Who We Are

Executive Board

Fiona Bowie

Fiona Bowie is a Visiting Senior Research Fellow in Anthropology at the King's College, London (Theology and Religious Studies) and member of Wolfson College, Oxford. Research interests include ethnographic approaches to the study of the afterlife, mediums and religious experience; African religions, Cameroon and the Cameroonian diaspora; kinship, adoption and the circulation of children.
Fiona Bowie is General Editor of the Berghan book series Exploring the Extraordinary.
Academia.edu page
King’s College London web profile
Amazon author's page
Exploring the Afterlife blog

Jack Hunter

Jack Hunter obtained a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Bristol. His research takes the form of an ethnographic study of contemporary trance and physical mediumship in Bristol, focusing on themes of personhood, performance, altered states of consciousness and anomalous experience. In 2010 he established Paranthropology: Journal of Anthropological Approaches to the Paranormal, as a means to promote an interdisciplinary dialogue on issues relating to paranormal beliefs, experiences and phenomena. In 2010 he was awarded the Eileen J. Garrett Scholarship by the Parapsychology Foundation, and in 2011 he received the Gertrude Schmeidler Award from the Parapsychological Association and a research grant from the Society for Psychical Research. He is the author of Why People Believe in Spirits, Gods and Magic (2012), a beginner's introduction to the anthropology of the supernatural.
Paranthropology Journal

Emily Pierini

Emily Pierini is an Hon. Research Fellow at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David (Religious Experience Research Centre) and lectures at The American University of Rome. She has obtained her PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Bristol. Her research on the the experiences of spirit mediums in the Spiritualist Christian Order Vale do Amanhecer (Valley of the Dawn) in Brazil addresses notions of the body and the self, and the therapeutic aspects of learning in mediumistic development. She has also conducted research on the Afro-Brazilian religions of the Federal District, Brazil, on Goddess Spirituality in the UK, and the expansion of the temples of the Vale do Amanhecer in the UK, Portugal and Italy. She coordinates with Alberto Groisman a research network on ‘Spirituality, Health, Embodiment and Ethnography’ at the Universidad Federal de Santa Catarina Brazil. University of Wales Trinity Saint David web profile
Academia.edu page

Bettina E. Schmidt

Bettina E. Schmidt lectures at University of Wales Trinity St David. She has published extensively on Caribbean and Latin American religions. Her research interests include anthropology of religion, in particular religious experience, diaspora identity, medical anthropology and gender issues. Her main fieldworks were conducted in Mexico, Puerto Rico, Ecuador, New York City, and, more recently, in São Paulo, Brazil where she conducted fieldwork on spirit possession and trance. She is the director of the Alister Hardy Religious Experience Research Centre which located in Lampeter.
University of Wales Trinity Saint David web profile
Academia.edu page

Members

Fabian Graham

Fabian Graham is a postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Max Plank Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic diversity. As anthropologist he has been researching Chinese spirit-medium cults in Southeast Asia since 2005. He graduated from Cambridge and he has obtained his PhD from the School of Oriental and African Studies. Specializing in spirit-mediumship and adopting an experiential approach research, he spent eighteen months in Taiwan and Singapore interviewing mediums in trance states, participating in rituals, and attempted to enter trance states himself with the intention of experiencing spirit possession first hand. His academic research into spirit mediumship and esoteric Taoist practices is on-going, and, he looks forward to further research and explorations into the metaphysical dimensions of religious experience.
Max Plank Institute web profile
Video Documentaries

Rita Langer

Rita Langer lectures in Buddhist Studies at the University of Bristol Her research focuses on two different but complementary areas of Buddhism: The theory of consciousness in the early Pali sources, and Buddhist ritual and its origin (in South and South East Asia, particularly Sri Lanka). Her approach is interdisciplinary and combines textual studies with field work. Building on her PhD research on Sri Lankan funerals rites she is now researching death rituals in Laos and Thailand as part of an AHRC funded project on Death Rituals in Southeast Asia and China.
University of Bristol web profile

Stefania Palmisano

Stefania Palmisano is Associate Professor in the Sociology of Religion at the University of Turin, Italy, and Visiting Research Fellow at Lancaster University, UK. She is a member of the editorial board of Etnografia e Ricerca Qualitativa (il Mulino), the first Italian journal (published also in English) that hosts high-quality, original ethnographic and qualitative research, combining careful empirical observation with sound theoretical reflection. She is also in charge of the journal’s Ethnography of religion section. In addition, she is the coordinator of the CRAFT (Contemporary Religion and Faiths in Transition) Research Centre, University of Turin. Her research takes the form of an ethnographic study of contemporary religious experience in mainstream religions, spiritual healing in alternative spiritualities (neo-shamanism and Goddess spirituality in Italy), and possession and exorcism in Catholic Charismatic movements. She is the author of Exploring New Monastic Communities. The Re-invention of Tradition, Ashgate, Aldershot, 2015.
University of Turin web profile

Angela Voss

Angela Voss lectured in Religious Studies at the University of Kent, Canterbury, where she directed an MA in the cultural study of cosmology and divination. She currently teaches a course on The Imaginal Cosmos for the Phoenix Rising Academy. Her research interests centre on the role of the imagination in spiritual knowledge.
Academia.edu page

Marianna Zanetta

Marianna Zanetta, University of Turin, visiting researcher at the Hosei University in Tokyo, has obtained a PhD in Anthropology of Religions and Far Eastern Studies (EPHE Sorbonne/University of Turin). Her research focuses on Japanese shamanism, in particular Itako practices, and their relation with the world of the dead. She conducted fieldwork in Japan. Her research interest lies in the deep connection between the shamanic practices of northern Japan, in particular their ritual for the invocation of the dead (the Kuchiyose), and the underlying connection with the Japanese notion of family and the changes it underwent after WWII. Linked to this topic is the analysis of the afterlife, both in its Buddhist and Shintoist declinations.
Academia.edu page
Documentary: Itako::Visions

Honorary Members

Edith Turner (Patroness) - In Memoriam

Edith Turner (1921-2016) lectured in Socio-cultural Anthropology at the University of Virginia. She is engaged in the study of ritual, religion and consciousness. Edie was a valued patron and supporter of the Afterlife Research Centre. She has been researching the field of symbol and ritual for 58 years, formerly in collaboration with Victor Turner. Her theoretical interests have developed from Turner's "anthropology of experience," a field that has been spreading in anthropology to narratology, humanistic anthropology, and the anthropology of consciousness.
Good anthropology rests on humanism - that is, respect for the ideas and religions of other cultures and, where possible, the willingness to experience through the eyes of others. Analysis therefore seriously has to take into consideration local exegesis (interpretation), and local statements of experience. For ourselves, we may look upon these experiential moments as crossing points into a culture's familiar world of the spirits. Human life is not limited to the mundane and, conversely, the body itself is often the medium through which people experience the
spirit.
Edie Turner's Obituary
University of Virginia web profile