7th  ETHNOGRAPHY AND QUALITATIVE RESEARCH CONFERENCE
University of Bergamo (Italy), 6-9 June 2018
 
PANEL: Experiencing the Sacred between Religion and Spirituality
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Convenors:
Stefania Palmisano (Università di Torino) stefania.palmisano@unito.it
Nicola Pannofino (Università di Torino) nicolaluciano.pannofino@unito.it
Emily Pierini (University of Wales Trinity Saint David / The American University of Rome) e.pierini@aur.edu
 
‘Religion’ and ‘Spirituality’ are terms of a binomial that is at the core of recent debates in the field of religious studies. Their relation is variably understood either as opposition or complementarity. In the first instance, according to the formula ‘spiritual but not religious’ used by those who cultivate a personal relationship with the transcendent beyond institutionalized religions. In the latter one, spirituality expresses the subjective dimension of religion. Both these definitions emphasize lived experience, and especially a sacred that permeates everyday practices, close to the body, to sensory perception and to the agency of the person in transition between multiple secular spheres of society.
In order to delve into this field, we invite contributions grounded in ethnographic research focussing upon the relationship between religion and spirituality in the social contexts of everyday life, and that stress a methodological reflection upon the status of ethnography in the study of lived religion and spirituality.
Some of the areas around which this theme can be developed are:

• spirituality and religion in everyday life
• spirituality and gender
• body, emotions and spirituality
• the perceptive dimension in the experience of the sacred
• health, wellbeing and spirituality
• spirituality and the notion of personhood
• creative expressions of the religious in secular contexts
• the ethnography of spirituality: how the ethnographer perceives the experiences of others

 
SESSION 1. Thursday 7 June – afternoon 16.00-19.00

1. God across borders. Patterns of catholic immigrant spirituality in Milan. Samuele Davide Molli (Università Cattolica di Milano)
2. Ethnographic study of monasteries in Poland. Marcin Jewdokimov (Faculty of Humanities, Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński University in Warsaw)
3. Agency and self-transformation in Catholic vocational discernment. Ekatarina Khonieneva (European University at Saint Petersburg / Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography)    
4. Ordinary lives in (extra?)ordinary times. Understanding everyday spirituality of young Congolese refugees in Kampala. Alessandro Gusman (University of Turin)
5. The invisible infrastructure of a spiritual metropolis. Religious ties between jihad de l’ame and practice of everyday life in the Sufi city of Tuba. Guido Nicolas Zingari (University of Turin)          
6. The Invisible that we all see in the Valley of Makua in the Island of O’ahu. Emanuela Borgnino (University of Milano Bicocca and University of Hawaii at Mānoa)

        
SESSION 2. Friday 8 June – morning 9.30-12.30

1. Spirituality and religiosity in transformation. Biographies of Orthodox Christians in post-Soviet Russia. Galina Novikova (University of Giessen, Germany)
2. Sacred Nature. Contemporary forms of green spirituality. Antonio Camorrino (Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II) 
3. Knowledge production and practices of interpretations in New Age spirituality. Andrei Tiuktiaev (European University at Saint Petersburg / Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography)
4. The Sacred Self: Negotiating with the sacred within through the body. Matteo Di Placido (Università degli Studi di Milano Bicocca Department of Sociology and Social Research)         
5. Sin City Religion: Exploring the intersections of entertainment culture, technology, and religion. Josiah Kidwell (Department of Sociology, University of Nevada-Las Vegas)            

 
Conference website: http://www.etnografiaricercaqualitativa.it/?page_id=517 
 


Call for Papers
 
Open panel 162. Spirituality and Health: Epistemologies of Healing and the Ethnographic Encounter
 
18th World Congress of the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences
Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina (UFSC), Florianópolis, Brazil, 16-20 July 2018
 
Convenors:
Emily PIERINI (University of Wales Trinity Saint David)
Alberto GROISMAN (Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina)
 
Therapeutic itineraries often unfold across different approaches to wellbeing posing new challenges to patients, healers and medical professionals. This panel explores the entanglements of spirituality and biomedicine in people’s experiences of healing, specifically asking: how do people make sense of and use different epistemologies of illness and healing in their therapeutic itinerary? How to they either draw, shift, or cross the boundaries between spiritual and medical approaches? How do they understand and apply notions of ‘efficacy’ and ‘evidence’ in their therapeutic experiences? How they deal with the power relations between the different approaches? How do they consider the relationships of negotiation and processes of decision implicated?
Researching these experiences, contexts and itineraries, demands that also ethnographers address particular methodological challenges. How could ethnographic knowledge approach the tension between different epistemologies of healing coexisting in people’s experiences? What kinds of methodological and ethical challenges arise in the ethnographic encounter with people in, or moving between, the fields of spirituality and biomedicine? 
We invite papers discussing ethnographic research in groups practising spiritual healing, among patients following both biomedical and spiritual therapeutic itineraries, and health professionals using conventional and non-conventional therapeutic approaches to healing. 
 
Keywords: spirituality; health; wellbeing; healing; therapeutic itineraries
 
Abstract submission: http://www.inscricoes.iuaes2018.org/trabalho/view?ID_TRABALHO=68
Thematic axis: 19. Health and Medical Anthropology
Open Panel. 162 Spirituality and Health: Epistemologies of Healing and the Ethnographic Encounter
Languages accepted for paper presentations: English, Portuguese, Spanish
Deadline: 28 February 2018
 
Please, circulate this to those who might be interested.

This workshop zooms in on new communities of practice and enskilment that evolve around techniques of mediumship in an interconnected world. The increased mobility of people, organizations and media that take part in or reformulate trance practices and spiritual experiences has significantly widened the scope and outreach of adepts of trance, spirit possession and spiritual body arts. Their body techniques, symbols and artifacts play a major role in the re-organization of spirituality on site and the emergence of transnational spirited publics across time and space, co-producing the “local” and the “global” of religious and spiritual practice. 
Components of shamanic journeys, afro-Brazilian rituals, trance mediumship and mystic traditions circulate, compete and merge with each other and are often combined with “alternative” healing procedures and body sports, reshaping individual experiences and cosmologies, mediating scales and contexts of situated communities of practices. 
With this workshop we intend to bring together work on new communities of practices, which evolve around mediumship, spirit possession and trance rituals, by adressing how these practices are taught and learned, transformed and re-invented in different settings. In particular, we are intested in the discussion on „apprenticeship“ as a process of enskilment (Ingold) in context of co-participation that is increasingly transformed through technologisazion, standardization and interaction at a distance. Increasingly, people do not only co-operate across ‘social worlds’ (Strauss), they act simultaneously in different and only partially overlapping social relations. The communal practices of trance and mediumship do therefore not signify the existence of firmly established communities, rather communality has to be continuously produced through interaction. We invite participants to reflect upon how, under the condition of heterogeneity, spiritual sociality and a shared socio-material world is produced through the mutual recognizable production of practices and common situations among spirits, their mediums, experts and followers.

Link to Abstracts
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A documentary about shamans, death and better life

A project by Marianna Zanetta and Edmondo Perrone
 
Itako are japanese shamans, known to be mostly blind. “Itako::Visions” is a journey across the subject of death and mourning,  through the rituals and practices developed and mastered by itako.
Before the encounter with shamanism, it is important to acknowledge the background in which itako work, within the peculiar japanese landscape and in particular the buddhist approach to death with its specific images of the afterlife. Beginning with the 2011 catastrophe, the earthquake and the tsunami that hit Northeastern Japan – where itako dwell – we deal with the death of a community, and the tragic loss of a child. We wonder what lead people now, in the XXI century, to look out for the help of a shaman. What kind of assistance can this type of medium actually offer? We then meet itako, we come to better know them, We try to talk about the future of this type of shamanism with the youngest among them, and with one of her clients. We will then have a clearer context of the human fragility in the face of death, and how ineffective will result materialism when dealing with the spiritual needs.
 
Credits
Project: Edmondo Perrone, Marianna Zanetta
Direction: Edmondo Perrone
Extra Shooting: Emanuele Satolli, Iwate Prefecture Noda Village, Tohoku Regional Bureau, Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Turism.
Illustrations: Flavio Bisca
Editing: Edmondo Perrone
Translation: Toshie Shinozaki, Kenji Maeji, Tamayo Muto, Sachiko Akebiyama, Noriko Sato, Aya Yamada Mitchell Urbanowicz
Subtitles: Mitchell Urbanowicz, Marianna Zanetta
Music: “I should Know” by Edmondo Perrone, performed by Edmondo Perrone, Paola Bernardeschi, “Emotional Inspiration” by e-soundtrax. “Dancing life” by Lucrezia Morticelly. “Taiko Action” by iCentury
 
For more information
www.itakodoc.com
 
Next Screening
23 February 2017, MAO – Museo d’Arte Orientale, Turin, Italy

Edited by Jack Hunter
2016 Aporetic Press
172 pages

Damned Facts: Fortean Essays on Religion, Folklore and the Paranormal is a collection of essays adopting a variety of 'Fortean' approaches to the study of religion, folklore and the paranormal. Over the course of four ground-breaking books published between 1919-1932, Charles Fort gathered thousands of accounts of weird events and experiences that seemed to upset the established models of mainstream science and religion. In order to explore these events Fort developed the philosophy of Intermediatism, whereby all phenomena (from the most mundane to the most extraordinary), are understood to partake of a quasi-existence, neither real nor unreal. It is from this indeterminate vantage point that the chapters in this book begin their investigations.

Table Of Contents:

Foreword: Damned Comparisons and the Real - Jeffrey J. Kripal

Introduction: Intermediatism and the Study of Religion - Jack Hunter

Chapter 1: No Limestone in the Sky: The Politics of Damned Facts - Amba J. Sepie

Chapter 2: The Methodologies of Radical Empiricism: The Experiential Worlds of William James and Charles Fort - Timothy Grieve-Carlson

Chapter 3: Extraordinary Religious/Anomalous Cases from Brazil and the Fortean Approach - Wellington Zangari, Fatima Regina Machado, Everton de Oliveira Maraldi and Leonardo Breno Martins

Chapter 4: A New Demonology: John Keel and The Mothman Prophecies - David Clarke

Chapter 5: UFO Abductions as Mystical Encounter: Faerie Folklore in W.Y. Evans-Wentz, Jacques Vallee and Whitley Strieber - Robin Jarrell

Chapter 6: Misunderstanding Myth as History: The Case of British-Israelism - David V. Barrett

Chapter 7: The Transmediumizers - Eden S. French and Christopher Laursen

Chapter 8: The Mirror Maze: True Reflections of the Hyperprophets - James Harris

Chapter 9: Implications of a Paranormal Labyrinth - Roberta Harris Short

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Damned-Facts-Religion-Folklore-Paranormal/dp/9963221424/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1461879901&sr=1-2&keywords=damned+facts+jack+hunter

Special Issue 'Fieldwork in Religion: Bodily Experience and Ethnographic Knowledge'
Vol 2 (2016)
Edited by Emily Pierini and Alberto Groisman
 
Access and download a free copy of the Journal here: 
​http://rerc-journal.tsd.ac.uk/index.php/religiousexp/issue/view/4

Articles:
 
Introduction. Fieldwork in Religion: Bodily Experience and Ethnographic Knowledge
Emily Pierini and Alberto Groisman
http://rerc-journal.tsd.ac.uk/index.php/religiousexp/article/view/27/30
 
Full Participation and Ethnographic Reflexivity. An Afro-Brazialian Case Study
Arnaud Halloy
http://rerc-journal.tsd.ac.uk/index.php/religiousexp/article/view/16/31
 
Embodied Encounters: Ethnographic Knowledge, Emotions and the Senses in the Vale do Amanhecer's Spirit Mediumship
Emily Pierini
http://rerc-journal.tsd.ac.uk/index.php/religiousexp/article/view/23/32
 
Daime Religions, Mediumship and Religious Agency: Health and the Fluency of Social Relations
Alberto Groisman
http://rerc-journal.tsd.ac.uk/index.php/religiousexp/article/view/25/37
 
Studying the Body in Rastafari Rituals: Spirituality, Embodiment and Ethnographic Knowledge
Anna Waldstein
http://rerc-journal.tsd.ac.uk/index.php/religiousexp/article/view/17/34
 
Spirits, Spies and Lies in Havana: Unwitting and Paranoid Entanglements between the Ethnographer and the Field
Diana Espirito Santo
http://rerc-journal.tsd.ac.uk/index.php/religiousexp/article/view/12/35
 
Immersion in Experiencing the Sacred: Insights into the Ethnography of Religion
Stefania Palmisano
http://rerc-journal.tsd.ac.uk/index.php/religiousexp/article/view/19/38
 
This Special Issue examines the construction of ethnographic knowledge in researching among participants of religious and spiritual groups through the lenses of bodily experience. Articles discuss the methodological implications of engaging the scholarly body in the field and the ways in which to convey these experiences through ethnography, by addressing the empirical, ethical, epistemological, relational, political and analytical implications of this significant aspect of fieldwork. Authors are particularly concerned with religious and spiritual groups whose practices imply the use of techniques, resources, plants, substances and other strategies used in religious contexts to modify the states of consciousness. They ask specifically how does the researcher's experience in researching among these groups inform the production of ethnographic knowledge? In which way does it redefine our analytical categories, and even the way we approach the experiences of participants in these groups? Up to which extent do our interlocutors expect us to know about their experiences and practices? Assessing critically their own experiences and their implications, they raise issues associated with contemporary debates around concepts of 'knowledge' and 'belief', 'body', 'self' and 'personhood', 'health' and 'illness' in religious contexts.

The Study of Religious Experience Approaches and Methodologies
Edited by Bettina E. Schmidt, University of Wales Trinity St David
Published by Equinox 
208 Pages
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Contents 
Foreword – Peggy Morgan 
Introduction – Bettina E. Schmidt 
Anthropological Approaches to the Study of Religious Experience 
1. How to Study Religious Experience: Historical and Methodological Reflections on the Study of the Paranormal – Fiona Bowie 

2. Ethnological and Neurophenomenological Approaches to Religious Experiences – Michael Winkelman 

Methodological Challenges for the Study of Religious Experience 
3. Fieldwork and Embodied Knowledge: Researching the Experiences of Spirit Mediums in the Brazilian Vale do Amanhecer – Emily Pierini 

4. Cultural-Linguistic Constructivism and the Challenge of Near-Death and Out-of- Body Experiences – Gregory Shushan 

5. Provincializing Religious Experience: Methodological Challenges to the Study of Religious Experiences in Brazil – Bettina E. Schmidt 

Theological and Philosophical Approaches to the Study of Religious Experience 
6. Immediate Revelation or the Basest Idolatry? Theology and Religious Experience – Robert Pope 

7. An Argument from Religious Experience: Origins and Revelations – Tristan Nash 

Reflections on Types of Religious Experience 
8. Text and Experience: Reflections on ‘Seeing’ in the Gospel of John – Catrin H. Williams 

9. Music as Spiritual Experience – June Boyce-Tillman 

10. Is It Possible to Have a ‘Religious Experience’ in Cyberspace? – Gary Bunt 
 
A rich and welcome addition to the literature which has something for anyone with a serious interest in this area of investigation. 
Professor Peggy Morgan, Mansfield College, University of Oxford
 
Quote the code Experience and receive 25% off the retail price when ordering from the book page.
To see further information on the book, chapter abstracts and to order please visit
https://www.equinoxpub.com/home/study-religious-experience-bettina-schmidt/