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The open access volume Skill and Scale in Transnational Mediumship presents ethnographic inquiries into new communities of practice and enskilment that revolve around techniques of mediumship, spirit possession, and trance rituals in a globally interconnected world. The increased mobility of people, things, signs, and symbols that shape and reshape trance practices and spiritual experiences has significantly widened their scope and outreach. Circulating body techniques, symbols, and artifacts play a major role in the re-organization of spirituality and contribute to the emergence of transnational spirited publics .
List of contents
1. Skill and Scale in Transnational Mediumship: New Communities of Practice and Enskilment.- 2. Ethnographic Incorporation: Research, Mediunity, and (Re-) flexible (-ive) Ontology.- 3. Guias and orixás in a German Umbanda: Ritual Atmosphere, Intercorporeality, and Interaffectivity in the Making of Spiritual Agency.- 4. Spirit Release Therapy as a Contemporary Healing Practice.- 5. Mediating the Spirit: Machines, Protocols, and Policies for the Mediation of Spirituality in the Medical Field.- 6. Scales of Materiality: Emergence and the Exceeding of Technology in Paranormal Chile.- 7. The Prophetic Skill: Learning to Discern and De-scale in the Angolan Tokoist Church.- 8. The Mediumistic Body: Transnational Ways of Knowing the Spirits in the Vale do Amanhecer.- 9. Enskilment as Embodied Spirituality: From Possession to Precision in the Performative Settings of two Brazilian Religions.- 10. The Romanticism of the Oyá: Feelings, Bodies, Memories, and the Multiple Space-Times of the Medium.- 11. Mediumship as Glocalized Phenomena: Reflections on a Journey into the Study of Mediumship in Brazil.
About the author
Marcello Múscari
is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Cologne.
Ehler Voss
is Managing Director of the collaborative research platform Worlds of Contradiction (WOC) and Private Lecturer at the Department of Anthropology and Cultural Research at the University of Bremen; Chair of the Association for Anthropology and Medicine (AGEM); Editor-in-Chief of the medical anthropology journal Curare; and Co-founder and Co-editor of boasblogs.org.
Martin Zillinger
holds the Chair for Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Cologne. He is Speaker of the Center for Research on Media and Modernity and of the Interdisciplinary Research Lab “Mediterranean Liminalities”, both at the University of Cologne; and Co-founder and Co-editor of boasblogs.org.
