Paper Short Abstract:

The aim of this presentation is to unwrite the dominant framework around extraordinary experiences and to address the issue of the underlying reality. I am developing an ontological approach in which embodied extraordinary experiences give access to a different world, made of invisible dimensions.

Paper Abstract:

The main issue with grasping extraordinary experiences is an ontological one: those experiences open up people to invisible and intangible dimensions of the world as well as subtle dimensions of themselves and living beings more generally. As such they strongly collide with the dominant rationalist, materialist, and scientific ontology.

In social sciences, the treatment of this hiatus is threefold. One approach dismisses those experiences as being naïve, non-scientific, erroneous beliefs, or pathological. At the opposite of the spectrum, few researchers affirm the reality of those invisible and subtle dimensions. In between those extremes, the dominant framework treats those experiences as parts of different worldviews or representations of the world, the reality of which shouldn’t be questioned following cultural relativism. In doing so, the crucial ontological issue is overlooked, and the dominant materialist and rationalist ontology tend to be implicitly (and probably unconsciously) reaffirmed.

In this presentation based on a research project among Canadians, my aim is to unwrite this dominant framework to do justice to extraordinary experiences. Drawing on an ontological anthropology (especially Ingold as well as Clammer, Poirier & Schwimmer), I am developing an approach of a world multiple (directly inspired by Anne-Marie Mol’s “The body multiple”) which is made of conflicting configurations of what is real and different ways of inhabiting it. This world is accessed to through embodied extraordinary experiences, which mobilize the senses and non-ordinary states of consciousness, that give people a peek in it as well as knowledge and practices.

Paper Short Abstract:

This paper will challenge the language of past and contemporary discourse on the topic of extraordinary experiences, highlighting the negative impact it can have on contributor-researcher relationships, and discuss more inclusive terminology that can be used both in and out of interview contexts.

Paper Abstract:

This paper addresses the language surrounding the discourse of extraordinary experiences, challenging the conventional terminology used when discussing these experiences and offering alternative language with which researchers can use to describe and engage with the data. The current language surrounding this area of research can be clinical and sceptical, when in reality it should be open and seeking to understand, rather than pass judgment.

This paper will engage with the theme of Unwriting by engaging with past, scientific methodologies, and countering their ability to provide accurate data on human experience in the context of ethnology and folklore. It will then outline the researcher’s stance on subjective, connective, and reflexive research through semi-structured interviews and participant observation that go beyond the goal of the researcher and, using Elaine Lawless’s methodology, ‘engag[e] in dialogue and interpretation with other people who are engaged in dialogue and interpretation seeking meaning.’ (Lawless 1992)

Finally, this paper will challenge the belief that extraordinary experiences are less than rational by exploring the schism between Western, post-colonial, secular views of reality and pre-colonial belief and traditions. This challenge will also lead to an examination of researchers themselves, and an identification of factors that may, perhaps, dissuade researchers from pursuing this topic based on biases which may affect their findings, trust in researcher and contributor relationships, and the future of research on this topic moving forward.

Paper Short Abstract:

This paper explores the methodological, ethical, and communicative challenges researchers face when engaging with extraordinary experiences, such as near-death phenomena. It reflects on navigating ontologies imposed by participants, addressing these realities in non-academic contexts, and fostering respect and understanding.

Paper Abstract:

This paper examines the challenges of communicating profound experiences, such as near-death phenomena, across diverse contexts. For individuals who have undergone such transformative events, these experiences often fundamentally alter their worldview, as the reality perceived beyond the body feels more real than everyday existence. However, this does not always translate into immediate or easy integration of the experience into their lives. For many, the aftermath includes significant challenges such as depression, alienation, or an inability to share their stories openly, particularly in cultural contexts where societal ridicule or misunderstanding prevails. As a result, these experiences often remain private and unspoken.

The central question explored in this paper is: How can such experiences be effectively communicated across diverse contexts? This includes how researchers can discuss near-death experiences outside academia, while also addressing the dilemma of navigating communication with participants outside formal research settings. Within academic contexts, acknowledging these alternative ontologies is methodologically enriching and ethically crucial, as recognizing another’s ontology fosters reflexive and respectful engagement.

However, such acknowledgment becomes more complex in non-academic or informal settings. Even casual conversations with research participants can become spaces where conflicting worldviews are negotiated. Anthropologists may also face the additional challenge of maintaining their own ontological integrity while fostering openness and mutual understanding. This paper reflects on these tensions and proposes strategies for engaging with extraordinary experiences across contexts, emphasizing the ethical, methodological, and communicative responsibilities of the researcher in fostering respect and understanding beyond academia.

Paper Short Abstract:

In exploring how WW2's long shadow takes spectral form as haunted battlefields, death camps, and bomb-damaged cities, my ethnography harnesses psychoanalytic and mediumistic practices of "reverie" to accentuate receptivity, attunement, and discernment to the war's preternatural aftermaths.

Paper Abstract:

In exploring how the "long shadow" of WW2 violences and traumas takes spectral form in former battlefields, death camps, and once-bombed-out cities worldwide, my current ethnography asks: When the wartime past speaks to us through ghostliness and hauntings, what does it say? How do we hear? What do we understand? To answer these questions, my project harnesses the power of psychoanalytic and mediumistic practices of "reverie" (intersensory introspection, imagination, and waking dream-states) to accentuate ethnographic receptivity, attunement, and discernment. Following from Alexander Nemerov's proposition that "the past is most available through irrational methods", my paper qualifies reverie as an idiosyncratic interdisciplinary technique which allows ethnographers to better summon the hazy, fragmentary, and ephemeral traces leftover from the war and those who once lived it. Reverie affords access to vitally instructive atmospherics and phenomenologies and complements anthropologists' use of more standard methodologies. For when reverie's results are preternaturally unusual or even inexplicable, though, ethnographers and interlocutors alike may struggle to give words to their experiences. My paper therefore highlights the theoretic and descriptive vocabularies used by social scientists and others -- ranging from psychologists to writers and artists, for example -- to interpret and give fuller voice to these kinds of spectral encounters and learnings. In the doing, my paper tackles and dismantles some of the barriers which too-often inhibit anthropologists' uses of non-traditional forms of ethnographic engagement and representation to tell different kinds of stories.

Paper Short Abstract:

Those who return from another another realm of existence on the threshold, like being in a coma or having a near-death-experience, encounter various obstacles when they tell their story. This paper will consider what gets unwritten during the rewriting of narratives of illness and suffering.

Paper Abstract:

The proposed paper will focus on stories told by people who return after being catapulted out of this world by a serious accident or illness. Like the philosopher in Plato's allegory of the cave who sees the sunlight on the surface and is met with disbelief when he talks about his experience with those still tethered in the cave, those who have unusual or even supernatural experiences have a hard time getting people to listen and believe their narrative. This can lead to silence or not telling about the worst or weirdest things. The role of the sympathetic listener, often a doctor, is important for this type of narrative. Sometimes when the experience is too strange to be believable it gets adapted to preconceived notions or literary genre conventions. This raises questions about authenticity. What gets unwritten during the rewriting of narratives of illness and suffering? Is it possible to talk about different degrees of authenticity and literariness in narratives of extraordinary experiences such as illness, coma and near death experience? Can this authenticity be preserved while still making the experience intelligible to other people? These questions will be considered with reference to illness narratives in literature, film, and on the internet, including social media.

Paper Short Abstract:

This presentation explores the challenges faced by researchers studying individuals like Kalapos Zoli, a devout Hungarian Roma man who identifies as a medium, exorcist, chakra-cleanser, and specialist in both esoteric and traditional Roma beliefs. Drawing on years of fieldwork and interactions—including with university students and international scholars—the study examines why Roma belief systems remain under-researched and mythologized. It also raises critical questions about the limits of maintaining an outsider perspective when engaging deeply with culturally complex and spiritually specialized subjects.

Paper Abstract:

"Kalapos Zoli" is a deeply devout Hungarian Roma man of Roman Catholic faith. One room in his house serves as a unique chapel, housing several Virgin Mary statues, candles, Hindu deity statues, rosaries, and various ritual objects. Zoli is a highly recognizable figure: he always wears a hat, from which he derives his nickname, and dons gold rings depicting saints, pentagram necklaces, gold teeth, and traditional Roma attire. Despite his devout beliefs, Zoli does not attend church services. According to his account, he identifies as a medium, exorcist, chakra-cleanser, fortune-teller, reading cards and palms, and claims the ability to see auras.

Over the past few years, I have developed a strong relationship with Zoli through extensive fieldwork. Alongside my university students, I have introduced him to a renowned American folklorist, who remains intrigued by Zoli's predictions about his future from afar.

This presentation, based on field research with Zoli—who variously identifies as a fortune-teller, medium, exorcist, and witch—explores the challenges faced by researchers working with individuals who are simultaneously specialists in esoteric practices and traditional Roma beliefs. The discussion raises questions such as: Why Roma belief system remain one of the least explored and most mythologized areas in contemporary research? Is there an "adaptive boundary" beyond which a researcher can no longer maintain an outsider perspective?

This case study aims to provide critical reflections on methodological and epistemological challenges, highlighting the negotiation of roles and boundaries between researcher and subject in ethnographic contexts involving complex cultural and spiritual systems.

Paper Short Abstract:

Based on fieldwork carried out in a Catholic spiritual practice over four years, mystical experiences - alien and their own - cried out to be taken into account due to the centrality they occupied in people's trajectories and narratives. Autoethnography made it possible to accommodate those experiences that often remain unwritten

Paper Abstract:

During my doctoral thesis, I conducted fieldwork with the idea of tracking and pursuing those people referred to as spiritual seekers. After a first period of participant observation, my phenomenological concerns and my interest in lived religion led me to adopt an autoethnographic approach with a radical participatory implementation.

After four years of experiential immersion in a Catholic spiritual practice, called ‘Journeys of Experiencing God’, there were many moments when I had to deal with experiences that, in most cases, are usually left in the ‘unacceptable’ drawer. Either for possible loss of credibility on the part of the researcher, or for not compromising those with whom we share the research process.

There were many reflections on methodological asepsis and agnosticism, or dispositional atheism, being aware of the self-censorship and silencing of our experiences with the radically other, due to scientific fundamentalism. I therefore elaborated ways of re-writing the unwritten, of using other forms of representation according to one's own lived experiences.

The written format, required for the presentation of the thesis, thus became a space from which to rethink diverse forms for the representation of other worlds that the textual medium hardly accepts; how can ethnographic work be relevant to delve into other ways of seeing, feeling and experiencing the world? How to narrate central experiences without betraying them, without cutting out their multiple dimensions? Many of these questions continue to motivate experimentation both in the way we research and in the formats for re-presenting them.

Paper Short Abstract:

This presentation, illustrated with visual examples, examines the phenomenon of "visionary art"--artworks created by individuals who have been inspired by extraordinary encounters and revelatory experiences attributed to a supranormal agency such as a deity, a spirit, a divine force, or a sacred realm. Such numinous encounters exist cross-culturally and the exploration of visionary art and related material culture provides specific insights that may contribute to a "unwriting" and deeper understanding of these realms of human experience.

Paper Abstract:

This presentation, illustrated with visual examples, examines the phenomenon of "visionary art"--artworks created by individuals who have been inspired by extraordinary encounters and revelatory experiences attributed to a supranormal agency such as a deity, a spirit, a divine force, or a sacred realm. The visionary encounters that motivate such art are prevalent cross-culturally and historically, as seen in the divinely-inspired art of shamans, prophets, sages, mystics, and other visionaries. This paper argues that such "extraordinary" experiences must be be understood within a wide range of anomalous phenomena, such as those mentioned above, as well as trance states, dreams, otherworldly journeys, out-of-body travel, near death experiences, mediumship, clairvoyance, divinely acquired prophetic or healing abilities, and other numinous encounters. The paper surveys such experiences and then explores characterizations of the loosely defined category of "visionary art." I offer a more precise definition of the term, in alignment with William A. Christian's work on visionary cultures. The paper then explores the relationship between extraordinary experiences and selected individuals who began to create art in response to trauma, loss, or personal crisis. I sum, I assert that a focus on visionary art and related material culture provides specific insights that may contribute to a "unwriting" and deeper understanding of these realms of human experience.

Paper Short Abstract:

Hanging in rural pizza shop, a painting depicts sasquatches spraying water on the building as it burns. Otherworldly beings instructed its painter. “Outsider artists” are often written as antisocial, but this case shows how idiosyncratic beliefs can powerfully connect individuals to their community.

Paper Abstract:

There is a tiny pizza shop in a rural area devastated by wildfire where a painting hangs on the wall that depicts two female sasquatchs spraying water on the roof of the building as it burns. After talking to the owner of the shop, I met “Justin” who lives nearby. Justin told me he painted the painting and gave it to the pizza shop’s owner because it “explained” how the restaurant survived the fire and because they are friends. Justin created an outward and material expression of his solidarity with his community in the face of a shared trauma, but it was beings from another dimension that told him in to do it.

Outsider artists are often imagined as antisocial and creating unconventional pieces that emerge from personal trauma, idiosyncratic beliefs, or visionary experiences. In recent decades, this art and its often-romanticized artists have become a lucrative form of high art. Justin, however, sells his art in the form of refrigerator magnets at local shops, as memorials for friend’s and colleagues’ pets, commissioned landscapes for local offices, and he gives many away to friends. Justin’s main career is making dental crowns from impressions.

Part of lifelong practice of visionary painting, Justin holds idiosyncratic religious beliefs that emerge from specific and repeated visionary encounters with supernatural beings, and those idiosyncratic experiences compel him to create art for his local community. Challenging how we imagine and depict visionary experiences, beings from beyond are helping Justin build and restore his community.

Paper Short Abstract:

The Imperfect Tarot is a custom set of artist cards using the traditional Tarot as a model. Taking the tarot as an intimate performance we can open a space for a sense of magic and the unseen. Through the experience we develop our capacity to hold awareness of multiple reality-senses simultaneously.

Paper Abstract:

Do you believe in magic? In this interactive and participatory performance, artist Sarah Dixon presents an opportunity to explore notions of truth and to question “ordinary” realities. Using the Imperfect Tarot to investigate participant questions on work, life, the mundane or the magnificent, we will enact an experiment in co-creating a temporary reality and envision unthought-of futures.

The Imperfect Tarot is a custom deck devised for Dixon’s recent postgraduate MA thesis at Central Saint Martins. It contains 78 cards, mimicking the popular Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot in structure, while introducing a range of fluid, liminal, visceral and eco-feminist images and themes from her wider socially-engaged practice.

In the Tarot readings, Sarah will invite members of the group to take part with their questions for the cards. This is a playful and intimate process where some of us may encounter real magic.

By introducing the notion of a magical layer, reality is temporarily suspended and a vulnerable, child-like sense of wonder can be summoned.

This is a method that conjures an interplay between imagination, reality and art, that is rooted in game-play and offers the tenderness of a possible occult. Through it, participants often come into greater awareness of inner truths and desires.

The performance is an intuitive experiment, co-creating a temporary reality and envision unthought-of futures.