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- Convenors:
-
Marta Songin-Mokrzan
(University of Lodz)
Emma Varley (Brandon University)
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- Formats:
- Panel
Short Abstract
This panel explores extraordinary experiences that blur boundaries of reality and reveal ontologies beyond polarity, asking what experimental ethnographic methods might accompany rather than represent the world’s becoming.
Long Abstract
The panel opens a space to explore extraordinary experiences - spiritual, psychedelic, supernatural, or involving encounters with otherworldly beings - that blur familiar boundaries of reality. Engaging the conference’s theme of polarity, the panel explores how such experiences open perspectives that move beyond dualistic opposition, transforming relations between self and world, the visible and the invisible, the human and the more-than-human. These are not merely matters of altered belief but of reconfigured being.
We ask panelists to consider, first, what kinds of ontological insights or worlds such experiences disclose, and second, what methods might be responsive to them. How can anthropology approach realities that are relational, processual, or non-dual without reducing them to pre-given categories? Might they call for experimental forms of ethnography that accompany the world’s becoming rather than represent it?
By treating extraordinary experience as both an ethnographic and epistemic event, the panel seeks to explore how anthropology might rethink ontology through method - and method through ontology. In dialogue with the conference’s concern for polarity, we ask how these emergent worlds may open multipolar, metamorphic understandings of being -and how anthropology might learn to move with them.
Accepted papers
Session 1Paper short abstract
In this paper I engage with an unexpected encounter with other-than-human beings during my fieldwork in Mustang, Nepal, and the way it radically transformed my experience of the place. I also discuss the role of a methodological openness, rooted in phenomenology, in enabling this transformation.
Paper long abstract
During my doctoral fieldwork in Mustang, Nepal, I occasionally encountered remarks and situations suggesting that the landscape was inhabited by other-than-human beings. Yet for a long time in the field, my attempts to understand these presences were met only with vague explanations. Although I gathered fragments of information, these remained quite abstract, and this dimension of local life long eluded me.
A pivotal shift occurred through an unexpected encounter while returning home at night from an archery festival in a nearby village. As my local companion, who was unsteady from drink, and I approached a gorge flanked by two chortens, he abruptly began shouting into the darkness. Only after my questioning did he explain that dangerous demons lived there and might take us if not frightened away. The next morning, he didn't remember the incident. Nevertheless, this fleeting yet extraordinary event initiated a chain of encounters that fundamentally transformed my understanding of local life, enabling me to understand local relationships with other-than-human beings more effectively than months of careful questioning.
In this paper, I discuss how these encounters did so by allowing me to partake in locals’ embodied ways of inhabiting environments dense with presences, obligations, and relationships; realities that cannot be fully articulated through words and escape the “distribution of the sensible” that dominates Western modernity (Bennett 2010: vii). Moreover, I explore how my capacity to be reconfigured by these encounters was predicated on a methodological openness to the metamorphic nature and multiplicity of the world, rooted in phenomenology.
Paper short abstract
Drawing on the experience of tengtengaw, an event described as being led astray in the forest by spirits, this paper explores ontological ambivalence in Ifugao, Philippines. I suggest that an ethnographic method attuned to uncertainty can reveal the ontological patchiness of the world.
Paper long abstract
We had been walking for two days toward the peak of Mount Amuyao when my local companions and I became lost in the mossy forest of Ifugao, Philippines. As we ascended the steep mountain, the trail suddenly disappeared. We walked in circles, repeatedly arriving at the same clearings, following what appeared to be a single path that nonetheless led us elsewhere each time. Only hours later did we find our way again, reaching the summit just before nightfall. This extraordinary experience is locally known as tengtengaw: an event described as being led astray in the forest by the mischievous pinacheng spirits. Yet what, precisely, had happened that afternoon? Was it exhaustion, disorientation, or the agency of forest spirits?
Rather than treating tengtengaw as a moment of altered belief or the disclosure of a different world, I approach it as an ambivalent, unresolved experience that resists univocal accounts. During and after the event, multiple explanations remained simultaneously plausible, none fully displacing the other. This coexistence of multiple accounts of causality did not resolve into ontological conflicts about what exists in the forest. Instead, the experience suggested forms of ontological entanglement where boundaries between ontologies dissolved. Drawing on this encounter, I propose that an ethnographic method attuned to uncertainty and ambivalence might reveal the ontological patchiness of a shared world.
Paper short abstract
Drawing on West African ontologies, this paper examines how (the agency of) the dead influences anthropological practice but also shapes new approaches to understanding reality. Researchers’ intimate experiences of extraordinary events also raise unique ethical questions about academic writing.
Paper long abstract
Anthropologists study death as a social and cultural phenomenon related to situated realities. In West African ontologies, the dead not only connect to the living through complex social relations, but also possess agency, which can affect the living in positive or negative ways. Yet, as a frame for the study of spiritual beliefs and practices, these ontologies have certain implications for researchers, as the dead can know, observe, validate or disagree. What happens to anthropologists’ modes of being when they enter a world of otherworldly connections, relations and recollections? Can they intimately feel the influence of the dead on them and on their work? When working within the processual relationships linking the living and the dead, researchers may suspend their own beliefs, while experiencing uncertainty as familiar boundaries between visibility and invisibility, or permanence and impermanence, progressively blur. This paper addresses the possibilities of embracing a different ontological reality, by which the ‘familiar’ is both abandoned and preserved along Mannoni’s line (1964) ‘I know well, but all the same…’ With reference to several supernatural and spiritual experiences during the author’s fieldwork in Sierra Leone – the appearance of a spirit, the manifestation of a dead person and a funeral – this paper questions researchers’ ability and authority to convey such events into academic narratives. It argues that the unique entanglement between personal experience, social relations and collective belief requires a type of existential writing that reflects renewed reflexivity, complex emotions and critical changes in the researcher’s ways of understanding reality.
Paper short abstract
The paper reflects on NDEs as ontological events that disrupt the experienced world and initiate ongoing processes of becoming. It examines how these processes unfold over time by tracing narrative repetition, omission, variation, and silence as signs of ongoing ontological negotiation.
Paper long abstract
This paper approaches near-death experiences (NDEs) as ontological events that disrupt the experienced world and initiate ongoing processes of ontological work rather than singular moments of completed transformation. For experiencers, NDEs do not result in a stable ontological conversion but generate continuous efforts to reinhabit a world that has been fundamentally altered. These efforts unfold through recurring movements of immersion and emergence, as individuals are repeatedly drawn back into the affective, historical, and practical demands of everyday life while intermittently maintaining access to an altered mode of being. Because such experiences exceed available ontological and linguistic categories, ethnographic access to NDEs is necessarily indirect. The ethnographer encounters ontological work not at the moment of disruption itself, but through retrospective narratives produced within already partially stabilized worlds. While these narratives are typically coherent and socially intelligible, they do not exhaust the ontological processes they seek to convey. The paper argues that ontological work following NDEs is distributed across bodily reorientation, affective transformation, altered temporal experience, shifts in relationality, and everyday practices. Narrative constitutes a central site where these processes become communicable and livable, yet remains a mediated and selective form of access. Drawing on existing ethnographic material and cyclical interviews conducted over time with the same experiencers, the paper traces how narrative stability coexists with ongoing ontological fluctuation, treating NDE accounts not as transparent representations of an original experience but as partial narrative surfaces through which unfinished processes of ontological reintegration become visible.
Paper short abstract
How can anthropology more resonantly engage worlds shaped by preternatural experience? Through autoethnographic reflection on spirit mediumship, this paper adapts reverie—an attentional practice with mediumistic roots—as a tool for attuning to realities that lie beyond stabilized ontologies.
Paper long abstract
How might anthropology engage more resonantly with worlds in which extraordinary, extrasensory, and otherworldly experiences are organizing forces of social life—especially when such moments destabilize distinctions between subject and object, presence and absence, the visible and the unseen? By autoethnographically reflecting on my practice of spirit mediumship, this paper adapts reverie—a disciplined practice of attentiveness with deep mediumistic roots—into an ethnographic tool of attunement for engaging realities that exceed ordinary analytic frames. Mediumship, as a mode of relation, does not depart from the real; it reconfigures how reality is sensed, inhabited, and borne. Because such experiences reorganize reality rather than negate it, they expose a methodological tension within anthropology: while ethnography has long registered reverie-like states in the field, it has tended to discipline these capacities away from method. By interweaving mediumistic practice with ethnography, my work reclaims reverie as a methodological resource for anthropologists working with spectral states, presences, and affects—one that, through practice, may open shared experiential registers rather than reinforce our analytic distance from interlocutors who claim access to preternatural phenomena. Drawing on Gaston Bachelard and Alexander Nemerov, I advance ethnographic reverie as an attentional practice oriented toward impressions, atmospheres, and immaterial or historical forces acting without full declaration. Reverie does not seek explanation or proof; it remains with emergence, accompanying experiences as they arrive, linger, recur, or refuse resolution. In doing so, reverie enables ethnography to inhabit zones of ontological overlap, aligning method with worlds whose boundaries are never fully settled.
Paper short abstract
Ultrarunners often report self-transcendent moments that blur mind/body and self/world divides. This paper proposes thick participation and experience-near interviewing as methodological devices for studying and interpreting such extraordinary experiences.
Paper long abstract
Ultra-endurance running sometimes gives rise to experiences that might be described as “extraordinary” or “not quite real”: sensations of communion with landscapes, temporal distortions, sensed presences of “others,” visions or voices, hallucinations, and moments of self-transcendence. Drawing on ethnographic research among Estonian ultrarunners (including semi-structured interviews, runners’ blogs and social media texts, and participant observation at ultrarunning events conducted both as a runner and as a volunteer) this paper examines how such episodes are described, evaluated, and rendered meaningful within a largely secular running milieu. I approach these episodes as extraordinary experiences that unsettle familiar polarities (mind/body, human/more-than-human, visible/invisible, self/world, natural/supernatural) without presuming any single ontological resolution.
Methodologically, the paper argues for “thick participation” as an alternative to both distanced observation and full-fledged autoethnography. I suggest that the ethnographer’s sustained, embodied involvement in endurance running enables experience-near phenomenological interviewing and enhances the capacity to pose plausible and resonant questions. At the same time, it foregrounds the epistemic limits of accessing others’ first-person experience, turning the gap between experience and expression into an analytically productive site. This is particularly evident in moments when runners struggle to make the ineffable communicable and explicitly acknowledge the inadequacy of available vocabularies for articulating such extraordinary experiences.
Paper short abstract
This proposal explores the challenges of representing the entanglements of phantom limb perception, interrogating how the experimental process of creative ethnography can help understand the fluctuating nature of experience.
Paper long abstract
This proposal addresses the extraordinary experiences called “phantom limbs” which usually appear after amputation, radically disrupting individuals’ perception and their sense of reality. In the chaos and confusion introduced by this phenomenon, amputees individually must learn to manage and make sense of the new sensory reality, reconfigurating the boundaries of their bodily experience and representation, as well as their sense of self. This isolating subjectivity is usually dealt with in isolation, where people improvise various strategies, especially when it comes to painless phantom sensations which are least known of. Through ethnography of neuroscientific diagnostic and mapping practices, I found that the questionnaires, interview methods, specific vocabulary and visual representations used, all act as technologies to conjure, stabilize, and negotiate different levels of consciousness and sensory nuances of the phantom phenomenology. These situations bring out a great variety of individual experiences, where the sensations of “presence” of the amputated limb engage different memories (mental, sensory, affective…) and “somatic modes of attention” (Csordas, 1993). In my current research, I have been collaborating with amputated participants on the challenges of communicating these complex and fleeting experiences which do not fit into the dualisms (or polarities) of visible-invisible, material-imagined, present-absent. This communication focuses on the challenges and contributions of this “creative ethnography” (Culhane and Elliott, 2017) on the topographies of phantom limb perception – experimenting with the tensions between the limitations of verbal and of visual representations of invisible and unexpressible extraordinary experiences.
Paper short abstract
This presentation explores how a dynamic form of dualism is used creatively by the Huni Kuin to enact social change and meditate upon matters of selfhood and otherness. To this end, I examine the extraordinary experience of the Ayahuasca ritual and it's recent reformulations.
Paper long abstract
Dualism pervades all aspects of Huni Kuin cosmology and life - from the dual organisation of kinship to the characteristic patterns adorning their art. Yet it is the dynamic nature of dualism that generates life and allows for its reproduction. Huni Kuin social life and art depend upon the simultaneous deployment of opposing principles and their fluidification by means of controlled mixing. The extraordinary experience of the Ayahuasca ritual as practiced by the Huni Kuin is a meditation upon the complex interplay between the rigidity and fluidity of polarities, where dualistic rhythms mediate a cosmopolitical encounter between Huni Kuin, spirits, and increasingly human strangers. The ritual has recently experienced a series of innovations which saw the introduction of instruments such as the guitar, accompanied by dancing and a new style of melodic singing, with the aim of attracting new types of human strangers. Rather than replacing the previous formulation of the ritual with a new one, the Huni Kuin have decided upon the ‘bifurcation approach’ by splitting the ritual in half – with the first half mediated by the old voice-only chanting, and the second by the newly integrated melodic guitar rhythms. The bifurcation of the ritual reveals further oppositions, such as those between the shamanic and the festive, self and other, forest and city, elders and youth. In this presentation I argue that such dynamic dualisms are not only a reflection of the Huni Kuin ethos, but are also creative methods of enacting social change.