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.
