When approaching the multiplicity of the spiritual experiences of healing, ethnographers are often presented with ideas of the existence of “other” worlds that may intersect with the so-called “material” or “physical” worlds. This book proposes a sensory ethnography of healing with a focus on ethnographic knowing as embedded in an embodied epistemology of healing. Epistemological embodiment signals that personal scholarly experience of the “unknown”—be it in the form of trance, or as the embodiment of an “other”—shapes the concepts of healing, body, trance, self, and matter by which ethnographers craft out analysis.
Arvustused
This book makes some highly original and extraordinarily important contributions to anthropology and religious studies that will appeal to a wide readership across these disciplines, from students and specialists of healing and spiritualism to those with an interest in scholarly theories and methods of illuminating the unknown. Katherine Swancutt, King's College London
This volume is an illustration of the productive and exciting developments in the field of the anthropology of religion, in particular to what concerns health and healing practices, covering novel approaches and territories that experimentally transcend the classic formulations and interpretations on "spirit possession". Ruy Llera Blanes, University of Gothenburg
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Embodied Epistemologies of Healing
Emily Pierini, Alberto Groisman and Diana Espírito Santo
Part I: Paradoxes and Dilemmas
Chapter
1. Playing with Other Worlds: renegotiating bodily experience and
hierarchy in Afro-Brazilian Candomblé
Giovanna Capponi
Chapter
2. Embodied Knowledge and the Phenomenological Posture to Frame the
Anthropology of Extraordinary Experiences
Géraldine Mossière
Chapter
3. Living with Spirits: Spirituality and Health in São Paulo,
Brazil
Bettina E. Schmidt
Part II: Transitions and Transformations
Chapter
4. The Ghosts that Haunt Me: Feeling with Affective Technologies and
Doing Ethnography about Spirit Possession in Contemporary Japan
Andrea De Antoni
Chapter
5. Try Feeding the Ghost More: An Illness Experience and
Understanding the Unseen in a Tamang Village in Nepal
Paula Bronson
Chapter
6. Encountering Other Worlds through Transreligiosity: A
Comparative Account of Healing, Embodiment and Transformation in the Field
Eugenia Roussou and Anastasios Panagiotopoulos
Chapter
7. Learning to Trance: The Affective Grounding of Becoming Another
Body in Another Place
Tamara Dee Turner
Part III: Engagements
Chapter
8. Ways of Knowing and Healing: Mediumistic and Ethnographic
Epiphanies in the Vale do Amanhecer
Emily Pierini
Chapter
9. Learning to Read the World: Education of Attention and
Parapsychic Perception of the Environment
Gustavo Ruiz Chiesa
Chapter
10. Sensory Ethnography and Anthropology of Mediumship: Exploring
Brazilian Spiritist Practices in (Mental) Well-Being and Health/Care
Helmar Kurz
Chapter
11. Channelling an Archangel: An Apprenticeship in Metatronic Life
and Healing
Fiona Bowie
Epilogue: Healing, Images, and Trust
Roger Canals
Index
Emily Pierini is Assistant Professor in Anthropology and Marie Skodowska-Curie Fellow at Sapienza University of Rome, Italy. She is the author of several journal articles and chapters, and the book Jaguars of the Dawn: Spirit Mediumship in the Brazilian Vale do Amanhecer (Berghahn, 2020).
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