the ecstatic states that can culminate in a direct encounter with God, the idea of such an encounter is alien to these brotherhoods. As Vincent Crapanzano, in his seminal study on the H . amadsˇa, emphasized, his interlocutors ‘‘would consider any suggestion that their h.a¯l is a mystical union or communion with God, or their saints, as blasphemous’’ (Crapanzano 1973, 189). Although adherents of the ‘Isa¯wa understand the h.a¯l as a divinely effected state (h.a¯l rabba¯ni), for the participants in the ritual, it is not the self-revealing and, in the trance, unmediated presence of God, but rather the multiple transitions between immanence and transcendence that they live through in d.ikr (the rhythmic intonation of the name of God), in the communal h.adra (the trance dance, raqs), and in the performance of music and recited poetry (sama¯’), to which they attribute the power of blessing (baraka).4 Baraka materializes through the body techniques of the trance dancers. By mastering their affliction and the painful contact with ‘‘other’’ forces, the dancers establish the divine or demonic power that brings about al-khiya¯r,

80

Martin Zillinger

the gift of divine bounty and goodness. This goodness then can be distributed in supplications and literally rubbed off through material contact, extending to all aspects of life and turning into a blessing for all. The early Sufi literature already claims that techniques of d.ikr serve to make the practitioner of d.ikr lose his awareness of himself and even of the d.ikr. But the adepts are thereby ‘‘initially thrown back and forth between the . . . absence from d.ikr and presence in d.ikr,’’ as the East Persian mystic alQushairıˆ writes in an eleventh-century guide to individual meditation. (Quoted from the Tartıˆb as-suluˆk in Halm [1978] 1984, 51.) The experience of alienation, the dissociation of the subjective individual, stands at the beginning of the ecstasy techniques practiced among the ‘Isa¯wa and H . amadsˇa during their communal rituals. This is a disquieting, in part painful, and occasionally dangerous process. When ritual participants ‘‘move away from what is present’’ (keig.ibu ‘ala/min al- wu¯gˇu¯d), ‘‘the h.a¯l beats them’’ (tdirbhum), and the gˇinn take form in them and have to be acted out in wild trances. In this process, the spirits are pacified and let go of the afflicted. In cases of extreme symptoms of possession, special healing rituals are necessary to institute the relationship between a particular person and one or more gˇinn who are identified as the source of the affliction. These rituals are carried out with the aid of the brotherhoods. The afflicted become patients—not only of a seer, but of the ritual community as a whole.5 The Ritual Space of Exchange A healing ritual, in Moroccan Arabic, lı¯la, consists essentially in mediating between the desires and demands of the gˇinn and humans and in ritually shaping this space of exchange between this world and the beyond cor˘ inn are spirits who can be good or evil and can help or harm rectly. G people. They don’t really belong to the beyond, but according to the holy scriptures, were created by God from fire and live with humans on earth, separated by a curtain. There are various ways to enter into contact with the gˇinn whereby it is generally the gˇinn who make themselves present to people and trigger initial crises, thereby necessitating regular rituals. The successful mediation between the world of the gˇinn and that of people presupposes the identification of the particular gˇinn who is possessing the patient or who is suitable for a request for aid. Seers—who are themselves possessed, but who have gained mastery over their possession—are consulted and, with the aid of their powerful spirits, force the gˇinn to reveal their identities.6

Absence and the Audiovisual Unconscious

81

To ensure contact with the world of the gˇinn, the supplicants bring in a rooster as an initial sacrifice on an offering plate and the seer spills its blood, opening the assembly space of the demons (ftah. dak al-mgˇ ma‘), because gˇinn like and eat blood. The offering plate (t.beq) also bears the nefqa—an assortment of examples of offerings for the gˇinn: clothes in the gˇinn’s colors, incense (bhu¯r), and food. The term nefqa traditionally also ˘ applies to the basket exchanged between two families to seal a betrothal, and this offering aims to bring about the association with the gˇ inn by bringing order to the relationship in the further course of the treatment.7 The rooster’s blood is spilled as a sacrifice to address the gˇinn. After the ritual expert determines the identity of the spirit that is tormenting the patient, he tries to suggest an agreement. The gˇinn may demand sacrifices, recurring rituals, or a pilgrimage in order to enter into a positively altered relationship with the supplicant. If it then transpires that a lı¯la of a certain brotherhood should be held, the clients hire a seer to carry out a ritual in accordance with the required form. The seer, as a person himself (or herself ) possessed, is obligated to sacrifice regularly and often integrates several clients into his or her own ritual cycle, invites further trance adepts, and contributes resources. In the course of the ritual, the gˇinn is to be pacified by employing additional sacrifices and performing trance dances. Its harmful power is thereby to be transformed into blessing power—baraka—with which the psychological, physical, and social crises of possession can be mastered. A positively shaped relationship promises all kinds of successes for the person who turns to the gˇinn. The gˇinn then become givers (al-gˇwa¯d), those who, in the words of the formulas of praise, are to be propitiated by ‘‘the tokens’’ of the sacrifice and in exchange are to give ‘‘from abundance.’’ Consider, for example a ritual that Tami8 —chairman of a folklore association for spiritual music, head of various brotherhoods, an entrepreneur in Moroccan festival and ritual culture, and a seer—carried out for a client and her family in 2006 during the celebrations of the saints’ festival (mu¯sim) of Sı¯dı¯ ‘Alı¯. For the occasion of the annual mu¯sim, tens of thousands of people make a pilgrimage to the mausoleum of the two founding saints of the H . amadsˇa and visit the large nearby grotto of the powerful, vindictive demon (gˇinnı¯a) associated with them, ‘Aisˇa Qandı¯sˇa. Among the pilgrims are many migrants to other countries who return to experience the charged atmosphere of the sacred/ecstatic pilgrimage in the Zerhoun massif and to have their crises or those of their loved ones treated. Throughout eleven months of the year, the villages have developed into a prospering pilgrimage center. (See Crapanzano 1973.) As the festival has

82

Martin Zillinger

been covered by the mass media and as it has become a point of reference in circulating video clips, the ritual networks have expanded to include Moroccans outside Morocco, and the festival itself has continually expanded. (See Dumont and Hermanns 2003.)9 In the ten days of the festival in 2006, Tami cooperated with various brotherhoods to meet the demand for ritual services. He reports that he took in 6,000 euros, which is four times the annual income of a simple craftsman in Morocco. The principal of the ritual examined here was a woman who had escaped her impoverished situation in Morocco by marrying and who returned at least twice a year from abroad or, when unable to return, still commissioned rituals to fulfill her ritual obligations. By choosing Tami as her ritual agent, she becomes his client and patient at the same time, since she asks him to use his knowledge and his relationship to the gˇinn in order to treat her affliction and guide her through her ritual possession. In 2006, various family members also contributed to the ritual costs and carried out sacrifices; with her assistance, many of them have built up livelihoods outside of Morocco. For the elaborate ritual, Tami collaborated with a woman friend who also is a seer.

Ritual Manifestations In this ritual, the gˇinnı¯a ‘Aisˇa Qandı¯sˇa is addressed in the form of ‘Aisˇa ‘Isa¯wı¯ya, that is, it is associated with the founding saint of the ‘Isa¯wa in Meknes, and therefore, the ‘Isa¯ wa of the West (‘Isa¯ wa diel g. arb) are involved. These brotherhoods with a peasant background developed their traditions in the fertile plain between the foothills of the central Atlas Mountains and the Atlantic seacoast. The rituals of the Western ‘Isa¯wa are characterized by ecstatic communal dances that include songs of lamentation, ecstatic d.ikr techniques, and animal trances in which the adepts choreographically act out the (gender-specific) trances of lions, jackals, and camels. (See Zillinger 2010.) In this lı¯la, ‘Aisˇa ‘Isa¯wı¯ya demands the sacrifice of the frı¯sa, in which, in the trance of the lion, some adepts tear apart a sheep and bolt down parts of the bloody liver. The gˇinn can already manifest themselves during the communal trance dances of the ‘Isa¯wa. Then they pull over the dancers (keilibsu¯hum) who have stepped out of the line of dancers to act out their ‘‘possessor’’ in a wild trance alone in front of the musicians. In the second part of the lı¯la examined here, a brotherhood of the Western H . amadsˇa goes into action; they are famous for pacing off the demonic

Absence and the Audiovisual Unconscious

83

spaces in healing rituals. In the trance, each gˇinn claims a specific space, literally a ‘‘room’’ (Moroccan bı¯ t; plural, biu¯ t); to be precise, there are seven biu¯ t, in which each demon is venerated in different shapes and addressed by means of the color of the clothing, the kind of incense burned, and certain foods and stimulants shared and sacrificed. In this part of the ritual, too, the demons have to be brought to depiction in ritually ordered manner, thereby transforming the connection between gˇinn and the patient into a ritually ordered association. At the beginning, when the gˇinn is affected by the music, it torments the dancer, and the ritual experts have to become active to use verbal (song), material (incense), and ritual (music, dance instruction) techniques to transpose this disordered, painful encounter into body techniques that conform to the course of the ritual. The incense characteristic of the gˇinn, in which the dancer is wrapped, the clothing in appropriate colors that is laid over the dancer, the songs sung in his ear, and certain essences such as henna or water that are smeared on and poured over the dancer not only address the gˇinn, but also open and transform the space and the body of the patient for the demon. In taking possession of the patient, the gˇinn manifests himself or herself in time with its rı¯h. (melody, literally ‘‘wind’’), the music of the brotherhood. The gˇinn dons (libs) the trance dancer or rides on him (rkeb) until, pacified, he lets the patient fall and goes on his way. After the possessed patients fall into a cataleptic rigidity, they begin to feel better; their exhausted faces often radiate calm and relaxation. Afterward, the sacrificial plates and animals are carried in a procession with the brotherhood, first to the sacred site of the saint Sı¯dı¯ ‘Alı¯ and then to the shrine of the demon ‘Aisˇa Qandı¯sˇa. There, the two seers and their patients fall again and again into a wild trance. At the shrine, the sacrificial animals are slaughtered, and the other offerings are deposited.

Ritual Media Tami made a video of this ritual for his clients.10 In what follows, I analyze the initial sequences of this video in detail. In the long beginning sequences, wishes for blessings are superimposed on images of fertile landscapes (see Figures 1a–c), of Tami, and of his brotherhood. These wishes for blessings can be read as a summary of the supplications that are spoken during the ritual for the clients and visitors. Irrespective of individual expressions, these wishes are kept primarily general and aim at (material) success (allah i‘ateik al nagˇa¯h.), alleviations (allah

84

Martin Zillinger

Figures 1a–c. Ritual media: introduction with fertile landscapes and supplications (video stills). isehel ‘aleik), and health or healing (allah isˇ a¯ fik). Immediately after this introduction, the ritual video per se begins with footage of the initial sacrifices, thereby marking the ritual happenings as a healing ritual. (See Welte 1990, 160.) The camera begins recording the ritual and—as we will see—enters into it as the gˇinn are addressed and a connection is created linking them, the sacrificial animals, and the patients. A total of seven clients are being treated, and for this purpose, eight demons are addressed. What is decisive is that the patients are brought into physical contact with the sacrificial animals in some way in order to associate the patients, their sacrificial offerings, and the addressees of the sacrifices. To this end, each patient, when present, is placed on a chair, and the plate with offerings is put on his or her lap. The sacrificial goat is placed across these nefqa, and then the two leaders of the ritual put the animal on the patient’s shoulders. Sometimes this is repeated a few times. Meanwhile fua¯teh., supplications, are spoken and the gˇinn addressed. However, in this ritual, of the seven patients, four are not personally present. As we will see, the video nonetheless serves as a way to integrate

Absence and the Audiovisual Unconscious

85

86

Martin Zillinger

them into the ritual. Because these patients are physically absent, a sacrificial animal employed for each of them is brought into contact with an item of clothing or nightgown, and with two of them, photos are also used. These objects function as media to enable cooperation and to constitute the space of ritual exchange through which ritual blessing (baraka) is conveyed beyond the immediate time and place of the ritual.11 The clients sent these utensils to Tami beforehand.

Ritual Media: Objects In conversation, Tami underscored that this personalization of the sacrifice for absent patients is indispensable: ‘‘They [the sacrificers] couldn’t attend; they sent money and their photos and things. They then tell me that I should sacrifice for them. It’s important to show the photos, so that the gˇinn knows who it comes from . . . they have to have put on [their things] before, they have to have sweated into them, and they mustn’t have been washed.’’ The substitution for an absent person must fulfill several requirements before it can be ritually implemented. The person must have sent money to pay for the sacrifice made in his or her name. And the person must send a piece of clothing and/or a photo enabling the absent patient to be identified. Both the sacrifice and the media that substitute for the sacrificer—the photo and the nightgown—have to be integrated into the ritual order. The photo and the nightgown must be draped beside the sacrificial plate and sprinkled with rosewater, just as it is done with a patient who is present. (See Figure 2.) For the baraka of the sacrifice to be transferred to the person, the photo must be rubbed along the side of the sacrificial animal (Figure 3). To associate the gˇinn and the clients more closely, the sacrificial blood from which the gˇinn has drunk is later rubbed onto the clothing and the photo: as Tami explained to me, ‘‘Either you rub the photo along the side of the billy goat or you let the animal walk on the photos and the clothing. . . . [After making the sacrifice], you smear the photo and the clothing with the blood . . . [that is] important!’’ This action, too, is analogous to the action performed on present persons, on whose forehead, arms, and legs the sacrificial blood is smeared. With special requests or extreme crises, photos and clothing are left at the shrine as ‘a¯r—as a gift and simultaneously as a conditional curse (see Westermarck [1926] 1968), to fulfill the gˇinn’s claims and to obligate him to make a gift in return. In other cases,

Absence and the Audiovisual Unconscious

87

Figure 2. Ritual media: sacrificial basket with photo (video still). Note on the left the vessel with rosewater in the hand of the seer. the objects are stored in the house of the seer until the client picks them up again and personally brings them to the shrine, buries them in a deserted spot, or throws them into the sea. In short, to integrate the various actors into the ritual process and bring forth a successful ritual order, it is indispensable to establish a relationship between the gˇinn and the possessed person, thereby translating the state of affliction, brought about by a gˇinn striking his victim and causing a physical and psychological crisis, into a relationship of giving and taking. For this reason, the ritual needs to be inaugurated with a sacrifice by means of which the giving patient presents himself or herself to the gˇinn and the latter identifies the former by accepting the gift. If the patient is absent, the gˇinn is presented an object pars pro toto (sweat) or a substitute (photo) for the patient from whom the sacrifice has been offered. Tami assured me that the gˇinn who, for example, is tormenting the person in France feels this treatment simultaneously in Europe. Both patient and demon are far away from the site where the sacrifice is performed and simultaneously integrated into and present in the ritual order.

88

Martin Zillinger

Figure 3. Camera fa¯th.a (video still). Note the seer rubbing the photo over the goat. From an ethnological standpoint, these forms of contact magic are not unusual. The photo seems to supplement the use of personal objects and to be integrated into a ‘‘chain of media’’ that serves the ritual translation between worlds and sites. (See Behrend 2003a.) As media of ritual operations, they not only associate gˇinn and patient, but also integrate a large number of actors. Among these are the family members who bring the photos and pieces of clothing and then take them back again, but also other adepts from the ritual network and all kinds of people who have brought back or been given ba¯ru¯k, gifts of blessings, from the ritual: candles, small hand mirrors, mascara brushes, hair barrettes, clothes, but also food and materials such as galena (gray lead sulfide, also known as ‘‘lead glance’’ or ‘‘potter’s ore’’ used as eye makeup), henna, seeds, and incense. Henna rolled in the saliva of a seer is stored between clothes in the closet, while candles are lit each week and incense is burned. Like the cosmetics applied to the body, their purpose is to repel evil and to preserve the baraka of the pilgrimage. The objects extend the ritual process and integrate the ritual community into everyday life outside and beyond the time and place of the ritual itself.

Absence and the Audiovisual Unconscious

89

Ritual Media: The Camera The videos of the rituals that circulate among and are shown to family members and the broader social networks serve similar purposes. They stabilize the ritual process through time and space and create a community of ritual cooperation. Ethnology has not yet adequately treated what can be called the ‘‘double translation’’ work of the film camera (see Latour 2005, 106–9) that occurs during the recording of the ritual acts and that, as actant, plays a role in the construction of the ritual. The camera creates its own contextuality and is ‘‘indissolubly interwoven with the history of the collective, which would look quite different’’ without this quasi-object (Rottenburg 2008, 410). Because the actions of the filmed ritual are performed into the camera, using the camera helps implement a simultaneity in this spatially disparate situation in that it connects actors in different sites whose cooperation is constitutive of the ritual. As further analysis will show, viewers are addressed who will see the video at a future point in time and be thus integrated into a ritual, which will, when the video is viewed, lie in the past. The separation of past, present and future collapses. It is worth noting that the camera enters into the ritual when the space of exchange between gˇinn and patient is first established and captures the identification of the patient. Only after the sacrificial animal is integrated into the ritual process for an absent client do the two experts turn to the camera. They stand to the right and left of a chair in whose middle the sacrificial plate is placed, on which there is the photo of an absent patient—a girl about fourteen years old. Tami has the sacrificial goat, already paid for on behalf of the pictured girl, brought into the room. Together with the seer, he places the goat in the middle of the plate, and his colleague signals him to turn to the camera for the fa¯th.a. The praisings, invocations, and supplications of the fa¯th.a open up a sacred space extending, on the one side, between him, the seer accompanying him, and the chair with the sacrificial plate, the photo, and the sacrificial goat, and, on the opposite side, the camera. (See Figure 4.) The seer speaks the praises directly into the camera (Figure 3). For the participants of a fa¯th.a, the doors between this world and the beyond open up in this sacred space (El Tom 1985, 421), a space also marked acoustically by praise of the Prophet. Then the seer begins rubbing the photo over the sacrificial animal. With rapid movements, she touches the animal’s back and head and then, in expansive circling gestures, rubs the photo over its sides. Then together they turn the goat, and the photo is rubbed across its head again. Finally the seer holds the photo in front of

90

Martin Zillinger

the camera and blesses it, intoning again a fa¯th.a. Then she folds it in a nightgown and gives it to the girl’s relatives, who are present, and they deposit it at the shrine later that night. The Camera Fa¯ th. a In carrying out the fa¯ th. a, the gˇ inn and the patient are thus addressed equally and are associated with each other via the sacrifice. The ritual thereby becomes a media ritual in the emphatic sense, in that the camera executes a doubled or twofold movement of substitution. The camera substitutes for the patient in the ritual, just as the video provides the patient with a substitute for the ritual: without the camera, this fa¯th.a would not be spoken, and neither the gˇinn nor the patient would be addressed.12 While the photo is being rubbed along the body of the sacrificial animal, the gˇinn is addressed. At my request, Tami repeats a supplication he makes for a client: ‘‘She is happy with the virtuous ones [the gˇinn], she gives to you from the little, give her from the wealth, smooth the path of her destiny, make it lighter, and carry out her interest.’’ Closer examination of the way in which the space of ritual exchange opens up in this process shows that we must distinguish between the fa¯th.a through the medium of the sacrificial animal (the actual supplication) and the fa¯th.a via the medium of the camera (the blessings). The first fa¯th.a is carried out in the here and now with the aid of the photo and reaches the gˇinn directly, while the fa¯th.a for the patient aims at the future, that is, at a point when he or she will watch the video, usually in company. For the patient, this means that at that future moment she will bring to mind that she was present and treated in the ritual. Through this work of mediation, she participates in the h.a¯l, the ritual preparation of the participants, and can hope to realize its power of blessing in her daily life. For Tami, the conveying of the h.a¯l, the trance experience, is especially important in the interaction with his patient by means of the camera: There are those who want to see their things, [and no one can ask me] have you carried out [the ritual] or not. Then [when watching the video] they are overwhelmed by the h.a¯l and she weeps . . . with the power, how much she misses her country, she . . . sees Lalla ‘Aisˇa and the mu¯sim and all of that, then she weeps until her possessors [mlu¯k (the gˇinn)] come, then the demons enter them.

As Tami adds, the videos serve as proof of the proper use of funds—the commissioning party can check whether the ritual has been performed and

Absence and the Audiovisual Unconscious

91

the sacrifice carried out. Nonetheless, it is the expectation of the corresponding emotional states that is repeatedly underscored in conversation and that the recipients confirm with outbreaks of tears and displays of gooseflesh in front of the television set. Since evoking emotional states in the participants is part of the ritual order of these trance rituals, this (expected) physical response also integrates the patient into the community of ritual practice.

Figure 4. The ritual space of exchange of the camera fa¯th.a.

92

Martin Zillinger

The Mediation of Absence Thus, the affectively charged absence of the patient and the distance between the patient and the ritual community lie at the center of the ritual treatment as implemented by the technical medium. It is possible that the interest of the migrants living outside Morocco in the ritual topography in and around Meknes develops differently through their life cycles and may depend on, for example, relationships of social obligation in their home country or the social and psychological situation in the context of their current residence. Increasingly organized in a transnational space, the rituals center not just on the affectively charged experience of absence—of Heimweh, or homesickness—but also on ambivalent feelings of loss and alienation. The migrants’ feeling of ‘‘nostalgia’’ corresponds to feelings of social and psychological ruptures that are ritually processed in the neighborly context of the brotherhoods. Michael Gilsenan characterizes these rituals as ‘‘shot through’’ with a ‘‘nostalgic expectation, a dream or fantasy of grace that has before and may again suddenly strike’’ (Gilsenan 1990, 113).13 The term ‘‘nostalgic expectation’’ aptly describes the longing for an experience of ritual ‘‘intimacy’’14 during a nightlong ritual, a longing brought about by the corporeal practices and aisthetic modes of perception that are shared by the members of these closely knit ritual networks.15 The ritual techniques of individual and communal trance are strongly connected with a longing for a place of origin, al as.l, a term comprising a sense of roots and emotional attachment. Sharing a common aesthetic style in religious ceremonies and inducing and expressing shared moods makes people feel at home, as Birgit Meyer and Jojada Verrips remind us (Meyer and Verrips 2008, 28). It is through the experience of dissociation in the trance and the ritual treatment of absence that this common aisthetic style is created and ‘‘affective directness’’ is generated. (See De Abreu 2009, 180.) During a ritual night of the ‘Isa¯ wa of the West, there are roughly four ritual sequences in which trances occur and through which absence becomes mediated, with the experience of absence itself becoming the medium of ecstatic states—the d.ikr, the tehla¯l, the h.adra, and the gˇidba. All four ritual techniques emphasize, lack, loss, and foresakenness. In thinking of God, in the d.ikr, one contemplates one’s distance from God; in the tehla¯l, one laments in poetic verses the forsakenness of human beings; in the communal dancing leading gradually into the trance, the h.adra, one seeks to leave behind ‘‘what is given’’; and in the h.adra and in the gˇidba, the wild possession trance, one experiences the absence of the ego.16

Absence and the Audiovisual Unconscious

93

In what follows, I will describe in detail the body and ritual techniques through which absence becomes mediated: in the d.ikr, men and women sit together in a circle and bob their bodies back and forth during the recitation of the hizb, a compilation of sacred verses handed down by the founding saint of the brotherhood to his followers to praise god. Their voices thereby grow louder and louder until they are downright shouting at each other. Some of them are regularly shaken by sobbing, some have fluid running from their mouth, nose, and eyes. As my interlocutor explained it, the experience of god-forsakenness, which is part of the mystical experience between absence and presence in the d.ikr, is translated into the experience of social losses: It is called (ktsma) al-hamra rabbania (the divine drunkenness). You become ˘ drunk with the dikr Allah. You fall into a trance (literally, you move away from what is present: ktg.ı¯b ‘ala al-wugˇu¯d ). At this moment, you weep involuntarily. You think of the old people who have already died at this time. . . . There is this h.enna, it is passed around [and a little of it is smeared in everyone’s palms], then you don’t find them [the dead], then you weep for them.

In the tehla¯l, as well, which often begins immediately after the hizb, social loss is lamented in invocations (‘aı¯u¯d). For this, men (and sometimes women) stand upright in the room and enter into a dialogue of laments. It is important that those present know each other, so that they take up the situation of the adepts who sit in close circles around them. These hela¯ la call upon the saint of the brotherhood and lament their own deceased and those of the others present; they weep over the death of their mothers or of a child, but they also narrate other feelings and problems: about friends who don’t appreciate the value of friendship, about deserted houses, about being scattered in migration, and about the loss of affluence. Often, the hela¯la sing or shout the laments onomatopoetically, their repertoire ranging from presenting the verses almost unintelligibly, hardly articulating any words, to clearly pronounced poetry. Often a few tones of their plaintive cries and the invocation of the saint suffice to reduce the attendees to tears. (See Bruˆnel 1926, 120.) In these repeated sequences, the space is filled with weeping and sobbing; men and women tremble, totter, cling to the clothing of those around them, and begin to scream. Often, toward the end of the tehla¯l, the gˇinn seizes the participants of the ritual. Mastering the possession thus demands living through the alienation and ritual distancing of the self. With the arrival of the gˇinn,

94

Martin Zillinger

the participants in the ritual may now fall into the trance of the camel or of the lion, which they act out in an elaborate trance choreography. Also, the gˇinn are ‘‘transferred’’ directly to the musicians, who now begin playing. The brotherhood’s adepts form a semicircle, and the leader of the dance, the h.adra, rhythmically guides them into the h.a¯l, the mystic state of communal dissociation. When the adepts hear ‘‘their’’ melody, the melody that addresses ‘‘their’’ gˇinn, they often cry out, and they walk, crawl, or leap forward toward the musicians as if by a will not their own. Their limbs twitch wildly; they fall into the gˇedba, the wild trance. Often, trance is induced by moving the limbs in opposite directions; they throw their upper bodies forward and their heads rapidly backward, and then, in rapid movements, they begin throwing their bodies and heads up and down. But the melody, the rı¯h. that invokes the appearance of the gˇinn, must first be found. The musicians let their sequences of tones ‘‘ramble about’’ in long variations until they have found a rı¯h., with which they can ‘‘seize’’ the gˇinn and cause it to appear visibly in the movements of the dancers’ bodies. The raising of the gˇinn often proceeds in eruptive twitchings that must be brought into the rhythm of the music and the dancers’ communal movements. In the beginning, the people may resist their h.a¯l. This is when the h.a¯l then beats them, it is said, and they are held fast, for they attempt to flee. Often, members of the brotherhood take positions to the left and right of their wildly twitching patients and force their bodies to move to the rhythm. Practiced trance dancers also support each other by linking arms with another and by jointly transposing the demon’s powers into an ordered movement. They simultaneously sing sorrowful melodies into the ears of those they accompany in the plunge into possession, along with invocations of the saint: ‘‘ja ba¯ba¯ sı¯dı¯ [invocation of the saint], ja habı¯bı¯ [my darling], you have gone [msˇı¯tı¯] and left me behind [halı¯tı¯].’’ The gˇinn takes ‘‘direct’’ form in the body of the dancers, and they fall into gˇidba. Mastering the possession demands living through the alienation and ritual distancing of the self. Baraka is generated after the gˇinn has left the dancers again. The experience of trance, therefore, is basically an experience of estrangement. In the course of dissociation, the possessed person experiences the source of his or her perception and agency as something other than himself or herself—an ‘‘other’’ that takes form in and through him or her. The modus of being acted upon is not initially a modus of immediacy. Despite the fact that this experience is not a conscious one— the occurrence of trance cannot be remembered—it is not the gˇinn but its refractions in the movement of the dancer’s body that gets depicted in

Absence and the Audiovisual Unconscious

95

trance. The spirits, in the well-reasoned words of Fritz Kramer, are images of the movements they invoke.17 This does not erode the affective directness of their ritual appearance, of course. The sign of a successful ritual operation is that up to a point, one cannot elude its techniques, that is, that the participating actors and components are subjected to its process.18 A client commissioning a ritual from abroad, according to Tami, is medially integrated into the ritual operations not only during the lı¯la (when her spiritual affairs are affected or when she is brought into the ritual by mobile phone and the hela¯la sing for them, most recently via Skype (Figure 5), but also after the ritual, by watching the ritual film. The nonsimultaneous ritual cooperation of actors from different places and social worlds is thus constituted with the aid of technical media, turning the ritual into a media ritual in the narrow sense of the term. This is schematically depicted in Figure 4:19 by means of the fa¯th.a, a sacred space (shown as a triangle here) links (i) the seers, (ii) the client in Europe, who is represented by the photo and addressed via the camera, and (iii) through the medium of the sacrificial animal, the gˇinn. To receive the blessing of a fa¯th.a, a person turns the palms of his hands upward and—after the continuous confirmation of a ‘‘so it is’’ (amı¯n)—then rubs them downward over his face and chest—which the seers, addressing the camera, anticipate as a

Figure 5. A hela¯l sings his laments for a client using a mobile phone.

96

Martin Zillinger

future act. When viewing the video in Europe, the client experiences herself as already having been treated in Morocco, upon which her situation in migration will continue to improve. Baraka arises in this ritual space of exchange. It is extended to the client as a blessing gift, ritually operationalized and medially circulated as the power of blessing. Part of the nature of a fa¯th.a is its public realization, whereby two or actually three levels of the public realm play a role (Figure 6). The first is that of the viewers present, who are usually relatives and who sing the praises of the Prophet and ritually acoustically mark the sacrificial act. They also receive the treated objects to bring them into contact with the sacrificial blood in the grotto of the demon after the end of the ritual and to leave them there as an ‘a¯r. The second level is that of the camera, which opens up the sacred space to other sites, while the third is that of all possible viewers who can view the video in the future, first and foremost the client and the seer herself. Since part of the character of the trance is that it cannot be remembered, this footage also serves to verify the experience of possession and its ritual dissociation and to stabilize the ritual roles—just as the ritual community and adherents as a whole are stabilized by their audiovisual documentation and the circulation of the videos. The actors experience themselves on the screen as if in a state of alienation; as seen above, people in trance are described as those who ‘‘have moved away from what is present’’ (keig.ibu min al-wu¯gˇu¯d ). ‘‘It’s hard for me to see myself this way, with all the blood,’’ Tami once commented on a scene in which we see him weeping over the sacrificial sheep, whose liver he is tearing out. Loosely recalling Benjamin, the footage makes the audiovisual unconscious of the trance available and at the same time confirms its unavailability. (See Benjamin [1938] 1969, 237.)

Conclusion To understand the impact that the new media have on sites, practices, and communities in religious contexts, a concept of religion as mediation has proven to be tremendously fertile. At the same time, few make the effort to follow in detail the media and mediation techniques in religious contexts. I have tried to show that the focus on ‘‘presenting’’ and ‘‘immediacy’’ in studies of religion and media overlooks the role that ‘‘absence’’ and ‘‘mediacy’’ can play in religious media practices. At least since 1992, the Western ‘Isa¯wa in Meknes have increasingly used cameras in their rituals. By recording the trance, dancers are able to

Absence and the Audiovisual Unconscious

97

Figure 6. Medial public realms of the ritual space of exchange. consciously observe the spirits as they are depicted in their bodies movements. The videos serve as memorabilia and are integrated into the personal archives of the adepts. Especially remarkable events can be recalled and the experience of ‘‘communitas’’ during the ritual can be reconstructed. Deceased members of the congregation are remembered and social relations with migrants reconsidered. Technical media are therefore

98

Martin Zillinger

especially used to maintain the transnational networks of the ‘Isa¯wa. People who are absent are made present during the ritual through the use of mobile phones, video cameras, and, more recently, video-chat programs such as Skype. Second, the media products are circulated among the adepts of the brotherhood. The possibility of digitalizing and inexpensively replicating CDs and DVDs have spawned an intense exchange of these videos among the adepts, even though the trajectories of their circulation and the publicity of the ritual activities remain a matter of concern vis a` vis modernists and religious reformists. But what is it that is mediated in this proliferating circulation of media products and, moreover, what is it that is mediated in the media-technical, ‘‘transnational division of ritual space’’? (See Salih 2002.) If we follow the theology of the actors themselves, it is the mediation of ‘‘absence’’ that is at stake in the rituals as much as in their mediation. Both, media rituals as much as face-to-face rituals, are patterned on a scheme that recalls van Gennep’s theory of ritual liminality (Van Gennep 1909): the experience of a physical or psychological crisis in states of individual segregation (possession and/or migration) is treated by a ritual and corporeal ‘‘cumulation’’ by dissociating in trance and is resolved through the establishment of baraka. From this theory of ritual mediation we learn that baraka is generated only through the experience and mediation of absence. It is generated through the completion of this ritual cycle, shared among the participants in the ritual and mediated into daily life and the respective social networks. It is neither present nor disposable on one’s own accord; it is meant to work prospectively, as something that will occur in the future.20 In the rituals of the ‘Isa¯wa of the West, the shift between immanence and transcendence is generated from absence in both the processing and the circulation of persons, signs, and things. The participants in the ritual ‘‘move away from what is present,’’ away from their social and psychological situation into the indeterminacy of the trance, and experience less the immediate presence of transcendent powers than a maximum of selfdistancing, in which a gˇinn takes form in them. Baraka arises as soon as the gˇinn has left the body of the dancer. In the d.ikr—the constant repetition of the name of God—the significance of the spoken word translates into body and breathing techniques and departs from the semantics of everyday order, just as the songs of lament in the tehla¯l dissolve the signs in the acoustic vortex of the plaintive cries, which translate as pure signifiers into body techniques, until finally the body, too, is released to move in trance, outside of conscious control. Also, the circulation of signs via technical

Absence and the Audiovisual Unconscious

99

media and other ‘‘things’’ (such as clothes, money, and so on) mediates the exchange space of absence. The use of technical media among the ‘Isa¯wa in Meknes is not characterized by compensatory effects that enhance ‘‘presence’’ or mediate ‘‘immediacy.’’ On the contrary, the media ritual emphasizes the experience of absence for the migrant both as commissioner of the ritual and in his or her modulation as ritual actor. Also, in these particular rituals, media do not move into the background as if operating beyond mediation. Rather, the recordings emphasize the visibility and the mediation of the mediators used for integrating the ritual actors across time and space: vestments, photos, and cell phones are held up to the camera, and their ritual use serves to enhance the ritual’s efficacy and is therefore demonstrated throughout the ritual. Media, mediators, and the experience of absence, therefore, goad each other on in order to unfold the power of the ritual. Therefore, the media rituals of the ‘Isa¯wa do not aim at the mediation of transcendence, as many a theological theorizing on media since Hegel wants us to believe, but at the mediation of absence, of pure biographical absence.

New Media and Traveling Spirits: Pentecostals in the Vietnamese Diaspora and the Disaster of the Titanic Gertrud Hu¨welmeier

In many countries today, new migration flows are changing the religious landscape. The revitalization of religion is one aspect of these changes, including the global explosion of Pentecostal Christianity, transnational Islam, Hindu nationalism, and spirit-possession cults. Globalization provides fluid transnational networks that help transport religious messages across geographical spaces. Media and new media technologies play a prominent role in the ways in which words and spirits travel and circulate among local and global audiences and are thus an intrinsic part of new religious movements. Religion and religious practitioners are not merely reacting to global processes, but generate global interconnectedness, not least via the mediascape of information and communications technology networks. Consider, for example, the ways in which the transnationalization of religious practices in Western and (post)socialist societies appears as a response to a ‘‘spiritual vacuum’’ in the report by Preacher John,1 who was invited to a 2006 summer camp in Germany, on the famous Lorelei Cliff on the Rhine River, hosted by the Holy Spirit Church, a Vietnamese Pentecostal church: The Summer Camp attended by Vietnamese from fifteen different countries mostly in Europe was held in the breath-taking mountainous area of

100

New Media and Traveling Spirits

101

Loreley overlooking the Rhine River. Our host was Pastor Tung, an apostle of the Lord who has started churches and missions in several different countries including Germany, Poland, Sweden, Switzerland, Bulgaria, and Hungary, to name a few. In contrast to the United States, a large percentage of the Vietnamese in these countries are from the area previously known as North Vietnam. Because these people once lived in the spiritual vacuum of communism, they are hungry for the things of the spirit. Once they are introduced to the Lord, they are very zealous for Him and His Kingdom.2

I participated in a similar summer camp of the Holy Spirit Church at the Lorelei Cliff in 2008, where I encountered many believers I already knew from my previous fieldwork in Berlin while researching Pentecostalism in the transnational religious networks of Vietnamese migrants in Germany and Vietnam. I also met Pastor Tung, the leader of the church, who had arrived in West Germany in 1980 as a boat refugee from Vietnam. The Holy Spirit Church, which he founded, is the first transnational Vietnamese Pentecostal network connecting believers in Germany, East European countries, Vietnam, and other parts of Southeast Asia. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Pastor Tung had a vision to missionize eastern Germany and other countries in Central and Southeastern Europe. Since that time, a number of believers from his churches have returned to Vietnam and established underground churches in Hanoi and the surrounding areas. During the summer camp at the Lorelei Cliff, Pastor Tung made extensive use of media technologies in order to transmit religious messages to Vietnamese in the diaspora across Europe and in Vietnam. In what follows, as an example of how media and media practices are becoming important tools in spreading religious messages across borders, I will explore how media technologies affect place, space, and the effort to fill an assumed ‘‘spiritual vacuum’’ in diasporic Vietnamese Pentecostal networks.3

Traveling Spirits: Religion, Migration, and Media Anthropologists focusing on religion and media (Van der Veer 1999; De Vries 2001; Meyer 2006a; De Witte 2010) have illustrated that media and practices of mediation (Meyer and Moors 2006, 7) transport messages over long distances and connect religious adherents who live dispersed across continents (Richman 2005, 167). The concept of religion as a practice of

102

Gertrud Hu¨welmeier

mediation (Meyer 2006a, 290) contributes to an understanding of the creation and maintenance of links between believers in the realm of everyday life, on the one hand, and religious practitioners and the spiritual realm, on the other. Instead of separating religion and technology into different domains, the focus on practices of mediation in what follows demonstrates how ideas about the supernatural, the spiritual, and the transcendental are made accessible for believers, how they are reconfigured via media, and especially how spirits travel across borders.4 The study of spirit-centered religious practices needs to be better connected to the study of migration and transnationalism (Csordas 2007), because religious imaginations are shaped by transnational media circuits that change and transform people’s ideas about ‘‘proper’’ religious behavior and feelings. Cassette sermons (Hirschkind 2006a) move outside the framework of the mosque. Muslims in northern Nigeria as well as Christians in the south use videos and cassettes to spread their religious messages (Behrend 2005a). Muslim scholars and healers employ audio cassettes with quotes from the Koran, the cassettes being imported from Saudi Arabia to cast out evil spirits (O’Brien 1999). The diversification and pluralization of spirit-centered religious practices in postrevolutionary Vietnam and in the Vietnamese diaspora are prime examples of this mobility and mediatization.5 Spirit worship is a booming industry in both Vietnam and the diaspora. For example, len dong spirit possession is a ritual of a Mother Goddess religion known as Dao Mau (Endres 2006). A medium can incarnate up to thirty-six spirits during the ritual, which lasts several hours.6 Such spirit possession rituals flourish not only in Vietnam, but also within new social networks opened up by migration and transnational ties. The spiritual support supplied by such rituals is quite important to many migrants when leaving the home country and settling elsewhere, and media such as videotapes and online messages help make such support available to migrants and their cobelievers in different places. In the case of a Silicon Valley temple run by Vietnamese boat refugees practicing len dong spirit mediumship (Fjelstad and Nguyen 2011), for example, photos were used as compensation for ritual goods such as votive offerings, which were not available in the United States (Fjelstad 2010).7 New communication technologies contribute to the creation of such transnational sacred ties. While U.S. len dong spirit mediums regularly use telephones to contact mediums in Vietnam, Internet access is still limited in many Vietnamese households, and most of the mediums in Hanoi cannot afford a computer. In Vietnam, as in some parts of the world, such as

New Media and Traveling Spirits

103

the Congo (Garbin and Va´squez 2011), people cannot use information and communications technology because it does not work where they live. However, in Western countries, particularly in the United States, mediums and their clients view spirit-possession ceremonies online. They even purchase videos of ceremonies that are held in Vietnam. As Karen Fjelstad has reported, mediums in Vietnam and the United States have their ceremonies videotaped by paid professionals, and these videos are freely distributed to other mediums. In most cases, the tapes are viewed partly as a form of pleasure, partly as a method of interacting with the spirits, and partly as a way of learning about the pantheon.8 In len dong practices, it is not only believers and spirit mediums who make use of new media. The use of technology by the spirits themselves is as advanced as that of their believers. When Vietnamese in Germany participate in soul-calling rituals in order to contact the spirits of dead loved ones and see if they are in need of anything in the other world, the connection is established via votive offerings made of paper (hang ma). Likewise, a whole industry in the old center of Hanoi is built around such offerings (Nguyen 2006), with a number of traders selling luxury items made from paper for precisely this purpose. When the dead demand new clothes, for example, the living buy cloth made from paper and burn it, thereby sending clothing to the other world. Today, technologically savvy spirits of the deceased ask for mobile phones in order to be able to communicate with their relatives or friends, and, the living provide cell phones made from paper for use by the spirits of the departed. During my visit to the city, I also noticed paper representations of computer laptops for the spirits and/or for the deceased.9 For many Vietnamese, contacting the spirits of the dead involves contacting the spirits of those killed during the U.S.-Vietnam War. The memory of the war and of the flight from its depredations is central to the experience of many Vietnamese today, and besides the expansion of len dong spirit mediumship, practices related to appeasing spirits of the war dead are also spreading throughout both Vietnam and in the Vietnamese diaspora. Memories of loss that have long been part of Vietnamese cultural practice were renewed in the 1960s and 1970s during the war. Recently, a number of people have begun searching for the mortal remains of the war dead in Vietnam. After locating the remains and receiving guidance from a ritual expert, the relatives rebury the deceased in their natal villages. Even people from Vietnam in Germany who had become German citizens returned to Vietnam on holiday and consulted ritual experts to help them

104

Gertrud Hu¨welmeier

find the remains of their brothers or fathers who died during the AmericaVietnam War. As part of this process, people take part in the revival of rituals dealing with the unknown dead and the ‘‘Ghosts of War’’ (Kwon 2008), rituals that go back to the anticolonial war against the French. New technologies are of great importance in this search for the missing dead. The ritual expert, living hundreds of kilometers away from the site of the search, will be contacted via mobile phone when the relatives are not successful in finding the bones in the predicted locality. Moreover, camera phones are used to document the finding of the dead bodies and the exhumation ceremony to display the event to other relatives who were not able to participate in the trip. New media technologies thus play an important role in Vietnamese religious practices, both those oriented toward the present and future well-being of the believers and those oriented toward the past and the appeasement of the dead. The new media technologies make it easy for the spirits of Vietnamese to travel and for the living to connect ritually with the world of spirits, even when the living are dispersed around the world. Only recently, however, have scholars begun thinking about the ways in which the Holy Spirit is also a traveling spirit (Hu¨welmeier and Krause 2010; Garbin and Vasquez 2011). One reason for this is the pervasiveness of the view that sees the Christian spirit as single, modern, global, universal, mobile and ubiquitous, while regarding non-Christian spirits as many, occult, antimodern, traditional, local, particular, and stationary (Hu¨ welmeier and Krause 2010, 2). This dichotomy has all too often limited the scope of studies in religious transnationalism, which tends to presume such binary oppositions when examining Christian and nonChristian religions in a global context. However, just as spirits that were originally located in Vietnam are also to be found in Germany, the Christian spirit is also mobile, traveling, for example, between South and North Vietnam and between Vietnam, the United States, Germany and other countries. By watching videos of mass gatherings and healing sessions that take place elsewhere, Vietnamese Pentecostal believers participate in more than one local context, creating ‘‘transnational ways of religious belonging’’ (Glick Schiller and Levitt 2004). Pentecostal believers are thereby affected by religious events and rituals on the other side of the globe. At the Pentecostal camp on the Rhine, for example, media teams recorded every sermon, prayer gathering, healing session, and many other activities. On the other side of the globe, in Vietnam’s capital, religious practitioners listened to the recordings of the pastor’s sermons on DVDs and MP3 players. Underground church leaders in Hanoi also were using

New Media and Traveling Spirits

105

sound systems, cameras, mobile phones, and camera phones in evangelizing campaigns and church services, and transposed religious messages via Skype to their ‘‘brothers and sisters in Christ’’ abroad on special occasions.

Pentecostals and the New Media in Vietnam and Germany Evangelical Protestantism, and in particular charismatic Pentecostal Christianity, is one of the fastest-growing religious movements in contemporary Vietnam, attracting people in the highlands as well as in the city of Hanoi. The power of the Holy Spirit is viewed by many Vietnamese as a ‘‘new religion.’’ In the capital of Vietnam, adherents of Pentecostal charismatic Christianity gather in underground churches and worship by speaking in tongues. Many of them are healed by the power of the Holy Spirit. Preaching sessions in private homes are recorded by church members using digital cameras and various other technologies, citing the miraculous healings as well as the charismatic authority of the pastors as evidence for the Holy Spirit’s power. However, in contrast to len dong spirit mediumship, whose CDs and video tapes of performances are available for purchase in shops and on the streets of Hanoi, the mediation of Pentecostal gatherings is restricted to the more private sphere of house churches. This also is in contrast to the way in which Pentecostalism has expanded in Africa and Latin America (Martin 1990; Meyer 2004; Robbins 2004; Va´squez and Williams 2005), where its global expansion manifests itself in the public sphere (de Witte 2003). This vast restriction to the private sphere occurs in part because this kind of Christianity is highly suspicious in the eyes of political authorities in Vietnam.10 Despite being monitored by the state, evangelical and Pentecostal movements are spreading in numerous places throughout Vietnam. In part, the rise of these movements is a consequence of migration. Although U.S. missionaries are still traveling to proselytize in Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City, and other places, a growing number of evangelists, apostles, and preachers are Vietnamese nationals. Some of them, such as Vietnamese boat people and contract workers in Germany, converted while in the Vietnamese diaspora and only later returned to preach the gospel in Vietnam and other places in Southeast Asia. Much like African Pentecostal churches in Europe (Van Dijk 1997; Nieswand 2005; Krause 2008; Adogame 2010) founded by migrants, Vietnamese Pentecostal networks in Germany were created by migrants from the homeland in the 1980s. Yet in contrast to African Pentecostal churches

106

Gertrud Hu¨welmeier

in the African diaspora, where followers already knew about the success of Pentecostalism in their home countries or had been adherents themselves at home, Vietnamese in Germany, in particular those in the former East Germany, the German Democratic Republic (GDR), had hardly any knowledge of this kind of ‘‘new’’ religion. Unlike Vietnamese boat people, a number of whom were Catholics or Buddhists at the time of their arrival in the late 1970s and early 1980s (Hu¨welmeier 2010a), former contract workers were not much interested in religion while living and working in the GDR during the 1980s, having arrived in Germany as Communists and nonbelievers (Hu¨welmeier, forthcoming). However, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, an increasing number of the sixty thousand Vietnamese former contract workers gained a new interest in religion. Only after the reunification of Germany in 1990 and the breakdown of Communism in Eastern European countries did a growing number of them begin visiting Vietnamese Buddhist pagodas in western Germany and western Berlin. In the GDR, no such places of worship had existed. Furthermore, a number of former contract workers began practicing ancestor worship. In the GDR, local authorities had not allowed the installation of altars in the workers’ homes. Most of the former contract workers did not practice ancestor veneration anyway, because their parents were still alive in Vietnam. However, this changed during the 1990s. This was due in part to the fact that the contract workers’ parents began to die, but it mainly stemmed from the integration of Vietnam into the global economy, when former contract workers in eastern Germany suddenly found themselves part of global capitalism, and from the simultaneous vigorous revival of religion in Vietnam (Taylor 2007). Today, ancestor altars can be seen in many private homes of Vietnamese in Berlin and other parts of Germany. In addition, a great number of former Vietnamese contract workers erected small shrines in the businesses they opened after the reunification of Germany: spirits and gods venerated in ‘‘snack bar altars’’ (Hu¨welmeier 2008) protect the owners of nail studios, shops, and restaurants in eastern Berlin neighborhoods with a high proportion of Vietnamese and guarantee the owners’ economic success. The rise of evangelical Pentecostal churches among Vietnamese migrants in Germany occurred in the context of this revival of interest in religion—to fill a ‘‘spiritual vacuum’’ in the lives of diasporic Vietnamese, as Pastor John put it. One of the evangelical Vietnamese Pentecostal churches in Germany is the Holy Spirit Church, founded by Pastor Tung in the 1980s. Initially, it was Vietnamese boat people who were enthusiastic about this church, which had branches in various cities and in the countryside all over western Germany. A decade later, after the reunification

New Media and Traveling Spirits

107

of Germany, however, it attracted principally former contract workers from the GDR as well. Due to irreconcilable political differences between boat people (so-called ‘‘non-Communists’’) and former contract workers (so-called ‘‘Communists’’), most of the boat people left the Holy Spirit Church during those years. Since then, some of the converted contract workers who lived in Germany for many years have now returned to Vietnam. Despite being monitored by the Vietnamese government, they have built a number of underground churches and are missionizing among the local population with increasing success. While creating transnational religious networks spanning the globe, from Europe to the United States to Asia, they spread their messages through sermons, audio cassettes, videos, and DVDs. The use of media among Vietnamese Pentecostal believers varies depending on the context. In small house churches in Berlin they sometimes gather around the TV, watching videos about mass evangelizing campaigns in Africa as well as DVDs about religious mass gatherings of their own church, such as the summer camp at the Lorelei Cliff. The gospel of prosperity, promising health and wealth for Pentecostal believers, and testimonies by religious practitioners in church services and different forms of media about the gospel coming true for them generate feelings of being part of a global Pentecostal mass movement, as does watching videos about healing sessions among huge crowds in various countries and testimonies of how the Holy Spirit came to touch the body of sick people. Leaders of house churches in Germany practice healing via mobile phone. They attentively listen to sad everyday stories of other followers while praying over issues such as marital problems or the migraine attacks of female adherents. During my fieldwork, religious practitioners reported that the words and prayers transmitted via phone had positive effects on their well-being—on both body and soul. They became calm, less anxious, and had a positive view about their future. Some religious practitioners regularly make phone calls to Hanoi to convert parents, sisters, and other relatives. Others use MP3 players and listen to sermons of the pastor, even in their workplaces. A female Vietnamese believer in Berlin utilizes this kind of new media while selling flowers in a Metro station. Only when clients enter the shop will she interrupt the practicing of her religious duties. Another flower shop owner in Germany is actively proselytizing in his shop, distributing DVDs of religious gatherings and leaflets announcing the next prayer camp.

108

Gertrud Hu¨welmeier

In Hanoi, distributing religious print materials and DVDs can be a dangerous endeavor, because local authorities will intervene at once. However, camera phones are an important means of communication. For example, when attacked by violent gangs, even in their private homes, charismatic Pentecostals in Vietnam immediately take photos of those who were beaten and send the photos to cobelievers. In these cases, camera phones are used as a means of sending religious messages, with the photos used as a kind of evidence for the church that practicing their religion even in the private sphere is quite problematic in contemporary socialist Vietnam. The ‘‘globalization of the sacred’’ (Va´squez and Marquardt 2003) thus takes place even in countries that are heavily controlled by state authorities, such as in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam,11 and media technology is becoming increasingly important in the production of such religioscapes or religious diasporic networks, because media technology enables participation in transnational religious fields (Levitt 2007; Glick Schiller and Levitt 2004). Although international mobility is not possible for many people, new media technologies enable the spreading of religious messages outside of traditional religious spaces such as temples or churches, because media generates visual witness and an immediacy of spiritual experience. American televangelists have long been very successful at transposing religious messages into that medium, and the Holy Spirit is particularly well transposed into visual media such as television and transported by them. This is evident in narratives of converts who experienced being filled with the Holy Spirit by touching the TV screen. However, the transnationalization of media and the emergence of ‘‘alternative circuits of media flows that operate outside the West’’ (Ginsburg et. al 2002, 14) have only recently started to be recognized by scholars of the media. Local appropriations of new media have come to play an ever larger role in the production and circulation of videos for proselytizing purposes, as has been reported from Nigeria (Ukah 2003). In Vietnam, radio was and still is an important means in proselytizing activities, in particular among ethnic groups such as the Hmong, who live in remote areas in North Vietnam and in the border zone between Vietnam and China (Ngo 2009). Moreover, video and television production sites play an important role in the transnational spread of Pentecostal religion, including the effect of such media productions on the sensations and emotions of people far from home (De Witte 2003).12 Indeed, as ‘‘media teams’’ in Pentecostal churches record religious mass events, including believers falling down in trance or testimonies of miraculous healing, in the Pentecostal churches,

New Media and Traveling Spirits

109

the videos that they produce have been used as a means of conversion across cultural and territorial distances. Thanks to such media, private homes, cinemas, shops, warehouses, buses, stadiums, and other locales are turned into arenas of proselytization by Pentecostal believers, and participants of Pentecostal ‘‘crusades’’ may be converted by watching healing ceremonies on huge TV screens or on small DVD players.13 This transmission of video recordings enables a reciprocal exchange between religious adherents in various locales. As Marleen de Witte (2010) has shown in the African context, videos produced for specific Pentecostal churches are used by other religious groups in other locales in order to imitate the habitus of pastors, performances of healing practices, and mass events. Practices of mediation thus transmit religious ideas and practices from particular localities to distant places by delocalizing messages while simultaneously relocalizing religious imaginations into a different cultural context.

The Sinking of the Titanic This process of delocalization and relocalization is what is most noticeably at work in Pastor Tung’s use of the image of the sinking Titanic in his sermon delivered on the Lorelei Cliffs in Germany to a congregation of Vietnamese Pentecostals. By visualizing the disaster in the mass gathering in Germany, Pastor Tung ‘‘Vietnamized’’ the catastrophe of the Titanic, articulating, in his explication of the sinking of the ‘‘unsinkable’’ ocean liner, a conception of spirit in which, he, serving as a medium himself, conveyed the putatively universal message of Christian salvation and the history of the work of redemption in terms that simultaneously delocalized ‘‘Western’’ conceptions of how spirit manifests itself in the world and relocalized Vietnamese conceptions of evil spirits, demons, and the Devil in terms of Christian conceptions of the Holy Spirit. That process of delocalization and relocalization has been a neglected topic in migration studies. Whether spirits travel with migrants depends on various circumstances. As Michael Lambek has argued, what is intrinsic to spirits is simply that they appear in and withdraw from materiality. The presence of spirits ‘‘is no more significant than their repeated coming into presence’’ (Lambek 2010, 17). In this sense, the Holy Spirit is not different from other spirits, and the ways in which so-called ‘‘traditional spirits’’ are conceptualized and the powers attributed to them remain strong in Vietnamese Pentecostal conceptualizations of the ways in which the Holy

110

Gertrud Hu¨welmeier

Spirit works, and these conceptualizations, together with the experiences of contemporary Vietnamese at home and in the diaspora, come together to make the image of the sinking of the Titanic one of exceptional power as employed by Pastor Tung. Memories of loss, war memories, and experiences of flight are all part of the religious messages in diasporic Vietnamese Pentecostal churches. After the end of ‘‘what the Americans call the Vietnam War (1960–75), and what the Vietnamese call the American War’’ (James 2011, 333), at the end of the 1970s and in the early 1980s, a large part of the population, about three million people, left the home country in small, leaky boats, hoping to be rescued by a large ship and taken to a rich country. Thousands of the boat people who were rescued were taken in as refugees in Germany, many of them saved by the German freighter Cap Anamur. Some of the boat people converted to Pentecostal Christianity in the refugee camps in Thailand and other countries in Southeast Asia, and on the small boats, some vowed that if they were rescued, they would honor their religious duties in the new country. Other survivors did not convert until they arrived in West Germany, where a number of them joined Pentecostal churches founded by other Vietnamese refugees—among them, the churches founded by Pastor Tung. While projecting on a huge screen an image of the demise of the Titanic in the North Atlantic in 1912, the pastor constantly narrated his own experiences during his flight from Vietnam on a small boat. The image was not taken from the famous movie Titanic directed by James Cameron that appeared in 1997, but was a black-and-white photograph of the sinking luxury cruiser. Referring to the need that huge boats have for a perfect ship’s captain, Pastor Tung emphasized that the lack of such a captain will lead to the boat sinking in the sea, as illustrated by the sad story of the Titanic. The message of his sermon was: repent and follow God as one’s captain, or drown in the sea. Thousands of the Vietnamese refugees never reached another country, but indeed drowned in the sea, and the image of the sinking Titanic therefore generated feelings of salvation and memories of survival among church members.14 The pastor used these memories of having been saved in a double sense—body and soul—to explain his own mission and the mission that he hoped his followers would help carry out: God intended for those who were rescued by His power and who did not find Jesus in their lives until they reached the diaspora to return to Vietnam and bring the Gospel to all Vietnamese.15 He reported his visions of God telling him personally to proselytize in the former GDR, Poland, Russia, and other

New Media and Traveling Spirits

111

East European countries (Hu¨welmeier 2010a). Thus, as Pastor Tung narrated it under the image of the sinking Titanic, for those saved from such an end, their miraculous rescue in the South China Sea led straight to the mission of bringing the Gospel to Vietnam by those who were rescued— the mission to transform Vietnam into a Christian country. And indeed, ‘‘God Save Vietnam’’ is one of the most popular songs in Pentecostal services. Pastor Tung thus staged himself typologically, in the prophetic role once occupied by the apostle John, as God’s medium, reporting that God spoke to him, asking him to evangelize eastern Europe and, later, to bring the Gospel back to Vietnam.16 And the parallel with John, who transmitted the vision of the apocalypse at the end of the Bible, was an important theme of Pastor Tung’s sermon. John fell into a state of entrancement and was possessed by the spirit: ‘‘I was in the spirit’’ (Revelation 1:10). Throughout his preaching, Pastor Tung constantly referred to religious practitioners—and of course, to himself—in this way: as tools whom God will use to spread the good news in their country of origin. However, the reference to the apocalypse and the end of the world was no accident. It was another way in which Vietnamese and ‘‘Western’’ conceptions of spirits were delocalized and relocalized in the pastor’s sermon. Pentecostal churches preach a dualistic worldview of good versus evil in which spiritual warfare, defending oneself against evil spirits and demons, is a crucial matter. The visualization of the conflict of occult forces in a Christian Pentecostal framework (Meyer 2010), as in the dragons and monsters, Satan, and false prophets described in the scenarios of the End of Days in the Book of Revelation, illustrates the way in which the powers attributed to so-called ‘‘traditional spirits’’ can be mapped onto Christian conceptions of the role played by the Holy Spirit in the world. Born-again believers are constantly confronted by the struggle between wrong and right, darkness and light, evil spirits and the Holy Spirit. As Pastor Tung employed the image, on stage and in his sermon, the end of the Titanic was linked with the End of Days as portrayed in the Book of Revelation, as well as with believers’ personal memories and emotions surrounding war, flight, displacement, and salvation. When Pastor Tung referred to his own rescue by the German freight ship Cap Anamur and to his body and soul being saved by God, he simultaneously pointed to the impending end of the world and the condemnation of those who have not accepted Jesus in their lives. In his loud and sometimes threatening style of preaching, the pastor used the disaster of the Titanic as simultaneously a metaphor for the immanent final conflict between good and evil

112

Gertrud Hu¨welmeier

and, via allusion to the experiences of his congregation, for the experience of salvation. Only in conversion can people be saved, and then only if they survive the constant battle between good and evil, just as the Vietnamese had survived the disasters that they had suffered. What is more, just as the prophetic writings of John, himself a prophet living in exile, were directed toward persecuted and harassed Christian communities, whom he encouraged by disclosure of the divine message of salvation to abolish other religious traditions and to hope for the return of Jesus Christ, Pastor Tung, in exile, exhorted his hearers—both those present and those who would see and hear his message in a variety of media across the world—to do the same. Seen from this perspective, the pastor’s reference to the apocalypse thus is also a critique of the current political situation in his home country, where persecuted and harassed church members were not allowed to perform their religious practices in the public sphere. However, there is also a promise to be found in the religious message: those who operate in underground churches in Vietnam, living in fear of surveillance and of paid gangs of thugs, will belong to the saved in a new time. The putatively universal message of Christian salvation is thus also a message about local political conditions in Vietnam and the state of the world as seen in Vietnamese terms from a cliff above the Rhine in Germany, all given concrete form by the image of the sinking Titanic. Via the recombination and dissemination of such visual images, religious transcendence is interwoven with the dialectic of deterritorialization and reterritorialization generated by media technologies. Via images such as this, spirits and spiritual powers travel through these media, linking people and places, and the Holy Spirit is as transnational as other spirits, traveling through audiovisual media as it does through migration networks.

The Delocalization and Relocalization of Traveling Spirits The mapping of traditional concerns regarding the nature of spirits and the conflict between good and evil on the Christian discourse about that conflict emerged when I asked a pastor about the possible significance of staging these camps on the Lorelei Cliff, a rocky place where so many shipwrecks have happened and still happen. The name of the rock refers to a legend from German folklore. According to the legend, Lorelei, a beautiful young woman, committed suicide because of an unfaithful lover,

New Media and Traveling Spirits

113

jumping from the steep rock into the Rhine River. Becoming a siren, she then lured sailors to their doom with her hypnotizing voice.17 One may assume that many Vietnamese believers are not familiar with this poem and have never heard the legend. However, according to the pastor I talked to during the meeting I attended, it is not important whether people know about the legend of Lorelei. Instead, he pointed to the fact that evil spirits are everywhere, even in this place. The famous rock of Lorelei is no different and must therefore be purified before the believers can start their prayer, preaching or healing services. Consequently, every morning, all participants of the prayer camp gathered in the sports hall, the only big building on the campground, to sing with powerful voices and thus chase away evil spirits. Believers enjoyed clapping their hands, jumping up and down, twirling around, and stomping their feet. And the contest between good and evil spirits did not cease later, when the services began. As enacted on the Lorelei Cliff, the contest between good and evil was a multimedia event, well beyond Pastor Tung’s selfstaging as the medium of the Holy Spirit. As some believers might say, being near the sky allows them to appropriate this locality, where the ‘‘coming into presence’’ of the Holy Spirit is possibly easier and more intense than in other places.18 But other spirits are present, as well, and must be dealt with. It was argued that by singing with all of one’s power, the evil forces would be chased away. Prior to the preaching, the music band of the Holy Spirit Church, with its huge sound system, encouraged the adherents to sing Christian songs as loudly as they could. The sound system is not just another way of adapting new technologies, but also a means of transposing religious messages. In close cooperation with the media group of the church, equipped with laptops and a projector, Vietnamese lyrics of praise and worship were shown on a huge screen and accompanied by the church band and choir with its expressive music style. For more than half an hour religious practitioners were put in the right mood by loud music, the crowd constantly repeating various songs at an incredible volume. Believers clapped and raised their hands, some of them jumping up and down in front of their seats. During the gatherings many church followers were blessed with the gifts of the Holy Spirit. Speaking in tongues was part of the repeated prayer sessions each day. Some adherents fell down when the pastor laid his hands on their heads or fell in trance during the loudly spoken prayers and songs.

114

Gertrud Hu¨welmeier

The sermon was translated simultaneously from Vietnamese into German with a special interpretation device, allowing German visitors to listen to the messages of the Vietnamese pastors. Religious messages of the English-speaking and German-speaking pastors were translated into Vietnamese via microphones. Microphones were even used in Sunday services in small rooms with only fifty believers, thus intensifying the charismatic authority of the preacher. All prayer sessions at the Rhine River were recorded by a special media group. Later on, these sermons and prayer sessions will be recorded on DVDs and circulated not just among church followers in Europe, but also to adherents in various branches in Vietnam and other places. Because Vietnamese believers have gathered at the rocks of the Lorelei for many years, the locality is still known by all adherents and in particular by those who have returned to Vietnam. Memories of Germany and memories of conversion and church membership are closely connected with the Lorelei rocks, because many believers were baptized during the summer camps at the Rhine River. A leaflet handed out at the camp visually summed up the process of delocalization and relocalization that I’ve been examining here. It reflected the ‘‘symbolic geographies of the sacred’’ (Garbin 2010), constructed by this process by visually representing the history of migration of tens of thousands of boat people and contract workers to Europe and the success story of the church by focusing on the new branches in various places in Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia. The ‘‘spiritual cartography’’ (Coleman 2010) mapped the existence of a global Pentecostal community in specifically local terms. The leaflet displayed the globe with two waves of migrants. On the lower and the southern half of the globe, arrows pointed from Vietnam to Germany as well as to a boat, representing the boat people arriving as refugees in West Germany in the early 1980s. Another group of migrants, the former contract workers, were shown arriving via airplane on the northern half of the globe. The countries of western and eastern Europe were displayed in different colors, with the eastern countries represented by tongues of fire, symbolizing that the Holy Spirit had already arrived there. In the middle, a huge arrow pointed from Europe to Vietnam, representing the movement of the Holy Spirit. Vietnam was framed by a church building with a cross on the roof. What brings the Christian message to ‘‘Godless’’ eastern Europe and ‘‘Godless’’ Vietnam is the circulation of migration, the transnational translation of conceptions of spirits from one locale to another and back again. As Pastor Tung constantly repeated in his sermons during the prayer camp, ties across borders connect Vietnamese in Germany, former Communist countries in Europe, and Vietnam. No longer are preachers such

New Media and Traveling Spirits

115

as Pastor Tung the only mediators between the Holy Spirit and congregations of believers. The new media also connect his preaching in a specific place and at a specific time to audiences in different specific places at different times on the other side of the world. It is thus that transnational media circuits delocalize and relocalize conceptions of various spirits, and it is through such media that spirits, including the Holy Spirit, travel.

Numinous Dress / Iconic Costume: Korean Shamans Dressed for the Gods and for the Camera Laurel Kendall

‘‘Korean shamans in their colorful costumes,’’ ‘‘Korean shamans in their bright robes,’’ ‘‘a shaman in a peaked white hood,’’ ‘‘a shaman in a highcrowned red hat’’—in photographs, the robes are iconic, or in Rosalind Morris’ sense, ‘‘emblematic’’ (Morris 2009), intrinsic to the thing itself, rather than merely representational. The robes make the icon, inform the viewer that this is a Korean shaman performing a kut—a shaman manifesting a god in antique fancy dress. But a Korean shaman’s robe is, and is more than a costume, and within the frame of a ritual, rather than the frame of a photograph, the robes and hats bear both invisible and sensate properties that do more than signify. In Birgit Meyer’s terms, they participate in a ‘‘mediation’’ between human and spirit. In this essay, I take up Meyer’s challenge that we examine the sensational and material stuff of religious practice as ‘‘elements of the religious life worlds of their beholders, and hence as key to the possibility of ‘authentic’ experience’ ’’ (Meyer 2006b, 20). Such a project assumes an awareness of how these senses, distinctly or in combination, participate in the construction of such experiences (Howes 2005; Patterson 2007). But I am also concerned with how symbolic, iconic, or emblematic readings of religious materialism can take on a life of their own, away from the sensory life of shaman practice as they move through an emergent landscape of visual representations in modern

116

Numinous Dress / Iconic Costume

117

media. In South Korea, that landscape is highly developed, and as new media becomes accessible, Korean shamans have themselves begun to engage in self-representation, enabled by some of the newer iterations of new media. In focusing on costumes, I am deploying only one among other possible sensory keys that might unlock a Korean shaman’s ritual. Music and movement are important, and Korean shaman shrines are dense with religious materialism: painted images of the gods, Buddha statues, incense pots, water vessels, candles, and offerings that range from packaged candy to imported alcohol. Elsewhere, I have described how a bottle of Chivas Regal, in the hands of a shaman manifesting a greedy god, became a significant prop, invested with some of the contradictory emotions that contemporary Koreans express over new wealth (Kendall 2008). I focus on the costume here because it is particularly present in media representations of Korean shamans and has been so for a very long time. I approach images of costumed shamans after years of having watched shamans dress each other in these same robes, perform in them, remove them with a flourish, and carefully pack them away in vinyl suitcases. On a shaman’s advice, I have gifted a costume to a personal patron god and on occasion have been dressed in this same costume to dance, most recently in May 2009 as I prepared an initial draft of these observations. In this essay, I will draw a distinction between how colorful costumes have been used to establish Korean shamans as an iconic presence in photographs, film, websites, and website streaming, and how and why the gods’ clothing is deployed in ritual contexts. The contrast reveals both how the robes become broadly emblematic in modern media portrayals and how, in ritual settings, the robes are vested with mediumistic properties in their own right, as instrumental and sensational objects that enable human interactions with spirits, working in conjunction with other sensate expressions, most notably music and the kinetics of a dancing, miming, and posturing body.

About Mansin and the Robes They Wear Korean shamans, mudang or mansin,1 are those who sing and dance to invoke, entertain, and secure the good will of spirits2 through elaborate rituals called kut. When they perform kut, charismatic shamans of the Seoul region3 and North Korea enact the gods’ personas through the medium of their own bodies—through their facial expressions and especially their voices, wearing robes identified with specific deities to do this

118

Laurel Kendall

(Figure 7). These mudang are known locally as mansin, literally ‘‘ten thousand gods.’’ Kut feast and entertain gods and ancestors, who deliver prognostications, usually initially criticizing the sponsoring family for past neglect and evoking the misfortunes that have caused them to sponsor the ritual, giving a detailed divination to each member of the sponsoring family and sometimes for the spectators, as well, and ending the manifestation with promises of good fortune.4 Unless otherwise specified, my observations are based on some thirty years of episodic fieldwork with shamans who perform in the Seoul tradition (Bruno 2002; Choi 1987, 1989a, 1989b; Kendall 1985, 1996). I call these (mostly) women ‘‘shamans’’ and not ‘‘mediums,’’ a translation choice that merits a brief explanation in a project framed by the notion of ‘‘mediumship.’’ Mudang or mansin are not constructed as passive vessels to be filled with the active presence of a deity, although this kind of possession is not completely unknown in their world. People destined to be shamans may be taken over against their will and made to shout and dance beyond their own volition as a sign of their divine calling, and some ordinary people, not quite shamans, may experience possession in and around shaman rituals, mimicking the shamans’ actions, but with glassy eyes and vacant affect, a profound contrast with the alert, engaged presence of a god or ancestor speaking through a mansin. Mansin will sometimes claim that they have been compelled to speak and act in ways counter to their own will or that they do not remember what transpired while they were manifesting a god. In general, however, mansin report a range of consciousness or partial consciousness when they speak for gods and ancestors on a given occasion. What they are when they are not fully themselves is more complex than could be accommodated by a blanket term such as ‘‘trance.’’ Ideally, the gods give the shaman power to speak and act beyond the range of an ordinary woman, but ideally, the shaman is also expertly trained to give a compelling manifestation of the god and to perform an effective ritual that is pleasing to the gods and consequently auspicious. A divine manifestation thus combines impulse, inspiration, vision, and art, a ‘‘mediation’’ that is performed by a shaman (Bruno 2002; Choi 1987, 1989a, 1989b; Kendall 1996). Once initiated, Korean mansin are empowered to engage the spirits, to invoke, to placate, to exorcise, and to bring good fortune. In this sense, they are ‘‘masters of the spirits,’’ following Sergei Shirokogoroff’s definition of a shaman (cited in Jakobsen 1999, 9). Albeit ‘‘mastery’’ may be an overstatement; their gods require respect, flattery, and cajoling commensurate with the divine power they wield, but on occasion, when the gods

Numinous Dress / Iconic Costume

Figure 7. The Mountain God arrives, May 30, 2009. This particular costume and hat have become iconic.

119

120

Laurel Kendall

ask too much and give too little in return, an exasperated mansin will flat out berate them. Roberte Hamayon’s notion of the shaman’s alliance with the deity, sometimes modeled on culturally specific understandings of marriage alliances, is appropriate here (Hamayon 1990, 1999, and as applied to Korea by Walraven 2009). Korean shamans sometimes speak of the absolute fidelity demanded by the gods as equivalent to that exacted of a traditional Confucian wife or of the demands placed upon shamans by the gods as analogous to a bride’s ordeal in her in-law’s house. Korean shamans deal with the gods and ancestors—and by extension, their mortal clients—by performing various simple and complex activities, from divinations, prayers, and exorcisms to kut, their signature and most complex ritual. These rituals, large and small, like their counterparts in other places, constitute a body of practice experienced by the client through the immediacy of a visual, tactile, and sonic engagement with the ritual as she bows, rubs her hands in supplication, receives return gifts of offering food in her own lap, crouches for an exorcistic pelting of grain, gives appropriate verbal responses to the gods, and receives consoling caresses from the ancestors with whom she weeps. Through these encounters, the shamans and the gods in their shrines become the foci of loose communities of followers whose loyalty is desirable, but seldom absolute, contingent upon the perceived efficacy of a particular shaman, shrine, and spirits and in competition with South Korea’s actively proselytizing Christians and the middle-class appeal of lay Buddhism. Regular clients (tan’gol) make seasonal offerings in the mansin’s shrine and attend an annual or semiannual kut that the shaman holds to entertain her own gods. The mansin knows the particular histories of troublesome ancestors and of particularly potent deities in the clients’ own household pantheons. In South Korea today, kut are less a source of communal entertainment than they were before so many South Koreans came to live in high-rise apartments and before television and electronic media were accessible in even the most remote communities. Today, most kut are held in commercial shrines, rather than in villages or low-rise urban neighborhoods where neighbors and curious passersby might be drawn into a kut by the sound of a shaman’s drum. Kut have become private experiences transacted between shamans and the immediate sponsors where the occasional curious spectator is most likely a folklorist or student of comparative religion, and some clients simply pay the shaman for the kut and go back to work while the shaman performs without them.5 If they have not themselves sponsored a kut in response to a family crisis, most contemporary South Koreans have seen the ritual in television documentaries and in staged,

Numinous Dress / Iconic Costume

121

abbreviated public performances and folk festivals. Many South Koreans, inside the shaman world and out, are aware of the cultural nationalist claim that the mudang and their work constitute the deep cultural and religious root of the Korean people. Some mudang—and some of their scholar allies—see the advantage of gaining official recognition for a shaman ‘‘religion’’ to counter perennial claims that what the shamans do is ‘‘superstition’’ or the work of Satan. Thus far, however, attempts to organize the shamans and their followers as a ‘‘religion’’ on a Western model have been Cinderella slippers on the wrong foot (Kendall 2009; S. N. Kim 2002).

Performing Kut in Costume In kut, and only in kut, do mudang put on the costumes that enable the presence of a god. Enrobed, the mansin chants an invocation and then dances while her fellow shamans pound drum and cymbals. At a critical moment, a sometimes imperceptible cue between the drummer and the dancer, the drum beats quicken as the shaman begins to jump, rotating on the balls of her feet, her deeply gored robe spinning out around her body, her broad sleeves waving up and down as she pumps her arms. Sound, motion, and the tactile presence of the costume foster a multisensing of things unseen (Patterson 2007, 17), or in Michael Taussig’s words, this is where ‘‘sentience takes us outside ourselves’’ (Taussig 1993, 38). The spectators experience transition through the visual spectacle of the shaman’s jumping, spinning body and the rising crescendo of the music. When the whirling stops, the drum and cymbals stop, and the shaman speaks and mimes in the god’s persona. Aided by visions, aural cues, and bodily sensations, she enacts the god’s or ancestor’s mood and gives prognostications in order to convey ‘‘the true words of the gods’’ (paru˘n kongsu), intuiting and mediating divine intentions. A full kut involves a series of these manifestations, a team of three or more shamans trading between drumming and performance, each segment performed by a single mansin who garbs herself in layers of costumes and removes them in sequence as gods of subordinate rank appear. In Alfred Gell’s terms, the costumes in kut are part of a ‘‘technology of magic’’ and work with the music and the abundant offering food to ‘‘lure’’ and ‘‘trap’’ the divine (Gell 1988)—to bring the gods into the here and now and win their favor by enabling them to feast and ‘‘play’’ (nolda), as manifested by the dancing, speaking, singing, and miming shaman. In the manner of secular entertainments, a wellsatisfied deity is favorably disposed toward the supplicant.

122

Laurel Kendall

The cuts of the robes that mansin wear for kut approximate court robes, armor, antique soldiers’ hats, and long vests banded at the chest— garments otherwise familiar to contemporary Koreans from costume dramas set in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries—as well as the white hoods and wide-sleeved robes of Buddhist ritual dances and the rainbowsleeved jackets and tiny crowns worn by palace women and brides, and sometimes gray monks’ robes. Buddhist garb aside, the costumes are in bright, bold, primary colors: red, deep blue or black, chartreuse, and yellow. Even the white robes are crossed at the chest with thickly embroidered red bands. These are colors identified with the five-element (ohaeng) cosmological scheme, the colors of talismanic folk paintings, the colors that suggest auspiciousness.6 Japanese ethnologists studying shamans in early twentieth-century Korea remarked on how the bright colors of the shamans’ robes contrasted with the off-white cotton clothing that most Koreans wore at that time (Akamatsu and Takashi [1938] 1991, vol. 2, 218). Colorful clothing in distinctive styles made the wearer stand out from the ordinary as a member of the court, brides and grooms on their wedding day, or children in birthday or holiday wear. In kut, the shamans’ costumes approximate the similarly colorful images of deities honored on the wall of a shrine, and vice versa. The gods are colorful beings, so much so that early missionaries to Korea read these images as a garish and hideous heathen presence.7 The mudang performing a ritual kut is similarly extraordinary in her engagement with spirits, and the kut itself, with its piles of offering food and the music of drum, gong, and cymbals, is a colorful and loudly percussive experience that stands out from quotidian time and space. In a basic sense, a mudang without a costume remains a mudang, although not an immediate stand-in for a god. Most mudang spend most of their time in contemporary everyday leisure wear, and they do not wear costumes when they divine or perform simple rituals or when they drum or hit the gong and cymbals for another shaman who is manifesting the gods. In another, literal sense, however, the costume participates in making the mudang. At her initiation kut, she was dressed in costumes appropriate to the gods who appear in each sequence of the kut. When inspiration eludes the initiate, other shamans encourage her to heed her impulses and to grab a costume from those that have been hung from a line in the shrine—to follow the inspiration that will lead her to a powerful body-governing deity who will unblock her ‘‘gates of inspired speech’’ (malmun) and enable her to speak and divine with ‘‘the true words of the gods’’ in the manner of a mansin. The robes, as the gods’ vehicles, help to

123

Numinous Dress / Iconic Costume

draw the gods’ presence to the initiate and enable her to speak in their voice.8 In a related logic, ordinary women are encouraged to entertain their personal spirits and bring good fortune to their families by dancing in the shamans’ costumes during an interval in the kut, an experience called mugam. Just occasionally, such dancing becomes an aperture through which ordinary women experience minor and temporary possession. Even more rarely, powerful deities have used the mugam to claim a theretofore ordinary woman as a shaman (Harvey 1979, 9; Kendall 1985, 59).

Iconic Images A mudang away from kut and out of costume is still a mudang, but she would not necessarily be recognized as one. The costume makes the image of a mudang in various media and has done so for a very long time. To my knowledge, an eighteenth-century genre painting by Sin Yun-bok, known by the pen name of Hyewon (1758–after 1813), is the earliest surviving visual representation of a mudang (Figure 8).9 Hyewon offers a scene in what is probably a mountain shrine, a three-sided building with a courtyard surrounded by a low stone wall and set in a rustic landscape. A shaman in a red robe with voluminous sleeves and a high-crowned hat stands with her arms extended, an open fan held aloft in her right hand. Three women, a child, and two male musicians sit on straw mats in the courtyard. Two of the women have elaborate coiffures; one of them seems to be casting rice on a shaman’s divination tray. Both of these women and the child attentively follow the shaman, while two male musicians perform with an hour-glass-shaped drum and a flute. A third woman, seated behind the other two, wears a green cloak over her head, a distinction of dress that identifies her as a wife of the yangban nobility or of the technocratic chungin class and that distinguishes her from the bareheaded women who are likely members of the shaman’s team, outcasts (ch’o˘nmin) in the rank system of the Choso˘n Kingdom (1392–1910). The veiled woman looks away from the performing shaman and toward a male spectator, bareheaded and therefore definitely of lower status than the veiled lady, who peers over the wall in her direction. The shaman’s costume, as much as her expansive pose, draws the reader’s eye, the red color a contrast with the earth tones of the setting and the pale garments of the other women and musicians. To the shaman’s immediate right, the child’s yellow jacket extends the colorful trajectory

124

Laurel Kendall

Figure 8. Hyewon’s painting. Note again the red robe and high hat. of the shaman’s outstretched arm. The matron’s green cloak, a smaller patch of color, diagonally balances the shaman’s red, causing the viewer’s gaze eventually to wander from the shaman’s commanding presence to the flirtation being enacted in the shadows. This voyeuristic touch is typical of Hyewon, who has also given us paintings of amorous meetings, women bathing, literati partying with female entertainers, and a brothel interior. In this painting, the wall surrounding the ritual space and the likely solitary sponsor suggest a private and quiet ritual such as a woman of the yangban nobility might hide from her husband (Anonymous 1903, 147). Hyewon offers a view of something almost forbidden to the gaze of his most likely audience—men of the yangban nobility—and yet the painting works only insofar as the setting—and the shaman’s identity as a shaman— are legible to the viewer, a function of her costume and posture.10 The shaman’s high-crowned hat and broad-sleeved red robe approximates the court robes worn by military officials in Hyewon’s day and by shamans enacting certain gods of high rank. The shaman’s posture, arms extended so that the big sleeves resemble a butterfly’s wings, distinguishes

Numinous Dress / Iconic Costume

125

her from a military official in a painting or a costume drama. The conventional title of this painting, Munyo˘ Sinmu (Shaman woman’s divine dance), suggests a moment of uncanny presence, as in contemporary Seoul kut when the mansin, in identical costume, gives a sudden shake to her shoulders, fluttering her fan, jangling her bells, to mark the Mountain God’s arrival. Until the introduction of rock music and later, rave dancing, Korean bodies did not ordinarily move in expansive and animated ways, neither in everyday life nor in Confucian or Buddhist ceremonial circumstances. Ecstatic farmers’ dances, shaman rituals, and masked dance dramas were exceptions, and all implied some manner of engagement with spirits (Heyman 1966, 30–38; Howard 1989; Lee 1969). The sensate presence of the deity, evoked by the drum and other percussion, gains extraordinary presence through the expansive, bold red costume, the long, wide sleeves, the bells that the shaman shakes in her hand, and the open fan. Hyewon must have peered over some walls himself to capture a moment still recognizable in kut performed today. Reading the costume against contemporary practice, the shaman is manifesting the Mountain God (Sansin, Sansillyo˘ngnim) who appears early in the kut.11 In shaman rituals of the Seoul region, Hyewon’s likely frame of reference, this god is no more significant than many others, and his appearance is far less engaging than that of the cruder, more demanding Official (Taegam), who wears a less spectacular costume. Even so, that voluminous red costume has proven as irresistible to contemporary color photography as it was to Hyewon’s brush. In early photography, however, shamans appear as objects of curiosity and as ethnographic subjects. In both instances, the costume makes the shaman legible as a shaman, even as it did in the eighteenth-century painting. Early photography, of course, was in black and white. In the early twentieth century, the Keystone View Company, then the largest producer of stereographs, circulated an image of a shaman garbed as the celestial gods of childbirth and fertility with the heading ‘‘Natives in their superstitious service’’ (Figure 9). In this image, the shaman’s white robe and peaked hood stand out by contrast against the dark interior of the shrine, marking, for the intended Western viewer, the strangeness of an indigenous Korean ritual. Although a proper view through a stereograph viewer would probably have suggested the dipping motion of the shaman’s long sleeves, blurred in this print, the image has the stiff, posed quality of an early ethnographic photograph, with the shaman in the foreground, the drummer to her right, and a line of women (other shamans? sponsors? spectators?) posed behind

126

Laurel Kendall

Figure 9. ‘‘Natives in their Superstitious Service.’’ Stereograph, Keystone View Company, 1919, LC-USZ62–72680. her to make a group photograph. Stiffness was probably inevitable if the photographer was to capture this image in the dark, cramped space of a shrine. The paintings in the background that mark the location as a shrine contribute to the image’s exotic ambiance, but it is the costume that causes the picture to stand out, marking alterity for the Western viewer, just as Hyewon had likely titillated the yangban male viewer with his stolen glimpse of female ritual space. In the early twentieth century, Japanese colonial ethnologists were the most avid early photographers of Korean shamans. Some of their images, produced in the name of science, had a popular second life on postcards,

Numinous Dress / Iconic Costume

127

as was the case with Murayama Chijun’s portrait of shamans at a kut (Gwon 2005, 190). Two shamans, in costumes with stovepipe hats not unlike the one painted by Hyewon, stand beside two hourglass-shaped drums, with two additional shamans in shadow wearing the black military hats and long blue vests of lesser-ranking deities. Although it is unlikely that this group of four would have simultaneously performed in costume, aesthetically, the stiff poses are more successful than ethnologists’ attempts to photograph from a distance shamans performing an actual kut, because the subjects almost invariably turn away from the lens at the critical moment (Akamatsu and Akiba [1938] 1991, vol. 2, figs. 114–17 and 129).12 The slow shutter speeds of early photography were ill adapted to the kinetics of a real kut. In the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, the Korean folklorist Chang Chu-gun would be incomparably more successful in recording the dynamics of kut in close-up and wide angle.13 In the 1930s, Akamatsu Chijo and Akiba Takashi collected shaman costumes and accessories as museum artifacts. To establish a visual typology of deities, they carefully photographed shamans in costume against neutral backdrops, with the shamans striking poses appropriate to each particular god as they flourished fans, bells, or knives (Akamatsu and Akiba 1991, vol. 2, figures 149–56). The costumes and equipment are not objects of documentation, but embodied objects; the shamans perform the costumes and paraphernalia in a manner that contrasts with the stiff postures in the novelty photographs described above. In their ethnographic writing, Akamatsu and Akiba recognized that the shamans had a particular relationship with their costumes and equipment—that these things were sacred objects, specially handled, carefully stored, and celebrated with offerings when a shaman honored her own personal gods (Akamatsu and Akiba 1991, vol. 2, 216–29). Like eighteenth-century painting, both popular representations and early ethnographic studies thus indicate an awareness of the costume as an embodied and sacred rather than a merely artifactual and symbolic object.

From Exoticism to National Symbol When I first went to Korea in the early 1970s, images of shamans were not very present outside of scholarly publications or rare folk festival performances. Official publications and museum labels described them as having all but died out, and antisuperstition campaigns were trying, unsuccessfully, to make this a reality. One of my Peace Corps assignments was

128

Laurel Kendall

for a monthly English-language tourist magazine where I pitched a cover image of a Korean shaman, an idea greeted with horror as ‘‘too much like Africa.’’ Shamans were an embarrassment, a sign of the rural past, but this was changing. A folklore revival was already underway on university campuses and in intellectual circles in response to rapid industrialization and urbanization and an influx of Western culture. Concerned scholars and a growing constituency of students and lay public felt that without conscious intervention, distinctive Korean traditions would disappear completely. In the 1960s, the government had established an official system for recognizing various performing arts as elements of an ‘‘intangible heritage.’’ Shamans participated by joining performing-arts troupes that preserved folk dramas and festivals—and they had their advocates in folklore and performing-arts circles, where the artistry of their own rituals was undeniable (Choi 1991, 1993, 1995; Kendall 2009, ch. 1; K. Kim 1994; Yang 2003). Members of the political opposition also sought out shamans and modeled protest theater after kut for the dead. All of these developments helped to naturalize a claim, first advanced in the 1930s, that Korean shamans are the bearers of primordial Korean traditions (Walraven 1993). Kim Sunam (Kuthakhoe 1983–, vols. 1–20) and Kim Tonghu˘i (T. Kim n.d., after 1982), two photographers whose work bridged ethnology and art, captured a nostalgic association between shamans and the vanishing countryside in publications pitched to a broad audience. In the manner of ethnographic photographs, their work was mostly done in black and white, framed to suggest rustic settings and to capture the wind-burned and wrinkled faces of the participants and spectators. While costumes are worn in many of these images, it is the range of intense emotions on the subjects’ faces that causes these photographs to stand out for an audience seeking a particularly Korean resonance in the shamans’ work. By the 1980s, South Korean thinking about the Korean past was also changing as South Korea entered the ranks of the newly developed nations and Seoul was selected as the site for the 1988 Olympics. A heritage that had theretofore been seen as rustic, superstitious, and antimodern could now be celebrated as a unique wellspring of Korean triumph, a link made explicit by using kut as the template for the Olympic festival’s performingarts program. In 1985, the government finally responded to a longstanding campaign among folklorists and appointed the master shaman Kim Geum-hwa as a ‘‘heritage transmitter’’ (poyuja), colloquially, a ‘‘human national treasure’’ (in’gan munhwaje) (Kim Geum-hwa, 1995). A commemorative postage stamp marking this event bore the familiar image

Numinous Dress / Iconic Costume

129

of a shaman in the red robe and high-crowned hat. The shaman in emblematic costume had become emblematic of Korea itself. Shamans in colorful costume now routinely appear on the covers of cultural publications and in spreads in in-flight magazines (Figure 10).

Shamans Represent Themselves The stiff portraits of early photography are long gone. Modern photography, no less than motion picture film, video, and DVDs, has enabled the representation of motion, combined in moving media with sound. Photographs reveal how the deeply gored hems of a shaman’s robes flare out and whirl when she dances. The mobile facial expressions of a shaman performing kut have become another signature of shaman photographs. Even so, the costume remains the most important component of the now thoroughly iconic Korean mudang, an image that some mudang and wouldbe mudang are deploying to good effect. National Treasure Shaman Kim Geum-hwa appears on the cover of her Anthology of Kim Geum-hwa’s Shaman Songs (1995) in a red robe and high-crowned hat covered with paper

Figure 10. 1985 Korean stamp portraying a shaman in familiar costume and pose.

130

Laurel Kendall

flowers. The book is an anthology of songs, combined with commentary on the meaning of specific rituals, the arrangement of offering food, and an autobiographical essay. This is a crossover book, intended for shamans who would master this tradition, scholars, and amateur folklore buffs. It is sold both in mainstream bookshops and in shaman supply shops (manmulsang). Ch’o˘n Pok-hwa, a younger shaman, offers advice and commentary on the shaman profession in her book, Mudang Chronicles, appearing on the cover in the same photogenic red robe and high crowned hat. This is also a crossover book. Both Kim and Ch’o˘n represent themselves in motion, their faces lit with inspiration (Ch’o˘n a little more Hollywood, smiling to reveal her perfect teeth), both captured by the camera amid the ‘‘divine dance’’ that Hyewon painted two centuries ago. In the micropolitics of the Korean shaman world, this is a not-insignificant move. These poses address a basic question—who is a real mudang, a real mansin, a real shaman?—a question framed in two very different ways. The first is the basic question asked most places where some religious specialists are described as ‘‘shamans’’: Who is a ‘‘real’’ shaman and who is merely simulating? Is this a shaman who receives inspiration and delivers ‘‘the true words of the spirits,’’ or is she merely playacting for the sake of cash? An old and enduring question in Korea, this is also an old and enduring issue in anthropology. (See LeviStrauss [1963] 1967.) The second framing of the question may be more specific to place: By what signs or attributes is a genuine mudang known? How is a mudang distinguished from other (to some eyes lesser) inspiriational religious practitioners? At least since the 1930s, when Japanese and Korean ethnologists began to write systematically about them, the boundaries of possible mudang identity have been simultaneously policed and muddled. Akamatsu and Akiba claimed that in the Choso˘n period (1392–1910)—barely a generation past at the time of their fieldwork, but for their informants already a benchmark of tradition—only those who performed kut with song and dance to entertain the spirits were ever called mudang. Diviners who gained inspiration from dead children, spirit mediums, exorcists, and other similar practitioners were not mudang, properly speaking (Akamatsu and Akiba 1991, vol. 2, 42–43). The issue would not merit mention if it were not already an issue for some proprietary mudang, as much as for the categorizing ethnologists, and it has remained an issue for successive generations of Korean folklorists (Hwang 2000, 265–68; Yim 1970). Those who in the past might have thought of themselves as diviners and performers of small rituals, with such titles as cho˘mjangi, posal, tongja posal, or myo˘ngdu, now have every incentive to style themselves as mudang. Sim Chin-song,

Numinous Dress / Iconic Costume

131

who spectacularly predicted the death of North Korean leader Kim Il Sung in 1994, appears in costume on the cover of her 1995 memoir, Woman Chosen by the Gods (Figure 11), wearing the high-crowned hat (Sim 1995). Sim claims fame as a diviner, but in the iconic image of a mudang and its now positive associations with national culture and performing arts. Thus, the fully embodied (and simultaneously disembodied) portraits of Kim and Ch’o˘n convey their kinetic claims as women who sing and dance to serve the gods, ‘‘real mudang,’’ ‘‘real mansin,’’ women whose images convey not only iconic identification with a tradition, but its religious and spiritual mastery in the performance of kut. In cyberspace, claims to mudang status are asserted on shamans’ own home pages, even when this status is ambiguous. For example, The Purple Cloud Goddess offers ‘‘Fate Counseling’’ and gives her cell phone number. There is no indication on her home page that she does anything more than divine, although she describes herself as a mudang in the tradition of Pyo˘ngan Province and presents herself wearing the white peaked hood and white robe associated with celestial spirits. Other cyberspace ‘‘counselors’’ appear in armor, robes, and with fans, knives, and other paraphernalia associated with mudang. Discussing the growth of ‘‘cyber shamans’’ who offer Internet counseling and protective talismans, Seong-Nae Kim eloquently argues that the ‘‘virtual’’ nature of cyberspace is not incompatible with the virtual reality of shamanic practice in the most general sense

Figure 11. Shaman website. Streaming of moving images will appear in the black rectangle.

132

Laurel Kendall

and that the disembodied and consequently ubiquitous presence of the cybershaman assumes a fundamental transformation of our understanding of person and world (S. N. Kim 2003). But this is also to say that cyberspace removes the shaman from the immediacy of encounter and from the sense of embodiment that is central to the kut’s uncanny power—albeit, as already noted, some clients now approach the kut as a pure commodity for which their own physical presence is no longer necessary. Performance and the potential manifestation of gods remain central attributes of the shaman’s identity where ambitious shamans distinguish themselves from website diviners by ‘‘streaming’’ their websites to show clips of artful and arduous sequences from their kut, evidence of their claims to be ‘‘real’’ and also exemplary mudang. For a while, Kim Geumhwa’s site offered a flickering animation of her changing facial expressions as she manifested a saucy god. Others, operating at a lower level of technical complexity, decorate their sites with dynamic photographs of themselves performing kut, bodies in motion, costumes flapping, faces lit with an ethereal other presence. The new media discussed here—websites, streaming, and technical improvements in still photography—thus enable both a continuation of projects representing the mudang as an iconic or emblematic presence and a radical departure from them. Once represented via the iconicity of their costumes since at lest the eighteenth century, in the technologically sophisticated society that South Korea has become, shaman subjects are now also agents of their own representation, presenting themselves as costumed mudang where mudang have won a respectable place in the cultural lexicon and demonstrating their abilities as authentic performers of sacredness. The intended audience for these shaman-sponsored websites is the shaman’s own potential clients, not detached gazers of things exotic or folkloric, and the possibility of advertising one’s abilities online is timely. Because most kut today are nearly clandestine events carried out in rented ritual spaces, they are removed from the critical eye of a seasoned audience whose first-hand observations and subsequent word of mouth could build or break a shaman’s reputation.14 The new media enable new shamans to assert claims of competence and authenticity in a discreet, highly controlled, and visually effective way.

Beyond Visuality: The Costume, the Invisible, and the Tactile The new media have allowed shamans to advertise their skill and authenticity in new ways. However, prior to and apart from their identity as

Numinous Dress / Iconic Costume

133

media images, the robes worn by mudang are seen, worn, danced, and touched as old media, as means to experiencing the invisible presence of the god through what David Howes describes as the ‘‘lived sensory order’’ (Howes 2005, 3), experienced in ways still not yet fully tractable to modern and contemporary forms of visual media. It is true that newer visual technologies enable the physically removed spectator to venture increasingly further into the visual and sonic experience of kut. The new media transform the costume from a thing of mere form and color into an object in motion, animated by the dancing shaman. Even still photographs now capture this. But in any of the new media, the costume plays on and through modernity’s fundamental sensate experience, sight (sometimes with sound, as well) to suggest the uncanny claims of shamanic power. The image of the costumed shaman, however exquisitely rendered, still only hints at the larger sensory (and extrasensory) landscape of kut, something that the streamed websites can only promise in deferred form, in the manner of a movie trailer, and that the cyberdiviners do not attempt. It is only within the kut’s own landscape that the costume participates in the construction and enactment of abiding relationships between shamans, clients, gods, and ancestors. Korean shamans’ costumes are sites of invisible transactions between human and spirit, gifts offered in the hope of acquiring auspiciousness or blessing (pok, chesu). As an offering, the costume thickens the relationship between gods and the mortals who serve them, the loose communities that take shape around them. Shamans offer new robes to the gods in their shrine on the strength of a dream or a divination from another shaman, but many of the costumes they wear are presented by clients when the shaman discerns in a vision or a dream that the client has a particularly potent deity in her household pantheon. Marked with the client’s name, the costume becomes a durable sign of an active relationship between the shaman, the spirits in her shrine, and the client and the client’s own family’s spirits. A robe belongs to the god who wears it in kut, and it becomes, with the pictures in the shaman’s shrine, a marker of the god’s latent presence. The robe must be treated with respect, stored carefully, usually in the shaman’s shrine, and kept apart from ordinary clothing. To keep the god satisfied, the god’s robe should be danced periodically in kut. Each time the shaman wears the robe dedicated by a particular client to feast and play at kut, even kut for the benefit of another client, the god is refreshed and smiles benevolently upon the donor of the robe. I have been told that I benefit by long distance when my longtime shaman conversation partner wears the long blue vest I dedicated many years ago.

134

Laurel Kendall

I became aware of the significance of costumes during my first fieldwork in the 1970s. Following a shaman and her clients for more than a year, I saw how during kut, when shamans’ clients danced mugam—danced in the shamans’ costumes—to satisfy their own body-governing gods, the shamans would sometimes cast a second robe of a particular cut and color over the dancing woman’s shoulders. If this robe prompted more animated dancing, it would be taken as the sign of a potent deity in the dancing woman’s household pantheon, an ancestor who had become a monk (gray robe), a grandmother who had made mountain pilgrimages to honor the Seven Stars (white robe), or a deceased shaman (yellow robe). A sighting might be followed by the suggestion that the woman honor this particular god and dedicate a new robe in the shaman’s shrine. The presence of an ancestral shaman might more ominously herald a divine calling. These dedicated robes functioned as ritual props—material properties that move action—as well as costumes; they were taken out and remarked upon when the mansin performed kut for these same clients and were offered to the clients, later in the day, for mugam. But more than props, they were also vehicles of divine presence, thin tissues through which human bodies encountered the divine. When she performed her annual kut for her own spirits and her community of clients, the mansin bundled on multiple versions of the same robe to bestow simultaneous blessings on several clients. By so doing, she also evidenced that her gods were powerful gods who have brought her much business over several years of practice, a thickening of client relations made literal through several layers of costume. If a client broke her relationship with a shaman and her shrine, the dedicated costume became useless, or rather, worse than useless—the site of an unsatisfied deity. I recall a shaman burning a costume dedicated by a client who now visited a Buddhist temple. As a sign and extension of the spirit’s presence, the robe also transmits the deity; shamans dust clients with auspiciousness by shaking the hems of their costumes toward them, fanning blessings at the client. When the shaman removes her robe and hat, she casts the costume into the client’s outstretched skirt as a sign of the god’s favor (Figure 12). The client feels the weight of blessing descending on her before passing the costume to the attendants. For the spectator, these are visual gestures, but for the client, these are also haptic experiences that combine with other actions in the kut—an exorcistic pelting of grain, the pounding of cymbals close to her ear, the caresses of weeping ancestors—as part of a broad sensorium of healing and benediction experienced as mediated encounters with the divine. (See Desjarlais 1996.) Wearing a robe over her own body to dance

Numinous Dress / Iconic Costume

Figure 12. Laurel Kendall receives a bundle of costume at a kut she sponsored in 2009.

135

136

Laurel Kendall

mugam at an interlude in a kut, feeling it flair around her while she jumps to the drum beats, the client herself becomes almost a shaman in the divine dance, almost a god. The robes thus function as both general signifiers of archetypal gods— most of the robes that a shaman wears when she performs a client’s kut were not dedicated by that particular client, but gods from the client’s household appear, just the same—and as markers of particular and emergent relationships between clients and their family histories and shamans and the gods they manifest.15 As a medium for the sensory experience of the invisible presence of the gods, the costumes of Korean shamans thus function in ways that their representation in new forms of media cannot. The physical and the material mediate the invisible in ways that the mere visuality of the new media—from early photography forward—does not allow, embodying the particular relations between gods, shamans, and individual clients in garments that can and must be worn, danced, and touched, not merely seen.

Rites of Reception: Mass-Mediated Trance and Public Order in Morocco Emilio Spadola Yasmine, twenty-four years old, and her boyfriend Aziz, both university students from Casablanca, display the tranquil assurance of children of the upper middle classes at the head of the country. ‘‘The King protects us. He won’t let the Islamists impose their moral order,’’ she says, dancing to Gnawa music, the genre imported to Morocco by descendants of African slaves. —hassane zerrouky, ‘‘Les islamistes a` l’assaut de Casablanca’’

In contemporary Morocco, the business and professional classes often discuss the local Sufi veneration of saints and spirits, including ritual forms of trance, in positive terms, associating them with the nation’s distinctly modern Islamic society, culture, and economy.1 Although hardly unanimous, many middle-class and underclass Moroccans do so, as well. As Hassane Zerrouky noted during the 2007 parliamentary elections, the Moroccan monarchy and elites reinforce the nation-state’s Sufi character during perceived political challenges to the national order (Zerrouky 2007) The association of Sufism with Morocco’s ‘‘moderate’’ national character was made explicit, for example, during the politically tense summer of 2003, which followed horrific suicide bombings at a Jewish cultural center and Spanish cafe´ in cosmopolitan Casablanca, carried out by al-Qaeda-linked Islamic militants. While the state summarily jailed and tortured thousands of presumed Islamic radicals, the national press and high-society magazines celebrated Morocco’s slate of Sufi-themed summer culture festivals (mihrajanat), including the Fez Festival of Sacred World Music and especially the Essaouira Festival of Gnawa and World Music, as signs of Morocco’s capacity for ‘‘modernity’’ in the face of the recent ‘‘barbarism,’’ signs of national order in the face of apparent chaos (Alaoui 2003).

137

138

Emilio Spadola

Characterizing of Sufism in general as explicitly Moroccan is unsurprising, as is the class privilege of those advocating Sufism. Doing so suits a Moroccan cultural elite and a divine monarchy grounded for the past four hundred years in Sufi-based sharifian sovereignty, that is, the social nobility of and political rule by the prophet Muhammad’s descendants, or shurafa’ (singular, sharif ), inheritors of his pious example and of the divine blessing (baraka) that he received from God. As recognized intermediaries of God’s blessing and commands, sharifian saints (wali, plural awliya’, literally ‘‘friends [of God]’’) and their descendents historically have enjoyed legal dispensations and titles (‘‘my master’’ [moulay]), as well as pious followings, ‘‘Sufi orders’’ [turuq sufiyya], that continue to garner widespread urban and rural membership and state support. As in the past, the Moroccan monarchy and Sufi elites claim the call of Islam—God’s law and gift of salvation—as their own, thus identifying pious receptivity to the call with social and political hierarchy. Nevertheless, elite Moroccans’ recent lauding of Sufi trance rites, in particular, bears a second look, because of the specifically modern itinerary of this discourse, in which particular rites have gone from being condemned an obstacle to national progress to being embraced as a national antidote to extremism among underclasses potentially receptive to Islamist proselytizing (Claisse 2003). A nationalist discourse invoking terms such as ‘‘progress,’’ ‘‘modernity,’’ and ‘‘barbarism’’ in the context of Moroccan modernity and Sufi trance rites is traceable to the first flush of popular Moroccan nationalism in the early 1930s and to young nationalists’ criticisms of French and Spanish colonialism. At that time, however, like many Muslim modernists in the Middle East and North Africa faced with European hegemony, distinctly upper-class Moroccan nationalists (among them shurafa’) explicitly and vigorously condemned underclass Sufi trance rites. Their criticisms were in part doctrinal: nationalists criticized Sufi ‘‘accretions’’ to the pure texts of the Qur’an and Sunna (the prophet Muhammad’s example), which had guided Islam’s victorious ‘‘pious ancestors’’ (al-salaf al-salih). More specifically, however, well-regarded nationalists criticized underclass trance rites in the name of an incipient national collective, le Peuple or alsh‘ab, for which they claimed to speak. For nationalists, trance rites were doubly corrosive, at once summoning the underclasses to states of deranged ecstasy, rather than mass political consciousness and unity, and presenting scandalous images of ‘‘Morocco’’ in increasingly massmediated colonial stagings (Al-Fassi 1954, 112; Berque 1967, 104; Spadola 2008). Indeed, although many upper-class Moroccan nationalists viewed

139

Rites of Reception

Sufi saints as moral exemplars, they sought a sharifian royal decree to ban the underclass Sufi trance rites and processionals as ‘‘an institution of superstition that had for long stifled Moroccan progress’’ (Al-Fassi 1954, 112). Between the 1930s and 2000s, then, Morocco’s privileged class has linked Sufi trance rites to national order, yet for those speaking in Morocco’s name today, the social and political significance of trance has apparently reversed. As Martin Zillinger documents both in Morocco and among Moroccan immigrants in Europe, a cosmopolitan upper class is now reclaiming its sharifian affiliations with popular ‘Isawa and Hamadsha Sufi orders, even as these same orders’ trance rites appear in transnational new media as signs of Moroccan particularity (Zillinger 2008). The new media are not incidental to trance’s changing fortunes: in state-sponsored and mass-mediated trance rites, an orderly Moroccan public coheres in receiving the sharifian Sufi call.2 Or rather, more accurately, in the view of the state and the upper classes, an orderly Moroccan public should do so, because trance should be a way to consolidate public order. However, the technological reproducibility of trance also poses specific challenges to such efforts at control, not least in private rituals, which evade state oversight. This essay explores the social conditions and discourses that have prompted the modern reversals of the status of Sufi trance rites and the effect that those changing social conditions and discourses have had on ritual practitioners and audiences as Sufi trance rites have simultaneously become both a means of imposing social order and a potentially destabilizing force in Moroccan society.

Sufi Trance Rites in Contemporary Fez What follows examines Sufi trance rites, ritual practitioners, and audiences in the city of Fez in northern Morocco, in particular, ‘Isawa, Hamadsha, and Gnawa rites. Historical and contemporary differences among these orders notwithstanding, in Fez the three overlap in structure and practice. Groups in all three orders are composed of a central master (muqaddam or ma‘alim) and musicians/dancers, and the groups perform public and private propitiatory trance rites (hadra, jedba) and sacrifices to a largely shared pantheon of sharifian saints and spirits (jinn, plural jnun; malk, plural mluk, literally ‘‘possessors’’ or ‘‘royalty’’ among jnun).3 Publicly, they participate in annual holidays (mawsim, plural mawasim) in honor of saints and spirits, appearing in some cases in succession during

140

Emilio Spadola

trance processionals through the streets of Old Fez (Fez Medina) and culminating in sacrifices at a saint’s tomb in the city or in pilgrimage to saints’ tombs and spirit shrines in nearby Meknes and Zerhoun. Privately, the groups perform curing rites with regular, but informal ritual communities of male and female spirit mediums or ‘‘seers’’ (masculine shuwwaf; feminine shuwwafa) and their clientele, family, and friends. These curing rites constitute a significant informal economy in Fez: groups of trance musicians and dancers typically receive 1000 to 6000 Moroccan dirhams (about 150–900 U.S. dollars) to perform, in addition to tribute (20 to 200 dirhams, about 3 to 30 dollars) given to group members of the ritual. In addition, seers in trance states both inside and outside ritual gatherings receive typically 20 to 200 dirhams (about 3 to 30 dollars) to diagnose spiritual illnesses or sorcery and related problems with employment, money, marriage, and infertility. While public ritual and communal forms were recorded—to nationalists’ chagrin—in colonial ethnographies, photography, and film, newer forms of public trance rites emerged in the 1980s and 1990s in Morocco, including Sufi and Moroccan cultural festivals (mihrajanat), the largest in Morocco being the Essaouira Festival of Gnawa and Trance Music, now retitled to include world music. These novel forms of public staging depart from older and ongoing forms of curing rites and mawasim: they include neither the sacrificial rites nor their famously bloody acts of selfflagellation. In most cases, these trance stagings also do not include a seer, male or female. They do include new forms of audience participation, including buying tickets beforehand, instead of offering tribute, and sitting in rows or standing before an elevated stage. More importantly, the success of these festivals has prompted corporate and state sponsorship and accompanying technological dissemination. Images of Sufi performers and trancing crowds circulate in state television broadcasts and are regularly uploaded to YouTube and exchanged via cassettes, compact discs, DVDs, and cell-phone videos. Although the new performances tend to juxtapose or blend differing styles, Gnawa, rather than ‘Isawa or Hamadsha musicians and groups, have largely taken center stage, and they have likewise enjoyed the most significant global circulation of their music and ritual forms (Becker 2002; Kapchan 2007; Paˆques 1999). These differences notwithstanding, the political significance of conventional mawasim and private curing rites and mass-mediated stagings alike rests, as I have suggested, on the devotional rites’ older corporal and social mediation of power—specifically, of divine power imbricated in sharifian society and politics. Trance is best understood as a rite of reception. It is

141

Rites of Reception

performative, repeatedly demonstrating and establishing the supremacy of the sharifian call that precipitates it. As trance seizes bodies of performers and, through them, audiences, participants signal their own receptivity to and identification with sharifian power, thus repeating its call for future or distant audiences. The technological reproducibility of reception extends and transforms the practice and value of public and private trance rites. In adopting new ritual norms of self-conscious staging and camera-ready performance—norms of conscious reception—performers and audiences of trance stand in the service of the sharifian state (and with permission of the state) as visible representatives of Morocco’s national Sufi ‘‘culture’’ (Kapchan 2007).4 In turn, however, whereas the public trance rites surrounding saints’ holidays receive state recognition and patronage, moral and legal opprobrium falls on trance rites—private curing and propiatory rites in particular—that fail to produce themselves as culturally representative commodities. Much as they were viewed by Moroccan nationalists, private rites of reception are judged by some middle-class and upper-class Moroccans to be simple superstition or acts of sorcery; trance practitioners, particular mediums or seers, risk legal accusations of fraud or even prostitution. Put simply, trance’s salutary position in Morocco applies only to those rituals that submit to state oversight and commodity aesthetics. The changing media of trance are displacing one mode of reception with another set of social and political controls.5

Trance and Hierarchy in Morocco The Moroccan state is a constitutional monarchy headed by shurafa’, or descendants of the prophet Muhammad. A dominant political and scholarly narrative identifies the emergence of the modern Moroccan nation with the consolidation of sharifian rule in the late fifteenth and sixteenth century by the Sa‘adian dynasty (Cornell 1998, 258–63). Stricter readings of a distinctly modern imagined community, however, point to its emergence from 1912 to 1956 during the colonial period under French, Spanish, and international rule and specifically within the elite nationalist movement of the late 1920s and 1930s and the popular anticolonial movement of the late 1940s and 1950s. The dominant currents of these movements were essentially monarchist, indeed, enthusiastically so, and postcolonial Moroccan political culture is commonly studied as a series of transpositions and adaptions of sharifian power to a centralized state and

142

Emilio Spadola

national community, the beginnings of which are located in the colonial intervention itself (Combs-Schilling 1989; Geertz 1968 and 1977; Hammoudi 1997; Tozy 1999; Waterbury 1970). As Abdellah Hammoudi argues of Morocco’s Sufi-based authoritarianism, ‘‘Everything existed before colonial domination; what colonialism invented were new connections between things and words and unprecedented controls over bodies and souls’’ (Hammoudi 1997, 109). Trance was one practice among a broad culture of veneration for saints and spirits that linked the state or monarch with particular status groups. In Fez, founded in the late eighth century by Idrissi shurafa’ and the locus of sharifian symbolic political capital, this link was especially pertinent to social and political order. At the cusp of colonial occupation, Fez had declined from its medieval golden era as a regional locus of Islamic scholarship and sharifian political symbolism, as a terminus for Saharan trade, and as a center of artisanal and mercantile wealth. From the midnineteenth century onward, European incursion shifted Morocco’s major trade to the Atlantic coast, in the process displacing Fez’s political and commercial wealth (and its wealthy and educated families) from the Old City’s magnificent riyads and labyrinthine urban weave to the rising centers of Casablanca and Rabat, as well as to Manchester, Marseilles, and Geneva (Halliday 2000, 192). Due in part to new mercantile ties, however, Fez remained a political and intellectual center and would do so throughout the colonial period, with a young generation of Fassi bourgeoisie leading the elite nationalist group Zawiya tied to the venerable Qarawiyyin mosque-university and the new French Colle`ge Moulay Idriss. Many Fassi shurafa’ occupied elite positions as merchants, scholars, or Sufi shaykhs; others were less wealthy, but enjoyed particular tax and legal exemptions granted by the sultan. While sharifian status did not guarantee direct links to trance rites, the trance rites were fully incorporated into sharifian culture, not least for their spectacular demonstrations of sharifian power. Variously conceived as ecstatic possession by spirits (mluk) or by the saint’s holiness (baraka), which controls spirits, trance ritually demonstrates devotees’ receptivity to power—their literal reception of holiness embodied in sharifian saints and their living descendants. Such sharifian descendants (shurafa’) included not only members of the Fassi cultural elite, but also the ruling ‘Alawi family itself. Conversely, trance performances largely fell to women and to marginal and underclass men, for whom it offered recognizable identities and communities (Crapanzano 1973, 1977b, and 1980). Gnawa trance specialists, musicians, dancers, and women seers included sub-Saharan peoples captured and sold as slaves for

Rites of Reception

143

the urban bourgeoisie and the ‘Alawite sultans’ army and servants.6 Members and participants in the Sufi orders of the ‘Isawa and Hamadsha, including musicians and dancers, belonged to the marginal ‘‘common’’ classes, the menial ‘‘unclean’’ trades (butchers, blacksmiths, cobblers, tanners), slaves and descendants of slaves, and waves of rural migrants (Bruˆnel 1926, 51–52, and see Geertz 1979). For underclass adepts, to receive divine power in a trance was structurally similar to entering into middle-class and upper-class Sufi orders: a commitment to a saintly or spiritual ‘‘exemplary center’’ (Geertz 1968, 44) and the relative prestige of proximity to spiritual origins. But to perform trance as a rite of reception also meant extending and transmitting the sharifian call to ordinary underclass Muslims and especially to the vast, effervescent crowds attending public processionals in honor of their eponymous saints and for other sharifian figures, such as the founding saint Mawlay Idriss II in the heart of Fez. These public rites of reception were not only astonishing, but a ‘‘favorite yearly spectacle for the Fassis’’ (Aubin 1906, 348). Beginning with milder trances, they culminated in the Hamadsha, which involves self-mutilation with knives and axes (Crapanzano 1973), the ‘Isawa consuming spiny cactus or boiling water, performing as particular wild animals (lions, jackals), and devouring raw sacrificial sheep (Aubin 1906, 349; Bruˆ nel 1926; Zillinger 2010). As Eugene Aubin observed, such ritual stagings summoned vast crowds of men and women who likewise fell into trances, the result being a feeling of ‘‘collective exaltation’’ (Le Tourneau [1949] 1987, 610) or submission to baraka, which the entranced performers received and transmitted to others. Such public rites permitted the circulation of wealth from devotees, to adepts, to shurafa’ in exchange for blessings (Crapanzano 1973). More broadly, in demonstrating a saints’ potency, the rites also affirmed trance adepts as intermediaries of the sharifian call for the gathered crowds. That is to say, trance was a vastly popular practice for the circulation of baraka and thus reiteration of its power.7 It is of course common to describe the body in trance as ‘‘receiving’’ sacred forces—the ‘‘first call’’ or command of an invisible force interpreted as a ‘‘dreaded sickness’’ (Lewis [1971] 2003, 26)—with the archetypal narrative of the medium, perhaps as much as the shaman, attaining new status through practical mastery of its effects. Although such an account risks reducing multifaceted practices to a single instrumental logic (Behrend and Luig 1999; Boddy 1994; McIntosh 2004), and although, as Heike Behrend suggests, these forms of trance contain elements hostile to hierarchy, even ‘‘thinly disguised protest movements’’ operate within the principle of hierarchy

144

Emilio Spadola

itself. In this sense, trance as a rite of reception confirmed and also obeyed the existing social hierarchy, permitting relative prestige to accrue to those who transmitted its living substance, or baraka.8 Receptivity in trance marked the bodies of trance adepts with underclass status, baraka’s contagious effects taking specific gestural forms, expressive or at least indicative of these power differentials. Possessed of the saint’s baraka, the noble shurafa’ were not possessed by it, for to possess baraka was to be able to withstand its effects. In her memoir of life within the royal court, Malika Oufkir quotes King Hassan II himself regarding trance and class. The king reprimands his young wife and Malika, who responded to a Sufi trance ritual in the palace by partaking of trance gestures: ‘‘Your rank does not permit you to behave like them. You are impervious to the devil and possession’’ (Oufkir and Fitoussi 2001, 45). Likewise, the Sufi saying ‘‘If the children of the saint fall into ecstasy, the followers of the saint fall out of ecstasy’’ (Crapanzano 1973, 74) suggests that reception of baraka inscribed in bodily acts established the social recognition upon which sanctification rested; the force of hierarchy rested on it. Ritual reiterated and reinforced social distinctions and political order.9 The Gnawa’s slave origins and the ritual connections between being possessed (mamluk) and enslaved (also mamluk) by the sultan also explicitly link trance and political hierarchy (Paˆ ques 1991; Ennaji 1999; Claisse 2003). As Mohammed Maarouf writes of underclass devotees of the Buffi saint lineage, followers ‘‘treat saints as sultans and perform rituals of submission to them’’ (Maarouf 2007, 5). Yet trance adepts and devotees employed their mastery of sacred forces to gain recognition and community within those conditions of social marginalization as women (including women from elite Fassi families) and marginal men. (See Lewis 2003.) Until the introduction of technological reproducibility to the rites, this relative power and popularity of underclass bodies remained circumscribed by hierarchy.

Changing Media of Publicity Precolonial performances of trance rites had raised occasional doctrinal criticisms and reformist concerns, but no sustained reformist movement emerged (El Mansour 1990), a testament to the domestication of the rites within the sharifian social and political order. As Aubin’s descriptions of the rites as favorite yearly spectacles attest, it was his hosts in the state

Rites of Reception

145

(Makhzen) itself who provided him with a balcony overseeing the processions. In L’Action du Peuple, a locally edited and published nationalist newspaper, however, nationalists in Fez took issue with the rites as spectacle, indeed, as ‘‘the most repugnant and most shameful demonstration that history has ever recorded’’ (August 25, 1933, 4).10 The Moroccan nationalist movement in Fez for which L’Action du Peuple was the mouthpiece followed in the wake of technological changes, the expansion of mass communications, in particular, in the milieu of the young urban upper class. Accessible Arabic and French printing presses, highway and railway networks, telegraphs and telephones, phonographs, radio broadcasts, photography, and film all emerged just prior to or in the decade following the 1912 establishment of a French protectorate over central and southern Morocco (Jaı¨di 2000).11 Such technological changes not only disseminated European, nationalist, and Islamic modernist thought within the educated classes, but these material conditions also made national unity imaginable. Efforts to ban trance rites coincided with nationalists’ own mass political call to unity through print and photography, as well as through novel and orderly rites of mass public celebration. They established the sharifian monarch Mohammed V as a national symbol via the circulation of his photographic image and in The Celebration of the Throne, a simultaneous multicity demonstration of devotion to the young king still celebrated annually. Yet while rendering such a mass call both politically necessary and technologically feasible, these same material conditions enhanced ritual stagings of trance. Not only had the protectorate’s railways and highways facilitated mass movements of pilgrims, but the French colonial state had honored the rites as ‘‘official’’ national holidays, and colonial cameras disseminated the rites to ‘‘the universe’’ (Bouhlal 1937, 2). Nationalists decried the power of such previously circumscribed rites to represent Morocco on the world stage, even as they recognized the political utility of trance rites for domestic control. Indeed the French protectorate took hold of the rites as part of a broader grip on social hierarchy, the sine qua non of which being the sultanate and sharifian nobility in general. French officials named their territory the ‘‘Sherifian Empire of Morocco,’’ promising in major treaties in 1904 and 1912 to ‘‘respect’’ Moroccan religious institutions and ‘‘customs’’—designation and regulation of which was to be the protectorate’s task. Confirming what Julia Clancy-Smith has called colonial France’s ‘‘obsessive interest in the political dimensions of spiritual cartography’’ in the Maghrib (Clancy-Smith 1994, 39), the colonial state harnessed the sheer political force of reception, or, in the apt words of one

146

Emilio Spadola

official, ‘‘the religious throb of the crowds’ soul’’ (Bruˆnel 1926, 176; Rivet 1988, 148).12 Although French governors in separate cities sought unsuccessfully to ban putatively unhygienic elements of trances (sacrificial rites, in particular), they commonly attended the public trance rites during annual saints festivals that drew tens of thousands of rural and urban pilgrims, occupying the place of honor next to sharifian observers. As an ‘Isawi sharif described it, ‘‘we were the companions of [Resident General] Guillaume, companions of the state’’ (ashab Guillaume, ashab alMakhzen).13 With the incipient nationalist movement in the early 1930s, the protectorate briefly considered the potential political danger of these movements (Reysoo 1991, 175), yet as nationalists’ criticisms confirmed, these were anathema to the new call to mass political consciousness. By the mid1930s, the alarm subsided, and the protectorate banned nationalist rallies instead for failing to ‘‘conform to customary usage’’ (Re´zette 1955, 12). Trance rites, however, were not so much depoliticized as domesticated within the effective ritual and hierarchical contours of the state and a significant section of society. As a Moroccan nationalist editor mimicked the colonial state with much sarcasm in L’Action du Peuple, ‘‘The Marabout, the Imam, the Mufti, this dear and faithful clergy you will adore. The hem of their bernous you will kiss, to their anesthetizing instruction you will bow, their sacred ‘baraka’ you will seek, if not, upon you will fall their malediction—which is mine’’ (August 18, 1933, 3). State support of public trances meant its submission to an international market for such exotica, as well. To be sure, ‘Isawa trance rites had been staged during the 1867 Paris Grand Expo (Bruˆnel 1926, xi), and Europeans in Tangier could enjoy performances by Gnawa troupes—so much so that to Georges Salmon of the colonial Mission scientifique au Maroc, Gnawa musicians ‘‘begging coins from tourists . . . resemble more batteleurs de rue than a religious brotherhood’’ (Salmon 1905, 102). Nevertheless, colonial occupation permitted an increase in the commoditized reproduction of trance rites as images, appearing widely in cartes postales and quasi-ethnographic and cultural magazines (Maroc Illustre´ , FranceMaroc) produced in the protectorate and read in the metropole.14 The theme of such images—Moroccans’ corporal and collective madness—borrowed from earlier Orientalist representations of Sufi trance, such as Delacroix’s famed Les fanatiques de Tangier. But photographic and filmic technologies provided a new impetus for arranging and staging trances for the camera itself as representations of Moroccan culture. Nationalists thus rightly complained of a new kind of disruption in which

Rites of Reception

147

what L’Action Du Peuple called ‘‘the camera within our walls’’ constructed the exotica it captured: ‘‘Africa Speaks: such is one of the scenes filmed to show Morocco to the universe. In short, snake charmers (a very African specialty) were displayed before the eyes of your stupefied artists, as were friendly Blacks, who played the African drum and the English bagpipes, and, overexcited, danced the rumba in their standing lines. Flute and tambourine players brought especially from Sale´ ‘the Barbarous’ completed the set.’’ (Bouhlal 1937, 2) While this colonial gaze was not a wholly external imposition—trance rites were already public and spectacular—the presence of a different and distinct receiver, one that retransmitted these public gestures technologically, beyond the conventional locus of sharifian circulation and recognition, was nonetheless significant, especially to Moroccan nationalists who now considered such images to be socially humiliating and politically destructive to Morocco’s future claims to independence. In particular, it registers the beginnings of a time when trance as reception—and its underclass prestige within the sharifian system— extended toward mass audiences, which, unlike local crowds, experienced the images as representations within a distinctly mass-mediated structure of power. To frame the rites as culture was to regulate their enactment—to make them suitable for framing, but also to claim their performative force for both the colonial state and the mass market (Dirks 1992; Rabinow 1989). Photography as much as law partook of the protectorate’s colonizing of the sharifian hierarchy, which is to say, through staging and mechanical repetition, the market aided the state’s appropriation of trance and of the sharifian Sufi call. Colonial incursion took hold of reception by way of its reproduction.

Postcolonial Trance and Power in Fez: Reception in and out of Control After independence in 1956, the political claims of the nationalist movement itself were suppressed in the monarchy’s consolidation of divine power and violence.15 While continuing to bestow formal recognition on sharifian families, the postcolonial state followed the French colonial reframing of trance rituals both as a cultural heritage and, increasingly, as a form of middle-class and upper-class entertainment. In some cases, this recuperation followed precolonial traditions. In an act of royal largesse, for example, Muhammad V welcomed back Gnawa kin of the ‘Alawi sultans’ Black Guard as well as three ‘Isawa troupes to live within his

148

Emilio Spadola

palaces—groups that his son and successor, Hassan II, continued to host. Other tactics followed the colonial mediations of trance. And today, Pierre Claisse argues, Gnawa masters function as the king’s public mediators with the underclasses as ‘‘guardians of . . . the maraboutic [saintly] tradition’’ who ‘‘embody the history of national unity’’ (Claisse 2003, 65). From the late 1980s to the present, Moroccan state institutions (the National Office of Tourism, the Ministry of Culture and Communication, the Moroccan National Broadcasting and Television Company) codified or canonized the rites as national. (Sufi affiliates could now register as an ‘‘Official Folklore Troupe.’’) Especially from 1985 onward, state media began to broadcast hybrid forms of trance dance and music (mainly of the Gnawa and ‘Isawa in their mildest forms) as ‘‘national,’’ ‘‘popular,’’ ‘‘folk,’’ and ‘‘folkloric’’ practices.16 Such folk practices, especially those of the Gnawa, marked the distinct entry of traditionally low-cultural practices into traditionally high-cultural domains, effectively displacing the historically aristocratic, Fez-based Andalusi music and upscale forms of Malhun recitals (sung poetry with orchestral accompaniment) as evening entertainment and programming filler. In the early 1990s, the airing of short segments of Gnawa, ‘Isawa, and Hamadsha performances was joined by longer evening programs (soire´es) recorded from new cultural ‘‘celebrations’’ or ‘‘festivals’’ (mihrajanat). The Fez Festival of World Sacred Music first aired in 1994, the Culture and Tourism Festival in Azmour in 1997, the National Festival of Folk Arts in 1999, and the Gnawa and World Music Festival of Essaouira—Morocco’s foremost international and domestic tourist event—was featured in 1998 and then presented yearly from 2001 on. The May 2003 Casablanca bombings provided additional impetus to deploy Sufi trance. On the margins of the Fez Festival of World Sacred Music middle-class and lower-class Moroccans were invited to free public stagings of Sufi rites [lilat sufiyya], with the ‘Isawa and Hamadsha orders annually drawing the largest crowds. The state’s expanded satellite channels regularly air Gnawa performances and post segments and shows online. Following 2011 prodemocracy protests denouncing the monarchy, the state again called upon Gnawa performers as cultural attache´s, with the monarchy helping to fund a U.S. tour of well-known Gnawa musicians.17 While in the 1930s, the production and exchange of trance rested in colonial hands, today it rests in Moroccan hand—but is still largely subjected to the sharifian state and social hierarchy. Indeed, trance’s peculiar modern itinerary in Morocco reflects the colonial and technological disruption of older ritual processes and communities and the recuperation of

Rites of Reception

149

mass-mediated ritual by the independent sharifian state. These stagings of trance rites attest that neoliberal promises of technological and commercial mediation are not raising the profile of the underclass at the expense of broader social hierarchy. Instead, the sharifian and colonial history of trance, its practice of underclass receptivity to baraka, has been displaced by another set of controls based on cultural representation and technologized transmission. Trance’s mass-mediated exhibition, imaged as representative of national (sharifian) Moroccan culture, demonstrates the sharifian state’s ubiquitous and abstract power, inhabiting the putatively uniform social body of the nation in the form of a technologized and massmarket gaze. How do these mechanisms of control via the intervention of the state and mass market affect ritual practitioners and audiences in contemporary Morocco?18 They do so ambivalently. On the one hand, they raise trance rites’ national profile, giving some underclass practitioners, and new middle-class audiences the status of mass cultural representatives. As a matrix of signifying gestures of national belonging, trance now appeals to a middle and privileged class of youth who, at least under older class structures, would not have succumbed to trance. On the other hand, this very representativeness comes as an articulation of distinctly modern power and public regulation. Along with the elimination of conventional elements of the ritual, including self-cutting and bloodletting, sacrifice, and the presence of seers, these new stagings include unspoken (but widely known) public norms of bodily propriety and with them, the maintaining of conscious, self-present performances. Such performances accrue value (explicitly and implicitly) only insofar as they submit to contemporary expectations of public self-discipline, acknowledging and demonstrating a sharifian state and market power abstracted from particular performances, but nevertheless overseeing participants as ostensibly uniform citizensubjects—as objects of a technologized gaze. In turn, suspicion and accusation fall on private rites of reception as spurring a potentially disruptive and unregulatable transmission of power and illegitimate claims to authority. This acknowledgement of trance as reception reproduces an older logic of baraka and its veneration. What is new, however, is the division of the value of trance as cultural representation from its value as reception, with cultural representations submitting to a dominant Moroccan sharifian identity.19 The nationalists’ negative characterization of trance was symptomatic of the colonial state’s communicative and political construction of the national body and its representations; the postcolonial reframing of

150

Emilio Spadola

trance as an element of national culture signaled a broader state and class recovery of at least its most public circulation and social effects. Moroccan nationalists’ criticisms of trance as a globally circulating colonial representation have been mitigated—not, as they anticipated, through its eradication, but through its expanded popularity and willing adoption among Moroccans. While Susan O’Brien, summarizing the literature of trance as a whole, has noted that in Kano, ‘‘forms of involvement with the spirit world index distinctions of class, education, and gender’’ (O’Brien 2001, 224), the new norms of mass-mediated trance has reshaped those distinctions. During interviews I conducted with Gnawa masters in Fez in 2003, two older performers brought along a young man of far better means than they and of far whiter skin. The older men were children of Gnawa performers under the protection of King Muhammad V—that is to say, they were descendants of slaves and sharifian soldiers summoned back to the palace upon independence. They had performed for the king and had attended his daughter’s wedding. Their stories and views were what interested me. Yet for each question I posed to the Gnawa musicians, they remained silent as the young man interrupted to speak on ‘‘authentic Gnawa practice’’ and ‘‘Gnawa culture’’ [taganawit]. He had no conventional kinship connection to the Gnawa. Rather, he described hearing Gnawa music on audiocassette while working in his father’s cloth boutique. He felt drawn to trance (jedba) and had since found his way to the Gnawa themselves. His case was in fact part of a trend: trance rites once limited to underclasses and to descendants of sub-Saharan slaves were now available to that typical recipient of technologized address: ‘‘anyone.’’ In their public presentation (to me) of trance as ‘‘culture,’’ Gnawa masters deferred to the practiced speech of the relatively higher-class representative. Among conventional trance groups, the norms of cultural representation are adopted strategically to capitalize on the domestic and international market for trance music and performance.20 Gnawa musicians in Fez, performing in hotels and cultural spaces during the annual Festivals of Sacred Music and Sufi Culture, thus are doing on a local scale what performers such as Hassan Hakmoun in New York City have successfully done on global scale. As mentioned above, some directors of older mawasim are now rebranding them as ‘‘festivals’’ [mihrijanat], replacing old rites with new forms of staging. Whereas in 1998, ‘Isawa, Gnawa, and Hamadsha trance processions in Fez in honor of Moulay Idriss II followed the established route through Fez Medina to end with a propitiatory sacrifice at the saint’s tomb, by 2003, the event (now a ‘‘festival’’) proceeded

Rites of Reception

151

across a renovated city square adorned with grandstands and dissipated before reaching the city walls. In middle-class and upper-class private rites, a performer’s self-framing was blatant: during a private trance performance, when I surreptitiously (or so I thought) raised my camera, a trance dancer turning toward me froze in place. I wondered what sudden event—something likely happening behind me—had caused so jolting a stop. But of course, it was my camera to which the trance dancer offered his body in pose, anticipating, as Morris writes, his ‘‘future recall as image’’ (Morris 2000, 190, emphasis in the original). Such moments of docility—the body frozen momentarily in place— signal the command of the technologized gaze as well as the norms of cultural representation. But the ambivalence of trance today signals the tenuousness of that command—the necessity of opprobrium in the place of control. In fact, the receptivity characteristic of trance mediums cannot always be contained simply in representations of it in public as in private. The new popularity of trance as representation brings with it expanded risks of reception. The 2003 Fez Sacred Music Festival featured a series of Gnawa performances off the main stage, in the nearby French cultural center and in private, exquisitely ornamented old Fassi mansions, or riyads. In one such mansion, a Gnawa troupe played while ‘‘Aisha,’’ whom I will introduce shortly, performed as a seer for an urbane audience of cosmopolitan Moroccans and Europeans. In the riyad courtyard, where lanterns were strung in the warm, dry night, the sharp drums and tickety-tick of the iron castanets (qaraqib) filled the air, and an audience member began to fall into trance, her head sagging, shoulders drooping, a rhythmic bobbing overtaking her. The audience response was audible. The mother of my host family, Fatima, nudged me to look. Although no one was overly shocked, a man, likely the woman’s husband, gripped her firmly by the shoulders and ushered her out of the courtyard, head still bobbing, and toward the street. ‘‘Poor thing! [Maskina!],’’ Fatima whispered to me. For all trance rites’ assimilation to the representational logic of ‘‘culture,’’ this woman’s response to the staging suggests—and the audience and her husband’s response to her confirms—that they retain the potential for supernatural transmission: for reception, rather than mere representation. I witnessed similar transmissions in 1998 when several young women fell entranced at a formal performance (not a ritual performance) of Gnawa musicians presented as cultural entertainment. Such incidents of public receptivity suggest that trance remains forceful, potentially spurring receptivity in others, setting off transmissions and further transformations. Reception spreads, signaling after the fact the overwhelming power that

152

Emilio Spadola

should have been circumscribed as ‘‘culture.’’ It is both the reception of the sharifian call and its repetition, provoking future acts of reception for which this rite will have been a new origin, a new call. The double moral judgment of trance in Fez points to the stakes of transmitting such calls and of the relative authority that trance adepts acquire among underclasses as baraka’s transmitters. If succumbing to trance (rather than consciously performing it) can provoke shame, as was painfully evident in Fez music festival for the ‘‘poor thing’’ who fell into a trance, in contrast, seers—trance mediums who have mastered rites of reception—provoke recalcitrant concerns over Morocco’s lack of national ‘‘progress’’ and ‘‘modernity’’ relative to the West. Where trance is experienced as reception, many Moroccans fear socially disruptive forces at work. Some critics cite the religious heterodoxies of the rites; Islamic modernists in Morocco, as elsewhere in the Muslim world, regularly condemn spirit possession and trance rites for idolatry (by placing a saint or a spirit before God, or as God’s representative) or for promoting excess pleasures of consumption or sexual impropriety (Bernal 1994; Boddy 1989; Masquelier 2001 and 2009; Soares 2005). Most often however, the complaints reiterate Moroccan nationalists’ concerns over superstition and ignorance. Educated middle-class and upper-class Moroccans in Fez describe the power of trance adepts to charge fees far in excess of what (often) poor and even relatively wealthy clients can afford. (In my observations, many clients do sacrifice other possible responses to illness or misfortune by paying Sufi trance groups and seers.) Such fears of course signal identification with the paternalistic state and, in cases of fraud, explicitly call for state intervention. But they also signal identification with the technologized gaze and mass-market norms: the same critics of trance in its older forms accept the new stagings of trance rites by naming them as Moroccan, rather than Islamic traditions, the former to be observed solely as entertainment, that is, from a conscious distance. The gender politics of trance also submit to this distinction. Trance performers, like women singers (shaykhat) in Morocco, may be morally and legally suspect in informal exchanges, but be celebrated in their ultravisible, broadcast media (on Moroccan Idol or at the Fez Festival of Sacred World Music) as beacons of modernity (Newcomb 2009). Apparently radical or culturally impossible stagings of a woman in trance nonetheless conform, as in American drag shows, to other norms, as well, namely, to normative values of commodity aesthetics that valorize the public performances of trance rites as stagings of national identity (Morris 1995).

Rites of Reception

153

Following ‘‘Aisha’s’’ performance, the family with whom I lived discussed precisely what claim she was making: was she an actress? Was she a seer (shuwwafa)? The mother said she was clearly a seer, a trance medium, but her oldest daughters, both in their thirties, disagreed—of course she was only acting. The daughters recognized the contemporary codes and representational logic of a public trance. But as it happened, the truth was more uncomfortable than that. She was both, or at least worked as both, maintaining her public life as an actress in part by privately working as a spirit medium and seer (shuwwafa). In our subsequent meetings, she very comfortably framed her public trance performances as a representation of Moroccan culture. and indeed, as part of her broader social and political efforts to bolster the sharifian heritage among underclasses as a means of social integration. Regarding her work as a medium, however, she was circumspect, marking (in the first months after our initial meeting) understandable limits to my ethnographic inquiry. Aisha (a pseudonym), born in 1954 in Fez to a sharifian father, was previously an actress and director with the national theater in Rabat. Now her ‘‘trance theatre,’’ as she described it, found audiences in cultural festivals and programs around Morocco and on nationally broadcast radio (Me´di-1), programs that she personally promoted, funded, and distributed in self-produced videos and on compact discs produced by the local company Fassiphone. Although a solo act, she hired and collaborated with various Gnawa masters and musicians, working in Fez exclusively with one master and his troupe. Their connection was commercial—she had no ethnic or kinship connection to the Gnawa order. Nor was her uppermiddle-class family and education at all mistakable for an origin on the social margins. Indeed, we eventually met not at the Fez Festival, but during an opening for the annual celebration, the mawsim, of Sidi Bin Hamdush where she served as keynote speaker. As in Fez, she spoke on behalf of sharifian culture, claiming authority not as a seer but as the vice president of a local NGO promoting mawasim. Her representational stagings of the sharifian call, warmly accepted by Moroccan and foreign publics, signaled a distinct form of authority from that claimed by her and other seers in private rites of reception. I had tried to interview seers in Fez with the assistance of Sanae, a daughter in my host family, but found access very often denied—I was not to enter until sacrificing a chicken, or I was not to enter at all. Just as telling, the few who did welcome me did so with a gesture of magnanimous fearlessness. Twice I was told, ‘‘I’ll let anyone in; I don’t fear the Makhzen [national police or state].’’ The fear, in Sanae’s view, stemmed from accusations of

154

Emilio Spadola

prostitution launched at seers, provable simply by my presence as a man. According to my friend Mohammed—himself harshly critical of seers and trance rites posing as anything but mere entertainment—they suspected I might be a policeman and that I could charge them for fraud. And indeed, stories of supernatural criminality, of seers and charlatans accumulating vast wealth, far out of proportion to their class authority, make for popular Ramadan newspaper serials and television expose´s. In the absence of older class structures, acts of trance mediumship or ‘‘seeing’’ threaten to generate further receptivity on the part of audiences and clientele, thus deploying a performative power that only the police (and mass-media exposure) can mitigate. ‘‘The Journey of a Female Charlatan Ends in Prison’’ ran in five segments in the popular Al-Sabah newspaper in Ramadan in October 2003. ‘‘Ghalia’’ (the name means ‘‘priceless,’’ or, more crudely, ‘‘expensive’’) held power by manipulating cultural conventions, in particular, by granting herself the title ‘‘Sharifa.’’ Her title, false as it was, worked; Ghalia’s power of reception was such that people believed that she herself transmitted baraka, God’s blessing. Succumbing to her power, clients turned toward her as the pious should turn toward God or, indeed, the police: ‘‘Her house,’’ the paper read, ‘‘became a qibla [the direction of Mecca] for all who sought a cure for magic’’ (October 29, 2003, 14). Aisha’s sharifian lineage was authentic; it served her authority as a cultural representative; indeed, in her view, her capacity to act in terms of cultural representation—‘‘symbolically’’—signaled knowledge of tganawit, ‘‘authentic Gnawa practice,’’ surpassing that of Gnawa masters. Whereas these latter were limited to particular rites in Fez Medina, her stagings could travel and indeed invoked a power of culture that already circulated nationally and globally. Yet like Ghalia and other seers, male and female, where Aisha’s reception would remain opaque to state power and to open market exchange, it would be suspect—an act of usurpation, rather than of mere representation. As reception, trance transmits power. Nationalist efforts to denigrate it and recent efforts to appropriate and circumscribe its effects in public stagings of culture alike attest to the potent role that it plays in contemporary Morocco. These efforts also suggest that as reception, proliferating across a mass-mediated social and political space, trance rites in Morocco retain the disruptive potential to constitute authority beyond the state and the technologized and mass-market gaze to which presumably modern and disciplined subjects submit. Consciously performing trance as a national

Rites of Reception

155

sign acknowledges the call and gaze of a power beyond oneself that authorizes value. Trance mediums, building on the relative prestige of baraka’s underclass transmitters, seem to render it wholly present and under their control. In rites of reception, they claim its call, at least momentarily, as their own.

Media and Manifestation: The Aesthetics and Politics of Plenitude in Central India Christopher Pinney

Film Me I started to develop an intimate acquaintance with Ambaram’s shamanic persona after I bought my first video camera. Ambaram, about whom we will shortly hear more, is a former industrial worker and ticket collector at a village railway station in central India and is now a shaman who incarnates the goddess Chamunda. I bought the video camera in 2004, the date of the most recent simhastha mela at Ujjain, part of the twelve yearly cycles of the huge festival the kumbh mela, which alternates with Nasik, Haridwar and Allahabad. I had attended the previous festival in 1992 and had found it (with its surging crowds of seven million obliterating a town of four hundred thousand) punishing. I imagined that the 2004 event might be the last one I would attend and that in the interests of for the benefit of my own personal memory I should shoot some film.1 My video camera was large enough, especially with its additional mike, to persuade most participants, ascetics, pilgrims and policemen alike, that I was the conduit or agent of transmission to CNN or the BBC. Where in 1992 I had been lost in those bewildering, thirsty, surging crowds, in 2004, I found myself consistently ushered to vantage points, visually obstructive pilgrims were removed from my lines of view, and initiation

156

Media and Manifestation

157

rituals were delayed until my equipment was in place. In the village in which I have done my research intermittently since 1982, I enjoyed a similar opening of doors. Villagers I thought I knew well—including Ambaram—started insisting that I come and film them possessed— ‘‘thrashing’’—(the Hindi verb is dhunana) while goddesses occupied their bodies. Film became the medium through which I was compelled to engage a preexisting set of practices whose intensity and frequency had remained up to this point largely invisible to the visiting anthropologist.

‘‘It is a different nature which speaks to the camera’’ This nexus of ritual, media, and technics to which my simhastha mela and subsequent village experiences alerted me can also be investigated historically, and in a manner that might help explain Ambaram’s desire to perform possession in front of the camera. There are parallels between the facilitation afforded by the video camera and the manner in which photography in nineteenth-century India worked within a prophetic register. Jacques Attali has argued that music, in certain circumstances, acts in advance of social reality—its code is ‘‘quicker’’ than that of society as a whole, its prophecy operating on a semiological frontier (Attali 1985). Photographic self-presentation embraces this prophecy and also grants access to the fluid network in which fluid beings open themselves up to forms of identification that are fundamentally undecided in the absence of the image. This is a quality perceptively engaged by Roland Barthes: ‘‘once I feel myself observed by the lens, everything changes: I constitute myself in the process of ‘posing,’ I instantaneously make another body for myself, I transform myself in advance into an image’’ (Barthes 1981, 10). Consider, for instance, two striking images photographed by Ahmed Ali Khan of the Begums in the Avadh Court, circa 1855. We will return to an image by this remarkable photographer at the end of this paper. The physician Joseph Fayrer recorded a visit,2 at around the same time, to treat one of the Begums who was ‘‘dangerously ill.’’ Arriving at the Chutter Manzil, he was taken to the sick room, where the chief eunuch and various female attendants were present: ‘‘A cashmere shawl was stretched across the room, behind which the Begum was seated.’’ In a manner reminiscent of Dr. Aziz in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Fayrer immediately requested that the parda be removed. The screen was removed to reveal the Begum ‘‘seated upon a silver charpoy, enveloped in shawls.’’ Fayrer repeated that ‘‘without seeing her nothing could be done, she giving faint

158

Christopher Pinney

and muffled replies from the depths of the shawls.’’ Fayrer is eventually able to hold her wrist, and by the third visit ‘‘was allowed to see her face and her tongue and to ascertain something of the nature of her case.’’ Ahmed Ali Khan’s photographs record a much greater readiness to unveil and suggest that the space in front of the camera became for many a zone for the presentation of selves that could not be so easily presented elsewhere. The presence of several of these images in an album—in the Alkazi Photographic Collection—seemingly compiled by a European (one of them is captioned ‘‘One of the King of Oudh’s Ladies’’)3 indicates that they were not circulating only within the seclusion of Wajid Ali Shah’s court. If Fayrer’s account can be said to record the everyday practices of visibility and seclusion in the Oudh Court, Ahmed Ali Khan’s photographs seem to record that peculiar space of prophetic experimentation that the camera engenders. As Walter Benjamin put it: ‘‘It is a different nature which speaks to the camera than the eye: so different that in place of a space consciously woven together . . . there enters a space held together unconsciously’’ (Benjamin [1931] 1980, 202). Other photographs—such as James Waterhouse’s images of the Begum of Bhopal mad in 1862—would seem to lend support to the idea that photography precipitates behavior that otherwise remains latent: Waterhouse reports that he ‘‘was constantly employed in taking pictures of the Begum in various dresses of Native ladies. I had no time to take the same picture twice as the Begum changed her dress immediately.’’ As with Attali’s music that ‘‘makes audible what will gradually become visible,’’ there is a faster exploration of possibilities when the camera is present and when the sitter controls the process.

The Real Is Precipitated by Techne¯: The Aesthetics of Efficacy The chief protagonist at the heart of this account is a forty-year-old Dalit shaman named Ambaram. A key concern of his practice is with the political potentiality of manifestation, with the liberating possibility of certain regimes of visible evidence, disseminated through photography and film. This superabundance of the divine—made manifest among subalterns—is contrasted with a different (and high-caste) idiom of nonvisibly manifest authority that privileges the indexicality of speech. There is a long history of struggle between these two modes of authority. Part of that history would acknowledge a reflexive understanding of the parallels between media, technics, and religion within the Indic tradition.

Media and Manifestation

159

In his analysis of early Buddhist scopic regimes, Andy Rotman, for instance, draws upon my account of late twentieth-century century Madhya Pradesh to explicate the automaticity of effect in Buddhist practices. C. B. Tiwari, whom Rotman cites, observed that the efficacy of a guru named Shri Paramhansji is not dependent on belief. Tiwari’s account stresses this ritual technics: ‘‘Suppose you want to use some electric power—you make a connection, fit your tube light, lay the wiring, provide a switch, connect this to the overhead wires. If the power is available, the tube is fine, the wiring is fine, the switch is fine, the tube light will come on—(chalega) with belief and without belief.’’ At this point Tiwari flicked his thumb, as though turning current on and off. The efficacy of Paramhansji could be invoked through the utterance of six sentences, and Tiwari commented that this was ‘‘just like a code (on a ‘telephone’ or a ‘computer’)’’ (Pinney 1997, 166–67). Rotman draws a parallel between Tiwari’s account and early Buddhist expectations of viewing images in his analysis of the agency of images theorized in the Divyavadana, a Sanskrit compilation of Buddhist narratives complied in the early centuries of the Common Era (Rotman 2008, 556). These emphasize that ‘‘certain objects (for example, Buddhas, images of Buddhas . . . stupas), whether directly labeled as such or not, are ‘agents of prasa¯da’ (prasa¯dika) and when particular individuals . . . come into contact with such objects, prasa¯da arises in them’’ (ibid., 557). Rotman emphasizes that it is not intention that matters in the arising of prasa¯da, but ‘‘being in the right place with respect to prasa¯dika objects’’ (ibid., 558). Once confronted with the appropriate kind of object, the response is effectively automatic for Buddhists in these narratives: agency ‘‘seems to inhere as much in the object of engagement as in the subject’’ (ibid., 564). The response that the Divya¯vada¯na normalizes is rather like the effect that visual pornography produces (at least as it is described by Catherine MacKinnon, and here I quote from Rotman): ‘‘The viewer of the prasa¯dika objects and the viewer of pornographic spectacles both view images whose function is less to communicate than to arouse’’ (ibid., 572). If I might be permitted to jump two millennia and switch from Indic rationalizations to British imperial mythmaking, we can note the role accorded by imperial historiography to the telegraph in precipitating the Insurrection of 1857–58. Consider, for instance the Comtean positivist Harriet Martineau, who, writing in 1858, presented an Indian fear of xenotechne¯ as symptomatic of a prescientific mentality: ‘‘The European railway, telegraph, and other magical arts introduce into India much more than themselves,’’ she wrote. ‘‘They introduce an experience subversive of ideas

160

Christopher Pinney

and practices, which would in natural course have taken centuries to dissolve and abolish’’ (Martineau 1858, 32).4 Even the liberal historian Edward Thompson would write in 1935: ‘‘Inventions such as the railway and the telegraph, suggested to the lower castes that the foreigners possessed occult knowledge hidden from the Brahman’’ (Thompson and Garratt 1935, 442).

Some Images Are Too Small and Flat The authority of manifestation and plenitude that is advanced by Ambaram has a long history of tension with less phenomenologically powerful modes of indexicality. Indeed, the image histories of numerous divine and nineteenth-century and twentieth-century political figures in India dramatize the inevitable supersession of a phenomenologically underachieved photographic indexicality by chromolithography. In conventional Peircean terms, the divine could be indexed, but the authority of the black-andwhite photograph was not as appealing to devotees as painted images mass-produced via chromolithography. A recent (that is, circa 2002) commentator in a compilation titled Photographs of Swami Vivekanada 1886–1901 produced by members of the Vedanta Society of Northern California noted the confluence of a technological miracle with a spiritual one: In the nineteenth century an extraordinary event occurred in the material world which also proved to be a boon in the spiritual one—the birth of photography. During the mid-nineteenth century when photography burst upon the world, Sri Ramakrishna and his companions were walking on this earth. Is it a coincidence that such a fortuitous occurrence took place—the advent of so many tremendous spiritual personalities at a time when their divine forms could easily be recorded through photographic images? In the past, outstanding spiritual teachers were pictured only through paintings, drawings, or writings of their own or others’, but since the nineteenth century it has become possible to produce a more immediate representation.

This writer then went on to note that Ramakrishna’s disciple, the Holy Mother, Sri Sarda Devi, announced that ‘‘one’s body and its shadow are the same; similarly she said a photograph of a spiritual person is his shadow—a living representation of divinity’’ (Vedanta Society of Northern California n.d., xiii).

Media and Manifestation

161

The Calcuttan sage and mystic Ramakrishna was photographed—it appears—on only on four occasions. One of these was taken in the studio of the Bengal Photographers on December 10, 1881. After his experience with the extraordinariness of the material world, Ramakrishna told a disciple (Keshab): ‘‘Today I enjoyed very much the machine by which a man’s picture is taken. One thing I noticed was that the impression doesn’t stay on a bare piece of glass, but it remains when the glass is stained with a black solution. In the same way, mere hearing of spiritual talk doesn’t leave any impression. People forget it soon afterwards. But they can retain spiritual instruction if they are stained with the earnestness and devotion’’ (Smaranananda [1976] 2003, 71). A further (undated) photograph of Ramakrishna seated precipitated an interesting discussion by his chief disciple, The Mother, Sri Sarada Devi. I kept the photograph with the pictures of other gods and goddesses and worshipped it. . . . One day the Master came there and sat and at the sight of the picture he said, ‘Hallo, what is all this?’ . . . Then I saw the Master take in his hand the bel leaves and flowers there for worship, and offer them to the photograph. He worshipped the picture. This is the same picture. (Ashrama 1988, 30)

Viewed from the hindsight of the early twenty-first century, what is so striking about these early enthusiasms for the indexical nature of photography is how short-lived they were. Ramakrishna, and also Swami Vivekananda, initially subjected to photographic regimes, were very soon circulated through the technology of chromolithography—a way of disseminating photos of the gods that was more phenomenologically adequate to the task of impressing quasi-divine power upon the viewer. The same would soon also be true of the political pantheon as it emerged toward the end of the nineteenth century. Tilak, Gandhi, Ambedkar, and numerous others were endlessly documented photographically, but it is as colored lithographs that they sedimented impressions of themselves among the wider populace. Popular Indian engagements with the photograph reveal that its phenomenological field is underachieved. Many Indians would agree with Picasso, who famously confronted with a friend who removed a photograph from his wallet and said, ‘‘This is my wife,’’ he responded, ‘‘She’s a bit small and flat, isn’t she?’’ In India (and elsewhere), it is frequently the case that the photograph serves as the first stage in a process of enfleshing images into life-sized chromolithographs. The magical technology of

162

Christopher Pinney

impressing and staining with black solutions that so enchanted Ramakrishna gives way to a more public technology in which what matters most is not the space between the subject and the camera lens, but the space between the devotee and the picture’s surface. Photography’s surface, it seems (at least for those whose cultic authority was already consolidated) simply wasn’t up to the demands of a mass ‘‘corpothetics’’ that is corporeal, embodied, and affective aesthetics (Pinney 2004).

‘‘Look all around you . . .’’ I’ve been working in Bhatisuda intermittently since 1982, and during various visits, up until 1999 I had very little sense that Dalits—or ‘‘untouchables,’’ as they have been called in the colonial-era discourses of the West—although they produced vigorous pragmatic complaints about their existence within a caste hierarchy (poverty, violence, ill-health, and so on) had fundamental critiques of caste and religious practices. Indeed, up till that date, I never heard the word ‘‘Dalit’’ used in the village, always considering it to be a sign of an exotic political sensibility to be found exclusively in western India. During the course of many short visits since 2004, it became dramatically apparent that this was no longer the case. Two Chamar intellectuals had emerged with distinctive and powerful new theorizations and had become loci for new ideological formations in the village. In the village, knowledge is valorized to an extraordinary degree, and in hierarchical Hinduism, it is a scarce resource. During the 1980s and 1990s, I was continually told (partly in response to my irksome questions) that somewhere there was a book ‘‘in which everything is written’’: ‘‘is mem sara likh a hai.’’ The phrase was offered when talk turned to complex matters of belief or of esoteric ritual practices. It was usually proffered by literate individuals mainly of higher caste. Among others, I heard it from the Brahman priest of the Krishna temple and the powerful Jain sarpanch (elected village leader), who showed me his Ananupurvvi, a small, fortyyear-old booklet with paintings of the tirthankaras, (saviors) exclaiming, ‘‘Is me sara likh a hai is mem, sara jain dharma ka kya hai, kya nahi,’’ ‘‘in this, everything is written, in this, all of what Jain duty is and is not.’’ Such fetishizations of an absolute knowledge also found a shadow in the statements of untouchables. Here, too, it was assumed that the sort of encompassing knowledge that an anthropologist might want could be

Media and Manifestation

163

found in a veridical and undisputed form in books. But the difference was that these were always books owned by others, by Brahmans and Jains. By 2004, much of this had changed: a new cadre of Chamars (eight or nine), plus one Bagdi had started to construct their own politics of knowledge, their own radical bookish culture (founded in large part on the Ravidas Ramayan), a Dalit text narrating the miraculous deeds of the god Ravidas, which enabled them to claim that yes, there are books in which everything is written, but they are our books, and they are quite unlike your false books. For certain Dalit intellectuals, privilege was above all else the world of the vidvan, the learned scholar. And the notion that somewhere there are documents in which ‘‘everything is written’’ has been powerfully appropriated by Dalits in their oppositional struggles. Ambaram is perhaps the most active and articulate advocate of the new Chamar political Hinduism. He narrates: ‘‘I didn’t go to school and wasn’t taught to read or write—nothing. But inside my body [sharir ke andar] I had the grace of knowledge [gyanpratap]—I saw the shastras [sacred writings] and wanted to know what’s in these? What’s in them and not in them. Then I saw that we’re called Chamar, nich [low, inferior]. And when I looked carefully at the shastras [I discovered] that we are the highest, we’re the highest jati of all [hum sabh se ucce hain, sab se ucce jati].’’ Vidvan is a commonly invoked term in the Bhatisuda Dalit lifeworld. I interpret it as an idiom of austerity that is radically opposed to hierarchy and the false mantras and slokas of the pandit log, the formulae and verses of the priests. It connotes a self-willed redemption through the triumph of gyan (knowledge) over the material forms of domination. It is a familiar idiom of austerity turned to political purposes. The shastra to which Ambaram refers principally is the Ravidas Ramayan, but it would be wrong to assume that Ambaram’s cosmology is the result of bookishness. Rather, books serve here as an alibi for a worldview that has been constructed out of numerous pragmatic experiences. But its core metaphor is of the stealer of fire, the stealer of knowledge to be found in books. (In this sense, we might understand the Dalit strategy to be ‘‘what was read,’’ rather than ‘‘what was heard’’—reading here appearing as private and oppositional.) In the part of India that concerns me, we can differentiate between, on the one hand, a high-caste, Brahmanic semiotics of indexicality embodied in the idiom of sruti (of what was heard), and on the other hand a Dalit, subaltern aesthetics of superabundance embodied in the notion of prakat or prakatan (manifestation). Central here is not the nature of representation, but the fact—that is, the possibility—of manifestation. Central

164

Christopher Pinney

Indian Dalits are in a state of becoming and appeal to a visual system to advance this becoming. Their political transitivity is announced in a series of grievances that demarcate a fluid and problematic subjectivity. Some of this is articulated in the language of entitlement: they lack the land and the property that they ought to have. But just as importantly, it is also articulated through a discourse of incompleteness that proposes an insufferable inhumanity. Sidhu Kapasya—an autodidact political radical—catalogues some of these: Thakurs (high-status Rajputs) who won’t eat roti or drink water that has been corrupted by Dalits; Thakurs who smash matkas (clay water pots) because Dalits have touched them. Sidhu continues: Like with going into temples: they impose restrictions because they think that if we go inside, we’ll make it apavitra (impure). . . . Or like if we’re going on a baraat (wedding party) and they say you can’t go on a horse because you’re nich jati (low caste). You can go by foot or on a tractor but not on a horse. . . . They’ll fight us and try and beat us if we go on a horse. Our population is greater than theirs, but we’re treated like we we’re something tiny.

Images partner with this emergent (incomplete and repressed) subjectivity in both pedagogical and performative ways. Some images are prized for their instructional narratives, which are granted an authorizing power. For Chamars (Dalits whose traditional caste occupation was leatherworking), images of the deities Ramdev and Ravidas provide complex texts for the mediation by the community’s intellectual leaders of a politics of equality and citizenship in terms of an ethics of surface and depth, outside and inside. Some images of Ravidas depict him cutting his chest open to reveal a sacred thread, proof of his Brahman status in an earlier life, an event associated with a conservative text, the Bhaktamala. This is a key image in articulating the somatic as a fulcrum between different ethical-political worlds. In the Bhaktamala version, the outside signifies Ravidas’ impossible, putatively Chamar powers. The inside reveals his ‘‘true’’ high-caste identity. The image, of course, plays out this materialization of a previously hidden truth. This relationality is inverted by Ambaram as part of his critique of highcaste oppression: 99 percent of all Indians are kharab (rotten), he claims . . . politics in the village has been fundamentally perverted by Thakur violence, and high-caste people are like roses: they appear to be beautiful on the outside, but they are studded with cruel thorns. They are ‘‘high’’ only in name, just as the rose is beautiful, but encrusted with thorns.

Media and Manifestation

165

The most popular images of Ravidas, however, depict him as a cobbler hard at work, and they visually narrate an anti-Bhaktamala politics. A key episode in these images concerns a Brahmanin Banaras to make offerings for a Rajput friend. Needing shoes, he visited Ravidas, who said he’d make the Brahman a pair of shoes if in return he would offer a betel nut to the Ganges. The Brahman made his offering for the Rajput and almost forgot to offer Ravidas’s betel nut. When he did so and tossed it casually into the river, Ganga Mata appeared to receive the offering personally. For Bhatisuda Chamars, the moral of the Ganga Mata story (and here they can claim the support of the Ravidas Ramayan) is that the corrupted hierarchy of the quotidian world has an extramundane shadow in which the superiority of Chamars is recognized. The Brahman may have mistakenly thought that his own status and that of his Rajput friend was higher, but Ganga Mata was under no such illusion. By delinking this episode from the Bhaktamala fallen-Brahman deus ex machina, Chamars cede validation of hierarchy away from humans towards the gods. Humans (especially Brahmans and Thakurs) don’t understand how things really are: only the gods do. Dalit society as a locus in which gods choose to manifest themselves is a powerful theme in Dalit ideology—a point to which I will return. This lesson in becoming is mediated through mass-produced paper images. But just as these images work toward the constitution of new Dalit subjectivities, Dalits constitute these images: it is their consecration of the image, their offering of marigolds, coconuts, and incense to the images and the repetitive devotional attention to these pieces of paper (one trace of which is gradual accretions on the surface of the images) that make these bhagvan ke photo, or photos of the gods, images capable of doing this work. The circulation of images of previously marginal figures to much wider subaltern audiences is a key political vector. For many, these chromolithographs become the focus of private performance designed to create an intimate and tactile space between the devotee and the surface of the image. For others, the images become a screen in front of which more public performances are enacted. We can see a parallel mutual becoming in the prominent role that goddess possession plays in rural Dalit political struggles. This form of intense and visceral divine manifestation is most visible in Dalit communities. A (largely calendrically determined) nexus of processions conjoin and disjoin villagers in various ways, and this is one stage on which the intense, enfleshed aesthetics of Chamar shamanism are mobilized in claims that it

166

Christopher Pinney

is they who make the presence of the gods more manifest and that consequently it is they who have a more legitimate claim to speak for Hindu practice in this local setting. We will see—contrary to the expectations that a conventional sociology of India might engender—that it is Dalit ‘‘counterpriests’’ who serve as the main conduits for the extramundane. Their power stems from performance and affect, the outward signs of manifestation, which serve as an index of divine presence.5 These dramatic performative interventions, which are also central to the becoming of Dalit political subjectivity, always occur in spaces that are already demarcated by mass-produced paper gods. Chromolithographs of goddesses (Kali, Durga, and so on) are displayed in the corner of the front room of the ghorla or shaman, and demarcate the extramundane space in which the animated goddess will appear. The ghorla thrashes—teeth chattering and body swaying, holding a bowl of burning coals and a sword—and enfleshes the printed images in front of which this performance occurs. This performative possession is efficacious in many ways: the goddess is able to advise the ghorla’s clients, and the ghorla is able to make a modest living from this. But the more articulate shamans also point to the image of the goddess that they have made and to the political lesson of this abundance of manifestation: higher castes may claim to be conduits to the divine, but they manifest this insufficiently. ‘‘In every direction, as you know,’’ Ambaram says, ‘‘Kalkaji comes, there’s Mangubhai [Mangilal]; Shitala comes—there’s Dhanna. They are in our samaj [caste]. And here [gesturing to his own house] Chamunda comes. That’s also in our samaj.’’ Here, Ambaram conjures the aesthetics of manifestation and superabundance and invokes an empiricist method of adjudicating these contesting claims to status and authority: ‘‘Go to any village and look around, and you’ll see. It’s mostly in our samaj that the dev lok [god’s world] comes [adhiktar hamare samaj mem dev lok ate hain zyada]. There’s Hariram, Ram [here he refers to other Chamars who regularly thrash], Mataji, Bhokuki Mata, Lal Mata . . . Bherumaharaj and Jhujhar Maharaj,’’ and so the list goes on. He proclaims that he is Mataji’s param (ultimate/absolute/best) bhakt and that (unlike in other jatis), ‘‘har dev hamara samaj mem pragat hote hain,’’ ‘‘every god is made manifest in our caste.’’ Dalit shamans’ performance of the image of the goddess (both the enfleshing of the printed image of goddesses and the performance as an image of efficacy which clients experience) thus sustains a claim to superiority: higher castes may have political dominance, but are unable to manifest visually their proximity to the gods. Ambaram’s self-learning, by

Media and Manifestation

167

contrast, leaves him in command of a competing material form of religious authority. Indeed, the crux of his critique is that his materializations of the extramundane are far more sensual than the mean, pinched, and deficient high-caste variety of materialization, which either pretend to lurk within the body of potent subalterns, playing their trick cards of earlier births, or (when actually manifest) reveal themselves to be like showy flowers that conceal hard thorns. By contrast, his are performatively and impressively true. Relations between surface and depth, the outside and inside—and the powers and truths they deliver—are hotly contested. This contestation also applies to evaluations of the very manifestation of Chamar possession to which Ambaram’s revolutionary empiricism draws attention. Higher castes, for instance, strongly disparage Chamar patterns of hereditary mediumship, imputing that this is a form of dhandha (traditional castework) and referring to ghorlas (mediums) as the halis of specific deities. A hali is a ploughman, a bonded laborer tied by employment to a higherstatus household on whom the hali is economically dependent. The imputation here is that ghorlas have entered self-interested economic relationships with those above them, unlike higher-caste mediums (more commonly female), who are liable to thrash unpredictably. Just as one can order a hali to plough a field for you, so ghorlas—if they are remunerated— will thrash to order. Higher castes extend their skepticism to very public displays of possession during the twice-yearly processions during the Nine Nights of the Goddess during the months of Kuar and Chet. Being fanned by the Dalit incarnated goddesses is widely understood to provide preventative protection for all castes, but one also hears comments such as those expressed by Pukhraj Jain: ‘‘Us mem mataji kuut rehte hai’’—‘‘In this, there is Mataji mimicry.’’ In other words, that the Dalit goddesses are inauthentic. Pukhraj’s cynicism dramatizes the contest over authenticity and abundance that lies at the heart of Bhatisuda politics. High castes appear torn between conceding the utility of Dalit shamanism and asserting its fraudulence. There is parallel anxiety about the plausibility of ascetics and adepts. Many villagers would agree that the majority of sadhus (holy men, for instance, at the kumbh mela, the major religious fair) are dhongi (hypocrites, imposters). Signs of their dhongi-ness include their attachment to external material forms (for example, air-conditioned cars) and to other external trappings—such as speech. Thus, a true mahatmaji, a real ascetic or renouncer, should not even have to ask you what troubles you or what you desire when you visit him.

168

Christopher Pinney

‘‘In Photography I can never deny that the thing has been there’’ One thread running throughout this account concerns the phenomenological authority of certain image forms and performances. The small and flat image photograph of Ramakrishna has been displaced by the colored chromolithograph. In a parallel manner, Bhatisuda ghorlas create spaces with the aid of chromolithographs of deities and then set about performatively exceeding those initial images. But the obtrusive video camera that was the conduit that first led me to encounter Ambaram and others in their shamanistic incarnations takes us back to the problem of the event, to what film scholars refer to as the ‘‘profilmic’’ and what Roland Barthes described as the ‘‘sovereign Contingency’’ of the photographic corps or body, as opposed to the (nonphotographic) corpus (Barthes 1981, 4). For Ambaram, the camera and the photographic event are mobilized as agents in this local contest between high-caste and low-caste claims to authority. Ambaram saw in that video camera precisely what Rudolf Wittkower described as the visual’s tendency to solidify presences and claims that in their linguistic form are always more uncertain. Wittkower noted a tactic in illustrated texts in which the appearance of an illustration can ‘‘favour belief in what is left open to doubt in the text’’ (Wittkower 1987, 62). Many scholars, indeed, have commented on this quality. Bernadette Bucher, in her otherwise significantly flawed account of the late sixteenthcentury copperplate engraving of Theodor de Bry, Icon and Conquest, makes an important and persuasive argument about what she calls the loss of ‘‘rhetorical negation’’ in the visual (Bucher 1981, 35). Whereas Montaigne, for instance, was able to observe of the Tupinanmba, ‘‘look they have no breeches,’’ de Bry is able only to depict the Brazilian cannibals in a state of positive nakedness. A parallel point is made by Rolena Adorno in her study of the early seventeenth-century Peruvian activist/artist Guamon Poma’s New Chronicle of Good Governance. She contrasts his tentative acknowledgment in his text that ‘‘it was said’’ that a particular conquistador had killed a hundred men with the visual assertion that the conquistador depicted had in fact slain that number (Adorno 2000, 85). There seems to be something about visual manifestation that demands a heightened assertion and presence. These point to the positivity of presence—the art of the concrete—mobilized by visual mimesis (mimeticity as sensuousness in, for instance, Michael Taussig’s reading of Benjamin, Taussig 1993): it is as though the caution and circumlocution of everyday syntax holds little or no sway in the visual field.

Media and Manifestation

169

A photograph made in the mid-1850s by Ahmad Ali Khan (whom we encountered at the beginning of this paper) reveals with a peculiar clarity how the photograph was unable to differentiate: it merely recorded whatever was placed in front of the camera. An image of the merchant L. E. Ruutz Rees (subsequently celebrated for his Personal Narrative of the Siege of Lucknow, 1858) is captioned ‘‘Mr Rees in a native Costume,’’ but what the photograph actually does, nonjudgmentally, is record a body in clothes: it has nothing to say about the normativity or identity of that body or its adornment (Ruutz-Rees, 1858). Bucher’s point was that language is capable of discriminating, of asserting difference, in a way that the visual cannot. The image of Ruutz Rees bears this out and reveals the way in which the syntagmatic quality of language can assert identity and difference (‘‘Mr Rees’’ versus ‘‘native costume’’) in ways that the paradigmatic photographic image—fated simply to record whatever is placed in front of it—cannot. The camera amplifies this general quality of the visual through its specific capture of the profilmic. The camera’s ‘‘sovereign Contingency’’ appeals to Ambaram: he can make a claim to an ineluctable presence and refute higher-caste critiques. Indian photographers and commentators seem to have understood very well the difference between photography’s ‘‘microevent’’ and the ‘‘something else’’ (the ‘‘corpus,’’ or the real) that it can never become except through a category error or other parallel confusion. The distinction was clearly understood by T. Rangachari, the chair of the 1927–28 Indian Cinematograph Committee, who, commenting on the potential effect on Indian audiences of seeing naked actresses on the screen, argued that the ‘‘question of [the] representation or misrepresentation of western life on the screen’’ was not the relevant issue. The only question of importance, he concluded, was what he described as ‘‘the fact’’ (in the final report of the committee, this phrase is underlined) that Western actresses were prepared to act in this manner in front of the camera, which was ‘‘bound to create a deservedly bad impression about western morals in the country’’ (Indian Cinematograph Committee, 1927–28, vol. 5, 45). Rangachari’s ‘‘fact’’ was what Barthes referred to as the ‘‘absolute Particular,’’ ‘‘the This (this photograph and not Photography)’’ (Barthes 1981, 4). In Nagda, a large industrial town six kilometers from Bhatisuda, the studio retains a central place in most peoples’ encounters with photography. Increasingly cheap and easy-to-use cameras have yet to sustain serious practices of self-photography: consumers still opt to surrender themselves to their local studio impresarios in the hope that under their

170

Christopher Pinney

skilled direction, they will ‘‘come out better.’’ Wanting to ‘‘come out better’’ in their photographs, ‘‘is se bhi zyada acchha mera photo ana chahie,’’ is the aspiration of every visitor to the studio, and they denote by this the desire not to replicate some preexisting ‘‘something else’’ (for instance, the impossible subjectivity of who they ‘‘really’’ are), but to submit themselves to masterly profilmic technicians who are able, through the use of costume, backgrounds, lighting, and camera angles to produce the desired pose, ‘‘look,’’ mise-en-sce`ne, or expression. One such technician is Vijay Vyas of Sagar Studios, who noted that ‘‘they don’t want vastavik [realistic] photos. They always say I want to look good . . . everyone says I am like this, but I want to come out better than this in my photo. So we try.’’ Vijay Vyas directs our attention to what Barthes termed the ‘‘necessarily real thing which has been placed before the lens’’ (Barthes 1981, 76), the ‘‘thing that has been there’’ that can never be denied. I have stressed the desirability of sundering this from the wholly different question (with which nevertheless it is nearly always confused) of what Barthes calls the ‘‘optionally real thing to which an image or sign refers’’ (ibid.). This is the distinction that we encountered earlier between the ‘‘body’’ and a ‘‘corpus.’’ Ambaram clearly shares this concern with the ‘‘body,’’ with what we might think of as the autonomy of everything that is placed in front of the camera. Freed from the demands of being ‘‘realistic’’ in the sense of conforming aesthetically, politically, or in some other normative manner to a wider world, his thrashing body remains, necessarily, real.

Media Transformations: Music, Goddess Embodiment, and Politics in Western Orissa / India Lidia Guzy

As a medium of religious, social, and political messages, the music of the ganda baja village orchestras of India’s Bora Sambar region of western Orissa functions as both agent and object in processes of individual, social, religious, and political transformation. The music of the ganda baja village orchestras represents local notions of the utterances of different goddesses and plays a central role in traditional rituals of goddess worship and healing. At the same time, ganda baja musical performances are deeply interrelated with the sociocultural hierarchy of the Indian caste system, and ganda baja music also plays a central role in regional identity politics. In recent decades, these two aspects of ganda baja musical performances have undergone transformations in the context of the rise of an urban secularized folk music and concomitant changes in the regional politics of cultural identity, not just accompanying those changes, but helping drive them. The essay that follows explores the role that media have played in those changes and in the role of ganda baja village orchestras as what I will call a ‘‘total media fact’’ in the construction and reconstruction of social and political identities.

171

172

Lidia Guzy

Ganda Baja in Western Orissa The Bora Sambar region is a mountainous region in the Barghar district of western Orissa,1 renowned for the holy waterfalls and mountains of Nursinghnath and Harishankar and the sacred landscape of the Gandha Mardhan hills. Its local center is the town of Padampur, which is surrounded by the Gandha Mardhan highlands.2 The population of the Bora Sambar region is an ethnic patchwork of former tribal communities, all highly conscious of their cultural distinction from other regions. Even if they are often reduced to the position of day laborers, locals generally claim for themselves the status of peasants—of being the owners and cultivators of the land. The majority of the indigenous population is constituted by Adivasi3 communities of the Binjhal, Gond, Dumal, and Khond peoples. Besides, communities of the Mali, Telli, Kulta, Brahmin, and Gour peoples are to be found in the region. According to legends, the Bora Sambar region originally was a little kingdom named Raj Bora Sambar, connected to the Binjhal community. Bora Sambar is famous for its rich musical heritage. In the region, music is considered as a factor of vital importance, expressing and transmitting a consciousness of regional and cultural identity. That identity is characterized by a predominant belief in local goddesses, such as Sato Bohoni (the seven sister goddesses), Durga, Maha Kali, Mangala, Tarani, Nissani Oila Devi, Subakesi, Tulsa Devi, Bontei Devi, Parvati, Lakshmi, Boiravi, Buri Ma, Patneshwari, and Samleshwari Ma. This belief mirrors the widespread religious notion of the feminine sacred, which can be found all over India, (Tambs-Lyche 2004), manifesting itself in local cults of diverse goddesses. (See Kinsley 1985; Wilke, Michaels, and Vogelsanger 1994; Fischer, Goswamy, and Pathy 2005.) The pan-Indian idea of the feminine sacred thus embraces manifold indigenous notions of socioreligious power, often referred to with the general term shakti (Tambs-Lyche 2004; Wadley 1975). In the Bora Sambar region, indigenous conceptions of divine powers, usually in the shape of local goddesses, are associated with the music of ganda baja village orchestras. It is thought that local goddesses manifest themselves in the sounds and rhythms of ganda baja, as well as in a variety of drums, such as for example the nissan, symbolizing the goddess Nissani and the sarmangalia, symbolizing the goddess Mangala. The local goddesses thus are venerated through the sound and rhythms of specific instruments while at the same time being identified with them. The music of the village orchestra and the sounds and rhythms of the local drums are

Media Transformation

173

believed to represent and communicate the diverse utterances of the local goddesses. Thus, sounds, rhythms and instruments simultaneously act as medium and message of a goddess. (See McLuhan [1964] 1994.) Ganda baja is an instrumental orchestral music performed exclusively by musicians originating from the marginalized Harijan4 caste Ganda (also called Pano). It is performed on three categories of instruments: membranophones (dhol, nissan, tasa, or timkiri), an aerophone (mohuri), and idiophones (kastal/jhang or jumka). An orchestra might consist of five to seven musicians. Sometimes it is also called panchabadya,5 which refers to the five instruments assembled. Similarities can be traced between ganda baja and other orchestral traditions, such as those of Chhattisgarh (Pre´voˆt 2008, 75–88) or Nepal (Helffer 1969; Tingey 1994; Wegner 1988). Ganda baja is an indispensable feature of the rituals held for local gods and goddesses or for wedding ceremonies. Ganda baja musicians are invited to perform in the different local communities, such as those of the Binjhal, Gouro, Dhol Khond, Mali, or Kulta. Therefore, ganda baja could be rightly termed an intercommunity orchestra, connecting different social groups and establishing a link between the communities and the world of the goddesses. The musicians can be regarded as ritual and social mediators,6 linking tribal and semitribal local groups and mediating local values as well as local power configurations. In former times, musicians were engaged and patronized by local kings (rajas) or landlords (zamindars) of the Raj Bora Sambar kingdom (later Padampur). Local power holders needed village musicians for the performance of politico-religious rituals, legitimating their social and symbolic power during such events as dassara, the worship of the goddess Durga and of the clan goddess Patneshwari. A proverb describes the ritual relationship between musicians and the local king: ‘‘Ager baja, poche raja’’—‘‘In front of the local king, there should always march the village orchestra.’’ While performing in front of the raja or the zamindar, the musicians had to wear colorful and extravagant clothes, a tradition still traceable today in the multicolored clothes and often longer-than-usual hair of village musicians. The performance of the politico-symbolic powers of the power holder was designed to be a cheerful event, associated with public entertainment and joyful festivities. As Harald Tambs-Lyche has suggested, Indian goddess worship is a local conception of socioreligious power (Tambs-Lyche 2004), and the social and political role of the ganda baja village orchestras of Bora Sambar exemplifies the way in which this conception operates. In the case of ganda baja, the role that the village orchestra’s musicians play in the creation and

174

Lidia Guzy

perpetuation of that power stands in a paradoxical relation to their own marginalized social position. Ganda baja musicians, who of necessity are male, belong to a Harijan caste called ‘‘Ganda,’’ which literally means ‘‘the bad-smelling.’’ Materially, this indigenous term refers to the activity of tanning the leather for drums, but it also hints at the sociocultural concept of the assumed ‘‘untouchability’’ or ‘‘pollution’’ of the Ganda musicians. From a Hindu perspective, Ganda musicians are considered ‘‘untouchable’’ (achua) for two reasons: first, because their drums are made from cowhide, and second, because by playing the oboe, the mohuri, they touch their saliva while creating sounds. The direct physical contact with cowhide and saliva classifies the Ganda musicians as extremely impure and thus ‘‘untouchable.’’ On the other hand, this so called ‘‘untouchability’’ qualifies the musicians for transcendent contact and communication with the local goddesses. Here, the paradoxical character of the Indian category of ‘‘untouchability’’ or ‘‘pollution’’ regarding the ritual performance of power becomes visible. This paradox takes the shape of a ritual inversion: the socially marginalized become spiritually powerful by communicating with the sacred powers of the goddesses. The ideological notion of being socially ‘‘untouchable’’ is in effect a prerequisite for successful contact with the literally ‘‘untouchable’’—the intangible, immaterial, prohibited sphere of the sacred. The goddesses’ powers of performance are thus transferred to the socially most powerless, who, during the ritual performance, take in and transmit the divine powers of the goddesses. That the socially powerless have physical and spiritual power inverse to their social status is a widespread notion all over India. That is why they are seen as qualified for ritual specialization and the handling of strong, uncontrolled divine powers feared by others.7

Music and Goddess Embodiment The music of ganda baja can be understood as a way of embodying an ‘‘untouchable’’ sacred entity in a manner that expresses local notions of the divine as a wild, uncontrolled power, manifesting itself in the rhythms of the instruments and in the trance dance of the priest embodying the goddess. Emotionally, its performance evokes a tense atmosphere of fear and hope. While in some sense the ganda baja as a ritual intervillage orchestra transcends local communities, through its musical expression of

Media Transformation

175

transcendence, it also creates a sensual experience of the local community’s identity in terms of communicating physically with a holy sphere. Baja music is extremely material and physical, and it can be mediated through material objects only: through music instruments, dance, and through the bodily presence of the Ganda musicians. In the Bora Sambar region, the ritual of trance and goddess embodiment is known as boil. The term boil is a polysemic religious concept that can be translated as ‘‘divine dance,’’ as ‘‘trance dance,’’ or as ‘‘dance of gods and goddesses.’’ Boil here refers to the action of the religious specialist (the pujari) who becomes boil, a trance medium, acting as a sacred dancer of the goddess Durga. Boil thus may further designate the pujari’s ‘‘opening up’’ for the entrance of a divine power and accordingly can be understood as signifying ‘‘possession’’ or ‘‘embodiment.’’ Boil can also be understood as denoting the procreative and creative divine power that comes upon the pujari. Boil can thus designate both the condition, the state of trance of the priest, as well as the priest himself as he embodies the goddess Durga.8 Every Monday, when the goddess Durga is worshipped, the goddess enters the body of her priest: boil comes upon the pujari. It is assumed that only the specific tunes and instruments of the ganda baja can bring about the embodiment of the goddess in her priest. Interacting with the dance and ritual speech of the pujari, the ganda baja then orchestrates a ritual healing performance in the course of which patients (kosti), in particular, in this case, individuals suffering from barrenness, are touched by the priest, who, as embodiment of the goddess, effects their healing. Boil is an ecstatic ritual, a performance of healing in the course of which the pujari might completely loose control over his body and would fall to the ground if he were not held upright by helpers (Laderman and Roseman 1996). For the boil ritual, the pujari priest, who is usually male, is fitted out with feminine attributes, wearing long, unbound hair and dressing in a red sari. During the month of dassara (October), which is especially devoted to the worship of the goddess Durga, the boil ritual takes on a further meaning. It is believed that in the boil ceremonies of this month, the pujari simultaneously becomes the medium of the goddess and of the local king. The ritual healing performance of the pujari thus assumes the additional purpose of symbolically regenerating royal power. The cultural phenomena of ganda baja and boil thus can be seen—to borrow a term from Marcel Mauss—as a ‘‘total social fact,’’ playing a role in the society that is ‘‘at once legal, economic, religious, aesthetic, morphological’’ (Mauss [1923–1924] 1967, 76–77). However, it also can be

176

Lidia Guzy

seen as a ‘‘total media fact.’’ The music of the ganda baja orchestra has a strong and immediate aesthetic and emotional effect on all who participate and believe in the ritual, an effect that has ramifications in all the domains of social life because it directly affects and effects the identity of individuals and the collective. Through the medium of ritual music, the dance priest is transformed into a goddess, while his audience, having listened to his speeches and poetic recitations, returns home consoled, strengthened, and finally healed. More broadly, both the music of the village orchestra and the trance dance of the priest can be understood as elements of a medium that transmits a local knowledge system and a religious view of the world based on the sensual perception and expression of sound, movement, and touch. (See Howes 1991 and 2005.) The ritual embodiment of a goddess is symbolized by a specific sequence of rhythms, the sixteen holy rhythms called sulo par. These rhythms are named after sixteen goddesses and represent their individual speeches and characters.9 Because the sequence of the sixteen rhythms is held to be one and the same with the process of the goddess’ embodiment in her priest, it may be conceived as a kind of rhythmic liturgy within the larger frame of the goddess embodiment ritual. A crucial role in communicating with the goddess is played by the dhol drum. By means of the dhol, a musician proves his strength (shakti) in order to deflect the goddess’s power of embodiment from himself and to direct it toward the priest. But while it is the musician alone who has the capacity to control the goddess, he remains marginalized, even while interacting with her: in contrast to the ritual priest and trance medium, he is not allowed to enter the inner sanctum of the temple. In the boil performances of the Bora Sambar region, a local notion of power thus takes shape.

Musical Change and Sociopolitical Transformations In recent years, however, a the scene in which the ritual powers of the village orchestra are exercised has shifted to the urban folk festivals named Loko Mohotsav, The People’s Festival, which are held in the towns of western Orissa. Beginning in 1997, Sambalpur, the municipality of the Sambalpur district of Orissa and the biggest town of western Orissa, has set an example of huge folklore events that have been replicated in many other towns of western Orissa, such as Bargarh, Bolangir, and Titlagarh.10 In the annual artistic multimedia folklore events, organized by the government of Orissa11 and supported by local cultural activists, performances of

Media Transformation

177

the power of the goddess gain a significance that goes beyond the traditional ritual inversion of socially powerless agents gaining a temporary ritual and spiritual power during the time of the ritual. (See Turner 1969.) In the urban folk festivals, the reinterpreted transformational power of performance of the ganda baja music involves the actual, rather than symbolic empowerment of the marginalized performers. Backed by the powers of the goddesses, marginalized musicians become not only ritually, but also socially empowered agents. For this reason, in western Orissa, music as the mediatization of the powers of the goddesses, may in the long run become a power of social transformation. In urban centers such as the town of Sambalpur, ganda baja has mutated into dulduli or Sambalpuri music, and the emerging urban folklore movement is called Sambalpuri. In Sambalpuri, traditional musical and performative elements of ganda baja have migrated years to an urban context and there have been transformed into a new stage art. As it has done so, the social status of the musicians has been transformed, and with it the relationship of their music and the powers of the goddesses to sociopolitical power. Dulduli or Sambalpuri resembles ganda baja music in its orchestral character: The instruments dhol, nissan, tasa, mohuri, and jumka are played in the same configuration as in ganda baja. In dulduli, however, the use of animal skin as drum skins is more and more frequently replaced by the use of industrially produced plastic membranes, thus avoiding the traditional stigma of ‘‘impurity’’ and ‘‘pollution’’ for the musicians. Dulduli players are in consequence no longer necessarily members of marginalized social groups, as were ganda baja musicians. Today, they are mostly urban, middle-class stage artists who belong to a second or third generation of former rural migrants from the villages around Sambalpur. They rehearse in private cultural centers (kala kshetra) in order to be hired to perform on stage in a range of folklore events, mostly sponsored by the Eastern Zone Cultural Center (EZCC) in Delhi in the context of governmental ‘‘Revival Projects.’’12 Paradoxically, under a governmental scheme ‘‘for rural artisans . . . helping them to grow as entrepreneurs by mobilising them into Self Help Groups,’’ it is mostly urban dulduli groups, performing on urban folklore stages, that are sponsored as the supposed ‘‘rural artisans.’’ Because the urban dulduli groups are actually in a better position to exploit the benefits of social and institutional networks than village artists, in recent years, they have tended to monopolize the cultural folklore industry.

178

Lidia Guzy

Musically, dulduli groups mix imagined traditional ‘‘village’’ rhythms with commercial trends of the growing Sambalburi music market, influenced strongly by international musical developments manifest in the extensive adaptation of ‘‘techno’’ rhythms. The result is a loud, rhythmically reduced musical repertoire intended to evoke associations of rural ‘‘wilderness’’ and employing simplified folk melodies. The dulduli performance is usually fueled by a standardized Sambalpuri dance routine, danced by girls or young women representing an urban imagination of rustic ‘‘feminine wildness.’’ Songs from the Loko Mohatsav festivals lead the charts of the highly commercialized Orissan folk music market. The loud sounds of Sambalpuri music reproduced on cassettes, CDs, and DVDs appeal to the mass of former urban migrants and their children in Sambalpur and the other towns of western Orissa. The simple rhythms and technically alienated sounds of dulduli music may in fact be an adequate expression for their feelings, torn between a memory of rural tradition and their everyday life in a strenuous, technologized, noisy urban environment. The rhythms of Sambalpuri music and the high-pitched voices of its mostly female performers blaze from every bus and cab, as well as from every corner store in Sambalpur and western Orissa, and the Sambalpuri music industry and its market are booming. The starting point of Sambalpuri folk music was perhaps the famous alltime hit ‘‘Rangabatti re Rangabatti’’ (Oh, color light from color light [a synonym for ‘‘colourful lady’’]), a folkloristic love duet from the late 1970s performed by the legendary folk singers Jitendar Haripal and Krishna Patel, to this day still enchants local listeners, who now download audio and video remakes from YouTube.13 Today, Sambalpuri hits are more popular in western Orissa than popular Bollywood songs. ‘‘Ollywood,’’ the TV and video production center of Orissa, uses dulduli music elements to incite the sale of its audiovisual products. With its appeal to cultural nostalgia and the newly won ‘‘tangibility,’’ or ‘‘touchability’’ in the literal sense of the term, of its formerly ‘‘untouchable musicians, urban Sambalpuri folk music seems prepared for further multimedia exploitation and commercialization as simplified and secular entertainment. In Sambalpuri folk music, popular media culture in an industrialized, urban milieu draws on folkloristic elements to reinvent itself through medially transformed shards of a reenacted rural cultural memory. The urban cultural activists who engage in the organization of folk festivals such as Lok Mohatsav seek to offer a forum for the revitalization of a rural cultural identity ‘‘lost’’ through industrialization and the adaptation to an

179

Media Transformation

urban way of life. They see the reenactment of a ‘‘rural’’ or ‘‘traditional’’ music and dance on stage as a way of discovering one’s own ‘‘lost’’ cultural roots. However, when reenacted on the urban stage, the local traditions undergo dramatic transformations: isolated from their rural context and alienated through an industrial musical aesthetic and through uniform stage costumes and decorations, they become fragmented ingredients of a new and different sociocultural totality. In Sambalpur, Sambalpuri music and dance seem to bundle up and express the invisible roots of a new, emerging local identity. The wilder the rhythms, and the wilder the whirling of the dalkhai girl dancers around on stage, the more the urban inhabitants of Sambalpur experience the music as ‘‘the beat of my heart,’’ as one visitor of a Lok Mahotsav put it. In such displays, as in the ganda baja music from which it departs and on which it builds, local life is enacted, or rather, it is reenacted, and the life of the local community is projected into that of the global community. In the ‘‘invention of tradition’’ in contemporary western Orissa, in ‘‘a process of formalization and ritualization, characterised by reference to the past’’ (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983, 4), modern media and technology are used to promote the real and imagined local rural cultural varieties of music and dance and to transfer them as an expression of a unifying local Sambalpuri identity the World Wide Web.14 On stage, the multimedia events of Loko Mahotsav project an idyllic and romanticized imagination of a ‘‘former’’ or ‘‘authentic’’ culture (poscim sanskruti), expressed in wild Sambalpuri rhythms and moves. A lost tribal identity seems to express itself in reinvented ‘‘tribal’’ music and dance performances. In the urban centers of western Orissa, folk festivals thus contribute to a strong medial retraditionalization of local culture in the form of an ongoing reinvention of traditions considered as ‘‘lost’’ or ‘‘forgotten’’ during the process of urbanization and modernization.

Music, Identity, and Politics In Sambalpuri folk music’s projection of the life of the local community into that of the global community, however, the reenactment of cultural identity also meets an organized search for a unified regional political identity. The expression of regional belonging and regional difference fuels aspirations for regional political autonomy. As Andrew Leyshon, David Matless, and George Revill have argued, ‘‘Music has always been implicated in the social and political world. Its

180

Lidia Guzy

power to affect, disturb, rouse and subdue has been used to great effect by monarchies, armies and governments throughout history.’’ (Leyshon et al., 1995, 426). Politically constructed musical identity is a universal phenomenon: it is observable in national anthems, for example, which homogenize and symbolically mark cultural and personal identity and difference,15 but also in musical folklore and popular music worldwide. Music provides cultural metaphors of national or local belonging16 and creates a space and a geographical imagination through the perception of sound. Because ‘‘ethnographic nationalism,’’ ‘‘the study, codification and idealization of peasant cultures in the interest of forging a new national culture’’ (Gellner 1992, 290), has proven to be especially important in the construction of national identities in postcolonial Africa and Asia, the use of musical and regional particularities such as local folksongs and folkdances to evoke and establish an imagined national consciousness and feeling of ethnic belonging has been especially prominent there, for example in the rise of the ‘‘nationalised’’ Carnatic music in the early Indian nationalism (Subramanian 1999, 131–63). One of the political uses of Sambalpuri music is by the regionalist and separatist Koshala movement, which demands the political reconstruction of the ancient—mythological— regional kingdom of Koshala in the territory of western Orissa in the form of the creation of a new state in the Indian union of states under this name. Village music, as it is reenacted on stage at festivals such as Loko Mahotsav and transformed into Sambalpuri folk music, has become the crucial symbol of regional identity and ethnicity of western Orissa, and regional identity and ethnicity have become central claims in the negotiation of the region’s relations with the central government of India. In the region, music and language are central to the construction of ethnicity, that is, of a group identity based on the assumption of a common history, origin, and culture.17 Music and language are said to provide evidence of the uniqueness of Sambalpuri culture. In the urban centers of the region, the newly created Sambalpuri folklore is thus becoming one of the focal points of the cultural and political aspirations of the peoples indigenous to the region for separate recognition and sociopolitical autonomy. The mass-media advantages of Sambalpuri music are exploited by local politicians who gladly distribute audio-visual messages accompanied by Sambalpuri music. Whereas in former times, the patrons of rural ganda baja were landholders or the local Bora Sambar king, today, the patrons of urban folk festivals are local politicians, who finance them. The sacredness of the traditional baja is being used to sacralize or at least to provide a sacralizing legitimation to political statements and political personalities.

Media Transformation

181

The Sambalpuri folklore festivals are frequently organized by Koshala activists, and often, folklore festivals such as Loko Mahotsav, even if sponsored by the central government in the context of cultural programs and intended to attract tourists to the region, become occasions for the eruptions of an ethnic discourse and of political movements that are critical of the Indian central state. The formerly sacred and ritualistic ganda baja seems to play a crucial part in this mobilization of regionalist identity for sociopolitical ends: transformed into secular Sambalpuri music, it becomes an emblem of political, cultural, and regional distinctiveness and regional pride.18 The transformation of rural ganda baja music into Sambalpuri folk music in the context of an urbanized and technologized western Orissa has had other sociopolitical ramifications, as well. It has empowered the members of the marginalized, ‘‘untouchable’’ Ganda community, whose cultural heritage has been appropriated and put to use by popular Sambalpuri musicians and regional political activists alike. While the dulduli players of Sambalpuri folk music are middle-class stage artists and no longer necessarily members of marginalized social groups, as ganda baja musicians traditionally had been, the revitalization of the ganda baja tradition has brought new self-confidence and new assertions of cultural status among rural and urban Ganda musicians alike. These claims have been grounded in a growing Dalit consciousness among these formerly marginalized musicians. The concept of Dalit consciousness19 refers to the mass conversions of members of the so called ‘‘untouchable’’ Mahar caste from Maharashtra to Buddhism in the 1970s. Mahars reacted against social oppression by converting to Buddhism and began to use the term Dalit (literally, ‘‘depressed,’’ ‘‘broken,’’ ‘‘torn into pieces’’) to designate themselves in order to avoid euphemisms or pejorative connotations. Likewise, Harijan musicians call themselves bajinya (musicians) both to signify their attachment to the idea of the traditional ganda baja village orchestra to avert habitual pejorative associations. Bajinya dalit activists claim that their music is fundamentally religious and insist that being a musician and performing baja should never be simply a musical performance, but should always be considered a puja, an act of worship of the goddess. One of the bajinya activists explains the relationship between music and religion as follows: Gods live in four of our bajinya instruments: In the dhol [the goddess] Kalka resides; in the nissan Buri Ma is manifested; in the tasa Mauli Ma lives and the black beauty Kali Sundari shows herself in the mohuri.

182

Lidia Guzy

In earlier times bajinya was never a performing art, but always a puja. Playing baja revealed a specific religious knowledge to perform the music and puja. The musicians as religious specialists arose from four brothers. Gradually that specific team became a bajinya orchestra.

Such explanations trace the traditionally marginalized and powerless social position of the bajinya musicians to their inherently strong devotion to god. ‘‘Only our economic disadvantages made us ashud lok,’’ untouchable people, another bajinya activist explained. ‘‘But because of our artistic brilliance, we were hired for musical services by the wealthy. This was the starting point when bajinya were forced to perform for money and where their social position declined.’’ As both musicians and mediums for the incarnation of the goddesses in religious rituals, traditionally oriented Ganda musicians thus denounce the entertainment-centered character of brass bands and dulduli parties as simplistic and profane. Harijan activists accuse urban brass bands and dulduli bands not only of usurping the lucrative performances at marriage ceremonies, but more generally of ‘‘stealing their culture and their intellectual property rights.’’20 Today, the consciousness of the ritual power of ganda baja music strengthens the self-awareness of the marginalized musicians and their communities. A new self-respect evolves hand in hand with a growing consciousness of their musical knowledge and skills, of the sociosymbolic power of their music, and of their intellectual property rights. The musicians as traditional mediators and transmitters of the divine powers have begun to question their former stigma of social marginality and to transform it into social power, equating their ritual power as mediums for the divine with claims to social value. In today’s India, as it becomes visible in the rural precincts of the Bora Sambar region, as well as in the urban centers such as the town of Sambalpur, the power of village sound and rhythm no longer is limited to traditional ritual contexts, but adopts new social and political roles. In an urban environment, it plays a crucial role in the process of constructing political identities. In its rural context, the self-assertion of musicians is a sign that the social stigmatization and devaluation of the communities to which their music originally belonged can be overcome by a parallel reinvention and reappropriation of a cultural heritage.

Transmitting Divine Grace: On the Materiality of Charismatic Mediation in Mali Dorothea E. Schulz

In July 1998, soon after I had started doing research on the Islamic moral reform movement in urban Mali, I was pointed to a prominent representative of the movement, the charismatic Muslim preacher Shaykh Sharif Haidara, whose radio broadcast and audiotaped sermons in Bamanakan, the lingua franca of southern Mali, had gained him an ever-growing following in the urban centers of Mali’s south.1 As I started to collect audio recordings of Sharif Haidara’s sermons and to frequent meetings of his followers in the southeastern town of San and in the capital, Bamako, my curiosity was piqued by the procedures with which they prepared themselves for the act of listening to his broadcast sermons. Central to their engagements with Haidara’s tapes were practices of tactility—such as touching the tape with one’s hands, forehead, lips, and ears—that preceded each joint tape listening session. Touch thus played a central role in engaging with media products that I had so far viewed as aural forms of mediating religious knowledge and experience. Experiences of the tactile also enjoyed a prominent position in the conversations I had with numerous listeners, whether they identified themselves as Haidara’s ‘‘disciples’’ (kalaniden) or simply as a ‘‘fan’’ of his highly entertaining broadcast speeches. Many of them reported that the ‘‘touch of voice’’ of Haidara’s speech, the viscerally palpable ‘‘impression’’ it made on them when they

183

184

Dorothea E. Schulz

heard him preach for the first time, had been a founding moment of their attachment to him and, in some cases, of their recognition of his spiritual guidance. The special qualities of his voice, some of them explained to me, conveyed the spiritual powers granted to him by God. Thus, in these mass-media engagements and related discursive representations, aural and tactile modes of mediation combined to generate experiences of transcendental presence and power (Schulz 2003). Yet it was also evident that the attempts by Haidara’s followers to partake in their leader’s special powers through practices of touch were the subject of considerable contestation on the part of other Muslims. These critics stressed their own identity as ‘‘true Muslims’’ and simultaneously expressed considerable reservations about the claims and practices of Shaykh Sharif Haidara and his disciples. They considered particularly offensive any suggestion that Haidara’s special ‘‘spiritual powers’’ emanated from his voice and could be invoked in the course of a listening event. To them, this practice and the implicit assertion of how Haidara’s special divine blessings could be accessed verged on polytheism (in Arabic, shirk). In their eyes, any such practice that engaged audiotapes and the written sources of Islam in ways other than reading and listening was a sign that Haidara and his followers were ‘‘phony Muslims’’ who diverged from the path of proper Muslim practice. As one critic, a leading representative of a prestigious religious family in Segu, put it: there is no reason to object to listening to sermon recordings. They may teach you valuable things about the rules of Islam, especially for believers who do not understand the Qur’an [ because they are not literate in Arabic]. Like reading the Qur’an, sermon tapes can help a believer to embrace the rules of Islam. But whoever tells you that these tapes are there to do something else, to influence God’s eternal will—whoever says so and whoever condones these practices is an imposter.

This derisive comment implies a neat contrast between acceptable and unacceptable uses of the Holy Scriptures and of other materials that are held to convey God’s word. According to this speaker and many other critics of Sharif Haidara, the only legitimate use of the Holy Scriptures is one based on interpretation and rational argument. To use audiorecorded lectures not for instruction and enlightenment, but to access or mobilize God’s hidden powers is thus an aberration from orthodox Muslim tradition. This contrast between legitimate and illegitimate ways of handling God’s revelations is not new. It is anchored in centuries-long controversies

Transmitting Divine Grace

185

among Muslims over what constitutes proper religious practice, controversies that still today are framed, as Louis Brenner has put it succinctly, as a ‘‘discourse of truth and ignorance’’ (Brenner 1993). In the following months, as I continued my research among Sharif Haidara’s acolytes and spent much of my time with his female followers, I realized that the haptic qualities of mediation my interlocutors attributed to his audiotapes applied to other things and materials, as well. Objects as diverse as wall decorations, bumper stickers, and dress items seemed to be frequently treated as materializations of his special spiritual powers. Practices of touch and the frequent mention of being touched played central roles in the appropriation of these materials by Haidara’s followers. Whenever some of these ‘‘aberrant’’ engagements with sermon recordings practiced by his disciples reached the ears of Haidara’s vigilant critics, their reactions ranged from vehement rejection, to resentment, to dismissal. The heated reactions and debates triggered by Haidara’s preaching and by his followers’ media-related practices of veneration provide a window into the different views of religious orthopraxy and legitimate authority that characterize the Malian (Muslim)2 religious field in Mali and, more particularly, the movement for Islamic moral renewal. This movement has been an emergent force in Malian public life since the 1980s; since the introduction of multiparty democracy in 1991–92 and aided by the concomitant diversification of state and private media outlet, the movement has gained considerable momentum, especially in urban areas. Another way of approaching the contested use of Haidara’s audiorecorded sermons by his followers is to compare to the various techniques and technologies that Muslims in this area of West Africa have conventionally deployed for the purpose of communicating with the transcendent world. Viewed from this angle, controversies over the legitimate or aberrant use of Haidara’s sermon recordings reveal the insecurities that surround the adoption of new media technologies in existing devotional practices and techniques of communing with the divine. Scholarship on Islam in West Africa has tended to treat practices relating to charisma and those relating to trance mediumship or ‘‘possession cults’’ along separate tracks. Studies of charisma and charismatic authority center on the notion of hereditary baraka (divine blessings) by presenting it as a grace that leaders of Sufi orders and their relatives hold and pass on through genealogical connections. Following Ernest Gellner’s famous distinction between different sources of religious authority, earlier studies

186

Dorothea E. Schulz

identified baraka and religious erudition as contrasting modes of generating religious authority. More recent work, however, has emphasized that these sources of authority often intermingle and that the contrast results from a discursive polarization posited by believers and Muslim authorities themselves (for example, Seesemann 2003; Schielke 2008). Several studies account for the practices and capacities associated with baraka as a source of charismatic authority, such as visions, dreams, and forms of spiritual intercession between ordinary believers and God (for example, Brenner 1984; Last 1988; Cruise O’Brien 1988; Schulz 2003; Soares 2005, ch. 5). Yet the twin questions of what materials and techniques are mobilized in these transmission processes and on what modes of perception these techniques rely have received little systematic attention.3 The literature on trance mediumship in Muslim societies in West Africa, on the other hand, has been shaped by a broader debate about whether ‘‘spirit possession practices’’ form part of ‘‘orthodox’’ Islam and how to relate them to broader power inequalities in society, such as those structuring relations between men and women (Lewis 1966; Boddy 1989) and people’s insertion into a global economic order (for example. Comaroff 1985; Masquelier 2001). While this literature provides important details on specific modes and techniques through which spiritual power makes itself manifest through embodiment, the question of how these forms of trance mediumship relate to the concept of baraka has received relatively little attention. In fact, partly in response to differences between these two repertoires of manifesting invisible forces, trance mediumship has been often conceived as the alter ego of baraka. Whereas scholars have emphasized that baraka constitutes an important source of authority for believers who show an affinity for the mystical traditions of Islam, they have also underlined the strong resentment that many Muslim leaders, among them those associated with Sufi Islam, express toward trancerelated and possession-related Muslim rituals. (See Masquelier 2001 and Soares 1999.) These (male) religious authorities thus tend to categorize charismatic authority and ‘‘trance mediumship’’ as belonging to contrasting moral universes. This essay contributes to the existing scholarship on charismatic authority in African Muslim societies by looking more closely at religious practices that serve the mediation of charismatic power and hence the attribution of charismatic authority. Rather than conceiving of charismatic mediation and trance mediumship as resting upon distinct processes, I will take them as forming part of a set of practices all of which aim at rendering the hidden workings and effects of God’s powers immanent, palpable, and

Transmitting Divine Grace

187

thus ‘‘sensible.’’4 I do not posit a clear divide—or disjuncture—between ‘‘old’’ and ‘‘new’’ media; media per se are ‘‘always already new’’ (Gitelman 2006; see Gitelman and Pingree 2003), yet also intertwine with established conventions and understandings of how mediation should and can be effected. My perspective thus departs from studies on Muslim practice in Africa that tend to stress the ‘‘modern’’ character of Muslim leaders and movements that employ mass media. By framing the relationship between uses of the Qur’an and of audio-recorded texts not in terms of contrast and rupture, but rather as a matter of capitalizing on a shared genealogy of mediation practices, I hope to expand the analytical focus that scholarship of Islam has often applied to investigate believers’ engagement with holy texts. As Jonathan Sterne demonstrates forcefully, the historically and socially determined emergence of a technical infrastructure as a ‘‘medium’’ relies on certain social and material institutions and practices, as well as on a set of moral interpretations and judgments (Sterne 2003). Along with these complex dynamics, particular subjects of media experience are formed. This means that media users emerge as subjects of media experience only when they undergo a process of ‘‘tuning the senses’’ (Schmidt 2000; Connor 2004). Because of the historically and culturally determined nature of people’s media practices and of the modes of sensation on which these media practices depend, we cannot anticipate, but need to explore how people’s ways of tuning the senses interact with new media technologies. Consequently, only by considering the long-standing history of intra-Muslim debate about mediation and access to the divine can we understand the contested meanings that different technologies of religious mediation have acquired over the last two decades Analysis in what follows therefore centers on the materials and techniques of transmission and the modes of perception that allow followers of Sharif Haidara to experience his charismatic power and to partake in it. I will pay particular attention to how Haidara’s followers account of their experiences and in the techniques they apply to facilitate them. All these techniques and practices, I argue, form part of their purposeful effort to tune their senses to the experience of divine presence in their daily lives.

A Heterogeneous Religious Field and Contested Notions of Spiritual Mediation Sharif Haidara’s followers refer to themselves as Ansar Dine, (a Bamanized5 version of the Arabic Ansar-ud-Deen, the ‘‘followers of religion’’).6

188

Dorothea E. Schulz

The Ansar Dine belong to a multitude of Muslim organizations and groups that, taken together, make up a broader movement for Islamic moral renewal. This movement started in the early 1980s and gained in strength and public presence after the political liberalization and concomitant diversification of the media landscape of the early 1990s. Those who support the renewal movement call for a ‘‘return’’ to the original readings of the Islamic foundational texts and for a purification of conventional religious practice from unlawful innovation (bid‘a). Another guiding concern expressed by leading representatives of the movement during their public, often mass-mediated interventions is that public order and collective life should be remodeled according to the laws set by God (shari’a). Yet beneath the assertions of commonality and unity, the landscape of Muslim reformist activism actually reveals a range of doctrinal and interpretive positions, religious practices, social organizations, and public activities. The heterogeneity of the religious field is exemplified by the different, partly new credentials on which various preachers and other religious figures draw to establish themselves as spokesmen of the Islamic renewal movement. Among the new credentials that they claim for themselves are educational degrees from local reformed Muslim schools (singular, medersa) or from institutions of higher religious learning in the Arab-speaking Muslim world. Also important for the prominent position that these religious leaders enjoy are their access to mass-media technologies and institutions, such as the national broadcast station ORTM, one of the private radio stations that emerged after the introduction of multiparty democracy in 1991, or simply a private recording studio that serves the production and reduplication of audio and video recordings of sermons and religious ritual. The recent diversification of sources of religious authority is also reflected in the growing number of women who disseminate their calls for moral reform through audiotapes and also on national and local radio. The activities of these male and female preachers generate much resentment among other Muslims, particularly among those who do not support the movement for Islamic renewal. Among the fiercest critics of the new preachers and leaders are representatives of established religious clans, as well as ‘‘secularist-minded’’ Muslim critics who work in the state administration.7 The leader of the Ansar Dine, Shaykh Sharif Haidara, is not only an important representative of the Islamic renewal, but also exemplifies the skilful and smooth incorporation of various doctrinal positions and sources of authority that account for the success of leading figures of the renewal

Transmitting Divine Grace

189

movement.8 Since the mid-1980s, Shaykh Sharif Haidara, an eloquent and media-savvy preacher, has disseminated his call for moral reform to an ever-growing constituency of ‘‘rightful believers’’ (silame dina kanubagaw) by relying heavily on audio recordings and on local radio stations. Similar to other leading protagonists of the renewal movement, Haidara stresses text-based understandings of religious practice, thereby echoing important tenets of Salafi-Sunni reformist thought articulated in Egypt and other areas of the Muslim world. Haidara also insists on believers’ personal responsibility for salvation, an insistence that signals a break with conventional assumptions about the desirability of human intercession in believers’ communications with God (Schulz 2006b and 2007). At the same time and seemingly in contrast to his insistence on believers’ individual communication with God, Haidara condones practices that are inspired by traditional understandings of the spiritual intercession that Sufi shaykhs can provide.9 As we will see below, Haidara’s public interactions with followers reveal the conviction of his acolytes that his special divine blessings (baraka) qualify him to intervene on their behalf in their supplications to God.10 Initially, his Muslim opponents, among them leading representatives of established religious clans that benefit from their long-standing closeness to Mali’s (changing) political regimes, dismissed Sharif Haidara as a rabble-rousing upstart with little erudition and stressed instead the importance of learning for religious leadership. Moreover, as reflected in the disparaging comment I cited earlier, Haidara’s opponents express considerable distrust of his lenient attitude toward believers who treat him as a ‘‘spiritual guide’’—that is, as someone endowed with special, divinely granted faculties and powers. Until the mid-1990s, these critics used their close connections to the government to prevent Haidara’s access to the national broadcast station in Bamako. Nevertheless, Haidara gradually managed to develop a broad following within and across the Malian border by drawing on private radio stations and on audiocassettes and videocassettes that circulated among his followers in West Africa and France. Finally, in 2002, the government of President Toure´ invited him to join the Haut Conseil Islamique, an official structure geared toward integrating (and containing) powerful factions of the Muslim religious field. Since then, Haidara has pursued a two-pronged strategy, stressing his ‘‘collaborative’’ attitude toward his Muslim critics while simultaneously maintaining a critical distance from government officials and established religious authorities (Schulz 2006b and 2007).

190

Dorothea E. Schulz

As Haidara’s highly contested role as a ‘‘spiritual guide’’ demonstrates, the mushrooming of institutions and actors in the Islamic renewal movement brings into focus conflicts among Muslims over correct interpretation, practice, and legitimate authority. Some divisions reiterate earlier lines of conflict between competing Muslim factions. Haidara’s opponents present reading and listening, on one side, and touch, on the other, as mutually exclusive paradigms of textual appropriation. They thereby reiterate the critique expressed by earlier generations of Muslim reformists against certain ritual practices inspired by Sufi-related notions of spiritual intercession and the hidden forces of God’s word.11 Those who criticize Haidara and his condoning of esoteric textual practices maintain that reading and listening are the only legitimate forms of textual appropriation. In so doing, they ignore—or dismiss—that historically, for the majority of believers, textual interpretation was only one way of engaging the Holy Scriptures, and often not the most central. The critics also disregard that many believers, in their actual engagements with the different materials and media of divine mediation, tend to blur the dividing lines between the interpretive and esoteric appropriations of texts.

Materials and Modes of Accessing the Divine: Charismatic Mediation in History Although studies of Muslim religious practices in West Africa make occasional references to forms of veneration that involve touch, not enough attention has been paid to the fact that all these tactile practices can be considered ways of mediating transcendent, ‘‘hidden’’ powers, that is, of rendering them palpable. This neglect seems to be due to the textcentered forms of analysis that have been predominant in scholarly studies of Muslim authority. As I noted above, these studies have tended to contrast two kinds of authority: the first, interpretative authority, as being based primarily on reading and writing as major modalities of accessing the written texts of Islam and religious interpretive knowledge, and the second as being grounded in the special ‘‘charisma’’ or divine blessings (baraka) that are associated with Sufi leadership and that grant family members of ‘‘Sufi-related’’ clans, both men and women, special powers to assume an intermediate position between God and human beings and to intervene on behalf of the latter (Coulon 1988; Coulon and Reveyrand Coulon 1990). As this suggests, there is a common, if contested sense that

Transmitting Divine Grace

191

the mere physical presence of leaders with a prestigious religious family background grants followers multiple opportunities to partake in the spiritual powers these leaders are said to hold. Material objects play an instrumental role in these practices of partaking in or ‘‘tapping into’’ the special spiritual powers of religious leaders. This is also suggested by the devotional practices in which Haidara’s followers engage. They illustrate that touch plays a pivotal role in local protocols of generating and experiencing authority—not only in interactions with leaders associated with mystical Islam, but also with Muslim scholars who claim spiritual leadership on the basis of text-based and sharia-based appropriations of Islam. As I have shown elsewhere, the tendency by Haidara’s followers to relate to written texts and to his audiotaped sermons through touch are in direct continuity with long-standing conventions of divine mediation. (See Schulz 2008.) Historically, the Qur’an has occupied a central place in practices of mobilizing and controlling worldly and spiritual power in this area of West Africa. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Muslim scholars based their authority on religious erudition, yet often they simultaneously offered services relating to their knowledge of the Islamic ‘‘esoteric sciences’’ (Brenner 1984),12 thereby responding to requests by rulers as well as to the daily needs of ordinary believers.13 These scholars and religious experts were taken to task for their esoteric practices by certain reform-minded Muslims, but the majority of Muslims regarded their esoteric services as legitimate and orthopractic forms of practicing ‘‘deep’’ Muslim knowledge (Brenner 1984, 21, 23, 26). ‘‘Writing’’ was the central metaphor of the esoteric practices effected by these Muslim experts, yet speaking, reciting, and reading were also essential for the mobilization of occult forces by an expert’s ‘‘work with the Qur’an’’ (baara ni kurana ye).14 All these acts of ‘‘magic writing’’ (Hame`s 1987) combined tactile and other embodied practices. Still today, the act of ‘‘writing’’ and ‘‘speaking over’’ also involves the touching of the written words and signs.15 Other practices aiming at the mobilization of the divine powers that are contained in sacred scripture include the ingestion of materials, their application to the skin, or their storing in special containers (Hame`s 1987, 314; Last 1988, 184, 199; Mommersteeg 1991, 54). At present, Islamic esoteric knowledge is still important for the ways Muslim authority is asserted and attributed. Many believers confide in the expertise of religious specialists and their knowledge of how to harness the divine powers contained in the Holy Scriptures through speech, writing, touch, and ingestion. (See Mommersteeg 1991; Schulz 2007.) The ways

192

Dorothea E. Schulz

in which Haidara’s followers relate to his sermon recordings are thus representative of a broader tendency to combine an exegetic approach to scripture with engagements with the Holy Qur’an that aim to mobilize its esoteric meanings and potential (Schulz 2005). In addition to the practices on which I reported at the beginning of this essay, I witnessed numerous other occasions on which Haidara’s disciples, both women and men, touched dress items and other objects that were considered to be charged with Haidara’s spiritual powers. Touching these objects, they explained to me, helped them in their efforts to ‘‘open themselves up to his forceful speech’’ and hence to render them more perceptive to the contents of his sermons (Schulz 2012). The importance that acolytes attribute to tactility as a mode of tapping into their leader’s divinely granted powers also appears in their frequent attempts to touch Haidara or any object exposed to his physical presence, such as his cell phone, his car seat, his scarf, robe, shoes, or watch. I suggest that these and other related bodily practices constitute instances of what Marcel Mauss set out to explore as ‘‘techniques of the body’’ in his historic lecture at the Socie´te´ de Psychologie in Paris in May 1934. By coining the notion of ‘‘techniques of the body,’’ Mauss identified as a central anthropological question people’s ‘‘knowledge of how to use the body’’ and how this knowledge varies across societies and history. He conceived of any bodily activity as a ‘‘cultural technique’’ that, composed of various gestures acquired through ‘‘education’’ and habituation, has at once emotional, material, and moral effects for those who act. Mauss stressed that bodily techniques and the embodied, partly implicit knowledge in which they are engrained and on which they reflect transform over time through the interaction with competing norms and modes of bodily practice (Mauss [1935] 1973, 70, 73–74). Mauss’s notion of ‘‘techniques of the body’’ can be usefully applied to gain a deeper understanding of the material and bodily practices in which Sharif Haidara’s acolytes engage to ‘‘tap’’ into his special powers. To be sure, not all of their gestures and practices are conducted with the explicit purpose of drawing on his charisma. What matters for my analysis here is that their bodily practices reveal implicit understandings of how Haidara’s charisma can be accessed and rendered palpable and immanent and hence through what bodily sensations it can be mediated. Also, similar to how Marshall McLuhan conceived of media as the material ‘‘extensions of man,’’ Mauss insisted that bodily techniques involve both the bodily gestural apparatus and various material means. This perspective helps to illuminate how Haidara’s followers integrate changing materials into their tactile and aural sensation of his charismatic force.

Transmitting Divine Grace

193

In their daily lives and during religious activities, followers of Haidara engage in a number of practices that draw on additional media that, in their view, facilitate a tactile experience of their leader’s special spiritual powers. Most often, these views remain implicit; they are articulated only on occasions when the process of transmitting Haidara’s charisma seems to be threatened. In May 2006, during a group meeting of the Ansar Dine women of San, I happened to overhear an exchange between several group members that highlighted the potential of dress items to store and transmit Haidara’s charisma. Shortly after the leader of the women’s group had declared the meeting to be over, two women approached the woman who sat next to me on the mat and requested to browse the assortment of ‘‘modest’’ garments that she used to bring to each group meeting to offer them for sale to her fellow group members.16 One of the women picked a robe from the bottom of the dress heap, yet before she could peruse it closely, my neighbor briskly tore it away from her, asserting emphatically that this garment was not for sale. The robe, she went on to explain, had been charged with Haidara’s spiritual energy during her recent visit to his vast compound in Bamako-Bankoni, where she happened to attend one of his public prayer sessions. The reason why she had brought the robe to the meeting was that she hoped that it would grant her protection and successful business transactions. Upon hearing my neighbor’s account, the other two women could hardly contain their excitement. Again and again, they touched the robe, pressed it to their foreheads and lips, and performed gestures of cleansing themselves with the robe, until my neighbor reluctantly, but energetically wrestled it away from their enthusiastic grip. The anecdote demonstrates that Haidara’s followers rely on touch as a mode of partaking in the special blessings God bestowed on their spiritual leader. The specific bodily techniques in which they engage for this purpose are in clear continuity with well-established practices of saint veneration that, although repeatedly and harshly criticized by reform-minded Muslim intellectuals since the 1940s, are still considered adequate means of enhancing one’s relationship to God.17 The scene also puts into relief the implicit understanding of Haidara’s followers that his mere physical presence may transform an ordinary dress item and other mundane objects into containers of his divinely granted powers. Finally, the scene illustrates some rituals of self-preparation that Haidara’s acolytes apply to turn themselves into receptacles of his spiritual powers. These preparatory ritual gestures reveal that touch, as a multivalent mode of sensation, plays a central role in the ways in which Haidara’s followers pass on and partake in

194

Dorothea E. Schulz

his charismatic faculties and thus perpetuate long-standing protocols of mediating and experiencing divine presence.

Divine Resonance: The Moving Powers of Sound and Speech Given this emphasis on touch, but also given that audio recordings of Haidara’s speech play such a prominent role both in his followers’ daily practices and in garnering him such success in national controversies, how does touch, as a conventional means of mediating God’s hidden powers, relate to aural forms of mediation and to audio broadcasting as a relatively new media technology? One of the most striking experiences during my early research on Sharif Haidara’s movement was the insistence with which his followers spoke of the ‘‘touching’’ and ‘‘gripping’’ effects that the sound of his voice had generated at the time when they heard it for the first time (Schulz 2003 and 2006a). Their recurrent references to an imagery of the tactile could be read as just that—a figure of speech and thus a merely metaphorical privileging of tactility. However, an interpretation of the discursive emphasis on touch as a purely metaphorical statement is inadequate to capture how Haidara’s followers—and most likely, other believers, too— conceive of the relationship of sound sensation and tactile perception. That relationship forms part of a broader set of symbolic and discursive parameters in which the practice of Islam has been grounded historically in wide parts of the Muslim world.18 The emphasis of Haidara’s disciples on the touching effects of his voice points to the synesthetic nature of the tactile and the aural as key modes of mediating spiritual authority as it is understood by West African Muslims. These local views of spiritual leadership are not strongly informed by a text-based Islamic tradition and thus provide a certain contrast to the ways in which Islamic knowledge acquisition and transmission is organized in other Muslim societies (Hirschkind 2006b). Instead, these West African understandings of authority integrate the aural and the tactile via local conceptions of a ‘‘touching voice’’ and a genuine, ‘‘heartfelt’’ hearing experience. Throughout Sahelian West Africa, people have historically conceived of the spoken word and of voice as two media with a peculiar agency (Zahan 1963; Camara 1976; Hoffman 1995; Schulz 2001; Diawara 2003). Still today, many people attribute to orality and aurality a particular transformative potential, a capacity they describe in ways reminiscent of what William Arens and Ivan Karp (1989) call the ‘‘power of action.’’ The voice,

Transmitting Divine Grace

195

because of its ‘‘touching’’ effects, is credited with an immense potential to affect listeners’ cognitive, ethical, and perceptive faculties. People describe these affective effects of the voice as one by which their ‘‘hearts’’ (singular, dunsun) and ‘‘minds’’ (singular hakili) are ‘‘mobilized’’ (lawuli, literally ‘‘raised’’) to prompt listeners to hear and to ‘‘heed’’19 the speaker’s advice and to perform exemplary ‘‘deeds’’ (kewale). In this manner, voice and speech are conceived as a continuum of action by which listeners’ capacities to listen are channeled into concrete deeds, that is, ways of reworking and affecting the material and social world. Although people generally appreciate the mobilizing, transformative powers of speech and voice, there are also many social norms, sayings, and codes of interaction that reveal their deep ambivalences about the affective effects of speech.20 A good illustration of these ambivalences is the respect and simultaneous disdain with which people treat the praised singers and family historians who act as specialists of the spoken word in many societies of Mali (jeliw in Bamanakan; see Camara 1976; Schulz 2001). These professional speakers and singers may be highly cherished for their oratory prowess, yet they are also distrusted because they convert silence into speech, a work that might unleash the harmful forces of deceit and betrayal. There is an obvious continuity between the mobilizing effects that are ascribed to the voice in this society and the accounts offered by some of Haidara’s followers that their decision to heed Haidara’s call for moral renewal was prompted by their experience of ‘‘feeling struck’’ by his ‘‘poignant voice’’ broadcast on local radio. Other acolytes remembered that hearing Haidara’s speech ‘‘from everywhere and nowhere’’ moved them to tears, but subsequently brought them a stillness of mind they had never experienced before. Yet others described this hearing experience as one of spiritual awakening, that is, as a moment foundational to their ‘‘resurrection’’ as a new human and moral being, saying, ‘‘He talks to you so compellingly that even if you are dead, he will awaken you again.’’ So physically and mentally arresting was the experience of hearing Haidara’s voice, they maintained, that it convinced them immediately of his chosen status as the guardian of God’s ‘‘undeniable truth.’’21 These remarks reveal three important points about the relation of the aural and the tactile here. First, Haidara’s voice itself is perceived as a medium of his divinely granted charismatic powers. Second, Haidara’s charisma manifests itself through perceptibility and imperceptibility. After ‘‘striking’’ the believer, it induces in her a ‘‘stillness’’ of mind and thus

196

Dorothea E. Schulz

manifests itself in the absence of sense perceptions. Finally, to these acolytes, audio-recording technologies such as audiotapes and radio broadcasts help ‘‘condense,’’ that is, render more palpable, the special powers inherent in and mediated by Haidara’s voice. In this way, believers conceive of the voice and of audio-recording technologies as different links in a ‘‘chain’’ of multiple media (see Behrend 2003b), all of which enable the mediation process by which God’s powers are rendered immanent in the world. The specific construction of voice, speech, and audio-recording technologies as interlocking means of mediating the powers of the divine is also evident in the bodily practices in which Haidara’s followers engage. When socializing with followers of Haidara in the period between 1999 and 2003, I often participated in their joint ‘‘sessions’’ listening to cassette sermons. Most of these sessions were spontaneously initiated; they manifested implicit rules and protocols of ‘‘proper listening’’ that, as Ansar Dine members explained to me, served to ‘‘free their minds’’ of distracting thoughts and feelings and to ‘‘center attention’’ on Haidara’s ‘‘forceful speech.’’ The protocols of ‘‘proper listening’’ included rules of proper posture (sitting upright, with eyes cast down), modest sartorial practices (choice of dress and ways of arranging it), as well as maintaining a bodily ‘‘openness’’ (through spatial orientation and the placing of hands and legs) toward the tape recorder and hence the technical source from which Haidara’s voice originated and reverberated in their ears and minds. When I asked fellow listeners what adopting these protocols achieved for them, they explained that they allowed them to perceive more forcefully the special, transformative powers that emanated from Haidara’s voice. Applying these techniques of the body made them more susceptible and responsive to both his voice and the lessons his voice mediated. Finally, they described the sensation of his ‘‘forceful speech’’ as an experience of inner transformation, one that is mediated through a sensation that is at once haptic and sonic. The bodily techniques devised by Haidara’s followers to facilitate the tactile and kinaesthetic effects of Haidara’s speech reveal the cultural framework of sense perception that informs their assessments of his spiritual authority. According to this framework, a person’s capacity to ‘‘touch’’ and to ‘‘move’’ people indicates his or her special capacities to mediate between the here and now and an invisible world. Technologies that heighten a person’s special emotive capacities are considered to play an instrumental role in the interactive generation of spiritual authority.

Transmitting Divine Grace

197

These technologies and the technical apparatus that incarnates their mediating powers are treated accordingly. This is evident in the ways in which Haidara’s followers treat material manifestations of Haidara’s sermons such as the radio sets and tape recorders on which they hear his sermons and various memorabilia that commemorate important steps in his spiritual career. All these practices reveal believers’ views that audio recording technology has the potential of rendering Haidara’s presence immediate and of facilitating access to it. Listeners acknowledge the distinctive effects that audio recordings generate in the mediation of spiritual power. But rather than taking the disembodiment of voice as an indication of a less authentic hearing experience, they claim as a particular feature of the sermon tape its capacity to contain and render manifest their leader’s special, divinely granted powers. In this manner, believers integrate technical media into conventional modes of accessing and perceiving God’s presence in the here and now.

Visual Mediations of Divine Presence In addition to the integration of the aural and the tactile in a ‘‘touching voice,’’ touch itself plays a central role in the ways these acolytes appropriate and harness their leader’s charisma. In the dress practices of Ansar Dine women, they engage in another kind of multisensory appropriation of their leader’s charisma, an appropriation that rests on the integration of the tactile and the visual. Many garments worn by Ansar Dine women are made of specially imprinted fabric that bears the Ansar Dine group logo, as well as portraits of Sharif Haidara and, occasionally, of his mother and wives. Women’s decision to don such a garment can be seen as both a way of embodying their attachment to their spiritual leader and of ‘‘endressing,’’ that is, of rendering manifest, their leader’s spiritual presence. Wearing garments with Haidara’s portrait forms part of a range of bodily techniques by which Haidara’s female followers seek to transform their daily lives and give them a new significance. Yet we can also interpret the dress practices by Ansar Dine women as a form of transmission, that is, of receiving, ‘‘processing,’’ and of passing on the special spiritual powers their leader holds as part of the blessings God granted him. As an illustration, let us take a closer look at a practice I observed repeatedly during informal socializing events by female followers of Haidara in San.22 Members of the group who felt they were close friends often visited each other in the afternoon to listen jointly to one of Haidara’s

198

Dorothea E. Schulz

audio-recorded sermons. During these listening sessions, the women would sometimes pass around particular dress items, such as a prayer shawl, from which Haidara looked at them with a calm, confidenceinspiring air. Some of the prayer shawls, I realized while observing the women’s reverential gestures, had been exposed to Haidara’s presence and divine blessings. To circulate these shawls thus resembled the function ascribed to the robe that, as I reported earlier here, had elicited enthusiastic responses by Ansar Dine women because of its impregnation with Haidara’s special powers. Women whom I asked about their experiences when covering themselves with a ‘‘charged’’ prayer shawl described it as another moment at which their minds came to a complete standstill. Rather than keeping the prayer shawl to themselves, their willingness to pass it on to other group members signaled their spirit of ‘‘solidarity’’ and empathy with fellow believers. After all, as one proud owner of a charged prayer shawl put it, by passing around this item, she enabled other women to partake in the special spiritual blessings contained in the scarf. Through the practice of circulating the prayer shawl, women established a circuit and flow of spiritual power. The process these women described was one by which Haidara’s spiritual blessings were passed on as a form of ‘‘trickle-down charisma’’ (Schulz 2011, ch. 7). This ritual thus implicates women and dress items in a chain of media that, ultimately, allow them to experience the workings of God’s powers in this world. When asked about the effects of this ritual, women often stressed their haptic experience of Haidara’s trickle-down charisma. The fact that these prayer shawls bore Haidara’s portrait deserves special attention. According to them, the scarf’s decoration with Haidara’s picture reinforced (‘‘doubled,’’ in their words) their experience of feeling touched. Circulating the scarf, they maintained, made them feel ‘‘watched’’ by their leader and his ‘‘compassionate gaze.’’ In this ritual, then, Haidara’s spiritual powers are passed on through a combination of the tactile and the visual. The ritual can therefore be seen as a synesthetic technique that operates in analogy to and with similar effects as voice and speech. Rather than dismiss Ansar Dine women’s reliance on the mediating capacities of dress as an instance of an unorthodox Muslim practice (as their Muslim critics of Mali would do), we should understand their practices against the backdrop of how the relationship between modes of bodily sensation and the mediation of supernatural powers has been conceptualized in this area of West Africa. Patrick McNaughton, in his work

Transmitting Divine Grace

199

on Bamanaya (non-Islamic) esoteric knowledge in southern Mali argues that dress plays an important role in harnessing invisible supernatural powers. He cites the example of hunters (donsonw), whose capacities to confront the malevolent spirits (jinew) populating the wilderness have historically garnered them much respect in the Mande-speaking societies of southern Mali (McNaughton 1982). Their shirts have a particular visual organization that breaks with the visual arrangements of everyday clothing23 and that allows them to harness supernatural powers in various amulets and through the haptic relationship between dress and body.24 Although more research is needed to understand how in these practices, the visual and the haptic might interact in the mediating of occult powers, the modus operandi of hunters’ shirts is clearly a synesthetic one. Another illustration, drawn from urban Senegalese society, also echoes the views of the haptic dimension of vision that Haidara’s female followers articulated. (See Sobchack 2004.) According to Allen Roberts and Mary Nooter Roberts (2003), Sufi visual arts in urban Senegal rest on a twodirectional viewing process: looking and being looked at. (See Mitchell 1994 and Pinney 2004.) For many believers, visual engagements with the portraits of religious leaders (particularly with those of Ahmad Bamba, the founder of the Muride order) that are painted on wall hangings and glass are an essential element of their venerational practice. Although commonly referred to as a form of ‘‘visual’’ piety (see Morgan 1999), believers’ attempts to partake in his spiritual powers through vision clearly involve a synesthetic mode of perception. To be sure, there are clear differences between how Haidara’s followers ‘‘endress’’ and experience their leader’s spiritual powers, on one side, and the ‘‘visual piety’’ described by Roberts and Nooter Roberts (2003), on the other. Still there are affinities between how these devotional conventions include tactility. What marks out the ‘‘power mediation practices’’ of Haidara’s acolytes is that in their case, ‘‘visual piety’’ involves not only wall hangings and other decorations, but also items worn on the body. At stake, here, is a particular synesthetic acquisition of spiritual power: an appropriation that works through the interlocking of touch, body movement, and the visual. Therefore, rather than substantiate the widely held belief that Islam as a civilization is essentially imagery averse, we should pay closer attention to the potentially wide range of synesthetic practices by which Muslims rely on vision as one mode of accessing or of rendering manifest God’s hidden powers.

200

Dorothea E. Schulz

Media Technologies and God’s Presence Media engagements by Haidara’s disciples illustrate a process of articulation and of crossover between different technologies and protocols of rendering God’s presence accessible. The employment of audio reproduction technologies by certain supporters of Islamic moral renewal in Mali does not prompt a break between conventional understandings of religious practice and experience, on the one hand, and of media-related experiences of the divine on the other. These technologies, the mechanical apparatus in which they solidify, and the related social practices and understandings of spiritual mediation create new opportunities for certain religious leaders to transpose the touching effects of their speech into new domains and forms of spiritual experience. For the moment, it is not evident to what extent these media-savvy religious leaders and the practices they condone can avoid—or ignore—the heavy contestation they face on the part of different Muslim factions. Still, it seems that with the growing medialization of everyday experience, these religious figures may become forerunners of partly novel forms of proper religious practice in which new technical media might play an important role in passing on the powers of the divine. After all, this is how Muslim religious practice has historically evolved in this area of West Africa: as the ever-changing, tension-ridden product of controversies over how to render God’s presence immanent.

Spaces of Refusal: Photophobic Spirits and the Technical Medium of Photography Heike Behrend

In an article published in 1893, E. F. Im Thurn, a traveling anthropologist who had struggled and experimented in various ways with the photographic camera ‘‘in the field,’’ suggested that the bodies of primitive folk ‘‘might indeed be more accurately measured and photographed for such purposes dead than alive, could they be conveniently obtained when in this state’’ (Im Thurn 1893, 184). Although Im Thurn favored photographing ‘‘these folk regarded as living’’ and documenting them in social activities in their surroundings, he named one of the predicaments of early photography: the necessity to fix and immobilize the photographed subject in the photographic act ‘‘as if dead’’ because of the long exposure time that was then required. It is not by chance that the first photographs—or rather, daguerreotypes—were taken of immobile things and corpses.1 As Walter Benjamin remarked, many of the early photographs by David Octavius Hill were taken at the Edinburgh cemetery of Greyfriars, and the models seemed perfectly at home there (Benjamin 1980 [1931], 204). And later, when exposure time was reduced to a few seconds and snapshots had become common, associations of photography as an act and photographs as objects, with immobility, freezing, and death continued to occupy the imaginations of (Western) scholars exploring the medium of photography. As Roland Barthes suggested, for example, to be photographed is ‘‘that

201

202

Heike Behrend

very subtle moment when, to tell the truth, I am neither subject nor object but a subject that feels he is becoming an object: I then experience a microversion of death’’ (Barthes 1981, 14). And, he continued: ‘‘However ‘lifelike’ we strive to make it (and this frenzy to be lifelike can only be our mythic denial of an apprehension of death), Photography is a kind of primitive theater, a kind of Tableau Vivant, a figuration of the motionless and made-up face beneath which we see death’’ (ibid., 31–32). Against the background of photography’s present global success and ubiquity, the panics and disturbances created by the introduction of the new medium seem to have been largely forgotten. In fact, it is difficult to recapture the shock, amazement, fright, and refusal that accompanied the new medium as it entered, transformed, and displaced already existing visual economies. (See Morris 2009, 1.) The ‘‘primitive’s’’ refusal to be photographed is a well-elaborated trope in the ethnographic literature (Spyer 2001, 305), and in many parts of the world—for example, in Japan (Kohara 2010, 230–31), in the Western Solomon Islands (Wright 2008), and in many parts of Africa (Behrend 2003a and 2003b), in popular discourses, photography was connected with death and misfortune by many people who were subjected to the camera’s gaze and its (visual) violence. As a ‘‘devil’s engine,’’ a machine ‘‘to capture a person’s spirit’’ or to subtract bodily substance, the camera was associated with death, theft, and sorcery, and photography was strongly refused. It seems that the nature of photography itself—freezing its subjects in the act and in the picture—was integrally connected both to indigenous resistance to it and concerns about it (Edwards 2003, 84). It took some time to transform the new medium from a wondrous, dangerous, and deadly machine to a medium routinized and deeply inserted into everyday life, rituals, ceremonies, and feasts. Paradoxically, it was in times of war, despair, and violent death—when too many young people died—that in many parts of the world, photography became increasingly accepted and ‘‘democratized.’’ In the United States after the Civil War (1861–1865), the idea of photographs as a way of preserving the memory of the dead came gradually more to the fore.2 At the same time, photography entered Spiritualism and became a tool to penetrate and reveal the invisible aspects of the spirit world. In fact, legal issues and cultural practices concerned with death, mourning, and bereavement figured into the success of spirit photography at this particularly divisive moment in American history (Kaplan 2008, 4). In this context, Spiritualists forged a synthesis of technology and the supernatural that endowed photography with a spiritual dimension and supplied Spiritualism with an apparently scientific form of evidence (Gunning 2008, 62).

Spaces of Refusal

203

In the West, photography and spirit, far from being opposites, have been seen as peculiarly analogous and adapted to one another.3 Since the beginning of spirit photography in the 1860s, the camera, photographers, and spirits have built up various alliances. Photography’s double identity as an instrument of scientific inquiry and an uncanny, almost magical process able to make visible what before had not been seen made for an association between photography and spirits that would illuminate both photography’s field of competence and the perceived essence and modalities of spirits. As John Harvey suggests, photography is ‘‘in essence, a medium of the spirit’’ (2007, 8, 157). In fact, spirit mediums and the medium of photography share structural similarities. Both resurrect the dead. Both create a certain uncanniness by bringing into the present something that belongs to the past, thus disturbing simultaneousness (Gleichzeitigkeit) through the interaction of two different temporalities. And both spirit mediums and the person photographed experience some sort of radical dispossession and radical self-estrangement by becoming an Other. Yet a transcultural history of media—of spirit mediums, as well as the medium of photography—that includes Africa and other places outside the West gives evidence of other relationships between photography and spirit, some of which are characterized by negativity and a refusal of the association that has prevailed elsewhere. In spite of photography’s seemingly global success, ubiquity, and ability to intrude in nearly all domains of social life, along the East African coast, reformed Muslims as well as ‘‘pagan’’ spirit mediums have shunned the presence of the camera. (See Behrend 2013.) They have refused photography’s reduction of the world to a visible trace and the camera as an uncanny mode of representation. In the following, I will explore the negative relationship between spirits, spirit mediums, and the technical medium of photography in Africa, in particular on the East African coast. In contrast to the rather simple suggestion that ‘‘the photograph and the ghost are never far apart’’ (Smith and Vokes 2008, 283),4 I will question and complicate the status of the essentialized positive relationship between photography and spirits as a global established fact. As I attempt to show, in many parts of Africa, spirit mediums have created ritual spaces in which a visual discourse is vocalized that expresses its alterity to the camera’s modernity in terms of the impossibility of representing spirits and their auratic power in photographs. Patricia Spyer, in two fascinating articles (2001 and 2009) has explored the many interdictions on participating in, observing, describing, and photographing a ritual in Aru, Indonesia. She asks why the camera, as an uncanny mode of representation that inserts an elsewhere into the present,

204

Heike Behrend

was seen as problematic and analyzes the defensive performative logic of the spirit-medium’s ritual there, something that issues from the political and historical specificity of Aru’s ambiguous position in modernity. Because the ritual is set against the modernity of the surrounding (Malay) world, it is not destined for representation, reproduction, or serialization. The complicated play of absence and presence on which it turns make its celebration incompatible with photography. At issue is the irreducible foreignness of the Aru in a modern world as expressed in their ritual and their refusal of photography. In Aru, it is not only the camera that is shunned at rituals, but also the Malay language; the written signs of the national language such as books, notebooks, pencils, and paper; as well as wall hangings, calendars, film posters, and colored prints depicting religious (Catholic) scenes and clothes—all things associated with the outside Malay world. Thus, according to Spyer, the refusal of photography is only one of many prohibitions that form part of the more general objectification of the Malay under the rubric of the prohibited. In contrast to Aru, however, along the East African coast (and in other parts of Africa), in rituals of spirit possession, spirits have established alliances with modern media, such as the Scriptures, the telephone, television, and video, and have adopted them into their rituals. Yet despite embracing modern media, they, too, refuse photography. Here, an interpretation that is based on the play of oppositional enframings of an inside against an outside, of tradition against modernity, falls short of explaining why photography, in particular, is refused by spirits during se´ances, while the spirits and the spirit mediums alike proliferate in representations in the medium of videotape. In fact, along the coast, photographic visibility is both contested and employed in various ways, thereby transcending the simple divide between appropriation and refusal. Via intermediation, as we will see, the adoption of video technologies permit photography and its associations with death, theft, and sorcery to be taken up by and rerepresented within a medium better suited to the representations of the way in which spirit possession operates in these African performances. The defensive performative logic and negative relation to photography on the coast are issues connected not only with the political and historical specificity of spirit mediums’ ambiguous position in relation to Islam and the postcolonial state, but also, as I intend to show, with characteristics of the photographic medium itself—freezing, fixation, and serialization— that seem to endanger the auratic power of spirits. What I seek to trace in the following are some of the more enduring structural relations between

205

Spaces of Refusal

the human body as a medium of spirits and photography at a specific time (perhaps a longue dure´e) in an otherwise open-ended history of media— spirit mediums and technical media alike—including the way in which photography and the reasons for its refusal themselves become part of the ways in which the work of spirits and spirit mediums is represented in other media. While the adoption and creative use of visual media technologies by local actors in the context of globalization processes have been extensively explored, both in this volume and in the literature of anthropology and other disciplines, I will focus on opposite processes—the processes of disentanglement, refusal, withdrawal from global media, the creation of new opacities and secrecies, and the use of other new media to represent and employ these resistances to photography, topics that have been largely ignored by scholars. I understand this contribution as an attempt to complement the existing theories of mediation by focusing on the discontinuous and disruptive role of media technologies in processes of globalizing religions.

Spirit Mediums along the East African Coast When doing ethnographic research on photographic practices along the East African coast from 1993 to 2011, I realized that in spite of photography’s increasing globalization and insertion into everyday life, it was not only reformed Muslims who problematized the taking of photographic portraits of, in particular, women, by referring to the ‘‘Islamic interdiction of images.’’ (See Behrend 2013.) Some ‘‘traditional’’ spirit mediums also strictly interdicted the presence of the camera during spirit-possession rituals. Along the East African coast, the existence of spirit mediums, preceded the introduction of the medium of photography, just as it did the introduction of textiles and the Scriptures, and it supplied important metaphors and imaginings for the interpretation and uses of the new medium and vice versa. In many parts of Africa, and also in other parts of the world (see, for example, Wright 2007), photographs, like ancestors, were named ‘‘shadows,’’ ‘‘shades.’’ and ‘‘spirits’’ (Wendl 1998), and the subtleties of this understanding were brought out by considering photography in relation to practices of memorializing the past in general and the dead in particular.

206

Heike Behrend

Long before the introduction of photography and painting, spirit mediums provided ‘‘living images’’ in an otherwise aniconic cultural milieu. In fact, the marginalization or absence of figurative images coincided with complex imaginative practices that centered on embodiment and the production of ‘‘inner’’ images that, in the context of spirit possession rituals, were externalized in order to be shared with others (Kramer 2001). Because ‘‘official’’ Islam regards the cult of ancestors in itself as problematic, in the spirit-possession cults, it was not ancestors who were embodied in their rituals, but various categories of foreigners who at different times had reached the Swahili coast. Along the coast, spirits not only represented the epitome of transformation, but in a dialectical process, also constructed images of their own through opposition. The characteristics emphasized in spirit portrayals are those that differentiate the group in question most dramatically from the self-images of the Muslim elite (Giles 1999, 148). The personalities and biographies of spirits often revealed the non-Islamic, the African, strangers, and especially, the slave— those who had remained silent, unarticulated, or at least devalued in the dominant discourse (ibid., 147). In spirit-possession rituals, spirits thus expressed specific aspects of the coast’s history of colonization, embodying the Other within the very colonization that outwardly assimilated them. Embodied spirits were not so much representations of individual people, but rather expressed more abstract concepts. The spirits of Arabs, for example, denoted ‘‘Arabness,’’ the generalized power by virtue of which Arabs were thought to be what they were. As living portraits of strangers, the visualization of spirits in rituals thus followed the conventions of abstraction found also in sculptures as portraits in other parts of Africa. As ‘‘images of passiones’’ (Kramer [1987] 1993), the embodied spirits would intensely communicate with cult members and audiences and exchange views or partake of food and drink. Of all image-producing techniques, the practice of spirit possession may be seen as the one that through embodiment allows not only the spiritual return of someone absent, but also his or her maximum of animation and presence, involving all the senses. Yet the ritual can create the physical presence of spirits only for a short time before the paradoxes of simultaneous absence and presence and of real unreality dissolve again in favor of an absence (Castel 1981, 238). Along the coast—Islamized since the eighth century—spirit-possession cults were more or less accepted as part of mila, usually translated as ‘‘traditional custom,’’ referring to ‘‘local knowledge and rituals, associated

Spaces of Refusal

207

with non-Islamic or pre-Islamic practices’’ (Middleton 1992, 162). However, since the 1980s, more radical reformed Muslims have defined spirit cults as a residue of primitive and animist belief and a false path to God that has to be barred. Spirit mediums are seen as indulging in secrecy and—often enough—in fraud and deception. As a monotheistic religion that claims to have not only an almighty God, but also the only true God, Islam—like Christianity—in the long run has the moral obligation to destroy or convert ‘‘pagan’’ spirit-possession cults. Yet the Quran admits the existence of spirits. As opposed to angels, which originated from light, spirits—majini or djinns—are mischievous creatures that could be good or evil and were created from fire. The good ones, of course, have accepted Islam, while the evil ones are pagan and speak ‘‘tribal’’ languages (Middleton 1992, 172). While Islam’s universal claim aims at the disappearance of ‘‘paganism,’’ pagan spirit mediums are continually borrowing aspects from the dominant religion that tries to marginalize them in order to strengthen their own powers and to generate aspects of subversion. (See Masquelier 2001.) Islamic practices and symbolism have strongly been incorporated into spirit-possession cults. In fact, of special interest is the widespread assimilation into the cults of the very force that was dedicated to their destruction. Many spirit mediums have converted to Islam, although they continue to be possessed by ‘‘pagan’’ spirits. In addition, a class of socalled Kiarabu spirits that generally hold a dominant position in the spirit hierarchy are pious Muslims and greatly concerned with ritual purity. Kiarabu recite the Quran, are fond of rosewater and perfume, and frequently ask for kombe, a medicinal drink made from the ink of Quranic texts (Giles 1999, 151), thus aligning themselves with the Scriptures by also incorporating it as ‘‘medicine’’ and protection. During rituals, they sometimes make use of the Quran as a prop and simulate reading Quranic verses, but do not write in the state of possession.5 They stand in strong opposition to pagan spirits, who exhibit all the characteristics of the Other of Islam, being wild, uncivilized, without Scripture, dirty, and smelly. In their long history, some spirit mediums—maybe to counter their ascribed primitivity—have built up hybrid alliances with technical media such as the Scriptures, TV, and video—but they have refused alliances with photography. While ‘‘pagan’’ spirit mediums under hegemonic Islam have been put under great pressure, strongly marginalized, and associated with the primitive Other of Islam, they nevertheless have joined forces with Islam in their iconoclastic attitude toward images. Whereas most Christians

208

Heike Behrend

aligned themselves to the logic of modern visual mass media without much reservation, some pious Muslims and most ‘‘pagan’’ spirit mediums intensely oppose photography. Through the iconoclastic gesture that spirit mediums share with (reformed) Muslims, they deny the historical distance that separates them from the monotheistic religion of Islam. By sharing the negative attitude toward the camera, spirit mediums position themselves on the same ‘‘stage’’ of religious evolution as Islam (or Christianity) and claim their ‘‘traditional’’ religion to be their equivalent. Indeed, the rejection of figurative representations is a more widespread feature and not limited to monotheistic religions. As Jack Goody has suggested, the aniconic trend is but one facet of the more general process of visualizing and representing (Goody 1997, 56).

Photophobic Spirits Along the East African coast, different categories of spirit mediums have given different reasons for rejecting photography. For example, alien, ‘‘primitive,’’ and ‘‘pagan’’ Maasai spirits have shunned the camera because they were said to be afraid of Western technology. The local pervasive mythologization of the refusal to be photographed appears as tantamount to the ideological rejection of modernity. By rejecting the camera because they fear Western technology, the Maasai, on the one hand, affirm their own primitivity while, on the other hand, establishing photography’s place in modernity (Spyer 2001, 307). In contrast, kibuki spirits in Zanzibar town have objected to cameras because the cameras are black.6 While the Maasai spirits form the primitive Other of Islam and are known to be wild, uncivilized, and also physically and ritually polluting, the kibuki spirits are strikingly non-African and non-Islamic; they show characteristics such as a fondness for imported alcohol that account for their conceptualization as Christians, and, more specifically, as French Catholic priests (Giles 1999, 158). The priests were also called ‘‘White Fathers,’’ and their association with the color white may perhaps account for their strange opposition to black cameras in the spirit world.7 An alternative explanation would be that—in contrast to colors such as red, green, and blue, which are associated with life—the (non)colors black and white, as well as all the variations and gradations of shades between them, are related to death and mourning. The association between the color black, death, and mourning could thus also be one of the reasons for the refusal of black cameras.

Spaces of Refusal

209

In addition, I was told by a few ‘‘pagan’’ spirit mediums that it is, above all, the flash of the camera that is disturbing to the spirits and causes them to interdict photography. This was also confirmed by Linda Giles in a personal communication. There are other regions of Africa where photography in certain ritual spaces is not allowed. In Western Uganda, spirit mediums have appropriated modern media such as writing and the telephone, but they object to the presence of the camera, explaining to me that ‘‘spirits do not like the camera.’’ Some mediums in Western Uganda also suggested—as along the Kenyan coast—that the flash of the camera would strongly disturb the spirits. Spirits did not allow themselves to be photographed because spirits and their mediums are working ‘‘at night,’’ hidden and in secrecy, as a former spirit medium who had converted to Catholicism informed me. The camera’s flash was thus seen as a violent intrusion into the theatre of concealment, the opacities and secrecies of spirit-possession rituals through which spirits attempt to assert their power. In northern Nigeria, in Kano, I was told stories by Bori priests and adepts of unsuccessful attempts to photograph spirits—in spite of the interdiction. I was told that after the development of the film, the negatives showed no trace of the spirits; everything else in the picture showed up, but not the spirits. Here, spirits claimed the power to elude the cameras. In addition, I was told of a camera that exploded when directed toward the spirits. And one priest of the Bori cult8 knew of a European photographer who had violated the interdiction and taken some pictures. He fell sick shortly afterward and eventually died. These stories give evidence of the power of spirits to resist being represented by a photographic camera. They also demonstrate the spirits’ superior power over technical media by effacing the picture or destroying those who transgress the interdiction. In the Brazilian Candomble´ religion, as well, embodied gods relentlessly have burned the pictures that photographers hoped would preserve at least a trace of their fleeting passage during a trance (De Aquino 2002, 234). However, according to a recent study (Van den Port 2006), it seems that nowadays, in Brazil, too, in spite of Candomble´’s constant emphasis on secrecy and media shyness, the taboos on the use of new media have been questioned and negotiated, some members using video and photography. Yet interestingly, in their videos, like Christian (Protestant) painters in Europe after the Reformation (Koerner 2002), they attempt to show, above all, absences, silences, deadened spaces, and shadows, revealing only screens that veil and conceal spiritual powers.

210

Heike Behrend

While in Thailand, photographs of spirit possession seem to have also been at least implicitly forbidden for nearly a century, today, as Rosalind Morris has shown, all spirit mediums have photographs of themselves, and some of them even possess a video library of their possession performances (Morris 2000, 183). Thus, there was and still is a strange opposition between spirits and the medium of photography in several parts of the world that, however, recently dissolved in Brazilian Candomble´ and Thailand, whereas in Africa, it (still?) holds.

Spirit Photography in the West In contrast to Africa, in the West, the medium of photography entered into a strong alliance with science during the second half of the nineteenth century, not only to document the visible world, but also to open up new fields of visibility. Eadweard J. Muybridge and Etienne-Jules Marey, for example, succeeded in making visible the motion and movements of humans and animals in photographic images in a radical new way, while Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen made it possible to see the interior of (living) human bodies, the bones and the skeleton, stripped of skin and flesh. Moreover, invisible spirits, phantoms, thoughts, and auras of all sorts started to make their appearance on the surface of photographs— ironically, at a moment in history that Walter Benjamin had declared to result in the destruction of aura through the new media of technical reproduction. Photography thus mediated between the visible and the invisible world, shifted the boundaries between the two, and defined the categories of the visible and the invisible in a new way. It contributed not only substantially to a modern, positivistic ‘‘culture of the real,’’ but also created new fictions, specters, and phantoms. Spirit photography evolved in the context of a ‘‘renaissance of spirits’’ during the second half of the nineteenth century that is named Spiritualism. Spiritualism became a global movement that started in the United States with the famous Fox Sisters in 1848 and from there spread to Europe, Australia, and Japan (Gettings 1978, 26). There was an older tradition, as well, going back to the visionary Emanuel Swedenborg (1688– 1772), the scorned Geisterseher of the Enlightenment German philosopher Immanuel Kant. In Swedenborg’s rationalized Christian cosmology, invisible spirits—the spirits of Africans being the purest and therefore closest to God—imprinted themselves in the visible world as figures of light. In

Spaces of Refusal

211

se´ances, the spirits of the dead appeared in the form of illuminated pictures (Krauss 1998, 28). In a way, Swedenborg anticipated photography— particularly spirit photography—by describing spirits who, without a technical apparatus, simply presented themselves as images of light. But these images of light could not be fixed and stored on a material support. They vanished at the end of the se´ance. Spiritualism was an alternative religion that attempted to transcend the divide between religion and science by building up an elaborate interface in which new technical media and scientific experiments in laboratories were used in trying to prove the existence of spirits. (This positioning of Spiritualism marks a difference from African spirit-possession cults, which have existed outside the realm of science, but not of modern technical media.) As Harvey has suggested, a double process took place: the simultaneous spiritualization of science and the scientification of Spiritualism. In fact, many Spiritualists considered electricity or magnetism to be the physical basis of the phenomena, and mediums were said to store up energy to produce materializations, like a battery (Harvey 2007, 70). Against the opposition and rivalry among the established churches, Spiritualists emphasized universal religious values and invited even those with an antipathy toward Spiritualism to join their cosmic and cosmopolitan community (ibid., 63). The se´ance was considered a religious activity and included prayers and blessings (including blessings of the camera and the unexposed plates) (ibid., 54). Unlike the established churches, Spiritualism insisted on the possibility of direct contact and communication with the dead (Matheson 2006, 37). This work of keeping the dead close may have affected people’s relationship with spirits themselves, because now, the dangerous and evil aspects of spirits of the deceased were played down and reformulated as rather innocent and ‘‘harmless’’—if not a bit boring— when compared, for example, with African spirits. (See Deger 2008, 307.) In fact, as various scholars have suggested, sin, evil spirits, demons, and the idea of damnation and perdition played only a marginal role in the cosmology of Spiritualists. Following Swedenborg, spirits were conceptualized as striving to advance and aspire toward greater enlightenment and moral perfection. Yet besides the spirits of the dead—the majority of spirits—alien spirits made their appearance during se´ances and on photographs, as well, for example, Pocahontas, the spirit child of a Native American, Vashti, the daughter of a Native American chief, or the spirit of chief Wapanaw,9 also a Native American, Saadi, the spirit of a poet of Persia, and Yolande, the spirit of a beautiful Arab girl (Owen 1989, 57, 101, 223).

212

Heike Behrend

With Spiritualism, a Western cosmology (re)evolved in which there was not only a flux between the visible and the invisible world, but things themselves also proved to be modes of motion, rather than stable identities (Wright 2008, 370). Through the power of spirits—including the Holy Spirit—tables, chairs, forks, and knives would lose their earthly gravity, elevate, and fly through the salon during se´ances, and tied-up beautiful young women, acting as mediums, fixed with ropes to their chairs, miraculously were freed and moved through space. The stability of persons and things was collapsed in various ways by spirits. The late German artist Sigmar Polke, as well as Anna and Bernhard Blume, for example, have connected to this tradition in photographs. The Blumes produced staged photographs of ‘‘home sweet home’’ in which vases experience ecstasy, towers of cups sway, people fly around, and arrangements of furniture collapse. In photographs, they created a world in flux, a world that was even ‘‘smashed up.’’ Their black-and-white photographs did not involve montage or digital manipulation; instead, the two artists really flew, crashed, and swirled—they were, however, not assisted by spirits, but by ropes, safety nets, and mattresses. Spiritualism was also a mass movement, including members of all social classes. Even Queen Victoria used to communicate with her late son, Albert, through her medium, John Brown. Se´ances took place in bourgeois parlors, in scientists’ laboratories, in Christian and proletarian homes, on fairgrounds, and in the entertainment business. The first spirit photographs are said to have been made by the Boston photographer William H. Mumler in 1861. After David Brewster had published a handbook in 1856 in which photographic tricks were described that produced uncanny appearances (Diekmann 2003, 153), Mumler, when developing a self-portrait in the darkroom, discovered a second, mysterious shape that he recognized as his cousin, who had died some twelve years earlier (Gettings 1978, 23). After this first spiritual appearance, others followed, among them no less than the spirit of Abraham Lincoln himself. The mass media publicized Mumler’s discovery. The interest in spirit photography was so strong that Mumler opened a new studio in New York, specializing in spirit photography. However, he was accused of fraud the same year, but was acquitted on grounds of insufficient evidence and because various important persons testified in his favor.

Spirit ‘‘Extras’’ and the Predicaments of Spirits’ Visualizations In Spiritualist photographs, the spirit not only appeared embodied in the person of a spirit medium, as is the case in Africa, but also appeared, in a

Spaces of Refusal

213

more or less foggy shape, in some additional, material supplement during the se´ance—as a cloud or light, for example—and this manifestation also appears in the photograph. In the terminology of Spiritualists, spirits ‘‘materialized’’ in the photograph. It is as if in the West, spirits had to produce this material supplement because the body of the personal medium alone was not seen as satisfactory as evidence of spiritual mediation and presence. ‘‘Materialization’’ signified the ability of the spirit to become a picture, to gain a visible shape made out of light, vapor, smoke, or ectoplasm. According to Spiritualist theory, these ‘‘materializations,’’ also called ‘‘extras,’’ emerged through the concentration or thickening of matter made visible and stored in the photograph. Often, the ‘‘extra’’ emanating from the spirit adapted the convention of the aureole or aura and thus connected to earlier representations of apparitions in the form of fireballs, lights, mist, and clouds (Harvey 2007, 10). It is, in fact, central for my argument that the spirit not only appeared in a personal medium, as in Africa, but also in the form of some additional, material ‘‘extra’’ during the se´ance and in the photograph. Se´ances normally took place in darkness, a condition that seemed to invite fraud and trickery, at least in the perspective of some critical observers. Before the introduction of photography, spirits had manifested themselves in the dark mainly through sound or touch. Because spirits seemed to thrive best in darkness, the strong light that was necessary for taking photographs was thought possibly to hinder their materialization. Yet surprisingly, neither the explosions of magnesium light nor—a bit later—the photographic flash greatly disturbed the production of ‘‘extras.’’ To expose themselves and the spirits that they invoked not only to scientists’ critical gaze, but also to bright light and enlightenment, spirit mediums positioned themselves clearly within and not outside of modernity. In fact, mediums and ‘‘extras’’ acted in highly photographic ways (Harvey 2007, 125). They mimicked the photographic process by becoming a (still) picture, either in the space of the se´ance or in the photographer’s darkroom. With the camera entering the se´ance, two types of spirit photographs emerged. The first recorded the presence of a spirit—as a transparent figure of light, for example—who was not perceived by the participants of the se´ance and who appeared afterward in the photograph developed in photographer’s darkroom, as was the case with Mumler. The other— which historically appeared later—captured the materialization of a spirit during the se´ance, visible to all participants (Fischer 2004, 172). Practitioners thus conducted their business in both the photographer’s darkroom and the dark room of the se´ance. When the camera intruded into

214

Heike Behrend

the se´ance and brought to light what before had not been seen, yet another dark room, called the ‘‘spirit cabinet,’’ was established. In this cabinet, the medium—often tied up—rested (unseen by the sitters) while the materialized spirit appeared during the se´ance. In May 1873, eight pictures of the fully ‘‘materialized’’ spirit Kati King were produced in England. Kati King was the daughter or wife of John King, the well-known spirit of a buccaneer called Sir Henry Owen Morgan (Owen 1989, 45). While her medium, Florence Cook, remained in bonds in the spirit cabinet, the ‘‘materialized’’ and rather solid spirit Katie King appeared among the participants of the se´ance, commenting on the preparations for taking the photographs and inspecting the camera. She not only posed, but also held the lamp to light her face better (Fischer 2004, 172). During one se´ance, however, a man among the sitters assailed her and claimed that she had a very human material consistency. The spirit put up a ferocious defense, so that those present had to come to the man’s aid, while the spirit was forced to retreat into the spirit cabinet. Although after five minutes, the cabinet was opened and the medium was found bound as she had been at the beginning of the se´ance (Fischer 2004, 183 n. 13), Florence Cook was suspected of fraud—of not having stayed in her cabinet, but instead of having played the role of Katie King. It was the possible resemblance (or even identity) of medium and materialized spirit that became a predicament and also occupied the minds of various scientists. In fact, there was always the danger that the photograph captured the image of the medium, rather than the materialization of the spirit. In addition, many observers were surprised to find that the materializations on the photographs, the ‘‘extras,’’ when not having succeeded in becoming fully materialized, closely resembled profane materials such as wool, fur, cotton, or paper or were often derived from already existing reproductions of portraits, engravings, paintings, and even other photographs. This, however, was explained by the suggestion that these ‘‘extras’’ were some sort of residual images that were (re)produced by the special powers of spirits and/or by those of the medium and/or the sitters. Debated was the question if ‘‘extras’’ were the spirit or the representation of spirits and if ‘‘extras’’ were produced by spirits or by the psyche/hallucination/imagination of the medium and/or the sitters, thereby shifting the terminology closer to psychology. But when spirit photographs did not provide sufficient interpretative clues, friendly spirit voices sometimes assisted the authentification of spiritual presence (Harvey 2007, 85) or gave hints about the process of production.

Spaces of Refusal

215

Spirit photographs, at least from the perspective of believers, were part of the tradition of images not made by human hands. As Harvey (2007, 26) has suggested, Spiritualism returned photography to its origin in occult science. Photography had grown out of the union of science and the supernatural in alchemy, and with spirits and their ‘‘materializations’’ or ‘‘extras’’ made visible and being fixed on glass or paper, this union was confirmed and reactualized. Although the ‘‘extra’’ of a spirit was made visible through a technical apparatus, the spirit as such remained invisible. The spirit itself stayed withdrawn from visibility and remained a ‘‘black box,’’ hidden, while the photographic plate gave something to see that had not shown itself before. Visualization is a process of creating new fictions, new images of something that remains hidden. The site of the invisible cannot be penetrated (Geimer 2006). ‘‘Extras’’ were thus not so much evidence that disincarnate spirits were successfully photographed, but evidence that images of the deceased were obtained by or through spiritual agency (Harvey 2007, 97). During se´ances, agency was distributed and circulated in highly complex ways between the spirit, the camera, the photographer, the personal medium, and the other participants. Sometimes the camera acted as a medium that captured or trapped the spirit. At other times, as in the case of Mumler, the photographer as a medium attracted the spirit. Most often, however, a personal medium, usually a young, attractive woman, would call on the spirit to materialize. During the se´ance, she would describe the spirit’s translucent body, which could not be seen by the ordinary participants, but would later appear on the photograph. Thus, apparatus and personal medium formed a hybrid alliance and confirmed each other. Or as in the case of the spirit Katie King, her medium, Florence Cook, would fully materialize the spirit to be seen and photographed during the se´ance while resting (at least in theory) in the cabinet. And in the case of the English photographer John Beattie, spirits themselves provided the images that manifested themselves on the photographs, while the camera and the personal medium served only as channels of transfer. Beattie produced photographs of spirits in series. In doing so, he added an element of movement to the spirits in photographs.10 Against the naturalization of death, spirit photography not only visualized spirits of the dead in a new way and thereby gave evidence of their ‘‘reality.’’ Spirit photographs also made possible the coexistence of living and dead, sharing the same medium, the same photographic space. Against this background, spirit photography appears as a vast enterprise of the

216

Heike Behrend

West to dissolve the hardened and strict boundaries between the living and the dead and between this world and the other.11

Spirits, Visibility, and Motion In contrast to such efforts in the West to dissolve the boundaries between the world of spirits and the world of human beings, spirits in Africa are already deeply embedded in everyday life and constantly move from one world into the other. In fact, in present-day Africa and in the context of a spiritual/religious revival on a global scale, most people feel no need to prove the existence of spirits. In Africa, it is the sheer excitement, motion, and art of transformation that are practiced in spirit-possession rituals. In the public space of the spirit theater, the secrets of the force and powers of metamorphosis are revealed and at the same time concealed. The practice of spirit possession and the spirit theater form the high art of dis/avowal, the art of recognizing a charged absence and denying it at the same time, presencing a world in flux and confusing the boundaries that separate visible and invisible realms (Taussig 1999, 68, 155). In many parts of Africa, spirits are associated with movement and motion. This is expressed in various African languages in which spirits are conceptualized as ‘‘wind’’ or ‘‘breeze,’’ in Kiswahili, pepo, or as something set in motion. Because spirits are present without presence and embodied spirits are not visible themselves, but only in their mediums, they can gain visibility primarily in the effects of their special powers. They show their presence, for example, in the breaking of taboos and/or in extraordinary ritual movements and dance. In dance and motion, they prove a strange surplus of energy, an excess of the body. In their vital aliveness, high intensity, speed, drive, and excess, spirits give evidence of their powers (Thompson 1974). In their animated materiality, they evoke the wonder of a secret source of transformative power generating astonishing public effects (Murphy 1998, 564). Because spirits in Africa are, above all, movement and motion, rather than light, as in Europe, this quality is something that the medium of photography, which freezes whatever it captures, is unable to apprehend and express. Not only does the photographic act force the person photographed to freeze, but also the photograph as a still image is drained of movement, the commonly accepted sign of life. When spirits are arrested and frozen in a photograph, they are trapped and rendered bereft of

217

Spaces of Refusal

motion, liveliness, and transformational capacities. Photographs are not able to mediate the excess of movement, heat, and motion of spirits; instead, they deface the extraordinary energy that spirits produce and instead bring back the presence of death. In fact, in various parts of Africa, motionlessness and stillness are associated with death. Masks, for example, have to be concealed when they are ‘‘dead’’—not moved and danced in a procession or ritual—so that they cannot be seen by ordinary people; they are allowed to be seen only when they are ‘‘alive,’’ full of energy and in motion. Because a dead body is a motionless body, a stiffened and still body that has turned into a picture, death and photography appear as similar procedures (Blanchot 2007). Both death and photography arrest and deface movement, motion, and ‘‘life.’’ This is why a corpse and a photographic image of a dead person are often treated as metonyms, as mutual substitutes of each other (Sykora 2010, 24). Thus, it is not only the freezing and arresting quality of photography, but also the association of immovableness and motionlessness with death—photography as mortification—that pose a threat to the representation of spirit mediums. Moreover, as one spirit medium explained, the photograph of a spirit would show only the immobile body of the spirit medium which no longer gives evidence of the spirit’s presence. Because spirits in Africa do not produce ‘‘materializations’’ and ‘‘extras,’’ as Western spirit mediums of the nineteenth century did, a photograph would show only the medium, a very human man or woman. Media function best when they succeed in making invisible the technical apparatus that produces mediation. But when spirits are photographed, the opposite is the case: because the spiritual power is not made visible in ‘‘extras,’’ it is the ‘‘apparatus’’ that is pictured—the human body of the medium that mediates spiritual power. Indeed, the disjuncture between the medium and the spirit is accentuated in the photograph, for one does not see the spirit, but the medium (Morris 2002). That is why, in contrast to the West, where spirits were eager to appear on photographs (as emanations of light) to prove their existence in a ‘‘scientific’’ way, in Africa, photography was understood as a medium capable of unmasking and exposing spirits in a dangerous way. Photographs threatened the spirits’ auratic value (ibid.).

Spirit Mediums, Aura, and Flash In many religions, light has served as a transcendent mediator par excellence, representing and presencing gods, prophets, spirits, and saints. Yet

218

Heike Behrend

(too much) light may also be experienced as intrusive and violent, as revealing what should be concealed and secret. As mentioned before, various spirit mediums on the East African coast (and in Western Uganda) told me that spirits would refuse the presence of the camera because the flash was disturbing them.12 The same argument was put forward by a Bori spirit medium in Kano, in northern Nigeria, during a conversation in 2003. Although in the pantheon of Bori spirits there is the spirit of lightning, which wears a red or black robe and bonnet and carries a hatchet adorned with bells symbolizing the spirit’s control over lightning and thunder (Alida and Masquelier 2010, 16), the camera’s flash seems to fall into a category of light that cannot so easily be integrated into the spirits’ aesthetics of illumination. In fact, the spirit of lightning gives evidence of its appearance not through the production of effects of light, but through its snakelike zigzag movements (sic) on the ground. Whereas in the context of Western Spiritualism and spirit photography, spirit mediums exposed themselves to the flash of the camera to reveal the truth of spirits,13 many spirit mediums in Africa prefer to perform their rituals in the realms of darkness. Interdicting the photographic flash during rituals of spirit possession could thus be seen as a protective gesture against a violent, discontinuous, and intrusive form of light that does not allow secrets and opacities. By shunning the flash, spirit mediums participate in the construction of darkness as the literal trope of modernity’s Other. While in certain settings, the refusal to be photographed has provided the evidence of the ‘‘primitivity’’ of the objects of photography, in other settings, the interdiction has bolstered the production of what Benjamin called aura, ‘‘aura as a unique appearance of a distance, however close it may be’’ (Benjamin [1938] 1969, 222). By bringing (potential) enlightenment, the substantial powers of the photographic flash allegorize modernity’s aporia, revealing while at the same time blinding, giving something to see while at the same time withdrawing it. Whereas during weddings on the East African coast (see Behrend 2013) the flashes of the cameras are welcomed, contributing to a tapestry of light that envelops the bride as part of an aesthetic of shininess (Picton 1995), in the case of spirit-possession rituals, the photographic flash seems to endanger the aura of spirits. ‘‘Primitive’’ aura, if I may say so, attempts to escape photographic visuality.

Visualizing Spirits in Videos However, despite the refusal of photography by spirit mediums and the spirits that possess them, since the end of the 1980s, African spirits have

Spaces of Refusal

219

been visualized in another (post)modern medium: in locally produced fictional videos. Spirits proliferate not only in Ghanaian and Nigerian videos, but also in recently produced videos from Tanzania and Kenya. Unlike photography, video is able to produce moving images and to visualize movement and motion.14 In Africa, videomakers have made use of that medium to represent spirits in motion—dancing, flying, and spending their energy in many creative ways (Meyer 2006b; Behrend 2007). In fact, in the context of the Christian and Muslim revival, videos became the medium of the Christian or Muslim god and have made visual his message. In videos, spirits have regained their powers to move, dance, and fly and thereby denote their radical disjuncture from the world of ordinary appearances. In particular, in special effects, the transformational powers of spirits could also be visualized by morphing, for example, from human to animal shapes (and back). And in videos, spirits have been strongly connected to an aesthetic of light that goes back to the ‘‘theology of light’’ in Christian as well as Muslim tradition. In videos, spirits have displayed their luminosity and auras by transforming into spectacular balls of light, fire, beams, flashes, sparkles, and rays to express their spiritual presence and power, whether of satanic or heavenly origin. In these videos, spirits also appear as hybrid phantoms, sometimes taking the shape of Western pinups or of European witches with long wild hair, grotesque faces with scarifications, the marks of pagan primitiveness, and (nearly) naked bodies decorated with paint or animal skins and bones. Since many of these videos have been financed by Christian churches or movements (and in northern Nigeria by Muslims), spirits are demonized and made to appear as the primitive Other of Christianity (and Islam). In these video narratives, Christian pastors or priests, as heroes in terrible struggles of good against evil, often finally destroy the evil spirits or devils, as they are called. The exposure and final defeat of evil (spirits) is essential for the happy ending of many videos. However, although the African videos visualize (satanic) spirits in a new way and reveal their intrigues, betrayals, and power, the videos do not give access to the spirits. It is not possible to communicate with spirits shown in a video, as is done in rituals of spirit possession. Video technology therefore also epitomizes the failure to communicate with the spirits (Morris 2002). Yet interestingly, the representation of spirits in locally produced feature videos has not destroyed the magic and power of (evil) spirits. Instead, the new visualizations of spiritual powers have contributed to a new merging of magic and mediality/mediumship. Because visualization is itself a mystery-mongering process whose main source of mystery

220

Heike Behrend

is its being taken for granted, it provides the raw material for the new magic and new secrets that are so brilliantly exploited in the videos. (See Taussig 1999, 190.) As Birgit Meyer (2003) has argued, these videos have contributed to a paradoxical recognition of the reality and power of occult forces in everyday experience. Thus, not only in Europe, but also in Africa, technology does not demystify the machinations of modernity, but instead becomes a new source of magic.

Intermediation: Reanimating Photography and the ‘‘Stop of Death’’ Thus, video seems to be able to translate spiritual powers—motion and movement—and their mediation in a more adequate way, something that photography fails to do. While insisting on embodiment, African spirit mediums who refuse photography oppose being doubled in photographic representations that reduce them only to a visual trace and that freeze and deaden their powers expressed in an excess of movement and motion. But the intermediation of photography in and by video offers the possibility of technologizing spirit possession in new ways. In various videos produced in Ghana or Nigeria, for example, photographs are introduced as representations of absent persons and take on important functions in the videos’ narratives. Through this form of intermediation, a striking stillness intrudes into the flow of images, the photograph freezing the video into the ‘‘stop of death’’ and taking the aesthetics of cinema back to photography. The frozen frame restores to moving images the heavy presence of passing time, absence, and of mortality (Mulvey 2006, 32, 66). The video film seems to suspend itself, creating another distance and another time. Yet interestingly, in some videos, such as, for example, Hakuri, made in Kano, northern Nigeria (1999),15 the still photograph of a woman is ‘‘reanimated.’’ Through special effects, the frozen image is turned into a moving image, and the depicted woman is resurrected from death and brought back to life. This sequence could be seen as a cinematic reflection on the two media: photography and film (video). It reflects on the different temporalities attached to film and photography, which no longer are simply a matter of movement and stillness, as well as on those of the single image as opposed to the filmstrip, the instant rather than the continuum (Mulvey 2006, 13). And in doing so, it reflects the special relationship between photography and death when first the freeze frame brings the presence of death back to the moving images, only to be reanimated to life.

‘‘Look with Your Own Eyes!’’: Visualizations of Spirit Mediums and Their Viewing Techniques in Tanzanian Video Films Claudia Bo¨hme

From the beginning of my fieldwork on the Tanzanian video film industry, I was fascinated by the portrayal of the mganga, a figure that features in most movies. Between 2006 and 2009, while I was participating in several video film productions, talking to actors and real waganga, I came to learn more about the mganga’s role in real life, as well as in fictional representations (Figure 13). On the night of a full moon, September 26, 2006, at about 8:00 p.m., the White Elephant film team is on the way to shoot a scene of their new horror movie, Chite Ukae (Return home, 2007). It will be a mganga scene, a scene in which a traditional healer and spirit medium, mganga (plural, waganga), has the main role. Among the film crew are the director and cameraman Mussa Banzi, his assistant, Robert John, alias Robi, the microphone holder, Madenge, and the two main actresses, Rehema and Bi Zuena. Walking deep into Magomeni Mburahati, a quarter of Dar es Salaam, we reach the location, a slumlike construction of iron sheets between two houses, the home of a family of four. The front court of the hut is used for the set, while the family stays inside. Because they don’t have electricity, the head of the household proposes to ask the neighbors to lend us some, and Madenge and Robi go over to ask. The power cable is led through the neighbors’ window and connected with the cable of the spotlight. Several mganga paraphernalia, such

221

222

Claudia Bo¨hme

Figure 13. Shooting a mganga scene for the film Popobawa (2009). as calabash pots, a mirror, a frond, cowrie shells, and a pot with bundles of bark are arranged on the floor. A red sheet, two little pockets, a cowrie chain, and a wooden Massai sculpture are attached to the back wall. The wooden pole of the house is wrapped in linen, and colored sheets are attached in front of the entrance. Bi Zuena puts on a black-and-red dress and a head scarf, and Robi paints a white line around her eyes and a vertical line through her face with Wite-Out. When Robi has completed the makeup, Banzi says that she looks like a witch, and Madenge adds that one could think she is a real mganga. Everybody breaks out in laughter, because she actually is.1

What surprised me was that there seemed to be a connection between the technical medium of video film and the mganga as a spirit medium. Many of the directors and actors I got to know were related to waganga in their respective families or were even waganga themselves. Not only was there a connection between filmmakers and waganga, but I observed that spirit possession was even practiced by some of the artists when they sometimes got possessed during artistic sessions or shootings. The Swahili term mganga, for a doctor, traditional healer, or diviner, is derived from uganga (healing practice) and can be further described with

‘‘Look with Your Own Eyes!’’

223

each healer’s specialization, for example as a mganga wa (tiba) asili (traditional [healing] methods), wa jadi (ancestry) or wa kienyeji (local).2 According to the waganga I talked to during my fieldwork, a mganga’s specialization today as an herbalist, diviner, spiritualist, or witch hunter is not strictly differentiated, but is an individual specialization in a combination of different working areas. The profession, as explained to me by waganga from the Zaramo at the coast near Dar es Salaam, traditionally is inherited and begins by the spirit calling for his seat, kiti. This results in a state of sickness or mental problems, which will be overcome only if the neophyte accepts the spirit. Through a ritual of initiation, tambiko, and the handing over of the mkoba (basket) that contains the mganga’s necessary tools, the initiation is completed. The act of being possessed is referred to as kupandisha (to let climb up), which describes the spirit rising into the head. (See Bruchhausen 2009, 178; Caplan 1997, 190; Giles 1987, 246.) Waganga have always been an important element in the narratives of Tanzanian popular culture. They are portrayed in Swahili literature, newspaper serials, comics, popular paintings, music, television, and film. Their role in these narratives is double, representing local traditions that should be preserved while at the same time ridiculing these customs by their often very comical performances. This can be seen as a reflection of the changing attitudes of those in power, who have dealt both ways with traditional medicine throughout the history of Tanzania. As Linda L. Giles has stressed in her work on Swahili society, spirit possession can be read as a ‘‘cultural text’’ or an ideal medium for its creation: ‘‘It creates powerful metaphorical dramas that are enacted in human form but attributed to the spirit world. The human actors are not actors in the conventional sense but a stage—the human body becomes a vehicle for the spirits to communicate with and interact with the human world’’ (Giles 1999, 143). But how can one describe the process of its visualization when spirit possession and the trance medium of the mganga become subject to dramas ‘‘in the conventional sense,’’ such as in video films produced for a mass audience? Trying to answer this question, I discuss the relation between the mganga as a spirit medium and the video film medium in Tanzania. Outlining the evolution of the Tanzanian video film industry, I will trace its connection to the mganga profession and will examine both the effects this visualization can have on the profession itself and, conversely, the functional role of the mganga’s staging in video film narratives.3 That staging is in many senses a remediation. The term ‘‘remediation’’ is defined by Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin as a process of borrowing from other media, but also as a reinterpretation or reforming of reality

224

Claudia Bo¨hme

(Bolter and Grusin 1999). The remediation of the role played by waganga, who themselves already are mediators between the spirit world and the human world in the everyday realities experienced by many Tanzanians, has occurred in the representational conventions of waganga promoted by both the Western colonizers of Tanzania and its African postcolonial modernizers. However, it has been remediated yet again in Tanzanian video films in ways that both perpetuate and modify existing conventions and representations. This remediation appears most clearly in the visualization of what is called ‘‘the TV asilia,’’ that is of the contemporary mganga’s clairvoyance technique, which, again, already is itself a form of remediation, generated by the presence of the newer media of television. The fictional mganga’s use of the clairvoyance technique of the TV asilia for visualizing spirits and future or past events creates what Heike Behrend has called a ‘‘new regime of visibility’’ (Behrend 2005b, 9).4 This new regime of visibility, in turn, has influenced public perception of real-life waganga and of the role that new media might play in traditional practices of clairvoyance. But reciprocally, it also has affected conventional images of the mganga. It has helped correct the negative image of the ‘‘witch doctor’’ established during the periods of colonization and modernization, whose currency remains at odds with the status of the mganga in everyday life. However, also is transforming public expectations about what spirit mediums can provide to their clients and altering the relationship between client and mganga. It is thus that local tradition and mythology are mediated and renewed within the context of global media circulation.

The Video Revolution and the Mganga In 1985, the former state-run Tanzania Film Company (TFC) produced a fiction film in cooperation with the American filmmaker Ron Mulvihill called Arusi ya Mariamu (The marriage of Mariamu; Mulvihill, 1985), a film about a young woman’s fears and experiences with a mganga. Filmmaking at that time was restricted to a closed circle of TFC staff, members of the Universityof Dar es Salaam and the Bagamoyo College of Arts, but the arrival of the medium of video film in the late 1990s democratized film production in Tanzania and has made it possible for many artists to make their own movies and to circulate alternative discourses. In the first video films with the two famous comedians King Majuto (Amri Athman) and Mzee Small (Said Ngamba), the latter had been trained by TFC practitioners, who started recording their comedy skits on video, the mganga

‘‘Look with Your Own Eyes!’’

225

and his viewing techniques appeared on the screen. Unlike its precursor, theatrical live performance, with its restricted possibilities of presentation, the video film for the first time made it possible to visualize not only the mganga, but also his or her encounters with the spiritual world. Directors and editors use several different visualization techniques to make the mganga’s powers visible, including jump cuts, morphing, and special effects that allow the insertion of flashes, lightning, fire, and smoke. When access to digital cameras and software became easier, Tanzanian filmmakers also could use computer graphics to create a mode of representation that David Jay Bolter Richard and Grusin call ‘‘hypermediacy,’’ a style that incorporates or refers to other media and makes the viewer aware of the medium (Bolter and Grusin 1999, 152, 272). While hypermediacy in the form of animated cartoon sequences was used in early Hollywood cinema to visualize dreams, mental disorders, or insanity (ibid., 152), Tanzanian filmmakers most often use the hypermediacy created by computer graphics to envision supernatural encounters. The same is true for the mganga techniques of ‘‘seeing’’ and the clairvoyance of future, present, or past events. Just as in European films set in medieval times, which show druids or witches using crystal balls or scrying pools, in Tanzanian movies, the mganga is shown with local forms of viewing techniques. Common media used to visualize this ‘‘seeing’’ in these films include ‘‘seeing’’ in a pot (with or without water), in a handmade sieve, or in a mirror held in the mganga’s hand or in a headband the client has to wear.5 All these divination techniques can be categorized as ‘‘African TV,’’ a pan-African phenomenon and a term that aptly captures the way in which remediation already has been at work in the ways in which the relationship between the practices of traditional spirit mediums and the new media has been conceptualized. After the introduction of new media like such as television in Africa, traditional seeing techniques were not seen as inferior to them, but on the contrary, as comparable and as already available equivalents (Behrend 2003b, 294–95). In Tanzania, the concept of African TV is called TV asilia or runinga6 za kiasili, ‘‘genuine’’ or ‘‘original’’ TV.7

Remediating Magic: ‘‘Original TV’’ in Kibuyu Traditionally, waganga used different devices, such as a calabash with water, to see. In Kibuyu (1999),8 one of the early video films, the filmmakers used the particular characteristics of the video film medium to portray the this traditional mganga viewing technique as ‘‘original TV.’’

226

Claudia Bo¨hme

The film begins with the pregnant Salima and her sister consulting a mganga because Salima is not feeling well. The mganga becomes possessed and calls Kibuyu, a female spirit, who, the mganga finds out, has taken possession of Salima. The mganga’s entrance into a trance is visualized by an insert of a black-and-white film clip of an atomic bomb explosion, which symbolizes the arrival of the spirit. The spirit, the mganga explains, wants to give birth to a mganga named Kibuyu using the body of Salima. If Salima rejects the spirit’s desire, she and her child will die, but she accepts it, and a daughter named Kibuyu is born. Salima’s turning to traditional practices leads to disputes with her husband, Malik, who represents the modern man in the movie. Modernity is symbolized by modern technology such as the computer, and Malik stresses in several scenes that he has sent his wife to do a computer course in order to further her education. In another scene, he wonders if he can enter his daughter’s name, into the school computer. Kibuyu grows up, and because she is chosen to be a mganga, she has to take part in a tambiko, an initiation ritual. When her father rejects her participation in the ritual, her mother falls ill, and together with her sister, they visit a second mganga. This mganga uses ‘‘original TV’’ in the form of cowrie shells and a mirror in which the mother is able to see that she will die if Kibuyu doesn’t take part in the ritual. Just as the mganga predicted, Salima dies, and Kibuyu has to be raised by her aunt. Soon afterward, her dead mother appears to Kibuyu and her aunt, making a bunch of bananas disappear and then reappear, realized by the editors through a simple stop trick. Kibuyu develops extraordinary skills and begins to behave strangely until she finally participates in the tambiko and receives the kibuyu (calabash) from the spirit. The movie ends with Kibuyu and her new husband at the beach, where he promises her that he doesn’t have any problem with her connection to the spirit world. Despite the fact that the first mganga in Kibuyu is played by the wellknown comedian King Majuto, the film’s presentation of the waganga is not at all comical. Instead, the film seems to promote a return to traditional belief systems, in contrast to conventional representations of waganga in popular theatre plays during the Ujamaa period, the 1960s through the 1980s, when the official policy of Tanzania was President Julius Nyerere’s program of African socialist modernization and development. The fact that the movie was sponsored by the National Social Security Fund (NSSF), the Tanzanian social security system established in 1997, not only shows that the early pioneers of Tanzanian video filmmaking had to look for external sponsors to finance their films, but illustrates

‘‘Look with Your Own Eyes!’’

227

the changing cultural politics in the post-Ujamaa era. The NSSF made sure that the organization and its services were mentioned in the movie. In one scene, the dead sister’s spirit even tries to convince her brother to join the NSSF. As the example of Kibuyu shows, the arrival of the new medium of video film functioned not only as an arena for the representation and negotiation of culture, tradition, and modernity, but also as a tool for the exploitation of the visual for the representation of what formerly had been invisible— the magical. Not only is the narrative figure of the mganga transferred to the new medium but, through editing, his viewing techniques are also remediated. The visualization of magic powers of waganga and spirits gives the viewer, as Birgit Meyer has shown in the Christian context of Ghanaian movies, ‘‘a super vision’’—it makes it possible to peep behind the surface of mere appearances, beyond the merely ‘‘physical,’’ directly into ‘‘the spiritual’’ (Meyer 2005, 21). When spirit possession and the trance medium of the mganga become subject to dramas ‘‘in the conventional sense’’ in this way, the representations have a reflexive effect on the practices and self-representations of the waganga themselves. As Meyer has also shown, religious representations and media have a circular relationship: ‘‘They mobilize belief by making use of techniques of make believe’’ (Meyer 2005, 4). Thus, not only are waganga the subject of popular culture, they are influenced by their own representations in it and make use of popular media to promote their services. In recent years, one can observe a multiplication, diversification, and popularization of the mganga profession in Tanzania, especially in urban areas such as Dar es Salaam. To be a mganga has become a business like any other. Creatively designed notice boards advertising the services of waganga are displayed on nearly every street corner. (See Green and Mesaki 2005.) This is also true for the growing number of advertisements of waganga services in local newspapers and tabloids. While these ‘‘city waganga’’ have a reputation for being charlatans, cheating people with their fake professionalism, the ‘‘true’’ waganga are associated with the coastal regions near Dar es Salaam, such as Bagamoyo. Real specialists, who are said to come from the northwestern regions of Tanzania, such as Sumbawanga or Mwanza (famous for its witchcraft reputation) and the southern parts, such as Songea (Green and Mesaki 2005, 373–74), advertise their short-term visits to Dar es Salaam. Some even promote themselves as coming from Nigeria, which became famous for its expertise in occult matters through the introduction of Nigerian witchcraft movies into the country.9

228

Claudia Bo¨hme

Waganga as Film Producers Because the new medium of video film can be used as a tool for the exploitation of the visual for the representation of what formerly had been invisible, waganga produce video films in order to use the new medium to represent and promote their work. As Dr. Maneno Tamba, the chairman of the association of waganga in Tanzania, told me: Art and traditional customs like healing are connected on several levels. Firstly, art is part of traditional customs, and within the arts, traditional customs are represented. While arts have a healing effect in educating society, healing itself represents a very eclectic form of education. A healer receives knowledge through his body and his thoughts, to discover the problem of his patient. The healer as well as the actor of a film act through their body and sentiments and that’s why they [film art and healing] are so closely related.10

The close relation between the performing arts and practicing waganga, as stated by Dr. Tamba, can be also seen in the fact that he was also the leader of the Tamba Arts Group, one of the first video film groups in Tanzania. After his initiation into the mganga profession, following in the footsteps of his father and grandfather, he opened his own consulting office near a bus stop in Magomeni Mikumi, a popular quarter of Dar es Salaam, offering walk-in treatments. He also uses the weekly serial ‘‘Magic Moment with Dr. Tamba’’ in the Sani newspaper and in programs on radio stations such as Times FM and Mlimani Park Radio to educate readers and listeners on spirits and spirit-related diseases. Inspired by Nigerian movies introduced into the country at the turn of the century, which are famous for their representation of witchcraft and occult practices, Dr. Tamba had the idea to make his own movies and to start a film-production company. The performance of the witch doctor or juju man in the Nigerian films functioned as a role model for his first productions.11 But in Nigerian movies with a Christian context, the witch doctors, as well as the witches, are presented as part of a traditional evil that must be destroyed and are defeated by priests at the end of the movies. Dr. Tamba, as a Muslim producer of video films and as a practicing mganga, wanted to show the mganga as the victor in the conflict between good and evil. Together with his younger brother, Sultan Tamba, and the director he befriended, Mussa Banzi,12 he produced their first movie, Nsyuka, about an evil ancestor spirit. When the film was completed in 2003,

‘‘Look with Your Own Eyes!’’

229

Dr. Tamba introduced Mussa Banzi to one of his clients, Farhad Mohammed Shivji, owner of Wananchi Video Production (a company then dealing only with the distribution of local music) to ask if he would buy and distribute the movie. Shivji agreed, and the first Tanzanian horror movie was released. In the first mganga sequence in Nsyuka, the mganga suggests that his female client have sexual intercourse with him to calm Nsyuka, the evil spirit, who is preventing her from getting pregnant. Despite the fact that the whole scene appears to be a comedy skit, signaled by the exaggerated reaction of the heroine and the portrayal of the mganga as a sex maniac, Dr. Tamba told me that an honest mganga would never have sex with his patient and that he wanted to warn people about such unprofessionalism.13 The heroine, who is not willing to sleep with the mganga, then consults a female mganga, who, thanks to the visualizations made possible by special effects, is able to call her fiance´ and Nsyuka and bring the spirit into the body of her husband, instead. Waganga, whether film producers or not, have a very ambivalent opinion about such representations of them in the movies. If the plot involves the patient being helped by a mganga, and if the mganga was represented in a positive manner, it is of course a promotion for their work. On the other hand, a ridiculing or horrifying representation would certainly lead to a bad reputation, which is especially the case with Tanzanian or Nigerian Christian movies in which the mganga is presented in a very negative manner, as Dr. Tamba stated. One of the female waganga to whom I talked also raised the issue that the all too overt and detailed presentation of witchcraft practices could cause the viewers try practicing sorcery themselves.14 ‘‘You can’t value a whole profession by a single representation in a movie,’’ argued Dr. Manyaunyau15 (‘‘Dr. Cats’’), whom I got to know in October 2009, when I asked him about his opinion of the mganga’s performance in films. At the time, Dr. Manyaunyau had become the most popular mganga in Tanzania, especially through different media, famous for slaughtering cats and drinking their blood before going witch hunting (Figure 14). Dr. Manyaunyau is another example of the connections between the conventional dramatic arts, spirit mediums, and the new media: before he became a professional mganga, he joined a group of actors, the Kaole Sanaa Group, in 1999 and acted in several TV series on ITV (Independent Television) in Dar es Salaam. But when he rejected his ancestors’ call to be a mganga, his career took a downward turn. When he finally returned to his home village and accepted the initiation ritual, he

230

Claudia Bo¨hme

Figure 14. Signboard of Dr. Manyaunyau: ‘‘I am fetching bad things for you out of houses and streets, whip of witches. He treats: potency, hookworms, heart, diabetes, scrotal hernia, bad omen.’’ was more successful in life. He became a very modern mganga, counseling and treating people via modern media such as mobile phones and e-mail all around the world. His live performances as a witch-hunting mganga became more and more popular in the neighborhoods of Dar es Salaam. The events soon sparked the interest of television producers, and in September 2009, the private television network EATV (East African Television) arranged a serialized reality show with Dr. Manyaunyau. In one of these shows, he was first introduced to the audience on stage before dressing up like a mganga, drinking cat blood, and jumping into a dirty river in search of a hidden charm. ‘‘Because the spirits like performing arts as long as I don’t neglect my duties,’’16 he stated that in the future he would like to be a video film producer.

Mise-en-Sce`ne of a Mganga: Waganga as Actors Because waganga produce video films in order to use the new medium for the promotion and representation of their work, and because the way in

‘‘Look with Your Own Eyes!’’

231

which waganga are represented in these films affects their reputation and their careers, even when real waganga portray waganga in these films, the characters that they play in the videos have to conform to popular images of the mganga and of mganga behavior, even if such images differ from what they, in their actual practice and in ‘‘real life,’’ actually are like and from what they do. The director Mussa Banzi told me: We usually get our ideas for a film from daily life experience in our society. Of course, everybody knows how waganga work, and you don’t have to be a script writer to write a mganga scene. But if I write a story and it comes to the mganga scene, I sometimes don’t know exactly how he works. So I will send somebody to investigate the mganga’s work and then continue the writing. . . . Normally we don’t create them exactly the way they [waganga] are, but we add some entertaining or artistic elements so that the viewer will enjoy it or laugh at it even more.17

‘‘What everybody knows’’ about waganga, however, and what makes them entertaining in these videos, often involves cultural images based on the negative characterization of mganga during the periods of colonialism and modernizing African nationalism in Tanzania. Theatrical performance and play have always been part of ritual trance practices, and there is only a very permeable borderline between possession rituals and acting (Leiris 1977, 158–84). The interconnection between possession and theatre becomes even more crucial if the possession is part of a video film performance. In them, the interconnection between the representations of mganga and conventional cultural images of traditional practitioners of magic and possession becomes clear. Colonial rulers and missionaries represented spiritual trance techniques during the era of Tanzanian colonialism as an afflictive form of possession that was to be exorcized, and this negative characterization was rearticulated as a popular cultural image (Bruchhausen 2009, 175). Many waganga were harassed, prosecuted, and killed, because their traditional authority was a threat to the power of the German colonial rulers. And during British rule after World War I, the Witchcraft Ordinance of 1922 prohibited waganga from doing any witchcraft-related work. From the 1930s on, traditional medicine was tolerated and coexisted with modern hospitals (Erdtsieck 2003, 38–40), but by then, the negative image of the mganga was established in popular culture. The subsequent influence of Ghanaian and Nigerian movies in which the witch doctor is represented through a Pentecostal lens as the servant of the devil reinforced such images and perpetuated their currency. (See McCall 2002; Meyer 2005, 170–71; Wendl 2004, 274–78.)

232

Claudia Bo¨hme

Such images have a direct effect on the production of video films in which waganga are represented. When Mussa Banzi and his crew finally started with the rehearsal and the shooting of the mganga scene for Chite Ukae referred to in the introduction to this chapter, the director Banzi was not satisfied with Zuena’s acting. Her voice was much too low, he said, and the whole performance was flat. Each time he stopped the scene by shouting ‘‘Cut!’’ and played it himself the way he imagined it to be. While acting out the role of the mganga, he spoke with a grumbling voice and broke out in evil laughter. He complained that she, as a real mganga, should know how a mganga behaves, and he praised the earlier performance of Chili, one of his comedy actors, while recounting the scene and singing one of his mganga songs. 18 Banzi’s expectation of mganga Zuena’s performance as a comical figure is rooted in popular theatre performances of colonial and socialist times, in which the mganga was often a subject of ridicule. Under modernizing colonial rule, traditional healers were the epitomes of backward-oriented practices and condemned as such. After independence in 1961, Ujamaa politics envisaged the introduction of a modern health care system, and trained health workers were sent to the villages.19 At the same time, practicing waganga’s work was restricted, and people were taught to give up these traditions (Erdtsieck 2003, 41). Thus, the model or imagination of the mganga was taken over from earlier stage performances. As Siri Lange reports: After having watched the shooting, I asked Sikumbili, who had impersonated the medicine man, if he had ever seen a mganga at work. ‘‘Yes’’ he said. ‘‘I have seen King Majuto’’ (another actor who performed a mganga many times). Since King Majuto is a comedian, it was in fact a caricature of a mganga that came to act as model for Sikumbili’s serious and ‘‘realistic’’ performance. Tanza Theatre made no attempt whatsoever to be funny and were never encouraged by the director to do so. (Lange 2002, 163)

As a result of the continued currency of these negative images, when the trance medium of the mganga becomes a subject of dramas ‘‘in the conventional sense’’ in the new medium of video films, there, as in popular theatre, the mganga is often represented in a comical way, an exaggerated acting out that employs rolling eyes, a grumbling loud voice, repeated speech, and diabolical laughter while becoming possessed. Likewise, the clients have to look extremely frightened and confused, patiently waiting for his advice while he only babbles. Another comical effect is added when

‘‘Look with Your Own Eyes!’’

233

he whispers the always overinflated price for his services, grabs the money and hides it away in a special bowl. The connection between such representations of the mganga and the conventions of popular comedy can also be seen in the fact that usually comedy actors such as Chili are chosen to play the mganga.20 While watching movies involving mganga scenes with people in Dar es Salaam, I observed audiences embracing this satirical performance with broad laughter. The same imperative to reduce representations of characters to negative colonial cultural images can be observed in other genres of Tanzanian popular culture. In his study of Tanzanian comics katuni za miujiza (wonder comics) Jigal Beez has shown that the mganga is portrayed as an ugly and evil witch doctor cutting out vital organs, which he uses for his business (Beez 2004, 157–62). And according to Uta Reuster-Jahn, in newspaper serials, stories written by Christian writers portray the mganga as a cheater. In popular novels, the mganga is a specialist in love charms, which can also be found in literature on advice on sexuality and sexual relations. (See Reuster-Jahn 2008 and 2009.) This appropriation of the figure of the mganga by colonial and modernizing discourses can occur because in traditional story telling, the mganga as a narrative figure is not that easily found. Uta Reuster-Jahn, who has been working on oral literature in southeastern Tanzania, states that the mganga figure does not normally appear in oral narratives, where healing practices are not described, nor does the term for mganga appear in the respective languages.21 On the other hand, ancestor spirits and their agents, including spiritual beings such as zimwi, an ogre, or jitu, a giant and giant snakes, are a very popular topic (Reuster-Jahn 1999).

Waganga Roles in Videos and in Everyday Life In tension with such conventional cultural images is the importance of waganga in the everyday life of Tanzanian citizens. Real waganga play real roles in the daily lives of Tanzanians, and although their appearance in videos frequently is determined by established cultural expectations about the character of the mganga, their appearance occurs there because art must imitate life. As Mussa Banzi told me: It depends on what the story needs, but if the story needs a mganga, it will get a mganga. I have already produced a lot of movies which needed a mganga because it could not be a doctor and it was compulsory that a

234

Claudia Bo¨hme

mganga appeared. In our African daily lives there is nobody who doesn’t know a mganga. With some diseases you go to the doctor and with others you go to the mganga. In a movie we want to show the real peoples’ lives and we don’t cheat people. If somebody goes to a mganga we will show that. Every day people go to waganga instead of going to the hospital.22

According to a study by the government-installed Council of Traditional Healers from 2005, 70 percent of the Tanzanian population is regularly treated with traditional medicine.23 Where there is little trust in ‘‘Western’’ medical services, as in the countryside, it is very common to consult a mganga. Even in the cities, if Western medicine fails, seeking the advice of a mganga is a valuable alternative, especially for mental diseases, which are often believed to be related to sorcery or spirit possession. But since waganga also have to substitute for the services of local dispensaries and hospitals, which are difficult to reach, the combination of ‘‘traditional’’ and ‘‘modern’’ healing techniques has become common. In the representations of waganga in the movies, however, the reasons for consulting healers are reduced simply to issues of witchcraft, and the waganga are presented not as healers, but as witches. In his description of the Ghanaian video film industry, Tobias Wendl describes a ‘‘juju mansubgenre’’ of Ghanaian and Nigerian movies and identifies three main reasons why the characters contact a juju man: love affairs, infertility, and money (Wendl 2004, 276–79). This is also true for the characters in Tanzanian movies. ‘‘Love affairs’’ are often related to women who want to get rid of a rival or to make desired men love them. A Tanzanian example is the movie Kihongwe (Banzi 2005) in which the mganga creates a zombie double of the heroine’s lover to make him compliant. Infertility is also a very common reason to consult a mganga in the films. As mentioned, in the movie Nsyuka the heroine is asked to have sexual intercourse with the mganga to become pregnant. Wendl has shown that in the plot lines of such movies, these children often turn out to be ‘‘demon-children’’ (ibid., 276). Tanzanian protagonists also consult a mganga to get rich through ‘‘occult economies’’ (Comaroff and Comaroff 1999). Usually, a relative has to be killed and sacrificed to the spirits so that they will reward one with wealth and success, but neither body parts for the production of money-making medicine nor money-producing wombs (see Wendl 2004, 277), which are frequently mentioned in Nigerian movies, can be found, as in Tanzanian films.24 In the sample of about three hundred Tanzanian movies I have seen, the tension between the stereotypical, negative representation of waganga

‘‘Look with Your Own Eyes!’’

235

in video films and their actual role in everyday life is dramatized when the idea of consulting a mganga is suggested, mostly following the advice of a friend or relative of the main character. This comes at the highest point of suspense, and the mere mention of the idea leads to horrific reactions by those concerned and to heavy disputes. The decision to call on a mganga is presented as the last resort, because it represents a return to traditional methods and witchcraft. Often, it becomes a real possibility only after the unsuccessful consultation of a medical doctor. Thus, the figure of the mganga is represented as the antagonist of modernity, represented by the figure of the modern doctor in a hospital, a healer who is either chosen in place of the mganga or chosen in opposition to the mganga. In the second part of the movie Fungu la Kukosa (The reason to fail; Banzi, 2008), for example, the medical doctor in the hospital even advises the patient’s husband to consult a mganga, which leads to the following dispute: Doctor: Shemeji Rita nahisi ugonjwa wake unahusiana na maswala ya kishirikina. Mr. Ben: Unasema nini Doctor? Doctor: Mambo ya kienyeji. Mr. Ben: Unataka kuniambia amerogwa? Doctor: Aa mi sijasema amerogwa. Wapo wenye utaaluma hizo ninachosema mimi shemeji anapaswa atibiwe na waganga wa jadi na siyo sisi mara tena. Mr. Ben: Unaniambia ukweli? Doctor: Kabisa Mr.Ben. Ukiendelea kung’ang’ania hospitali unapoteza pesa na muda wako bila mafanikio.

I think sister (-in-law) Rita’s sickness has to do with witchcraft. What are you saying Doctor? Traditional business. You want to tell me that she has been bewitched? No, I’m not saying that she has been bewitched. There are people with that expertise, what I’m saying is that she should be treated by waganga and not by us again. Are you telling me the truth? Totally Mr. Ben If you go on clinging to the hospital, you will lose your money and your time without any success.

As the dialogue shows, the doctor’s and the mganga’s responsibilities seem to be clearly divided. While a medical doctor treats ‘‘natural’’ diseases, the mganga’s job is everything that has to do with the spiritual realm.25 The roles and representations of the fictional and the real mganga thus differ dramatically, even if played by real waganga, as in Chite Ukae. In addition to the influence of colonial and postcolonial modernizing discourses, this difference also reflects the religious background of the makers

236

Claudia Bo¨hme

of Tanzanian video films. As the antagonist of the doctor in these stories, in dealing with the supernatural, the mganga’s narrative role is equivalent to that of the priest, the spiritual expert in Christian movies. However, the first Tanzanian video filmmakers were Muslims, and they used a mganga as a spiritual expert out of respect for the sensibility of Tanzanian Muslims and Islam’s aniconism, they wanted to avoid the representation of Islamic practices in their movies, and because they wanted their films to be religiously neutral, they did not want to represent Christian practices, either.26 Thus, Muslim filmmakers reframed the conventional, stereotypical figure of the West African witch doctor, and it is the figure of the mganga who fights evil, but not the same mganga to whom Tanzanians turn in their quotidian troubles.27

The Mganga’s Use of ‘‘New’’ Media: TV Asilia Although the video film medium represents waganga in these culturally inflected ways, video film technique allows the filmmakers to represent a mganga’s powers in a way that challenges and modifies the conventional cultural images of them. The fusion of older and newer media in the representation of visualization of the mganga’s viewing techniques in what is known as TV asilia, ‘‘original TV,’’ functions in this way. When the character and practices of mganga become subject to dramas ‘‘in the conventional sense’’ in the medium of video film, even as cultural conventions skew the representation of spirit mediums and their practices, the representation of the character and practices of the mganga in the new media reciprocally works to transform the cultural status of the spirit medium. One of the most popular examples of where the representation of TV asilia can be found is in the film Shumileta (1 and 2; Banzi 2005–6), about a female evil spirit haunting a human man. Shumileta, a hybrid of vampire and Mami Wata, a female water spirit,28 is sent to Earth from a world beyond the ocean by her parents to find a human husband. She chooses Mack, who is already married to Monte, and the young couple’s relationship is put to the test. Monte seeks advice from her mother, who recommends her to consult a mganga. Shortly afterward, Shumileta appears to Monte and warns her not to see the mganga, seduces Mack, and takes him with her. The next day, because Monte’s mother still insists on seeing a mganga, the mother and daughter go to see Mganga Ndele.

‘‘Look with Your Own Eyes!’’

237

The mganga’s office is a room with dark green cloth covering the walls and the mganga’s paraphernalia on the floor mat. A white rectangular sheet is attached to the back wall with the superscription ‘‘TV Asilia.’’ The camera zooms on the words ‘‘TV Asilia’’ before it takes the viewers into the room, where the mganga, wearing a white skirt and with his body decorated and heavily painted, is sitting in the corner of the room holding a white pigeon in his hands. After having introduced the screen on the wall as ‘‘our original TV, our origin,’’ he points the pigeon and his frond at the screen and, as if using a remote control, starts the screening (Figure 15). Monte and her mother look shocked and are overwhelmed by the mganga’s technical capabilities while following the film on the wall. In this ten-minute film, they and the viewers can see how years ago, Mack met Shumileta while on a boat trip to an island with his friends. After the screening on this ‘‘original TV,’’ Monte and her mother beg the mganga to help, and he promises to do his best, because ‘‘he is there to help and not to ruin.’’ But because Monte has ignored Shumileta’s warning not to consult a mganga, she is punished by being transformed into a white chicken, and Shumileta kidnaps Mack and takes him to the underwater world. In the second part of the movie, Monte’s mother returns to Mganga Ndele, who

Figure 15. TV asilia in Shumileta I.

238

Claudia Bo¨hme

shows her on the TV asilia what happened to her daughter and her sonin-law. The soundtrack for this scene is a repetitive melody of traditional marimba music. The mganga bursts into conventionally diabolical laughter as he is getting possessed and starts to introduce and comment upon the ‘‘TV Asilia’’ viewing apparatus to the mother and the viewer (Figure 16). Mganga: Ndiyo mama sitaki nikukope, sasa nitakuonyesha mwanao jinsi mambo yalivyotokea, unasikia? Mama: Ndiyo mimi shida yangu ni mwanangu tu. Mganga: Ha, ha, ha ninajua wewe shida yako ni mwanao, sasa mwanao utamwona kupitia TV asilia. Hahaha. Mama: Nitashukuru. (The mganga sings, picks up a winnow sieve and the cover of a pot, close-up mother’s face and of the smoking pot. The mother stands up to see better)

Figure 16. TV asilia in Shumileta II.

So mama, I don’t want to cheat you, I will show you your child and what happened to her. Are you listening? Yes, my problem is only to get my child. Ha, ha, ha, I know your problem is to get your child, now, your child, you will see her with the TV asilia. Ha, ha, ha. I’d be grateful.

‘‘Look with Your Own Eyes!’’

Mganga: Hahaha, sasa mama, kazi ndiyo hii ambayo imekuleta wewe-sasa tutaangalia na wewe utaangalia kwa macho yako mawili! Kupitia TV asilia! (The picture appears on the screen) si unaona? Mama: Ndiyo Mganga Ndele. Mganga: Hayo ndiyo ambayo yaliyotokea. Sasa utaangalia wenyewe kwa macho yako mawili, hahahaha! (Shumileta transforms Monte with a flash into a chicken) Mama: Mganga Ndele mwanangu amegeuzwa kuku, sasa utasaidiaje Mganga Ndele? (Shumileta flies with Mack into the sky) Mganga: Hahaha, Mama haya ndo yaliyotokea mwanao na wenzio, umeona? Mama: Nimeona Mganga Ndele. Mi ninachotaka mwanangu tu. Mganga: Hahaha unataka mwanao? Basi hayo haina matatizo! . . .

239 Ha, ha, ha, so mama, this is the work that has brought you here—now we will look, and you, you will look with your own eyes! Through TV asilia! Don’t you see? Yes I do, Mganga Ndele. This is what happened. So now you will look yourself with your own eyes, ha, ha, ha!

Mganga Ndele, my child has been transformed into a chicken. How can you help Mganga Ndele?

Ha, ha, ha, mother, that is what happened to your child and her friend, have you seen? I have seen, Mganga Ndele. What I want is only to get my child. Ha, ha, ha, you want your child? So that is no problem! . . .

The act of seeing with one’s own eyes, which is stressed in the dialogue of the scene, can be read as a self-reflexive commentary on the filmmaker’s power to make people see. The mother’s repetitive statement that she only wants to get back her child shows that she doesn’t seem to be interested in this spooky business, but the mganga forces her to look before he can solve the problem. The mother is then astonished to see what really happened and thus has more trust in the mganga’s work. But while a spirit medium normally forgets what he has seen while being possessed, the mganga comments on what has been shown on the TV asilia, even after the screening. The TV asilia thus makes visible what was invisible before and reveals the mganga’s visions. It transfers the secret trance practice of the mganga to a wider video viewing public, and in this way, the mganga gains authenticity. Hamis Bakari, who played Mganga Ndele, commented on the TV asilia scene as follows:

240

Claudia Bo¨hme

To tell the truth, I have just been given the script. For example when the mother comes to me, she has a problem, so you will see the reasons she is told and shown with the TV asilia. So she looks there and afterward we will insert something, because the things acted out are helped by the computer. So when I point to the TV asilia, the computer has filled the gap with TV asilia for what the mother has come to see. So finally she sees the TV asilia and what has happened.29

Bakari, in stressing ‘‘the gap’’ that can be ‘‘filled by the computer,’’ is referring to the work of the editor who enables the viewer to see the TV asilia. While without the TV asilia, it was the mganga’s role to inform and translate what he envisioned while being possessed, the TV asilia enables the client to see for himself or herself through the medium of film. When I asked practicing waganga in Dar es Salaam about the TV asilia, I received quite negative reactions. The effect of this ‘‘new regime of visibility’’ would lead only to conflict, they argued, because the victims could see who actually bewitched them.30 Because the TV asilia is now received as true, they worried, their clients may ask for a screening exactly the way they have seen it in the movies. While the new regime of visibility enabled by video film techniques thus restores to the popular image of the mganga the authenticity and cultural authority in spiritual affairs that they enjoy in everyday life, it also reconfigures the relations between the spirit medium and his or her clientele. It makes it possible—indeed, expected—to ‘‘look with your own eyes’’ at what previously was unseen and unseeable by anyone not a mganga.

Possession Play: On Cinema, Reenactment, and Trance in the Cologne Tribes Anja Dreschke

A kind of origin myth circulates among the Cologne Tribes, the Ko¨lner Sta¨mme, an association of around eighty clubs from Cologne, Germany, that reenact the historical lifeworlds of ‘‘foreign’’ cultures—notably, the Huns and Mongolians—as a leisure-time activity: In the mid-1950s, a local painter of cinema billboards went to the movies to watch Douglas Sirk’s historical drama Sign of the Pagan (1954) starring Jack Palance as Attila the Hun. He was so fascinated by the film that he became obsessed with the idea of impersonating the famous Hun ruler. Thus, he decided to dress up as Attila for Carnival—a festivity celebrated with masked parades and street parties that envelop the whole city of Cologne for almost a week. His appearance seems to have been quite impressive, since he soon attracted a band of followers who shared his enthusiasm. Improvising with bedside rugs, fur, and rivets, they passionately imitated the style of the costumes from Hollywood historical dramas to embody their screen idols (Figure 17). This led to the founding of the 1. Ko¨lner Hunnenhorde, the First Hun Horde of Cologne, as a Verein fu¨r Ethnologie, a society for anthropology, in 1958 (Figure 18).1 When I asked members of the Cologne Tribes during my field research2 how they initially came to their hobby, they often referred to this ‘‘origin myth’’ to describe their first encounter. Drawing on this

241

242

Anja Dreschke

Figure 17. German cinema guide to the film Sign of the Pagan, 1955.

Possession Play

243

Figure 18. Group portrait of the First Hun Horde of Cologne, ca. 1970. account, they specified how they were infected by the ‘‘Hun virus’’ while watching one of these movies. This ‘‘infection’’ caused a great excitement, which they often described as a state of mind that makes the entire body tingle with sensation. Overwhelmed by the cinematic images of alterity, they became anxious to impersonate these alien peoples from Hollywood. Jokingly, they characterized the way in which they were emotionally affected as a state of possession. Once you become one of the ‘‘Huns,’’ they told me, you also acquire the ‘‘Hunnic gaze,’’ which enables you to discern what is ‘‘Hunlike’’ and what is not—what fits with the hobby and what does not. I want to take up this narrative as a starting point to investigate the entanglement of film fascination and the mimetic desire to experience otherness bodily. I will take a closer look at the implications of practices involved in performative media appropriation and embodiment as a means to experience alterity, trying to answer the question of how they can be situated in the continuum of altered states of consciousness ranging from the excitement and immersion in film perception to ecstatic phenomena such as trances and possession. The significance of the clubs’ shamans in the social fabric of the Cologne Tribes and the way in which the spiritual practices of the mimicked cultures are adapted and transformed offer important insights in this regard.3 First, however, I will give a short introduction to the differentiated local network of the Cologne Tribes, a that

244

Anja Dreschke

encompasses such diverse areas as Carnival, amateur anthropology, hobbyism, historical reenactment, and alternative spirituality.4

From Carnival, to Reenactment, to Shamanism As their ‘‘origin myth’’ suggests, the Cologne Tribes initially emerged from local Carnival, and in this context, their tradition can be traced back to the nineteenth century, when the consumption of cultural otherness became an important feature of popular culture and entertainment (Wolter 2004).5 The experience of alterity in masquerades is a fundamental feature of carnival as festivity of inversion and—in addition to crossdressing—the display of ethnic, national, or cultural stereotypes can be considered one of the most popular practices of disguise. In case of the Cologne Tribes, it is mainly the ancient culture of nomadic people from Central Asia such as Huns, Tartars, and Mongols or various historically documented peoples such as the Romans, Vikings, or Celts that are emulated. Other societies are more loosely inspired by popular imaginations of the ‘‘exotic,’’ the ‘‘savage,’’ or the ‘‘primitive,’’ calling themselves ‘‘barbarians’’ or ‘‘cannibals.’’ Like the entire Rhine area, Cologne has a very distinctive carnival tradition that can be regarded as constitutive for the local identity (Klauser 2007). Thus, to shed one’s everyday role temporarily and ‘‘become someone else’’ is a habitual practice for the members of the Cologne Tribes that initially appeared in the context of the informal street carnival and still maintain the linkage to the local customs by participating in the numerous formally organized pageants during the carnival season. The local concept of alterity connected to the idea of ‘‘becoming’ someone else’’ includes different levels of transformation, ranging from just wearing funny accessories to mark the difference from quotidian life to the complete enactment of another role, along with a full disguise that transforms the wearer beyond all recognition. These processes of transformation are put in place by manifold rules and regulations, some of them retraceable to and/or performed by the Catholic Church. Following Victor Turner, carnival in general can be described as a liminal phenomenon that is structured by a number of temporary, spatial, social, and performative boundaries. As a festival of inversion and transgression, travesty and masquerade, it provides a prime example of the social interplay of structure and antistructure (Turner [1969] 1995). In case of the Cologne carnival, notions of the antistructure of the communitas can be associated with the street carnival, as opposed to the restrictive

Possession Play

245

structure of the established carnival societies that are responsible for the organization of the main events of the festivity, such as masked balls, other formal carnival events (Karnevalssitzungen), and most notably, the famous parade on Rose Monday.6 Whereas the participation in these activities is partly restricted to club members and/or regulated by high entry fees, the street carnival is open to anybody dressed up in a costume and willing to party. During the heyday of the carnival season between Fat Thursday (Weiberfastnacht) and Ash Wednesday, the whole city is turned upside down by masked people celebrating in the streets and in pubs. The hilarious and euphoric atmosphere is enhanced by performative practices such as singing, dancing, and schunkeln, rocking back and forth with linked arms in time to music, a collective movement that allows and enforces close physical contact with strangers. These practices are accompanied by catchy and repetitive songs with easily memorized lyrics that glorify the common experience of celebrating, as well as the local identity. Besides that, the (heavy) consumption of alcohol—which is an indispensable part of Carnival—establishes the collective mood. In a recent study, Yvonne Niekrenz (2011) has described the collective celebrations of the street carnival as an ‘‘ecstatic community’’ (Rauschhafte Vergemeinschaftung). Following Roger Caillois’ categorizations of play, these ecstatic communities of the street carnival combine mimicry, which encompasses playing with masks and disguises, with what he calls ‘‘ilinx,’’ which describes games in which the participants experience feelings of ecstasy (Caillois 1958). Both together lead to altered states of consciousness: ‘‘Beside the psychoactive substance alcohol, psychological techniques to generate ecstasy are also relevant. Music and dance (arousing dizziness) are the most prominent examples to manipulate perception. . . . Additionally, the costume, which can provoke an altered perception of the body, also simulates the ecstatic in carnival’’ (Niekrenz 2011, 232, my translation). Though the Cologne Tribes are related to the ecstatic communities of the carnival, most of them developed a further interest in the peoples they mimic, going far beyond carnivalesque amusement. They study the culture and history of those they seek to imitate in an attempt to reconstruct their social lives as ‘‘authentically’’ as possible. To achieve this, they spend most of their spare time crafting elaborate replicas of the attire, the weapons, and other artifacts by drawing on a broad variety of media representations, ranging from globally circulating popular media such as feature films, adventure novels, and television documentaries to expert literature such as ethnographies, travelogues, and historical resources. By this means, some club members have gained an impressively detailed knowledge and special

246

Anja Dreschke

manual or ritualistic skills. This holds particularly true for members of the societies that refer to the history and culture of the Mongols. They travel to Mongolia on a regular basis and have established a special relationship with Mongolian migrants living in Germany. These clubs describe themselves as ‘‘anthropological societies’’ and cooperate with museums and media institutions that contact them both as performers and as cultural experts, especially with regard to their practical knowledge. With their efforts to experience historical or indigenous lifeworlds corporeally, the Cologne Tribes resemble a more widespread phenomenon of vernacular culture that is generally referred to as ‘‘historical reenactment’’ or ‘‘living history.’’ In the second half of the twentieth century, the ‘‘incorporated realizations of past events’’ (Fischer-Lichte 2012, 13) in ‘‘themed environments’’ (Schlehe et al. 2010) has developed into a popular pastime that is performed in open-air museums, theme parks, at tourist sites, and among a growing number of hobbyists who search for bodily, sensory, and emotional access to historical events or eras.7 A common ground shared by the different practitioners of what is subsumed under the label ‘‘reenactment’’ is the ostentatious importance attached to an utmost ‘‘authentic’’ reconstruction of the material culture—the attire, weapons, and artifacts. Nevertheless, the main goal of the practices tends to be the experience of what it might actually have felt like to live in the past, rather than to provide a ‘‘professional’’ theatrical performance (Otto 2012, 234).8 The staging aims at the creation of an environment that generates the impression of ‘‘pastness’’ (Holtorf 2010) for the practitioners and that supports the quest for the ‘‘time warp,’’ or the ‘‘period rush’’ (Otto 2012, 240; Gordon Jones 2010, 226). These are the terms that participants use to characterize the transcendental experiences they seek during reenactments and that a Civil War reenactor describes as follows: ‘‘The best moments are when I forget that I’m a twentieth-century man. When I get lost in the perceptual cues and think for one magic moment that I’m actually a Civil War soldier in the war. That is the moment that all the work and cost and training is trivial and I have my reward’’ (Allred, cited in Otto 2012, 240). Although this longing for a magical experience has led to the assumption that reenactments are based on an animistic concept of the past (Roselt and Otto 2012), the obvious spiritual motivation for this kind of reenactment has gained almost no scholarly attention so far. An exception is the research on the ‘‘Indian hobbyists,’’ who emulate the historic culture of Native Americans9 and whose practices show significant similarities to those of the Cologne Tribes. Both explicitly draw

247

Possession Play

on ‘‘foreign’’ cultures and share a certain interest in adapting the spiritual practices of their examples. In the context of Indian hobbyism, these practices are subject to an ongoing controversy centered on questions of fake and illegitimate appropriation.10 In this discourse, nonindigenous practitioners are often pejoratively termed ‘‘plastic medicine men,’’ ‘‘shame-on-shamans,’’ or ‘‘culture vultures’’ and are accused of having a neocolonialist or Eurocentric attitude. (See Welch 2007, 97–99.) This can again be linked to a broader debate concerning practices subsumed under the terms ‘‘neoshamanism,’’ ‘‘urban shamanism,’’ or ‘‘modern Western shamanism.’’11 In case of the Cologne Tribes, these criticisms primarily apply to the adaptation of practices connected to Siberian and Mongolian shamanism and to a lesser extent to shamanistic rituals from other cultural backgrounds. These are appropriated by the clubs’ shamans, who appear to be well versed in knowledge of the respective spiritual practices and cosmologies. Based on their expert knowledge, they create new social and ritual practices in a complex process of ‘‘invention of tradition’’ (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983), although with them, it is not a question of re-creation but rather of the amalgamation of fragments derived from ‘‘other’’ cultures that are hybridized with their ‘‘own’’ culture and thus imbued with new meanings. To achieve this, they draw on a collection of practices from diverse cultural and religious backgrounds, ranging from local carnival traditions to shamanic trance techniques. It is not my intention to evaluate whether these rituals are ‘‘authentic’’ compared with the assumed ‘‘originals.’’ Instead, I consider authenticity a ‘‘discursive formation’’ (Bendix 1997): On the one hand, the question of authenticity concerns the politics and power relations connected to claims of cultural-heritage rights, while on the other, it obtains an emotional dimension that is expressed through the longing for reenchantment and spirituality. In this perspective, I am interested in the practices of bricolage that are employed to appropriate, produce, and display (anthropological) knowledge about shamanism and other aspects of the ‘‘imitated’’ cultures, as well as the local concept of ‘‘authenticity’’ that is the matter of ongoing debates and quarrels among the Cologne Tribes.12

Corporeal Appropriation of Media In his influential study of the interdependencies of mimesis and alterity in colonial encounters, Michael Taussig (1993) takes up Walter Benjamin’s

248

Anja Dreschke

term ‘‘mimetic faculty,’’ which he defines as ‘‘the nature that culture uses to create second nature, the faculty to copy, imitate, make models, explore difference, yield into and become Other’’ (Taussig 1993, xiii). Following Benjamin, he asserts a revival of the compulsion for mimesis ‘‘thanks to new social conditions and new techniques of reproduction (such as cinema and mass production of imagery)’’ (ibid., xix). As a matter of fact, the effect of mediatization is of crucial importance for the mimetic practices of Cologne Tribes, because they know the cultures they mimic not by immediate encounter, but in a mediated form through a multitude of globally circulating representations that are appropriated and transformed in diverse forms of self-staging, for example, in artifacts, websites, club magazines, photography, and home videos. This process of remediation (Bolter and Grusin 1999) is expanded by performative and corporeal practices of appropriation that are expressed through masquerades and costumes, as well as through role playing and rituals. Thus, the body becomes a medium through which visual, textual, or sonic representations are experienced and transferred into social and ritual practices. As such, the performative media appropriation practices of the Cologne Tribes can be conceived as reenactments in another perspective. According to Ulf Otto, it is a general feature of the practices of reenactments that they translate media examples into material spaces of experience and through the corporeal appropriation of these spaces of experience in turn aim at the creation of medial reproductions themselves. As events that are based on media as well as motivated through media, reenactments are not imagined to be elusive or ephemeral, but only ever come into existence through medial preparation, processing, and postprocessing. In reenactments pictures become alive and life is in turn captivated in pictures. (Otto 2012, 236, my translation)

Of particular significance for these practices of reenactment is the fascination with Hollywood historical dramas, which served as catalysts for the inception of the Cologne Tribes. To the societies, these films are not only resources for information and aesthetic ideals, but also encompass a sensory dimension that seems to elicit a certain mimetic desire. The concept of ‘‘aesthetic formations’’ developed by Birgit Meyer ‘‘to better account for the affective power of images, sounds, and texts over their beholders’’ (Meyer 2010, 6) provides a way to explore this aspect of the tribes’ efforts at mimesis. Alluding to Michel Maffesoli’s considerations of new forms of collectivization in so-called ‘‘post-traditional’’ societies, Meyer coined the term to characterize ‘‘new kinds of religious communities that evolve

249

Possession Play

around mass-mediated images and other cultural forms’’ (Meyer 2010, 10). Meyer suggests going beyond the concept of representation and instead focusing on the ‘‘aisthetic’’ qualities of media with regard to the material, bodily, and sensory dimensions of perception and experience, ‘‘the modes through which imaginations materialize and are experienced as real, rather than remaining at the level of interchangeable representations located in the mind. Imaginations, though articulated and formed through media and thus ‘produced,’ appear as situated beyond mediation exactly because they can be—literally—incorporated and embodied, thus invoking and perpetuating shared experiences, emotions, and affects’’ (ibid., 7). Her argument invokes Christopher Pinney’s idea of ‘‘corpothetics’’ (2004 and in this volume, ‘‘Media and Manifestation: The Aesthetics and Politics of Plenitude in Central India,’’) and also can be related to the concept of the ‘‘embodied spectatorship’’ (Marks 2000; see also Sobchack 1992, 2004, Shaviro 1993, and MacDougall 2005) in phenomenologically inspired media and film theory. The increasing interest in embodiment focuses not only on the body as an object of filmic representation, but on the corporeality of the cinematic situation, the somatic addressing and reception of film and the participation of the body in the experience of film. These theoretical approaches establish a basis for exploring the efforts that the Cologne Tribes make literally to embody the alterity they experienced in film perception.

Cine´-trance To investigate the entanglement of media appropriation and embodiment further, it is illuminating to take into account the assumption that the processes of immersion and identification connected with the perception of film correspond to states of dissociation and experiences of alterity in trances and possession. The effects that films might possibly have on the viewer, as well as the consequences of these effects, are persistent topoi in film theory and its popular disseminations. The potentially manipulative and suggestive nature of the medium was the cause of disquiet right from the inception of the medium, but so was its inherent ambiguity with regard to ‘‘reality.’’ On the one hand, the striking effect that film has as an objective reflection of reality seemed to affirm its evidence value, but on the other hand, its strongly fictitious and affective capacities have been used to visualize and invoke the imaginary, fantastic, magical, unconscious, or uncanny aspects of the human condition. Already in the initial days of the

250

Anja Dreschke

medium, film perception was conceived as a trancelike state of consciousness comparable to dreams and reveries. The possibility of hypnotic effects caused by the new medium was a widespread motif in early film history, as well as a subject matter of scientific discourse. (See Andriopoulos 2008.) This is no coincidence, but the outcome of sustained, mutual interferences between prevalent ideas of Spiritualism and esotericism developed in the nineteenth century and the invention and use of new technical media. (See Hahn and Schu¨ ttpelz 2009.) As Ute Holl (2002) has put it, film was invented as a technical trance medium in the psychological and neurophysiological laboratories of the nineteenth century, where human perception was examined and manipulated by the application of diverse technological contrivances and apparatuses. Out of these experimental settings, cinema developed as a ‘‘laboratory for technically induced feelings and sentiments that underlie all stories onscreen’’ (Holl 2002, 20, my translation). The ‘‘flickering, wavering, and glimmering of light and dark’’ of the film projection in the darkness of the theatre (ibid., 31) manipulate the sensory organs, simulating and stimulating involuntary brain functions. As Holl elaborates, from the very onset of the medium, its tranceinducing effects were optimized and refined, establishing the film tricks and means of design that sustain the trance state of the viewer: ‘‘slight slow motion, lighting effects, certain defamiliarizations through graininess and conciliations, focus shifting, employing different focal widths, etc.’’ (ibid., 27). By establishing these effects, the technical preconditions that trigger excitement and trance are concealed, and cinema as trance technique is developed in a cybernetic process occurring below the threshold of perception (ibid., 21). These feedback connections between perception and technical devices cause a transformation in the viewer, the effects of which last beyond the cinema experience itself. Another approach concerning the interferences of film and states of trance or possession was formulated by Jean Rouch. Drawing on the theory of Russian filmmaker Dziga Vertov, he developed his influential concept of ‘‘cine´-trance’’: ‘‘Leading or following a dancer, priest, or craftsman, he [the filmmaker] is no longer himself, but a mechanical eye accompanied by an electronic ear. It is this strange state of transformation that takes place in the filmmaker that I have called, analogously to possession phenomena, ‘cine-trance’ ’’ (Rouch 2003, 39). Rouch’s claims are based on his experience filming African rituals of spirit possession. During these ceremonies, he was partly possessed himself in the state of cine´-trance and at the same time—in the local conception—he became a sorcerer stealing the souls of the possession dancers with his camera (Rouch 1982; see Behrend 2007).13

Possession Play

251

As Heike Behrend has pointed out, Rouch was one of the few anthropologists who have turned the pathos-like qualities of the ethnographic field research into a method, letting himself feel overwhelmed by the experience of alterity (Behrend 2007, 188). Out of these impressions, he derived the notion of a shared anthropology: ‘‘Filmed possession and danced cinematography fused in sensual ecstasy and in technical noise. Specifically, the cinematographic technology, the interconnection of his body with the camera, allowed him to transform and to devote himself to the alien spirits and to develop a reciprocal ethnography that permanently revises itself through transcultural feedbacks’’ (Behrend 2007, 185). But it is not only the merging of the person and the camera in the process of filming that characterizes the state of cine´-trance. According to Rouch, the mere presence of the camera, as well as the watching of a film, can induce states of trance. Therefore he refused to show his famous film Les maıˆtres fous (1954–1955) to people who appear on-screen in the state of possession because they ‘‘went into trance in an uncontrollable and almost dangerous way’’ (Taussig 1993, 243). Thus, even to see oneself in trance on a screen has the effect of ‘‘a sort of electric shock’’ on the latently possessed (Rouch 1995; see also Schu¨ttpelz 2005, 292). In Les maıˆtres fous, the adepts of the Hauka cult are possessed by alien spirits that are characterized as Europeans, who, apart from colonial military representatives, also include the spirit of the ‘‘locomotive’’ and that of the ‘‘van driver.’’ The wild behavior of the possessed, whose movements and gestures mimic the military drill of the European occupiers, is commonly interpreted as a way to cope with the barbarisms of the colonizers and as an act of resistance against colonial violence. Besides that, the ritual contains references to ‘‘Western’’ cinema, featuring a film poster next to an altar, pith helmets, and wooden rifles as ‘‘Western’’ objects with which the Hauka are worshipped (Schu¨ttpelz 2005, 292). Heike Behrend argues that in this context, cinematic images also share the power of the Western spirits: ‘‘The spirit of the images externalized in the cinematic images captured the mediums and made them experience the power of the images in a state of possession’’ (Behrend 2007, 195). The connection with ‘‘Western’’ cinema becomes more obvious in Rouch’s film Moi, un noir (1958), which, like Les maıˆ tres fous, deals with young Songhay migrant workers from Niger who mimic the European or ‘‘Western’’ Other through embodiment. Rouch shows their everyday life in Treichville, the port district of Abidjan, and as is typical for his ethnofictional films, Moi, un noir challenges the border between documentary and fiction in many respects, most confusingly because the protagonists have taken on the names (and

252

Anja Dreschke

roles) of admired stars and popular characters from American and French movies: A young boxer emulates Edward G. Robinson, and a prostitute calls herself ‘‘Dorothy Lamour’’; their unemployed friend simultaneously plays Eddie Constantine and his film character Lemmy Caution, while another calls himself ‘‘Tarzan’’ and his girlfriend ‘‘Jane.’’ They imitate their screen idols in a complex play in which their everyday personal roles, adopted roles, and film roles overlap in multilayered ways. Whereas in the Hauka cult depicted in Les maıˆtres fous the alien spirits force the young migrant workers to produce similarity, in Moi, un noir, this force is transferred to the Western film heroes. Both films thematize forms of mimetic enactment of colonial power relations as a postcolonial search for identity that seems to be fueled by the desire for participation in ‘‘Western modernity.’’ Around the same time that Rouch shot these films in West Africa, the cinema-inspired youth in Cologne started to embody their ‘‘Hunnic’’ screen idols, aiming at an identification with the premodern, with the allegedly ‘‘primitive’’ and ‘‘barbaric.’’ Their role models, the ‘‘historical’’ Huns, have been considered the epitome of the negative Other in the collective imagination of Europe for centuries. (See Gießauf 2006.)14 In a way, the gesture of self-primitivization expressed by mimicking the Huns corresponded with the zeitgeist of postwar Germany, when a whole nation in search of identity had created a political and social climate in which it was possible for a carnival hit such as the ‘‘TrizonesienLied’’15 (1948) to advance to the status of unofficial national anthem.16 These connections raise the question of whether the emergence of the Hun clubs in postwar Cologne, along with their practices of appropriation and embodiment of the hostile Other, can be interpreted as a performative approach to deal with issues concerning collective memory, national identity, and suppression.17 When the first ‘‘Huns’’ appeared in the street carnival in the 1950s, they soon became famous as ‘‘enfants terribles’’ of the Cologne carnival, known for excessive drinking and other provocative behavior. With their threatening looks—dressed up in opulent costumes, armed to the teeth, and with their faces painted with bleeding cuts and scars—the ‘‘Hun’’ hordes always caused a great hurly-burly in the parades, especially when they inverted the carnival traditions. For example, I was told, that they used to throw raw meat to the crowds instead of the customary candy and flowers. As a consequence of their bad reputation, they were not allowed to take part in the famous parade on Rose Monday that has formed the highlight of carnival season since the beginning of the nineteenth century.

253

Possession Play

The official reason given for this exclusion was and still is that the adaptation of ‘‘foreign’’ cultures is not part of the carnival traditions. In turn, the Hun clubs claim that their examples indeed can be traced back to the local history by invoking St. Ursula, the city’s patron saint, who, according to the local version of the legend, died in martyrdom to save the city from Attila and the Hunnic invasion.18 Hence, the identification with the Huns as the ‘‘barbaric’’ Other can be interpreted not only as an expression of resentment against the established carnival societies, but also as a subversive appropriation of the local history by a group that is marginalized within the city’s traditions. According to their self-conception, the Cologne Tribes are a working-class phenomenon and thereby opposed to the traditional carnival clubs, which are tacitly restricted to the middle and upper classes. In an interview, an Attila impersonator brought the ambivalent relationship between the Cologne Tribes and the regular carnival clubs to the point by exclaiming: ‘‘I am the Prince Carnival of the underdogs.’’

Betwixt and Between In summer, the Cologne Tribes organize large camping events to immerse themselves in the historical lifeworlds of their examples. These summer camps appear to be an odd mixture of masked ball, fun fair, campground, Renaissance fair, open-air museum, and Vo¨lkerschau.19 Despite this multiply contradictory appearance—and, to most outsiders, paradoxically—the camps are perceived by the club members as suitable locations to enact their adopted role properly and experience a shared feeling of authenticity (Figure 19). The camps offer participants several different ways to act out a role. Some club members conduct guided tours in a first-person historical interpretation style (known as ‘‘living history’’ in museum exhibitions) or demonstrate ancient handcrafts to visitors, while others celebrate at the beer booth listening to carnival music played by a DJ. At the same time, ceremonies are held at the so-called ‘‘round table,’’ where the rulers of the participating societies welcome their ‘‘fellow tribes.’’ The highlight of the summer camps is improvised role playing staging the life at the court of an ancient emperor. When I attended these, I was always impressed how quickly the character of these performances can change from carnivalesque celebration to serious ritual. The whole atmosphere can immediately turn from hilarious to solemn, a mood that can

254

Anja Dreschke

Figure 19. Summer camp of a Hun Horde, 2008. be described as ‘‘ritual commitment.’’ These amazing transformations are accomplished by the clubs’ shamans, who skillfully switch from jesters to cult leaders and back. As I mentioned before, the impersonation of the shamans is of particular importance for the social fabric of the Cologne Tribes, because they are basically in charge of all performances, and they conceive, direct, and perform a wide range of rituals, either collective or individual, ranging from theatrical staging to bodily trance techniques. Following Schu¨ttpelz (2013) three forms of spaces of negotiation can be discerned in which trance mediums perform: in public places such as parades, stages, or ceremonies, in intimate interior spaces to which the entrance is regulated by certain groups, and in hidden places, where secret or even prohibited practices are performed. This categorization also holds for the performances of the Cologne Tribes, although they generally do not allow for clear-cut distinctions, but mix different levels of publicity, intimacy, and secrecy. First, there are public performances that address the club members as well as the visitors of the summer camps. These ‘‘spectacles at the round table’’ (Spektakel an der Tafel) are more or less improvised role playing

Possession Play

255

conceived and directed by the shamans, who act as masters of ceremony and entertainers, provoking the audience with cheeky jokes. Sometimes they write a scenario to serve as the basis of the role playing. Besides their entertaining character, the public performances can include an educational perspective, which means, for example, that the shamans demonstrate and explain bodily trance techniques and invocations as part of the staging to instruct the audience in shamanic practices (Figure 20). Second, the shamans conduct ceremonies and rituals such as initiation rites for new members or inaugurations for aspiring leaders, and life-cycle rituals such as weddings, baptisms, and funeral rites. These performances can be public, but they usually have a more private character and address only the club members or relatives and friends of the persons involved. The effect of these performances is not restricted to the hobby, but can also ramify into everyday life. For example, a ‘‘Hunnic’’ wedding ceremony performed by the club shaman can be experienced by the bridal couple as more effectual than a civil marriage ceremony, and in many cases, it substitutes a church wedding. As some of my informants—who mostly confess to the Roman Catholic faith—told me, they prefer the club

Figure 20. Shaman performing a ritual during a summer camp, 2008.

256

Anja Dreschke

shamans’ life-cycle rituals to the Christian sacraments because they find them to be more ‘‘authentic.’’ The shamanistic rites are not regarded as opposed to the Christian belief, but as consistent with it and even more appropriate to the experience of spirituality. Moreover, shamanistic rituals are compared to local practices of folk piety, such as lighting a candle in the Cologne cathedral or donating votive offerings to the statue of a Black Madonna practices that have a certain meaning in the context of local popular piety.20 The third category of performances usually takes place in secrecy. These include trance rituals practiced by the shamans on an individual basis, sometimes together with other shamans or the persons that the ritual concerns. In all three categories, the performance of bodily trance techniques can be included, though in the public events, they appear to be more or less staged for the audience, whereas in private se´ances, they are performed to induce a spiritual experience. According to the different character of the performances, the role of the shaman can be that of a master of ceremonies, a jester, an intermediator, a cult leader, or a trance expert. However, the shaman’s paramount task is to mediate between the different modes of performance, as well as to mediate between the liminal hobby world and everyday life by shaping the transition between them through ritual practices.

Becoming a Shaman Most of the shamans I talked to during my field research told me that they had taken on their position primarily because there was a vacancy in the club structure, rather than it being a calling or their having spiritual tendencies. As one shaman explained to me, the role was initially a ‘‘job in the club,’’ like that of a warrior, lord, or king, and mainly served the purpose of making the role playing and rituals entertaining. Improvisational talent was required, as well as quick-wittedness, creativity, and a sense of humor. However, in performing shamanic practices, they developed a deeper interest in the corresponding cosmologies and gradually cultivated particular skills. Moreover, as a result of their experiences, they began to reinterpret their biographies so that they recognized some special aptness and qualifications that predestined them for the spiritual aspects of their shaman role. For example, a personal crisis or an illness could be reframed as the initial shamanic crisis. In her studies on people practicing magic in

Possession Play

257

Great Britain, Tanya Luhrmann describes this process as an ‘‘interpretative drift’’: ‘‘the slow shift in someone’s manner of interpreting events, making sense of experiences, and responding to the world.’’ People do not enter magic with a set of clear cut beliefs which they take to their rituals and test with detachment. Nor is their practice mere poetry, a new language to express their feelings. Rather, there seems to be slow, mutual evolution of interpretation and experience, rationalized in a manner which allows the practitioner to practice. The striking feature, I found, was how ad hoc, how seemingly unmotivated, this transformation became. Magicians did not deliberately change the way they thought about the world. Becoming involved in magic is exciting, and as the neophyte read about the practice and talked to other practitioners he picked up intellectual habits which made the magic seem sensible and realistic. He acquired new ways of identifying events as significant, of drawing connections between events, with new, complex knowledge in which events could be put into context. (Luhrmann 1989, 12)

Among the shamans of the Cologne Tribes, the ‘‘interpretive drift’’ develops in the course of their apprenticeship, which usually takes several years and is guided by a ‘‘shaman father’’ or a ‘‘shaman mother’’ who conveys knowledge and instructs his or her pupil in ritualistic practices. At the end of this process, the novice is initiated by the older shamans in a classic rite of passage encompassing symbolic death through dismemberment and subsequent resurrection. A major part of the training takes place in a private setting at home or at ‘‘secret’’ meetings. Almost every shaman has an altar or a section of his or her apartment where the shaman practices alone or in the company of fellow practitioners. They meet to share experiences, manufacture paraphernalia, and jointly experiment with trance techniques or undertake shamanistic se´ances. The practices employed to manipulate states of consciousness include drumming, shaking the head, moving the upper part of the body, and jumping up and down. Some shamans stay abstinent from particular foods or practice fasting before a trance ritual, while others are said to consume psychoactive substances such as special mushrooms or alcohol. Another important step on the way to become a ‘‘real’’ shaman is to study expert literature on shamanism. However, while all my informants tirelessly emphasized the significance of these books, it was almost impossible to find out which sources they actually consulted.21 But their performances and vocabulary did suggest a certain amount of knowledge of

258

Anja Dreschke

the ‘‘shamanic’’ literature that circulates in the Western shamanism scene.22 Their familiarity with this literature is evident in their appropriation of terms such as ‘‘shaman illness,’’ ‘‘shaman journey,’’ ‘‘power animals,’’ and ‘‘aiding spirits’’ and becomes especially apparent in the set of classical images and narratives, as reported by Mircea Eliade ([1951] 1999, 499–500), that they use to describe their visions and to characterize the shaman’s journey, such as traveling to an ‘‘underworld’’ or climbing a tree to ascend to the ‘‘upper world.’’ Not only the texts, but also the pictures, photographs, and sketches in books on shamanism affect this appropriation process in various ways. In one particular case, a shaman started to visualize his trance experience by painting pictures. One of the pictures he showed me included a very detailed reproduction of a shaman drum from Siberia (Figure 21). Nonetheless, the appropriation of textual or visual resources is considered with ambivalence by the shamans themselves. On the one hand, the reference to historical or anthropological expert literature appears to be an attempt to underline the sincerity of one’s occupation with shamanism. On the other hand, ‘‘intuitive’’ shamanic practice enjoys a higher regard.

Figure 21. Painting of a drum next to a tree used as an ovoo, a Mongolian shamanistic cairn.

Possession Play

259

Only when a shaman ‘‘commits’’ to the drum and engages in ecstatic practices has he or she found the way to shamanism. What always struck me when I talked to the shamans about their trance experiences was the frequency with which they made use of metaphors that referred to film perception, such as describing their visions as being ‘‘like being in a movie’’—‘‘Da geht bei mir ein Film ab.’’ This reminded me of the metaphor of the ‘‘Hunnic gaze’’ that members of the Cologne Tribes use to describe a kind of ‘‘skilled vision’’ (Grasseni 2009) that is trained while practicing the hobby. In a narrow sense, this training concerns the practices of appropriation, production, and display of ‘‘outer images’’ of alterity in artifacts or costumes, according to a specific aesthetic or style that the club members consider authentically ‘‘Hunnic.’’ In a broader sense, it pertains to the development of ‘‘inner images,’’ for example in the form of shamanic visions, that lead to a change of attitude. By experiencing these new ways of envisioning, the club members learn how to relate things in a new way and gradually change their perceptions of the world.

‘‘Modern’’ Technical Media and ‘‘Traditional’’ Ritual Practices The Cologne Tribes are members of ‘‘modern’’ society who deliberately and temporarily turn ‘‘back’’ to traditions and beliefs usually associated with premodern societies. This inversion of the relationship between tradition and modernity complicates the use of technical media in ritual practice. The Cologne Tribes generally share the view that non-Western, indigenous societies are ahistorical, inconvertible entities that are threatened or even destroyed by the process of modernization. In this perspective, which has been popularized not least by anthropologists themselves, technical media—especially those designed for mass communication—are the most prominent indicators of this decline. Accordingly, most clubs shun the use of media devices, along with other ‘‘modern creature comforts’’ that do not correspond to or serve their ‘‘authentic’’ historical reconstructions. By this, they also express their antimodern stance, particularly toward the consumption of television and the Internet (but only during summer camp).23 Yet their high demands for authenticity are difficult to implement in everyday practice during the summer camps: attempts to accommodate the campers with modern comforts lead to permanent debates and quarrels. To reduce disagreements, in club statutes, it is common to set down certain rules for the treatment of ‘‘modern’’ items. These prohibitions usually concern only the visibility of the shunned

260

Anja Dreschke

objects, linking the claim for an ‘‘authentic’’ reconstruction primarily to vision. This implies that mobile phones, for example, are allowed as long as they are hidden in an appropriate pouch and their use is restricted to ‘‘behind the yurt.’’24 Sneakers are concealed by sticking fur on them, and glasses are replaced by contact lenses. (Only the most determined hardliners dispense with modern optic visual aids completely.) In the case of rituals and role playing, matters get even more complicated. The guidelines mentioned above appear to be suitable mainly for public performances. Their staginess and theatrical character retain a great affinity with the winter carnival celebrations, where public display is an integral part of the collective event and technical media, in the form of digital devices, are omnipresent. However, the performances address an audience consisting of club members, as well as numerous visitors ‘‘without attire,’’ notably amateur photographers or reporters of local media.25 Especially with the latter, the members of the Cologne Tribes have developed a special kind of routine interaction: they grimace wildly and swing around their weapons in such a way that it is barely possible to get images free of martial postures.26 Besides this obvious posing for the cameras of the guests, there are more subtle allusions to a kind of media awareness that Roland Barthes has described as immediately acquiring another body and transforming into a picture in the presence of a photo camera (Barthes 1981, 10–11). In their postures and performances, the club members imitate not only the costumes, but also the style of speech, the gestures, and the whole body language depicted in historical dramas, but they do so in a rather unconscious or arbitrary manner.27 Somehow, the stage of the public performances reminds one of a film setting with the shaman acting as director. If a public ritual takes place, the shaman prepares the ‘‘set’’ by positioning the camera people in a place were they can follow the action, but stay out of sight of the other attendees. At the beginning of the performance, she or he gives an introductory explanation of the content and meaning of the event. This includes the request for the visitors ‘‘without attire’’ who do not ‘‘fit into the picture’’ to keep out of sight so as not to disturb the proceedings visually. Another gesture toward cinema is the film music played during the performances to underline dramatic effects, evoking an aesthetic experience similar to film’s. In the private rituals, the situation is different. Commonly, there are few or no ‘‘outsiders’’ present, and it took a while until I was allowed to participate. As a visitor ‘‘without attire,’’ I was sometimes requested to wear a spare shaman garment while filming to ‘‘fit into the picture.’’ But my camera was generally tolerated as a necessary concession to modern

Possession Play

261

times, although the camera and I sometimes caused suspiciousness. For example, a shaman was skeptical about my use of the camera during a private ritual and prohibited me from taking pictures, because I would thereby ‘‘steal the souls’’ of those being photographed. This ‘‘photophobic’’ attitude (Behrend ‘‘Spaces of Refusal: Photophobic Spirits and the Technical Medium of Photography,’’ in this volume), however, seemed to be a part of the ‘‘savage’’ or ‘‘pagan’’ role, rather than a genuine conviction, since with closer acquaintance, he abandoned his refusal and even let me take pictures of his trance rituals. As Heike Behrend (2004) has shown, the idea that the photo camera steals the soul was a popular narrative of the Othering of non-European cultures in the process of colonization. Based on cultural misunderstandings or assumptions, it often resulted from European actors deliberately using technical media as a means either to terrify their counterparts or to generate ‘‘miracles.’’ They ‘‘used fireworks, mirrors, the laterna magica, telescopes, and cameras in a twofold way: first, displayed as wondrous objects, with an eye to introducing them as commodities in a circulation of desire, and second, as magical instruments to overpower the natives and furnish themselves with an aura of superhuman power’’ (Behrend 2004, 73). This rampant colonial narrative seems to have returned in the practices of the Cologne Tribes. In another case, a shaman insisted on ritually cleansing my camera with incense before a public ritual (Figure 22). This cleansing with incense was applied to all participants who were supposed to step into the protective circle he had drawn before the ceremony. Such a special preparation was necessary because it was one of the rare public trance rituals. As the shaman explained to me, the cleansing should shelter the attendees from unwanted contact with the spirits invoked during the trance. The camera had to be cleaned, he further explained, because otherwise, the spirits present during the ceremony could uncontrollably enter and leave the circle through the pictures. I heard the same argument when I took part in a trance ritual by a shaman from Mongolia whom I met at a summer camp of the Cologne Tribes. As Heike Behrend elaborates in ‘‘Spaces of Refusal’’ in this volume, it often occurred that ‘‘ ‘traditional’ spirit mediums . . . strictly interdicted the presence of the camera during spiritpossession rituals.’’ In this case, the Mongolian shaman completely forbade my photographing or filming during her ceremony, maintaining that the uncontrolled escape of the spirits through the photographs was supposed to cause great danger. She did not, however, disclose the nature of this menace, but her allusions imbued me with the due respect necessary to adhere to the ban.

262

Anja Dreschke

Figure 22. Shaman cleansing my photo camera with incense before a trance ritual, 2010. These examples outline the liminality of adaptation and transformation that is characteristic for the performances of the Cologne Tribes. The interplay of transference and countertransference that is a typical feature in intercultural encounters is also reminiscent of the multiple reflections and inversions that are part of the process of the mimesis of alterity that Michael Taussig characterizes as ‘‘colonial mirror of production’’ (Taussig 1993, 87). For colonial ‘‘first-contact’’ situations, it is often said that Europeans mimicked the ‘‘savagery’’ they imputed to the Other and that this led to a bewildering process of mimesis (Taussig 1993). In case of the Cologne Tribes, the recourse to alleged ‘‘traditional’’ magic concepts or beliefs such as ‘‘stealing the souls’’ with the camera or the danger caused by the uncontrolled travel of the spirits through the camera and the pictures seems primarily to be a way to control the production of images. It was the means employed by the Cologne shamans as well as by the Mongolian shaman. Nevertheless, the assumed ‘‘foreign’’ beliefs and imaginations linked to the invocation of spirits in the state of trance are efficient, because they appeal to local or individual notions of magic and spirituality (and also to those of the researcher). Furthermore, the ritual cleansing of

Possession Play

263

the camera allowed for circumventing the photo prohibition and at the same time prevented the ritual from losing its alleged magic efficacy or endangering the participants. It balanced the assumed ‘‘traditional’’ demands with the ‘‘modern’’ desire for technical reproduction and accordingly accommodated the adopted ‘‘traditional’’ role with the ‘‘modern’’ everyday role. It is through complicated negotiations of modernity and its rejection that the Cologne Tribes appropriate modern media, including representations of alterity, and transfer them to social or ritual practices, opening up new cultural spaces as extensions of the liminal event of Carnival. These practices of performative media appropriation provide a venue in which it is possible to immerse oneself in ‘‘foreign’’ lifeworlds through the reenactment and the appropriation of ‘‘alien’’ practices of spirituality that are blended with diverse local traditions.

Trance Techniques, Cinema, and Cybernetics Ute Holl Magic cannot be explained. Magic can only be practiced, as you all well know. —Heinz von Foerster

The field trips of writers such as Michel Leiris and Antonin Artaud and the ethnographic expeditions of anthropologists in the 1930s and 1940s such as those of Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead to Bali, Maya Deren to Haiti, and Jean Rouch’s many travels to Mali and Niger have not only resulted in reports on foreign cultures, but have also led to a series of fundamental epistemic crises regarding the researchers’ own cultures and identities. In the cases mentioned, unforeseen effects of cultural and media techniques intervened between those ethnographic filmmakers and their anthropological studies: instruments of field recordings such as typewriters, gramophones, and photographic gear turned into self-reflecting devices and evoked all the symptoms of what Marshall McLuhan called the ‘‘Narcissus trance,’’ the state of oblivion in respect to the technical media that form and enforce the structures of subjects and society, resulting in a form of externally controlled or, to put it in surrealistic terms, seemingly automatic behavior (McLuhan [1964] 1994, 15). Ethnographic filming is a special case in this confusion of self, other, and technology, because the specificities of cinematic time entangle ritualistic and filmic times and tenses. In filming trances and dances, Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead, as well as Maya Deren and, for that matter, Jean Rouch, set out to record

264

Trance Techniques, Cinema, and Cybernetics

265

and document the cultural customs as well as the affective regimes and relationships of different other cultures. At the same time—and mostly involuntarily—they also recorded their own cultural behavior. While those extremely reflective and self-conscious anthropologists were searching for coherent cultural patterns in other cultures and while those patterns were supposed to be evident and visible on film, rather than in written descriptions, they were confronted with the logics of media that framed not only the subjectivity and social behavior of those they were studying, but their own subjective states and social relations. Applying devices such as cameras or tape recorders in the field, anthropologists were caught in a sort of epistemological mirror stage—some of them ignoring this, others intentionally implementing it in their theories and practices of filmmaking. Those who ignored the difference between mirror and image, between recording technique and recorded patterns, between map and territory, or between technical picture and cultural image were confronted with inexplicable logics that nevertheless seemed to rule visible behavior, just as spirits and gods in indigenous rituals ruled the behavior of the possessed. Trance then proved to be a phenomenon on both sides of ethnographic contact: a result of media practices, as well as of ritual spirit evocations.

Techniques The film material that Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead brought back from Indonesia in 1939 represents a milestone in the history of anthropology. The two anthropologists had many reasons to believe that in Bali they had found a model of nonaggressive social dynamics and of noncompeting social behavior, thus turning their field trip into a mission of peace in a time of worldwide acceleration of hostilities. Sponsored by the Committee for Research in Dementia Praecox, then the name for schizophrenia, and part of a series called ‘‘Character Formation in Different Societies,’’1 the investigations that Mead and Bateson conducted in Bali were also inspired by questions of social behavior in a broader political sense. In addition, the Balinese findings became famous in that they established the frame for a future dynamic anthropology based on causal circular systems. Already during their researches in New Guinea during the 1930s, Bateson and Mead had observed behavior as organized by complex patterns—for Margaret Mead, a precondition for new anthropological methodologies.2 Among the youth in different villages on the Sepik River,

266

Ute Holl

they came across social dynamics they had called ‘‘schismogenetic.’’ Through this concept, processes of progressive ‘‘cumulative interaction’’ could be described as dynamics of symmetrical or complementary intersubjective behavior, either as rivalry or as mutually appropriate opposite attitudes. An example of the latter could be the differentiation of male and female behavior, which is negotiated and established in relationships and gazes through rituals and games of, for example, voyeurism and exhibitionism (Bateson 1936, ch. 13).3 Mead and Bateson showed that the formation of cultural identity could be conceived of as the result of interrelation and as interplay. Their implicit methodological discovery was that anthropologists, instead of searching for existing structures in an unknown society, should rather learn to perceive recursive processes that constitute and change behavioral patterns. Instead of simply describing and classifying differences in rites, rituals, and forms of relationships, anthropological studies should focus on invisible rules of transformation that could change human behavior on a social scale, individually and possibly even in a global context. What amazed them in Bali was that schismogenetic behavior seemed largely absent. Bali appeared to be a ‘‘nonschismogenetic’’4 social system, and the dynamics of Balinese character could serve as a perfect pattern for postwar social formation.5 After they had returned from their research trip to Bali in 1939, Mead and Bateson were invited to attend the Macy Conferences as anthropologists, together with physicists, mathematicians, and neurologists, to explore ‘‘circular causal and feedback mechanisms in biological and social systems’’ (Von Foerster [1951] 2003).6 It was then that Bateson diagnosed schismogenesis to be a dynamic process induced by feedback. During the course of these conferences, cybernetics emerged as a general epistemological concept for postwar thinking and social order. (See Heims 1991.) To procure solutions for a wartime and postwar world that—as Bateson had predicted in 1936, schismogenetically had run out of control (Bateson 1936, 186), this American think tank and later research program discussed issues of modeling and regulating social relationships and systems as processes that could be predicted and handled through informational devices coordinating mental and technical processes. While these schemes were mostly based on forms of symbolically discrete computing machines, because there seemed to be possible adaptations between electronic and neural networks (see McCulloch and Pfeiffer 1949),7 the social perspectives of the Macy Conferences regard theories of media formations as reconsiderations of Western thinking and subjectivity in general and of memory and will in particular. The ‘‘will’’ of an individual seemed to be

Trance Techniques, Cinema, and Cybernetics

267

modified or even ruled not only by some unconscious principle, but also by interferences of energy and tensions in or between different systems— whether of animals or machines.8 Similar to navigating on the ocean— kybernetes, the helmsman, is the Greek etymological godfather of all cyberneticists—understanding behavior was thought to be a process of orientation in ongoing evaluations and course corrections in complex and interpersonal situations. To do so, a method to discover patterns of behavior beyond individual actions, perceptions, and teleologies was necessary. And these patterns would emerge only over time. Consequently, cinematography, with its temporal organization of all events, initially promised to be the ideal recording instrument for the new ethnologists. While written or typewritten notes obviously include the filtering matrix of language, codes, and a symbolic systems that introduce a fundamental gap between the lives of people surveyed and those of the surveyors, filming in the field promised to provide a direct approach to recording the behavior of other and unknown people and societies. Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead of course were not the first to introduce filming into anthropology. In fact, Bateson’s mentor, Dr. Alfred Cort Haddon, was one of the first to employ a movie camera, as early as 1898, on the Torres Straits expedition. (See de Brigard 1995 and Griffith 2002, ch. 4.) But the film and photographic material of the Bali trip, more than mere illustrations of the findings recorded as written notes, was thought to be an ethnographic source in its own right, reforming anthropology’s scientific methods. Looking at the black-and-white material in its edited film form today, as Margaret Mead edited it with her own voice-over narration, the charm of the films immediately captures the viewer’s mind. In the films, the graceful and strange movements, which often seem to resist gravity, the choreographies of flowing materials in specific lighting, but also the tenderness, visible in relationships between adults, children, and babies who are introduced into the realm of spiritual movements, literally integrate the viewers’ perception into a Balinese environment. Indeed, through cinematography, the characteristics of Balinese gaits in their special space perception, attitudes, and behavior, the visible materiality of relationships, and above all, the moving figures and the grounding environment and its patterns not only can be studied, but also invoke, as Bateson wanted, a ‘‘feel’’ of the Balinese situation. Initially, however, the cinematographic material turned out to be an ‘‘unexpected quantitative leap’’9 that overwhelmed the researchers through the sheer amount of images with which they had to deal. From

268

Ute Holl

the research trip between 1936 and 1939, Mead and Bateson brought back around twenty-five thousand photographs and about twenty-two thousand feet of 16-millimeter film material with a total duration of more than twelve hours that they intended to analyze as the basis of their studies of trances and dances in Balinese rituals (Bateson and Mead 1942).10 The problem was to find a corresponding methodological leap toward structuring and organizing the material. Only upon their return to New York and after viewing the visual material several times did Mead and Bateson realize that technical recording was just a first step in a media revolution of anthropological paradigms. Articulating a principle or paradigm that would provide the basis for the filmic montage proved to be a problem. Mead and Bateson could not find or decide on a criterion in terms of which to edit Balinese behavior so as to make basic patterns visible. Also, the ways in which the material had been filmed by Gregory Batson and Jane Belo, a Bali-based artist and anthropologist, were extremely diverse. Scenes of everyday life, rituals, and trance dancing had been recorded in every type of light, from many points of view and perspectives, with different lenses and at different speeds. An epistemological matrix that could draw the material together was yet to be found. This, however, is part of any methodological procedure in scientific systematization, not only in structural anthropology. Establishing criteria of distinction is the beginning and basis and probably the responsibility of any anthropological work. At the beginning of his great work on the structures of universal ethnological thought, Claude Le´vi-Strauss writes: ‘‘in any field a system of significances can be constructed only on the basis of discrete quantities’’ (Le´ vi-Strauss [1964] 1970, 53). The difference that makes a difference would have to be established by the observer. In filming though, structures are not discrete, and the structures of the surveyed scenes cross fade with those imposed by the cameramen, with the technical parameters of a shot, and with the viewers’ attitudes during projection. Bateson and Mead had started to work with analog media as recording devices just as the avant-garde of anthropologists was trying to formalize structured relations in binary codes. Claude Le´vi-Strauss, who, like Bateson, taught at the New School for Social Research in Manhattan in the early 1940s, had developed his method of structural anthropology in analogy to linguistics, that is, to E´mile Benveniste’s and Roman Jakobson’s analyses. And learning from linguistics, Le´vi-Strauss had started to envision a cooperation between engineers and anthropologists. He remarked

Trance Techniques, Cinema, and Cybernetics

269

that ‘‘on the side of the anthropologist there is some, let us say, melancholy, and a great deal of envy,’’ since ‘‘during the past three or four years we have been impressed not only by the theoretical but by the practical connection which has been established between linguistics and communication engineering’’ (Le´vi-Strauss 1963, 69–70). Just as linguists distinguished phonemes in language, Le´ vi-Strauss discovered ‘‘differential elements’’ and ‘‘opposing pairs’’ in ethnological analysis. One example of these is the kinship relation, to which certain types of behavior could be linked. Accordingly, observing behavior or communication in the field meant deciphering the relations that emerged from those oppositions. Le´ viStrauss pointed out that the problem of traditional sociology had been to strive for ‘‘purely empirical observation, or . . . intuitive consideration of phenomena,’’ instead of ‘‘measuring some basic relationships between the various elements of costume’’ (Le´vi-Strauss 1963, 59), an observation he might also have drawn from Sigmund Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, where Freud states that it is important to decipher elementary relationships instead of a picture’s contents. Le´vi-Strauss was working on formalizing these relationships in order to process them. Just as he found it ‘‘in fact, difficult to see why certain linguistic problems could not be solved by modern calculating machines,’’ he believed that anthropological relations should be solved mathematically (ibid., 57). Relations that Le´vi-Strauss had discovered as cultural forms in society could all be coded and systematized as ‘‘Ⳮ’’ or as ‘‘–’’ so that ‘‘each culture is a unique situation which can be described and understood only at the cost of the most painstaking attention’’ (Le´ vi-Strauss 1987, 103), yet still remains part of a general order of relationships.11 With the help of this system, he hoped to be able to extract, for every culture, an algorithm that portrays its patterns, processes, communications, and transformations—a utopian wish of any electronically aided sociology or administration. For Le´vi-Strauss, binary coding is a formalization that—and this is the surprising turn in his argument—owes its status as a fundamental law in anthropology to the unconscious activities of the mind. If, as we believe to be the case, the unconscious activity of the mind consists in imposing forms upon content, and if these forms are fundamentally the same for all minds—ancient and modern, primitive and civilized (as the study of the symbolic function, expressed in language, so strikingly indicates)—it is necessary and sufficient to grasp the unconscious structure underlying each institution and each custom, in order to obtain a principle

270

Ute Holl

of interpretation valid for other institutions and other customs, provided of course that the analysis is carried far enough. (Le´vi-Strauss 1963, 21)

In its procedures, the structurally designed unconscious would be perfectly adaptable to the universal Turing machine. As an anthropological function, it could integrate all cultures, historical, present, and future, with their customs, institutions, and systems of thought: a Hegelian universal machine. In contrast to Le´vi-Strauss, Gregory Bateson, who relentlessly emphasized the value of ‘‘shoddy thinking’’ (Bateson 1972a, 82), a ‘‘combination of loose and strict thinking’’ (ibid., 75), in the scientific process, intentionally kept the relationship permeable between linguistic and ethnologic methods, between organic and social structures, between nature and mind. Distinctions mushroom, he believed, not organically, but in the dynamics of a very Anglo-Saxon method of trial and error, cognition and affect, perception and memory: When I am faced with a vague concept and feel that the time is not yet ripe to bring that concept into strict expression, I coin some loose expression for referring to this concept and do not want to prejudge the issue by giving the concept to meaningful a term. I therefore dub it hastily with some brief concrete colloquial term—generally Anglo-Saxon rather than Latin. . . . These brief Anglo-Saxon terms have for me a definite feeling-tone which reminds me all the time that the concepts behind them are vague and await analysis. I can go on using the vague concept in the valuable process of loose thinking—still continually reminded that my thoughts are loose. (Bateson 1972a, 83–84)

In this way, as the literary procedure of his study of the Naven proves, Bateson could refine his conceptual matrix, capture unknown patterns of unknown cultures, while simultaneously remaining an observer in some British noncolonial camouflage. However, this method turned out to be rather difficult in respect to filmmaking. In Bali, Bateson and Mead had proceeded with complementary recording systems, written and audiovisual. Margaret Mead recorded in writing, in a method she had developed as ‘‘running field notes,’’12 whatever she observed and heard—relying, of course, on the translations of her informant, I Made Kaler. Gregory Bateson simultaneously photographed and filmed what he saw, sometimes being directed by Mead.13 The photographs of the trip were later published as a book, Balinese Character (1942), a special publication of the New York Academy of Sciences. It contained

Trance Techniques, Cinema, and Cybernetics

271

a compilation of almost eight hundred pictures in thematic tableaus of five to ten. Each series was accompanied by a written commentary on the opposite page. This fine publication provides a typology of images of Balinese behavior in 100 chapters. In his introduction, Bateson lists the cameras, lenses, the photographic material he used and even which chemicals he applied, yet he never states anywhere according to which concepts of space and time—anthropological, filmic, or cultural—he used the telephoto lens or the wide-angle lens and when and according to what patterns he either shot series or preferred to take single portraits. Theoretically, technical gadgets for him obviously did not have the status of concepts, and they could be of no use in vague or shoddy thinking. The parameters of the technical devices and distinctions in the social ordering of the Balinese do not make any basic methodological differences in Bateson’s concepts. He was still experimenting with forms and formations of audiovisual thinking. Since he often employed a then-new device, the automated film-advance drive, tableaus in the book resemble filmic frame sequences or chronophotography, the representation of movement in successive photographic frames.14

Times and Tenses In the course of the nineteenth century, the need or will to find means of representing contingent or unpredictable events as well as phenomena such as unintentional movements and behavior determined scientific experimentation in many different disciplines, including physiology, neurology, biology, and ballistics, and shaped the logics of research in their laboratories. From the 1860s on, dark rooms were introduced in research institutes and specifically in clinics, where all kinds of involuntary behavior—seizures, attacks and tantrums—were photographed, analyzed, and systemized in stereotypes of nervous diseases. These were the salad days of trance studies and trance phenomena in European medicine (Charcot 1874; Bernard and Gunthert 1993; Didi-Huberman 1997; Holl 2002). Bodies seemed to be seized by uncontrolled movements in invisibly short and fast intervals, and chronophotography was the means to detect, analyze, and diagnose all sorts of states, sometimes even to induce them. Contingency and movement were central problems of science in the wake of modernity. The wish to conquer and control the fortuitous, the volatile, and the potential led to experiments in recording consecutive states of animal bodies and locomotion, as well as of objects or things.

272

Ute Holl

While, as Mary Ann Doane has argued referring to Sigmund Freud and his note on the ‘‘mystic writing pad,’’ time became ‘‘antithetical to the notions of storage and retention of traces’’ (Doane 2002, 45), experiments with increasingly fast photography tried to catch a glimpse into hitherto invisible and purportedly unconscious procedures of the world. During the seventies of the nineteenth century, due to accelerated photochemical processing, different forms of capturing photographic traces of movement were invented. Different forms of chronophotography—sometimes called ‘‘instant photography’’—were employed in the sciences to trace a visible record of movement in relation to forms of spatialized time. (See Marey [1894] 1994 and Braun 1992.) In the early experiments of E´tienne Jules Marey, Albert Londe, and Louis Regnault, originally designed for motion and ergonomic studies, the physical bodies of men and women, soldiers and workers, were captured and submitted to a regime of universal metric time. Just as in anthropometric still photography (see Griffith 2002, 86), some sort of scale or grid and very often clocks often were integrated into the chronophotographic picture series in order to mark scientifically the course of distinct moments on the document itself. Thus, with the help of technical instruments, dynamics and processes were made visible that would normally remain below the limits of human perception, in the realm of the subliminal. Chronophotographic techniques could convey patterns of behavior behind series of single consecutive moments. Writing in the 1930s, at the same time that Mead and Bateson set out to Bali and just as fascism tightened its rule over bodies and minds through media politics in Europe, Walter Benjamin declared this intervention of media into the ‘‘prison worlds’’ of modern life, into our ‘‘taverns and our metropolitan streets, our offices and furnished rooms, our railroad stations and our factories’’ to be an emancipation, freeing constricted forms of behavior with the ‘‘dynamite of a tenth of a second.’’ Simple filmic techniques give access to processes of an unknown nature: ‘‘With the closeup, space expands, with slow motion, movement is extended. . . . Evidently a different nature opens itself to the camera than opens to the naked eye—if only because an unconsciously penetrated space is substituted for a space consciously explored by man.’’ Benjamin especially comments on the filmic analysis of gait, attitude, and ethos that had been the aim of investigation in early ethnographic filmmaking: Even if one has a general knowledge of the way people walk, one knows nothing of a person’s posture during the fractional second of a stride. The act of reaching for a lighter or a spoon is familiar routine, yet we hardly

Trance Techniques, Cinema, and Cybernetics

273

know what really goes on between hand and metal, not to mention how this fluctuates with our moods. Here the camera intervenes with the resources of its lowerings and liftings, its interruptions and isolations, its extensions and accelerations, its enlargements and reductions. The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses. (Benjamin [1935] 1969, 237)

Initially, however, chronophotography was a method of analyzing and controlling physical motion and locomotion according to the demands industrialization in Europe and the West, and also, as Marey’s work shows, to meet the ergonomic demands of new warfare. (See Braun 1992, 42–49.) When the first ethnographic photo series were shot at world fairs, in zoological gardens, at the 1895 E´xposition Ethnographique in Paris, for example, or even on location in the colonies, chronophotographies such as those of Albert Londe and Fe´lix-Louis Regnault proved to be systems of discipline, rather than of liberation.15 Chronophotographic means served as a first step toward imposing discipline on the bodies of people of other continents—on Arabs, Africans, and Aborigines—just as emerging cinema had ‘‘reinscribed the recognizable tropes . . . essential to the nineteenthcentury colonial imperative to conquer other times, other spaces’’ (Doane 2002, 3). Mary Ann Doane substantiates this argument by emphasizing that it is never a specific person or people that is subjected to cinema and cinematic time, but that cinema produces heteronomic times and spaces. Cinema’s genealogy in the service of knowledge and science carries its structures into the field of research by structuring the consciousness of the researchers themselves. Of course, this escapes their awareness and attention. Since this media form of perception takes place below conscious awareness of the process, notions of power in modernity are no longer attached to an individual will. Controlling contingency founded and formed practices of governance and governability of nineteenth century Europe. After the unknown spaces beyond human perception had been detected and analyzed with the help of chronophotographic methods, cinema synthesized its images, again subliminally, in the imperceptible flickering of twenty-four still frames per second to form a second nature of imaginary knowledge.16 At the same time that Walter Benjamin wrote his artwork essay, discussing issues of perception in modernity and under fascism, the American psychologist and pediatrician Arnold Gesell developed his filmic research method of unconscious movement patterns, ‘‘cinemanalysis,’’ which he used to film

274

Ute Holl

and observe children and animals and later to screen images of different stages of development in order to compare individuals to their former selves. Gesell’s ‘‘Cinemanalysis: A Method of Behavior Study’’ (1935) obviously was Margaret Mead’s textbook for the filmic investigation of behavior and development. But she used it as a recipe book, not considering the implications of control and power this sort of surveillance of movement implies. For her, it was no more than an optimized form of recording behavior.17

Teleology Gregory Bateson made at least one differentiation when filming in Bali: Since very little film stock was available, the ‘‘more active and interesting moments’’ were shot as movies, consuming a lot of material, while everything else was photographed with a still camera in single frames. (Bateson and Mead 1942, 50). However, Bateson does not give an explanation why or when he exposed the 16-millimeter film at twenty-four frames per second, or instead did so faster, to create slow motion, or slower, using just fourteen frames or so per second, to create time-lapse films. All he remarks is that ‘‘we were compelled to economize on motion-picture film’’ (ibid.). Thus, as opposed to all methodological intentions, the recordings from Bali lack a coherent rule of transformation. The methods behind Bateson’s filmic anthropology are generally oriented toward giving contingency a chance: ‘‘it is so hard to predict behavior, that it was scarcely possible to select particular postures or gestures for photographic recording. In general, we found that any attempt to select for special details was fatal, and that the best results were obtained when the photography was most rapid and almost random’’ (ibid.). Here, Bateson in fact does use the camera itself as a way to employ ‘‘loose’’ or ‘‘shoddy’’ thinking. While he had not considered that lenses or film speed make a difference in a visual argument, in his random photography, he did actually insert the element of technology into the process of establishing relations between cultures. With ‘‘random’’ shooting, he tried to avoid any personal, culturally inclined intention, any prefabricated forms of dramaturgy or a prejudiced gaze. Instead, he strove to achieve the balanced attention of the anthropologist. As Bateson later explained in an interview, the notion of purpose and teleology as a whole was challenged by his work, and it was this issue that he wanted to address.18 The difficulty of doing anthropology in Bateson’s days was to introduce a

Trance Techniques, Cinema, and Cybernetics

275

notion of nonlinear teleology: ‘‘one of the essentials . . . for understanding it, was to have been brought up in the age when purpose was a total mystery’’ (Bateson, Mead, and Brand 1976, online). To take photos at random thus meant to allow for the contingency of sight, for unintentional patterns of space and temporality to enter the picture. The ethnographer’s Western will should be largely eliminated, or at least be led by the events on the scene: ‘‘we tried to shoot what happened normally and spontaneously, rather than to decide on the norms and then get the Balinese to go through these behaviors in suitable lighting’’ (Bateson and Mead 1942, 49). In recording the unpredictable, beyond preconceived concepts, the field of anthropology thus should have been restructured through audiovisual media. And in fact, film did finally allow for recording human behavior beyond classifiable ‘‘postures and gestures,’’ salvaging physical reality and the uniqueness of random correspondences, respecting singularities of movements, speeds, and lighting. On the other hand, cinema was also a very definite way to frame and structure patterns of space and temporality in the picture, with or without the ethnographer’s intention, purpose, or teleology. While it is definitely not deterministic, cinema does in fact create its own feedback systems between motion and emotion, picture and perception. While Gregory Bateson respected the issue of eliminating teleology and intention in regard to the analysis of Balinese social lives and patterns, he was probably a little too ‘‘shoddy’’ about the role played by the filmic or media side of his project. Fighting Western patterns by applying random choices in recording, he felt he had overcome the ambivalent position of every ethnographer, who is simultaneously part of a scene and outside it. Of course, this was exactly the situation Bateson was constantly reflecting on as the ecological activities of minds. He had hoped that in contrast to the protocols of writing, filming could make a difference and relieve the ethnographer of his position and ego: ‘‘The photographer himself ceased to be camera conscious’’ (Bateson and Mead 1942, 49). But it is precisely his oblivion in regard to the recording system that entangles the ethnographer in the scene and that involves him in the trance, if we call ‘‘trance’’ a state of being caught between heterogeneous times and spaces and acting according to a system of heteronymous orders, not according to an individual form of will. Photography and film transform the environment, times, spaces, behaviors, and eventually the cultures they observe and analyze. Just as the

276

Ute Holl

protocols of writing and the typewriter previously employed by anthropologists in the field had done, film translated one culture into the matrixes of another, with each technology refracting and transforming situations and communications according to its own rules. Through mechanical devices, chemical processes, and optical dispositifs, but also in regard to standards and habits of seeing and the visibility of historically formed perceptive patterns of, in this case, Western cultures, what we see is not a Balinese character, but the Balinese transformed by cinema’s conventions, speed, and pace. While this mediation was not considered in early anthropological filmmaking, film theory had made this explicit as a basic assumption. With cinematic techniques such as the close-up, which expands space, and slow motion, which extends movements, ‘‘a different nature opens itself to the camera than opens to the naked eye—if only because an unconsciously penetrated space is substituted for a space consciously explored by man’’ (Benjamin [1938] 1969, 236–37). In Bateson’s film work, for example, the effects produced by the slow-motion camera are related to a form of Westernized notion of ecstatic states, a Western notion of how to represent trance.19 It is important to note that in the history of the sciences and their practices of visualization, the acceleration of film speed and the freezing of movement in slow motion is correlated with early photography as it was employed in pathological contexts. Of course, those perceptive patterns can be changed, interrupted, and rearranged, provided that the logics of media transformations have been understood and are addressed in the cinema’s aesthetics.

Duration While the film material from Bali remained unedited, Gregory Bateson began to search for other means of representing the Balinese character and culture of nonschismogenetic self-organization, reflecting his findings in lectures at the New School for Social Research. He conceived a solution to the ethnographic problem of representation halfway between writing and image—sketching out a graphic or diagrammatic translation of Balinese behavior. Setting out from the hypothesis that ‘‘human beings have the tendency to involve themselves in sequences of cumulative interaction’’ (Bateson 1972b, 115), he distinguished the sequences of cumulative interaction characteristic of the Balinese, who, as far as Mead and Bateson

Trance Techniques, Cinema, and Cybernetics

277

had observed, were taught and trained from childhood to abandon emotional overexcitement or, in McLuhan’s term, overheating, and instead keep emotions at a constant level and relations in balance. Bateson translated this behavior into a grid, with the ‘‘cumulative action’’ on the axis of ordinates and with ‘‘time’’ on the axis of abscissae, thus drawing the line of an interrupted ascent changing into a continuous plateau. This plateau was later to become famous in the history of philosophy when Gilles Deleuze and Fe´lix Guattari adopted it for their book A Thousand Plateaus in a model of thinking that relates manifold strata of realities, a model that dismisses the subject in favor of manifold processes of becoming. According to Deleuze and Guattari, Bateson had created the most important turn in Western thinking with this paradigm: ‘‘ ‘Some sort of continuing plateau of intensity is substituted for [sexual] climax,’ war, or a culmination point. It is a regrettable characteristic of the Western mind to relate expressions and actions to exterior or transcendent ends, instead of evaluating them on a plane of consistency on the basis of their intrinsic value’’ (Deleuze and Guattari [1980] 1987, 22). At the New School for Social Research, it was a young filmmaker, Maya Deren, who pointed out to Gregory Bateson that the form and course of his plateau was due solely to the structure of his representational matrix— the coordinate system. Deren argued that Balinese emotions appeared as a discontinuity only because Bateson chose to ignore temporal duration as an increase in intensity. Quite in line with Le´vi-Strauss, who had remarked that meaning emerges as a result of a preconceived paradigmatic system, Deren whimsically suggested a completely different mode to deal with the same data: ‘‘The duration in time . . . applied to sexual activity even in occidental cultures is not considered a negation but, on the contrary, valued as a considerable achievement’’20 and thus could have been represented with a continually rising curve. When deciphered in its elementary relations instead of for its pictorial value, the graph contained more information about Bateson and his culture than about Bali. In systems-theoretical terms, Deren’s rebuke can be summarized as an indication of precisely the error that Bateson considers to be the most frequent: the confusion of the territory with the map. Deren diagnosed Bateson’s ethnological grid as an ‘‘order’’ in the double sense of a ‘‘classification’’ and a ‘‘command.’’ At the core of her argument is the idea that cultural processes and identities can be shown and perceived only in an adequate translation of temporality.21 While Bateson had applied time as a grid that had no effect on the images, from her cinematic experiences as a filmmaker and frequent moviegoer, she knew that cinematic time is not

278

Ute Holl

to be partialized or fragmented. In an article on film editing titled ‘‘Creative Cutting,’’ which Deren published in the time of discussions of the Balinese material with Bateson, she makes clear that ‘‘it is the phenomenon of duration as tension which explains why slow motion—which may have in it very little activity—often makes for greater tension than normal or rapid motion for the tension consists in our desire to have our anticipation satisfied.’’ (Deren 1947a part 1, 191). There is no evidence in Deren’s texts that she has read or dealt with Henri Bergson’s work, but the basic idea to turn a coordinated system of time and space into a concept of duration that precedes and constitutes all experience is the same. (See Bergson [1908] 1991). Interestingly, while Bergson rejected cinema, Deren discovers the logics of duration through film practice and film perception—as Deleuze would about forty years later. The transformation of ‘‘duration’’ into ‘‘tension’’ produces cinematic affect. In film and its theory, this is assumed as a basic experience. One of the first theoreticians of cinema perception, Gestalt psychologist Rudolf Arnheim, who, as a German immigrant, also lectured at the New School for Social Research, had once observed: ‘‘Simply changing the speed of the film simultaneously creates a fundamental change of expression’’ (Arnheim 1979, 43, my translation). The charm and magic of movements in cinema, slow motion or time lapse, is always attributed to the one who moves, not to the cinematic apparatus. Chaplin used the effect of a slight time lapse to give his characters a trace of hysterical wit. Slow motion is often used to picture the filmed person in a realm beyond the reality principle—as outstanding, as heroic or divine. Cinematic duration thus makes a difference in meaning and perception. While Bateson and Mead were using the device of filming to analyze Balinese trances, they ignored cinematic time and thus were themselves submitted to a state of subliminal perception in that they neglected the effect of their own cultural techniques, recording devices, and thus the matrix of time and space they were introducing into the visible field. It is not important that the ritual Bateson and Mead were filming was commissioned, staged, and paid for as it would have been for any tourist (Jacknis 1988, 167), since of course they were not claiming simple authenticity for the documents. It is always a second nature that speaks to the camera and this is what is interesting to visual anthropologists. The problem is, rather, that Bateson and Mead were unconsciously and unknowingly lost in media translation themselves. Recording Balinese dances in time lapse showed them in rapid motion so that there would be perceived a certain nervousness in the movement of the dancers while also maintaining that their character was balanced and unexcited.

Trance Techniques, Cinema, and Cybernetics

279

Margaret Mead always insisted on the neutrality of the recording device: ‘‘If a tape recorder, camera or video is set up and left in the same place, large batches of material can be collected without the intervention of the film-maker or ethnographer and without the continuous selfconsciousness of those who are being observed’’ (Mead [1974] 1995, 9). To people who resisted her filming, she would even propose the threat of expulsion from history: ‘‘the isolated group or emerging new nation that forbids filmmaking for fear of disapproved emphases will lose far more than it gains,’’ for ‘‘they will rob of their rightful heritage their descendants, who . . . may wish to claim once more the rhythms and handicrafts of their own people’’ (ibid., 7). Instead, any ritual that is filmed needs integrity of time and duration to be perceived as of a different culture and as making a filmic difference. Mead’s well-intended form of technically induced adaptation of otherness became obvious in a later scholarly projection of her films. A renowned professor for anthropology who screened Mead and Bateson’s films in his classes at Brown University adjusted the speed of the 16-millimeter projector in order to show Balinese movements in ‘‘normal’’ timing. Unfortunately then, Margaret Mead’s off-camera commenting voice also changed, and her voice dropped ‘‘an octave or so,’’ transforming her voice from feminine to masculine, making another fundamental difference, that of gender, which Mead had so thoroughly studied with other cultures. (See Heider 1976, 30.)

Trance States of trance thus seem to haunt cinematic perception from all sides. After Mead and Bateson had handed over the Bali material to Maya Deren, asking for a professional filmmaker’s advice, she watched the material on her home editing device, on which time could be manipulated ad libitum. In her notebook, she recorded a rather strange and ecstatic experience: The minute I began to put the Balinese film through the viewer, the fever began. It is a feeling one cannot remember from before, but can only have in an immediate sense. The immediate physical contact with the film, the nearness of the image, the automatic muscular control of its speed——the fact that as I wound—my impulses and reactions towards the film translated themselves into muscular impulses and so to the film directly with no machine buttons, switches, etc.—between me and the film. . . . Later of

280

Ute Holl

course, I shall use the projector to get proper speed, etc. But first this intimate copulation between me and the film must take place. (Deren 1947b, entry for February 16, 1947)

This could be considered a feedback system, to say the least. But for Deren, there is no doubt that the ecstatic effect is one of cinema, and not simply a transference of a Balinese dance and trance ritual. While Bateson had just given up the hope that film could be a medium for illustrating the invisible circular causal and feedback mechanisms in social systems, he had involuntarily helped to build one. This cinematic feedback mechanism not only proved to be able to implement affects, but to be able to construct and deconstruct the integrity of identity and probably even personality at will. The basic elements of cinema, when time could be manipulated and duration intensified, proved to work nicely as a trance machine. Its viewers were subjected to its effects. Eventually, the ultimate concept of anthropological studies seems at stake: subjectivity. Subjectivity can no longer be considered to be a given, but must be seen as a variable that emerges from different cultural technologies and practices. The issue of character formation that stood at the beginning of their films had turned into an interpersonal dynamic involving the techniques of the observer. With the global rise of new technologies, this has become a critical commonplace in ethnographic field and media studies. (See Axel 2006.) A few years later, Gregory Bateson, in a ‘‘revolutionary’’ (Simon 2005) theory of communication he wrote together with Swiss psychiatrists Ju¨rgen Ruesch, integrated Maya Deren’s objection that in Bali he had subjected a foreign culture to his own by means of the recording devices while ignoring that this was a communicative relationship, and not a representational system. In studying psychological disorders as failed or ambivalent communication, Bateson and Ruesch concentrated completely on the organization of the technical and personal environment—the matrix, not the content of communication—and consequently called their study a social matrix of psychiatry. Two things are striking in this theory: as in all cybernetics, the difference between body and mind is dissolved in favor of the notion of ‘‘behavior,’’ which makes all aspects of a communicative situation visible. Summarizing his earlier considerations about cybernetics and the cinema into an emancipatory theory of personality according to which identities are developed, destroyed, but also healed within the context of communicative systems and durations of time, structures of character are seen as the result of social processes—teleological processes taking

Trance Techniques, Cinema, and Cybernetics

281

place beyond intentions of individuals. In the preface to a new edition of the book, Bateson casually remarks that ‘‘at the time this book was written, it became abundantly clear that the age of the individual had passed’’ (Ruesch and Bateson [1951] 1987, xii). As a theoretician and the great practitioner of a system of ‘‘learning to learn,’’ which can mean both ‘‘learning to deal with and expect a given kind of context for adaptive action’’ and a ‘‘character change due to experience’’ (Bateson and Bateson 1987, 13), Gregory Bateson thus integrated the lesson of the doubled film time into his communications theory. Starting with the psychiatric studies, he placed a social matrix at the basis of all human understanding, relativized the observer’s standpoint, and recognized every codification and illustration mode as an evaluation (Ruesch and Bateson [1951] 1987,198). Maya Deren was equally concerned with personal and social transformation. In 1947, she noted: ‘‘there is no society or organization designed to change itself and this is what the whole hitch is’’ (Deren 1947c, entry for March 16, 1947). To study the ways of social change, she took a different route, travelled to Haiti, and filmed rituals of Voudoun possession that she never edited, thus seeking to maintain the integrity of the ritual. The ritual, for Deren, included herself as an observer entangled in the ritual space, as well as the times, tenses, and durations of the filming process. In her book on the gods of the Voudoun, she has described her own initiation trance as the tearing of a filmstrip (Deren 1953, 258–59). She thus identified both, the Voudoun techniques of evocation and the cinematic dispositif, as possible techniques of cultural change. Other filming ethnographers, first and foremost Jean Rouch, have described cine´ -trance as a ritual combined of media and old ritualistic forms, which themselves, of course, are techniques to manipulate times and spaces. Rouch also has used the notion of feedback to conceptualize a nonhierarchical relation between the filmer and the filmed: This extraordinary technique of ‘‘feedback’’ (which I translate as ‘‘audiovisual counter-gift’’) has certainly not yet revealed all of its possibilities, but we can see already that, thanks to feedback, the anthropologist is no longer an entomologist observing his subject as if it were an insect (putting it down) but rather as if it were a stimulant of mutual understanding (hence dignity). This sort of research employing total participation, idealistic though it may be, seems to me to be the only morally and scientifically possible anthropological attitude today. (Rouch 1995, 96)

Feedback, which is so familiar to us in every media device, in electronic networks, and in administrative or social interactions with which we deal

282

Ute Holl

today, probably puts us in a constant state of trance in which we are oblivious of the cultural techniques and orders we are given and follow. To reflect on these techniques and the orders that they transmit and to integrate these into our accounts of society and epistemology thus might be the order of the day. In a letter dated December 20, 1967, Gregory Bateson wrote to neurophysiologist Warren McCulloch, then a pioneer in the study of neuronal network processes: ‘‘I suggest that one of the things that man has done through the ages to correct for his short-sighted purposiveness is to imagine personified entities with various sorts of supernatural power, i.e., gods. These entities, being fictitious persons, are more or less endowed with cybernetic and circuit characteristics’’ (Bateson [1967] 1982, 67).

notes

on the subject of spirit mediumship in the age of new media Rosalind C. Morris My deepest gratitude is owed to Heike Behrend, Martin Zillinger, and Anja Dreschke, who did me the great honor of inviting me to serve as keynote speaker for the conference Trance Mediums and New Media. This essay grew out of the paper I presented there, but was transformed as a result of the conversations at the conference, where my understanding of a topic I thought I knew grew enormously. I would also like to acknowledge, in particular, Erhard Schu¨ttpelz, Maria Jose´ A. de Abreu, Christopher Pinney, and Ute Holl. trance mediums and new media: the heritage of a european term Erhard Schu¨ttpelz This essay was written during a stay (dedicated to the topic of liminality and power) at the Institute of Advanced Studies at the University of Konstanz, part of the university’s Cultural Foundations of Integration Center of Excellence established in the framework of the German Federal and State Initiative for Excellence. I would like to thank participants in the institute’s discussion in January 2010; the members of the research project Trance Mediums and New Media at the Media Upheavals Research Center at the University of Siegen: Anja Dreschke, Marcus Hahn, and Martin Zillinger; the participants in conferences Trance-Medien und Neue Medium um 1900 in Siegen (2008) and Trance Mediums and New Media in Cologne (2009); Heike Behrend, Albert Ku¨mmel, and Justyna Steckiewicz for discussions at the Media and Cultural Communications Research Center at the universities of Cologne, Bonn, and Aachen (1999–2003); and finally, but and foremost, Ehler Voss (Leipzig) and Helmut Zander (Bonn). 1. On the one side, there was the thoroughly will-less medium; on the other, the hypnotizer with his power over both the medium and himself. The roles could not have been divided more clearly, and that constituted (and continues to constitute) the attractive power of this dyadic model, which

283

284

Notes to pages 70–79

already at the time had to remain inappropriate and unconvincing for other international practices and their social situations. In other cultures and in a different scientific framework, this dyadic model remains more than inappropriate: to study or to induce trance. 2. Only in the last twenty years have anthropology and media anthropology awakened from these categorizations to rediscover a worldwide affinity between religious mediums and new technical media that was neglected or deemed ‘‘irrational’’ in the twentieth century. absence and the mediation of the audiovisual unconscious Martin Zillinger I would like to thank Heike Behrend, Anna Brus, Anja Dreschke, Birgit Meyer, Dorothea Schulz, Erhard Schu¨ttpelz, Emilio Spadola, and the anonymous reviewer for Fordham University Press for their comments on various drafts of this paper. 1. The term ‘‘aisthetics’’—or, more commonly, aesthetics—refers to the Aristotelian notion of aisthesis and corresponds to ‘‘our corporeal capability . . . to perceive objects in the world via our five different sensorial modes’’ (Meyer and Verrips 2008, 21). 2. There are classic ethnological examinations of all three groups, especially Bruˆnel 1926, Crapanzano 1973, and Welte 1990. The translation of the Arabic term ‘‘t.aifa’’ as ‘‘brotherhood’’ follows Crapanzano’s classic study, even if the term fails to reveal that women perform important ritual functions in the narrow circle of adepts. On the other hand, the term ‘‘congregation,’’ in addition to its Christian connotations, seems to me to suggest a firm organizational structure that is not true of the groups treated here. 3. Just as certain forms and methods of Sufism are controversial in Islam, within these groups themselves there also is quarreling about what constitutes the right practices. Likewise, these brotherhoods’ affiliation with Sufism is controversial. (See Crapanzano 1973.) The term t.as.auwuf—the term for Islamic mysticism in general, which derives from the Arabic word for wool and refers to the ‘‘woolen frock’’ as an insignia of the order—literally means ‘‘behave as a Sufi’’ and thus nicely captures these brotherhoods’ selfestimation. 4. Translating baraka as ‘‘divine blessing’’ is somewhat reductionist, since the word covers a whole range of linked ideas specifying and delimiting this basic meaning. (See Geertz 1968, 44.) It may best be described as a whole complex of forces constituting, governing, and affecting the world in positive ways and inhering in persons, places, actions, or things (Gilsenan 1973, 33–34; Crapanzano 1973, 19–20). Its force, however, can also turn into a destructive

Notes to pages 79–83

285

power. The saints’ baraka (in Arabic: walı¯/awliya¯’ allah) invoked in the rituals, for example, may strike the devotees if they fail to meet certain demands, not unlike the saints on the northern shore of the Mediterranean who generally help, but may harm at times, striking the believer with their wrath or simply by overpowering the devotee. (See Hauschild 2011.) 5. As Le´vi-Strauss taught us, spirit possession is enacted and communicated between patients or clients, ritual experts, and observers, that is, it is a public matter (Le´vi-Strauss 1967). It is important to note that the trance state, the h.a¯l, may strike all participants during a ritual. While the seer and some of the dancers are recruited as ritual experts, they usually become patients during the trance, and their patients, who suffer from various forms of crises and visit the trance ritual for ‘‘treatment,’’ also may help others to perform their trance during the ritual and thus become part of the public and/or perform the role of experts, while bystanders may fall into trances and become patients. The ritual constantly transforms all participants who are jointly affected by the ritual procedures they produce. 6. Other experts are Koran scholars (fuqaha¯‘) who use the power of reading the Koran to this end and who generally try to exorcise the spirit. 7. For my use of ‘‘association,’’ compare Callon 2006. 8. I have anonymized and given pseudonyms to all the persons mentioned here. 9. Crapanzano (1973) assumes that between thirty-five thousand and fifty thousand visitors arrived during the course of the saints’ festival, while Welte (1990) estimates one hundred thousand visitors for the period of his research in the early 1980s. According to a Moroccan television report on the pilgrimage site of Sı¯dı¯ ‘Alı¯ ben H . amdu¯sˇ (in the series 45 Minutes broadcast by Al Aoula of the Socie´te´ Nationale de Radiodiffusion et de Te´le´vision), in 2008, three hundred thousand pilgrims made the trip to the saints’ festival (Al Aoula 2008). 10. I myself was not present at this lı¯la because, a few hundred meters away, I took part in a ritual for members of the royal family being performed at the same time in the pilgrimage center. The next morning, adepts of the brotherhood reported to me on the ritual and the extraordinary frı¯sa. I watched the video with Tami once before my departure in 2006 and was able to discuss it with him again when I returned to Meknes in 2008. In the course of my fieldwork, I was able to accompany Tami again and again in his ritual activities and to conduct interviews with him. Just as Tami himself occasionally telephones older and more experienced seers to clear up ritual details and he in turn is called by clients who, for example, want to use their own possession to heal patients in Europe and must clarify questions, a few times after my return to Europe, we talked on the phone and discussed details of his work and of this film recording. The course of healing rituals is familiar to me from my fieldwork and my participatory observation.

286

Notes to pages 86–92

11. In the literature since the work of James Frazer, this substitution has been treated as an act of sympathetic magic in which contact with part of or with a substitute for a person can transfer powers from and to this person, even over great distances. Even if the principles of analogy that informed the classical theories of magic apply here (see, for example, Frazer 1922, 13–54 and Tambiah 1990; for a valid criticism, see Taussig 1993, 47–58), the mediating function of these objects seems clear. 12. Of course, in rituals it is possible to have fua¯teh. spoken for relatives; then I become the medium for the power of blessing that is supposed to accrue to my relatives via the ritual. But then the fa¯th.a is spoken for me and for my relatives. It is something else when, on behalf of someone else, I hand over money and ask for a blessing for them. In my experience, in this case a telephone connection is always made during the ritual so that the fa¯th.a and the baraka can reach the patient directly through the telephone; or, as in this case, a film camera is used. This also indicates that the person depicted in the photo knows about the treatment, which is not always the case otherwise. 13. Gilsenan is referring to Sufi brotherhoods in Egypt and Morocco. Drawing from the work of Crapanzano, he has in mind the ‘‘H . amadsˇa of the West’’ the latter encountered in 1967–68 in the bidonvilles of Meknes (Crapanzano 1973, 101–13). Since then, these shanty towns have developed into town quarters and the barracks into houses made of bricked walls and consisting of three to four floors. The brotherhoods I have mentioned in this essay come from these quarters. Often I met the same actors at rituals both of the H . amadsˇa and of the ‘Isa¯wa of the West. Gilsenan emphasized that the rituals of these groups ‘‘are part of a world structured by exclusion, hazard, and disprivilege’’ (Gilsenan 1990, 113). The transnational ritual practices I have encountered in Meknes since 2005 show a more differentiated picture. Many migrants and their families at home who partake in these rituals are modestly well off by Moroccan standards. However, the experience of socioeconomic deprivation and a hazardous social environment characterized by a constant competition for scarce resources prevails for many at the place of origin and/or the place of settlement. 14. I am indebted to Michael Herzfeld’s work on cultural intimacy. See Herzfeld 1997. 15. Interestingly, the term ‘‘nostalgia’’ was coined for the affliction that raged among and carried off many Swiss soldiers working outside of their home country in the seventeenth century, a phenomenon called in French ‘‘la maladie du pays.’’ In 1688, Johann Hofer proposed to call ‘‘this disease ‘nostalgia,’ from no´stos, the return to the motherland and algos, pain or sadness.’’ (Quoted in Frigessi Castelnuovo and Risso 1986, 11, my translation.) This disease, we learn from other archival sources, was triggered by

Notes to pages 92–100

287

the sound of particular Swiss music, played by shepherds on horns, that regularly reduced the Swiss migrants to tears (ibid., 17). 16. On all Sufi paths (t.uru¯q), the first step in the search for God is always remorse, through which the entanglements of daily life are to be left behind. As Annemarie Schimmel emphasizes in her introduction to Islamic mysticism, the fear of being separated from one’s divine beloved is designated as one of the wings with which one flies to paradise; the other is the hope for God’s grace. On the level of the ahwa¯l, fear corresponds to the experience of distress (qabd.), which transforms into holy joy, the ‘‘drunkenness of the soul’’ (Schimmel 2000, 26, my translation: bast., the expansion of the soul). Later directions taken by Sufism, such as Sˇadhilı¯ya, on whose doctrine the t.arı¯qa ‘Isa¯wiya is based, particularly emphasize the seeming godforsakenness that humans feel in distress, because in this state, God’s greatness becomes especially manifest. 17. Fritz Kramer reconsiders the outmoded concept of passiones in order to grasp the modus of ‘‘being acted upon.’’ Unlike the term ‘‘passion,’’ passiones connotes the inversion of agency in relation to the human self. He considers the spirits to be the ‘‘images’’ of the passiones they invoke, see Kramer 1993. 18. The participants bring forth and shape rituals, but also experience their effectiveness as an autonomous dynamic. On this, see Rappaport 1979 and the instructive remark from Erhard Schu¨ttpelz (2008, 244), who, using Aristotelian terms, sums up this ‘‘ability of operational chains to bring all the actors it coordinates into conformity with its forms of process’’ as the ‘‘being jointly affected’’ (pathos) of a procedure of ‘‘making’’ (poiesis). See also the concept of passiones in Kramer 1993 and of patienthood/agency in Gell 1998. 19. Here I follow the principles of agnosticism (listing all participating actors), generalized symmetry (the same terminology for contradictory aspects), and free association (avoidance of all a priori distinctions between ‘‘natural’’ and ‘‘social’’) that Michel Callon worked out for a sociology of translation. See Callon 2006. In this sense, all relevant actants must be taken into account to constitute the ritual, including the sacrificial goat, the ginn, . the camera, and the photo. 20. And it is therefore nothing that certain people ‘‘have,’’ as Geertz suggests. (See Geertz 1968, 44). As Crapanzano points out, baraka is always ascribed to someone or something other than oneself (Crapanzano 1973, 120), and it is established, we may add, during the ritually mastered dissociation of the self. new media and traveling spirits: pentecostals in the vietnamese diaspora and the disaster of the titanic Gertrud Hu¨welmeier 1. Preacher John is the leader of a Pentecostal Church in the United States.

288

Notes to pages 101–2

2. Taken from a report in 2006 written by a U.S. preacher who was invited to the summer camp. All names have been changed to protect the anonymity of the people. 3. My ethnographic fieldwork was carried out in 2007 and 2008 in Berlin and Hanoi. The research project, ‘‘Transnational Networks, Religion, and New Migration’’ (HU 1019), was funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). I am grateful to the participants of the conference on trance and trance mediums in Cologne for their critiques of my paper. An earlier version of this essay was presented at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Go¨ttingen. Thanks to Peter van der Veer, Steven Vertovec, and my colleagues at the MPI for stimulating discussion and comments. 4. What follows therefore does not put emphasis on the consumption of media in a national context. Instead, taking into consideration the restricted possibilities of the use of ICT networks in underground churches in contemporary Vietnam, as well as recent critiques of methodological nationalism (Wimmer 2009) and of the reception and use of media within a defined national territory (Hofmeyr 2008, 200), it examines what happens between spaces, such as Germany and Vietnam and explores the connecting role of media among religious practitioners and of (sacred) places across continents. 5. Religion has become a thriving force in contemporary Vietnam and in other regions of Southeast Asia (Endres and Lauser 2011). After decades of state suppression, pagodas and temples are being renovated in many places, and pilgrimages are being undertaken by large crowds. Due to processes of globalization and the country’s integration into the market economy, a growing number of people have been participating in ancestor veneration, spirit mediumship, soul calling, and fortune telling over the past few years. Ghosts of war (Kwon 2008) and popular imaginings about the wandering souls of war dead play an important role in the lives of many Vietnamese. Taking spirit mediumship as an ethnographic example, scholars even talk about a ‘‘spirit industry’’ (Endres 2010) that began to appear with the opening of the market and the emergence of capitalism (Salemink 2008). By referring to the resurgence of so-called ‘‘traditional’’ religious activities as well as of Buddhism and Christianity, Philip Taylor has discussed the reflorescence of prosperity cults, pilgrimages, and spirit worship in terms of the ‘‘reenchantment’’ of religion in postrevolutionary Vietnam (Taylor 2007). Yet while so-called ‘‘traditional’’ religious activities are newly flourishing, they continue to be labeled as ‘‘superstition’’ by the state. Interestingly, these activities are rejected by Vietnamese Pentecostals as well, as they consider them to be the work of Satan. 6. As Karen Fjelstad describes the hierarchical order of these spirits, ‘‘goddesses occupy the highest levels of the pantheon and mandarins, courtly

Notes to pages 102–8

289

ladies, princes, and princesses who incarnate into mediums in established sequences serve them, in descending order. Possession is highly stylised and while possessing mediums the spirits dance, listen to songs, distribute spirit gifts (loc), bestow spirit blessings, and read the fortunes of others’’ (Fjelstad 2010, 53). 7. Members of the temple asked their master medium to have votive offerings constructed, photographed, and then burned in Vietnam in the name of the U.S. temple. The master then sent the photographs to the United States, and they are now used as substitutes for the original votives. 8. While watching ceremonies, mediums often analyze the mood and behavior of spirits through their incarnations, and videos help them to learn how the spirits dance and what kinds of clothes they wear when they are incarnated into other mediums. However, watching videos can have unintended effects, and one Silicon Valley medium even became possessed while watching a video of herself becoming possessed (Fjelstad 2010, 62). This example parallels narratives about believers being filled with the Holy Spirit while touching the screen of a Pentecostal video preaching. 9. In a suburb of Dresden, I visited Mrs. Hoa, a Vietnamese len dong spirit medium who performs rituals in her garden in a temple that was formerly a barn. Mrs. Hoa’s clients travel from eastern Berlin and other places in eastern Germany in order to seek advice in marriage or business problems, to have their fortunes told, and to use her services as a soul caller. When Mrs. Hoa’s mother visited her in Germany, she transported such votive offerings for her daughter to use in the rituals. 10. In contexts where Pentecostal churches operate in the underground, such as in Vietnam, the production and circulation of DVDs is quite ambivalent and connected with fear and anxieties. Due to restricted access to public space, the distribution of DVDs and bibles is one of the few possibilities to get into contact with people. Yet such media products will be confiscated by the police during proselytizing events and may be used as evidence against believers by state authorities. 11. In socialist countries such as Vietnam, where TV and the press are state controlled, spreading the gospel via TV channels is not possible. 12. In most cases, access to a well-equipped recording studio increases the status of religious leaders and evokes images of a ‘‘media empire,’’ thereby legitimizing the power of certain pastors. Paradoxically, the documentary character of media such as DVD recordings can also turn into delicate matters of evidence in the case of conflicts within transnational religious networks, threatening or limiting the power of the above-mentioned experts. Girish Daswani (2010) mentions the case of a traveling prophet who came under pressure from his church in Ghana when, from a video, the leaders learned of controversial exorcism practices that he had performed on migrants in Europe.

290

Notes to pages 109–11

13. By referring to maps and media, Simon Coleman (2010) analyzed how technologies of visualization relate to space, place, and travel. While spiritual landscapes are made up of traveling preachers, prophets and pastors, charismatic agency evolves from travel and mobility (Hu¨welmeier 2010b). 14. In contrast to the African appropriation of the disaster of the Titanic as portrayed in Nigerian videos (Behrend 2005a), in Congolese music videos and in an audiotape album of the Kamunyonge Seventh–Day Adventist Church in Tanzania (Krings 2009), there is no remake of the Titanic story in Vietnam. However, both the ‘‘Africanization’’ and the ‘‘Vietnamization’’ of the Titanic include political messages. While the Hausa remake generates memories of the African slave trade and thus places the Titanic within an Afrocentric perspective, the appropriation of the Titanic in Vietnamese Pentecostal churches in Europe is immediately connected with flight, migration, and the threat of death in the South China Sea. 15. As proof of the agency of the Holy Spirit, Pastor Tung claimed, the ‘‘fruits’’ of his work doing God’s work, those who attended the prayer camp, mostly now were former contract workers from ex-Communist countries. Indeed, the fact that the pastor’s audience nowadays no longer is composed exclusively of boat people, but consists mostly of Vietnamese contract workers was another reason for employing the image of the Titanic. The narrative of salvation and survival on the high seas had to be reported to the new believers and interpreted as spiritual resurrection. Former contract workers have arrived in the GDR by plane, and not least due to political propaganda in the 1970s and 1980s, are not familiar with the tragic experiences of the boat people. However, during my fieldwork in Hanoi, I became aware of the existence of a new film entitled Journey from the Fall, by writer/director/editor Ham Tran, 2006. This film tells the story of people in a reeducation camp in Vietnam and the experience of boat people after the fall of Saigon in 1975. Long segments inform the viewer of the dramatic experiences of the refugees on the high seas and their subsequent arrival in the United States. Because this film was financed by the Vietnamese-American community and takes a critical stance toward the political developments in Vietnam after the end of the war, it is banned in Vietnam, but circulates underground in pirated form. Informants who were born after the war, educated middle-class people who saw the film in private circles in Hanoi, were shocked by images of the dramatic escape, the living conditions of the refugees after their arrival in refugee camps, and the racism in the United States. No one had ever told them about the fate of these people and never before, they asserted in our conversations, had they seen such images of the misery and horror of their own countrymen, images that they claimed led to strong feelings of compassion. 16. Jacques Derrida ([1985] 2009, 13) translates the Greek word ‘‘apocalypse’’ as ‘‘detection, disclosure, lifting the veil.’’ As Derrida argues, John did

291

Notes to pages 111–22

not write because of an autonomous decision, but because he was made a tool or a medium by God. 17. The famous poem ‘‘Die Lorelei’’ by Heinrich Heine, one of the most significant German romantic poets, is well known in German culture. It was set to music in 1837 by Friedrich Silcher and is today one of the most famous German folk songs. Heine, a Jewish journalist, essayist and literary critic, converted to Protestantism in 1825. 18. It is the physical ‘‘emptiness’’ of the space (K. Krause 2008, 110) that makes this locality so attractive to religious practitioners. There are no houses, no other people on the temporarily sacred ground, just nature, high above the Rhine River, and a view across the entire landscape. numinous dress / iconic costume: korean shamans dressed for the gods and for the camera Laurel Kendall 1. In this discussion, I use ‘‘shaman’’ or mudang for Korean shamans in general, mansin for my immediate subjects, who are shamans from the Seoul region and, in a few instances, shamans from northwest Korea. 2. I use the word ‘‘spirits’’ to indicate both gods and ancestors. I use ‘‘god’’ or ‘‘deity’’ for the Korean sin or sillyo˘ng and ‘‘ancestor’’ for chosang. Unlike most shamans and mediums in East and Southeast Asia, mudang manifest both gods and ancestors. Some ancestors do double duty, appearing in ancestral guise and then inhabiting the position of a particular deity. The shaman Yongsu’s mother’s dead husband appears as the Spirit Warrior (Sinjang) in her shrine. Her mother, whom I knew in life, now appears as The Great Spirit Grandmother (Taesin Halmo˘ni) who leads the dead to kut. 3. Most of my fieldwork has been with charismatic shamans of the Seoul region. I have also had abundant opportunities to observe shamans in Seoul and Inch’o˘n who perform in the style of the northern province of Hwanghae. Both Seoul and Hwanghae shamans are called mansin. These are the bestknown, most iconic Korean shaman traditions and most of what I say would apply to both of them, particularly with respect to sequential costuming. For sequential appearances by costume-appropriate gods, see Kendall 1985 and 2009. 4. For descriptions of kut, see Bruno 2002; Kendall 1985, ch. 1 and 2009, ch. 2; and S. N. Kim 1992. 5. I give a detailed example of a kut in a village setting in Kendall 1985, ch. 1, and in a more recent publication discuss how kut performed by the same shamans are transformed when they are performed in public shrines. (See Kendall 2009, ch. 2.) 6. Taken individually and in specific contexts, the colors are not unequivocally auspicious. Yellow, as a color associated with the fifth direction, the

292

Notes to pages 122–32

central space occupied by an emperor or a king, is also worn, sometimes in a gold tone, by the Jade Emperor when he appears in kut. But yellow also connotes the realm of the dead, ‘‘the Yellow Springs’’ (Hwang Ch’o˘n); deceased shamans who lead the ancestors to kut appear in yellow robes. When shamans divine with colored flags (the ‘‘five-direction flags,’’ obanggi), the colors are associated with the ascendancy of particular spirits in the client’s immediate circumstance: white (the celestial gods) and red (the generals) are auspicious, because powerful and protective deities are in ascendancy. Deep blue means an active, greedy supernatural character, the Official, who will importune the client for a cup of wine. Yellow means active, restless ancestors, and chartreuse green indicates the most unwelcome presence of wandering ghosts. 7. See Michael Taussig’s discussion of the nineteenth-century European aversion to the bold colors of non-Western dress and religious expression in Taussig 2009. 8. The documentary that Diana Lee and I made of a shaman’s initiation kut provides a good illustration of this as the seasoned mansin repeatedly urge the initiate toward appropriate potentially potent robes. When she is unable to find inspiration, they toss over her shoulders the robes identified with gods who have already made their presence known through her initiation (Lee and Kendall 1991). 9. Wikipedia, s.v. ‘‘Hyewon pungsokdo,’’ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Hyewon_pungsokdo. 10. As in his painting of a noblewoman on her way to pray at a temple while being lasciviously gazed on by a monk, Hyewon offers not only a hidden glimpse of women’s activities, but the comic possibility of a noblewoman’s own possible transgressions when she ventured abroad for some allegedly religious purpose. 11. In the traditions of Hwanghae Province, northwest Korea, the red robe and high-crowned hat are worn by the so˘ngsu, ancestral shamans who give the shaman inspiration and power. In this tradition, the high crown of the hat is covered with colored paper flowers (Walraven 2009). 12. ‘‘Photo Collection of Murayama Chijun,’’ http://www.flet.keio .ac.jp/⬃shnomura/mura, figures 125 and 127. 13. Kungnimminsokpangmulgwan, (National Museum of Folklore) 2003, vol. 1. 14. There are several reasons for this trend toward privacy. From the 1980s, nine-to-five urban lifestyles, apartment living, and noise ordinances intended to harass shamans encouraged the development of private kut tang, or shaman shrines, on the peripheries of major cities. Urban life also fostered a more discreet presentation of personal and family life antithetical to a public airing of family crises and tribulations in the manner of a village kut. See Kendall 2009, ch. 7.

293

Notes to pages 136–39

15. In a recent article, Boudewijn Walraven (2009) emphasizes the particularistic nature of Korean shamanic practice through his discussion of the emergent relationship between shamans in the northern tradition of Hwanghae Province and the ancestral deities in their shrines, distinctive relationships between particular shamans and particular deities in particular circumstances that develop over time. I have similarly tried to suggest the emergent quality of shaman practice in discussions of shamans’ relationships with particular clients and the deities that are a particularly marked presence in their households, relationships that may be thickened by the client’s dedication of costumes and other paraphernalia in the shaman’s shrine (Kendall 1985). rites of reception: mass-mediated trance and public order in morocco Emilio Spadola 1. The 2012 Fez Festival of Sufi Culture (Mihrajan Fa Li al-Thaqafa alSufiyya), organized by a professor of Sufism from a ‘‘grande famille’’ of Fez, Faouzi Skalli, describes Sufism as bringing a ‘‘message of universal spirituality that irrigated the whole of the Muslim culture and nourished its artistic, literary, and even social and economic forms of expression.’’ For Skalli, Sufism is ‘‘inscribed in [Morocco’s] culture and history’’ in particular (Faouzi Skalli,‘‘A Word from the President,’’ available at http://www.festivalculture soufie.com/2012.pdf ). 2. From the 1960s onward, scholars of Morocco and the Maghreb have discussed the political forces mobilized by the veneration of saints, without, however, sustained discussion of the mass mediation of its ritual or performative effects (Combs-Schilling 1989; Geertz 1968 and 1977; Hammoudi 1997, Tozy 1999; Waterbury 1970). From the 1980s on, scholars have pointed to the increasingly mass-mediated stagings of Moroccan and Maghrebi Sufi trances, with Deborah Kapchan’s and Martin Zillinger’s study of Gnawa trance in transnational context breaking significant new ground (Andezian 1984; Kapchan 2007; Paˆques 1991; Zillinger 2008 and 2010). Martin Zillinger (2008) discusses the national political implications of the rites’ mass mediation, in particular. 3. Abdelhafid Chlyeh (1998) asserts that any identity between the dialectal term mluk (‘‘possessor’’) and standard Arabic muluk (‘‘kings’’ or ‘‘royalty’’) is a mistake based on Western scholars’ poor grammar. But his assertion addresses neither the broader ritual links between spirits and the sovereign—which practitioners in Fez make explicit—nor the equally explicit references to muluk al-jinn (kings of the Jinn) by the same proper names as mluk, among fuqaha, or scholarly jinn curers, in Morocco (Spadola 2009, 166 n. 11). Here, as among other trance practices, the lines between spirit and saint are hazy; it is in response to the call and command of the mluk, whether in dreams or

294

Notes to pages 139–41

possession or illness or inheritance, that Sufi trance adepts and their followers carry out trance ceremonies, and it is for the mluk that they prepare propitiatory gifts of (among other things) milk and dates—precisely those traditionally offered to Moroccan royalty. 4. Deborah Kapchan’s reading of Gnawa music and trance and of ‘‘trance’’ more generally as ‘‘a transnational category of the sacred’’ points to a new commodification of the possessing spirits as ‘‘culture’’ (Kapchan 2007, 1). That is to say, commercial circulation means that whereas Gnawa musicians were once possessed by spirits, they now possess culture. But while the notion of possessing or representing culture is accurate, Kapchan asserts that Gnawa do not submit to this logic (ibid., 204–5); indeed the division of her ethnography both along this divide and by geographical location suggests that Gnawa trance encounters this logic only abroad. In contrast, Viviana Paˆques captures the effects of media and commercial success within Morocco: ‘‘Now [the Gnawa] pursue two dreams: to travel abroad . . . and to appear in public on the theatrical stage, like television stars. One consequence is that even while maintaining the content and tempo of their performance, they carry out their dances facing the public rather than always being turned toward their ma‘alim. The quality of the dances and chants finds itself improved; the discipline of the staging more rigorous. . . . The demand seems to be increasing: We are moving from a ritual to a spectacle’’ (Paˆques 1991, 317). Both Kapchan and Paˆques identify transformations of trance with ritual’s increasing capacity to travel as a commodity, whether in media or as an entire troupe, finding new commercial audiences at home and abroad. As Paˆques suggests, this change is not simply exterior to ritual. 5. Such colonial, media, and market changes are hardly unique to Morocco, especially because they conjoin the spirit world with national politics (Behrend 1999a; Comaroff 1985; Comaroff and Comaroff 1999 and 2000; Geschiere 1997; Ivy 1995; Kessler 1977; Morris 2000; Rothenberg 2004; Siegel 1998, 2000, and 2006; Stoller 1995; Zillinger 2008). Indeed, the repeated links between trance rites, spirit mediumship, and shamanism— spirits and Spirit, ghosts and Volksgeist—are as much the result of particular cultural histories as of the proliferating media and markets of modular nationalism. Such links attest to rituals’ established communicative or performative effects (Comaroff and Comaroff 1993)—their capacity, that is, to form and transform a ritual community—but they attest no less to the powers of commodity and technological reproduction to amplify those perhaps ‘‘pedagogical’’ effects on a mass scale (Bhabha 1990, 303). Rosalind C. Morris (2000) develops a similar argument in an exemplary study of premodern and early modern Thai practices of magical performance—spirit mediumship, in

Notes to pages 141–43

295

particular—as it has intersected with commodity relations and the Thai nation-state’s mass-mediated consolidation. Morris observes a revival, rather than the anticipated decline of spirit rituals, and with it, as Paˆques suggests, new forms of staging and new focus on costuming. Morris links such changes to a state-sanctioned discourse of ‘‘Thainess’’ in the broader discourses of culture, a quality for which mediums stand as representatives. That is to say, she posits these rites’ assimilation of distinctly modern representational logics and of the media technologies by which the rites are commoditized. Thus Morris, proposing that the ubiquity of the camera has affected not only how we see, but how we are seen, links spirit mediums’ new emphasis on costume to modern Thai subjects’ performance of culture, recognition of which can come only from afar, through technologized channels or lenses. The subject becomes a commodity, anticipating its own exchange by way of the photograph, ‘‘as image’’ (ibid., 198). Thus is modernity infused with new forms of magicality. Morris’s work demonstrates the ruptures in a practice of ‘‘spiritual presencing’’ induced by mass mediation; the camera does not merely reproduce, but introduces reproducibility and exchangeability within the heart of the rite. As Morris makes clear, spirit mediums always rested on mediation, a ritual structure, for example, permitting potential recognition of a spirit’s arrival. (See Meyer and Moors 2006.) But processes of mass mediation have supplemented both older mediums and older media as they have reorganized the relationships between performer, market, audience, and state. It is in these new configurations that the contemporary significance of trance rites lies. Such transformations of trance rituals’ meaning render them less or not at all the effect of ethnic or historical heritage and more a response to the camera’s technologized and commoditized gaze and the anticipation it induces of being seen from afar, on the market, as image (Morris 2000, 190). 6. Ethnographers note similarities of Gnawa trance and West African rites: the Bori cult of Niger and upper Nigeria (Masquelier 2001, 2009; Paˆques 1991; Tremearne 1914), and the Zar ceremonies of Egypt and the Sudan (Boddy 1989; Westermarck [1926]1968). Claisse (2003) proposes that Gnawa trance rites emerged as members of the sultan’s army joined the underclass Sufi orders and combined ecstatic Sufi rites of saint veneration with subSaharan practices of spirit possession. Colonial-era French observers, rather, posited Gnawa rites of trance as corrupting influences on the Sufi orders. 7. The circulation itself of baraka is not incidental to its power. On the contrary, as Julia Clancy-Smith notes, in precolonial Algeria (part of what she calls the Maghrebian ‘‘baraka belt’’), ‘‘mere possession of baraka was not sufficient to attain holy person status; the possessor had to be able to transmit it to others’’ (Clancy-Smith 1994, 33). Clifford Geertz likens baraka to ‘‘spiritual electricity’’ (Geertz 1983, 136). Baraka, writes Vincent Crapanzano,

296

Notes to pages 143–45

invoking the communicative force of trance, ‘‘is contagious’’ (Crapanzano 1973, 120). Among shurafa’, baraka was inherited. Among Sufi adepts across a spectrum of devotional practices, trance included, however, baraka’s transmission required active work by the disciple, that is, acts of receptivity to the master (Hammoudi 1997). Abdellah Hammoudi has emphasized disciples’ inversion or feminization; we may question, however, whether ‘‘feminization’’ is the proper term and suggest rather that Hammoudi has identified a quality of receptivity and the loosening of bodily integrity and boundaries linked as much to the body politic as to female bodies (Comaroff and Comaroff 1992, 73). Where Hammoudi is entirely correct is in his assessment of the relationship of power established with baraka’s transmission. 8. Although Vincent Crapanzano’s work with trance specialists among adepts and devotees of the Hamadsha Sufi order (1973, 1977b, 1980) emphasizes trance as an ethnopsychiatric cure for biosomatic illnesses, in particular for possession by demons (jinns), he likewise points out the communicative power of reception. Following Le´vi-Strauss (through Lacan; see Siegel 2006), Crapanzano viewed trance as a matter of social integration. Trance, as a idiom and a practice, provided a language through which the ill might reconstitute themselves as recognizable subjects within a devotional hierarchy. Such a discernment of trance as idiomatic and hierarchical performance points to intersections between trance as a communicative medium and as a staging ground of power, a set of choreographed and recognizable gestures, a ‘‘behavioral set’’ or ‘‘symbolic set’’ expressing the overwhelming force of spirits [mluk] and, just as crucial, the curative power of the sharifian saints’ baraka to endure it (Crapanzano 1973, 2, 11). That is to say, the effectiveness of receiving baraka—‘‘the curative substance par excellence’’ (Crapanzano 1973, 56)—rests on codified gestures of submission to the saint. 9. In his detailed accounts of 1920s public rites, Rene´ Bruˆnel noted that ‘Isawa adepts in trances generally acknowledged social hierarchy. For example, while they attacked any spectators wearing the color black, they permitted its blatant presence amongst the shurafa’: The ‘Isawa, he wrote, ‘‘do not attack the rich, nor those who could disturb them. Furthermore, they don’t attack the Children of the Saint [shurafa’], who parade among them often robed in superb black jellabas’’ (Bruˆnel 1926, 131). 10. I have written elsewhere of the scandalous and politically debilitating effects mass-mediated trance rites presented for young Moroccan nationalists. I draw on similar material here. For a more complete treatment of 1930s media and politics, see Spadola 2008. 11. A smaller Spanish protectorate and a multilateral international zone were established in northern Morocco and Tangier, respectively.

Notes to pages 146–50

297

12. In 2003, a sharifian interlocutor of mine in Rabat described colonialera relations between the French and his family. A local gouverneur and a French doctor, he said, accompanied his sharifian uncle in presiding over an ‘Isawa trance ceremony in Oran (western Algeria). The Rabati sharif noted the doctor’s amazement at the spectacle (which involved eating poisonous scorpions) and, as with other stories of life under the protectorate, emphasized the proximity of the shurafa’ to the colonial ruling power. 13. Si Mohammed Sultan, personal interview, Rabat, November 30, 2003. 14. Images of trance rites likewise appear in a range of general works about the Arab world and Moroccan history. See, for example, Hourani 2002. 15. Divine power and violence were demonstrated in concert: Hassan II’s escape from two coup attempts in 1971 and 1972, along with the violent disposal of the perpetrators, contributed to the legendary potency of his baraka (Munson 1993). 16. Based on my archival research in the general film and video archives and unsorted records of the Moroccan National Broadcasting and Television Company, Rabat, September 2003. 17. Hisham Aidi, personal communication, May 2013. 18. Trance as reception, rather than as mere cultural representation, occurs around saints’ shrines, but in ways that support the overlapping sharifian class and state power over rites of reception. There, however, the seers’ powers of reception are not so much benign as circumscribed—much as they were during precolonial and colonial era saint festivals. Although seers sit in rows calling out to clients as they pass to and from a white and glistening green tomb, they do so under the ubiquitous gaze of gendarmes and flags, of portraits of the king, and in the wake of much-discussed visits from the royal ‘Alawi family. 19. To be sure, such identity is not uniformly accepted on either religious or political grounds. Some critics of the authoritarian politics of sharifian cultural privilege view subjects of trance as too susceptible to mass media—the duped or opiated masses. As a friend in Fez involved in prodemocracy reforms said to me, ‘‘Moroccans see the ‘Isawa on television and they think it is something big, something important.’’ 20. As Cynthia Becker (2002, 120) shows, the name ‘‘Gnawa’’ is being adopted by Moroccan performers specifically for commercial purposes, as in the late 1990s, when the southeastern Moroccan Ismkhan ‘‘renamed their group the Gnawa of Khamlia’’ to bolster popular interest in order to be marketable as a national and international tourist attraction. ‘‘The Ismkhan remain hopeful,’’ she says, ‘‘that the popularity of Gnawa recording artists and the Gnawa Festival of Essaouira will attract both Moroccan and European tourists’’ (ibid., 118). As anticipated, their healing ritual performances in 2001 and 2002 brought record crowds. Notably, however, it is not the

298

Notes to pages 150–66

‘‘healing ceremony’’ itself, but rather ‘‘trance’’ that appeals: ‘‘While the healing ceremony still continues, their recreation of the slave market rarely occurs from year to year. Instead, Moroccan tourists crowd around the Ismkhan to be entertained by the popular hadra or ‘trance dance.’ Professional photographers are available to take pictures of Moroccan tourists posing near Ismkhan men’’ (ibid., 120). As Cynthia Becker suggests, ‘‘Gnawa’’ may apply to anyone, including middle-class and upper-class Moroccans partaking of it as cultural entertainment (Becker 2002). media and manifestation: the aesthetics and politics of plenitude in central India Christopher Pinney 1. As it transpired, I am already eagerly looking forward to 2016, the date of the next simhastha mela. 2. Fayrer’s visit may have left its literary deposition in Salman Rushdie’s description of Dr Aadam Aziz’s examination of Naseem Ghani in Midnight’s Children. 3. Alkazi Collection of Photography, Delhi, Warner Album 2001.18.0001 4. Martineau continues, elaborating a metaphor which would have fascinated Walter Benjamin: ‘‘A Brahmin broke the microscope long ago. He could thus disguise from himself, and conceal from his neighbours, the vanity of their endeavour to abstain from destroying life and swallowing animal substances. He might persuade himself when the microscope was destroyed, that the animated world he had seen in a drop of water was a dream or a temptation; but when it comes to a railway train moving through a hundred miles of villages, or of a telegraph enabling men on the Indus to talk to men at the mouth of the Ganges, the case is beyond Brahmin management; and we ought to prepare for the hostility of all who live under Brahmanical influence. I must refer again, though I have done it more than once before, to the significant fact that, for some years past, there has been a controversy in Hindostan Proper, as to how far the accommodation of the rail will lessen the merit of pilgrimage. From year to year the Hindoo notions of virtues and expediency have been more and more shocked and encroached upon by the introduction of our arts among a people who would not otherwise have attained them for centuries to come. They see that there is no chance for their adored immutability, their revered stagnation, their beloved indolence where the English magic establishes itself.’’ 5. A parallel space for these claims are the dwellings of individual ghorlas (mediums), where several Chamars in this village make their living from possession.

Notes to pages 172–74

299

media transformations: music, goddess embodiment, and politics in western orissa / india Lidia Guzy 1. Data for this article were assembled during seventeen months of fieldwork in the Sambalpur and Barghar Districts between 2002 and 2010. My research was funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) (from 2002 to 2005) and by the Volkswagen Foundation (2006 to 2009). 2. According to the Sambalpur Gazetteer, the Bora Sambar Zamindari area extends about an estimated 2.178 square kilometers and contains 476 villages (Senapati and Mahanti 1971, 516). 3. The Adivasi (Sanskrit adi ‘‘the first,’’ vasi, ‘‘dweller’’) number around 100 million people (according to the census of 2011) forming more than six hundred socioculturally autochthonous Austro-Asiatic and Dravidian language and kinship groups in India, administratively labeled ‘‘Scheduled Tribes,’’ that is, as indigenous peoples recognized as such under the Indian constitution. As a political term, ‘‘Adivasi’’ was coined by Oraon and Munda students who founded the first Adivasi Mahasabha in 1915. For the government of India, however, the administrative term ‘‘Scheduled Tribe’’ is used and refers to a category of people who are eligible to benefit from quotas that tend to compensate the inequalities resulting from a lack of socioeconomic development (and Carrin and Guzy 2012, 1–18). The diversified, smallscale, preindustrial communities live in remote areas as forest dwellers, hunters and gatherers, shifting cultivators, or agriculturalists. Their sociocultural systems and religious worldviews strongly differ from the hierarchical logic of the Indian caste system (Pfeffer 1997, 3–27). According to the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and according to its working definition of indigenous peoples, ‘‘Scheduled Tribes’’ are also considered ‘‘indigenous peoples’’ by transnational multilateral agencies such as UNESCO, UNDP, the World Bank, and the Indian Confederation of Indigenous and Tribal Peoples or IWGIA (International Working Group on Indigenous Affairs). 4. ‘‘Harijan’’ is a euphemism introduced by Mahatma Gandhi to redesignate the ‘‘untouchable’’ castes as ‘‘God’s children.’’ It embraces a multitude of subcategories of marginalized castes and is often used in order to avoid the pejorative notions of indigenous categories. 5. See the similarity with the pancha baja of the Nepalese Damai musicians (Tingey 1994). 6. For comparison with the Pano in Koraput, see Pfeffer 1994. 7. The combination of social marginalization and spiritual specialization can also be found, for example, with the subaltern Sidhis in Gujarat (Basu 1994).

300

Notes to pages 175–81

8. The terms boil asile / boil asi (boil came) or boil asibe (boil will come) are used to indicate the trance dance of the priest pujari who, while dancing, represents and becomes boil, the trance medium. Boil charibe, jibe (boil will leave) defines the end of his dance and the disappearance of the divine power. 9. The sixteen goddesses are Durga Par; MahaKali Par; Ma Magala Par; Ma Tarani; Oila Devi Par; Subakesi Par; Tulsa Devi; Bontei Devi; Chandraseni Par; Ganga Devi; Parvati; Lakshmi; Boiravi; Buri Ma; Patneshwari Par; Samleshwari Par. 10. Since 1997, Lok Mohatsav has been celebrated in Sambalpur each year from January 4 t0 January 6. Only in the year 2000, due to the supercyclone that hit Orissa, it was celebrated from March 15 to 17. 11. Lok Mahotsav is organized by the Sambalpur District Council of Culture, by the Orissa Department of Tourism and Culture, and by the Orissa and Eastern Zonal Cultural Center, Kolkata. 12. The Eastern Zone Cultural Center ’s mission statement reads: ‘‘EZCC and the Ministry of Rural Development through the Special Project under Swarnajayanti Gram SwarojgarJogana (SGSY) scheme is creating self employment opportunities for rural artisans and helping them to grow as entrepreneurs by mobilizing them into Self Help Groups. This project will revive and revitalize a few chosen dying art forms of eastern India and provide a sustainable livelihood to 4000 beneficiaries. The project period is 3 years ending on 31 March 2008. The selected backward districts and the dying art forms include . . . Sambalpur with Sambhalpuri Dance.’’ Ministry of Culture, Government of India, Eastern Zone Cultural Center ‘‘Revival Projects,’’ http://ezccindia.org/revival-projects.html. 13. See, for example, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v⳱-BVBlQlZcoE. 14. See, for example, http://sambalpur.nic.in/lokmahotsav/index.html and http://sambalpur.nic.in/lokmahotsav/2007/index.html. 15. For an analysis of the function of national anthems see Gellner 1983 and 1997; Anderson 1991. 16. For comparative studies on music and nationality, see Wade 2000; Radano 2003; Sellers 2004; Biddle and Knights 2007. 17. For definitions and discussion, see Waltzer et al. 1982; Guibernau and Rex 1997; Ben-Ami, Peled, and Spektorowski 2000. 18. The recent successful history of administrative reorganization and the creation of two new neighboring states, Jharkhand and Chhattisghar, in 2002, which used their ‘‘tribal’’ character as a crucial argument for their regional claims, are concrete political models for the political aspirations of activists in western Orissa. 19. The dalit movement was the brainchild of Dr. Ambedkar—himself a Mahar, politician, and activist. In contrast to Gandhi, who intended to reform

301

Notes to pages 181–87

Hinduism, Ambedkar completely rejected it. In a recent work on Ambedkar and conversion as a socio-political tool of the dalit movement, Johannes Beltz (Beltz 2005) analyzes Ambedkar’s options for conversion and his final choice of Buddhism in the face of alternative possibilities (Sikhism, Islam and Christianity). A few days before his death in 1956, Ambedkar converted to Buddhism, thereby placing himself in continuity with As´oka’s conversion and with Buddhist mythology. His conversion caused a wave of conversions to neo-Buddhism among the Mahar. The new religion became a potent factor in the sociopolitical struggle of this underprivileged group. 20. This shift finds parallels in recent observations by C. Joe Arun on processes of self-assertion taking place between the socially stigmatized Paraiyar musicians in Tamil Nadu. Through the reevaluation of the symbol of the parai drum, the marginalized Parayars have in recent times gained a new selfconsciousness, as well as real political power (Arun 2007). transmitting divine grace: on the materiality of charismatic mediation in mali Dorothea E. Schulz 1. What follows is based on research conducted in San, a town of about twenty-five thousand inhabitants in southeastern Mali, and in the capital, Bamako, between July 1998 and January 2010 (altogether, twenty-six months). I conducted my research in Bamanakan, the lingua franca of southern Mali, and in French. In addition to participant-observation and more than sixty semistructured interviews with supporters of the Islamic moral renewal movement, I regularly attended the twice-weekly or thrice-weekly learning sessions for Muslim women in San and Bamako. I also participated in numerous religious ceremonies and social events organized by Muslim women in these two locales. 2. More than 85 percent of the Malian population consider themselves observant Muslims. The rest of the population is divided into Christians (ca. 2 percent) and those who practice other African religions. 3. See Schulz 2008 for a first attempt to address these questions. 4. By positing that all these practices aim to mediate between the visible and the invisible or imperceptible worlds, I am inspired by Meyer’s (2005) argument that different religious traditions articulate specific understandings of how to render the presence of transcendental forces perceptible and immanent. (See also Stolow 2005.) 5. Unless indicated otherwise, all foreign terms are rendered in Bamanakan (‘‘the language of the Bamana’’), the lingua franca of southern Mali. 6. Cherif Haidara’s followers are mostly men and women who come from the urban middle and lower-middle classes. The Ansar Dine network is at its

302

Notes to pages 187–90

strongest in southern towns that historically have not been under a strong influence of prestigious lineages associated with the practice of the mystical traditions of Islam that are commonly referred to as turuq or Sufi orders. 7. The public interventions of the female ‘‘preachers’’ generate contestations that differ significantly from those surrounding male leaders of the reform movement (Schulz 2010, 2012). Critics take particular issue with female leaders, whose activities in semipublic and public arenas they decry as signs of a lack of propriety. They thereby allude to the fact that although ‘‘edifying lessons’’ were conventionally deemed to be an important domain of female Muslim activity and moral leadership, women were expected to do so only in more intimate, women-only educational settings. 8. Historically, religious leadership in this area of Muslim West Africa was grounded in two sources of authority. Religious leaders drew on their sustained knowledge in the religious disciplines of jurisprudence and interpretation. Religious experts could also base their claims to authority on their genealogical connections to illustrious families associated with a Sufi order or even to the leader (shaykh) of a Sufi order and thus on their capacity to ‘‘tap’’ into the special divine blessings (baraka) that these religious families were said to hold. 9. Haidara often maintains that his genealogical origins (from a family famously associated with Sufi-related practices and spiritual authority) do not play a role in his successful mobilization of large numbers of followers. But whenever he interacts with his acolytes, he is very responsive to their inclination to treat him as their ‘‘spiritual guide’’ (nyemo`go`), a term that alludes to his spiritual intercession with God that is similar to the role played by shaykhs and other ‘‘friends of God’’ (Arabic, wali). 10. This observation also applies to those young men who, living in Bamako and other towns of southern Mali, identify themselves not as acolytes, but as his ‘‘fans’’ and eagerly attend Haidara’s public ‘‘prayer gatherings.’’ Their support of Haidara points to yet another, widely acknowledged reason for Haidara’s enormous success: his repeated claim that ‘‘he does not meddle with politics,’’ a claim he often combines with a denunciation of ‘‘hypocritical’’ Muslim leaders and their affiliation with governmental, ‘‘immoral’’ politics (Schulz 2006a). 11. Starting in the late 1930s, reform-minded Muslim intellectuals returned to Mali from Egypt and the hejaz (the area around Mecca and Medina) and sought to purify local practices of Islam from what they considered to be unlawful innovations, as exemplified in the notions of human intercession associated with Islamic mystical traditions and their organizational forms, the so-called Sufi orders (Arabic, turuq). The reformists sought to adapt traditional Qur’anic education to the new exigencies of the time and,

Notes to pages 190–95

303

in a situation of competition with colonial schooling, to broaden access to religious education. They initiated changes in the pedagogy and curricula of traditional Qur’anic education that challenged established religious specialists and contributed to the diversification of the field of Muslim debate (Amselle 1985; Triaud 1986; Brenner 2001). 12. Many of their ‘‘writing’’ (sebeni) practices related to the hidden powers of letters and numbers (Arabic, ‘ilm al-huruf ). In addition to esoteric practices relating to the hidden, power-laden significance of words, names, and verses from the Qur’an, there exist other categories of practices that similarly reflect Islamic conceptions of man’s engagement with the hidden forces of the universe. Among them are visions, dreams, and other practices related to prophetic revelation and predictive efforts such as astrology and geomancy (Arabic, ‘ilm al-raml, khatt al-raml), along with other forms of divination and soothsaying (Brenner 1984, 22–23). 13. Muslim scholars claimed that any kind of power, be it ‘‘worldly,’’ spiritual, or sacred, had its origin in divine power (se), and thus blurred the distinction between the realms of ‘‘religion’’ and ‘‘politics.’’ 14. These uses are commonly referred to in local languages as ‘‘recipes’’ (dalilu). The dominant role of the Islamic writing paradigm is illustrated by the fact that non-Islamic esoteric power practices employ ‘‘writing’’ in similar ways. In each case, ‘‘writing’’ testifies to the secret knowledge (donnifin, literally ‘‘dark/occult knowledge’’) of experts (McNaughton 1982; Schulz 2007; see Lambek 1993). See Schulz 2007 and 2008 for a detailed discussion of these different uses of ‘‘writing.’’ 15. The bodily mediation of esoteric forces may also involve the—literal— ingestion of God’s word in the form of a solution made of the water that has been used to wash off the sacred words inscribed by a practitioner on a writing plate. (See, for example, Mommersteeg 1991, 58.) 16. For the economic transactions effected during the group meetings, see Schulz 2011, ch. 5. 17. Among these practices are those practiced at the tombs of eminent religious figures, some of them the leaders of a Sufi order, who because of their exemplary piety and/or erudition were already during their lifetime considered to be a ‘‘friend of God’’ (wali). Believers’ devotional activities revolve around various haptic engagements, such as kneeling and touching with one’s forehead the stone marking the tomb or touching other material tokens of the wali’s pious excellence. 18. The following discussion draws extensively on Schulz 2012. 19. As I discuss elsewhere in more detail, the term for ‘‘hearing’’ (me`n) also denotes ‘‘heeding.’’ See Schulz 2011, ch. 7. 20. Historically, among Muslims, the ambivalence toward the transformative potential of speech often manifested itself in contrasting judgments

304

Notes to pages 195–203

about the moralizing activities of women and of male preachers (Schulz 2012). Elite Muslim women would be respected for their pious comportment and for their ‘‘truthfulness’’ that, according to listeners, was reflected in certain qualities and ethical effects of their voices. Male preachers, in contrast, were often judged according to their argument and particular wordings of their sermons. There thus existed—and still exists—a gender-specific moral framework that serves to assess and validate proper and ‘‘truthful’’ speech. 21. It is telling in this respect that at the beginning of his pathbreaking career as a media preacher in the late 1980s, Haidara received the nickname Wulibali Haidara—‘‘Haidara [Who Speaks] the Undeniable Truth.’’ 22. For another event that illustrates the following argument, see Schulz, forthcoming. 23. The shirts display a complex potpourri of attachments (horns, claws, skin-covered amulets) taken from and representative of the forces of the wilderness that the hunters seek to control and to put to their own use. 24. It should be noted that McNaughton (1982) himself does not pay much attention to the particular ways dress (and fabric) help to mediate supernatural powers. That is, he treats the hunters’ shirts mainly as a kind of canvas to which amulets and other containers of supernatural forces are attached. Also, McNaughton emphasizes primarily the symbolic and expressive functions of the shirts, thereby downplaying the fact that they do not only represent, but effect the workings of supernatural powers. spaces of refusal: photophobic spirits and the technical medium of photography Heike Behrend 1. In 1840, Hippolyte Bayard, the inventor and unlucky rival of LouisJacques-Mande´ Daguerre and William Henry Fox Talbot for the claim to have invented photography, took a photograph of himself as if dead by drowning. Bayard had tried in vain to interest the academies in his process for the positive printing of photographic images, and in this way, he chose to comment visually and silently on his marginalization, thereby producing the first fictional photograph in the history of photography (Frizot 1998, 30; Brunet 2009, 88). 2. In fact, as John Harvey has suggested, spirit photography added to the ritual and professionalization of bereavement, in particular after the Civil War in the United States and after World War I in Europe. For grieving relatives and friends, sitting for a spirit photographer was as customary as a visit to a ‘‘normal’’ photographer. ‘‘The photographer medium married heaven and earth, the dead and the living, on the surface of a glass plate’’ (Harvey 2007, 58). 3. Japan has also a strong tradition of spirit photography that continues today.

Notes to pages 203–16

305

4. Although the otherwise outstanding issue of Visual Anthropology, edited by Benjamin R. Smith and Richard Vokes, contains quite a few examples, in particular, from Australian Aborigines, that problematize the early relationship between photography and spirits as interdiction, this complication was neither taken up nor theorized in the introduction by the two editors. 5. Personal communication from Linda Giles. 6. Personal communication from Linda Giles. 7. This negative relation to the color black needs further research. Martin Zillinger, studied spirit possession cults in Morocco and the Moroccan diaspora (see ‘‘Absence and the Mediation of the Audiovisual Unconscious’’ in this volume), informed me that spirits inducing the lions’ trance among adepts of the Isawa brotherhood object to the camera because it is black. In order to get them to accept its presence, the camera is wrapped in white cloth. In Morocco, the color black is associated with the (Christian-Jewish) Sabbath spirits, which show an affinity for everything ‘‘European,’’ including alcohol. There, the color white is conceptualized as the color of Islamic feast days. I am grateful to Martin Zillinger for his critical comments on my paper. 8. Surprisingly, in a photographic book on the Bori cult by Caroline Alida and Adeline Masquelier, published in 2010, the interdiction on taking pictures is not mentioned at all. In fact, the photographs seem to have been taken in the private domain of the spirit mediums when they were not possessed by a spirit. Unfortunately, the photographer gives no further information about the interactions and negotiations between her and the photographed members of the Bori cult. She only mentions that she allowed the photographed persons to determine how they wanted to show themselves, and that she never used a flash (Alida and Masquelier 2010, 123). 9. Vashti, the daughter of an American Indian chief, was said to have been slain with her father in 1861 at the Yellowstone River massacre. Vashti and Wapanaw appeared in Mumler’s spirit photographs (Harvey 2007, 63)—see below. 10. Series of photographs have been described as ‘‘filmic,’’ because they transform the ‘‘cut’’ of time between photographs into an illusion of flow and movement (Schwarzenbach 2005, 159 cited by Sykora 2010, 556). 11. There are many reasons why spirit photography and Spiritualism declined after the World War I, but in private circles, the practice of spirit mediumship continues today, and it has shown a remarkable resiliency. From the beginning, spirit mediums were suspected of being deceptive, manipulative, and a hoax. This, however, forced its followers to rethink and refine their methods even more in order to prove the existence of spirits. And because the Spiritualists had never excluded the possibility of fraud, the spectacular discovery of a few faked cases did not destroy the credibility of the

306

Notes to pages 216–25

movement as a whole. In Germany, until the 1920s, spirit mediums had even been used by the police and detectives to find murderers and other criminals (Schellinger 2009). 12. Linda Giles informed me that she was able to photograph spirit ceremonies without too many problems, except in some locations like Mombasa. Yet it still took her a while to get permission to take flash photos. 13. However, the trope of shunning the light, of secrecy and betrayal, came up in the spirit photographer Mumler’s trial. Mumler admitted that he had been hiding in the closet in performing his secret and delicate art. The darkroom became the space in which the photographic conjurer avoided the light of day and lurked in the shadows, reanimating the photographic doubles (Kaplan 2008, 219). 14. Of course, photography, although arresting what it depicts, also is able to visualize motion, for example, by blurring the contours of the photographed object (by putting it out of focus) or by producing series of pictures. 15. The director of Hakuri is Bala Anas Babinlata. ‘‘look with your own eyes!’’: visualizations of spirit mediums and their viewing techniques in tanzanian video films Claudia Bo¨hme 1. Field notes, Dar es Salaam, September 26, 2006. 2. Jessica Erdtsieck (2003, 57) identified twenty-three terms for different specializations of waganga. To avoid misleading translations, throughout what follows, I will use the Swahili term. 3. In my analysis I will refer mainly to the movies of Mussa Banzi and the production and distribution company Wananchi Video Production. Banzi is one of the pioneers of the Tanzanian film industry famous for many horror movies in which waganga perform. 4. It can also be referred to what Birgit Meyer in the context of Pentecostal-Charismatic Christianity in Ghana has called ‘‘techno-religious realism’’ which ‘‘transcends facile oppositions of technology and belief, media and authenticity, and entertainment and religion’’ (Meyer 2005, 6). 5. In the comic strip Kisiki cha Mpingo (The ebony stump), by John P. Oscar and Emmanuel P. Soko (Dream Team Entertainment, 2002), for example, the mganga and his counterpart, the witch, use a runinga za kiasili, ‘‘a magic mirror . . . in which the magicians can follow the events they are interested in, as on a monitoring camera’’ (Beez 2004, 157). 6. Runinga is another word for ‘‘television’’ in Swahili. 7. Asilia, a derivation from asili (beginning, origin, source, ancestry, family, originally, in nature, in olden times . . . ), means ‘‘genuine’’ or ‘‘original.’’

Notes to pages 225–29

307

8. Kibuyu here means both ‘‘calabash’’ and the name of a spirit. Story by Hemmie Rajab; Sky Video in cooperation with the Bagamoyo College of Arts, sponsored by the National Social Security Fund (NSSF) (1999). 9. Nigerian movies are also blamed for the revival of witchcraft practices in Tanzania. In a newspaper article on the killings of albinos in Tanzania, Godson Mollel, chair of the Arusha section of the Chama cha Albino (Association of Albinos), is quoted as claiming that the severe attacks on albinos and selling of their body parts for witchcraft purposes in 2007 and 2008 in the northern part of Tanzania could be related to the influence of Nigerian video films (Engelhardt and Eveleens 2009). In reaction to the killings, the government banned waganga throughout Tanzania in January 2009 until Dr. Tamba, the chairman of the association of waganga in Tanzania (CHAWATIATA, the acronym for Chama cha Waganga na Wakunga wa Tiba Asilia Tanzania, the Association of Traditional Healers and Midwives, Tanzania), convinced the government that not all waganga were involved in these evil practices. Interview with Dr. Tamba, October 19, 2009. Incidentally in one of Tamba’s first movies, Tabana (Banzi, 2004), the topic of sacrificed albinos was raised and condemned. 10. Interview with Dr. Maneno Tamba, October 19, 2009. 11. See also Krings (2010), who elaborates on the Nigerian film industry, ‘‘Nollywood,’’ as a model for the Tanzanian video industry. 12. Mussa Idi Kibwana Bwaduke was born in 1978 in Dar es Salaam and was working as a cartoonist for several Tanzanian newspapers. When he left the Bagamoyo High School, he joined the Kaole Sanaa Group, where he became a cameraman and director for television serials on ITV (Independent Television). So far, he has written and directed about sixty video films. 13. Interview with Dr. Tamba, October 19, 2009. 14. Ironically, in the case of the movie Nsyuka the accusation of a negative representation of the waganga was created by the producers themselves as a fake scandal, a common practice in the Tanzanian video industry to promote the movies. ‘‘The Makers of Nsyuka to Be Called to Court?’’ was the title of the article in the newspaper Kasheshe, in which one of the associations of waganga in Tanzania called CHAWAMAMU claimed that the waganga in the film were ridiculed and given a negative image. In films such as Nsyuka, the waganga would cheat on people and do not help them, as they would do in reality. CHAWAMAMU warned the filmmakers that if they continued to make fun of waganga in the films, the association would take them to court. CHAWAMAMU is the acronym of Chama cha Watafiti wa Malaria sugu, Mazingira na Ukimwi kwa Tiba Asili, the Association of Researchers of Severe Malaria, Witchcraft, and AIDS with Traditional Methods. ‘‘Waandaaji wa Nsyuka kuburuzwa kortini?’’ (The makers of Nsyuka to be called to court?), Kasheshe, August 6, 2005.

308

Notes to pages 229–35

15. Manyaunyau is the plural nominal derivation, here reduplication, of nyau as onomatopoeic for cat. 16. Interview with Dr. Manyaunyau, October 12, 2009. 17. Interview with Mussa Banzi, September 26, 2006. 18. The actor Rajabu Jumanne, alias Chili, whose uncle is a real mganga, is famous for his comical performance and mganga songs which he collects from real waganga and also composes himself. These songs, also called dhikri, from the Arabic dhikr (remembrance) are used in Sufi brotherhoods as a ritual chanting in praise of God (Giles 1987, 253) and are performed by Muslim healers at the beginning of a traditional ritual healing performance ngoma. (Ngoma means ‘‘drum,’’ ‘‘music,’’ or ‘‘dance.’’) Healing or therapeutic ngoma were traditionally performed in ritual cults, but were later dismissed by waganga working individually (Erdtsieck 2003, 48).The songs are characterized by repetitive rhythmic chanting and a breathing technique leading to hyperventilation and trance (Giles 1987, 253). These songs are sung by the mganga actor at the beginning or end of a film scene and, as Jumanne states, give the scenes a local flavor and make it more entertaining for the audience. He also translates local songs from languages like Kizaramo into Swahili to make it understandable for the audience. Interview with Rajabu Jumanne, Dar es Salaam, December 11, 2007. 19. ‘‘In colonial times, as well as in the Ujamaa era, popular theatre was used to fight against superstition and to impart messages about modern health care and so on. As a legacy of this tradition, waganga and witchdoctors are almost always ridiculed in contemporary plays as well’’ (Lange 2002, 225–26). 20. King Majuto, Chili, Mganga Ndele, Zimwi, and Masanja are among the comedy actors who have acted as waganga, to name but a few. 21. Communication, May 30, 2009. 22. Interview with Mussa Banzi, September 26, 2006. 23. Moris Lyimo, ‘‘Asilimia 70 ya Watanzania hupata tiba kwa dawa za asili.’’ Nipashe, February 21, 2007. 24. One exception is the movie Noti-Mlango wa siri (2004) from Sultan Tamba in which a mganga conjures the main actor’s mother into a money producing dead body. 25. In another film by Mussa Banzi, Kinyamkela (2005), a modern doctor is suddenly confronted with the fact that he has been chosen by the spirit Kinyamkela to receive the mkoba (basket) that means that he has to inherit the mganga profession. The film plays with the transfer of the healing profession and Banzi’s own biography, because his grandmother was herself a mganga who worked with Kinyamkela. When she died, Banzi was relieved that the mkoba was passed on not to him, but to the other side of his family. Interview with Mussa Banzi, September 26, 2006.

309

Notes to pages 236–41

26. While one cannot speak of a Muslim cinema in Tanzania, certain aspects of the visualization of the mganga can be traced to Islamic aesthetics, like the use of Islamic healing traditions like dhikr as described above. The visualization practices can also be compared to early Oriental cinema as a haptic space in which, as Laura Marks describes, ‘‘The mysterious and magical powers attributed to the Orient merge with the new tricks of optical printing and hand-tinting’’ which resulted in antirealist spectacles (Marks 2010, 119–120). 27. The priest as a figure fighting against superstition came later, when Christian filmmakers entered the industry. The influence of the Nigerian model of a witch doctor thus can be described as a kind of ‘‘Pentecostalization’’ of Muslim-made video films in Tanzania. I thank the Fordham University Press reviewer for this observation. 28. On the globally diffused belief in female water spirits and deities, see Wendl 1998, 1991, 2004. 29. Interview with Hamis Bakari, Kigogo/Dar es Salaam, December 6, 2007. 30. Interview with Dr. Tamba and Dr. Manyaunyau, Dar es Salaam, October 12 and 19, 2009. possession play: on cinema, reenactment, and trance in the cologne Tribes Anja Dreschke I would like to thank the participants of the Trance Mediums and New Media conference for their inspiring contributions and discussions. In particular, I thank Heike Behrend, Erhard Schu¨ttpelz, and Martin Zillinger for critique and comments and Sonja Scho¨pfel for her translation work. 1. In the following, the terms ‘‘society’’ or ‘‘club’’ will be used to translate the term Verein, a particular German form of community that can be defined as ‘‘a group of people having a common interest and cause and deciding to organize themselves for certain goals. The association is jurally registered, has a management committee elected by the votes of the members and has a membership open to those of the same or similar interest and paying a small membership fee’’ (Chaudhary 2006, 5). On the significance of the Verein in German society, see Hu¨welmeier 1997; on the social history of its development, see Hu¨welmeier 1997, 23–36. 2. Within the framework of my ethnographic research, I accompanied the Cologne Tribes with a video camera for several years. My study is situated in the fields of audiovisual and media anthropology and encompasses an extensive methodological use of video and photography. The comprehensive

310

Notes to pages 241–46

audiovisual material I recorded during my research supplied the basis for the ninety-minute documentary film Die Sta¨mme von Ko¨ln (The tribes of Cologne, 2011). It was published on DVD after its cinema release and screenings at several international film festivals. The ethnographic information provided in this article is derived from the observations, discussions, and interviews carried out during the field research. 3. I use the terms ‘‘shaman’’ and ‘‘shamanism’’ here as they are employed by the Cologne Tribes themselves, thus presenting the local concept of shamanism from the perspective of the actors involved. 4. Petra Hartmann and Stephan Schmitz give a very comprehensive overview of the phenomenon in Ko¨lner Sta¨mme: Menschen, Mythen, Maskenspiel (1991). 5. The traditions of the Cologne carnival after its reinvention in 1823 were shaped by romanticism and nationalism and are closely related to the development of civic clubs and societies in the course of the nineteenth century. Moreover, in the wake of colonialism, between 1870 and 1940, so-called Vo¨lkerschauen—exhibitions in which non-European ‘‘exotic’’ peoples were displayed in world’s fairs, zoological gardens, circuses, and fun fairs throughout Germany and the rest of the ‘‘Western World’’—flourished. These colonial spectacles, which attracted their audiences with the promise actually to meet real ‘‘primitives’’ face to face, were taken up in the carnival parades. (See Frohn 2001.) Furthermore, in 1885, German colonial politics became the topic of the Rose Monday parade when, under the motto ‘‘Held Karneval als Kolonisator,’’ ‘‘Hero Carnival as Colonizer’’—an allusion to the occupation of the German South-West Africa (today Namibia). All participants dressed up as Africans, and the event caused an Afrikafieber (Africa fever) all over town. In the aftermath, numerous carnival clubs mimicking Africans were founded (Hartmann and Schmitz 1991, 30–31). 6. On the history of the Cologne carnival, see, for example Frohn 2001; on the Cologne Tribes in the context of carnival, see Dreschke 2010 and forthcoming. 7. There are no distinct definitions of the terms ‘‘reenactment’’ and ‘‘living history,’’ but they can roughly be divided as follows: reenactments are more or less improvised role playing in which historic events—notably, battles—are reconstructed in detail at original sites in coeval garments. Living history, in contrast, denotes a popular form of mediating the past in museum exhibitions through the impersonation of historic characters and through the practices of experimental archaeology (Roselt and Otto 2012). Among hobbyists, the term is also used for performances that are more generally dedicated to a collective submergence into an ancient era—most commonly the Middle Ages—without referring to a certain person or event. There is some disagreement as to

Notes to pages 246–50

311

whether popular cultural phenomena such as live-action role playing, cosplay (costume play), and Star Trek fandom should be understood as reenactments, since they relate to fictional scenarios. 8. For example, reenactments are not always directed at an audience, and the boundary between performers and spectators is quite permeable. 9. Although Indian hobbyism is widespread all over Europe and North America, Western and Indian clubs are particularly common in Germany, probably due to the persisting popularity of the adventure novels by Karl May and their numerous film adaptations. Recent publications on Indian hobbyism give proof of the cultural relevance of this phenomenon. Particularly illuminating is Petra Kalshoven’s research on Indian hobbyists in various European countries (Kalshoven 2012, 2005, 2004); Deloria (1998) locates it in the United States. For further literature on European Indianism, see Bolz 1987 and Broyles Gonzalez 1989; on Indian hobbyism in the context of the Karl May Festspiele and among the Cologne Tribes, see Sieg 2002, and for the most recent study on the so-called ‘‘Indianisten’’ in the former German Democratic Republic, see Von Borries and Fischer 2008. Among the Cologne Tribes of today, the clubs that are focused on Native Americans can be considered comparatively marginal, but they used to be of great importance in the 1960s and 1970s. 10. On the appropriation of indigenous spiritual practices by nonindigenous practitioners, see, for example, Lindquist 1997, Jenkins 2004, and Roch 2006. 11. On this debate, see, for example, Hoppa´l 1994, Jakobsen 1999, and Johansen 2001. 12. On the construction and popularization of shamanism by anthropologists and ‘‘Western’’ practitioners, see, for example, Flaherty 1992, Hutton 1999, Von Stuckrad 2002, Znamenski 2007. 13. Referring to the local mythology that underlies the possession cults of the Songhay-Zama, Rouch’s essay ‘‘On the Vicissitudes of the Self: The Possessed Dancer, the Magician, the Sorcerer, the Filmmaker, and the Ethnographer’’ (1982) describes in detail how the process of filmmaking is intertwined with their view of spirit possession: every person has a double, called a bia, a term that has several meanings such as shadow or image, but also a mirror reflection or soul and a ‘‘spiritual principle of ‘living beings’ ’’ (Rouch 1982, 4). This double is connected to the body of the person, but lives in a kind of parallel world that is the world of spirits, as well as the place of dreams and imagination (ibid.). During possession, deities take the place of the bia and act through the body of the possessed. A sorcerer can steal doubles in order to eat them. If he succeeds within a certain amount of time, the person dies. Only magicians can try to catch the double and restore it to the

312

Notes to pages 250–53

person. Rouch compares these concepts to the act of filmmaking by equating the camera with an aspect of a spirit that takes possession of a person. In the act of filming, the filmmaker becomes a sorcerer by consuming the doubles when he sends the films to the laboratory to be developed. When he brings the doubles/images back during the film projection, he in turn becomes a magician. 14. Concerning the origin and effects of the perception of mounted nomadic ethnic groups as an ‘‘Asian threat,’’ see Gießauf 2006. He illuminates the ‘‘development and tradition’’ of such stereotypes in Central Europe ‘‘between the end of antiquity until the end of the Middle Ages,’’ but states that ‘‘the Occident’s primal fear’’ of a ‘‘threat from the east’’ can be traced ‘‘from Huns to the Turks up to Communism’’ (Gießauf 2006, 12). 15. The ‘‘Trizonesien-Lied’’ (Trizonia song), by Karl Berbuer, refers to the American-British-French occupation zone of postwar Germany known as the ‘‘Trizone.’’ A verse in the chorus says ‘‘We are the Aborigenes of Trizonia.’’ 16. The ‘‘Trizonesien-Lied’’ became so popular after 1949 that it was played at official occasions as a substitute for the missing national anthem (Limbach 2004). 17. Kathrin Sieg comes to a similar conclusion analyzing the great popularity of Indian impersonations in the context of the Karl May Festivals that also emerged in postwar Germany. These festivals present dramatized versions of the Wild West novels by the German author Karl May that have had a great impact on German adolescents since their first publication in the last decade of the nineteenth century. In his adventure novels, Karl May paints a very broad-brush image of a fictitious Apache chief named Winnetou, a ‘‘noble savage’’ who, together with his German blood brother Old Shatterhand, fights cash-hungry villains to protect his people from extermination. The festivals usually take place in open-air theatres, so-called ‘‘natural stages’’ that are specifically designed for this purpose. The most famous are situated in Bad Segeberg, Elspe, and Dasing. According to Sieg (2002), these performances served as ‘‘historical surrogation’’ by which the Germans tried to exculpate themselves of their past. 18. During my field research, I was told many different versions of the legend of St. Ursula that circulate among the societies. According to the most common version, Ursula was a Christian princess from Brittany who was engaged to a pagan prince. To escape this marriage, she asked her father to go with her on a pilgrimage, together with 11,000 virgins. On their journey, they came to Cologne, where Ursula had a vision: an angel told her to visit the pope in Rome and thereafter to return to Cologne to die in martyrdom and save the city from the Hunnic invasion. Thus, she and her companions went

Notes to pages 253–60

313

to Rome, and when they returned to Cologne, they found the city besieged by the Huns. The leader of the Huns, Attila, offered to spare the city if Ursula would become his wife. But she chose to die in martyrdom, rather than be married to a pagan. When the Huns had killed Ursula and her 11,000 companions, an angelic army came down from heaven and chased away the Hunnic invaders. Thus, Ursula saved the city from the Huns, and as a reward, not only was sanctified, but became the city’s patron saint. The purported remains of her and her companions were and today still are exhibited in the Golden Chamber (Goldene Kammer) of the Basilica Church of St. Ursula in Cologne and are venerated in a relic procession once a year. These relics, together with what are supposed to be the remains of the three Magi that are treasured in the Cologne cathedral, are said to form the basis of the economic rise of the ‘‘holy’’ city of Cologne in the Middle Ages. 19. For Vo¨lkerschau, see note 5. 20. The Black Madonna at St. Maria in der Kupfergasse, a church of pilgrimage in the center of Cologne, has a special meaning in local folk piety. The Carnival prince visits the Madonna to pray for blessings for the parade on Rose Monday, and members of the local soccer team, the 1. FC Ko¨ln, officially pray for her support before an important match. 21. Only when I spoke to younger shamans could I discover which literature they drew upon. They especially recommended a book that they referred to as their ‘‘Bible,’’ Erika and Manfred Taube’s Schamanen und Rhapsoden: Die geistige Kultur der alten Mongolei (Shamans and rhapsodies: The spiritual culture of ancient Mongolia), which was published in Leipzig in 1983 and therefore was hard to obtain in West Germany. There were only a few copies, which were passed on from one shaman to the other. Especially younger shamans use the ‘‘Bible of shamans,’’ as it is called, to develop and prepare rituals. 22. Over the last decades, a vast amount of literature dealing with shamanism, mostly guidebooks, was published in the context of the ‘‘New Age’’ or esoteric movement. (See Voss 2011, 52.) 23. Many of my interlocutors told me that they enjoy the experience of having no access to the Internet or TV during summer camp. For some, abstinence from mass media seems to be a particular quality of the hobby. 24. A visibly worn watch is considered the worst slip, possibly because it recalls probably the best-known faux pas in film history: an extra wearing a watch in the 1925 movie Ben Hur. 25. Photographers and journalists are welcome guests at the summer camps, because the Cologne Tribes are very much interested in appearing in the local media. This may be due to the fact that they want to keep up with the established carnival societies, whose events are broadcast by the local TV stations on a regular basis. Some are even aired nationwide.

314

Notes to pages 260–66

26. During my field research, I employed either still photography or video cameras. So in the following, I will refer to both media. Concerning the matters discussed here, the Cologne Tribes make no difference between still photography and video cameras. 27. This is in contrast to fan cultures such as the Star Trek fandom, or fantasy role players who deliberately choose characters from the films or TV series they admire. trance techniques, cinema, and cybernetics Ute Holl 1. The series consists of six films (Bateson and Mead 1951–e): A Balinese Family, Bathing Babies in Three Cultures, Childhood Rivalry in Bali and New Guinea, First Days in the Life of a New Guinea Baby, Karba’s First Years, and Trance and Dance in Bali. 2. Mead: ‘‘You find the same pattern recurring in different aspects of the culture. You find, for instance, a house in which there’s no ornamentation inside, all the ornamentation’s on the gate. You find a people who are preoccupied with the external aspects of their skin and believe that any breakage will impair them so that they’re imperfect for something else, and so forth. With that kind of understanding, if you’re told something, you can tell whether it fits or not. . . . From a complex culture like Bali you take a lot of chunks—birthday ceremonies and funeral ceremonies, children’s games and whole series of things, and then you analyze them for the patterns that are there’’ (Bateson, Mead, and Brand 1976). Actually, the notion of patterns enters Bateson’s methodology through the work of his father, geneticist William Bateson. (See Bateson 1972a, 74.) 3. Bateson states that not all societies practice a contrasting sex ethos, but that in some societies, differences between male and female ethos are diminished. In any case, Bateson and also Mead came to conceive of identity differences as cultural procedures based on biological facts. ‘‘I am inclined to see the status quo as a dynamic equilibrium, in which changes are continually taking place. On the one hand, processes of differentiation tending towards increase of the ethological contrast, and on the other, processes which continually counteract this tendency towards differentiation. . . . I would define schismogenesis as a process of differentiation in the norms of individual behaviour resulting from cumulative interaction between individuals’’ (Bateson 1936, 175). 4. After the war, Gregory Bateson elaborated on this figure of thought precisely as an alternative to John von Neumann’s game theory formula of deterrence (Bateson 1972b, 115). 5. This position has often been contested since, prominently in a gesture of counteranthropology by Gordeon J. Jensen and Luh Ketuut Suryani (1992)

Notes to pages 266–71

315

who conclude that many observations of Balinese behavior were induced by the appearance of Mead and Bateson themselves. This discussion is omitted here in favor of Bateson and Mead’s basic epistemological considerations and in favor of the issue of media in this essay. 6. In fact, Gregory Bateson claims to have been one of the initiators of the project (Bateson, Mead, and Brand 1976). 7. In this article, McCulloch and Pfeiffer point out that Boolean algebra (combining binary elements by and, or, not) was applied to biological and technical networks at the same time, but independently of each other, by Claude Shannon, who described the functions of relays in networks with it in his master’s thesis ‘‘A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits’’ (1940). Unaware of this the work, Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts published ‘‘A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity’’ three years later. 8. This program was not initially called ‘‘cybernetics,’’ because Norbert Wiener’s book Cybernetics (1948) had not yet been published. On the genealogy of cybernetics, see Von Foerster 1993, 115. 9. ‘‘It meant that the notes I took were similarly multiplied by a factor of ten, and when Made’s notes also were added in, the volume of our work was changed in tremendously significant ways’’ Mead states in a chapter called ‘‘Bali and Iatmul: A Quantum Leap’’ in Blackberry Winter (1972, 234). ‘‘Made’s notes’’ refers to I Made Kaler, her informant in Bali. 10. Catherine Russell, quoting from a introductory speech of Patrick Laughney in the Museum of Natural History on 8 November 1996, refers to about 36,000 photographs, 45,000 feet of film, and 7,200 boxes of notes. 11. This, of course, has been a general notation system in anthropology, and Bateson in his research on the Naven initially represents the sociology of the tribe in exactly those diagrams. But Le´vi-Strauss is conceiving them as codes that possibly will be digitally processed. 12. ‘‘The basic model was a theatrical or film script, and in fact, the team soon came to call these notes ‘scenarios.’ Contextual information included the day of observation, (and of write-up) a summary title of the action, a complete list of Balinese present, the kind of photography used (cine or still, with identifying numbers), and the general cultural themes or behavior exhibited. Then came the ethnographic record proper. Along the left edge was a running time note (measured against synchronized watches), and on the right the actual descriptions, with notes on the involvement of the ethnographer’’ (Jacknis 1988, 163). 13. ‘‘In fact, Mead acted as a kind of director, alerting Bateson to particular interesting behavior to be filmed’’ (Jacknis 1988, 164). 14. Chronophotography, of course, carries its own history of scientific thought and order.

316

Notes to pages 273–77

15. For a detailed account on the construction of race as spectacle and specifically on the work of Felix-Louis Regnault, see Tobing Rony 1996. 16. ‘‘It is the contention of this book that the epistemology of contingency which took shape in the nineteenth century was crucial to the emergence and development of the cinema as a central representational form of the twentieth century’’ (Doane 2002, 19). 17. See the brilliant article by Andrew Lakoff, ‘‘Freezing Time: Margaret Mead’s Diagnostic Photography’’ (1996). 18. ‘‘From Aristotle on, the final cause has always been the mystery. This came out then. We didn’t realize then (at least I didn’t realize it, though McCulloch might have) that the whole of logic would have to be reconstructed for recursiveness. When I came in from overseas in ’45, I went within the first two or three days to Frank Fremont-Smith, and said, ‘Let’s have a Macy Conference on that stuff’ ’’ (Bateson, Mead, and Brand 1976, online). 19. Catherine Russell, studying yet another transition in ethnographic imaging—that is, from film to video—remarks: ‘‘While slow motion certainly lends itself to analysis, and is almost always used in films about possession rituals, it also mimics the effect of trance, the ‘otherworldliness’ of the spectacle. The fragmented nature of Bateson’s footage, combined with the slow motion, suggests that the imperative of accurate documentation extends to capturing the ‘feel’ of trance. If this cannot be imparted to the spectator of the film, how can the event be known?’’ (Russell 1999, 205) 20. Deren 1947c, entry for February 24, 1947. 21. After a lecture, she noted: ‘‘Last night the Bateson theory lecture and the mix up about Balinese ‘startle.’ I suspect it doesn’t sit in there right, because it is a ‘symptom’ of something which is an order, and it is not itself an order in the sense that the ‘other feedbacks’ are orders. Anyway, that dominance-submission business feels very wrong somehow but I don’t dare speak as strongly as I should like to because I’d not have the right thing to offer instead. At least if he would use arrows of dynamic movement (what the hell is the name of them?) rather than make those directional signposts! Time Time Time—not Space. Energy—not Matter.’’ Deren 1947b, entry for February 22, 1947.

works cited

books and articles Aber, W. W. 1990 [1906]. A Guide to Mediumship Dictated by a Materialized Spirit, through the Mediumship of W. W. Aber. Lily Dale, NY: Dale News. Reprinted with original pagination in Gary L. Ward, ed., 1990. Spiritualism I: Spiritualist Thought. New York: Garland. Adogame, Afe. 2010. ‘‘From House Cells to Warehouse Churches?: Christian Church Outreach Mission International in Translocal Contexts.’’ In Traveling Spirits: Migrants, Markets, and Mobilities, edited by Gertrud Hu¨welmeier and Kristine Krause, 165–185. Oxford: Routledge. Adorno, Rolena. 2000. Guamon Poma: Writing and Resistance in Colonia Peru, 2nd ed. Austin: University of Texas Press. Akamatsu, Chijo, and Takashi Akiba. 1991 [1938]. Choso˘nmusokeui yo˘n’gu. Korean language translation of Cho¯sen fuzoku no kenkyu. 2 vols. Translated by U. Sim. Seoul: Tongmun. Alaoui, Hassan. 2003. ‘‘Culture, ouverture et modernite´: A Essaouira, le Maroc de´voile son identite´ profonde.’’ Le Matin, June 29, 30–31. Al-Fassi, Allal. 1954. The Independence Movements of Arab North Africa. Washington, D.C.: American Council of Learned Societies. Alida, Caroline, and Adeline Masquelier. 2010. Bori: Healers of the Soul. Milan: Continents Editions. Amselle, Jean Louis. 1985. ‘‘Le Wahhabisme a` Bamako (1945–1985).’’ Canadian Journal of African Studies 19 (2): 345–57. Anderson, Benedict. 1991 [1983]. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. New York/London: Verso. Andezian, Sossie. 1984. ‘‘La Hadra des Isawa: Ce´re´monie re´ligieuse ou spectacle?’’ Annuaire de l’Afrique du Nord 23: 373–81. Andriopoulos, Stefan. 2008. Possessed: Hypnotic Crimes, Corporate Fiction, and the Invention of Cinema. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2013. Ghostly Apparitions: German Idealism, the Gothic Novel, and Optical Media. New York: Zone Books, 2013. Anonymous. 1903. ‘‘Korean Mudang and Pansu’’ Korea Review 3: 145–149, 203–208, 257–260, 301–305, 342–346, 383–389.

317

318

Works Cited

Arnheim, Rudolf. 1979. ‘‘Filmtheorie.’’ In Arnheim, Kritiken und Aufsa¨tze zum Film. Frankfurt am Main: Hanser Verlag, 17–164. Arens, William, and Ivan Karp, eds. 1989. Creativity of Power: Cosmology and Action in African Societies. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press. Arun, C. Joe. 2007. ‘‘From Stigma to Self-Assertion: Paraiyars and the Symbolism of the Parai Drum.’’ Contributions to Indian Sociology 41 (1): 81–104. Asad, Talal. 1993. Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Ashrama, Advaita. 1988. Sri Sarada Devi: A Biography in Pictures. Calcutta: Advaita Ashrama. Attali, Jacques. 1985. Noise: The Political Economy of Music. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Aubin [Descos], Eugene. 1906. Morocco of Today. London: J. M. Dent. Axel, Brian Keith. 2006. ‘‘Anthropology and the New Techniques of Communication.’’ Cultural Anthropology 21 (3): 354–84. Azouvi, Francois. 1976. ‘‘Sens et fonction e´pistemologique de la critique du magne´tisme animal par les Acade´mies.’’ Revue d’histoire des sciences 29 (2): 123–42. Baer, Ulrich. 2005. Spectral Evidence: The Photography of Trauma. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Baier, Karl. 2009. Meditation und Moderne. 2 vols. Wu¨rzburg: Ko¨nigshausen & Neumann. Barthes, Roland. 1981. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Hill & Wang. Basu, Helen. 1994. Habshi Sklaven, Sidi-Fakire: Muslimische Heiligenverehrung im Westlichen Indien. Berlin: Das Arabische Buch. Bateson, Gregory. 1936. Naven: A Survey of the Problems Suggested by a Composite Picture of the Culture of a New Guinea Tribe Drawn from Three Points of View. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1972a [1949]. ‘‘Bali: The Value System of a Steady State.’’ In Steps to an Ecology of the Mind, 107–27. New York: Ballentine Books. ———. 1972b [1940]. ‘‘Experiments in Thinking about Observed Ethnological Material.’’ In Steps to an Ecology of the Mind, 73–87. New York: Ballentine Books. ———. 1982 [1967]. Letter to Warren McCulloch. Reprinted in CoEvolution Quarterly 36 (Winter): 62–67. ———, and Mary Catherine Bateson. 1987. Angels Fear: Towards an Epistemology of the Sacred. New York: Macmillan. ———, and Margaret Mead. 1942. Balinese Character: A Photographic Analysis. Special Publications of the New York Academy of Sciences, vol. 2. New York: The New Academy of Sciences.

Works Cited

319

———, Margaret Mead, and Steward Brand. 1976. ‘‘For God’s Sake, Margaret!’’ CoEvolutionary Quarterly 10 (June): 32–44. Also published online at http://www.oikos.org/forgod.htm. Beattie, John, and John Middleton, eds. 1969. Introduction to Spirit Mediumship and Society in Africa, xvii–xxx. New York: Africana Publishing. Becker, Cynthia. 2002. ‘‘ ‘We Are Real Slaves, Real Ismkhan’: Memories of the Trans-Saharan Slave Trade in the Tafilalet of South-Eastern Morocco.’’ Journal of North African Studies 7 (4)): 97–121. Beez, Jigal. 2004. ‘‘Großstadtfieber und Hexenmeister: Horror-und Fantasycomics aus Tansania.’’ In Africa Screams: Das Bo¨se in Kino, Kunst und Kult, edited by Tobias Wendl, 153–63. Wuppertal: Peter Hammer Verlag. Behrend, Heike. 1999a. Alice Lakwana and the Holy Spirits: War in Northern Uganda, 1985–1997. Athens: University of Ohio Press. ———. 1999b. ‘‘Power to Heal, Power to Kill: Spirit Possession and War in Northern Uganda (1986–1994).’’ In Spirit Possession, Modernity, and Power in Africa, edited by Heike Behrend and Ute Luig, 20–33. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. ———. 2001. ‘‘Salvation and Terror in Western Uganda: The Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God.’’ In Millenarian Movements in Africa and the Diaspora, edited by Jan Lodewijk Grothaars. Brussels: Belgian Association of Africanists. ———. 2003a. ‘‘Photo Magic: Photographs in Practices of Healing and Harming in East Africa.’’ Journal of Religion in Africa 33 (2): 129–45. ———. 2003b. ‘‘ ‘Call and Kill’: Zur Verzauberung und Entzauberung westlicher technischer Medien in Afrika.’’ In Signale der Sto¨rung, edited by Erhard Schu¨ttpelz and Albert Ku¨mmel, 287–300. Munich: Fink. ———. 2004. ‘‘Seelenklau—Zur Geschichte eines interkulturellen Medientransfers.’’ In Seele: Konstruktionen des Innerlichen in der Kunst, edited ny Johannes Bilstein and Matthias Winzen. Staatliche Kunsthalle BadenBaden, Nuremburg: Verlag fu¨r moderne Kunst. ———. 2005a. ‘‘ ‘Untergang der Titanic in Afrika’: Zur interkulturellen Transkription eines nordnigerianischen Remakes.’’ In Bewegliche Horizonte, Festschrift fu¨r Bernhard Streck, edited by Katja Geisenhainer and Katharina Lange, 251–64. Leipzig: Leipziger Universita¨tsverlag. ———. 2005b. ‘‘Zur Medialisierung okkulter Ma¨chte: Geistmedien und Medien der Geister in Afrika.’’ In Gespenster: Erscheinungen-MedienTheorien, edited by Moritz Bassler, Bettina Gruber, and Martina WagnerEgelhaaf, 201–14. Wu¨rzburg: Ko¨nigshausen & Neumann. ———. 2007. ‘‘Magie, Geister und ihre Visualisierung in westafrikanischen Videos.’’ In Afrika Im Wandel, edited by Thomas Bearth et al., 273–85. Zurich: Vdf Hochschulverlag.

320

Works Cited

———. 2011. Resurrecting Cannibals: The Catholic Church, Witch-Hunts and the Production of Pagans in Western Uganda. Oxford: James Currey. ———. 2013. Contesting Visibility: Photographic Practices along the East African Coast. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag. ———, and Ute Luig, eds. 1999. Spirit Possession, Modernity and Power in Africa. Oxford: James Currey. Beltz, Johanne. 2005. Mahar, Buddhist and Dalit: Religious Conversion and SocioPolitical Emancipation. New Delhi: Manohar. Ben-Ami, Shlomo, Yoav Peled, and Alberto Spektorowski, eds. 2000. Ethnic Challenges to the Modern Nation State. Houndsmills, UK: Macmillan. Bender, Cora, and Martin Zillinger. 2014. Handbuch der Medienethnographie, Berlin: Reimer. Bendix, Regina. 1997. In Search of Authenticity: The Formation of Folklore Studies. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Benjamin, Walter. 1969 [1938]. ‘‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.’’ In Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt, 217–51. Translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken. ———. 1980 [1931]. ‘‘A Short History of Photography.’’ In Classic Essays on Photography, edited by Alan Trachtenberg, 199–216. New Haven: Yale University Press. Bergson, Henri. 1991 [1908]. Matter and Memory. Translated by Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer, New York: Zone. Bernal, Victoria. 1994. ‘‘Gender, Culture, and Capitalism: Women and the Remaking of Islamic ‘Tradition’ in a Sudanese Village.’’ Comparative Studies in Society and History 36 (1): 36–67. Bernard, Denis and Andre` Gunthert. 1993. L’instant reˆve´: Albert Londe. Nıˆmes: Editions Jacqueline Chambon. Bernichi, Loubna. 2003. ‘‘Ambience et se´curite´.’’ Maroc Hebdo International, July 4–10. Berque, Jacques. 1967. French North Africa: The Maghrib between Two World Wars. Translated by Jean Stewart. New York: Frederick A. Praeger. Bhabha, Homi K. 1990. ‘‘DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation,’’ in Nation and Narration, Edited by Homi K. Bhabha. London: Routledge. Biddle, Ian, and Vanessa Knights, eds. 2007. Music, Nationality and the Politics of Location: Between the Global and the Local. Hampshire, UK: Ashgate. Bilu, Yoram. 2003. ‘‘Dybbuk, Aslai, Zar: The Cultural Distinctiveness and Historical Situatedness of Possession Illnesses in Three Jewish Milieus.’’ In Spirit Possession in Judaism, edited by Matt Goldish, 346–65. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. ———, and Yehuda C. Goodman. 1997. ‘‘What Does the Soul Say?: Metaphysical Uses of Facilitated Communication in the Jewish Ultraorthodox Community.’’ Ethos 25 (4): 1–33.

Works Cited

321

Blanchot, Maurice. 2007. ‘‘Die zwei Fassungen des Bildlichen.’’ In Die neue Sichtbarkeit des Todes, edited by Thomas Macho and Kristin Marek, 25–40. Munich: Fink. Bloor, David. 1976. Knowledge and Social Imagery. London: Routledge. Boddy, Janice. 1989. Wombs and Alien Spirits: Women, Men, and the Za¯r Cult in Northern Sudan. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. ———. 1994. ‘‘Spirit Possession Revisited: Beyond Instrumentality.’’ In Annual Review of Anthropology 23, 407–34. Bolter, David Jay, and Richard Grusin. 1999. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Bolz, Peter. 1987. ‘‘Life Among the Hunkpapas: A Case Study in German Indian Lore.’’ In Indians and Europe: An Interdisciplinary Collection of Essays, edited by Christian F. Feest, 475–90. Aachen: Rader. Boissevain, Katia. 2006. Sainte parmi les saints: Sayyda Mannubiya ou les recompositions culturelles dans la Tunisie contemporaine. Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose. Bouhlal, A. 1937. ‘‘La came´ra dans nos murs.’’ L’Action Du Peuple, June 17, 2. Braun, Marta. 1992. Picturing Time: The Work of Etienne Jules Marey (1830– 1904). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Brenner, Louis. 1984. ‘‘The ‘Esoteric Sciences’ in West African Islam.’’ In African Healing Strategies, edited by Brian M. Du Toit and Ismail Hussein Abdalla, 20–28. Buffalo: Trado-Medic Books. ———. 1993. ‘‘Constructing Muslim Identities in Mali.’’ In Muslim Identity and Social Change in Subsaharan Africa, edited by Louis Brenner, 59–78. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 2001. Controlling Knowledge: Religion, Power, and Schooling in a West African Muslim Society. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Broyles Gonzalez, Yolanda. 1989. ‘‘Cheyennes in the Black Forest: A Social Drama.’’ In The Americanization of the Global Village: Essays in Comparative Popular Culture, edited by Roger Rollin, 70–86. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press. Bruchhausen, Walter. 2009. ‘‘Wahnsinn oder Heilungsweg, Teufel oder Ahnen?: Ostafrikanische Geistmedien unter deutscher und britischer Herrschaft.’’ In Trancemedien und Neue Medien um 1900: Ein anderer Blick auf die Moderne, edited by Marcus Hahn and Erhard Schu¨ttpelz, 173–85. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag. Bruˆnel, Rene´. 1926. Essai sur la confre´rie religieuse des Aissaoua au Maroc. Paris: Librarie Orientaliste Paul Geuthner. Brunet, Francois. 2009. Photography and Literature. London: Reaktion Books. Bruno, Antonetta L. 2002. The Gate of Words: Language in the Rituals of Korean Shamans. Leiden: CNWS. Bucher, Bernadette. 1981. Icon and Conquest: A Structural Analysis of de Bry’s Great Voyages. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

322

Works Cited

Caillois, Roger. 1958. Les jeux et les hommes: Le masque et le virtige. Paris: Gallimard. ¨ berCallon, Michel. 2006 [1986]. ‘‘Einige Elemente einer Soziologie der U setzung: Die Domestikation der Kammuscheln und der Fischer der St. Brieuc-Bucht.’’ In ANThology: Ein einfu¨hrendes Handbuch zur AkteurNetzwerk-Theorie, edited by Andre´a Belliger and David J. Krieger, 135–74. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag. Camara, Sory. 1976. Gens de la parole: Essai sur la condition et le roˆle dans la socie´te´ Malinke´. Paris: La Haye. Caplan, Pat. 1997. African Voices, African Lives. London: Routledge. Carpenter et al., eds. 1953–57. Explorations: Studies in Culture and Communication 1–8. Carrin, Marine, and Lidia Guzy. 2012. Voices from the Periphery: Subalternity and Empowerment in India. New Delhi: Routledge. Caruth, Cathy. 1996. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Castel, Robert. 1981. ‘‘Bilder und Phantasiebilder.’’ In Eine illegitime Kunst, edited by Pierre Bourdieu et al., 235–66. Frankfurt am Main: Europa¨ische Verlagsanstalt. Charcot, Jean-Martin. 1874. Klinische Vortra¨ge u¨ber Krankheiten des Nervensystems. German translation by Dr. Berthold Fetzer. Stuttgart: Metzler. Chaudhary, M. Azam. 2006. ‘‘Rhineland Ethnography and Pakistani Reflexivity.’’ Zeitschrift fu¨r Ethnologie 131 (1): 1–26. Che´roux, Cle´ment, ed. 2005. The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult. New Haven: Yale University Press. Chlyeh, Abdelhafid. 1998. Les Gnaoua du Maroc: Itine´raires initiatiques transe et possession. Casablanca: Editions Le Fennec. Choi, Chungmoo. 1987. ‘‘The Competence of Korean Shamans as Performers of Folklore.’’ Ph.D. diss., University of Indiana. ———. 1989a. ‘‘The Artistry and Ritual Aesthetics of Urban Korean Shamans.’’ Journal of Ritual Studies 3 (2): 235–50. ———. 1989b. ‘‘The Recruitment of Shamans in Korea: The Symbiosis between Cultural Idiom and Performing Arts.’’ In Shamanism Past and Present, edited by Miha’ly Hoppa’ly and Otto von Sadovszky, 283–95. Budapest: Ethnographic Institute, Hungarian Academy of Sciences and Los Angeles: International Society for Trans-Oceanic Research. ———. 1991. ‘‘Nami, Ch’ae, and Oksun: Superstar Shamans in Korea.’’ In Shamans of the Twentieth Century, edited by Ruth-Inge Heinze, 51–61. New York: Irvington. ———. 1993. ‘‘The Discourse of Decolonization and Popular Memory: South Korea.’’ Positions 1 (1): 77–102.

Works Cited

323

———. 1995. ‘‘Minjung Culture Movement and the Construction of Popular Culture in Korea.’’ In South Korea’s Minjung Movement: The Culture and Politics of Dissidence, edited by Kenneth M. Wells, 105–18. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Claisse, Pierre-Alain. 2003. Les Gnawa marocains de tradition loyaliste: Histoire et perspectives me´diterrane´ennes. Paris: Harmattan. Clancy-Smith, Julia A. 1994. Rebel and Saint: Muslim Notables, Populist Protest, Colonial Encounters: Algeria and Tunisia, 1800–1904. Berkeley: University of California Press. Coleman, Simon. 2010. ‘‘Constructing the Globe: A Charismatic Sublime?’’ In Traveling Spirits: Migrants, Markets, and Mobilities, edited by Gertrud Hu¨welmeier and Kristine Krause, 186–202. Oxford: Routledge. Colson, Elizabeth. 1969. ‘‘Spirit Possession among the Tonga of Zambia.’’ In Spirit Mediumship and Society in Africa, edited by John Beattie and John Middleton, 69–103. New York: Africana Publishing. Comaroff, Jean. 1985. Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance: The Culture and History of a South African People. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Comaroff, John L., and Jean Comaroff. 1992. Ethnography and the Historical Imagination: Studies in the Ethnographic Imagination. Boulder: Westview Press. ———. 1993. Modernity and Its Malcontents: Ritual and Power in Postcolonial Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1999. ‘‘Occult Economies and the Violence of Abstraction: Notes from the South African Postcolony.’’ American Ethnologist 26 (2): 279–303. ———. 2000. ‘‘Millennial Capitalism: First Thoughts on a Second Coming.’’ Public Culture 12 (2): 291–343. Combs-Schilling, M. Elaine. 1989. Sacred Performances: Islam, Sexuality, and Sacrifice. New York: Columbia University Press. Connor, Steven. 1999. ‘‘The Machine in the Ghost: Spiritualism, Technology and the ‘Direct Voice.’ ’’ In Ghosts: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, History, edited by Peter Buse and Andrew Stott, 203–25. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2004. ‘‘Edison’s Teeth: Touching Hearing.’’ In Hearing Cultures: Essays on Sound, Listening, and Modernity, edited by Veit Erlmann, 153–72. Oxford: Berg. Cornell, Vincent J. 1998. Realm of the Saint: Power and Authority in Moroccan Sufism. Austin: University of Texas Press. Couldry, Nick. 2003. Media Rituals: A Critical Approach. London: Routledge. Coulon, Christian. 1988. ‘‘Women, Islam, and Baraka.’’ In Charisma and Brotherhood in African Islam, edited by Christian Coulon and Donal Cruise O’Brien, 113–33. Oxford: Clarendon Press of Oxford University Press.

324

Works Cited

———, and Odile Reveyrand-Coulon. 1990. L’Islam au fe´minin: Sokhna Magat Diop Cheikh de la Confre´rie Mouride (Senegal). Talence: Centre d’E´tude d’Afrique Noire. Crabtree, Adam. 1993. From Mesmer to Freud: Magnetic Sleep and the Roots of Psychological Healing. New Haven: Yale University Press. Crapanzano, Vincent. 1973. The Hamadsha: A Study in Moroccan Ethnopsychiatry. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 1977a. ‘‘Introduction.’’ In Case Studies in Spirit Possession, edited by Vincent Crapanzano and Vivian Garrison, 1–37. New York: John Wiley and Sons. ———. 1977b. ‘‘Mohammed and Dawia: Possession in Morocco.’’ In Case Studies in Spirit Possession, edited byVincent Crapanzano and Vivian Garrison, 141–76. New York: John Wiley and Sons. ———. 1980. Tuhami: Portrait of a Moroccan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Cruise O’Brien, Donal. 1988. ‘‘Introduction.’’ In Charisma and Brotherhood in African Islam, edited by Christian Coulon and Donal Cruise O’Brien, 1–32. Oxford: Clarendon Press of Oxford University Press. Csordas, Thomas J. 2007. ‘‘Introduction: Modalities of Transnational Transcendence.’’ Anthropological Theory 7 (3): 259–72. Darnton, Robert. 1983. Der Mesmerismus und das Ende der Aufkla¨rung in Frankreich. Munich: Hanser Verlag. Available in English as Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968. Daswani, Girish. 2010. ‘‘Ghanaian Pentecostal Prophets: Transnational Travel and (Im-)Mobility.’’ In Traveling Spirits, Migrants, Markets, and Mobilities, edited by Gertrud Hu¨welmeier and Kristine Krause, 67–82. Oxford: Routledge. Dayan, Daniel, and Elihu Katz. 1992. Media Events: The Live Broadcasting of History. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. De Abreu, Maria Jose´ A. 2009. ‘‘Breath, Technology, and the Making of Community in Canc¸a˜o Nova in Brazil.’’ In Aesthetic Formations: Media, Religion, and the Senses, edited by Birgit Meyer, 161–82. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. De Aquino, Patricia. 2002. ‘‘No Freeze Frame on God.’’ In Iconoclash: Beyond the Image: Wars in Science, Religion, and Art, edited by Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel. Karlsruhe: ZKM. De Brigard, Emilie. 1995. ‘‘The History of Ethnographic Film.’’ In Principles of Visual Anthropology, 2nd ed., edited by Paul Hockings, 13–43. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter. De Certeau, Michel. 1986. The Possession at Loudun. Translated by Michael B. Smith. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Works Cited

325

———. 1988. The Writing of History. Translated by Tom Conley. New York: Columbia Press. Deger, Jennifer. 2008. ‘‘Imprinting on the Heart: Photography and Contemporary Yolngu Mournings.’’ Visual Anthropology 21: 292–309. Deleuze, Gilles, and Fe´lix Guattari. 1987 [1980]. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deloria, Philipp J. 1998. Playing Indian. New Haven: Yale University Press. Degele, Nina, and Cristian Dries. 2005. Modernisierungstheorien—Eine Einfu¨hrung. Munich: Fink. Deren, Maya. 1947a. ‘‘Creative Cutting,’’ parts 1 and 2. Movie Maker May: 190–206, and June: 242–260. ———. 1947b ‘‘Notebook 1947.’’ Handwritten notebook on the film about rituals from the Maya Deren Estate. Mugar Library, Boston University. ———. 1947c. ‘‘Typoscript, Typewritten Notebook 1947.’’ From the Maya Deren estate. Mugar Library, Boston University. ———. 1953. Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti. Kingston, NY: McPherson & Company. Derrida, Jacques. 1978. ‘‘Freud and the Scene of Writing.’’ In Writing and Difference. Translated by Alan Bass, 196–231. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1994. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge. ———. 1998. ‘‘Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone.’’ Translated by Samuel Weber. In Religion, edited by Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo, 1–78. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 2001. ‘‘Above All, No Journalists!’’ In Religion and Media, edited by Hent de Vries and Samuel Weber, 56–93. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 2009 [1985]. Apokalypse. Vienna: Passagen Verlag. Available in English as ‘‘No Apocalypse, Not Now (Full Speed Ahead, Seven Missles, Seven Minutes).’’ Translated by Cathereine Porter and Philip Lewis. In Psyche: Inventions of the Other, vol. 1, edited by Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg. Stanford: Stanford University Prtess, 2007. Desjarlais, Robert R. 1996. ‘‘Presence.’’ In The Performance of Healing, edited by Carol Laderman and Marina Roseman, 143–64. New York: Routledge. De Vries, Hent. 2001. ‘‘In Media Res: Global Religion, Public Spheres, and the Task of Contemporary Comparative Religious Studies.’’ In Religion and Media, edited by Hent de Vries and Samuel Weber, 3–42. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

326

Works Cited

De Vries, Hent, and Samuel Weber, eds. 2001. Religion and Media. Stanford: Stanford University Press. De Witte, Marleen. 2003. ‘‘Altar Media’s Living Word: Televised Charismatic Christianity in Ghana.’’ Journal of Religion in Africa 33 (2): 172–202. ———. 2009. ‘‘Modes of Binding, Moments of Bonding: Mediating Divine Touch in Ghanaian Pentecostalism and Traditionalism.’’ In Aesthetic Formations: Media, Religion, and the Senses, edited by Birgit Meyer, 183–205. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2010. ‘‘Religious Media, Mobile Spirits: Publicity and Secrecy in African Pentecostalism and Traditional Religion.’’ In Traveling Spirits: Migrants, Markets, and Mobilities, edited by Gertrud Hu¨welmeier and Kristine Krause, 83–100. Oxford: Routledge. Diawara, Mamadou. 2003. L’empire du verbe et l’e´loquence du silence. Cologne: Ru¨diger Ko¨ppe. Didi-Huberman, Georges. 1997. Die Erfindung der Hysterie: Die photographische Klinik von Jean-Martin Charcot. Munich: Fink. Available in Eglish as The Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpeˆtrie`re. Translated by Alisa Hartz. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003. Diekmann, Stephanie. 2003. Mythologien der Fotografie: Abriß zur Diskursgeschichte eines Mediums. Munich: Fink. Dirks, Nicholas, ed. 1992. Colonialism and Culture. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Doane, Mary Ann. 2002. The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Dreschke, Anja. 2010. ‘‘Playing Ethnology.’’ In Staging the Past: Themed Environments in Transcultural Perspective, edited by Judith Schlehe, Michiko Uike Bormann, Carolyn Oesterle, and Wolfgang Hochbruck. Bielefeld: transcipt Verlag. ———. Forthcoming. ‘‘ ‘Wir sind die Horde vom alten Dschingis Khan’: Die Auffu¨hrungen der Ko¨lner Sta¨mme zwischen Karneval und Reenactment.’’ In Feiern—Singen—Schunkeln: Karnevalsauffu¨hrungen vom Mittelalter bis Heute, edited by Anno Mungen and Christine Siegert. Paper for the conference of the Arbeitsgemeinschaft fu¨r Rheinische Geschichte e.V., November 11–13, 2011, Cologne. Durkheim, Emile. 1965 [1915]. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. Translated by Joseph Ward Swain. New York: The Free Press. Edwards, Elizabeth. 2003. ‘‘Talking Visual Histories: An Introduction.’’ In Museums and Source Communities: A Routledge Reader, edited by Laura Peers and Alison K. Brown. London: Routledge. Ego, Anneliese. 1991. ‘‘Animalischer Magnetismus’’ oder ‘‘Aufkla¨rung’’: Eine mentalita¨tsgeschichtliche Studie zum Konflikt um ein Heilkonzept im 18. Jahrhundert. Wu¨rzburg: Ko¨nigshausen & Neumann.

Works Cited

327

Eisenlohr, Patrick. 2009. ‘‘Technologies of the Spirit: Devotional Islam, Sound Reproduction and the Dialectics of Mediation and Immediacy in Mauritius.’’ Anthropological Theory 9 (3): 273–96. Eliade, Mircea. 1999 [1951]. Schamanismus und archaische Ekstasetechnik. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp Verlag. Available in English as Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. Translated by Willard R. Trask. New York: Bollingen Foundation, 1964. Ellenberger, Henri F. 1970. The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry. New York: Basic Books. El Mansour, Mohamed. 1990. Morocco in the Reign of Mawley Sulayman. Wisbech, UK: Middle East & North African Studies Press. El Tom, Abdullahi Osman. 1985. ‘‘Drinking the Koran: The Meaning of Koranic Verses in Berti Erasure.’’ Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 55: 414–31. Endres, Kirsten W. 2006. ‘‘Spirit Performance and the Ritual of Construction of Personal Identity in Modern Vietnam.’’ In Possessed by the Spirits: Mediumship in Contemporary Vietnamese Communities, edited by Karen Fjelstad and Nguyen Thi Hien, 77–93. Ithaca: Cornell Southeast Asia Program Publications. ———. 2010. ‘‘ ‘Trading in Spirits’?: Transnational Flows, Entrepreneurship, and Commodifications in Vietnamese Spirit Mediumship.’’ In Traveling Spirits: Migrants, Markets, and Mobilities, edited by Gertrud Hu¨welmeier and Kristine Krause, 118–32. Oxford: Routledge. ———, and Andrea Lauser. 2011. Engaging the Spirit World: Popular Beliefs and Practices in Modern Southeast Asia. New York: Berghahn Books. Engelhardt, Marc, and Ilona Eveleens. 2009. ‘‘Die weißen Schwarzen.’’ Die Tageszeitung, May 29. Engelke, Matthew. 2010. ‘‘Religion and the Media Turn: A Review Essay.’’ American Ethnologist 37 (2): 371–79. Ennaji, Mohammed. 1999. Serving the Master: Slavery and Society in Nineteenth-Century Morocco. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Erdtsieck, Jessica. 2003. In the Spirit of Uganga: Inspired Healing and Healership in Tanzania. Amsterdam: AGIDS. Fabian, Johannes. 1983. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia University Press. Fauchereau, Serge. 2005. Hommes et mouvements esthe´tiques du XXe sie`cle, vol. 1, Les premiers ismes, l’occultisme, la naissance de la abstraction. Paris: Cercle d’art. Firth, Raymond. 1969. ‘‘Foreword.’’ In Spirit Mediumship and Society in Africa, edited by John Beattie and John Middleton, ix–xiv. New York: Africana Publishing.

328

Works Cited

Fischer, Andreas. 2004. ‘‘The Reciprocal Adaption of Optics and Phenomena: The Photographic Recording of Materializations.’’ In The Perfect Medium, edited by Clement Cheroux et al. New Haven: Yale University Press. Fischer, Eberhard, Brijinder N. Goswamy, and Dinanath Pathy. 2005. Go¨ttinnen—Indische Bilder aus vier Jahrhunderten. Zurich: Museum Rietberg. Fischer-Lichte, Erika. 2012. ‘‘Die Wiederholung als Ereignis: Reenactment als Aneignung von Geschichte.’’ In Theater als Zeitmaschine: Zur performativen Praxis des Reenactments, edited by Jens Roselt and Ulf Otto, 13–52. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag. Fjelstad, Karen. 2010. ‘‘Spirited Migrations: The Travels of Len Dong Spirits and Their Mediums.’’ In Traveling Spirits: Migrants, Markets, and Mobilities, edited by Gertrud Hu¨welmeier and Kristine Krause, 52–66. Oxford: Routledge. ———, and Nguyen Thi Hien. 2011. Spirits without Borders: Vietnamese Spirit Mediums in a Transnational Age. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Flaherty, Gloria. 1992. Shamanism and the Eighteenth Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Frazer, James. 1922. The Golden Bough. London: Macmillan. Freud, Sigmund. 1961 [1925]. ‘‘A Note upon the ‘Mystic Writing-Pad.’ ’’ In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 19 (1923–1925), The Ego and the Id and Other Works, edited by James Strachey and Anna Freud, 225–32. London: Hogarth Press. Frigessi Castelnuovo, Delia, and Michele Risso. 1986. Emigration und Nostalgia: Sozialgeschichte, Theorie und Mythos psychischer Krankheit von Auswanderern. Frankfurt am Main: Cooperative. Frizot, Michel, ed. 1998. Neue Geschichte der Fotografie. Cologne: Ko¨nemann. Frohn, Christina. 2001. Der organisierte Narr: Karneval in Aachen, Du¨sseldorf und Ko¨ln von 1823 bis 1914. Marburg: Jonas Verlag. Galison, Peter. 1997. Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Garb, Jonathan. 2011. Shamanic Trance in Modern Kabbalah. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Garbin, David. 2010. ‘‘Symbolic Geographies of the Sacred: Diasporic Territorialization and Charismatic Power in a Transnational Congolese Prophetic Church.’’ In Traveling Spirits: Migrants, Markets, and Mobilities, edited by Gertrud Hu¨welmeier and Kristine Krause, 145–64. Oxford: Routledge. ———, and Manuel A. Va´squez. 2011. ‘‘ ‘Sacred Connections’: Religious Spaces, Transnational Communication, and the Congolese Diaspora.’’ In Migration, Diaspora, and Information Technology in Global Societies, edited by

Works Cited

329

Leopoldina Fortunati, Raul Pertierra, and Jane Vincent, 156–71. New York: Routledge. Geertz, Clifford. 1968. Islam Observed: Religious Developments in Morocco and Indonesia. New Haven: Yale University Press. ———. 1977. ‘‘Centers, Kings, Charisma: Reflections on the Symbolics of Power.’’ In Culture and Its Creators, edited by Terry Nichols Clark and Joseph Ben-David, 150–71. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1979. ‘‘Suq: The Bazaar Economy in Sefrou.’’ In Meaning and Order in Moroccan Society: Three Essays in Cultural Analysis, edited by Clifford Geertz, Hildred Geertz, and Lawrence Rosen, 123–225. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1983. Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology. New York: Basic Books. Geimer, Peter. 2006. ‘‘Bilder ohne Vorbild: Versuch u¨ber die Blackbox.’’ In Das Unsichtbare sehen: Bildzauber, optische Medien und Literatur, edited by Sabine Haupt and Ulrich Stadler, 161–80. Zu¨rich: Edition Voldemeer. Gell, Alfred. 1988. ‘‘Technology and Magic.’’ Anthropology Today 4 (2): 6–9. ———. 1998. Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press of Oxford University Press. Gellner, Ernest. 1983. Nations and Nationalism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. ———. 1992. ‘‘Nationalism Reconsidered and E. H. Carr.’’ Review of International Studies 18 (4): 285–93. ———. 1997. Nationalism. New York: New York University Press. Geschiere, Peter. 1997. The Modernity of Witchcraft: Politics and the Occult in Postcolonial Africa. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Gesell, Arnold. 1935. ‘‘Cinemanalysis: A Method of Behavior Study.’’ Journal of Genetic Psychology 47/1: 3–16. Gettings, Fred. 1978. Ghosts in Photographs: The Extraordinary Story of Spirit Photography. New York: Harmony Books. Gießauf, Johannes. 2006. Barbaren, Monster, Gottesgeißeln: Steppennomaden im europa¨ischen Spiegel der Spa¨tantike und des Mittelalters. Graz: Leykam. Giles, Linda. 1987. ‘‘Possession Cults on the Swahili Coast: a Re-examination of Theories of Marginality.’’ Africa 57 (2): 234–58. ———. 1999. ‘‘Spirit Possession and the Symbolic Construction of Swahili Society.’’ In Spirit Possession-Modernity and Power in Africa, edited by Heike Behrend and Ute Luig, 142–64. Oxford: James Currey. Gilsenan, Michael. 1973. Saint and Sufi in Modern Egypt: An Essay in the Sociology of Religion. Oxford: Clarendon Press of Oxford University Press. ———. 1990. Recognizing Islam: Religion and Society in the Modern Middle East. London: Tauris.

330

Works Cited

Ginsburg, Faye D., Lila Abu-Lughod, and Brian Larkin, eds. 2002. Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain. Berkeley: University of California Press. Gitelman, Lisa. 2006. Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Gitelman, Lisa, and Geoffrey Pingree, eds. 2003. New Media, 1740–1915. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Glick Schiller, Nina, and Peggy Levitt. 2004. ‘‘Conceptualizing Simultaneity: A Transnational Social Field Perspective on Society.’’ International Migration Review 38 (3): 1002–39. Goody, Jack. 1997. Representations and Contradictions: Ambivalences towards Images, Theatre, Fiction, Relics, and Sexuality. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Grasseni, Christina. 2009. Skilled Visions: Between Apprentice and Standards. New York: Berghahn Books. Green, Maia, and Simeon Mesaki. 2005. ‘‘The Birth of the ‘Salon’: Poverty, ‘Modernization,’ and Dealing with Witchcraft in Southern Tanzania.’’ American Ethnologist 32 (3): 371–88. Griffith, Alison. 2002. Wondrous Difference: Cinema, Anthropology, and Turn-ofthe-Century Visual Culture. New York: Columbia University Press. Guibernau, Montserrat, and John Rex, eds. 1997. The Ethnicity Reader: Nationalism, Multiculturalism and Migration. Cambridge: Blackwell Publishers. Gunning, Tom. 1995. ‘‘Phantom Images and Modern Manifestations: Spirit Photography, Magic Theater, Trick Films, and Photography’s Uncanny.’’ In Fugitive Images: From Photography to Video, edited by Patrice Petro, 42–71. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. ———. 2008. ‘‘Invisible Worlds, Visible Media.’’ In Brought to Light: Photography and the Invisible, 1840–1900, edited by Corey Keller, 51–63. New Haven: Yale University Press. Gwon, Hyeok Hui. 2005. Choso˘neso˘on sajinyeopseo. Seoul: Minumsa. Hagen, Wolfgang 2002. ‘‘Globale Gegenwartsvergessenheit: Anna¨herungen an Harold A. Innis und seiner Theorie einer Medien-Raumzeit.’’ In Raum—Wissen—Macht, edited by Rudolph Maresch and Nils Weber, 193–213. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Hahn, Marcus, and Erhard Schu¨ttpelz, eds. 2009. Trancemedien und Neue Medien um 1900: Ein anderer Blick auf die Moderne. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag. Halliday, Fred. 2000. Nation and Religion in the Middle East. Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers. Halm, Heinz. 1984 [1978]. ‘‘Der islamische Mytiker (Sufi, Fakir, Derwisch) und sein ekstatischer Zustand (h.a¯l).’’ In Rausch, Ekstase, Mystik: Grenzformen religio¨ser Erfahrung, edited by Hubert Cancik, 41–58. Du¨sseldorf: Patmos.

Works Cited

331

Hamayon, Roberte N. 1990. La chase a` l’aˆme: Esquisse d’une the´orie du chamanisme sibe´rian. Nanterre: Socie´te´ d’Ethnologie. ———. 1999. ‘‘Shamanismus Heute: Soziale und politische Aspekte.’’ In Stimmen des Nordens: Spuren der Schamanen, 5–8. Berlin: Haus der Kulturen der Welt. Hame`s, Constant. 1987. ‘‘Taktub ou la magie de l’e´criture islamique: Textes soninke´ a` usage magique.’’ Arabica 34 (3): 305–25. Hammoudi, Abdellah. 1997. Master and Disciple: The Cultural Foundations of Moroccan Authoritarianism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hanegraaff, Wouter J., et al., eds. 2005. Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism. 2 vols. Leiden: Brill. Harvey, John. 2007. Photography and Spirit. London: Reaktion Books. Harvey, Youngsook Kim. 1979. Six Korean Women: The Socialization of Shamans. St. Paul: West Publishing. Hartmann, Petra, and Stephan Schmitz. 1991. Ko¨lner Sta¨mme: Menschen, Mythen, Maskenspiel. Cologne: Vista Point. Hauschild, Thomas. 2011. Power and Magic in Italy. Translated by Jeremy Gaines. New York: Berghahn. Heider, Karl G. 1976. Ethnographic Film. Austin: University of Texas Press. Heims, Steve Joshua. 1991. Constructing A Social Science for Postwar America: The Cybernetics Group, 1946–1953. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Helffer, Mireille. 1969. ‘‘Fanfares villageoises au Ne´pal.’’ Objets et Monde 9 (1): 51–58. Paris: Muse’um national d’histoire naturelle. Herzfeld, Michael. 1997. Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics in the Nation State. New York: Routledge. Heyman, Alan C. 1966. Dances of the Three-Thousand-League Land. Seoul: Dong-A Publishing. Hirschkind, Charles. 2006a. ‘‘Cassette Ethics: Public Piety and Popular Media in Egypt.’’ In Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere, edited by Birgit Meyer and Annelies Moors, 29–51. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 2006b. The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Counterpublics. New York: Columbia University Press. Hobsbawm, Eric, and Terence Ranger, eds. 1983. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hochgeschwender, Michael. 2009. ‘‘Geister des Fortschritts: Der US-amerikanische Spiritualismus und seine mediale Vermittlung im 19. Jahrhundert.’’ In Trancemedien und Neue Medien um 1900, edited by Marcus Hahn and Erhard Schu¨ttpelz, 79–96. Bielefeld: transcipt. Hoffman, Barbara. 1995. ‘‘Power, Structure, and Mande Jeliw.’’ In Status and Identity in West Africa: Nyamakalaw of Mande, edited by David C. Conrad and Barbara E. Frank, 36–45. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

332

Works Cited

Hoffmann, Stefan. 2002. Geschichte des Medienbegriffs. Hamburg: Felix Meiner. Hofmeyr, Isabel. 2008. S.v. ‘‘Text.’’ In Key Words in Religion, Media and Culture, edited by David Morgan, 198–207. New York: Routledge. Holl, Ute. 2002. Kino, Trance und Kybernetik. Berlin: Brinkmann und Bose. Holtorf, Cornelius. 2010. ‘‘The Presence of Pastness: Themed Environments and Beyond.’’ In Staging the Past: Themed Environments in Transcultural Perspective, edited by Judith Schlehe, Michiko Uike Bormann, Carolyn Oesterle, and Wolfgang Hochbruck, 23–40. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag. Hoppa´l, Miha´ly. 1994. Schamanen und Schamanismus. Augsburg: Pattloch Verlag. Hourani, Albert Habib. 2002. A History of the Arab Peoples. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Howard, Keith. 1989. Bands, Songs, and Shamanistic Rituals: Folk Music in Korean Society. Seoul: Royal Asiatic Society, Korea Branch. Howes, David, ed. 1991. The Varietes of Sensory Experience: A Sourcebook in the Anthropology of the Senses. Toronto: Toronto University Press. ———. 2005. The Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader. Oxford: Berg. Hutton, Ronald. 1999. Shamans: Siberian Spirituality and the Western Imagination. London: Hambledon. Hu¨welmeier, Gertrud. 1997. Hundert Jahre Sa¨ngerkrieg: Ethnographie eines Dorfes in Hessen. Berlin: Reimer Verlag. ———. 2008. ‘‘Spirits in the Marketplace: Transnational Networks of Vietnamese Migrants in Berlin.’’ In Transnational Ties: Cities, Identities, and Migrations, edited by Michael Peter Smith and John Eade, 131–44. New Brunswick: Transaction. ———. 2010a. ‘‘Moving East: Transnational Ties of Vietnamese Pentecostals.’’ In Traveling Spirits: Migrants, Markets, and Mobilities, edited by Gertrud Hu¨welmeier and Kristine Krause, 133–44. Oxford: Routledge. ———. 2010b. ‘‘Female Believers on the Move: Gender and Religion in Vietnamese Pentecostal Networks in Germany.’’ In Gender, Religion and Migration: Pathways of Integration, edited by Glenda Tibe Bonifacio and Vivienne Angeles, 115–31. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. ———. 2013. ‘‘Cell Phones for the Spirits: Ancestor Worship in Contemporary Vietnam.’’ Paper presented at the International Symposium Mediating Religion, Eberhard Karls Universita¨t Tu¨bingen. ———. Forthcoming. ‘‘The ‘Children of Uncle Ho’: Socialist Cosmopolitans in East Germany.’’ In Socialist Migrations during the Cold War, edited by Katrin Hansing and Maxim Matusevich. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ———, and Kristine Krause. 2010. ‘‘Introduction.’’ In Traveling Spirits: Migrants, Markets, and Mobilities, edited by Gertrud Hu¨welmeier and Kristine Krause, 1–16. Oxford: Routledge.

Works Cited

333

Hwang, Ru-si. 2000. Hwang Ru-siu˘i urimudangiyagi. Seoul: P’ulbit. Im Thurn, Everard F. 1893. ‘‘Uses of the Camera.’’ Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 22: 184–203. Indian Cinematograph Committee. 1927–28. Report, vol. 5. Calcutta: Government of India Central Publication Branch. Innes, Harold A. 1951. Empire and Communications. Oxford: Clarendon Press of Oxford University Press. Irigaray, Luce. 1985 [1977]. This Sex Which Is Not One. Translated by Catherine Porter, with Carolyn Burke. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Ivy, Marilyn. 1995. Discourses of the Vanishing: Modernity, Phantasm, Japan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Jacknis, Ira. 1988. ‘‘Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson in Bali: Their Use of Photogaphy and Film.’’ Cultural Anthropology 3 (2): 160–77. Jaı¨di, Moulay Driss. 2000. Diffusion et audience des me´dias audiovisuels: Cine´ma, radio, te´le´vision, vide´o et publicite´ au Maroc. Rabat: Al Majal. James, Wendy. 2011. ‘‘Lives and Deaths of the Imagination in War’s Shadow.’’ Social Anthropology 19 (3): 332–41. Jakobsen, Merete Demant. 1999. Shamanism: Traditional and Contemporary Approaches to the Mastery of Spirits and Healing. New York: Berghahn Books. Jenkins, Philip. 2004. Dream Catchers: How Mainstream America Discovered Native Spirituality. New York: Oxford University Press. Jensen, Gordeon J., and Luh Ketuut Suryani. 1992. The Balinese People: A Reinvestigation of Character. Singapore: Oxford University Press. Johansen, Ulla. 2001. ‘‘Shamanism and Neoshamanism: What Is the Difference?’’ In The Concept of Shamanism: Uses and Abuses, edited by HenriPaul Francfort and Roberte N. Hamayon, 297–303. Budapest: Akade´mia Kiado´. Jones, Gordon L. 2010. ‘‘ ‘Little Families’: The Social Fabric of Civil War Reenacting.’’ In Staging the Past: Themed Environments in Transcultural Perspective, edited by Judith Schlehe, Michiko Uike Bormann, Carolyn Oesterle, and Wolfgang Hochbruck, 219–234. Bielefeld: transcipt Verlag. Jones, Graham M. 2010. ‘‘Modern Magic and the War on Miracles in French Colonial Culture.’’ Comparative Studies in Society and History 52 (1): 66–99. Kalshoven, Petra Tjitske. 2004. ‘‘Play and Display as Knowledge: Generating Mechanisms in ‘Indian Hobbyism.’ ’’ In Germans and Indians: Fantasies, Encounters, Projections, edited by Colin G. Calloway, Gerd Gemu¨nden, and Susanne Zantop, 195–212. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. ———. 2005. ‘‘ ‘Is This Play?’: Reframing Metaphoric Action on Indianist Playgrounds.’’ Kroeber Anthropological Society Papers 91: 66–88. ———. 2012. Crafting ‘‘the Indian’’: Knowledge, Desire, and Play in Indianist Reenactment. New York: Berghahn Books.

334

Works Cited

Kapchan, Deborah. 2000. ‘‘La marche´ de la transe: Le cas des gnaoua marocains.’’ In La transe, edited by Abdelhafid Chlyeh, 157–68. Casablanca: Editions Marsam. ———. 2007. Traveling Spirit Masters: Moroccan Gnawa Trance and Music in the Global Marketplace. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press. Kaplan, Louis. 2008. The Strange Case of William Mumler, Spirit Photographer. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Karmazyn, Jean-Claude. 1994. Le maroc en cartes postales. Paris: Edition Publifusion. Keane, Webb. 2007. Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kendall, Laurel. 1985. Shamans, Housewives, and Other Restless Spirits: Women in Korean Ritual Life. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. ———. 1996. ‘‘Initiating Performance: The Story of Chini, a Korean Shaman.’’ In The Performance of Healing, edited by Carol Laderman and Marina Roseman, 17–58. New York: Routledge. ———. 2008. ‘‘Of Hungry Ghosts and Other Matters of Consumption in the Korean Shaman World.’’ American Ethnologist 35 (1): 1–17. ———. 2009. Shamans, Nostalgias, and the IMF: South Korean Popular Religion in Motion. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Kessler, Clive S. 1977. ‘‘Conflict and Sovereignty in Kelantanese Malay Spirit Seances.’’ In Case Studies in Spirit Possession, edited by Vincent Crapanzano and Vivian Garrison, 295–332. New York: Wiley. Kim Geum-hwa. 1995. Kim Ku˘mhwa-u˘i mugajip. Seoul: Munu˘msa. Kim, Kwang-ok. 1994. ‘‘Rituals of Resistance: The Manipulation of Shamanism in Contemporary Korea.’’ In Asian Visions of Authority: Religion and the Modern States of East and Southeast Asia, edited by Charles F. Keyes, Laurel Kendall, and Helen Hardacre, 195–219. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Kim, Seong-Nae. 1992. ‘‘Dances of Toch’aebi and Songs of Exorcism in Cheju Shamanism.’’ Diogenes 40 (158): 57–68. ———. 2002. ‘‘Han’guk Mugyou˘i Cho˘ngch’eso˘nggwa Chonggyoso˘ng: Cheangjo˘m Punsk.’’ Syamonijum Yo˘n’gu 4: 359–94. ———. 2003. ‘‘Korean Shamanic Heritage in Cyber Culture.’’ In Rediscovery of Shamanic Heritage, edited by Miha´ly Hoppa´l and Ga´bor Ko´sa, 279–95. Budapest: Akade´miai Kiado´. Kim, Tongho˘i. n.d., after 1982. Kim Tonghu˘i Kutp’ansajinjip. Seoul: Toso˘ch’ulp’an. Kinsley, David. 1985. Hindu Goddesses: Visions of Divine Feminine in the Hindu Religious Traditions. Berkeley: University of California Press. Klassen, Pamela E. 2008. ‘‘Practice.’’ In Key Words in Religion, Media and Culture, edited by David Morgan, 136–48. New York: Routledge.

Works Cited

335

Klauser, Helene. 2007. Ko¨lner Karneval zwischen Lebensform und Uniform. Mu¨nster: Waxmann Verlag. Koerner, Joseph. 2002. ‘‘The Icon as Iconoclash.’’ In Iconoclash: Beyond the Image: Wars in Science, Religion, and Art, edited by Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, 164–213. Karlsruhe: ZKM. Kohara, Masashi. 2010. ‘‘Between Life and Death, Public and Private, East and West.’’ In Suspending Time: Life—Photography—Death, edited by Geoffrey Batchen. Shizuoka: Nohara Publishing. Kramer, Fritz W. 1993 [1987]. The Red Fez: Art and Spirit Possession in Africa. London: Verso. ———. 2001. ‘‘Praktiken der Imagination.’’ In Die Unvermeidlichkeit der Bilder, edited by Gerhard von Graevenitz, Stefan Rieger, and Felix Thu¨rlemann. Tu¨bingen: G. Narr. Krause, Kristine. 2008. ‘‘Spiritual Spaces in Post Industrial Places: Transnational Churches in North East London.’’ In Transnational Ties: Cities, Identities, and Migrations, edited by Michael Peter Smith and John Eade, 109–30. New Brunswick: Transaction. Krauss, Rosalind. 1998. Das Photographische: Eine Theorie der Absta¨nde. Munich: Fink. Krings, Matthias. 1999. ‘‘On History and Language of the ‘European’ Bori Spirits, Kano, Nigeria.’’ In Spirit Possession, Modernity, and Power in Africa, edited by Heike Behrend and Ute Luig, 53–67. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. ———. 2009. ‘‘Black Titanic: African-American and African Appropriations of the White Star Liner.’’ In ‘‘The Sea is History’’: Exploring the Atlantic, edited by Carmen Birkle and Nicole Waller, 25–43. Heidelberg: Universita¨tsverlag Winter. ———. 2010. ‘‘Nollywood Goes East: The Localization of Nigerian Video Films in Tanzania.’’ In Viewing African Cinema in the Twenty-first Century: FESPACO Art Films and the ‘‘Nollywood’’ Video Revolution, edited by. Ralph Austen and Mahir Saul, 74—94. Athens: Ohio University Press. Ku¨mmel, Albert, and Petra Lo¨ffler, eds. 2002. Medientheorie 1888–1933: Texte und Kommentare. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Ku¨mmel-Schnur, Albert, and Jens Schro¨ter, eds. 2008. A¨ther: Ein Medium der Moderne. Bielefeld: transcipt Verlag. Kungnimminsokpangmulgwan [National Museum of Folklore]. 2003. ˘ jewa onu˘l, 1950–2000 Nyo˘ndae, Chang Chu‘‘Sajinu˘ro ponu˘n minsoku˘i O gun Paksa Kiju˘ngsajin charyujip.’’ Volume 3. Seoul: Kungnimminsokpangmulgwan. Kuthakhoe. 1983. Han’gugu˘i Kut. 20 vols. Seoul: Yo˘lhwadang. Kwon, Heonik. 2008. Ghosts of War in Vietnam. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

336

Works Cited

Laderman, Carol, and Marina Roseman, eds. 1996. The Performance of Healing. London: Routledge. Lakoff, Andrew. 1996. ‘‘Freezing Time: Margaret Mead’s Diagnostic Photography.’’ Visual Anthropology Review 12(1): 1–18. Lambek, Michael. 1993. Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte: Local Discourses of Islam, Sorcery, and Spirit Possession. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. ———. 2002. ‘‘Spirit Possession.’’ In Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology, edited by Alan Barnard and Jonathan Spencer. London: Routledge. ———. 2010. ‘‘Traveling Spirits: Unconcealment and Undisplacement.’’ In Traveling Spirits: Migrants, Markets, and Mobilities, edited by Gertrud Hu¨welmeier and Kristine Krause, 17–35. Oxford: Routledge. Lan, David. 1985. Guns and Rain: Guerillas and Spirit Mediums in Zimbabwe. London: Currey. Lang, Bernhard, and Colleen McDannell. 1988. Heaven: A History. New Haven: Yale University Press. Lange, Siri. 2002. ‘‘Managing Modernity: Gender, State, and Nation in the Popular Drama of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.’’ Ph.D. diss., Department of Social Anthropology, University of Bergen. Last, Murray. 1988. ‘‘Charisma and Medicine in Northern Nigeria.’’ In Charisma and Brotherhood in African Islam, edited by Christian Coulon and Donal Cruise O’Brien, 183–213. Oxford: Clarendon Press of Oxford University Press. Latour, Bruno. 1991. ‘‘Technology Is Society Made Durable.’’ In A Sociology of Monsters: Essays on Power, Technology, and Domination, edited by John Law, 103–31. New York: Routledge. ———. 1993. ‘‘Ethnography of a ‘High-Tech’ Case: About Aramis.’’ In Technological Choices: Transformation in Material Cultures since the Neolithic, edited by Pierre Lemonnier, 372–98. London: Routledge. Lee, Du-hyun (Yi Tuhyo˘n). 1969. Han’guk kamyo˘n’guk. Seoul: Munhwa Kongbobu, Munhwaje Kwalliguk. Leiris, Michel. 1977. Die eigene und die fremde Kultur. Frankfurt: Syndikat. Le Tourneau, Roger. 1987 [1949]. Fe`s avant le protectorat: E´tude e´conomique et sociale d’une ville de l’Occident musulman, 2nd ed. Rabat: Socie´te´ marocaine de librairie et d’e´dition. Le´vi-Strauss, Claude. 1963. Structural Anthropology. New York: Basic Books. ———. 1967 [1949]. ‘‘The Sorcerer and His Magic.’’ In Structural Anthropology. Translated by Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf. Garden City: Anchor Books, 161–80. ———. 1970 [1964]. The Raw and the Cooked: Introduction to a Science of Mythology, Volume 1. Translated by John Weightman and Doreen Weightman. London: Jonathan Cape.

Works Cited

337

———. 1987. The View from Afar. Translated by Joachim Neugroschel and Phoebe Hoss. London: Penguin Books. Levitt, Peggy. 2007. God Needs No Passport: Immigrants and the Changing American Religious Landscape. New York: The New Press. Lewis, I. M. 1966. ‘‘Spirit Possession and Deprivation Cults.’’ Man, new series 1 (3): 307–29. ———. 2003 [1971]. Ecstatic Religion: A Study of Shamanism and Spirit Possession, 3rd ed. London: Routledge. Leyshon, Andrew; David Matless, and George Revill. 1995. ‘‘The Place of Music.’’ Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, new series 20 (4): 423–33. Limbach, Peter. 2004. ‘‘Trizonesien-Lied sorgte 1949 fu¨r Aufregung.’’ Ko¨lner Stadt-Anzeiger, November 5. Lindquist, Galina. 1997. Shamanic Performance on the Urban Scene: NeoShamanism in Contemporary Sweden. Stockholm: Alquist Wiksell. Lockwood, William M. 1990 [1895]. The Molecular Hypothesis of Nature: The Relation of Its Principles to Continued Existence and to the Philosophy of Spiritualism. Reprinted with original pagination in Gary L. Ward, ed. 1990. Spiritualism I: Spiritualist Thought. New York: Garland. Loers, Veit, ed. 1995. Okkultismus und Avantgarde: Von Munch bis Mondrian, 1900—1915. Ostfildern: Edition Tertium. Luhmann, Niklas. 1996. Die Realita¨t der Massenmedien, Wiesbaden: VS Verlag fu¨r Sozialwissenschaften. Luhrmann, Tanya M. 1989. Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft: Ritual Magic in Contemporary England. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Luig, Ute. 1999. ‘‘Constructing Local Worlds: Spirit Possession in the Gwembe Valley, Zambia.’’ In Spirit Possession, Modernity, and Power in Africa, edited by Heike Behrend and Ute Luig, 124–41. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Maarouf, Mohammed. 2007. Jinn Eviction as a Discourse of Power: A Multidisciplinary Approach to Moroccan Magical Beliefs and Practices. Leiden: Brill. MacDougall, David. 2005. The Corporeal Image: Film, Ethnography, and the Senses. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Marey, Etienne-Jules. 1994 [1894]. Le mouvement. Nıˆmes: Editions Jacqueline Chambon. Marks, Laura. 2000. The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses. Durham: Duke University Press. ———. 2010. Enfoldment and Infinity: An Islamic Genealogy of New Media Art. Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press. Martin, David. 1990. Tongues of Fire: The Explosion of Protestantism in Latin America. Oxford: Blackwell.

338

Works Cited

Martineau, Harriet. 1858. Suggestions towards the Future Government of India. London: Smith, Elder & Co. Masquelier, Adeline Marie. 1999. ‘‘The Invention of Anti-Tradition: Dodo Spirits in Southern Niger.’’ In Spirit Possession, Modernity, and Power in Africa, edited by Heike Behrend and Ute Luig, 34–49. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. ———. 2001. Prayer Has Spoiled Everything: Possession, Power, and Identity in an Islamic Town of Niger. Durham: Duke University Press. ———. 2009. Women and Islamic Revival in a West African Town. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Matheson, Neil. 2006. ‘‘The Ghost Stamp, the Detective and the Hospital for Boots: Light and the Post-War Battle Over Spirit Photography.’’ Early Popular Visual Culture 4 (1): 35–51 Mauss, Marcel. 1967 [1923–1924]. The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies. Translated by Ian Cunnison. New York: Norton 1967. ———. 1973 [1935]. ‘‘Techniques of the Body.’’ Economy and Society 2 (1): 70–88. ———, and Henri Hubert. 1902. ‘‘Esquisse d’une the´orie ge´ne´rale de la magie.’’ L’Anne´e Sociologique 1902–1903: 1–146. McCall, John C. 2002. ‘‘Madness, Money, and Movies: Watching a Nigerian Popular Video with the Guidance of a Native Doctor.’’ Africa Today 49 (3): 79–94. McCulloch, Warren S., and John Pfeiffer. 1949. ‘‘Of Digital Computers Called Brains.’’ Scientific Monthly 69 (6): 368–76. McCulloch, Warren S., and Walter Pitts. 1943. ‘‘A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity.’’ Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics 5: 115–33. McIntosh, Janet. 2004. ‘‘Reluctant Muslims: Embodied Hegemony and Moral Resistance in a Giriama Spirit Possession Complex.’’ Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 10 (1): 91–112. McLuhan, Marshall. 1962. The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. ———. 1994 [1964]. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. McNaughton, Patrick. 1982. ‘‘Language, Art, Secrecy and Power: The Semantics of Dalilu.’’ Anthropological Linguistics 24 (4): 487–505. Mead, Margaret. 1995 [1974]. ‘‘Visual Anthropology in a Discipline of Words.’’ In Principles of Visual Anthropology, edited by Paul Hockings, 4–10. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. ———. 1972. Blackberry Winter. New York: Morrow. Meyer, Birgit. 1999. Translating the Devil: Religion and Modernity among the Ewe in Ghana. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Works Cited

339

———. 2003. ‘‘Visions of Blood, Sex and Money: Fantasy Spaces in Popular Ghanaian Cinema.’’ Visual Anthropology 16 (1): 15–41. ———. 2004. ‘‘ ‘Praise the Lord.’ Popular Cinema and Pentecostalite Style in Ghana’s New Public Sphere.’’ American Ethnologist 31 (1): 92–110. ———. 2005. ‘‘Religious Remediations: Pentecostal Views in Ghanaian Video Films.’’ Postscripts 1 (2/3): 155–81. ———. 2006a. ‘‘Impossible Representations: Pentecostalism, Vision, and Video Technology in Ghana.’’ In Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere, edited by Birgit Meyer and Annelies Moors, 290–312. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 2006b. ‘‘Religious Revelation, Secrecy and the Limits of Visual Representation.’’ Anthropological Theory 6 (4): 431–53. ———. 2008. ‘‘Religious Sensations: Why Media, Aesthetics, and Power Matter in the Study of Contemporary Religion.’’ In Religion beyond a Concept, edited by Hent de Vries, 704–23. New York: Fordham University Press. ———. 2009. ‘‘Introduction: From Imagined Communities to Aesthetic Formations. Religious Mediations, Sensational Forms, and Styles of Binding.’’ In Aesthetic Formations: Media, Religion, and the Senses, edited by Birgit Meyer, 1–28. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2010 ‘‘ ‘There Is a Spirit in That Image’: Mass-Produced Jesus Pictures and Protestant-Pentecostal Animation in Ghana.’’ Comparative Studies in Society and History 52 (1): 100–130. ———. 2011. ‘‘Mediation and Immediacy: Sensational Forms, Semiotic Ideologies, and the Question of the Medium. Social Anthropology 19 (1): 23–39. ———, and Annelies Moors. 2006. ‘‘Introduction.’’ In Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere, edited by Birgit Meyer and Annelies Moors, 1–25. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———, and Verrips, Jojada. 2008. S.v. ‘‘Aesthetics.’’ In Key Words in Religion, Media, and Culture, edited by David Morgan, 20–30. New York: Routledge. Middleton, John. 1992. The World of the Swahili: An African Mercantile Civilization. New Haven: Yale University Press. Mitchell, Thomas. 1994. Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mommersteeg, Geert. 1991. ‘‘L’education coranique au Mali: Le pouvoir des mots sacre´s.’’ In L’enseignement islamique au Mali, edited by Louis Brenner and Bintou Sanankoua, 44 n. 61. Bamako: Jamana. Morgan, David. 1999. Protestants and Pictures: Religion, Visual Culture, and the Age of American Mass Production. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2008. ‘‘Introduction: Religion, Media, Culture: The Shape of the Field.’’ In Key Words in Religion, Media and Culture, edited by David Morgan, 1–19. New York: Routledge.

340

Works Cited

Morris, Rosalind C. 1995. ‘‘All Made Up: Performance Theory and the New Anthropology of Sex and Gender.’’ Annual Review of Anthropology 24: 567–92. ———. 2000. In the Place of Origins: Modernity and Its Mediums in Northern Thailand. Durham: Duke. ———. 2002. ‘‘A Room with a Voice: Mediation and Mediumship in Thailand’s Information Age.’’ In Media Worlds, edited by Faye Ginsburg, Lila Abu-Lughod, and Brian Larkin, 383–97. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 2009. Photographies East: The Camera and Its Histories in East And Southeast Asia. Durham: Duke University Press. Morsy, Soheir A. 1991. ‘‘Spirit Possession in Egyptian Ethnomedicine: Origins, Comparison and Historical specificity.’’ In Women’s Medicine: The Zar-Bori Cult in Africa and Beyond, edited by I. M. Lewis, Ahmed Al-Safi, and Sayed Hurreiz, 189–208. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Mulvey, Laura. 2006. Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image. London: Reaktion Books. Munson, Henry. 1993. Religion and Power in Morocco. New Haven: Yale University Press. Murphy, William P. 1998. ‘‘The Sublime Dance of Mende Politics: An African Aesthetic of Charismatic Power.’’ American Ethnologist 25 (4): 563–82. Newcomb, Rachel. 2009. Women of Fes: Ambiguities of Urban Life in Morocco. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Ngo, Tam. 2009. ‘‘The ‘Short-Waved’ Faith: Christian Broadcasting and Protestant Conversion of the Hmong in Vietnam.’’ In Mediated Piety: Technology and Religion in Contemporary Asia, ediited by Francis Lim, 139–58. Leiden: Brill. Nguyen, Thi Hien. 2006. ‘‘A Bit of a Spirit Favor is Equal to a Load of Mundane Gifts: Votive Paper Offerings of Len Dong Rituals in Post-Renovation Vietnam.’’ In Possesed by the Spirits: Mediumship in Contemporary Vietnamese Communities, edited by Karen Fjelstad and Thi Hien Nguyen, 127–42. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Niekrenz, Yvonne. 2011. Rauschhafte Vergemeinschaftungen: Eine Studie zum rheinischen Straßenkarneval. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag fu¨r Sozialwissenschaften. Nieswand, Boris. 2005. ‘‘Charismatic Christianity in the Context of Migration: Social Status, the Experience of Migration and the Construction of Selves among Ghanaian Migrants in Berlin.’’ In Religion in the Context of African Migration, edited by Afe Adogame and Cordula Weissko¨ppel, 243–65. Bayreuth: Bayreuth African Studies Series.

Works Cited

341

O’Brien, Susan. 1999. ‘‘Pilgrimage, Power and Identity: The Role of Hajj in the Lives of Nigerian Hausa Bori Adepts.’’ Africa Today 46 (3–4): 11–40. ———. 2001. ‘‘Spirit Discipline: Gender, Islam, and Hierarchies of Treatment in Post-Colonial Northern Nigeria.’’ Interventions: The International Journal of Post-Colonial Studies 3 (2): 222–41. Ong, Aiwa. 1987. Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline: Factory Women in Malaysia. Albany: State University of New York Press. Oscar, John P., and Emmanuel P. Soko. 2002. Kisiki cha Mpingo. 5 vols. Dar es Salaam: Dream Team Entertainment. Otto, Ulf. 2012. ‘‘Re: Enactment. Geschichtstheater in Zeiten der Geschichtslosigheit.’’ In Jens Roselt and Ulf Otto, eds. Theater als Zeitmaschine: Zur performativen Praxis des Reenactments, 229–54. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag. Oufkir, Malika, and Miche`le Fitoussi. 2001. Stolen Lives: Twenty Years in a Desert Jail. Translated by Ros Schwartz. New York: Talk Miramax Books/ Hyperion. Owen, Alex. 1989. The Darkened Room: Women, Power, and Spiritualism in Late Victorian England. London: Virago. Paˆques, Viviana. 1991. La religion des esclaves: Recherches sur la confrerie marocaine des Gnawa. Bergamo: Moretti & Vitali. Patterson, Mark. 2007. The Senses of Touch: Haptics, Affects and Technologies. Oxford: Berg. Pels, Peter. 2000. ‘‘Spirits of Modernity: Alfred Wallace, Edward Tylor, and the Visual Politics of Facts.’’ In Magic and Modernity: Interfaces of Revelation and Concealment, edited by Birgit Meyer and Peter Pels, 302–40. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Peters, John Durham. 1999. Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Peters, John Durham, and Peter Simonson, eds. 2004. Mass Communication and American Social Thought: Key Texts, 1919–1968. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Pfeffer, Georg. 1994. ‘‘Music in Context: Ethnography and Meaning.’’ Beitra¨ge zur Musikethnologie 30: 14–20. ———. 1997. ‘‘The Scheduled Tribes of Middle India as a Unit: Problems of Internal and External Comparison.’’ In Contemporary Society: Tribal Studies. Vol. 1, Structure and Process, edited by Georg Pfeffer and Deepak K. Behera, 3–27. New Delhi: Concept. Picton, John. 1995. The Art of African Textiles: Technology, Tradition and Lurex. London: Lund Humphries Publishers. Pinney, Christopher. 1997. Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian Photographs. London: Reaktion. ———. 2004. Photos of the Gods: The Printed Image and Political Struggle in India. London: Reaktion Books.

342

Works Cited

Podmore, Frank. 1902. Modern Spiritualism: A History and a Criticism. 2 vols. London: Methuen. Pre´voˆt, Nicholas. 2008. ‘‘How Musical is God?: A Pantheon and Its Music in Bastar.’’ In Religion and Music, edited by Lidia Guzy, 75–88. Berlin: Weißensee Verlag. Pytlik, Priska, ed. 2006. Spiritismus und a¨sthetische Moderne—Berlin und Mu¨nchen um 1900: Dokumente und Kommentare. Tu¨bingen: Francke. Rabinow, Paul. 1989. French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Radano, Ronald M. 2003. Lying Up a Nation: Race and Black Music. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rappaport, Roy. 1979. ‘‘The Obvious Aspects of Ritual.’’ In Rappaport, Ecology, Meaning, and Religion, 173–222. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books. Reuster-Jahn, Uta. 1999. Mwera Ndango: Untersuchung einer afrikanischen Erza¨hlgattung (Su¨dost-Tansania). Cologne: Ko¨ppe. ———. 2008. ‘‘Newspaper Serials in Tanzania: The Case of Eric James Shigongo.’’ Swahili Forum 15: 25–50. ———. 2009. ‘‘Advice on Sexuality and Sexual Relations in Popular Newspaper Columns and Pamphlets in Tanazania.’’ Paper presented at the international colloquium La fabrique des savoirs en Afrique subsaharienne: Acteurs, lieux et usages dans la longue duree, May 13–15, 2009, Paris, France. Reysoo, Fenneke. 1991. Pe´lerinages au Maroc: Feˆte, politique et e´change dans l’islam populaire. Paris: E´ditions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme. Re´zette, Robert. 1955. Les partis politiques marocains. Paris: Presses de la fondation nationale des sciences politiques. Richman, Karen. 2005. Migration and Vodou. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Rivet, Daniel R. 1988. Lyautey et l’institution du protectorat franc¸ais au Maroc, 1912–1925. Paris: L’Harmattan. Robbins, Joel. 2004. ‘‘The Globalization of Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity.’’ Annual Review of Anthropology 33: 117–43. Roberts, Allen, and Mary Nooter Roberts. 2003. A Saint in the City: Sufi Arts of Urban Senegal. Los Angeles: UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History. Roch, Claudia. 2006. Plastikschamanen und AIM-Krieger: Zur Rezeption indianischer Spiritualita¨t on der New-Age-Bewegung. Leipzig: Leipziger Universita¨tsverlag. Rodowick, David. 2001. Reading the Figural, or Philosophy after the New Media. Durham: Duke University Press. Roselt, Jens, and Ulf Otto, eds. 2012. Theater als Zeitmaschine: Zur performativen Praxis des Reenactments. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag.

Works Cited

343

Rothenberg, Celia. 2004. Spirits of Palestine: Gender, Society, and the Stories of the Jinn. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Rotman, Andy. 2008. Thus You Have Seen: Visualizing Faith in Early Indian Buddhism. New York: Oxford University Press. ¨ bersetzung und ihre Dementierung.’’ In Bruno Rottenburg, Richard. 2008. ‘‘U Latours Kollektive: Kontroversen zur Entgrenzung des Sozialen, edited by Georg Kneer et al., 401–24. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Rouch, Jean. 1982. ‘‘Essay u¨ber die Verwandlung der Person, des Besessenen, des Magiers, des Hexers, des Filmemachers und des Ethnografen.’’ Kinemathek: Film und Ethnographie 60: 2–13. ———. 1995. ‘‘The Camera and Man.’’ In Principles of Visual Anthropology, 2nd ed., edited by Paul Hockings, 79–98. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. ———. 2003. Cine´-Ethnography. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Rowlands, Peter, and J. Patrik Wilson, eds. 1994. Oliver Lodge and the Invention of Radio. Liverpool: PD Publications. Ruesch, Jurgen, and Gregory Bateson. 1987 [1951]. Communication: The Social Matrix of Psychiatry. New York: Norton. Russell, Catherine. 1999. Experimental Ethnography: The Work of Film in the Age of Video. Durham: Duke University Press. Ruutz-Rees, L. E. 1858. A Personal Narrative of the Siege of Lucknow. London: Longman, Brown. Salmon, Georges. 1905. ‘‘Confre´ries et zaouyas de Tanger.’’ Archives Marocaines 2: 100–114. Salemink, Oscar. 2008. ‘‘Spirits of Consumption and the Capitalist Ethic in Vietnam.’’ In Religious Commodifications in Asia, edited by Pattana Kitiarsa, 147–68. New York: Routledge. Salih, Ruba. 2002. ‘‘Reformulating Tradition and Modernity: Moroccan Migrant Women and the Transnational Division of Ritual Space.’’ Global Networks 2 (3): 219–31. Sanchez, Ra´fael. 2001. ‘‘Channel-Surfing: Media, Mediumship, and State Authority in the Maria´ Lionza Possession Cult (Venezuela).’’ In Religion and Media, edited by Hent de Vries and Sam Weber, 388–434. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Sant Cassia, Paul. 2000. ‘‘Exoticizing Discoveries and Extraordinary Experiences: ‘Traditional’ Music, Modernity and Nostalgia in Malta and other Mediterranean Societies.’’ In Ethnomusicology 44 (2): 281–301. Sawicki, Diethard. 2002. ‘‘Leben mit den Toten’’: Geisterglauben und die Entstehung des Spiritismus. Paderborn: Ferdinand Scho¨ningh Verlag. Schellinger, Uwe. 2009. ‘‘Trancemedien und Verbrechensaufkla¨rung: Die ‘Kriminaltelepathie’ in der Weimarer Republik.’’ In Trancemedien und Neue Medien um 1900, edited by Marcus Hahn and Erhard Schu¨ttpelz, 311–40. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag.

344

Works Cited

Schielke, Samuli. 2008. ‘‘Policing Ambiguity: Muslim Saints-Day Festivals and the Moral Geography of Public Space in Egypt.’’ American Ethnologist 35 (4): 539–52. Schimmel, Annemarie. 2000. Sufismus: Eine Einfu¨hrung in die islamische Mystik. Munich: C. H. Beck. Schlehe, Judith et al., eds. 2010. Staging the Past: Themed Environments in Transcultural Perspective. Bielefeld: transcipt Verlah. Schmidt, Leigh Eric. 2000. Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Schott, Heinz. 2008. ‘‘Magie, Mesmerismus und Hypnose: Trancemedien aus medizinhistorischer Sicht.’’ Paper presented at the conference Trancemedien und Neue Medien um 1900, University of Siegen, July 2008. Schulz, Dorothea E. Perpetuating the Politics of Praise: Griots, Radios and the Politics of Tradition in Mali. Cologne: Ru¨diger Ko¨ppe. ———. 2003. ‘‘ ‘Charisma and Brotherhood’ Revisited: Mass-Mediated Forms of Spirituality in Urban Mali.’’ Journal of Religion in Africa 33 (2): 146–71. ———. 2005. ‘‘Love Potions and Money Machines: Commercial Occultism and the Reworking of Social Relations in Urban Mali.’’ In Wari Matters: Ethnographic Explorations of Money in the Mande World, edited by Stephen Wooten, 93–115. Mu¨nster: Lit Verlag. ———. 2006a. ‘‘Promises of (Im)Mediate Salvation: Islam, Broadcast Media, and the Remaking of Religious Experience in Mali.’’ American Ethnologist 33(2): 210–29. ———. 2006b. ‘‘Morality, Community, ‘Public-ness’: Shifting Terms of Debate in the Malian Public.’’ In Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere, edited by Birgit Meyer and Annelies Moors, 132–51. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 2007. ‘‘Ambiguous Interventions: On the Professionalization of Divination Practices in Urban Mali.’’ Mande Studies 7: 49–68. ———. 2008. ‘‘ ‘Channeling’ the Powers of God’s Word: Audio-Recordings as Scriptures in Mali.’’ Postscripts 4 (2): 135–56. ———. 2010. ‘‘Remaking Society from Within: Extraversion and the Social Forms of Muslim Activism in Urban Mali.’’ In Development and Politics from Below: Exploring Religious Spaces in the African State, edited by Barbara Bompani and Maria Frahm-Arp, 74–98. London: Palgrave-MacMillan. ———. 2011. Muslims and New Media in West Africa: Pathways to God. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 2012. ‘‘Dis/Embodying Authority: Female Radio ‘Preachers’ and the Ambivalences of Mass-Mediated Speech in Mali.’’ Journal of International Middle East Studies 44 (1): 23–43. ———. Forthcoming. ‘‘Islam, Commercialization, and the Making of Religious Authority in Mali.’’

Works Cited

345

Schu¨ttpelz, Erhard. 2005. Die Moderne im Spiegel des Primitiven. Munich: Fink. ———. 2006. ‘‘Die medienanthropologische Kehre der Kulturtechniken.’’ In Kulturgeschichte als Mediengeschichte (oder vice versa?), edited by Lorenz Engell, Joseph Vogl, and Bernhard Siegert, 87–110. Weimar: Universita¨tsverlag Weimar. ———. 2008. ‘‘Der Punkt des Archimedes: Einige Schwierigkeiten des Denkens in Operationsketten.’’ In Bruno Latours Kollektive: Kontroversen zur Entgrenzung des Sozialen, edited by Georg Kneer et al., 234–58. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. ———. 2013. ‘‘Elemente einer Akteur-Medien-Theorie.’’ In Akteur-MedienTheorie, edited by Erhard Schu¨ttpelz and Tristan Thielmann, 9–67. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag. Schwarzenbach, Alexis. 2005. ‘‘Afterword.’’ In Bilder mit Legenden: Fotografien, edited by Alexis Schwarzenbach and Rene´e Schwarzenbach-Wille, 155–67. Zurich: Scheidegger und Spiess. Seesemann, Ru¨diger. 2003. ‘‘The Sufi Orders: An atavism in the Modern Age?’’ Paper presented to the conference Modern Adaptations of Sufibased Popular Islam: Concepts, Practices, and Movements in a Translocal Perspective. Berlin, Center of Modern Oriental Studies, April 2003. Sellers, Julie A. 2004. Merengue and Dominican Identity: Music as National Unifier. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Senapati, Nilamani, and Bhabakrushna Mahanti. 1971. Orissa District Gazetteers: Sambalpur. Cuttack: Orissa Government Press. Shannon, Claude. 1940. ‘‘A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits.’’ Master’s thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Deptartment of Electrical Engineering. Shaviro, Steven. 2006 [1993]. The Cinematic Body. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Sieg, Katrin. 2002. Ethnic Drag: Performing Race, Nation, Sexuality in West Germany. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Siegel, James T. 1998. A New Criminal Type in Jakarta: Counter-Revolution Today. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ———. 2000. ‘‘Possessed.’’ In Siegel, The Rope of God. Revised ed. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. ———. 2006. Naming the Witch: Cultural Memory in the Present. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Sim, Chin-song. 1995. Sini sont’aekhan yo˘ja. Seoul: Paeksong. Simon, Fritz B. 2005. ‘‘Im Netzwerk der Kommunikation.’’ In Schlu¨sselwerke der Systemtheorie, edited by Dirk Baecker, 31–49. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag fu¨r Sozialwissenschaften. Smaranananda, Swami. 2003 [1976]. Sri Ramakrishna: A Biography in Pictures. Delhi: Advaiata Ashramaa.

346

Works Cited

Smith, Benjamin R., and Richard Vokes. 2008. ‘‘Introduction: Haunting Images.’’ Visual Anthropology 21 (4): 283–91. Soares, Benjamin F. 1999. ‘‘Muslim Proselytization as Purification: Religious Pluralism and Conflict in Contemporary Mali.’’ In Proselytization and Communal Self-Determination in Africa, edited by Abdallah A. An-Na’im, 228–45. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis. ———. 2005. Islam and the Prayer Economy: History and Authority in a Malian Town. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Sobchack, Vivian. 1992. The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience. Princeton: Princeton University Press ———. 2004. Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press. Sollors, Werner. 1983. ‘‘Dr. Benjamin Franklin’s Celestial Telegraph, or Indian Blessings to Gaslit American Drawing Rooms.’’ American Quarterly 35 (5): 459–80. Spadola, Emilio. 2008. ‘‘The Scandal of Ecstasy: Sufi Rites, Communication, and Social Reform in 1930s Morocco.’’ Contemporary Islam 2 (2): 119–38. ———. 2009. ‘‘Writing Cures: Religious and Communicative Authority in Late Modern Morocco.’’ Journal of North African Studies 14 (2): 155–68. Spitulnik, Debra. 2002. ‘‘Mobile Machines and Fluid Audiences: Rethinking Reception through Zambian Radio Culture.’’ In Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain, edited by Faye D. Ginsburg, Lila Abu Lughod, and Brian Larkin. Berkeley: University of California Press. Sprague, Rev. E. W. 1912. Spirit Mediumship: Its Various Phases, How Developed, and Safely Practiced. In 1990, Spiritualism I: Spiritualist Thought, edited by Gary L. Ward. New York: Garland. Spyer, Patricia. 2001. ‘‘The Cassowary Will (Not) Be Photographed: The ‘Primitive,’ the ‘Japanese,’ and the Elusive ‘Sacred’ (Aru, Southeast Moluccas).’’ In Religion and Media, edited by Hent de Vries and Samuel Weber, 304–19. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 2009. ‘‘In and Out of the Picture: Photography, Ritual, and Modernity in Aru, Indonesia.’’ In Photographies East: The Camera and Its Histories in East and Southeast Asia, edited by Rosalind Morris. Durham: Duke University Press. Star, Susan Leigh, and James R. Griesemer. 1989. ‘‘Institutional Ecology, ‘Translations,’ and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907–39.’’ Social Studies of Science 19 (3): 387–420. Sterne, Jonathan. 2003. The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Production. Durham: Duke University Press. Stoller, Paul. 1995. Embodying Colonial Memories: Spirit Possession, Power, and the Hauka in West Africa. New York: Routledge.

Works Cited

347

Stolow, Jeremy. 2005. ‘‘Religion and/as Media.’’ Theory, Culture and Society 22 (4): 119–45. ———. 2006. ‘‘Techno-Religious Imaginaries: On the Spiritual Telegraph and the Circum-Atlantic World of the 19th Century.’’ Available at the the Globalization and Autonomy Online Compendium, http://www.global autonomy.ca/global1/servlet/Xml2pdf?fn⳱RA_Stolow_Imaginaries. Subramanian, Lakshmi. 1999. ‘‘The Reinvention of a Tradition: Nationalism, Carnatic Music and The Madras Music Academy, 1900–1947.’’ The Indian Economic and Social History Review 36 (2): 131–63. Sykora, Katharina. 2010. Die Tode der Fotografie. Paderborn: Fink. Tambiah, Stanley. 1990. Magic, Science, Religion, and the Scope of Rationality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tambs-Lyche, Harald. 2004. The Feminine Sacred. Delhi: Manohar. Taussig, Michael. 1987. Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1993. Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses. New York: Routledge. ———. 1997. The Magic of the State. New York: Routledge. ———. 1999. Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 2003. ‘‘Viscerality, Faith, and Skepticism: Another Theory of Magic.’’ In Magic and Modernity: Interfaces of Revelation and Concealment, edited by Birgit Meyer and Peter Pels, 272–306, Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 2009. What Color Is the Sacred? Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Taylor, Philip, ed. 2007. Modernity and Re-enchantment in Post-revolutionary Vietnam. Singapore: ISEAS Publishing Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. Thompson, Robert Faris. 1974. African Art in Motion: An Illustrated Guide to the Exhibition. Washington: National Gallery of Art. Thompson, Edward, and Geoffrey T. Garratt. 1935. Rise and Fulfilment of British Rule in India. London: Macmillan. Tingey, Carol. 1994. Auspicious Music in a Changing Society: The Damai Musicians of Nepal. London: School of Oriental and African Studies. Tobing Rony, Fatimah. 1996. The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacle. Durham: Duke University Press. Tozy, Mohamed. 1999. Monarchie et Islam politique au Maroc. Paris: Presses de la Fondation nationale des sciences politiques. Tremearne, Arthur J. N. 1914. The Ban of the Bori: Demons and Demon-Dancing in West and North Africa. London: Heath, Cranton, and Ouseley. Triaud, Jean-Louis. 1986. ‘‘Abd al-Rahman l’Africain (1908–1957), pionneur et precurseur du wahhabisme au Mali.’’ In Radicalismes islamiques, vol. 2, edited by Olivier Carre´ and Paul Dumont. Paris: Harmattan.

348

Works Cited

Turner, Victor. 1969. Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. The Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. ———. 1995 [1969]. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Chicago: Aldine Transactions. Tylor, Edward. 1871. Primitive Culture. New York. London: John Murray ———. 1872. ‘‘Notes on ‘Spiritualism.’ ’’ Manuscript copy, Pitt-Rivers Museum Manuscript Collections, Oxford. ———. 1971 [1872]. ‘‘Notes on ‘Spiritualism.’ ’’ In George Stocking, ‘‘Animism in Theory and Practice: E. B. Tylor’s Unpublished ‘Notes on Spiritualism.’ ’’ Man new series, 6 (1), 88–104. Ukah, Asonzeh. 2003. ‘‘Advertising God: Nigerian Christian Video-Films and the Power of Consumer Culture.’’ Journal of Religion in Africa 33 (2): 203–31. Van den Port, Mattijs. 2006. ‘‘Visualizing the Sacred: Video Technology, ‘Televisual’ Style, and the Religious Imagination in Bahian Candomble´.’’ American Ethnologist 33 (3): 444–61. Van der Veer, Peter. 1999. ‘‘Religious Mediation.’’ In Media and Social Perception, edited by Caˆndido Mendes and Enrique Rodrı´guez Larreta, 345–56. Rio de Janeiro: UNESCO/ISSC/Educam. Van Dijk, Rijk. 1997. ‘‘From Camp to Encompassment: Discourses of Transsubjectivity in the Ghanaian Pentecostal Diaspora.’’ Journal of Religion in Africa 27 (2): 135–69. Van Gennep, Arnold. 1909. Les rites de passage, Paris: A. et J. Picard. Van Ginneken, Jaap. 1992. Crowds, Psychology and Politics, 1871–1899. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Va´squez, Manuel A., and Philip J. Williams, eds. 2005. ‘‘Religion and Identity in the Americas.’’ Special issue, Latin American Perspectives 32 (1). ———, and Maria Friedmann Marquardt. 2003. Globalizing the Sacred: Religion Across the Americas. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Vattimo, Gianni. 1998. ‘‘The Trace of the Trace.’’ In Religion, edited by Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo, 79–94. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Vedanta Society of Northern California. n.d. (ca. 2002). Photographs of Swami Vivekanada 1886–1901. Chennai: Sri Ramakrishna Math. Virilio, Paul. 1994. The Vision Machine. Translated by Julie Rose. London: British Film Institute. Von Borries, Friedrich, and Jens-Uwe Fischer. 2008. Sozialistische Cowboys: Der Wilde Westen Ostdeutschlands. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Von Foerster, Heinz. 1993. ‘‘Zirkula¨re Kausalita¨t: Die Anfa¨nge einer Epistemologie der Verantwortung.’’ In von Foerster, KybernEthik, 109–25. Berlin: Merve Verlag.

Works Cited

349

———. 2003 [1951]. ‘‘Cybernetics: Circular Causal and Feedback Mechanisms in Biological and Social Systems. Transactions.’’ New York: Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation. Re-published 2003 in Cybernetics: The Macy Conferences 1946–1953, edited by Claus Pias. Zurich: diaphanes Verlag. Von Stuckrad, Kocku. 2002. ‘‘Reenchanting Nature: Modern Western Shamanism and Nineteenth-Century Thought.’’ Journal of the American Academy of Religion 70 (4): 771–99. Voss, Ehler. 2008. ‘‘Von Schamanen und schamanisch Ta¨tigen: Peinlichkeit und ihre Vermeidung im Kontext des modernen westlichen Schamanismus.’’ In Ethnologische Religionsa¨sthetik: Beitra¨ge eines Workshops auf der Tagung der deutschen Gesellschaft fu¨r Vo¨lkerkunde in Halle (Saale) 2005, edited by Mark Mu¨nzel and Bernhard Streck, 111–42. Marburg: PhilippsUniversita¨t. ———. 2011. Mediales Heilen in Deutschland: Eine Ethnographie. Berlin: Reimer Verlag. Wade, Peter. 2000. Music, Race, and Nation: Mu´sica Tropical. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wadley, Susan S. 1975. Shakti: Power in the Conceptual Structure of Karimpur Religion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Walraven, Boudewijn C. A. 1993. ‘‘Our Shamanistic Past: The Korean Government, Shamans, and Shamanism.’’ Copenhagen Papers in East and Southeast Asian Studies 8: 5–25. ———. 2009. ‘‘National Pantheon, Regional Deities, Personal Spirits?: Musindo, So˘ngsu, and the Nature of Korean Shamanism.’’ Asian Ethnology 68 (1): 55–80. Waltzer, Michael, Edward Kantowicz, John Higham, and Mona Harrington. 1982. The Politics of Ethnicity: A Series of Selections from the Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Waterbury, John. 1970. Commander of the Faithful: The Moroccan Political Elite—A Study of Segmented Politics. New York: Columbia University. Wegner, Gert-Matthias. 1988. The Naykhibaja of the Newar Butchers. Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag. Welch, Christina. 2007. ‘‘Complicating Spiritual Appropriation: North American Indian Agency in Western Alternative Spiritual Practice.’’ Journal of Alternative Spiritualities and New Age Studies 3: 97–117. Welte, Frank Maurice. 1990. Der Gna¯wa-Kult: Trancespiele, Geisterbeschwo¨rung und Besessenheit in Marokko. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Wendl, Tobias. 1991. Mami Wata oder ein Kult zwischen den Kulturen. Mu¨nster: Lit. ———. 1998. ‘‘ ‘God Never Sleep’: Fotografie, Tod und Erinnerung.’’ In Snap Me One! Studiofotografen in Afrika, edited by Tobias Wendl and Heike Behrend. Munich: Prestel Verlag.

350

Works Cited

———. 2004. ‘‘Wicked Villagers and the Mysteries of Reproduction: An Exploration of Horror Movies from Ghana and Nigeria.’’ In African Media Cultures, edited by Frank Wittmann and Rosemarie Beck, 263–85. Cologne: Ko¨ppe. Werbner, Richard. 1989. Ritual Passage, Sacred Journey: The Process and Organization of Religious Movements. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press. Westermarck, Edward. 1968 [1926]. Ritual and Belief in Morocco. Vol. 1. New Hyde Park, NY: University Books. Wiener, Norbert. 1948. Cybernetics: Or the Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Wilke, Annette, Axel Michaels, and Cornelia Vogelsanger, eds. 1994. Wild Goddesses in India and Nepal: Proceedings of an International Symposium. Bern: Lang. Williams, Raymond. 1974. Television: Technology and Cultural Form, Technosphere Series. London: Collins. Wimmer, Andreas. 2009. ‘‘Herder’s Heritage and the Boundary-Making Approach: Studying Ethnicity in Immigrant Societies.’’ Sociological Theory 27 (3): 244–70. Wittkower, Rudolf. 1987. Allegory and the Migration of Symbols. London: Thames and Hudson. Wolf-Braun, Barbara. 1999. ‘‘Mesmerismus, Hypnotismus und die paranormalen Pha¨nomene Wissenschaft und Okkultismus im 19. Jahrhundert.’’ Unpublished manuscript. ———. 2009. ‘‘Parapsychologische und psychiatrische Konstruktionen des Mediumismus um 1900.’’ In Trancemedien und Neue Medien um 1900, edited by Marcus Hahn and Erhard Schu¨ttpelz, 145–70. Bielefeld: transcipt Verlag. Wolter, Stefanie. 2004. Die Vermarktung des Fremden: Exotismus und die Anfa¨nge des Massenkonsums. Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag. Wright, Christopher. 2007. Photo-Objects. Available at http://www.material worldblog.com/2007/01/photo-objects. ———. 2008. ‘‘ ‘A Devil’s Engine’: Photography and Spirits in the Western Solomon Islands.’’ Visual Anthropology 21 (4): 364–80. Yang, Jongsung. 2003. Cultural Protection Policy in Korea: Intangible Cultural Properties and Living National Treasures. Seoul: Jimundang. Yim, Seuk Jai (Im So˘k-chae). 1970. ‘‘Han’guk mosok yo˘n’gu so˘so˘l.’’ Journal of Asian Women (Seoul) 9: 73–90. Zahan, Dominique. 1963. La dialectique du verbe chez les Bambara. Paris: Mouton. Zander, Helmut. 2009. ‘‘Ho¨here Erkenntnis: Die Erfindung des Fernrohrs und die Konstruktion erweiterter Wahrnehmungsfa¨higkeiten zwischen

351

Works Cited

dem 17. und dem 20. Jahrhundert.’’ In Trancemedien und Neue Medien um 1900, edited by Marcus Hahn and Erhard Schu¨ttpelz. Bielefeld: transcipt Verlag, 17–56. Zempleni, Andras. 2012. ‘‘From Illness to Trance: The Socialization of rab Spirit Possession in Senegal.’’ Paper presented at the conference Spirit Possession: European Contributions to Comparative Studies, Pe´cs, Hungary, September 14–16. Zerrouky, Hassane. 2007. ‘‘Les islamistes a` l’assaut de casablanca.’’ L’Humanite´, September 6. ¨ ber Zillinger, Martin. 2008. ‘‘Rappen fu¨r Gott, Ko¨nig und Vaterland: U Trance, Folklore und Macht in Marokko und der marokkanischen Migration.’’ In Wider den Kulturenzwang: Kulturalisierung und Dekulturali¨ zkan Ezli, Dorothee sierung in Literatur, Kultur und Migration, edited by O Kimmich, and Annette Werberger, 135–73. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag. ———. 2010. ‘‘Passionate Choreographies Mediatized: On Camels, Lions, and Their Domestication among the ‘Isa¯wa in Morocco.’’ In Animism, Volume 1, edited by Anselm Franke, 214–27. Berlin: Sternberg Press. Znamenski, Andrei A. 2007. The Beauty of the Primitive: Shamanism and the Western Imagination. Oxford: Oxford University Press. films and other media Al Aoula (broadcaster). 2008. ‘‘The mu¯sim of Sı¯dı¯ ‘Alı¯ ben H . amdu¯sˇ’’ (in Arabic), 45 Minutes (television documentary, Morocco). 45 min. Bateson, Gregory, and Margaret Mead. 1951a. A Balinese Family. 2 reels, 16 mm, New York University Film Library. ———. 1951b. Bathing Babies in Three Cultures. 1 reel, 16 mm, New York University Film Library. ———. 1951c. Childhood Rivalry in Bali and New Guinea. 2 reels, 16 mm, New York University Film Library. ———. 1951d. First Days in the Life of a New Guinea Baby. 2 reels, 16 mm, New York University Film Library. ———. 1951e. Karba’s First Years. 2 reels, 16 mm, New York University Film Library. ———. 1951f. Trance and Dance in Bali. 2 reels, 16mm, New York University Film Library. Banzi, Mussa. 2003. Nsyuka. VHS, Wananchi Video Production, 96 min. ———. 2004. Tabana. VCD, Wananchi Video Production, Part 1: 90 min, Part 2: 107 min. ———. 2005a. Kihongwe. VHS, Wananchi Video Production, 105 min. ———. 2005b. Kinyamkela. VCD, Wananchi Video Production, 80 min. ———. 2005c. Shumileta: Queen of Devil 1. DVD, Wananchi Video Production, 106 min.

352

Works Cited

———. 2006. Shumileta: Queen of Devil 2. DVD, Wananchi Video Production, 96 min. ———. 2007. Chite Ukae. DVD, Wananchi Video Production, 60 min. ———. 2008. Fungu la Kukosa 2I. VCD, Wananchi Video Production, 90 min. Dreschke, Anja. 2011. Die Sta¨mme von Ko¨ln. DVD, Realfiction Filmverleih, 90 min. Dumont, Dirk, and Philip Hermanns. 2003. Living the Invisibles / Vivre Les Invisibles. DVD, London: Royal Anthropological Institute, 52 min. Lee, Diana S., and Laurel Kendall. 1991. An Initiation Kut for a Korean Shaman. VHS. Los Angeles and Honolulu: Produced at the Center for Visual Anthropology, University of California, and distributed by the University of Hawaii Press, 36 min. Mulvihill, Ron. 1985. Harusi ya Mariamu. DVD, TFC, 36 min. Rajab, Hemmie. 1998. Kibuyu (The Calabash). VHS, Sky Video, 86 min. Rouch, Jean. 1958. Moi, un noir. 16 mm, DVD: Edition Montparnasse, 70 min. ———. 1954. Les maıˆtres fous. 16 mm, DVD: Edition Montparnasse, 28 min. Sirk, Douglas. 1954. Sign of the Pagan. 35 mm, Universal Pictures, 92 min.

contributors

Heike Behrend, previously a Professor of Anthropology and Media Studies at the Institute of African Studies at the University of Cologne, Germany, is now retired and lives in Berlin. She has conducted intensive research in Kenya, Uganda, Ghana, and Nigeria. Since the early 1990s, she has been studying media in Africa, in particular photography and video, and has continued to investigate the relationship between religious change, violence, and war in Uganda. She has been teaching as a Visiting Professor at the E´cole des hautes e´tudes en sciences sociales in Paris; in the African Studies Program of Northwestern University; and at the University of Florida. In 2007, she was Senior Research Fellow at the IFK in Vienna. She has published extensively on photographic practices in eastern Africa and on religion, violence, and war. The most recent of her books are Resurrecting Cannibals: The Catholic Church, Witch-hunts, and the Production of Pagans in Western Uganda (James Currey, 2011) and Contesting Visibility: Photographic Practices on the East African Coast (Transcript-Verlag, 2013). Claudia Bo¨ hme is Lecturer for African Media and Popular Culture at the Institute of African Studies at the University of Leipzig. She has been working as a lecturer and research collaborator at the Department of Anthropology and African Studies at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz and was a member of the DFG-funded research project ‘‘The Negotiation of Culture through Video Films and Bongo Flava Music in Tanzania.’’ Between 2006 and 2010 she conducted intensive field research in the video film sector of Dar es Salaam/Tanzania and wrote her Ph.D. thesis, ‘‘White Elephant: The Negotiation of Culture in the Tanzanian Video Film Industry.’’ Anja Dreschke, an anthropologist and filmmaker from Cologne, received a degree in cultural anthropology, history of arts and theatre, and film and television studies from the University of Cologne. From 2007 to 2012 she worked as a researcher on the project ‘‘Trance Mediums and New Media’’ at the University of Siegen. Currently she is

353

354

Contributors

Research Fellow at the graduate school Locating Media at the University of Siegen and Lecturer for Visual and Media Anthropology at the University of Cologne. Recently she released the documentary film Tribes of Cologne, which is concurrently part of her Ph.D. dissertation intended as a three-fold project combining text, video, and photography. Lidia Guzy is Lecturer in Contemporary South Asian Religions at University College Cork, National University, Ireland, and Lecturer (Privatdozent) at Freie Universita¨t Berlin. Guzy is a social anthropologist and scientist of religions with a specialization in anthropology of South Asian religions (popular Hinduism, indigenous Adivasi religions, ascetic and ecstatic traditions, goddess worship) and media anthropology with a special focus on music and museum anthropology. She was Project CoDirector of the Tandem project ‘‘From Imperial Museum to Communication Centre’’ (together with Rainer Hatoum and Susan Kamel), funded by the Volkswagen Foundation at the Free University Berlin, Institute for Scientific Study of Religions, from 2006 to 2010. Guzy obtained her binational Ph.D. from Freie Universita¨t, Berlin, and E´cole des hautes e´tudes en sciences sociales, Paris, with her work on ascetic and ecstatic traditions in rural Hindu and indigenous India entitled Babas und Alekhs—oder Askese und Ekstase einer Religion im Werden. Vergleichende Untersuchung der asketischen Tradition Mahima Dharma in zwei Distrikten Orissas/Indien (2002). Since 2002 Lidia Guzy works on music as a medium of society and religion. In this context she published Par e Sur—Sounds of the Goddess from the Bora Sambar Region of Eastern India (CD and booklet) (2007), she edited Religion and Music (2008), and she finished her habilitation thesis on Music, Religion and Politics of the Bora Sombar region of Western Orissa/India (2011). Ute Holl is Professor for Media Aesthetics in Basel, Switzerland. After being lecturer, TV editor, and freelance film journalist, she has worked on experimental and anthropological cinema and its genealogy in nineteenthcentury psychophysiology. Other fields of studies are the history of cinematic perceptions, audiovisual epistemologies, electroacoustics, and filmsound. Among her publications is the book Kino, Trance und Kybernetik (2002), which deals more closely with the issues addressed in her contribution to this volume. Gertrud Hu¨ welmeier is Privatdozentin (Habilitation) and Senior Researcher at the Humboldt University Berlin. She has worked on religion, gender, and transnationalism for many years and has conducted fieldwork in Europe, the United States, India, and Vietnam. Currently she is the Director of the DFG-funded research project ‘‘Transnational

Contributors

355

Networks, Religion, and New Migration.’’ This project focuses on religious diversity among Vietnamese and Ghanaian migrants in Berlin and the countries of origin. Among her publications are Na¨rrinnen Gottes. Lebenswelten von Ordensfrauen (2004), Hundert Jahre Sa¨ngerkrieg. Ethnographie eines Dorfes in Hessen (1997), and the forthcoming books Transnationale Religion. Vietnamesen in Asien und Europa and (co-editor, with Kristine Krause) Travelling Spirits: Migrants, Markets, and Mobilities (Routledge). Laurel Kendall is Curator of Asian Ethnographic Collections at the American Museum of Natural History, Chair of the Anthropology Division at the American Museum of Natural History, and Adjunct (full) Professor at Columbia University. In 1979 she received her Ph.D. with distinction from Columbia University. A specialist on Korea who has written on religion, ritual, gender, performance, marriage, and modernity, she is the author of Shamans, Housewives and Other Restless Spirits: Women in Korean Ritual Life (1985); The Life and Hard Times of a Korean Shaman (1988); Getting Married in Korea: Of Gender, Morality, and Modernity (1996); and Shamans, Nostalgias, and the IMF: South Korean Popular Religion in Motion (2009), as well as many articles, book chapters, and edited volumes. Rosalind C. Morris is Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University. A scholar of both mainland Southeast Asia and South Africa, she has published widely on topics concerning the politics of representation; the mass media; the relationship between violence and value, gender and sexuality; and the changing forms of modernity in the global South. Her most recent books are Photographies East: The Camera and Its Histories in East and Southeast Asia (2009) and Can the Subaltern Speak? Reflections on the History of an Idea (2010). She is also the author of In the Place of Origins: Modernity and Its Mediums in Northern Thailand (2000) and New Worlds from Fragments: Film, Ethnography, and the Representation of Northwest Coast Cultures (1994). Since 2002, Morris has been engaged in a series of writing projects about the U.S. military’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and their global consequences. These will be published under the title Wars I Have (Not) Seen by Seagull Press. Christopher Pinney, an anthropologist and art historian, is currently Visiting Crowe Professor in the Department of Art History at Northwestern University and Professor of Anthropology and Visual Culture at University College London. His research interests cover the art and visual culture of South Asia, with a particular focus on the history of photography and chromolithography in India. Among his publications are Camera

356

Contributors

Indica: The Social Life of Indian Photographs (1997), Photography’s Other Histories (co-edited with Nicolas Peterson, 2003), and The Coming of Photography in India (Panizzi Lectures 2006), British Library 2008. Dorothea Schulz is Professor for Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Cologne. She received her Ph.D. in sociocultural anthropology from Yale University and her Habilitation (second doctoral degree required for promotion in the German academic system) from the Free University Berlin. Her research, publications, and teaching are centered on the anthropology of religion, Islam in Africa, gender studies, media studies, public culture, and the anthropology of the state. She has extensive field research experience in West Africa, particularly in urban and rural Mali. Among her publications are Perpetuating the Politics of Praise: Jeli Praise Singers, Radios, and Political Mediation in Mali (2001) and Muslims and New Media in West Africa: Pathways to God (2012), as well as various articles. Erhard Schu¨ ttpelz is Professor for Media Theory at the University of Siegen. He has published extensively on the history of anthropology and media studies and is currently working on a book on media anthropology. Emilio Spadola is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York. He received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 2007 and was a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia’s Center for Global Thought. Spadola’s articles and reviews have been published in the Anthropology Quarterly, Journal of North African Studies, International Journal of Middle East Studies, and Yearbook of the Sociology of Islam. His historical ethnography of popular Islam and media in urban Morocco, titled The Technologized Call, will be published by Indiana University Press. Martin Zillinger is Assistant Professor at the Research Lab ‘‘Transformations of Life’’ at the University of Cologne. A former graduate student of the University of Constance, he received his Ph.D. from the University of Tu¨bingen and was a postdoctoral research fellow in the research project ‘‘Trance Mediums and New Media 1900/2000’’ and a Lecturer at the Department of Media Studies at the University of Siegen. He conducted extensive fieldwork in North Africa, especially in Morocco, and in Europe, particularly in Belgium. His research interests include media anthropology, anthropology of religion, and migration, with a special focus on the Mediterranean. He has published several articles and edited volumes. His dissertation, ‘‘Die Trance, das Blut, die Kamera. Trance-Medien und Neue Medien im marokkanischen Sufismus,’’ received the Frobenius Research Award of the Frobenius Society.

index

absence 16, 22, 79, 80, 85, 92, 99, 154, 209, 216, 220, 284; ⬃ of the image 157, 206; ⬃ of mediation 196; mediation of ⬃ 77–90, 209, 220; ⬃ and presence 9, 34, 80, 93, 204, 206; ⬃ of technology 46. See also presence Adorno, Rolena 168 advertise 132, 227. See also commercialization; commodity aesthetics aesthetics 156–70, 179, 218, 298; ⬃ and aisthetics 284; cinema’s ⬃ 276, 220; commodity ⬃ 141, 152; Islamic ⬃ 309; spirits’ ⬃ 218; subaltern ⬃ 163. See also aisthetics affect 20, 50, 55, 118, 166, 180, 243, 249, 270, 280, 287; ⬃ and voice 195 affective 92, 95, 195, 248; ⬃ aesthetics 162; ⬃ directness 16, 92; ⬃ regimes 265 African religions 77, 78, 205, 208, 301. See also cult agency 2, 13, 23, 24, 61, 70, 77, 94, 159, 194, 287, 290; ⬃ of images 159; ⬃ in ritual settings 14, 77; ⬃ within us 44; delegated ⬃ 15; distributed ⬃ 20, 215; magical ⬃ 13; a spirit medium’s ⬃ 9, 61, 68, 69; spiritual ⬃ 215 aisthetics 92, 249; ⬃ of media practice 78 Algeria 12, 295, 297 alienation 38, 79, 80, 92, 94, 96, 179; ego ⬃ 69, 71, 93. See also estrangement allochrony 7, 9, 74 altars 106, 251, 257. See also shrines altered state 23, 58, 60, 61, 245; ⬃ and alienation 96; ⬃ of consciousness 23, 58, 245, 243; ⬃ as crisislike state 79 (see also crisis); ⬃ and dissociation 2, 80, 92, 94, 96, 98, 249, 287; as divinely effected state 79; ⬃ and ecstatic states 79, 92,

276 (see also ecstasy); as emotional state; ⬃ and sickness 223 alterity 22, 25, 47, 126, 263; ⬃ and camera 203; experience of ⬃ 1, 2, 243, 244, 249, 251; exposure to ⬃ 25, 29; images of ⬃ 126, 243; marking ⬃ 126; mediumship and ⬃ (see mediumship); mimesis of/and ⬃ 23, 247, 262; practices of ⬃ 23; presence and ⬃ (see presence); representations of ⬃ 263. See also spirit possession amateur 72, 130; ⬃ anthropology 244; ⬃ photographers 260 ambivalence 18, 25, 61, 77, 151, 195, 229, 249, 253, 258, 275, 289, 303 ancestors 32, 118, 120, 133, 134, 138, 205, 206, 229, 291, 292 Anderson, Benedict 300 aniconic. See iconicity animal 210, 267, 271, 274; ⬃ magnetism 60, 62; animals and sacrifice 83, 84, 86, 89, 90, 95; ⬃ shape 219; ⬃ skin as drum skin 21, 177, 219; ⬃ substances 298; ⬃ trances 82; wild animals 143 animation 132, 133, 206 reanimation 220, 30 apparatus 3–5, 20, 43, 45, 50, 192, 197, 211, 215, 217, 238, 250; cinematic ⬃ 278; psychical ⬃ 46 apparition 4, 213; ⬃ and apparatus 4; ghostly ⬃ 16; representations of ⬃ 213 archaization 7, 9, 17, 26, 74 archive 25, 32, 45, 286, 297; ⬃ of mediumship 26, 53; personal ⬃ 32, 97, 54; in terms of storage 45, 191, 192, 272 Arens, William 194 Aristotle 58, 72, 75, 287, 316 art 65, 118, 216, 224, 228, 233, 298, 306; ⬃ history 67; artisan 142, 177, 300;

357

358 artist 65, 177, 168, 181, 182, 212, 222, 224, 268, 297; artistic 65, 68, 71, 75, 128, 177, 182, 231, 293; artwork 273; dying ⬃ forms 300; folk ⬃ 148; magical ⬃ 159; modern ⬃ 65, 66; performing ⬃ 128, 131, 183, 230; stage/dramatic ⬃ 177, 181, 229; Sufi visual ⬃ 199 Artaud, Antonin 264 Asad, Talal 26, 27, 28 Attali, Jacques 157, 158 Aubin, Eugene 143, 144 audience 25, 42, 115, 124, 128, 132, 139, 141, 151, 153, 154, 165, 169, 176, 206, 230, 233, 255, 256, 260, 290, 294, 295, 308, 310, 311; ⬃ members 32, 42, 151, 260; ⬃ participation 140; ⬃ on stage 230; European ⬃ 12; local and international/global ⬃ 14, 21, 100; mass ⬃ 147, 223; middle-class ⬃ 149; public ⬃ 32; subaltern ⬃ 165; urban ⬃ 151 audio recordings 150, 183, 184, 185, 187, 188, 189, 194, 196–98, 290; audiotape sermons 102, 185, 188, 191 audiovisual counter-gift 281 aura 15, 17, 121, 183, 184, 192, 194, 195, 197, 203, 204, 210, 213, 217–18, 219, 261 authenticity 17, 26, 62, 70, 71, 132, 150, 154, 167, 240, 245, 247, 253, 256, 278, 306; authentic culture 179; authentic medium 69; authentic reconstruction 259, 260; ⬃ and experience 116, 197; concept of ⬃ 247 authentification 214 authoritarianism 30, 48, 142, 297 authorities 58, 105, 108, 186, 189, 289; cultic ⬃ 162; legitimate ⬃ 185, 190; local ⬃ 12, 106; religious ⬃ 2, 167, 185, 186, 190, 191; spiritual ⬃ 20, 191, 194, 196, 302 authority 20, 35, 149, 152, 153, 154, 158, 166, 168, 191, 194, 231, 302; ⬃ of images 160, 168; charismatic ⬃ 105, 114, 185, 186; cultural ⬃ 240 Baier, Karl 67 Bali 22, 24, 264–68, 270, 271, 272, 274, 276, 277–80, 314, 315, 316 baraka 79, 81, 86, 94, 96, 98, 138, 142–44, 146, 149, 152, 154, 155, 185, 186, 189, 190, 284, 285, 286, 287, 295, 296, 297, 302

Index Barthes, Roland 28, 33, 157, 168–70, 201, 202, 260 Bateson, Gregory 22, 24, 264–68, 270–72, 274–82, 314–16 battery 5, 60, 211 Beattie, John 9, 34, 215 Becker, Cynthia 297 Behrend, Heike 5, 8, 18, 19, 28, 35, 48, 77, 143, 196, 224, 251, 261, 283, 284, 304, 309 bells 125, 127, 218 Belo, Jane 268 belonging: local ⬃/national ⬃/regional ⬃ 149, 179, 180; religious ⬃ 104 Benjamin, Walter 8, 53, 96, 158, 168, 201, 210, 218, 247, 248, 272, 273, 276, 298 Benveniste, E´mile 268 Berbuer, Karl 312 Bergson, Henri 278 Berlin 57, 101, 107, 288, 289 Bernheim, Hippolyte 64, 65, 69, 71 Bible 16, 28, 48, 111, 289 black box 215 Blavatsky, Helena P. 70 blessing 78–81, 83, 86, 88, 90, 95, 96, 133, 134, 138, 143, 154, 184, 185, 189, 190, 193, 197, 198, 211, 284, 286, 289, 302, 313. See also baraka blood 81, 82, 140, 229; animal ⬃ 81, 230; ⬃ brother 312; ⬃letting 149; sacrificial ⬃ 86, 96 Bloor, David 67 Blume, Anna and Bernhard 212 body 20, 45, 88, 143, 160, 166, 167, 169, 170, 216; animal’s ⬃ 90; ⬃ and corpus 120, 168; ⬃ and dance 94, 98, 117, 134; ⬃ governing gods 122, 134; ⬃ and image 157, 251; ⬃ and knowledge 163, 228; ⬃ language 260; ⬃ and mind 280; ⬃ movement 121, 199; ⬃ of representation 249; ⬃ and soul 107, 110, 111; control over the ⬃ 175; dead ⬃/ immobile ⬃ 151, 217, 308; ears 94, 183, 185, 196; eyes 59, 88, 93, 118, 123, 147, 158, 196, 222, 232, 239, 221–40, 272, 276, 306; forehead 86, 183, 193, 303; hands 44, 87, 88, 95, 113, 114, 117, 120, 123, 125, 161, 183, 196, 215, 223, 225, 237, 273, 286, 309; human ⬃ as a medium 6, 8, 16, 33, 42, 44, 75, 205, 213, 217, 248; lips 183, 193; national ⬃ 149; opaque ⬃ 40; painted ⬃ 237; parts

Index 234, 257, 307; and perception 199, 245; politic/social ⬃ 53, 149, 296; a priest’s ⬃ 175; sensation and the ⬃ 243; sick ⬃ 83, 107; spirit’s ⬃ 215, 223, 226, 229. See also blood; body techniques; bones; hair; saliva; skin body techniques 77, 79, 83, 93, 98, 113, 121, 192, 196, 197, 257, 308; body practices and ⬃ 15, 17, 192, 196, 199, 243, 246, 255, 256; ⬃ as trance techniques 23, 79, 83, 93, 98, 231, 255, 257, 308; dancing 37, 79, 92, 117, 122, 123, 125, 134, 137, 219, 245, 268; fasting 257; jumping 113, 121, 230, 257; schunkeln 245; shaking 134, 257 Boehme, Claudia 16, 17 Bollywood 32, 178 Bolter, Jay David 223, 225, 248 bones 104, 210, 219 book 2, 28, 130, 162, 163, 204, 257, 270, 271, 281; ⬃ of nature 59; ⬃ of Revelation 111; bookish culture 20, 33, 163; hand⬃ 212; recipe ⬃ 274. See also scripture Bori cult. See cult boundary objects 2, 12, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72 Brazil 168, 209, 210, 311 Brenner, Louis 185, 191, 303, 339 Britten, Emma Hardinge 70 broadcast media 29, 32, 152. See also Internet; radio; television Bruˆnel, Rene´ 146, 284, 296 Bucher, Bernadette 168–69 Buddhism 27, 31, 40, 67, 106, 120, 122, 125, 134, 159, 181, 280, 301 Caillois, Roger 245 Callon, Michel 287 camera 9, 11, 18, 19, 20, access to ⬃ 22, 23, 44; addressing/attitude toward the ⬃ 18, 95, 208, 306; body and ⬃ 20, 251; ⬃ as agent 20, 23, 90, 168, 215, 287; ⬃ consciousness/readiness 141, 157, 158, 275; ⬃ and death 202; ⬃ evidence 46; ⬃ fatha. 87, 89, 90, 286; ⬃ flash 209, 218; ⬃ and gaze 202, 295; ⬃ lens 46, 162, 271; ⬃ and neutrality 279; ⬃people/men 6, 221, 260, 268, 307; ⬃ phone (see telephone); ⬃ presence 19, 205, 209, 218, 251, 295; ⬃ and prophetic experimentation 158; ⬃ and

359 psyche 45, 46, 151, 169, 208, 215; ⬃ and reproducibility 46, 295; ⬃ in research 201, 265; ⬃ and ritual 84, 89–91, 96, 99, 130, 205, 262 (see also ritual); ⬃ and se´ance 211, 213, 214; ⬃ and second nature 278; ⬃ and soul 250, 261, 262; ⬃’s sovereign contingency 169, 272, 274, 279; ⬃ and the uncanny 203; ⬃ and writing 48; cleansing the ⬃ 261, 263, 305; colonial ⬃ 145, 147; digital ⬃ 32, 105, 225; film ⬃ 23, 89, 286; as mechanical eye 250; movie ⬃ 267, 274; off-⬃ 279; posing/staging for the ⬃ 146, 151, 170, 260, 29; rejecting/ shunning/suspicion of ⬃ 19, 203, 204, 208, 260, 261; spiritualized ⬃ 9, 312; still ⬃ 274; uncontrolled spirits/spirits’ resistance and ⬃ 209, 262; video ⬃ 11, 16, 32, 98, 156, 157, 168, 309, 314 camera obscura 59 Candomble´ 209, 210 capitalism 1, 2, 25, 38, 52, 150, 187, 288; global ⬃ 106 carnival 23, 73, 241, 244–47, 252, 253, 260, 263, 313 Carpenter, Edmund 9, 74 Casablanca 137, 142, 148 Catholicism 16, 75, 106, 204, 208, 209, 244, 255 CD 98, 105, 140, 153, 178 celebrity 53, 54, 55 cell phone. See telephone censorship 45, 49, 52 ceremony 11, 92, 103, 125, 202, 250, 253, 254, 255, 261, 289, 294, 297, 301; baptism 114, 255; birthday 314; boil ⬃ 175; exhumation ⬃ 104; funeral 255, 314; healing ⬃ 109, 297, 298; master of ⬃ 256; trance ⬃ (see ritual); wedding ⬃ 21, 173, 182; Zar ⬃ 295. See also ritual Charcot, Jean-Martin 63, 64, 65, 66, 69, 71, 271 charisma 20, 65, 78, 105, 114, 117, 108, 185, 186, 187, 190, 192, 193, 194, 195, 197, 198, 291, 301, 306; charismatic authority 105, 114, 185, 186; charismatic mediation (see mediation); charismatic powers 186, 195; trickledown ⬃ 198 chat/video. See Internet Chaudhary, M. Azam 309 China 108, 111, 290

360 Chlyeh, Abdelhafid 293 Christianity 20, 27, 28, 59, 63, 77, 78, 100, 104, 105, 109, 110–12, 114, 207–9, 212, 219, 227, 228, 256, 284, 288, 301; Christian cosmology 210; Christian movies/filmmakers 229, 236, 309; Christian mythology 38; Christian songs 113; Christian writers 233; ⬃ and Buddhism 67; ⬃ and globalatinization 26, 47, 53; ⬃ and iconology 53; ⬃ and incarnation 28; ⬃ and media technology 26, 27, 28, 306; ⬃ and militant antisorcery 38; ⬃ and other monotheistic book religions 27, 207, 208, 219; fundamentalist ⬃ 28; kenotic mediation 77. See also Catholicism; Pentecostalism; Protestantism chromolithography 20, 160, 161, 165, 166, 168 cinema 4, 9, 23, 32, 35, 74, 109, 220, 241, 242, 243, 248–51, 252, 260, 273, 275, 278, 280, 281, 309, 310, 314, 316; African ⬃ 335; ⬃ aesthetics 220, 276; ⬃ as haptic space 309; ⬃ and space 23, 248, 273, 275, 276, 278, 281; ⬃ and temporality 24, 264, 273, 275–78; ⬃ as trance technique 23, 250; cinemanalysis 273, 274; cinematic perception (see film perception); cinematographic technology 24, 25; cinematography 24, 35, 169, 251, 267; early/emerging ⬃ 249, 273; European ⬃ 35, 225, 251; Indian ⬃ 169; Muslim ⬃ 309; Russian ⬃ 250; U.S.-American ⬃ 278. See also Bollywood; Hollywood; Nollywood; Ollywood; video industry cine´-trance 22, 23, 249–53, 276, 279, 281 circuits 11, 33, 54, 198, 282, 315; documentary ⬃ 54; media ⬃ 102, 108, 115 circulation 2, 23, 114, 140; ⬃ of agency 15, 215; ⬃ of baraka 143, 295; ⬃ of desire 261; ⬃ of modernizing strategies 7; ⬃ of myth/legend 224, 241, 312; ⬃ of persons, signs, and things 11, 78, 98, 99; ⬃ of the power of trance 2; ⬃ of rumor 33; ⬃ of technical media and media products 11, 12, 14, 18, 20, 22, 23, 78, 82, 89, 96, 98–100, 108, 114, 125, 140, 145, 154, 158, 161, 165, 189, 198, 224, 245, 248, 258, 289, 290; ⬃ of wealth 143; commercial ⬃ 294; global ⬃ 150, 154, 245; Sharifian ⬃ 147

Index clairvoyance 60, 62, 77–99, 224, 225. See also seer Claisse, Pierre 148, 295 Clancy-Smith, Julia 145, 295 class 21, 51, 297; ⬃ authority 154; ⬃ conflict 51; ⬃ distinction 150; ⬃ structures 154; lower class/under class 13, 14, 137, 138, 139, 142, 143, 144, 147–50, 152, 153, 155, 295; middle class 120, 137, 141, 143, 149, 148, 151–53, 177, 181, 290, 298, 301; upper class/higher class 14, 138, 139, 141, 145, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 253, 298; working class 253 cleansing. See purification clientele 140, 154, 240 clothing. See dress Coleman, Simon 290 Cologne 23, 241–63, 283, 288, 310–14 colonialism 9, 10, 12, 35, 38, 73, 126, 138, 141, 142, 145, 146–50, 162, 206, 231, 232, 235, 247, 251, 252, 261, 262, 270, 273, 294, 295, 297, 303, 308, 310; anticolonialism 34, 141, 204; colonial ethnography 140; postcolonialism 141, 147–55, 204, 252; precolonialism 144, 147, 295, 297 colonization 38, 147, 206, 224, 251, 261, 310; decolonization 36 color 31, 81, 83, 114, 116, 117, 122, 129, 133, 134, 173, 178, 208, 222, 291, 292; black 122, 127, 131, 147, 161, 218, 208, 256, 296, 305, 313; black and white 12, 110, 125, 128, 160, 208, 212, 226, 267, 296, 305; blue 122, 127, 133, 208, 292; ⬃ lithography (see chromolithography); ⬃ photography (see photography); green 123, 124, 208, 237, 292, 297; meaning of colors 292; red 35, 116, 122, 123, 124, 125, 129, 130, 175, 208, 222, 292; shaman’s colored flags in white, red, blue, and yellow 292; white 116, 122, 125, 131, 134, 150, 208, 212, 221, 237, 292, 297, 305; yellow 123, 134, 291, 292 Colson, Elizabeth 9, 10, 37, 38 Comaroff, Jean 34, 294, 296 Comaroff, John 294, 296 comics 223, 233, 306 commercialization 21, 120, 149, 153, 178, 294, 297

Index commodification 2, 5, 13, 26, 31, 34, 38, 39, 132, 146, 261, 294, 295 commodity: ⬃ aesthetics 141, 152; ⬃ economy 39 communication 2, 3, 4, 37, 39–44, 45, 46, 52, 54, 62, 63, 72, 74, 108, 148, 173–75, 185, 189, 211, 212, 223, 269, 276, 280, 281; ambivalent ⬃ 280; ⬃ of spirit possession 3, 34, 41, 42, 51, 54, 103, 175, 206, 219, 223, 296; ⬃ technologies 8, 34, 41, 74, 100, 103, 106; ⬃ and trance 2, 4, 34, 37, 63, 149, 294; ⬃ without mediation 33, 51, 55; communicative force of trance 296; failed ⬃ 219, 280; mass ⬃ 49, 64, 72–74, 145, 259; ritual ⬃ 3, 4, 46, 62, 174–76, 185, 206, 211, 219, 274; staging of ⬃ 3, 41, 42; theory of ⬃ 73, 74, 280, 281 communism 12, 101, 106, 107, 290, 312 communitas 97, 244 computer 10, 49, 102, 103, 225, 226, 233, 240, 266 Confucianism 120, 125 Congo 103, 290 controversy 7, 11, 17, 60–64, 69, 72, 184, 185, 194, 200, 284, 289, 298 contestation 12, 17–19, 20, 166, 167, 184, 185, 187, 190, 200, 302; testing 41, 56–58, 60, 62, 64, 66, 236, 257 conversion 108, 207, 109, 112, 114; ⬃ to Buddhism 181, 301; ⬃ to Catholicism 209; ⬃ to Christianity 38; ⬃ to Islam 207; ⬃ to Pentecostalism 105, 107, 109, 110; ⬃ to Protestantism 291; mass ⬃ 181 corpothetics 20, 249; ‘‘mass corpothetics’’ 162 costume. See dress Crapanzano, Vincent 79, 284, 285, 286, 287, 295, 296 crisis 79, 80, 81, 86; epistemic ⬃ 264; family ⬃ 120, 292; mental problems/ insanity 223, 225 (see also altered states); personal ⬃ 256; physical ⬃/illness/ sickness 60, 87, 107, 140, 143, 152, 157, 209, 225, 235, 256, 258, 294; psychological ⬃ 87, 98; shamanic ⬃ 256; social ⬃ 81 crusades, Pentecostal 109 Csordas, Thomas, 2, 102 cult 2, 3; basangu ⬃ 39; Bori ⬃ 37, 38, 209, 218, 295, 305; ⬃ of ancestors 206;

361 Hauka ⬃ 35, 251, 252; Holey Spirit ⬃ 22, 23; local ⬃ 9, 172; Madonna ⬃ 256; Mami Wata 236; Maria Lionza 29, 47; Masabe ⬃ 38, 39; new ⬃ 33; Ngoma ⬃ 308; possession ⬃ 100, 185, 206, 207, 211, 305, 311; prosperity ⬃ 288. See also saints culture 81, 120, 142, 150, 152, 154, 182, 210, 246, 314, 246, 247, 275, 276, 270, 277, 295, 313; ancient ⬃ 244; Balinese ⬃ 24; bookish ⬃ 33, 163; capitalist ⬃ 13, 26, 38; cultural activism 177, 178; cultural authority 240; Cultural Center 137, 151, 177, 300; cultural determination 187; cultural forms 248, 269; cultural heritage 14, 147, 181, 182, 247; cultural identity 38, 171, 172, 178, 179, 266; cultural images 231, 233, 236, 265; cultural lexicon 132; cultural memory 178; cultural milieu 8, 206; cultural origin 121, 180; cultural politics 13, 227; cultural pride 181; cultural techniques (see Kulturtechniken); ⬃ and authenticity 26, 179, 245; ⬃ and entertainment 151, 298; ⬃ and misunderstanding 261; different/other/ foreign ⬃ versus own ⬃ 18, 172, 241, 244, 247, 248, 253, 264, 265, 276, 279, 284; digital ⬃ 28; East African ⬃ 204; fan ⬃ 314; French ⬃ 12; German ⬃ 246; Gnawa ⬃ 150; high versus low ⬃ 148; intercultural encounter 262; Jewish ⬃ 137; local ⬃ 179; mimicked ‘‘foreign’’ ⬃ 23, 243; Ministry of Culture 148; Moroccan ⬃ 138, 153; Muslim ⬃ 137, 293; national ⬃ 139, 150, 180; non-European ⬃ 261; peasant ⬃ 180; political ⬃ 141; popular ⬃ 53, 178, 227, 231, 233, 244, 311; possession as ⬃ 294; primitive ⬃ 56; representations of ⬃ 149, 150, 151, 154, 155, 227, 294, 297; Sharifian ⬃ 142, 153; Sufi ⬃ 150, 293; Tanzanian ⬃ 233; tourism and ⬃ 300; transcultural 22, 203; unknown ⬃ 270; urban/rural ⬃ 21, 179; vernacular ⬃ 246; Western ⬃ 128, 276, 277 curing. See healing cyberdiviner 133 cybernetics 264–82, 266, 280, 314, 315; feedback mechanisms/feedback systems 266

362 cybershaman 131 cyberspace 131, 132 cymbals. See musical instruments dance 10, 15, 24, 37, 39, 81, 82, 83, 94, 96, 117, 118, 121, 122, 129, 130, 131, 133, 134, 136, 139, 140, 142, 143, 175, 178, 216, 219, 251; Balinese ⬃ 268, 278, 280, 314; body of the dancer 94, 98; curative ⬃ 37; dancing spirit 289; folk ⬃ 180 (see also folklore); masked ⬃ 125; trance/ecstatic/possession ⬃ 37, 79, 81, 83, 94, 125, 148, 151, 174, 175, 176, 250, 285, 298, 300, 311. See also body techniques; ritual Daswani, Girish 289 Davis, Andrew Jackson 63 De Abreu, Maria Jose´ A. 16, 92 De Certeau, Michel 41 De Vries, Hent 1, 77 De Witte, Marleen 78, 109 death 9, 19, 36, 41, 44–46, 52, 53, 93, 201, 202, 204, 208, 215, 217, 220, 257, 290; the dead/the deceased 9, 10, 32, 40, 41, 44, 46, 62, 63, 93, 97, 103, 104, 128, 130, 195, 202, 208, 209, 211, 212, 215, 216, 226, 227, 253, 291, 292, 308; the dead and resurrection 203; ⬃ and photography (see photography); deceased shamans 134, 292; necromancy 62; symbolic ⬃ 257; spirits of the dead (see spirits); war dead 103, 104, 288 deceased. See death deity 14, 20, 117, 118, 120, 121, 122, 123, 125, 127, 133, 134, 164, 167, 168, 291, 292, 293, 309, 311; goddess 20, 21, 102, 131, 156, 157, 161, 166, 167, 171–77, 181, 182, 288, 299, 300 Delacroix, Eugene 146 Deleuze, Gilles 277, 278 Delhi 177 demons 35, 78, 79, 81, 82, 83, 84, 87, 90, 94, 96, 109, 111, 211, 219, 296; children of ⬃ 234. See also ginn Deren, Maya 22, 23, 264, 277–81, 316 Derrida, Jacques 4, 26, 27, 28, 43, 44, 45 Descartes, Rene´ 58 devil 16, 109, 111, 121, 144, 202, 231, 288; devils 219; diabolic laughter 232, 238

Index devotion 20, 22, 54, 140, 142–45, 160, 161, 162, 165, 175, 182, 185, 191, 199, 251, 285, 296, 303; devotional attention 123, 165, 196; devotional gifts/ offerings 10, 86, 87, 120, 133, 165, 199, 294; devotional practices 303 diaspora 100 digital 8, 28, 29, 30, 32, 33, 48, 50, 105, 212, 225, 260, 315; ⬃ apprehended in terms of the analogue 30, 33; ⬃ media 8, 29, 32, 33, 48, 50, 98, 105, 225, 260; ⬃ photography 33; digitization 28, 30, 48, 52, 98 (see also camera; media); magic of the ⬃ 49 disenchantment 1 dissociation. See altered states; ritual distribution 27, 61, 73, 80, 107, 108, 153, 180, 229, 289, 306; ⬃ of agency 20, 215; ritual ⬃ 15. See also Internet; mass media divination 2, 118, 120, 123, 133, 225, 303 diviner 16, 130, 131, 222, 223; website ⬃ 132. See also mediumship Doane, Mary Ann 272, 273 dreams 10, 34, 38, 65, 92, 133, 186, 225, 250, 269, 293, 294, 298, 303, 311 Dreschke, Anja 23 Dresden 289 dress 10, 117, 122, 123, 158, 175, 185, 192, 193, 196, 199, 230, 245, 252, 271, 292, 304, 310; cloak 123; cross-dressing 241, 244; ⬃ in terms of clothing 81, 83, 86, 88, 93, 99, 103, 116–36, 117, 122, 133, 169, 173, 199, 204, 289; ⬃ practices 197; robe 123; scarf 191, 198, 222; shawl 17, 157, 158, 198; sleeves 123 druid. See mediumship drum 10, 21, 38, 120–23, 125, 127, 136, 147, 151, 172, 174, 176, 177, 257–59, 301, 308 Durkheim, Emile 64; Durkheimian scholars 26 DVD 98, 104, 105, 107–9, 114, 129, 140, 178, 289, 310 East African: coast 203–5, 208, 218; television 230 ecstasy: ⬃ community 82, 245; ⬃ dance 125; ⬃ movement 65; ⬃ possession 32, 142; ⬃ pilgrimage 81; ⬃ practices 23, 259; ⬃ rituals 175, 295; ⬃ techniques

Index 80, 82; ecstatic 14, 24, 35, 138, 144, 212, 243, 251, 259, 279, 280 ectoplasm 46, 213 Einstein, Albert 60 effect: comical ⬃ 232; contagious ⬃ 144; emotional ⬃ 159, 176, 180, 260; epistemological ⬃ 24; ethical/moral ⬃ 192, 304; hypnotic ⬃ 250, 280; kinaesthetic effects 196; magic ⬃ 12, 263; mobilizing ⬃ 195, 296; placebo ⬃ 65; psychological ⬃ 13, 65; reality ⬃ 28, 49; without ⬃ 54, 99, 277 efficacy 15, 16, 24, 30, 32, 129, 149, 158–60, 296; aesthetics of ⬃ 158–60; communicative ⬃ 294; corporeal ⬃ 79; ⬃ of a guru/shaman 120, 143, 159; ⬃ of healing 16, 107, 175, 228; ⬃ of historical tradition 31, 312; ⬃ of invocation/trance 216, 316; ⬃ as mark of potency 32; ⬃ of media 9, 15, 28, 30, 49, 52, 64, 65, 73, 74, 108, 129, 143, 169, 187, 197, 218, 220, 227, 232, 248, 249, 250, 251, 264, 276, 278, 280, 289, 294; ⬃ of possession 166; ⬃ of supernatural powers 186, 201, 304; ⬃ of the voice 195, 198; image of ⬃ 166; ritual ⬃ 11, 12, 14–17, 21, 78, 99, 118, 146, 154, 198, 255, 256, 262, 293; social ⬃ 139, 150; tactile ⬃ 17, 120, 194, 195, 200; visual ⬃ 14, 132, 223, 240. See also special effects electricity 5, 16, 45, 59, 63, 75, 159, 221, 266, 281; electric light 75, 76; electric shock 251; electronic communication/ media 33, 34, 53, 120, 250; electronification 51, 55; fantasies of ⬃ 51, 211; spiritual ⬃ 295 Eliade, Mircea 258 emblem 14, 76, 116, 117, 129, 181; emblematic presence 132 embodiment 2, 3, 9, 23, 52, 127, 131, 132, 136, 142, 148, 162, 163, 171, 174–76, 186, 191, 192, 197, 206, 212, 216, 220, 241, 243, 249, 251, 252; disembodiment 3, 131, 132, 197, 215; embodied spectatorship 249; gods’/ goddesses’ ⬃ 20, 171–82, 209, 299; ritual ⬃ 176. See also incarnation; incorporation emotion. See affect; altered states Engelke, Matthew 6 England 38, 214

363 entertainment 13, 14, 21, 59, 117, 118, 120, 123, 130, 147, 148, 151, 152, 154, 173, 174, 182, 212, 231, 244, 255, 256, 298, 306, 308; female entertainers 124, 152; secular ⬃ 121, 178 entrepreneurship 81, 177, 300 Erdtsieck, Jessica 232, 306 esotericism 12, 65, 66, 68, 70, 71, 162, 190–92, 199, 250, 303, 313. See also writing estrangement 23, 94; ego ⬃ 19, 69, 70, 71, 203. See also alienation: ego-alienation Europe/Europeans 9, 12, 13, 19, 35–38, 56, 59, 63, 71–74, 87, 95, 96, 100, 101, 105–7, 111, 114, 138, 139, 142, 145, 146, 151, 158, 159, 209, 210, 216, 219, 220, 225, 251, 252, 261, 271–73, 283, 285, 289, 290, 292, 297, 304, 305, 311, 312; non-Europeans 13, 261, 310 evangelical churches. See Pentecostalism Evans-Pritchard, Edward 22 evidence 26, 35, 42, 46, 56, 105, 108, 132, 134, 180, 203, 212, 213, 215–18, 249, 272, 289; empirical ⬃ 64, 66, 71; visible ⬃ 46, 158, 265 exorcism. See spirit possession experience 3, 20, 33, 43, 80, 98, 120, 121, 123, 147, 157, 159, 161, 163, 195, 196, 224, 245, 248, 249, 257, 278, 281, 285, 313; aesthetic ⬃ 260; authentic ⬃ 116; cinema ⬃ 250, 278; corporeal ⬃ 243, 246; death ⬃ 202; ecstatic ⬃ 24, 279, 212; everyday ⬃ 200, 220, 224, 231; ⬃ of absence 92, 99; ⬃ of alterity 1, 2, 23, 243, 244, 249, 251; ⬃ of authenticity; ⬃ of authority 187, 191 253; ⬃ of communitas 97; ⬃ of distress 92, 287; ⬃ of effectiveness 255, 287; ⬃ of intimacy 92; ⬃ of salvation 112; ⬃ of threat 18; ⬃ of trauma 36, 110, 286, 290; haptic ⬃ 14, 134, 198; media ⬃ 79, 187, 200; mystical ⬃ 93; possession ⬃ 3, 37, 96, 118, 251; religious ⬃ 26; ritual ⬃ 14; sensual ⬃ 14, 23, 136, 175; sonic ⬃ 120, 122, 133, 179, 194, 195, 197; spiritual/transcendental ⬃ 17, 18, 81, 108, 166, 187, 194, 199, 200, 227, 236, 246, 247, 256; tactile ⬃ 17, 120, 183, 193; trance ⬃ 22, 90, 94, 152, 258, 259; unmediated ⬃ 16, 77, 78; violent ⬃ 218; visual ⬃ 5, 8, 19, 120, 133, 203, 259

364 experiment 22, 56, 250, 257, 271; camera ⬃ 201, 272; prophetic ⬃ 158; scientific ⬃ 211 experimental archaeology 310 expert 118, 235, 257, 258, 285, 303; cultural ⬃ 246; musical ⬃ 21; religious ⬃ 191, 302; ritual ⬃ 3, 11, 15, 17, 21, 81, 83, 89, 103, 104, 285; therapeutic ⬃ 72; trance ⬃ 12, 256 expulsion of demons. See spirit possession Fabian, Johannes 73 fame 131, 265; famous movies 35, 110, 228, 251, 306; famous music/art 146, 172, 178, 291; famous persons, 161, 210, 224, 229, 241, 277, 308; famous places 100, 113; famous ritual/event 82, 140, 245, 252, 302, 312; unfamous 53 fantastic 47, 48, 249 fantasy 54, 92; ⬃ of communication 33; ⬃ of immediacy 43, 51, 55; fantasy and media 50, 55; ⬃ of permanence 44; ⬃ role play 314; ⬃ of social harmony 51; ⬃ of transparency 51; suicidal ⬃ 26; technological ⬃ 51, 77 festival: film ⬃ 310; folk ⬃/cultural⬃ 81, 82, 121, 127, 128, 137, 140, 148, 150, 152, 153, 156, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 293, 297, 312; music ⬃ 151; saints ⬃ 146, 285, 297 festivity 128, 173, 241, 285. See also carnival fetishist 25 fetishization 162 Fez 137, 140, 142, 143, 145, 147, 148, 150–54, 293 fiction 215, 221, 224, 235, 241, 249, 251, 311; ethnofiction 251; fictional film 224; fictional photography 304; fictitious persons 249, 282, 312 film 5, 6, 9, 11, 17, 20, 23, 89, 117, 129, 140, 145, 147, 156, 158, 221–40, 241, 242, 246, 248, 264–82, 290, 297, 306, 307, 308, 309, 311, 312, 315, 315, 316; 16-mm ⬃ 268; black-and-white ⬃ 226; circulation of ⬃ 11, 14; close-up 273, 276; ‘‘embodied spectatorship’’ 249; ethnographic ⬃ 22, 24, 250–51, 264, 265, 267, 281, 310, 314, 315; fascination with ⬃ 23, 241, 243, 251, 252, 314; ⬃ actors 221; ⬃ archive 297; ⬃ editing including montage 33, 227,

Index 267, 279, 278, 268; ⬃ effects 219, 220, 225, 229, 250; ⬃ history 250, 313; ⬃ images 10; ⬃ images as new ‘‘spirits of technology’’ 23; filmmaker 224, 225, 264, 307, 309, 312; filmmaking 265, 270, 312; ⬃ material 265, 268; ⬃ music 260; ⬃ perception and vision 5, 243, 249, 251, 260, 279; ⬃ posters 204; ⬃ production 221, 224, 226, 228; ⬃ projection 250, 312; ⬃ reception 95, 259; ⬃ recording 285; ⬃ as research method 260, 261, 265, 267, 270, 310; ⬃ script 315; ⬃ set 17, 260; filmstrip 220, 261; ⬃ team 221; ⬃ technologies 146; ⬃ and temporality 220, 281; ⬃ theory 168, 249, 250, 265, 276; ⬃ time 17; ⬃ as trancelike state of consciousness 250; ⬃ as trance medium (see cinema: as trance technique); filming trance and spirit possession 89, 156, 157, 231, 251, 264, 281, 316; flickering 250, 274; mediums as ⬃ actors 230, 231, 235, 307; mediums as filmmakers 222, 236, 239; mediums as ⬃ producers 16, 228, 229, 230; ‘‘profilmic’’ 168, 169, 170; relation between filmmaker and filmed 281; ritual film/films as ritual media (see video); se´ance on ⬃ 22; slow motion 276, 316; spiritualized ⬃ image 9; zoom 237; shunning of ⬃ (see camera); spirit possession on ⬃ 20, 223; trance on ⬃ 5. See also camera; cinema; video fire 80, 114, 163, 207, 213, 219, 225; ⬃walking 32; ⬃works 261 Fischer-Lichte, Erika 246 Fjelstad, Karen 288 folk: ⬃ dance (see dance); ⬃lore (see folklore); ⬃ music 21, 171, 178, 179, 180, 181; ⬃ piety 256, 313; ⬃ songs 178, 180, 291 folklore 14, 21, 112, 120, 176, 177, 180, 181; ⬃ festival 121, 148, 176, 178, 179, 181; ⬃ industry 177; urban ⬃ 21, 177 forces 38, 47, 59, 60, 68, 74, 79, 159, 284; cosmological ⬃ 13, 303; ensorcelling ⬃ 39; esoteric ⬃ 303; evil ⬃ 113; ⬃ of wilderness 9, 304; imponderable ⬃ 59, 61, 63, 68, 74; invisible ⬃ 186; manifestation of ⬃ 71; market ⬃ (see capitalism); mechanized ⬃ 59; natural ⬃ 58; occult ⬃ 16, 111, 191, 220; political ⬃ 152, 207, 293; possession ⬃

Index 40; sacred ⬃ 78, 143, 144; supernatural ⬃ 304; telecommunicative ⬃ 64; transcendental ⬃ 16, 301; unknown ⬃ 65, 69 forgetting 6, 39, 40, 42, 44, 45, 47, 53, 54, 55, 161, 239, 246 France 12, 60, 87, 145, 189 Frazer, James 286 Freud, Sigmund 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 49, 63, 65, 269, 272 game 245, 266; children’s ⬃ 314; ⬃ theory 314 Geertz, Clifford 143, 287, 295 Gell, Alfred 121, 287 Gellner, Ernest 13, 180, 185, 300 gender 82, 150, 279, 304; ⬃ politics 152 Gennep, Arnold van 98 Germany 12, 100, 101, 103–7, 109, 110, 112, 114, 241, 246, 252, 288, 289, 306, 310, 311, 312, 313 Gesell, Arnold 273, 274 Ghana 35, 78, 219, 220, 227, 231, 234, 289, 306 Giles, Linda 206, 207, 208, 209, 223, 305, 306, 308 Gilsenan, Michael 92, 284, 285, 286 ginn 78, 79, 80–84, 86–90, 93, 94, 95, 98, 139, 207, 287, 293, 296 Gitelman, Lisa 187 global: ⬃ community 114, 179; ⬃ interconnectedness 100; ⬃ media; 7, 18, 205; ⬃ movement 107, 210, 226; Global South 54 globality 2, 34, 41, 55, 100, 104, 106, 114, 150, 154, 179, 186, 203, 224, 245, 266, 309; globalatinization 26, 47, 53; Christianity’s ⬃ 27; ⬃ of the sacred 108; globalization 1, 3, 5, 7, 12, 18, 21, 22, 33, 34, 100, 105, 106, 140, 202, 203, 205, 224, 245, 280, 288 glossolalia. See speaking in tongues Gnawa 137, 139, 140, 142, 144, 146, 148, 150, 151, 153, 154, 293, 294, 295, 297, 298 goddess 172. See also deity Goody, Jack 208 gramophone 264 Grusin, Richard 223, 225, 248 Guattari, Fe´lix 277 Gunning, Tom 46, 202 Guzy, Lidia 12, 21, 299

365 Haddon, Alfred Cord 267 Hahn, Marcus 4, 283 hair 88, 173, 175, 219 Haiti 22, 264, 281 Harvey, John 203, 211, 213, 214, 215, 304, 305 H . amadsa 77–99, 139, 140, 143, 148, 150, 296 Hamayon, Roberte 120 Hammoudi, Abdellah 142, 296 Hanoi 10, 12, 101–5, 107, 108, 288, 290 Hartmann, Petra 310 Hauka. See cult Hausa muslims 290 Hauschild, Thomas 285 healing 15, 31, 34, 65, 66, 79, 80, 84, 140, 141, 154, 175, 296; ginn curer 293 Hegel, G. W. F. 99, 270 Heine, Heinrich 291 herbalist. See mediumship heritage 64, 65, 72, 75, 128, 138, 223, 294, 296, 308; cultural ⬃ 14, 147, 172, 181, 182, 247; ⬃ rights 247, 279; ⬃ transmitters 5, 12, 128; historical ⬃ 56, 283, 295; Sharifian ⬃ 153 Herzfeld, Michael 286 Hindu, Hinduism 27, 162, 163, 174 hobbyism 241, 243, 244, 246, 255, 256, 259, 310, 313; Indian ⬃ 246, 247, 311 Hobsbawm, Eric 179, 247 Hochgeschwender, Michael 63 Hoffmann, Stefan 58, 59, 60, 73, 74 Holl, Ute 22, 23, 24, 250 Hollywood 23, 130, 225, 241, 243, 248; ‘‘Western’’ 251 Holy Scriptures 80, 163, 184, 190, 191, 192 Holy Spirit 3, 20, 104, 105, 109, 111, 112, 114, 212, 290; body and the ⬃ 107; ⬃ Church 100, 101, 106, 107; media and the ⬃ 108, 115, 289; medium of the ⬃ 113; power of the ⬃ 16, 105, 212; speaking in tongues and the ⬃ 113; spirit possession and the ⬃ 289 Howes, David 133, 176 Hu¨welmeier, Gertrud 10, 12, 104, 106, 111, 287, 309 hypnosis 9, 57, 58, 61, 62, 64–71, 73–76, 113, 250, 283; hypnotic practices 62; hysteria and ⬃ 64; self-hypnosis 70 hysteria 61, 62, 64–66, 69, 71, 278

366 iconicity 27, 28, 46, 48, 52, 116, 117, 119, 123, 129, 131, 132, 291; aniconic 29, 206, 208, 236; icon 48, 50, 53, 116, 168; iconic images 123–27; imagery averse 199, 207 iconoclasm 29, 77, 207, 208 iconology, 27–29, 53; abandonment of ⬃ 33 identity 29, 36, 37, 46, 51, 80, 81, 87, 130, 132, 142, 164, 169, 176, 184, 252, 264, 280, 314; cultural ⬃ 38, 171, 172, 178, 179, 180, 266, 277; discourse of ⬃ 37, 47; iconic identification 131; identification 23, 86, 89, 141, 157, 249, 253; ⬃ politics 21, 171; local ⬃ 39, 175, 179, 244, 245; musical ⬃ 179, 180, 182; national ⬃ 152, 180, 252; non-identity 37, 44; personal ⬃ 180; political ⬃ 171, 182; regional ⬃ 21, 180, 181; shaman’s ⬃ 132, 142; Sharifian ⬃ 149; stable ⬃ 212; tribal ⬃ 179; self-identity 5, 183, 302 image 3, 5, 16, 19, 20, 30, 33, 47, 48, 49, 50, 54, 83, 95, 109, 110, 111, 117, 122, 126, 128, 129, 131, 138, 147, 149, 151, 157, 158, 160, 161, 164, 165, 166, 168, 169, 170, 194, 206, 214, 215, 220, 231, 232, 260, 262, 267, 273, 276, 277, 290, 295, 297, 312; absence of the ⬃ 157; cinematic ⬃ (see film); cultural ⬃ 231, 233, 236, 265; ethnographic imaging 126, 316; film ⬃ (see film); flow of images 220; iconic ⬃ (see iconicity); ⬃ of Buddha 159; ⬃ of ecstasy 35; ⬃ of encounter 38; ⬃ of light 211; ⬃ of a medium 214; imagery averse (see iconicity); images of passiones 206, 287; images of possessed 32; images of shamans 125, 127, 128, 133, 258; images of spirits 46; images of Sufi performers; inner ⬃ 3, 206, 259; instability of the ⬃ 30; interdiction of ⬃ 205; living ⬃ 206 (see also tableaux vivants); magical ⬃ 48; media ⬃ 52, 133; mirror and ⬃ 265; moving ⬃ (see film); negative ⬃ 224, 231, 232, 307; photographic ⬃ (see photography); popular ⬃ 126, 165, 231, 240; power of the ⬃ 248, 251; production of images 11, 20, 30, 160, 165, 206, 248, 262; rites as images 146; screen ⬃ (see film); selfimage 65, 165, 206; 140; televisual ⬃

Index (see television); textuality of the ⬃ 29; typology of images 271 imaginations 13, 15, 38, 42, 43, 45, 50, 68, 70, 71, 178, 179, 205, 232, 244, 248, 249, 282, 288, 311; artistic ⬃ 71; collective ⬃ 252; geographical ⬃ 180; imaginary effect 24; imaginary knowledge 273; imaginary spaces 23; ⬃ of the medium 214; ⬃ of the nation 13, 145, 180 (see also imagined community); ⬃ of spirits 5, 262, 289; imaginative horizon 50; religious ⬃ 102, 109 imagined community 141; imagined tradition 178 immanence 17, 60, 61, 65, 68, 78, 79, 98, 111, 186, 192, 196, 200, 301, 315 immediacy, 6, 16, 22, 30, 77, 78, 94, 96, 98; fantasy of ⬃ 13, 51, 77; film and ⬃ 267, 279; ⬃ of effect 176; ⬃ of encounter 132, 248; ⬃ and ritual 120; immediate spiritual experience 78, 98, 108; technical media and ⬃ 22, 79, 99, 197; theory of ⬃ 78 imperceptibility 121, 195, 273; imperceptible worlds 301 impurity 21, 164, 174, 177 incarnation 27, 28, 33, 36, 39, 47, 53, 102, 156, 167, 168, 182, 197, 289 incorporation 29, 34, 35, 40, 59, 142, 188, 207, 225, 246, 249 indexicality 20, 150, 158, 160, 161, 163, 166 India 20, 40, 156–70, 171–82, 298, 299, 300 Indonesia 203, 265 infrastructure 36, 37, 49, 187 ingestion 191, 303 initiation 122, 223, 228; ⬃ ritual 156, 223, 226, 229, 255; ⬃ trance 281; shaman’s ⬃ 292 intensity 14, 16, 63; ⬃ of authority 114; ⬃ of duration 277, 280; ⬃ of emotion 128, 277; ⬃ of exchange 98; ⬃ of experience 17; ⬃ of manifestation 165; ⬃ of opposition 1, 208; ⬃ of practices 157; spiritual ⬃ 16, 113, 206 intermediation 19, 138, 143, 204, 220, 256 Internet 14, 22, 50, 131, 179, 259, 313; ⬃ access 102; Internet-distributed sermons 27; video chat/Skype 98;

Index websites 117, 131–33, 248; YouTube 50, 54, 140, 178 intimacy 11, 20, 54, 57, 77, 156, 254, 280, 302; cultural ⬃ 286; ritual ⬃ 14, 92, 165 invisibility 47, 132, 136, 157, 210, 215, 227, 239, 271 invisible: ⬃ apparatus 217; ⬃ mechanism 280; ⬃ powers 59, 143, 186, 199; ⬃ presence 133, 136; ⬃ procedures 277; ⬃ properties 116; ⬃ roots 179; ⬃ rules 266; ⬃ spirits 210; ⬃ transactions 133; ⬃ worlds 196, 202, 210, 212, 216, 301 Irigaray, Luce 37 ‘Iswa 77–99, 139, 140, 143, 146–48, 150, 296, 297, 305 Islam 13, 27–29, 100, 138, 183–85, 187, 190, 194, 199, 204, 208, 301, 303; ⬃ and ancestors 138; ⬃ and Christianity 207, 219; ⬃ and Judaism 27; Islam’s universal claim 207; Islamic aesthetics 205, 236, 309; Islamic Council 189; Islamic esotericism 191; Islamic feasts 305; Islamic modernism 145, 152; Islamic renewal 2, 14, 183, 185, 188, 190, 200, 301; Islamic scholarship 142; Islamic society 137; Islamic tradition 13, 152, 194, 302, 309; Islamists 137, 138; Islamization 206; mystical ⬃ 79, 186, 191, 284, 287, 302; official ⬃ 206; orthodox ⬃ 186; pre-Islamic practices 207. See also Sufism Jakobson, Roman 268 Japan 19, 32, 122, 126, 128, 130, 202, 210, 304 jester 254, 256 Jones, Graham 12, 13, 246 Judaism 3, 291, 305; Jewish Cultural Center 137; ⬃ and Islam 27; orthodox 2 Jung, C. G. 65, 71 Kalshoven, Petra 311 Kant, Immanuel 43, 44, 210 Kapchan, Deborah 293 Karp, Ivan 194 Kendall, Laurel 5, 14, 15, 135, 291, 292, 293 Kenya 28, 209, 219 Kierkegaard, Søren 27 Koran. See Qu’ran

367 Korea 14, 15, 116–36, 291, 292, 293 Kramer, Fritz 95, 206, 287 Krings, Matthias 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 307 Ku¨mmel, Albert 283 Kulturtechniken 4, 24, 67, 77, 192, 227, 245, 264, 278, 280, 281, 282. See also body techniques; trance techniques; writing laboratory 13, 211, 212, 250, 271, 311 Lacan, Jacques 41, 296 Lakoff, Andrew 316 Lambek, Michael 11, 109 Lang, Bernhard 19, 63 Lange, Siri 232, 308 laterna magica 59, 261 Latour, Bruno 7, 10, 11, 15, 89 Lee, Diana 292 Leiris, Michel 231, 264 Le´vi-Strauss, Claude 3, 36, 268, 269, 285, 296 Leyshon, Andrew 179, 180 liminality 57, 98, 244, 256, 262, 263, 283 lithography. See chromolithography liturgy 176 local knowledge 39, 176, 194, 206, 247, 303 Lodge, Oliver 64 Londe, Albert 272, 273 London 56, 57 Luhmann, Niklas 8 Luhrmann, Tanya 23, 257 Luig, Ute 38, 39, 47 Maarouf, Mohammed 144 madness 31, 44 Maffesoli, Michel 248 magic 14–17, 24, 32, 55, 59, 62, 73, 154, 159, 203, 220, 225–27, 231, 249, 256, 257, 263, 264, 286, 295, 298; contact ⬃ 88; ⬃ of the digital 49; ⬃ and mediality 219; ⬃ and mirror 306; ⬃ of movements 278; ⬃ of spirits 219; ⬃ and technology 15, 32, 48, 73, 74, 161, 219, 220, 295; magical fairs 12; magical image 48; magical instruments 261; magical performance 294; magical powers 55, 227, 309; magical skills 13; ‘‘magical writing’’ 191; magician 12, 257, 306, 311, 312; natural ⬃ 59; personal ⬃ 70; protective ⬃ 49, 50;

368 sexual ⬃ 70; technique of ⬃ 15, 121; writing as ⬃ (see writing) magnetism 59, 61, 70, 74, 211; animal ⬃ 60; self-magnetization 70 Mali 17, 172, 183–200, 248, 264, 301, 302 Malinowski, Bronislav 22 Mami Wata. See cult manifestation 56, 59, 62, 73, 74, 105, 118, 121, 163, 166; aesthetics of ⬃ 166; authority of ⬃ 160; ectoplasmic ⬃ 46; from latent to manifest and back 10; ⬃ of ancestors 291; ⬃ of the divine 20, 59, 158, 165, 174; ⬃ of an ego-alien force 71; ⬃ through embodiment 186; ⬃ as form of prophecy 46; ⬃ of ginn (see ginn); ⬃ of God/a Goddess 116–18, 122, 125, 132, 136, 166, 172, 181, 199, 287, 291; ⬃ of images 215; ⬃ of mediumship 67, 186; ⬃ of nonhuman powers 61, 68; ⬃ of possession 167; ⬃ of shamans 20; ⬃ of spirits 31, 33, 57, 61, 69, 109, 186, 197, 213; material ⬃ of sermons 197; media and ⬃ 156–70, 298; occult ⬃ 60; passive ⬃ 70, 71; possibility of ⬃ 163; religious ⬃ 28; ritual ⬃ 82–83; somnambulant ⬃ 60 Marey, Etienne Jules 210, 272, 273 marginality 2, 21, 31, 63, 142, 143, 153, 165, 182, 207, 311; ideological ⬃ 63; ⬃ of mediums in the development of the Western world 57 marginalization: ⬃ of images 206; ⬃ of musicians 176; ⬃ of women 144; social ⬃ 21, 25, 173, 174, 177, 181, 182, 207, 253, 299, 301, 304 Maria Lionza cult. See cult Marks, Laura 249, 309 masks 217, 245; masked ball 245, 253; masked dance 125; masked parades 241; masquerades 244, 248 Masquelier, Adeline 207, 305 Masquelier, Caroline Alida 305 mass communication. See communication mass media. See media mass psychology. See psychology materiality 9, 10, 29, 30, 117, 134; dematerialization 9–11; material objects 16, 88, 117, 175, 191, 192; materialization 5, 9–11, 37, 41, 52, 56, 79, 164, 167, 185, 211, 213, 215, 217, 249; religious materialism 116, 117; solidification 20, 168, 199, 200, 214

Index Matless, David 179 Mauss, Marcel 4, 64, 175, 192 May, Karl 311 McDannell, Colleen 63 McLuhan, Marshall 9, 33, 37, 50, 55, 74, 75, 192; ‘‘Narcissus Trance’’ 264 McNaughton, Patrick 198, 304 Mead, Margaret 22, 24, 264–68, 270, 272, 274–76, 278, 279, 314, 315, 316 media: analog ⬃ 28, 32, 33, 45, 48, 268; audiovisual ⬃ 78, 96, 112, 178, 180, 188, 275, 281, 309; chains of ⬃ 15, 16, 77, 88, 196, 198; circuits (see circuits); digital ⬃ (see digital); electronic ⬃ (see electricity); global ⬃ (see global); mass ⬃ 3, 9, 11, 13, 15, 20, 28, 29, 34, 49, 58, 63, 64, 66, 70, 72–74, 78, 82, 107, 137–40, 147, 149, 150, 152, 154, 165, 180, 184, 187, 188, 208, 212, 232, 248, 259, 293, 295–97, 313; ⬃ circulation (see circulation); ⬃ consciousness 50, 51, 75, 141 (see also camera); ⬃ coverage 52, 82, 313; ⬃ as disturbance 16, 18, 19, 33, 201–22, 260; ⬃ engagement 48, 117, 161, 183–85, 187, 190, 192, 193, 197, 200; ⬃ and manifestation 156–70 (see also manifestation); ⬃ mogul 52, 53; ⬃ products 98, 108, 178, 183, 200, 248, 289; ⬃ representations 14, 15, 73, 116, 117, 123, 129, 136, 147, 149, 160, 169, 203, 204, 213, 216, 217, 219, 220, 224, 227, 229, 230, 236, 245, 248, 249, 275; ⬃ savvy 103, 189, 200; mediascape 50, 52, 100, 188; ⬃ and spirits (see spirits); ⬃ as symptom of decline 259; mediatechnical division of ritual space 98; ⬃ technologies (see technology); ⬃ theory 9, 37, 66, 74–76, 78, 98, 249, 250, 276, 281; ‘‘⬃ theory before ⬃ theory’’ 73; mediatic space (see space); mediums and ⬃ (see mediums); modern concept of ⬃ 58, 61, 64, 66, 67, 72, 74, 75, 208; multi-media 113, 176, 178, 179, 196, 248; new and old ⬃ 8–9, 28, 32, 34–39, 48, 55, 76, 133, 150, 187, 236; newest ⬃ 32, 46, 55; popular ⬃ 17, 59, 73, 154, 165, 178, 223, 226, 227, 232, 245, 297, 310; print ⬃ 78, 108, 204, 304, 309; religion and ⬃ (see religion); religious ⬃ practices (see religion); ritual ⬃ (see ritual); shunning of technical ⬃ 201–22 (see also camera); technical ⬃ 1, 3–8, 10,

Index 12–19, 21, 22, 24, 58, 59, 73, 75, 77, 78, 92, 95, 97–99, 197, 200, 203, 205, 207, 209, 217, 250, 259–63, 264, 268, 284; voice and ⬃ (see voice) mediacy: ‘‘hypermediacy’’ 225. See also immediacy mediality 219 medialization 200 mediation: audiovisual ⬃ (see audiovisual media); aural ⬃ 194; bodily/corporeal ⬃ 140, 192, 303; charismatic ⬃ 183–200, 301; colonial ⬃ of trance 148; commercial ⬃ 149 (see also capitalism); communication without ⬃ (see communication); ‘‘ghostly quality of ⬃’’ 4; haptic qualities of ⬃ 83, 185; immediacy and ⬃ 22, 77–79, 96, 99; intermediation 19, 204, 220; kenotic ⬃ 77; mass ⬃ 13, 15, 138, 140, 149, 154, 165, 188, 248, 293, 295, 296; mass ⬃ of trance 150; materialities of ⬃ 10, 30; media and ⬃ 1; mediated feedback loop 6; mediating capacities of dress 198 (see also dress); ⬃ of absence (see absence); ⬃ between humans and God 72; ⬃ between humans and spirits 80, 116; ⬃ between materiality and immateriality 10, 136, 175; ⬃ between this world and beyond 62, 196; ⬃ between this and other worlds 196; ⬃ between visibility and invisibilty 3, 210, 301; ⬃ of charismatic power 186; ⬃ of the divine 121, 134, 190, 191, 194, 196; ⬃ free 13 (see also immediacy); ⬃ and liminality 98, 256; ⬃ of the past 310; ⬃ and performance 256; ⬃ process 196; ⬃ of social worlds 79; ⬃ of spiritual power 19, 190, 194, 196, 197, 199, 217; ⬃ of supernatural powers 198, 304; ⬃ techniques 78, 96 (see also Kulturtechnik); ⬃ through material objects 175; ⬃ as trading zone 4, 12, 19; ⬃ and trance (see trance); ⬃ of transcendence 99; ⬃ of values 173; ⬃ by voice 196; mediums and ⬃ 295 (see also mediums); modes of ⬃ 18, 184; new forms/means of ⬃ 11, 22; new means of ⬃ 11; old and new forms of ⬃ 32; photographic ⬃ 210, 217 (see also photography); practices of ⬃ 101, 102, 109, 199; religion as ⬃ (see religion); religious ⬃ 12, 20, 78, 187; re-mediation 28, 29, 48, 223–25, 227,

369 248; ritual ⬃ 3, 4, 15, 16, 19, 98, 415; shamans and ⬃ 118; social ⬃ of power 140; spirits and ⬃ (see spirits); spiritual ⬃ 187–90, 197, 200, 213; technology and ⬃ 4, 15, 16, 19, 22, 27, 46, 217; theories of ⬃ 18, 205, 276; visual ⬃ 197–200 (see also cinema; film); work of ⬃ 3, 4, 15, 16, 19, 78, 90 mediatization 77, 102, 177, 248; ‘‘Christianity’s monopoly of the mediatic’’ 53; McLuhan’s mediatic trinity 37; mediatic innovation 30; mediatic retention 42; mediatic robes 15 (see also dress); mediatic technology 32 (see also media); ⬃ and immediacy 77 mediator 78, 98, 148, 173, 217, 224; public ⬃ 148; ritual ⬃ 21, 99, 115, 256; social ⬃ 173; technical ⬃ 15; traditional ⬃ 182; transcendent ⬃ 217 medicine 207; ⬃ men 232, 247; traditional ⬃ 223, 231, 234; Western ⬃ 234, 271 medium diaphane 58, 72, 75 mediums, personal 3–7, 9, 10–12, 15, 17–19, 21–23, 25, 29, 31–33, 37–41, 47, 54, 58–60, 61, 63, 67, 73, 76, 102, 103, 141, 151, 155, 182, 205, 208, 211, 217, 220, 221, 229, 251, 254, 289, 305, 306; acting as ⬃ 212; basangu ⬃ 38; debate about ⬃ 67; democratic ⬃ 50, 51; dreams and ⬃ 38; emergence of ⬃ 61; engagement of ⬃ 48; epistemological claims of ⬃ 65; epoch of spirit ⬃ 75; female ⬃ 140; ghorlas 167, 298; historical specificity of spirit medium’s ambiguous position 204; history of ⬃ 66, 74; Holey Spirit ⬃ (see cults); lineage of ⬃ 31; ⬃ as agents of their own representation 14; ⬃ as charlatans 154, 227; ⬃ as cheaters 227, 233, 234, 238, 307; ⬃ and clients 224; ⬃ compared to batteries 5; ⬃ and extrasensory capacities 66; ⬃ and film (see film); ⬃ have no recall of possession 42; ⬃ as heritage transmitters 5, 12, 128, 295; ⬃ and modernity 213; ⬃ and new media, 29, 49–52; ⬃ as objects of ethnographic gaze 14; ⬃ and photographs of themselves 210; ⬃ and rites of reception 152; ⬃ turned into an apparatus 5; ⬃ as vehicles 25, 31, 39, 134; ⬃ as vessel, 5; ‘‘pagan spirit ⬃’’

370 203, 207, 209; passivity of ⬃ 70; practices of ⬃ 13, 39, 57, 61, 62, 64–66, 68, 69, 71–73, 236; representations of ⬃ 217; spirits and their ⬃ 216, 291; staging of ⬃ 13; the term ⬃ 58; traditional spirit ⬃ 205, 225; waganga 16; Western spirit ⬃ 217 mediumism 70, 117; mediumistic properties 118 mediumship: archive of ⬃ 26, 53; augmentation of ⬃ 32; hereditary ⬃ 167; history of ⬃ 29; magic and ⬃ 219; manifestation of ⬃ 67; ⬃ and alterity 25, 26, 34, 44; ⬃ and anthropology 21–24, 34, 89; ⬃ and aspiration to return 25; ⬃ and audiences 25, 32; ⬃ and business 134; ⬃ and capitalism 38; ⬃ in Christianity 2; ⬃ and colonial bureaucracy 35, 36; ⬃ and film (see film); ⬃ and giving a voice 19; ⬃ and healing practices 2 (see also healing); ⬃ and herbalists 223; ⬃ in Hinduism 20; ⬃ and historicity 31; ⬃ and iconology 53; ⬃ and incarnation 36; ⬃ and the invisible 47; ⬃ in Islam 2, 28, 77–99; ⬃ in Judaism 2; ⬃ and monarchy 142; ⬃ and music 94; ⬃ and nation-state 5; ⬃ and nostalgic expectation 92; ⬃ and other religious discourses 35; ⬃ and performance 2, 6, 32, 165; ⬃ and permanence 44; ⬃ and power 52; ⬃ and public sphere 31; ⬃ and reification 31; ⬃ and state power 36, 128; ⬃ and scientific investigation 70; ⬃ and the search for truth 65; ⬃ as sign of tradition 31; ⬃ and simultaneity 44; ⬃ and social change 34; ⬃ as spectacle 30–32; ⬃ and spirits (see spirits); ⬃ and subjectivity 55, 164; ⬃ in Sufism 2, 137–55; ⬃ and technical media 4, 31, 45, 48; ⬃ as theater 25, 41; ⬃ and transformation 39; ⬃ transformed 25; ⬃ and unregulated possession 31, 83; ⬃ of witches (see witch); modernity of ⬃ 41; modernization of ⬃ 5, 7; political significance of ⬃ 39, 48; problems of ⬃ 43; religion and ⬃ 27; resurgence of ⬃ 2; ritual ⬃ 4, 30; spaces of ⬃ 14; spirit ⬃ 2, 10, 12, 15, 17, 18, 25, 26, 28, 31, 33, 34, 35, 37, 42, 44, 53, 77, 102, 103, 288, 294, 305; staging of ⬃ 25, 140; traditions of ⬃ 2, 36, 39; trance ⬃ 4, 5,

Index 7, 11, 21, 51, 154, 185, 186; visualization of ⬃ 221–40 memories: ⬃ of conversion 114; ⬃ of loss 103; ⬃ of rural tradition 178; ⬃ of slave trade 290; ⬃ of survival 110; war ⬃ 103, 110 memory 36, 43–45, 49, 54, 156, 178, 266, 270; collective ⬃ 252; commemoration 128, 202, 245; memorabilia 97, 197; memorializing 205 Mesmer, Franz Anton 60, 63; Mesmerism 12, 13, 35, 57, 58, 60–62, 64, 66–68, 70, 71, 73 message 13, 47, 107, 109, 171, 219, 308; audiovisual ⬃ 180; divine ⬃ 112, 173; the medium is the ⬃ 52, 55, 75; political ⬃ 171, 190; religious ⬃ 100, 105, 110, 112–14; universal ⬃ 109, 112, 293 messianism 26, 27 Meyer, Birgit 16, 78, 79, 92, 116, 220, 227, 248, 249, 284, 301, 306 microphone 114, 221 microscope 59, 289 Middleton, John 34, 207 migration 9, 11, 21, 35, 78, 93, 96, 98, 100, 101–5, 114, 177, 290; migrating substances 74; ⬃ studies 102, 109; networks of ⬃ 7, 112 mimesis 9, 23, 40, 243, 247, 248, 252, 262; visual ⬃ 168 mimicry 167, 245 missionizing 7, 59, 101, 105, 107–10; 120, 122, 138, 146, 231, 289; evangelizing 27, 105, 107, 108, 111 modernism 6, 9, 31, 63–65, 74, 98, 138, 145, 152; alternative ⬃ 64; postmodernism 34 modernity 1, 6, 7, 12, 15, 18, 26, 29, 37, 41, 46, 64, 133, 137, 138, 152, 203, 204, 208, 213, 218, 220, 226, 227, 235, 252, 259, 263, 271, 273, 295; institutions of ⬃ 66; ⬃ and contingency; ⬃ and disenchantment 1; purification work of ⬃ 6; technologies of ⬃ 35 modernization 5, 7, 14, 15, 36, 64, 179, 224, 226, 231, 232, 235, 259 money 86, 99, 140, 182, 233–35, 286, 308 Mongolia 241, 246, 247, 261, 313 Morocco 5, 11, 13, 15, 78–83, 92, 96, 137–55, 285, 286, 293, 294, 296–98, 305

Index Morris, Rosalind 5, 6, 13, 15, 18, 20, 116, 151, 202, 210, 217, 283, 295 Moses, Stainton 56, 57 motion 3, 10, 19, 52, 94, 95, 121, 125, 130, 133, 176, 199, 210, 212, 216–18, 220, 251, 271–73, 275, 276, 278, 279, 305, 306, 316; bodies in motion 132; locomotion 271, 273; mass movement 145; ⬃ and emotion 275; motionlessness 202, 217; movement of the Holy Spirit 114; rapid ⬃ and slow ⬃ (see film); spirits and ⬃ 19, 216–17, 219; spiritual movement 267 movement(s): charismatic ⬃ 65; esoteric ⬃ 12, 313; moral reform ⬃ 5, 13, 14, 144, 183; mystic ⬃ 3; political ⬃ 34, 64, 141, 143, 145, 146, 181; religious ⬃ 2, 35, 100, 105, 107, 180, 187, 194, 219, 301; religious renewal ⬃ 185, 188, 189, 301, 302; revival ⬃ 31; spiritualism 4, 12, 13, 35, 42, 46, 56–76, 210, 306; theoretical ⬃ 70 MP3 player 104, 107 music 15, 21, 32, 37, 56, 79, 83, 94, 113, 117, 121–23, 137, 140, 148, 150–52, 157, 158, 171–82, 223, 229, 238, 245, 253, 287, 291, 294, 299, 308; brass bands 182 musical instruments 37, 172–74, 177, 181; bells 125, 127, 218; cymbals 121, 122, 134; drum 10, 21, 38, 120–23, 125, 127, 136, 147, 151, 172, 174, 176, 257–59, 301, 308; flute 123, 147; musical performance 171, 181; musicians 82, 139, 142, 143, 146, 153; oboe 174; orchestra 148, 171–77, 181, 182; tambourine 147 Muybridge, Eadweard J. 210 mythology 35, 38, 73, 159, 180, 202, 208, 224, 301, 311; myths of media effects 65; origin myth 241, 244 Narcissus trance. See trance narcosis 75, 76 nationalism 5, 14, 51, 55, 100, 108, 121, 138, 141, 142, 145–47, 149, 150, 152, 154, 180, 231, 296, 310; ethnographic ⬃ 180; methodological ⬃ 288 nature: ⬃ def. 52, 160, 267, 270, 272, 291, 306, 312; imponderables of ⬃ 72; natural elements 58, 59, 72, 75; natural forces 58–62, 68; natural history 315;

371 natural and nonnatural causes 69; natural sciences 72; naturalization 62, 128, 215; second ⬃ 248, 273, 278; the supernatural 102, 151, 154, 198, 199, 202, 215, 225, 236, 282, 292, 304 Naturphilosophie 62 necromancy. See death New Guinea 265, 314 New York 57, 150, 212, 268; New York Academy of Science 270 Newton, Isaac 58 Niekrenz, Yvonne 245 Niger 22, 35, 251, 264, 295 Nigeria 35, 36, 102, 108, 209, 218–20, 227, 228, 234, 290, 295, 307, 309 Nollywood 307 nostalgia 92, 128, 286 oboe. See musical instruments O’Brien, Susan 102, 150 occultism 12, 13, 60, 104, 215, 227, 228; occult conjurations 62; ‘‘occult economies’’ 234; occult forces/powers 16, 111, 191, 199, 220; occult knowledge 160, 303 offerings 10, 81, 83, 84, 87, 117, 120–22, 127, 130, 133, 161, 165, 294; votive ⬃ 102, 103, 256, 289. See also sacrifice Ollywood 178 onomatopoiesis 93, 308 orthodoxy: heterodoxy 31, 152; Jewish ultra-orthodox 2, 320; Muslim ⬃ 184, 186 orthopraxy 185, 191 Otto, Ulf 246, 248, 310 Oufkir, Malika 144 paint 206. See also color painted body 219, 222, 237, 252 painter 209, 241 painting 117, 122–27, 130, 160, 162, 199, 214, 223, 258 paper images 20, 165, 166, 215. See also offerings paraphernalia 10, 35, 127, 131, 221, 237, 257, 293 parapsychology 65–68, 71 Paris 57, 63, 192; E´xposition Ethnographique (1895) 273; Paris Grand Expo (1867) 146 pastness 15, 246

372 Pentecostalism 12, 20, 34, 78, 100, 101, 104, 105–11, 114, 287–90, 306, 309 perception: cinema ⬃ 278, 279 (see also cine´-trance; film); film ⬃ 23, 243, 249, 250 (see also film); imperceptibility 121, 273; modes of ⬃ 17, 75, 92, 186, 187, 273; movement ⬃ 24; perceptibility 37; perceptibility and imperceptibility 195, 301; perceptions 16, 73, 77, 94, 120, 137, 203, 213, 253, 259, 267, 277, 279; perceptive faculties (see senses); perceptive patterns 276; perceptivity 192; perceptual consciousness 49; perceptual cues 246; perceptual knowledge 33; perceptual stimulation 45; public ⬃ 11, 224; sensory/human ⬃ 17, 43, 44, 58, 62, 75, 176, 196, 197, 249, 267, 272, 273, 275, 284; space ⬃ 267; sound ⬃ 180; subliminal ⬃ 278; synesthetic modes of perception 199; tactile ⬃ 194; threshold of ⬃ 250 performativity 141, 161, 167, 245, 248, 293, 294; performative appropriation 23; performative boundaries 244; performative force/power 147, 154; performative images 20 (see also tableaux vivants); performative interventions 166; performative logic 204; performative media 243, 263 photography 4, 6, 8, 9, 11, 13, 15, 18, 19, 20, 28, 30, 32, 34, 35, 46–48, 78, 116, 117, 125, 126, 129, 140, 145, 157, 158, 161, 169, 201, 202–5, 207, 213–16, 218–20, 248, 258, 261, 268, 270, 272, 274, 275, 288, 289, 304–6, 309, 313, 315; amateur ⬃ 260; ban on ⬃ 32; black-and-white ⬃ 110, 160; chronophotography 271–73, 315; color ⬃ 161, 168, 204, 225; digital and analog ⬃ 33; ‘‘disturbance of ⬃’’ 33; early ⬃ 125, 127, 136, 276; ethnographic ⬃ 24, 128; hegemony of photographic vision 18; photophobic spirits 201, 208–10, 261, 304; the photographic 27, 51; photographic flash 213; photographic gear 264; photographic indexicality 160; photographic material 267, 271; photographic mediation (see mediation); photographic process 213; photographic regime 161; photographic surface 162 (see tableaux vivants);

Index photographic technology 146; photographic visibility 204, 215; ⬃ and body 168, 170; ⬃ and death 201, 202, 217, 220, 304; ⬃ and ritual (see ritual); ⬃ of spirit possession 210; ⬃ and temporality 205; ⬃ and theft; ⬃ working within a prophetic register 157; refusal of ⬃ 204, 209; se´ances on ⬃ 211; shaman ⬃ 129; spirit ⬃ 46, 203, 209, 211, 212, 214, 215, 217, 218, 305, 306, spirit ⬃ in the West 210–12; spirit mediums and ⬃ 32, 208; spiritualist ⬃ 64, 210; still ⬃ 132, 133, 314; studio ⬃ 161 piercing 32 pilgrimage 81, 88, 134, 140, 145, 156, 285, 288, 298, 312, 313; urban ⬃ 146 Pinney, Christopher 20, 21, 159, 162, 249, 298 play 25, 121, 231, 252; card ⬃ 167; categorizations of ⬃ 245; costume ⬃ 311; ⬃ acting 130; ⬃ with machines 44; possession ⬃ 241–63; roleplay 224, 233, 246, 248, 253, 255, 256, 260, 310, 311; theater ⬃ 226 Podmore, Frank 51 Polke, Sigmar 212 pollution 174, 177, 208; impurity 21, 177 polytheism 184 possession. See spirit possession postage stamp 128, 129 postcards 126 poster: film ⬃ 204, 251 power 3, 10, 19, 21, 23, 28, 33, 35, 39, 48, 71, 73, 78, 110, 113, 142–44, 149, 154, 159, 162, 174, 189, 190, 192, 198, 206, 219, 239, 247, 283, 289, 296, 303; affective ⬃ 166, 180, 248; authorizing ⬃ 164; colonial ⬃ 10, 35, 36, 231, 252, 297; conceptions/notions of ⬃ 32, 176, 273; disempowerment 5, 10; divine ⬃ 140, 143, 175, 199, 297; empowerment 21, 118, 177, 181; empowerment of spirits through media 5; esoteric ⬃ 303; harmful ⬃ turned into blessing ⬃ 81; Holy Spirit’s ⬃ (see Holy Spirit); local ⬃ 172; mass-mediated structure of ⬃ 147; occult ⬃ 199, 220; overpowering 261, 285; patterns of ⬃ 35; performative ⬃ 154; political ⬃ 63, 301; ⬃ of action 194; ⬃ of appearance 15; ⬃ of being seen from afar 33; ⬃ beyond

Index oneself 135; ⬃ of blessing 78, 90, 96, 286; ⬃ of goddess 122; ⬃ inequalities 186; ⬃ of knowledge 46; powerless 174, 182; ⬃ mediation practices 199; ⬃ of metamorphosis 216; ⬃ of music 182; ⬃ of reading the Koran 285; ⬃ of rituals 99, 145; ⬃ of spirits 33, 79–81, 204, 209, 212, 251; ⬃ of trance (see trance); powerful indexicality 160; 123, 176, 177, 292; protecting ⬃ 16; quasi-divine ⬃ 20, 161; resistance to ⬃ 25; royal ⬃ 175; sacred ⬃ (see sacred); self-empowerment 39; shamanic ⬃ 118, 292, 133; Sharifian 141; sociopolitical ⬃ 182, 177; socioreligious ⬃ 78, 172, 173; specter of ⬃ beyond containment 52; spiritual ⬃ 16, 19, 174, 177, 186, 191, 192, 197–99, 217, 219; state ⬃ 12, 36, 154, 297; subjective ⬃ 74; superhuman ⬃ 61, 261; supernatural ⬃ 198, 199, 282, 304; symbolic ⬃ 172; those in ⬃ 223, 152; transcendental ⬃ 184; transformative ⬃ 17, 177, 196, 216, 219; uncanny ⬃ 132; uncontrolled ⬃ 174, 173 powers 3, 17, 39, 76, 164, 167, 190, 220; asubjective ⬃ 74; charismatic ⬃ (see charisma); demon’s ⬃ (see demon); disembodied ⬃ 3; divine ⬃ 172, 174, 182, 191, 196; divinely granted ⬃ 189, 192, 193, 197; God’s ⬃ 184, 186, 194, 196, 198, 199; goddesses’ ⬃ 177; hidden powers of letters and numbers 303; magical ⬃ (see magic); mediating ⬃ 197; mganga’s ⬃ 225, 236; occult ⬃ 199; otherworldly ⬃ 68; ⬃ of commodity and technological reproduction 294 (see also capitalism); ⬃ of media chains 16; ⬃ of metamorphosis 216; ⬃ of speech 195; ⬃ of technical media; protective ⬃ 16; sacred ⬃ (see sacred); the seers’ ⬃ 297; spiritual ⬃ 112, 184, 185, 191–93, 197–99, 209, 219, 220; strange new ⬃ 15; supernatural ⬃ 198, 199, 304; transcendent ⬃ 98, 190; transformative ⬃ 19, 195, 196, 219 presence 17, 22, 124, 147; aspiration to ⬃ 25; bodily ⬃ of mediums 175, 191–93, 197, 206, 293; coming into ⬃ 109, 113; co-presence of the medium’s body and the spirit’s consciousness 45, 48, 54;

373 divine ⬃ 194; emblematic ⬃ (see emblem); iconic ⬃ 117, 132 (see also iconicity); illusion of ⬃ 27, 28, 51; invisible ⬃ of God, 133, 136; ⬃ and absence (see absence); ⬃ and alterity 6, 34, 48, 54; ⬃ of death 217, 220 (see also death); ⬃ of fieldworker 154; ⬃ of images 158; ⬃ and immediacy (see immediacy); ⬃ of media 18, 19, 203, 204, 205, 209, 218, 224, 251, 260, 261, 305; ⬃ as opposed to cybershamans 132; ⬃ and remediation 28; ⬃ solidified 20, 168, 213; ⬃ of spirits (see spirits); ⬃ without transcription 33; return to ⬃ 48; ritual ⬃ 78, 158, 206; spiritual ⬃ 197, 213, 214, 219; tactile ⬃ 121; televisual presencing 28; transcendental ⬃ 184; uncanny ⬃ 125; unmediated ⬃ 16, 42, 77, 79, 98; unmediated ⬃ of God 79; valorization of ⬃ 27 private sphere 12, 105, 108 proselytization. See missionizing Protestantism 63, 105, 209, 291 psyche 30, 42–45, 49, 54, 55, 214 psychoactive substances 245, 257; alcohol 31, 35, 117, 208, 305; mushrooms 257 psychoanalysis 62, 65, 66, 71, 273 psychology 61, 68, 73, 81, 87, 92, 98, 192, 214, 245, 250, 273; Gestalt ⬃ 278; mass ⬃ 9, 64, 66, 75; sociopsychology 65, 74, 79 psychotherapy 61, 64, 65, 67, 68 public sphere/domain/realm 11, 12, 17, 19, 20, 31, 54, 77, 96, 97, 105, 112, 148, 216, 292; semipublic and public arenas 302 publicity 98, 144–47, 254 purification 6, 29, 42, 113, 188, 302; cleansing 193, 261, 262 purity, ritual 207 Puyse´gur, Marquis de 60, 61, 66 Qu’ran 2, 102, 138, 184, 187, 191, 192, 207, 285, 302, 303 Rabat 142, 153, 297 radio 5, 9, 15, 22, 44, 64, 73, 74, 108, 145, 153, 183, 188, 189, 194, 195–97, 285 Randolph, Paschal Beverly 70 Ranger, Terence 179, 247 Rappaport, Roy 287

374 reading 30, 48, 184, 190, 207, 285; misreading 50; ⬃ and writing 190; rereading 50; speaking and ⬃ 191 recitation 79, 93, 148, 176, 191, 207 recording 60, 99, 268, 297; filmic ⬃ 6, 24, 84, 105, 127, 140, 169, 270, 274, 285, 310; photographic ⬃ 11, 140, 158, 160, 271, 274; ⬃ instruments 267, 278, 280; ⬃ of rituals 11, 89, 96 (see also video); ⬃ of sermons 104, 183–85, 192 (see also audio recordings); ⬃ system 275; records 297 (see also audio recording); tape ⬃ (see tape recorder); video ⬃ (see video) reenactment 23, 178–80, 241, 224–48, 263, 309–11 Regnault, Louis-Fe´lix 272, 273, 316 religion 1, 3, 5, 11, 12, 21, 22, 26–28, 34, 35, 48, 53, 57, 58, 72, 77, 78, 96, 102, 104, 109, 120, 121, 145, 146, 158, 167, 171, 172, 176, 181, 184, 187, 204, 205, 207, 208, 217, 235, 247, 288, 292, 297, 301, 303, 306; alternative ⬃ 211; concept of ⬃ 101; new ⬃ 2, 105, 106, 248, 301; ⬃ and valorization of presence 27 (see also presence); religioscapes 108; the religious 3, 6, 26, 175; religious authority 167, 185, 186, 188, 189; religious experts 130, 131, 175, 191, 302; religious knowledge 183; religious leader 17, 199, 289; religious materialism 117; religious mediums 284 100, 105, 108, 110, 112–14; religious networks 101, 108, 289; religious practices 12, 20, 79, 104, 107, 111, 112, 116, 152, 162, 185, 188, 189, 190, 193, 200, 291; religious reformism 98; religious representations 227; religious revival 2, 12, 63, 100, 216; religious rituals 182 (see also ritual); return of the religious (see return); religious sphere 15; religious studies 4; religious worship 21. See also Buddhism; Christianity; Islam; Judaism; Pentecostalism; ritual; Sufism remediation. See mediation reproducibility 11, 33, 34, 53, 139, 141, 144, 295. See also technology return, 26, 33, 45, 51, 53, 176; aspiration to ⬃ 25, 29; discourse of ⬃ 6, 34, 53; eternal returns 46; figure of ⬃ 9, 13, 26, 34; ⬃ of the archaic; ⬃ to linguistic

Index models of reading 50; ⬃ of media 9, 46; ⬃ of mediumship 54; ⬃ of the orgiastic 6, 13; ⬃ to original readings of the foundational texts of Islam 188; ⬃ of the premodern past 7; ⬃ of the religious 1–3, 6, 7, 26, 29, 46, 101; ⬃ to traditional belief systems 226; ⬃ to traditional methods and witchcraft 235; returned colonial narrative 261; spiritualism, photography, and ⬃ 215 Reuster-Jahn, Uta 233 Revill, George 179 revitalization 15, 177, 181, 300; religious revivalism 26, 63; ⬃ of religion 12, 100, 106, 216, 219; ⬃ of rural cultural identity 178. See also folklore; movements; ritual rhythm 10, 94, 151, 172–74, 176–78, 182, 308 ritual 3, 4, 11, 15, 19, 21, 27, 77–79, 82, 83, 87, 88, 89, 92, 94, 97–99, 103, 104, 116, 117, 118, 120, 122, 125, 128, 130, 132, 139, 140, 171, 173, 174, 175, 181, 182, 198, 202, 206, 207, 217, 218, 226, 247, 251, 253–55, 257, 266, 268, 285, 286, 287, 289, 304, 313; baptism (see ceremony); calendrical ⬃ 32; circulation and ⬃ 78, 82, 103; effect of a ⬃ (see effect); funeral (see ceremony); lifecycle ⬃ 255, 256 (see also ceremony); local knowledge and ⬃ 206; media ⬃ 79, 84, 90, 95, 98, 99; online ⬃ 103; politico-religious ⬃ 54, 173; private ⬃ 124, 139, 260, 261; public ⬃ 54, 140, 260, 261, public trance ⬃ 140, 141, 146, 149, 152, 153, 261; religious ⬃ 182, 188; revival of ⬃ 104; ⬃ and affect 16; ⬃ and belief 26; ⬃ and camera 6, 9, 11, 16, 19, 22, 84, 88, 89, 91, 95, 96, 98, 99, 141, 157, 104, 203–5, 208, 211, 260–62, 263, 278, 279, 286, 287, 295, 305; ⬃ and cine´-trance (see cine´trance); ⬃ commitment 254; ⬃ community 15, 80, 88, 92, 96, 140, 148, 294; ⬃ connection to the world of spirits 104, 144, 286; ⬃ cooperation 15, 89, 95; ⬃ cycle 81, 98; ⬃ dance 122, 216; ⬃ and dissociation 96, 287; ⬃ distancing of the self 93, 94; ⬃ distribution 15; ⬃ efficacy (see efficacy); ⬃ as entertainment 256, 294; ⬃ exchange 86, 90, 91, 97; ⬃ experts 3, 11, 15, 17,

Index 21, 81, 83, 103, 104, 131, 246, 285; ⬃ and film; ⬃ financing 118, 180, 219, 226, 290; ⬃ goods 102; ⬃ and healing 78, 79, 80, 83, 84, 175, 285, 297, 308; ⬃ of initiation 223, 226, 229, 255; ⬃ intimacy (see intimacy); ⬃ inversion 174, 177; ⬃ liminality (see liminality); ⬃ and magic 263; ⬃ media 5, 14, 83–91, 95, 96, 149, 157, 198, 259, 293, 294; ⬃ mediation (see mediation); ⬃mediumship (see mediumship); ⬃music 79, 174, 176, 308; ⬃ networks 82, 92; ⬃ norms 141; ⬃ operation 88, 95; ⬃ order 14, 86–88, 91; ⬃ performance 6, 14, 15, 19, 20, 21, 131, 141, 144, 148, 151, 174, 175, 176, 210, 253, 255, 256, 294, 297; ⬃ performance of power 10, 70, 174, 177, 182, 293; ⬃ and photography (see photography); ⬃ practices 3, 15, 91, 162, 190, 231, 247, 248, 256, 259, 286; ⬃ presence of spirits 206; ⬃ props 134; ⬃ purity 207; ⬃ of selfpreparation 193; ⬃ skills 12, 246; ⬃ space (see space); ⬃ speech 175; ⬃ of spirit possession 5, 6, 9, 22, 28, 70, 82, 102, 186, 204, 205, 206, 209, 216, 218, 219, 231, 250, 261, 281, 316; ⬃ structure 295; ⬃ techniques 4, 13, 15, 72, 83, 93, 159; ⬃ time 177, 264, 279; ⬃ topography 92; ⬃ treatment 92, 285; ⬃ work 4, 16, 19; ritualization 179; ritually polluting 208; setting of the ⬃ 14, 86, 117; shamanistic ⬃ 117, 118, 125, 247, 256; staging of the ⬃ 143, 145, 278; trance ⬃ 79, 91, 137, 142, 144–47, 175, 186, 257, 261, 262, 275, 280, 294; underclass ⬃ (see class); women and ⬃ 126, 284, saints and ⬃ (see saints); soul-calling ⬃ 12, 103, 289. See also ceremony Roberts, Allen 199 Roberts, Mary Nooter 199 Rodowick, David 50, 51 Roentgen, Wilhelm Conrad 210 Rotman, Andy 159 Rottenburg, Richard 89 Rouch, Jean 22, 23, 35, 250–52, 264, 281, 311, 312 Ruesch, Juergen 280 Rushdie, Salman 157, 298 Russell, Catherine 315, 316

375 sacred 114, 132, 174, 175, 180, 294; the feminine ⬃ 172; ⬃ dancer 175 (see also dance); ⬃ forces 144; ⬃ landscapes 172; ⬃ objects 26, 127; ⬃ places/sites 83, 288, 291; ⬃ power 174; ⬃ scripture (see Holy Scriptures); ⬃ space (see space); ⬃ thread 164; ⬃ tombs 140, 150, 297, 303; ⬃ words 93, 303; ⬃ writings (see writing) sacrifice 10, 78, 81–84, 86, 87, 89–91, 95, 96, 139, 140, 143, 146, 149, 152, 234, 287, 307. See also offerings saints 40, 79, 81–83, 93, 94, 137–44, 146, 148, 150, 152, 193, 217, 253, 285, 293, 295–97, 313 Salih, Ruba 98 saliva 88, 174 Sa´nchez, Rafael 29, 47 Satan. See devil Saudi Arabia 102 Schimmel, Annemarie 287 schizophrenia 265 Schlehe, Judith 246 Schmitz, Stephan 310 Schulz, Dorothea 17, 18, 192, 194, 198, 301, 302, 303, 304 Schu¨ttpelz, Erhard 9, 12, 13, 251, 254, 283, 287 screen 22, 96, 113, 157, 165, 169, 209, 225, 237, 239; onscreen 16, 17, 250, 251; screenings 6, 50, 237, 239, 240, 279, 310; television ⬃ 47, 108, 109; touching the ⬃ 289 scripture 13, 192, 205, 207; holy ⬃ and sacred ⬃ (see Holy Scriptures) se´ance 56, 213, 215 secrecy 18, 27, 46, 50, 75, 205, 207, 209, 218, 254, 256, 257, 306; body as tracing remains secret to the medium 44; secret knowledge 303; secret source of transformative power 216; secret trance practice 239; secrets 11, 16, 46, 47, 216, 220 secularity: secular entertainment 121, 178; secular experts 12; secularist critics; secularized music 171, 181 self-mutilation 143 senses 8, 116, 187, 195, 206; extensions of the ⬃ 75; extrasensory capacity 66; multisensory appropriation 197; ⬃ as faculties 68, 189, 194, 195; ⬃ ritual 14 (see also ritual); sensorium 33, 134;

376 sensory access 246; sensory dimension 249; sensory experience 136; sensory keys 117; sensory landscape 133; sensory life 116; sensory mode 284; sensory order 14, 133; sensory organ 250; sensory perception (see perception); tuning the ⬃ 187 sentience 121 serialization 19, 204, 230; newspaper serial 154, 223, 233. See also television sermons. See audio recordings sexuality 31, 233; sex ethos 314; sexual impropriety 152; sexual intercourse 229, 234, 277; sexual magic (see magic) shamanism 165, 167, 168, 310, 311, 313; modern Western ⬃ 243, 244–47, 258, 351; modern Western shamans 254, 255, 257, 259–61, 262; neoshamanism 247, 256; New Age ⬃ 27; power animals (see animals); ⬃ as alternative to mediumship 118; shamans 14, 15, 20, 27, 118, 120, 122, 124, 127, 116–36, 143, 156–70, 291, 292, 293, 294, 310, 313; shamans drum (see musical instruments); shamans and illness (see healing); urban ⬃ 247, 257. See also cybershaman Shannon, Claude 315 Shirokogoroff, Sergei 118 shrines 47, 83, 86, 87, 90, 106, 117, 120, 122, 123, 125, 126, 133, 134, 140, 291, 292, 293, 297; commercial ⬃ 120 Sieg, Kathrin 312 Siegel, James 51 Silcher, Friedrich 291 simulation 130, 207, 245, 250 singing 113, 121, 232, 245 sites 17, 22, 86, 89, 96, 133, 310 skepticism 4, 12, 19, 56, 57, 68–70, 167; radical ⬃ 3; skeptical shaman 261; ⬃ of skepticism 26 sketches 258, 276 skills 4, 132, 170, 182, 226, 256, 259; magical ⬃ 13 (see also techniques); ritual ⬃ 12, 246, 254. See also techniques: of the body skin 150, 191, 210, 304, 314 Skype. See Internet Smith, Benjamin R. 203, 305 somnambulism 60–62, 65, 73 sound 40, 120, 121, 129, 133, 172–74, 176, 178, 180, 182, 194, 213, 248, 287;

Index soundscapes 21; ⬃ system 105, 113; soundtrack 238 Southeast Asian traditions 32 space: concept of ⬃ 271; cultural ⬃ 150, 263; extramundane ⬃ 166; geographical ⬃ 100; imaginary ⬃ 23; intimate ⬃ 11; photographic ⬃ 215; political ⬃ 13, 154; public ⬃ 11, 12, 216, 289; religious ⬃ 107, 108; ritual ⬃ 4, 78, 83, 91, 97, 98, 124, 126, 132, 203, 209, 343; ritual ⬃ of exchange 78, 80, 86, 89, 90, 96, 97, 99; sacred ⬃ 89, 95, 96; ⬃ between devotee and picture surface 162; ⬃ and mediumship 9, 14; spaces of negotiation 254; ⬃ of prophetic experimentation 158; ⬃ of refusal 19, 201–20, 26, 304; ⬃ of se´ance 213; spirits and ⬃ 83 (see also spirits); tactile ⬃ 20, 165. See also cyberspace Spadola, Emilio 13, 14, 293, 296 speaking in tongues 40, 105, 113 spectacle 31, 32, 45, 53, 54, 121, 143, 144, 254, 297, 309, 310, 316; rites as ⬃ 145, 294; ⬃ as a form of arousal 159 spirit mediumship. See mediumship spirit possession 3, 6, 11, 13, 19, 26, 34, 35, 39, 44, 47, 102, 103, 111, 152, 186, 204–7, 216, 210, 218, 220, 222, 223, 227, 230, 234, 285, 294, 295, 305, 311; representations of ⬃ 204 (see also film; photography; video); ⬃ and anticolonial movements 34; ⬃ and camera (see camera); ⬃ and commentary 49; ⬃ and commodity forms 34; ⬃ and death 41 (see also death); ⬃ and exorcism 2, 120; ⬃ and the globalizing economic order 34; ⬃ and language 40–41; ⬃ and the possibility of translation 40–41; ⬃ as a recognized fact 3; ⬃ ritual (see ritual); ⬃ as theater of forgetting 42; ⬃ as theater of relation to the foreign 40; studies of ⬃ 41; technologizing ⬃ 19 Spiritism and Spiritualism. See movements spirits 3, 4, 7, 10, 11, 15, 17, 19, 24, 32, 33, 38–40, 44, 45, 47, 80, 81, 95, 97, 101, 103, 106, 111, 112, 115, 116, 118, 120, 122, 125, 133, 204, 206, 212, 219, 223, 230, 234, 261, 265, 292, 296, 307, 308, 312; African ⬃ 210, 211, 218; aiding ⬃ 258; alien ⬃ 251, 252; attributes attracting ⬃ 13, 215; celestial ⬃

Index 131; conceptions of ⬃ 109, 114; European ⬃ 36, 37; extra-European ⬃ 13; evil ⬃ 102, 109, 111, 113, 199, 211, 219, 228, 229, 236; female ⬃ 226, 236, 309; iconoclastic ⬃ 77; images of ⬃ (see photography); imaginary of ⬃ 5; interaction with ⬃ 117; invisible ⬃ 210, 215, 217; invocation of ⬃ 2, 261, 262; manifestations of ⬃/materializations of ⬃ 31, 57, 61, 69, 213, 215; modern ⬃ 37; motion of ⬃217; named ⬃ 31; pagan ⬃ 207, 208, 209; personal ⬃ 123, 202; photophobic ⬃ 201, 208, 261, 304; presence of ⬃ 134, 261; recognizability of ⬃ 46; sabbath ⬃ 11, 305; societies of ⬃ 35; spirit cabinet 114; spirit child 211; spirit of the camera 22; spirit industry 288; spirit-related diseases 228; spirit warrior 291; spirit worship 78, 102; spirit’s arrival 295; spirit’s blessing ⬃ 289; spirit’s translucent body 215; ⬃ of an airplane/Western technology 9, 10, 23; ⬃ of ancestors 133, 227, 228, 233; ⬃ and clothes 103 (see also dress); ⬃ and colors 31, 83, 208; ⬃ and consumption 31, 35, 38; ⬃ and darkness 213; ⬃ and food 83; ⬃ gifts 289 (see also ginn); ⬃ and incense 83; ⬃ and instruments of writing 36; ⬃ language 42; ⬃ and light 213, 218; ⬃ and their paraphernalia 35; ⬃ and photography 203, 210, 213, 305; ⬃ photography (see photography); ⬃ power (see power); ⬃ revealing strangers 206; ⬃ and saints 137, 139, 142, 293; ⬃ shrines 140; ⬃ as specters of the deceased/⬃ of the dead 2, 10, 11, 13, 40, 103, 211, 215, 227; ⬃ speech 48, 54; ⬃ and their clients 41; ⬃ as wind 216; technologically savvy ⬃ 103; the term ⬃ 291; traveling ⬃ 100–15, 284; uncontrolled escape of ⬃ 261; visualization of ⬃ 16, 215, 224; Volksgeist 294; words of ⬃ 130; work of ⬃ 110, 205; world of ⬃ 104, 150, 202, 208, 216, 223, 224, 226, 294, 311 spirituality 2, 5, 10, 16, 27, 244, 256, 262, 263, 293 sponsor, financier; principal. See ritual financing Sprague, E. W. 42 Spyer, Patricia 202–4

377 Star, Susan Leigh 67 states. See altered states Steckiewicz, Justyna 283 Sterne, Jonathan 187 Stolow, Jeremy 1, 64, 77, 301 Sufism 2, 3, 79, 80, 137–43, 147, 148, 150, 185, 186, 189, 190, 199, 284, 286, 287, 293, 295, 296, 302, 303, 308 suggestion 64, 73; hypnotic ⬃ 70; suggestibility 9, 64, 65, 71, 74; ⬃ and the masses 73; ⬃ and media 65; suggestive nature of the medium 249 superstition 12, 121, 125–28, 139, 141, 152, 288, 308, 309 Swedenborg, Emanuel 63, 210, 211 talisman 121, 122, 131 tambourine. See musical instruments Tanzania 16, 17, 219, 221–40, 290, 306, 307, 309 tape recorder 17, 184, 185, 196, 197, 265, 279; tape recording 17, 196, 197, 265, 279 Taussig, Michael 121, 168, 216, 247, 248, 251, 262, 292 Taylor, Philip 288 techne 4, 45, 158, 159 technical media. See audio recordings; camera; cinema; compact disc; DVD; film; Internet; mp3; photography; radio; tape recorder; telephone; television; typewriter; video techniques 46, 54, 57, 66, 67, 69, 82, 83, 186, 187, 265–71; breathing ⬃ 98, 308; cinematographic ⬃ 24 (see also film); cultural ⬃ (see Kulturtechnik); ecstasy ⬃ 80; healing ⬃ (see healing); ⬃ of inspiration 65, 224; material ⬃ 15, 83; media ⬃ (see media); musical ⬃ 21; psychological ⬃ 245; recording ⬃ 265; ritual ⬃ 4, 13, 15, 83, 92, 93, 95; seeing ⬃ 225; synesthetic ⬃ 198; ⬃ of the body (see body techniques); ⬃ of communing with the divine 185; ⬃ of culture (see Kulturtechnik); ⬃ of cultural change 281; ⬃ and divination (see divination); ⬃ of make-believe 17; ⬃ to manipulate time and space 281; ⬃ of the observer 280; trance ⬃ (see trance); verbal ⬃ 15, 83; viewing ⬃ 221–40, 306; visualization ⬃ 59, 225

378 technology 2, 6, 7, 9, 10, 13, 15, 16, 18, 25, 27, 29, 31, 35, 39, 45, 46, 48–50, 52, 53, 73–75, 105, 113, 132, 133, 140, 147, 148, 162, 179, 194, 196, 200, 202, 220, 226, 250, 264; cinematographic ⬃ (see cinema; film); communication ⬃ 8; psyche and ⬃ 43, 44; recording ⬃ 196, 197; religion and ⬃ (see religion); 34, 41, 100, 102, 103; science and ⬃ studies 67; technological apparatus 45, 197; technological change 34, 145; technological fantasy 51; technologization 19, 149, 150, 151, 154, 178, 181, 220, 295; ⬃ and belief 306, 77; ⬃ and reproducibility 32, 139, 141, 144, 153, 204; ⬃ and spirits 103 (see also spirits); ⬃ and violence 36; as Western 9, 39, 41, 208; typographic ⬃ 35. See also digital; magic; radio; video telegraph 5, 13, 35, 145, 159, 160, 298; spiritual telegraphy 64 telehearing 4, 17 telepathy 64 telephone 4, 35, 50, 102, 107, 145, 159, 204, 209, 285, 286; camera ⬃ 22, 104, 105, 108; cell phone video 140; cell-/ mobile ⬃ 10, 16, 50, 98, 99, 103–5, 107, 131, 140, 192, 230, 260 teleseeing 4, 16, 17 televangelism 27, 108 television 4, 9, 15, 17, 47, 50, 51, 53, 74, 91, 108, 120, 123, 140, 148, 154, 224, 230, 245, 259, 285, 297, 306, 313; African ⬃ 16, 225; independent ⬃ 229; private ⬃ 230; state ⬃ 140, 148, 297; ⬃ documentaries 120, 145; ⬃ series 228, 307; ⬃ stars 294; televisuality 28, 29, 47, 49, 51–53 temple 27, 102, 108, 134, 162, 164, 176, 288, 289, 292 temporality 7, 9, 19, 30, 37, 43, 73, 78, 79, 90–91, 203, 220, 267, 275, 277; ⬃ and cinematography (see cinema) Thailand 15, 16, 30–33, 37, 38, 40, 41, 44–50, 52–55, 110, 210, 294; ‘‘Thainess’’ 53, 295 Thompson, Edward 160 Thompson, Robert 216 transgression 209, 292 travesty 244 trance: ambivalence of ⬃ 151; archaization of ⬃ 9; ban on ⬃ 145; body and

Index ⬃ 143, 256 (see also body; body techniques); communal ⬃ 82, 92; communicative force of ⬃ 296; constant state of ⬃ 282; defined 2, 3, 29, 118, 279–82; entrancement 111, 143, 151, 222; fall into ⬃ 93, 113, 308; feel of ⬃ 316; indeterminancy of ⬃ 98; initiation ⬃ 281; mass-mediated ⬃ 137–55, 296; Narcissus ⬃ 264; political significance of ⬃ 139, 145; popularity of ⬃ 151; possession ⬃ 92; propitiatory ⬃ rites 139; secret ⬃ practices 240; social-psychological explanations of ⬃ 65; staging of ⬃ 140, 146, 152; Sufi ⬃ 138, 139, 144, 146, 148, 152, 293, 294; technological reproducibility of ⬃ 139, 146; ⬃ among subalterns 158; ⬃ and animals 82, 143; ⬃ choreography 94 (see also cine´-trance); ⬃ condemned as idolatry 152; ⬃ as corrupting 295; ⬃ as experience of alterity 2; ⬃ experts 12, 142, 296; ⬃ gestures 144; ⬃ and hierarchy 141–44; ⬃ inducing 23, 24, 66, 250, 284; ⬃ and institutionalizability 72; ⬃ and knowledge 163; ⬃ of the lion 82; ⬃ and mediumship (see mediumship); ⬃ rites as culture 147, 150; ⬃ rites as disruptive potential 154; ⬃ mediums and new media (see mediums and media); ⬃ and nationalism 137–55; ⬃ networks 78; ⬃ on-screen 23, 96, 251; ⬃ and political becoming 164; ⬃ and potency 143; ⬃ and power 2, 152; ⬃ processions 140, 150; ⬃ and public order 137–55; ⬃ as rite of reception 13, 137–55, 293, 296, 297; ⬃ rites (see ritual); ⬃ and self-mutilation/flagellation 140, 143; ⬃ and shamanism (see shamanism); ⬃ and skin (see skin); ⬃ and spirit possession (see spirits); ⬃ studies 268, 271; ⬃ techniques 22–24, 73, 231 (see also body techniques); ⬃ and technological change 34 (see also class); ⬃ theater 153; ⬃ as transnational category 2, 13, 294; transformations of ⬃ 294, 295; unhygienic elements of ⬃ 146. See also altered states; ecstasy; ritual; spirit possession transcendence 15, 45, 60, 61, 68, 78, 79, 98, 99, 112, 174, 175, 184, 185, 190, 217, 246, 277, 301; the transcendental 3, 16, 77, 78, 102

Index transference 13, 30, 49, 86, 94, 174, 179, 227, 239, 248, 263, 280, 286, 308; channels of transfer 215; ⬃ and countertransference 71, 262 transnationalism/transnationalization 2, 11, 13, 15, 78, 92, 98, 100, 102, 288, 294; religious ⬃ 22, 98, 100, 101, 104, 107, 108, 289; trance as transnational category (see trance); transnational agencies 299; transnational media networks 7, 139, 115; transnational space 92; transnational ties 102; ⬃ and ritual 78, 92, 286 transparency 30, 32, 49, 51, 54 trauma 36 Turner, Victor 177, 244 Tylor, Edward 56, 57, 68, 73 typewriter 264, 276 typewritten. See writing typography 35 Uganda 5, 16, 35, 209, 218 unconsciousness 25, 52, 69, 158, 260, 267, 272, 273, 276, 278; the audiovisual unconscious 77, 96, 284; carnal ⬃ 273; the unconscious 43, 63, 65, 67, 72, 269; unconscious optics 273 United States 9, 19, 51, 52, 57, 63, 73, 74, 101–4, 107, 202, 210, 289, 290, 304, 311 urbanization 120, 128, 138, 142, 178, 179, 181, 182, 227, 292; emerging urban folklore 171, 176–78, 180; rituals/Sufi arts/village music in urban context 21, 181, 199; urban audience 151; urban imagination of ‘‘feminine wildness’’ 178; urban masses 14; urban middle class 143, 301; urban moral reform movement 183, 185; urban musicians 181; urban pilgrims 146; urban shamanism 247; urban upper class 105 Van den Port, Mattijs 78, 209 Van der Veer, Peter 101, 288 Van Gennep, Arnold 98 Vattimo, Gianni 26, 34, 48, 53 Venezuela 25, 29, 47 Verrips, Jojada 92, 284 Vertov, Dziga 250 Vertovec, Steven 288 video 6, 15–17, 19, 22, 32, 90, 95–97, 107–9, 129, 188, 204, 207, 209, 219,

379 220, 224, 225, 227, 228, 231–33, 236, 279, 285, 307, 309, 316; Congolese music ⬃ 290; Ghanaian ⬃ industry 231, 234; home ⬃/self-produced ⬃ 248, 153; Nigerian ⬃ industry 219, 231, 234, 290, 307; Tanzanian ⬃ industry 17, 221–40, 307, 309; VHS ⬃ 16; ⬃ archives 297; ⬃ camera (see camera); ⬃ clips 82; ⬃ and everyday 235; ⬃ graphically inscribed sermons 27, 188; ⬃ industries 16, 178; ⬃ library 210; ⬃ makers 19; ⬃ as memorabilia 97; ⬃ producers 228, 230, 289; ⬃ recordings of ceremonies/rituals/ performances 83, 84, 89, 103, 105, 104, 109; ⬃ remakes 178; ⬃ revolution 224–25; ⬃ and spirits (see spirits); videotapes 32, 50, 102, 105, 189, 204, 225; ⬃ of trance 6; ⬃ technology 204; video-viewing public 239. See also film Vienna 57, 63 Vietnam 10, 101–6, 108, 110–12, 114, 288–90, 332; Vietnamese 12, 100, 106, 107, 109, 113, 287 Virilio, Paul 49 virtualization 27; virtual reality of shaman practice 131; virtual space of shaman practice 14 visibility 53, 55, 99, 165, 174, 182, 210, 213, 240, 265, 276, 280, 313; increasing ⬃ 14; the invisible, 132–36; invisibility 116, 158, 202, 210, 217, 280; invisible forces/powers 59, 143, 186, 199; invisible presence (see presence); invisible rules 266; invisible transactions between humans and spirits 133; make visible 38, 41, 44, 48, 203, 210, 213, 215, 225, 227, 239, 268, 272; photographic ⬃ (see photography); practices of⬃ 158; regimes of ⬃ 158, 224, 240; tropes of ⬃ 8; visible evidence 46, 158, 215; visible materiality 267; visible representatives 141; visible trace 203; ⬃ on film 265; ⬃ of shunned objects 259; ⬃ and spirits (see spirits); ultravisibility 152; visible and invisible world 3, 47, 196, 210, 212, 215, 216, 301 vision 199, 260; hegemony of ⬃ 33 visions 5, 10, 101, 111, 118, 120, 121, 133, 186, 227, 258, 259, 269, 303, 312; visionary 63, 118

380 visual: ⬃ appearance 94; ⬃ field 210, 278; ⬃ media. See also cinema; film; Internet; photography; telephone; television Vo¨lkerschau 253; world exposition 12 voice 5, 15, 17, 31, 33, 54, 93, 117, 178, 184, 195, 196, 198, 232; disembodiment of ⬃ 55, 197; ethical effect of ⬃ 304; hypnotizing ⬃ 113; spirit’s ⬃ (see spirits); touching ⬃ 183, 194, 197; ⬃ and affect 194, 195; ‘‘voice-boxes’’ 5; voice-over 267, 279 Vokes, Richard 203, 305 Voss, Ehler 313 votive offerings. See offerings Voudoun 281 war 35, 55, 103, 111, 246, 277; civil ⬃ 202, 246, 304; ‘‘ghosts of ⬃’’ 104, 288; postwar 252, 266, 290, 314; spiritual warfare 111; Vietnam War 103, 104, 110; ⬃ dead (see death); warfare 273; warrior 256; World War I 65, 231, 304, 305; World War II 36 website. See Internet Wendl, Tobias 205, 231, 234, 309 West Africa 22, 185, 186, 189–91, 194, 198, 200, 236, 252, 295, 302 ‘‘Western.’’ See Hollywood Western Orissa 21, 171–82, 299, 300 wildness: association of ⬃ 178; ‘‘feminine ⬃’’ 178; wild grimace 260; wild hair (see hair); wild spirits 208 (see also spirits); wild trance 80, 92; wilderness 9, 199, 304; wild animals (see animal; trance) Williams, Raymond 53 witch 219, 222, 225, 234, 306; bewitched 240; whip of witches 230; witchcraft

Index 227, 229, 234, 235, 307; Witchcraft Ordinance 231; ⬃ doctor 224, 228, 231, 233, 236, 308, 309; ⬃ hunting 223, 229, 230; ⬃ movie 227, 228, 236 Wittkower, Rudolf 168 World music. See music World Wide Web. See Internet worship 21, 105, 106, 113, 161, 171, 173, 175, 181, 251; spirit ⬃ 78, 102, 288 writing 32, 42, 43, 46; automatic ⬃ 67; camera and ⬃ (see camera); Christian writers 233; indisollubility of ⬃ 36; Islamic ⬃ paradigm 109, 303; ‘‘magical ⬃’’ (see magic); mediums and ⬃ 6, 32; ‘‘mystic ⬃ pad’’ 42, 43, 45, 272; prophetic ⬃ 112; protocols of ⬃/ ethnographers ⬃ in the field 265, 267, 270, 276; sacred ⬃ 162, 163 (see also Holy Scriptures); shunning of ⬃ 204; sociality of ⬃ 44, 49; theatre of ⬃ 32; typewritten 267, 276; writers 160, 264, 290, ⬃ as esoteric practice 191, 303; ⬃ and image 276; ⬃as magic 32, 48, 191; ⬃ as a medium for God 209, 291, 303; ⬃and possession 207; ⬃ of spiritual teachers 160 You Tube. See Internet Zambia 38 Zander, Helmut 66, 68, 283 Zempleni, Andras 6 Zerstreuung 23 Zillinger, Martin 15, 16, 139, 284, 293, 305 Zionism 34