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

Other Worlds, Other Bodies

Embodied Epistemologies and Ethnographies of Healing

Edited by Emily Pierini, Alberto Groisman, and Diana Espírito Santo

Epilogue by Roger Canals

293 pages, 4 illus., bibliog., index

ISBN 978-1-80073-846-1 Hb Published (February 2023)

eISBN 978-1-80073-847-8 eBook

Details

“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

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.

Emily Pierini is Assistant Professor in Anthropology and Marie Skłodowska-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).

Alberto Groisman is a Volunteer Professor at the Federal University of Santa Catarina, Brazil. He co-coordinates with Emily Pierini for “HEAL - Network for the Ethnography of Healing”.

Diana Espírito Santo is Associate Professor at the Escuela de Antropología, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. She is the author of three monographs and has co-edited several volumes, including The Dynamic Cosmos: Movement, Paradox and Experimentation in the Anthropology of Spirit Possession (Bloomsbury, 2022).

Subject: Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General) Medical Anthropology

Area:

LC: BF1275.F3 O93 2023

BL: DRT ELD.DS.765558

BISAC: SOC002010 SOCIAL SCIENCE/Anthropology/Cultural & Social; REL062000 RELIGION/Spirituality; SOC039000 SOCIAL SCIENCE/Sociology of Religion

berghahn New York · Oxford

Contents

Other Worlds, Other Bodies

Embodied Epistemologies and Ethnographies of Healing

Edited by Emily Pierini, Alberto Groisman, and Diana Espírito Santo

Epilogue by Roger Canals

Related Link: Book Launch at Sapienza University of Rome, Italy as part of the conference “Sapienza in Trance: Healing, Cooperation, and Imagination”:

Subject: Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General) Medical Anthropology

Area:

Home -> Title

Contents

Other Worlds, Other Bodies

Embodied Epistemologies and Ethnographies of Healing

Edited by Emily Pierini, Alberto Groisman, and Diana Espírito Santo

Epilogue by Roger Canals

Related Link: Book Launch at Sapienza University of Rome, Italy as part of the conference “Sapienza in Trance: Healing, Cooperation, and Imagination”:

Subject: Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General) Medical Anthropology

Area: