Skill and Scale in Transnational Mediumship

Skill and Scale in Transnational Mediumship
Conference at the a.r.t.e.s. Graduate School, University of Cologne, Germany, 25-26 September 2017.

Abstract of my presentation

Fiona Bowie

Spirit Release Therapies: Healing Networks and Mediumistic Practices in Contemporary Britain
The term ‘spirit release therapy’ and presence of individuals who advertise their skills as ‘spirit release therapists’ are relatively recent – gaining ground in the last couple of decades in the UK. The idea that spirits can cause problems to the living, can attach themselves to someone, attack them psychically, and even take over their minds and bodies to ‘possess’ them, is certainly not new. Spirits, usually but not only of the deceased, who continue to trouble the living and who may need help to ‘move on’ appear in one form or another in all cultures and geographical locations. As far as we can tell they also have an ancient pedigree and human societies have evolved various means of dealing with spirits, honing specialised skills of exorcism, ‘de-obsession’, soul retrieval, healing and spirit communication. Anthropologists have been interested in documenting such beliefs and practices since the inception of the discipline in the Nineteenth Century. Spirit practices and the unseen world of psychic forces, be they in the form of witchcraft in Africa, spirit possession in Brazil, shamanistic practices in Northern Europe or Australia, or the so-called folk beliefs of Europe that stubbornly resurface whenever presumed to be on the verge of extinction, remain ubiquitous. What is new is a particular configuration of ideas concerning spirit release as a therapeutic tool in the United States and the United Kingdom (and no doubt elsewhere) that currently finds expression in a range of publications, web sites, conferences, group and individual healing practices. It is this loose-knit community of healers and clients, very much dependent on modern means of communication and technology, and the ideas and practices that are in circulation within it, that I wish to discuss in this presentation.
     Theoretically a priori as mistaken or inferior (Henare, Holbraad and Wastell, 2007), are all part of this wider engagement with interconnectivity and process. Whether we use terms such as ‘new materialism’ or ‘the anthropology of ontology’, similar ideas recur. For my purposes these trends sit comfortably with the views of contemporary spirit release practitioners and their clients. We live as modern, rational, scientifically educated individuals in a world that is constantly interacting with and open to the influences of external forces - spirits – and it is assumed in most instances that the processes involved can be explained in physical terms and studied scientifically by those who are sufficiently open-minded. It is a world of vibration, energy, frequencies, intention, experience and matter, constantly interacting with one another in ways that can be documented and described. There is an element of predictability, sufficient for the development of expertise and for healing practices to be tested and honed, and unpredictability, as life and experience are never wholly replicable, and each new event affects the composition of the whole.
      In this talk I will give an overview of some of the key texts and ideas current among spirit release practitioners and their clients, and describe the ways these circulate and serve to build up overlapping networks than encompass both academic university departments and individual practitioners operating well outside the mainstream. Using case studies and illustrations of mediumistic readings and therapeutic encounters, we can approach more general questions concerning the ontological status of these practices – an area that has for long been taboo among social scientists - as well as giving a phenomenological account of contemporary spirit release therapies. In doing so I am indebted to the pioneering work of Edith Turner (1993). In opening-up the question of the ‘reality of spirits’, she enabled the sorts of discussions that take place in Young and Goulet (1994) and Goulet and Miller (2006), which acknowledge the extraordinary and transformative encounters that take place through an engagement with alternative world views. Like David Hufford (1982, 1995) and Gregory Shushan (2013, 2014) I find both the similarities and differences involved in comparative studies of anomalous phenomena (for want of a better term), including mediumship and spirit release, suggestive of a core of experiential data that is, as Jack Hunter remarks (2013, 2015) innately human, whatever its source.

References
Fuentes, A. 2017. The Creative Spark: How Imagination Made Humans Exceptional. Dutton: New York.
Goulet, J-G. & Miller, B.G. (eds.) 2006. Extraordinary Anthropology: Transformations in the Field. Lincoln & London: University of Nebraska Press.
Henare, A, Holbraad, M. & Wastrell, S. (eds.) 2007. Thinking Through Things: Theorising Artefacts Ethnographically. Abingdon & New York: Routledge.
Hodder I. (ed.) 2013: Humans and landscapes of Catalhoyuk: reports from the 2000-2008 seasons. Catalhoyuk Reseach Project Series Volume 8. British Institute at Ankara Monograph No. 47 / Monumenta Archaeologica 30. Los Angeles: Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press.
Hodder, I. 2014. The Entanglements of Humans and Things: A Long-Term View. New Literary History 45(1): 19-36.
Hufford, D. 1982. The Terror that Comes in the Night: An Experience-Centered Study of Supernatural Assault Traditions. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Hufford, D. 1995. Beings Without Bodies: An Experience-Centered Theory of Belief in Spirits. In Walker, B. (ed.) Out of the Ordinary: Folklore and the Supernatural. Logan: Utah State University Press.
Hunter, J. 2013. Numinous Conversations: Performance and Manifestation of Spirits in Spirit Possession Practices. In A. Voss & W. Rowlandson (eds.) Daimonic Imagination: Uncanny Intelligence. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press.
Hunter, J. 2015. ‘Between Realness and Unrealness’: Anthropology, Parapsychology and the Ontology of Non-Ordinary Realities. Diskus: Journal of the British Association for the Study of Religion. 17(2):4-20.
Ingold, T. 2011. Being Alive: Essays on movement, Knowledge and Description. Routledge: London & New York.
Ingman, P., Utriainen, T., Hovi, T. & Broo, M. (eds.) 2016. The Relational Dynamics of Enchantment and Sacralization: Changing the Terms of the Religion Versus Secularity Debate. Sheffield: Equinox.
Latour, B. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Translated by C. Porter. Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press.
Latour, B. 2010. On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods. Translated by H. MacLean and C. Porter. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Latour, B. 2017. Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Pina-Cabral, J.d. 2017. World: An Anthropological Examination. Chicago: Hau Books. Shushan, G. 2013. Rehabilitating the neglected ‘similar’: Confronting the issue of cross- cultural similarities in the study of religions. Paranthropology: Journal of Anthropological

Approaches to the Paranormal. 4(2):48-53.

Shushan, G. 2014. Extraordinary experiences and religious beliefs: deconstructing some contemporary philosophical axioms. Method and Theory in the Study of Religion. 26:384- 416.
Young, D.E. & Goulet, J.-G. 1994. Being Changed by Cross-Cultural Encounters: The Anthropology of Extraordinary Experience. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press.
Turner, E. 1993. The Reality of Spirits: A Tabooed or Permitted Field of Study? Anthropology of Consciousness. 4(1):9-12.