Transnational Healing: Therapeutic Trajectories in Spiritual Trance

Project Information

THETRANCE

Grant agreement ID: 895395

DOI

10.3030/895395

Project closed

EC signature date 3 April 2020

Start date 1 July 2020

End date 29 September 2023

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Total cost

€ 249 597,12

EU contribution

€ 249 597,12

Coordinated by

UNIVERSITA DEGLI STUDI DI ROMA LA SAPIENZA
Italy

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - THETRANCE (Transnational Healing: Therapeutic Trajectories in Spiritual Trance)

Reporting period: 2022-07-01 to 2023-06-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

THETRANCE is an anthropological study investigating therapeutic spiritual trance in a transnational perspective. It analyses how people learn and narrate about spiritual trance, with what kinds of consistencies and differences across cultures, and how trance-based healing practices may be relevant for therapeutic purposes. Therapeutic trajectories often unfold across different approaches to wellbeing posing new challenges to patients, healers and medical professionals. THETRANCE adopts a focus upon experience as crucial to understand non-biomedical approaches to healing. This is imperative especially when addressing therapeutic practices that involve spiritual trance, mediumship or possession. Indeed, spirit mediumship and possession have been approached through Western psychiatric categories. However, more recent research is interested moving beyond pathological interpretations in order to reframe these phenomena into broader aspects of human experience, opening up a space to restore a dialogue between the disciplines. Ethnographic studies indicate that these experiences rather than pathological are ultimately therapeutic mechanisms. Rather than marginal, shamanism, possession and mediumistic trance are in fact relevantly present in our societies circulating through therapeutic networks and thus reshaping healing practices; rather than hidden, they are overtly expressed in the people’s narratives about their therapeutic experiences. THETRANCE seeks to understand the therapeutic uses of these practices and the place they occupy in contemporary societies from a transnational perspective.
Through an approach that combines social and medical anthropology, and the anthropology of religion, drawing parallels with research in psychology and psychiatry, THETRANCE focuses upon specific cases of people learning spiritual trance for therapeutic purposes: for physical and mental health and to recover from substance addictions. The methodology is grounded in a multi-sited ethnographic research in temples of the Spiritualist Christian Order Vale do Amanhecer (Valley of the Dawn) in Brazil, the United States, and Europe. Firstly, it examines the transnational mobility of practices and concepts related to spiritual healing and trance. Secondly, it compares the use of trance-based healing practices in people’s therapeutic trajectories between spirituality and biomedicine in North and South America, and Europe. And thirdly, it investigates the role of religious/spiritual learning in patients' well-being.
THETRANCE is innovative in combining the analysis of therapeutic trajectories between spirituality and biomedicine with the focus upon the process of learning spiritual trance through a transnational perspective. In doing so, it unsettles the pathological reductions of spiritual trance to understand how these experiences are rather used therapeutically.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

The Fellow, Dr Emily Pierini, has conducted research during the Outgoing Phase at the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina (PPGAS-UFSC), which has contributed to shape the theoretical direction of the research at the interface between the anthropology of religion and the anthropology of health. The work carried out at UFSC included the organization of a seminar and the workshop "Mediumship(s) and Health(s): Dialogues and Tensions". During a 6-month secondment at the University of Oxford, School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, Dr Pierini has developed the theoretical discussion around approaches to transnational religious mobility, learning and conversion through healing, which led to the organization of the workshop "Moving and Being Moved: Healing, Conversion, Trance and Transnationalism". The Fellow has also undertaken a short visit in Portugal at the CRIA–ISCTE Lisbon University Institute that has fostered academic exchange with anthropologists of religion in Portugal.
A multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork was conducted by Dr Pierini in the temples of the Vale do Amanhecer in Italy, Portugal, Brazil and the United States through participant observation in healing rituals and interviews.
During the Incoming Phase the Fellow has transferred the knowledge acquired during the Outgoing Phase to Sapienza University of Rome through undergraduate and postgraduate courses, the supervision of theses on religion and health, and the organization of workshops and the final international conference “Sapienza in Trance: Healing, Cooperation, and Imagination”.
Dissemination and communication activities included: 1 international conference; 3 conference panels; 7 project workshops; participation in 7 other events and seminars; 13 conference papers; 6 project presentations; 1 website and 5 social network channels; 1 book "Other Worlds, Other Bodies: Embodied Epistemologies and Ethnographies of Healing" (Berghahn 2023) edited by Emily Pierini, Alberto Groisman, Diana Espírito Santo; 2 chapters in the edited book and 2 articles in scientific journals.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

Cognitive anthropologists have identified a gap in the literature concerning a consideration of 'the way contextual factors shape cognitive, perceptual and emotional processes leading to possession expertise', that is how 'the interrelationality of environmental conditions and mental processes' is articulated (Halloy and Naumescu 2012). THETRANCE addresses this gap precisely by highlighting the process of learning mediumistic trance for therapeutic purposes, considering cognitive factors in relation to bodily experience, and identifying consistencies and differences in various cultural contexts. Dr Emily Pierini has coined the term “trance-formative therapeutic experiences” to highlight the therapeutic aspects of learning mediumistic trance, pointing to how multisensory images emerging from trance mobilize somatic transformative experiences.
The work carried out during the Action is raising awareness about therapeutic processes involving trance-based spiritual practices for the person’s wellbeing, and how these practices are positioned in relation to biomedicine in people’s experiences. The project has actively fostered interdisciplinary dialogues and roundtable discussions between the different actors in the field of healing, who are also potential users of the project results. The project events provided new opportunities for collaborations and multi-perspective understandings of these phenomena as much as of doctor-patient relationships. In fact, collaborative, interdisciplinary and multi-perspective approaches to healing become timely and urgent matters when wellbeing is increasingly a key concern of human experience, affected in many ways by the pandemic, social and climate changes at a global level.

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