Paper short abstract:

This paper focuses on exorcism in contemporary Japan, relying on data gathered at Kenmi shrine in Tokushima Prefecture. I argue that healing emerges from serendipitous consequential engagements with actors that end up constituting a technology of affect which also elicits detachment from suffering.

Paper long abstract:

Recent anthropological research has analyzed experiences with spirits as based on bodily affordances that ground ‘the cultural kindling’ of spiritual experiences (Cassaniti and Luhrmann 2014). Notably, anthropologist Tanya Lurmann’s (2012) study on hearing the voice of God among American Evangelicals, suggested that through religious practices, Evangelicals learn to retrace the borders between their own thoughts and what they become enskilled in identifying as God’s messages. Luhrmann claimed that such experiences become possible because tracing the border between what is internal to the self and what is not, is something that people are socialized into. Other studies have emphasized the role of enskilment and entrainment in processes of learning possession, as well as the role of feelings and perceptions as grounds for possession states.

In this paper, I will rely on such analytical approaches, while applying them to healing from afflictive possession. In order to do so, I will focus on ethnographic data gathered through fieldwork at Kenmi shrine in contemporary Tokushima Prefecture. This shrine is renown in the whole Japan because of its ritual to exorcise from spirit possession, especially possession by the Dog-God (inugami). Firstly, I will introduce the feelings experienced by sufferers during the ritual and their experienced of having been “relieved.” Secondly, I will suggest that the ritual has a technological dimension which elicits certain affects, and that repeatedly undergoing the ritual leads to the sufferer’s wellbeing as a form of enskilment.

I will show that feelings of relief are not only the result of the ritual, but also of engagements with other actors that surround it, such as the street to go to the shrine, or the natural environment. Thus, I shed light on the technologies of affect that lead to the deliverance from evil spirits, arguing that “healing” emerges as a result of engagements with a variety of actors that end up configuring a technology of affect because of their serendipitous consequentiality. I will also show how such technology of affect contributes to elicit detachment from the initial suffering conditions, by enabling the disassembling of specific affective entanglements, while allowing for new connections with others.