Paper short abstract:

What is it like to be a Muslim possessed by a jinn spirit? How do you find refuge from madness and evil in a place like Denmark? In this presentation I discuss some of the ways in which Danish Muslims have sought to protect themselves.

Paper long abstract:

When Muslim patients seek healing in the psychiatric institutions of the Danish welfare state or the religious healing practices offered by mosques their bodies and souls become a battlefield between the moral demands of Islam and the normative ideals of secularism—religious and political doctrines that are often portrayed as mutually incompatible. Yet in strikingly similar ways, both psychiatrists and Muslim exorcists appear to use transgressive, even sacrificial practices of healing to counter their patients' perceptions of their condition.

In this presentation I will show videos of and discuss the experiences of a Palestinian refugee, living in Aarhus, Denmark, who was sentenced to long-term and intensive psychiatric treatment after a severe case of jinn possession which caused him to smash up the interior of a mosque, crash several cars, and insult a number of people. In particular I discuss the dynamics of a particular kind of psychoeducation that applies what in Danish psychiatry is conceptualised as "respectful coercion" in order to facilitate a situation in which patients may freely choose to comply and submit to the psychotropic treatments they have been sentenced to take. With tools from ritual theory, studies on the effects of placebo, as well as theories on ethical self-cultivation I discuss the differences and parallels between these interventions and his experiences with exorcisms in the mosques.

Paper short abstract:

Authors argue that recent discussions of "decolonizing" movements within anthropology need the incorporation of the humanistic scholarship from African Diaspora to the study of human biology which will in turn enable a more firm approach to the authentic talk and respect towards spirituality.

Paper long abstract:

Skeletal studies of anatomical collections are foundational to the scientific conceptualizations of race that remain at the center of discussions and debates about genes, health and identity. However, they do not factor into these discussions as a historical or contemporary point of reference. It could be argued that this is largely due to continued investments in the production of scientific knowledge, which includes a naturalized positioning of anatomical remains as always already research subjects. Black feminist theory and critiques of science are used to bring attention to how this investment lends to colonized research practices (Wynter, 2003; Spiller, 2010)

In a similar case of failed research practices, during Croatia's Defense War in 1991 the forensic expertise was advanced 'in excellence' through the USA Smithsonian Institution cooperation. To this day, regardless of the technological investments over a thousand Souls are still missing in the many undetected mass graves. The explanation of this neglect can be sought in the politics of science at the disservice to people and in service of silencing the communistic enslavements of the past (Špoljar Vržina, 2016). Humanity in need of freedom from the process of enslavement of the inferior and superior alike (Fanon, 1967).

Authors argue that recent discussions of "decolonizing" movements within anthropology bring to the fore the need of incorporating the minimal application of humanistic scholarship from African Diaspora to the study of human biology (Harrison 1991, 2016; Watkins 2017) which will in turn enable a more firm approach to the authentic talk and respect towards spirituality.

Paper short abstract:

Practices relevant to the matrix of Cuban religiosity of African origin are often gendered. This paper investigates the gendering of these religious traditions and the implications it has on practitioners across gendered lines.

Paper long abstract:

Practices relevant to the matrix of Cuban religiosity of African origin are often gendered. The gendering of these religious traditions has implications for their practitioners. Both practice and practitioners become gendered through technologies of spirit communication and gendered and racialized stereotypes relevant to the wider socio-historic Cuban imaginary. Espiritismo Cruzado, a religious tradition rooted spirit mediation, is generally associated with women and gendered feminine. This paper examines the way the practice's spirit and practitioner relationships interface with and generate tensions surrounding sexuality and gender via the use of the body. This, I have argued elsewhere, is due to the association between women's reproductive and procreative capacities mapped spiritual and creative capacities. Given that some technologies of spiritual communication are relegated to the feminine, how do practitioners negotiate femininity and masculinity? How is this different for women, the majority of practitioners, and men, the minority

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the relationship between the body and the Holy Spirit, and how, given the nature of salvation, American Evangelical Christians manage manage contentious notions of the human.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the Christian body as the dwelling place of the Holy Spirit, and asks how American Evangelicals manage the imagined physicality of being 'saved.' In the American Bible Belt, Conservative Evangelical Christians understand salvation as a moment of complete spiritual change. That change is embodied, as the Holy Spirit enters the physical person, but not entirely bodily. The Holy Spirit changes a person's soul, and grants a new body after death, but the living body of the Christian remains a problematic site. This generates internal contention between the sinful desires of the body (often called 'the flesh') and the moral spiritual guidance of the indwelling Holy Spirit, as the individual strives to participate in a collective Christian ethic. Boundaries between the human and the non-human become complicated as distinctions between individual agency and 'the will of God' are obscured. In similar ways, Christians maintain intangible boundaries between the living and the dead, as non-Christians are sometimes referred to as 'walking corpses.' Drawing on twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork in the southern US state of Arkansas, I argue that for the Conservative Evangelical, the Holy Spirit problematizes what it means to be human, for 'lost' and 'saved' people alike.

Paper short abstract:

This article is concerned with cursed personhood and spirits. It illuminates how bodily transformations reflect dynamics of human and non-human interactions, exemplified through the instances of curse infliction.

Paper long abstract:

This article is about cursed bodies and cursing practices in post-Soviet Kyzyl, the capital of Tuva. While showing how human bodies bring together humans and spirits, I concentrate on how cursing induces 'bodily' changes which engage physical, emotional, and cognitive processes, whilst shifting humans from a fragile condition of homeostasis to turbulence. I put a specific stress on the images of cursed bodies and physical deformations that spirits produce while inflicting curses. These images are revealed by shamans during divination practices and curse deflection rituals. In my analysis of the materiality of curses, I draw on Latour's argument concerning bodily existence as 'learning to be affected' (2004: 205). In this way, while discussing the shamans' visions, I approach a (cursed) body not as a 'provisional residence of something superior - an immortal soul, the universal, or thought - but (…) a dynamic trajectory by which we learn to register and become sensitive to what the world is made of' (ibid.: 206). Along these lines, I seek to illuminate how curses transform people into a particular stage upon which complex interactions between humans and non-humans are being instantiated and played out. Thus, I suggest that cursed personhood in Tuva, rather than utilizing the perspective of spirit possession or anything resembling it, represents a form of living with and around spirits.

Paper short abstract:

In Algerian rituals, trance provides the social recalibration of material, human bodies and immaterial, energetic ones. This paper explores the body as a creative site where the biological, social, and material are managed through the temporal, social ecosystem of ritual.

Paper long abstract:

In Algerian popular Islamic rituals, bodily techniques of trance articulate sociality between material and immaterial worlds. Bodies are key here, whether they are human or nonhuman bodies (as atmospheric energies or spirits), because they are always assumed to be porous and are therefore engaged as creative sites of material-immaterial relationships between human and nonhuman dimensions. For example, in trance, the moving, human body has access to otherworldly knowledge, it may become a vessel for transgenerational memory (images that enter consciousness), and it may become a host of immaterial agents, all which drastically affect human social relations. When such relationships fall into disrepair, resulting in various manners of sickness from mental-emotional disturbance to paralyzation and chronic illness, trance is a way of engaging with such pain and suffering and their intertwined social implications. Furthermore, trance renders individual suffering public and socially relevant. Indeed, the express purpose of trance is to provide a pluralistic and porous body-ness in the ritual's highly dynamic social ecosystem so that the material and immaterial can be recalibrated through the human body with the direction of musical and ritual experts. In this paper, I contextualize eighteen months of fieldwork on Algerian rituals within the broad strokes of related theoretical work on the aesthetics of pain and illness (Asad 2003; Desjarlais 1992; Kleinman & Das 1997; Pinto 2011; Scarry 1985; Throop 2010), recent phenomenological approaches in anthropology (Ram & Houston 2015), bodily practices (Blackman 2012; Csordas 1999; Scheer 2012) and the canon of music and trance.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how the joik, a singing tradition practised by the Sámi, engages spiritual presences and the singing body in the emergence of a 'more-than-human' sociality within the performers and auditors. 'Humanity' is thus problematised in terms of what the human body can do.

Paper long abstract:

Joiks are songs performed by the Sámi of Northern Europe. They share with spirits an intangible, aerial mode of being and a status of actors in the world. They appear spontaneously, visit humans in unexpected ways and occur within a shared creativity between the (human) performers and the (more-than-human) environment.

Each joik is tied to a person, an animal or a place. Even when deceased or hidden from sight, these elements of the world withhold a presence that can be engaged with by singing their joiks. This ability to 'make present the absent' is nested in an ecological conception of personhood: every human is inhabited by an inner reindeer, an inner bear, other humans and places, all of whom are in correspondence with the actual animals and places located in the environment. Singing their joiks aims at attending to them, making them grow and developing the performer or auditors into 'more-than-human' ecologies.

The singing body is thus a vector of growth and sociality. It is through its breath and resonance, from 'within,' that humans get in touch with the invisible. The joik thus mitigates the category of 'humanity' in that it attends to the 'non-human' within the 'human' and vice-versa. On the other hand, this ability to engage with and selectively explore their invisible, inner depths with the 'joiking' voice appears to be a feature that distinguishes humans from other animals.