Periodic Reporting for period 1 - THETRANCE (Transnational Healing: Therapeutic Trajectories in Spiritual Trance)
Periodo di rendicontazione: 2020-07-01 al 2022-06-30
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 comparative 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.
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 comparative 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.
THETRANCE involves Sapienza University of Rome as Beneficiary, Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina (UFSC) as Partner Institution, and the University of Oxford as institution for the Secondment.
The Fellow, Dr Emily Pierini, has carried out the outgoing phase at UFSC, Postgraduate Programme in Social Anthropology (PPGAS) and the Instituto Brasil Plural (IBP), which has contributed to shape the theoretical direction of the research at the interface between the anthropology of religion and the anthropology of health given the expertise of the PPGAS-UFSC in this field. This phase also included the development of the HEAL Network for the Ethnography of Healing that the Fellow is co-coordinating with Prof. Groisman. During the 6-month secondment at the University of Oxford, School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, the Fellow worked with Prof. Ramon Sarró to develop the theoretical discussion around approaches to transnational religious mobility, learning and conversion through healing into the broad theme of ‘healing conversions’. The Fellow has also undertaken a short visit in Portugal at the Centro em Rede de Investigação em Antropologia CRIA–ISCTE Lisbon University Institute that has fostered academic exchange with experts in religions in Portugal.
The Fellow has conducted fieldwork in the temples of the Vale do Amanhecer in Italy and Portugal through participant observation in healing rituals and interviews to explore how participants experience mediumistic trance. Ethnographic data from Italy and Portugal shows that the experiences of Europeans in these practices are primarily marked by therapeutic trajectories in search of healing rather than religious paths. Those who approached these practices of mediumistic trance for the first time had previous experiences across networks of spiritual or complementary therapies, which indicates that it is necessary to consider the transnationalization of the Vale do Amanhecer, not only in terms of religious pluralism, but also in relation to the therapeutic cultures that circulate in European countries. The participants’ narratives of their experiences highlighted the importance of the concepts of “movement” and “substance” in articulating experiences of illness and healing.
Dissemination and communication activities included 2 project workshops with anthropologists, psychologists, and healing and religious practitioners: "Mediumship(s) and Health(s): Dialogues and Tensions" held online at Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina in 2021, and "Moving and Being Moved: Healing, Conversion, Trance and Transnationalism" at the University of Oxford in 2022. Other activities included 5 events among conference panels, roundtables and workshops, 1 inaugural lecture at the PPGAS-UFSC, 10 conference papers, 6 project presentations, 1 website, and 4 social network channels, 1 edited book "Other Worlds, Other Bodies: Embodied Epistemologies and Ethnographies of Healing" edited by Emily Pierini, Alberto Groisman, Diana Espírito Santo to be published by Berghahn in 2023; and 2 chapters in the edited book.
The Fellow, Dr Emily Pierini, has carried out the outgoing phase at UFSC, Postgraduate Programme in Social Anthropology (PPGAS) and the Instituto Brasil Plural (IBP), which has contributed to shape the theoretical direction of the research at the interface between the anthropology of religion and the anthropology of health given the expertise of the PPGAS-UFSC in this field. This phase also included the development of the HEAL Network for the Ethnography of Healing that the Fellow is co-coordinating with Prof. Groisman. During the 6-month secondment at the University of Oxford, School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, the Fellow worked with Prof. Ramon Sarró to develop the theoretical discussion around approaches to transnational religious mobility, learning and conversion through healing into the broad theme of ‘healing conversions’. The Fellow has also undertaken a short visit in Portugal at the Centro em Rede de Investigação em Antropologia CRIA–ISCTE Lisbon University Institute that has fostered academic exchange with experts in religions in Portugal.
The Fellow has conducted fieldwork in the temples of the Vale do Amanhecer in Italy and Portugal through participant observation in healing rituals and interviews to explore how participants experience mediumistic trance. Ethnographic data from Italy and Portugal shows that the experiences of Europeans in these practices are primarily marked by therapeutic trajectories in search of healing rather than religious paths. Those who approached these practices of mediumistic trance for the first time had previous experiences across networks of spiritual or complementary therapies, which indicates that it is necessary to consider the transnationalization of the Vale do Amanhecer, not only in terms of religious pluralism, but also in relation to the therapeutic cultures that circulate in European countries. The participants’ narratives of their experiences highlighted the importance of the concepts of “movement” and “substance” in articulating experiences of illness and healing.
Dissemination and communication activities included 2 project workshops with anthropologists, psychologists, and healing and religious practitioners: "Mediumship(s) and Health(s): Dialogues and Tensions" held online at Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina in 2021, and "Moving and Being Moved: Healing, Conversion, Trance and Transnationalism" at the University of Oxford in 2022. Other activities included 5 events among conference panels, roundtables and workshops, 1 inaugural lecture at the PPGAS-UFSC, 10 conference papers, 6 project presentations, 1 website, and 4 social network channels, 1 edited book "Other Worlds, Other Bodies: Embodied Epistemologies and Ethnographies of Healing" edited by Emily Pierini, Alberto Groisman, Diana Espírito Santo to be published by Berghahn in 2023; and 2 chapters in the edited book.
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.
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 is actively fostering 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, 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.
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 is actively fostering 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, 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.