Spirit Possession (Anthropology)

Once viewed as an embarrassing superstition, the theatrical religious performances of Korean shamans—who communicate with the dead, divine the future, and become possessed—are going mainstream. Attitudes toward Korean shamanism are changing as shamanic traditions appear in staged rituals, museums, films, and television programs, as well as on the internet.

Contemporary Korean Shamanism explores this vernacular religion and practice, which includes sensory rituals using laden altars, ecstatic dance, and animal sacrifice, within South Korea's hypertechnologized society, where over 200,000 shamans are listed in professional organizations. Liora Sarfati reveals how representations of shamanism in national, commercialized, and screen-mediated settings have transformed opinions of these religious practitioners and their rituals.

Applying ethnography and folklore research, Contemporary Korean Shamanism maps this shift in perception about shamanism—from a sign of a backward, undeveloped Korea to a valuable, indigenous cultural asset.
https://iupress.org/9780253057174/contemporary-korean-shamanism/

Introduction to See You On The Other Side podcast, episode 133, 28 February 2017 (interview by Mike Huberty and Allison Jornlin, Madison, Wisconsin).
Online at http://othersidepodcast.com/blog/2017/02/28/133-popobawa-dr-martin-walsh-idea-virus/.

For over four centuries the Catholic Church enjoyed a religious monopoly in Latin America in which potential rivals were repressed or outlawed. Latin Americans were born Catholic and the only real choice they had was whether to actively practice the faith. Taking advantage of the legal disestablishment of the Catholic Church between the late 1800s and the early 1900s, Pentecostals almost single-handedly built a new pluralist religious economy. By the 1950s, many Latin Americans were free to choose from among the hundreds of available religious "products," a dizzying array of religious options that range from the African-Brazilian religion of Umbanda to the New Age group known as the Vegetable Union. R. Andrew Chesnut shows how the development of religious pluralism over the past half-century has radically transformed the "spiritual economy" of Latin America. In order to thrive in this new religious economy, says Chesnut, Latin American spiritual "firms" must develop an attractive product and know how to market it to popular consumers. Three religious groups, he demonstrates, have proven to be the most skilled competitors in the new unregulated religious economy. Protestant Pentecostalism, the Catholic Charismatic Renewal, and African diaspora religions such as Brazilian Candomble and Haitian Vodou have emerged as the most profitable religious producers.

Chesnut explores the general effects of a free market, such as introduction of consumer taste and product specialization, and shows how they have played out in the Latin American context. He notes, for example, that women make up the majority of the religious consumer market, and explores how the three groups have developed to satisfy women's tastes and preferences. Moving beyond the Pentecostal boom and the rise and fall of liberation theology, Chesnut provides a fascinating portrait of the Latin American religious landscape.

Kasenian réak is a regional variant of the Javanese horse dances from Bandung, Indonesia. Commonly known in the archipelago as jaranan, kuda lumping or jathilan, the Javanese horse dances are a group of ceremonial musical performances during which a group of performers, led by a trance master, undergo voluntary possessions on behalf of spirits of the ancestors and other supernatural beings, under the influence of a musical ensemble. In different possession and trance phenomena around the world recognizing the acting spirit is often the key to communication with the supernatural being and treatment of the possessed. Thus, more or less different and precise taxonomies may be developed in order to do so. In réak, the possessed behaviour is interpreted by the trance master and members of the group in order to meet the spirit’s various demands and act accordingly to manage the possession. The purpose of this article is to examine the spirits’ taxonomies at play in réak as a case study. I do this in order to show in which sense analyses of the phenomenon of possession based on classification often fail to grasp the complexity and thus the significance of the experience. The outcome will underline which benefits can be obtained by a an approach that gives more value to a context-based ethnography of the possessed and its peculiarities than to the development of a general theory of possession with comparative purposes.

The Bijago believe that if a man has accomplished his initiation, upon his death his soul (orebok) can get to anarebok (the world of ancestors), to return, at last, into the world, as a newborn. A bijagó male who has died before the end of his initiation, is unable to reach anarebok, and his orebok is destined to wonder and suffer. Only girls have the power to re-estabilish order, by allowing these arebok to possess thieir bodies in initiation ceremonies, called manras arebok. Through bijagó women, the deceased males experience initiation and gain the access to the anarebok and to the possibility to come to life again. The bijago woman is the necessary intermediary between the world of the living and that of the dead and allows the arebok's cycle between the two worlds, which is the life's cycle.

Ritual Imagination is a study of spirit possession and ritual dynamics. Based on fieldwork in eastern Madagascar, Hilde Nielssen shows how tromba possession works as a flexible and fluid force, whose ritual imaginary playfully draws together elements from radically different cultural and social domains, thereby constituting human realities and creating ways of relating to changing and disjunctive circumstances. Tromba's strength lies in its fluid capacities to relate to ongoing social change by altering its own practices, while at the same time continuing to heal person and cosmos. The book critically addresses the still dominant perspective in anthropology, where rituals are understood as representations of culture and society. Using tromba as a pivotal case in the critique of ritual as representation, this book offers a fresh perspective on ritual and spirit possession.

https://cup.columbia.edu/book/the-buddhas-wizards/9780231187602

Wizards with magical powers to heal the sick, possess the bodies of their followers, and defend their tradition against outside threats are far from the typical picture of Buddhism. Yet belief in wizard-saints who protect their devotees and intervene in the world is widespread among Burmese Buddhists. The Buddha’s Wizards is a historically informed ethnographic study that explores the supernatural landscape of Buddhism in Myanmar to explain the persistence of wizardry as a form of lived religion in the modern era.

Thomas Nathan Patton explains the world of wizards, spells, and supernatural powers in terms of both the broader social, political, and religious context and the intimate roles that wizards play in people’s everyday lives. He draws on affect theory, material and visual culture, long-term participant observation, and the testimonies of the devout to show how devotees perceive the protective power of wizard-saints. Patton considers beliefs and practices associated with wizards to be forms of defending Buddhist traditions from colonial and state power and culturally sanctioned responses to restrictive gender roles. The book also offers a new lens on the political struggles and social transformations that have taken place in Myanmar in recent years. Featuring close attention to the voices of individual wizard devotees and the wizards themselves, The Buddha’s Wizards provides a striking new look at a little-known aspect of Buddhist belief that helps expand our ways of thinking about the daily experience of lived religious practices.

In Adam Benkato & Arash Zeini (eds.), The roar of silence: A Festschrift in honour of François de Blois. [Special issue]. Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 31(3), 421-432. 

This article contains ethnolinguistic observations and materials on the so called zâr cult, as practiced in present day Hormozgân province, Iran. The cult, which is spread across the Persian Gulf and central and north-east Africa, consists of practices and rituals of placation with which a category of spirits known as zâr and referred to as winds are warded off from a victim. The article, in particular, aims at offering an accurate description of the sub-lexicon associated with zâr in local Hormozgâni dialects, an aspect of research which has not been taken into consideration up to now.

In this article I apply film theory as an analytic prism through which to examine the ritual mechanisms of a particular kind of Islamic exorcism (al-ruqya al-sharʿiyya). I show how these exorcisms operate as a ritual montage that conjures the absent presence of al-ghayb—a hidden world of power that only God can see in its totality and to which the possessed patients and the jinn spirits must succumb. These exorcisms thus provide healing, not in the sense of immediate "well-being" or "relief from pain" but in the sense of moral witnessing, an opportunity to testify to the limits of human seeing and action and to the ways in which invisible and divine forces give shape to the tangible world.

In the 1690s, a series of enthusiastic episodes rocked Pietist circles. Scholars have often pointed to Pietism's "heart religion" to explain these events. This essay demonstrates, however, that such experiences belonged to an older, firmly established cultural pattern in an Early Modern Europe in which a magical world view prevailed. Martin draws on dozens of texts, most previously overlooked by historians of Pietism, that document the continuity of this tradition from the sixteenth century into the Pietist era . She traces the integration of ecstatic events into Pietist conventicles and shows how Pietists adapted and transformed these older patterns to fit the new context of Pietism.

The Trans-Saharan, TransAtlantic , Indian Ocean, and Domestic African Slave trades encompass hundreds of years, tens of millions of slaves, and remain as one of the greatest societal and political injustices in the history of the world. The ramifications of the slave trade are immeasurable, and it continues to disaffect black people from Africa to Haiti, Los Angeles to Lagos: structural poverty, police brutality, underdevelopment, mass incarceration, miseducation, and racism in all of its guises. The truth is, most of us know little about the history of slavery and many lack the empathy to understand how it makes people of " African descent " feel, or more importantly, how around the world people of African descent continue to be at a pronounced disadvantage. There is a dire need for collective reconciliation and greater dialogue about how the lives of slaves are remembered, in hopes of curtailing continuing systemic racial injustice. The African religious imagination and a propensity for mobility, adaptability, and innovation have helped Africans thrive on both sides of the Atlantic. With the estimated global population of modern slaves currently at over 40 million, the time is now to generate new ways of understanding slavery. " Shackled Sentiments: Slaves, Spirits, and Memories, in the African-Diaspora " is an edited volume focusing on memories and embodiments of slavery through case studies from Western, Eastern, and Central Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America. The chapters span the spectrum of the social sciences and humanities, including history, anthropology, ritual studies, art, and linguistics. One of the more interesting and least studied aspects of Atlantic slavery has been the way that memories of slavery have been internalized through the lenses of African ways of knowing. Rituals and story-telling are mechanisms that generate the collective memories of slavery. This is a fruitful way to analyze black history and culture and illuminates a diversity of ways of seeing and being in the world. The time is ripe in societies with significant African populations to look at a more varied and empathetic picture of the " African " side of the slavery dyad. This may be an aspect of the topic that is very much in the public and potential buyer's eye. Memories of slavery and its history are rapidly shifting in parts of the United States, and are at the forefront of political and scholarly discussion. This book will present the other crucial side of the same coin

In this article, I explore the conditions of ethnographic knowledge production, with a focus on 'full participation', i.e. an unrestricted affective and relational commitment on the part of the ethnographer doing fieldwork. The very notion of participation raises some questions as to the objectivity of the ethnographic endeavour, as well as to the nature of the knowledge thus produced. The main goal of this article is to show that this knowledge, under specific conditions, is not only scientifically admissible but also likely to shed a different kind of light on the reality studied ethnographically. As I will argue, this can only be achieved through the development of three forms of ethnographic reflexivity. Finally, I will stress the heuristic and epistemic added value of full participation and conclude with a discussion of the place of intuition in ethnographic work and its consequences for the training of today's and tomorrow's anthropologists.

In the cognitive sciences, interoception, i.e. the perception of one's own internal bodily processes (e.g. heartbeat, digestion) has been thoroughly explored. In the social sciences, instead, there is still a lack of theories explaining how cultures shape the way we listen to our bodies. Fyssen Foundation enabled a cross-disciplinary research in anthropology, cognitive sciences and technology studies, conducted at Northwestern University. This research integrates multiple datasets, spanning from an ethnography of demonic possession in Nicaragua to an ongoing inquiry on medically unexplained symptoms in the US. Far from being exclusively a physiological matter, interoception is at the core of the formation of shared representations. This research bridges the gap between the microlevel of the cognition of inner sensations (1) and the macrolevel of the formation of beliefs and shared representations that we call "culture" (2).

I've just finished The Wrath of Koma, Maurice Kambishera Mumba's entertaining tale about tradition and tragedy among the Kauma, published by Heinemann Kenya in 1987. The back-cover blurb of the paperback introduces the story: "Old Chembe, a Kauma man from the Am[i]dzichenda people of the Kenya coast, is gravely worried about his son, Dundu, who appears to be going mad. He travels across many ridges to see Mokoli Mwiru, the famous medicineman, for a diagnosis of his son's problem. Mokoli Mwiru gives his diagnosis: Dundu, born after intercession to the ancestral sprits, is under the wrathful attack of the spirits who resent the ingratitude of Chembe's family. Mokoli Mwiru prescribes a ceremony of appeasement. Old Chembe, weak and irresolute, botches the ceremony... What tragic fate awaits him, his son and his larger family as the unappeased spirits seeks their revenge?"

The Brazilian Spiritualist Christian Order Vale do Amanhecer (Valley of the Dawn) is the place where the worlds of the living and the spirits merge and the boundaries between lives are regularly crossed. Drawing upon over a decade of extensive fieldwork in temples of the Amanhecer in Brazil and Europe, the author explores how mediums understand their experiences and how they learn to establish relationships with their spirit guides. She sheds light on the ways in which mediumistic development in the Vale do Amanhecer is used for therapeutic purposes and informs notions of body and self, of illness and wellbeing.

Pierini, E., 2020, Jaguars of the Dawn: Spirit Mediumship in the Brazilian Vale do Amanhecer, New York; Oxford: Berghahn.

https://www.berghahnbooks.com/title/PieriniJaguars

Статья посвящена одержимости и жертвоприношениям в афрогенных традициях, главным образом в пало монте и сантерии. В ней также уделено внимание обрядам и феноменологии вуду и креольского спиритизма. Жертвоприношения и практики
одержимости (инкорпорации духа) рассматриваются в контексте реципрокной субъективации людей и духов, что позволяет обнаружить общую для обоих направлений сакральной деятельности логику обмена. Как жертвоприношения, так и се-
ансы одержимости взаимно одаривают и усиливают духов и участников культа. Бытие людей связывается с развитием духов мертвых и регламентируется через практики одержимости, обустройство ритуальных ассамбляжей и их усиление
субстанциями жертвенных животных. Интерпретируя одержимость через понятия телесности (воплощенности), становления, интенсивности и ассамбляжа, автор обрисовывает постструктуралистские рубежи афрогенной сакральности, намечая пути сближения с концепциями перспективизма и проблемные места на этих путях.

The article tackles the spiritual possession and sacrifices in Afrogenic traditions, mainly in Palo Monte and Santeria. It also examines the rites and phenomenology of Voodoo and the Creole spiritualism. I consider possession practices (the incorporation of the spirit) and sacrifices in the context of the reciprocal subjectivity of people and spirits in order to locate the sacred logic of exchange unifying both types of activity. Sacrifices and possession rituals bestow and empower spirits and worshipers mutually. The existence of people is associated with the development of spirits of the dead and regulated through the possession practice, the arrangement of ritual assemblies and their strengthening with the substances of sacrificial animals. By interpreting the logic of possession through the notions of embodiment, becoming, intension, and assemblage, I outline the post-structural frontiers of the Afrogenic sacredness and draft the ways of convergence with concepts of perspectivism and some problems related to these approaches.

Zwischen 2006 und 2008 erhielt das Museum Rietberg als Geschenk eine Sammlung aus Wien von über fünfzig südindischen Bronzen und Holzskulpturen. Im Katalog zur Ausstellung werden die Buta-Verehrung in Karnataka anhand von Masken,  Ritualen und Quellentexten erstmals dem deutschsprachigen Publikum vorgestellt.

В статье на основе кейса обряда исламского экзорцизма рукъя рассматривается гипотеза о легитимности использования методов традиционной медицины в терапии по-граничных состояний (на примере наблюдения и дешифровки сеанса лечения в Центре исламской медицины в Грозном). Данная процедура работы с феноменом «одержимости» предполагается как культурно-обусловленная практика лечения невроза и диссоциатив-ных расстройств личности, тождественная терапии психоанализа. Такое сопоставление обосновано классической работой Клода Леви-Стросса «Структурная антропология» и анализом обряда помощи шамана при трудных родах.

The article, on the basis of Islamic Exorcism named Ruqya Sharia Study, examines
the hypothesis of the legitimacy of using the methods of Islamic traditional medicine in the treatment of borderline conditions, despite the external irrationality of the process. This type of working with the phenomenon of possession is supposed to be a culturally-determined practice of treating neurosis and dissociative disorders, identical to psychoanalysis therapy. This comparison is based on a classic work of Claude Levi-Strauss “Structural Anthropology” and on the analysis of the rite of a shaman’s assistance in complicated births.

The temples of the Vale do Amanhecer (Valley of the Dawn) in Brazil and across the world are intended as 'spiritual emergency units' where mediums and their spirit guides provide patients with free assistance for health, relational, spiritual, and material matters concerning the person’s wellbeing. The therapeutic practice is known as 'disobsessive healing' and involves the release of causal spiritual agents considered to be affecting the person’s wellbeing. This paper discusses the Vale do Amanhecer’s etiology of illness and how mediums understand disobsessive healing as a complementary epistemology of healing, discerning spiritual and pathological experiences. Then, it examines how patients may draw their therapeutic trajectories across biomedical and spiritual contexts, sometimes developing mediumship as part of their therapeutic process. Approaching these therapeutic practices from the standpoint of affect and bodily experience may undermine the prominence of 'belief' in the study of non-biomedical approaches to healing, shedding light upon the relational, embodied, and lived-through dimensions of the notions involved in the therapeutic process.

In 2019, we watched 'The possibility of spirits' as part of two anthropology courses at the University of Glasgow: the Masters course 'Religion in Society' , and the Honours course 'Cosmology, Ritual and Belief', both taught by Diego Maria Malara. We all found the film endlessly fascinating, but, because it sparked particularly lively debates in our classes, we felt the need to further explore some of its complexities with the director, Mattijs van de Port. The following questions stem from these class debates, but, in their current form, have been shaped by Alex Gibb (student on Cosmology Culture and Belief), Leonie Colmar, Martha Gardiner (students on Religion in Society), and Diego Maria Malara.
https://www.gla.ac.uk/schools/socialpolitical/research/sociology/blogresearch/interviewsseminarslectures/headline_762885_en.html

Based on recent fieldwork among Vietnamese Americans in California, this paper explores the meanings of the mirror that spirit mediums gaze into, and why it is a required object on altars to the Vietnamese “Mother Goddesses" (Đạo Mẫu), whose worship has recently had a great resurgence in diasporic California communities.  It looks at religious ways of mediating displacement and re-forming an identity in the reflected glory of the imperial past.

The Democratic Republic of Congo has a long history of violence and poverty. Throughout the last five centuries, the country has experienced very few moments of peace. Starting with early colonization and continuing to the present wars raging in the eastern provinces, the Congo is a society that has been ripped apart and, in the wake of turmoil and destruction, left searching for someone to blame. Many people have turned to children as the reason for the misfortunes experienced; accusations of child witchcraft in the DRC have risen in the last decade. Whereas women and the elderly have traditionally been the accused, children have become the new target.

In this article, the passages about demon-possession in John (7:20; 8:44, 48; 10:19-21) are considered from an anthropological perspective. Scholars often interpret these passages by referring to Johannine theology. Yet, the anthropological theories of possession show that the notion of possession has sociological aspects as well. To be possessed by a demon and be filled with a spirit can be regarded as two dimensions of possession, and they serve to enhance social status. Viewed in this light, by accusing Jesus of being demon-possessed, Jesus' opponents reinforce their established status. On the other hand, John depicts Jesus as being possessed by the Holy Spirit. Similarly, Jesus' followers have enhanced their social status by claiming to be possessed by the same spirit and identifying themselves as a spirit-possessed community. The article concludes that the Johannine notion of possession is not simply a description but much more than that, it is a language of identification.

This article explores the performative dimensions of the Zar ceremony as carried out throughout the Persian Gulf. This ceremony is mirrored by similar ones throughout North and East Africa, suggesting that the Zar may have resulted from cultural diffusion along historical trade routes. The Zar practitioners, the baba and the mama, have extensive demands in musical performance, movement and coordination in order to affect a palliative relief for persons affected by spirit ‘winds’ that inhabit them. The analysis in this paper uses the framework of ritual structure developed by Arnold Van Gennep and Victor Turner to show how the practitioners skilfully guide the person at the centre of the ceremony and the community of the ‘People of the Wind’ to a successful conclusion by bringing persons under treatment from a ‘normal’ state through a ‘liminal’ state to an eventual ‘reincorporated’ state in which relief is experienced. The performative aspects of the ceremony move those who are being treated through stages in which the inhabiting spirit is  addressed: induction, movement into a trance state both for the practitioner and the person being treated, addressing of the spirit by the practitioners and return of the person being treated to normal life. All of these stages are marked by special music, chanting and movement. The Zar ceremony is an important method of non-allopathic treatment for emotional disorders that might elsewhere be treated through psychiatry in clinical settings.

"Foucault and Witches. Confessional Subjectivities and Resistance of the Flesh

Foucault is often accused of focusing too much on the omnipresence of power, while giving only scant attention to the productivity of struggle and resistance against it. In an attempt to correct this view, the present article tries to cast a fresh look on pastoral power through an exploration of the role of witchcraft and possession in the thought of the French philosopher. Both witchcraft and possession are thus exposed as practices of resistance, inscribed in a system of power relations to which they were the “odd term”, a resistant extension undermining power from within. According to Foucault, the end of witchcraft and the rise of the problem of possession illuminate the emergence of a new strategic field of power relations centred not on the juridico-political paradigm, but on the production of subjectivities through positive incitement of the relationship of the self with the self. This is what I call “a confessional society”.

Keywords: Pastoral, Biopolitics, Confession, Witches, Possession, Resistance of the flesh."

http://www.materialifoucaultiani.org/en/rivista/volume-i-number-1.html

A spiritual revolution is transforming the religious landscape of Latin America. Evangelical Protestantism, particularly Pentecostalism, has replaced Catholicism as the leading religion in thousands of barrios on the urban periphery. But in few Latin American nations have Protestants multiplied as rapidly as in Brazil. What accounts for this rise? Combining historical, political, and ethnographic research, R. Andrew Chestnut shows that the relationship between faith healing and illness in the conversion process is integral to the popularity of Pentecostalism among Brazil's poor. He augments his analysis of the economic and political factors with extensive interview material to capture his informants' conversion experience. In doing so, he presents both a historical framework for a broad understanding of Pentecostalism in Latin America and insight into the personal motivations and beliefs of the crentes themselves.

Escenarios del cuerpo propone al lector un viaje al interior de la Venezuela contemporánea a través de una serie de escenarios corpóreos que están emergiendo en las últimas décadas en el culto de posesión espiritista de María Lionza. Esta conocida forma de religiosidad popular, según la tesis que se sostiene en el libro, no debe entenderse como una tradición arcaica sino como un producto de la modernidad petrolera en continuo proceso de tranformación. El libro se compone de seis partes: Tiempos, Espacios, Cuerpos, Miradas, Aflicciones y Heridas. Con el fin de explorar la permeabilidad entre el espiritismo y otros campos de la realidad social, cada uno de estos escenarios plantea la discusión de ámbitos donde María Lionza se ha hecho presente en Venezuela, poniendo el énfasis en el desarrollo y consolidación histórica de una forma de estar en el mundo autónoma, de enorme intensidad sensorial y no menos capacidad crítica. El objetivo último de este ensayo es responder a la siguiente pregunta: ¿cuál es el potencial del desciframiento de los cuerpos y las prácticas corporales en el análisis de las sociedades contemporáneas?

https://utpress.utexas.edu/index.php/books/bacigalupo-thunder-shaman
As a “wild,” drumming thunder shaman, a warrior mounted on her spirit horse, Francisca Kolipi’s spirit traveled to other historical times and places, gaining the power and knowledge to conduct spiritual warfare against her community’s enemies, including forestry companies and settlers. As a “civilized” shaman, Francisca narrated the Mapuche people’s attachment to their local sacred landscapes, which are themselves imbued with shamanic power, and constructed nonlinear histories of intra- and interethnic relations that created a moral order in which Mapuche become history’s spiritual victors. Thunder Shaman represents an extraordinary collaboration between Francisca Kolipi and anthropologist Ana Mariella Bacigalupo, who became Kolipi’s “granddaughter,” trusted helper, and agent in a mission of historical (re)construction and myth-making. The book describes Francisca’s life, death, and expected rebirth, and shows how she remade history through multitemporal dreams, visions, and spirit possession, drawing on ancestral beings and forest spirits as historical agents to obliterate state ideologies and the colonialist usurpation of indigenous lands. Both an academic text and a powerful ritual object intended to be an agent in shamanic history, Thunder Shaman functions simultaneously as a shamanic “bible,” embodying Francisca’s power, will, and spirit long after her death in 1996, and an insightful study of shamanic historical consciousness, in which biography, spirituality, politics, ecology, and the past, present, and future are inextricably linked. It demonstrates how shamans are constituted by historical-political and ecological events, while they also actively create history itself through shamanic imaginaries and narrative forms.