Main description:

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.

Contents:

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Embodied Epistemologies of Healing

Emily Pierini, Alberto Groisman and Diana Espirito Santo

Part I: Paradoxes and Dilemmas

Chapter 1. Playing with Other Worlds: renegotiating bodily experience and hierarchy in Afro-Brazilian Candomble

Giovanna Capponi

Chapter 2. Embodied Knowledge and the Phenomenological Posture to Frame the Anthropology of "Extraordinary" Experiences

Geraldine Mossiere

Chapter 3. Living with Spirits: Spirituality and Health in Sao 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