9

The Struggle for Sovereignty

The Interpretation of Bodily Experiences
in Anthropology and among
Mediumistic Healers in Germany
Ehler Voss

The question of how to interpret the experiences we have during our

first shamanic journeys was one of the main questions the participants of
the weekend beginners course I joined were examining. The alternative
seemed to be that the source of these experiences lies inside or outside the
own SelL As one participant put it, 'Do the spirits we meet really exist or
are they just projections of my inner self?' I was there as part of my ethnological PhD fieldwork concerning mediumistic healers in Germany. From
2005 to 2007 I followed the metaphor of 'mediumistic healing' and came
in contact with about thirty healers who act in different ways as mediums
for different entities to enable them to curatively affect help-seeking clients as well as with several hundred of their clients and followers (Voss
2011). Mediumistic healing in Germany is part of a larger and vivid scene
generally associated with the term spiritual healing and can be divided into
different, mostly transnational scenes, each of them with their own vocabulary, techniques, social organisation and ideas about mediumship. Specifically, it is possible to speak of people who mainly refer to themselves in
a spiritistic tradition as a medium, others as shamans, while others practice
Reiki and others Family Constellation. Nevertheless, many healers and
followers often participate in different scenes and combine their practices
in everyday life and thus a wcll-defined classification is often not easy.!
Even if contact with usually invisible entities such as gods, spirits, fairies, angels and so on is common for many people all over the world, healing
through spirits and similar entities contradiets the hegemonie biomedical
and psychological ideas of bodies, personhood and healing efficacy within

Interpretation of Bodily Experiences in Anthopology 169

Western societies. This results, among other things, in the exclusion of

such practices within official health insurance systems. Nevertheless healing practices with the help of spirits are widespread in such societies, and
even in Germany many people from all social classes are familiar with
such practices. But the impression that such practices and corresponding
worldviews seem not to suit Western societies can also be found within
the scene of mediumistic healing, and as a result a kind of uncertainty often accompanies practitioners' attitudes.
In the discussion of mediumship, it is not only the emic discourse of the
mediumistic healers that oscillates between finding the origin of such experiences inside and outside the Self, but it is also within the etic discourse
about experiences in religious contexts that anthropologists mostly seem
to find themselves faced with the decision whether they should argue for
the one or the other of these options. On the one hand spirits, energies and
similar things are seen as metaphors for social forces like abstract entities
such as society, a social system or culture which affect or rather generate
the Self, while on the other hand they are seen as having originated in the
Self through projections of the unconscious or through the imagination.
This discussion leads to old ontological and epistemological questions.
Today it is common to trace back different dualisms which are established in Western societies to the Cartesian dualism of res extensa and res
cogitans. Thus dichotomies such as body and soul, nature and culture,
subject and object appear as Western 'folk models' which turn out to be an
obstaele for anthropological research. First they impede the understanding of emic perspectives in other regions of the world, and second they
lead to a scientific ideal of objectivity which does not correspond with the
reality of research because it does not seem to be possible to make a clear
distinction between subject and object (as well as similar oppositions) as it
isclaimed against the background of such an ideal.
Even if there were many efforts to present alternatives to those kinds
of dualisms, there is obviously still a need for discussion as, among other
things, this collection shows. One of the reasons could be the complexity of problems which follow from questioning the classical subjectobject dichotomy. Reflecting on alternatives means reflecting not only on
categories such as body and soullmind or ownness and foreignness, but
also on experience and the Self as weil as the relationship between the Self
and the Other. In anthropology one of these alternative approaches is the
much-cited concept of embodiment proposed and elaborated by Thomas
Csordas during the 1990s as a new paradigm for anthropology (Csordas
1990, 1993, 1994a, 1994b), which is also mentioned by the organisers of
this volume in their introduction.
In the following I will point out a weakness or rather an oddity of
Csordas's conception and argue for a phenomenology of otherness which
deals with the category of a radical foreignness and the assumption of a
foreignness of experience itself in the way it is worked out by the German

170 Ehler Voss

philosopher Bernhard Waldenfels (b. 1934). To make his approach explicit

using an ethnographic example, I will then turn to the interpretation of
bodily experiences among mediumistic healers in Germany and suggest a
way to go beyond the emic as wel1 as etic entanglements in classical dualisms while discussing mediumistic practices.

Perception beyond Empiricism and Intellectualism Maurke Merleau-Ponty

Csordas tries to combine the approaches of Pierre Bourdieu and Maurice
Merleau-Ponty. The oddity of Csordas's approach lies mainly in his interpretation of Merleau-Ponty's theory of perception which Merleau-Ponty
tried to work out beyond the classical subject-object dichotomy.2 In so
doing, Merleau-Ponty rejects two ways of conceptualising perception,
which he refers to as empiricism and intellectualism. Both approaches he
accuses of maintaining the classical subject-object dichotomy. On the one
hand there is empiricism, which regards the world as complete and given.
In this conception, consciousness is also objectified. Thus perception is
thought in the way that given objects affect the sense organs and that atomistic impulses are registered, assimilated and recomposed by the consciousness. In doing so the perspectivity of al1 perception is neglected. On
the other hand there is intcllectualism. Intellectualistic' approaches also
assurne a complete given world and a consciousness (namely, Husserl's
transcendental ego) with the difference that all theses of empiricism are
reversed. The empiristic terms receive the addition 'consciousness of' and
the world merely exists for the constituent. Thus empiricism tends towards objectivism and intel1ectualism tends towards constructivism.
Merleau-Ponty attempts a third way in relocating the object into the
experience of the body (Leib, le corps propre). Due to its being-in-theworld, Merleau-Ponty indicates an indissoluble enmeshment of the perceiving body and the world. The body is oriented towards the world and
involved in a dynamic process of constructing the world, which at the
same time exists as an entity which always confronts a subject. In such
a conception oppositions such as subjeet and object, inner and outer or
ownness and foreignness entangle themselves in a process of mutual references which makes it impossible to get a clear analytical distinction between them.

Sacralisation of the Self - Thomas Csordas

While in Merleau-Ponty's conception subject and object incessantly cause
each other, Csordas (1990) talks about objects emerging from a 'process of
self-objectification'. This hc demonstratcs with, among other things, the

Interpretation of Bodily Experiences in Anthopology 171

example of a healing ritual of Charismatics in the United States in which

the participants are dispossessed and in which the demons leave the bodies
accompanied by shrieking, coughing and vomiting. According to Csordas
the participants do not in fact perceive demons, but rather they lose control of a specific thought, habit or emotion. Ir is the healer as a specialist
in cultural objectification who defines a perception as triggered by possession or as an emotional problem. 'When a thought or embodied image
comes into consciousness suddenly, the Charismatic does not say "I had
an insight", but "That wasn't from me, how could I have thought of that.
It must be from the Lord'" (Csordas 1990: 34). Csordas refers to Emile
Durkheim for whom the sacred emerges through sacralisation of the society, and thus Durkheim would substitute the social for the sacred. Csordas instead points out the characteristic of human beings to sacralise parts
of their own as something foreign. With such a conception, Csordas's
,approach shows a crucial difference to the approach of Merleau-Ponty.
While with Merleau-Ponty, subject and object and thus ownness and foreignness emerge through an incessant process of simultaneous inclusion
and exclusion, Csordas instead seems to understand the Other as a mere
unrecognised or negated part of the Self. The Other of the Self and thus
foreignness is originated in the Self, and thus Self and other become identical. The question arises as to what the Other could be and if it could be
reduced to apart of the Self. This is also the question Teresa Platz raises in
her insightful essay on the anthropology of the body (2006: 98-100). But
in her criticism of Csordas she also seems to fol1ow too strongly Csordas's
interpretation of Merleau-Ponty that 'perception began in the body and,
through reflective thinking, ends in objects' (Csordas 1993: 37; Platz 2006:
45). Formulation of this kind stil1 remains evocative of those empiristic
and intellectualistic theories of perception actually criticised by MerleauPonty (1966: 3-88), and it seems that the desired collapsing of dualities is
in Csordas's approach not always ful1y carried out.

Phenomenology of Foreignness - Bernhard Waldenfels

The German philosopher Bernhard Waldenfels also deals frequently with

the question of the Other in terms of foreignness. In doing so he also
often refers to Merleau-Ponty and his 'phenomenology of perception'. A
crucial aspect of Waldenfels's writings is introducing the category of 'radical foreignriess'. Radical foreignness is characterised by the fact that it is
not just an Other, which could be compared against the background of
a third and general category (like table and bed as two different pieces of
furniture: they 'are distinguishable due to a specific difference but they
do not differ on their own). Instead ownness and foreignness emerge - as
with Merleau-Ponty - from a simultaneous in- and exclusion; in other
words: 'Ownness emerges because something escapes from it. And that

172

Ehler Voss

which escapes is that which we experience as foreign or rather foreignness.

Ownness and foreignness are separated by a barrier and nobody can stand
on both sides of the barrier at thc same time' (1997: 21).3
Radical foreignness is not to bc confused with an 'absolute foreignness'.
Thus foreignness is not an object but a relationship. It appears through
withdrawal, and we have no influence on its appearance. Because radical
foreignness is something which withdraws, it remains absent. There is no
foreignness in itself in the same way as there is no left in itself. Radical foreignness is something beyond order. Thus there are as many foreignnesses
as there are orders because every order has its own foreignness. Foreignness beyond order appears in border phenomena such as ecstasy, sleep or
death, all of which even break the normal order of space and time. Phenomena of radical foreignness not only question specific interpretations
but also the possibility of interpretation in general. If foreignness were
conceptualised as a kind of object, it would bc something which is merely
not yet known, not yet understood or not yet explained (which would be
a relative foreignness) but without an inherem attribute.
When foreignness is conceptualised as something beyond order, the
question arises how experience, in which such exceedings take place, could
be understood. Waldenfels tries to describe an alternative to common ways
of talking about experience with the terms pathos and response. Pathos
eludes the alternative of causality and intentionality, i.e., of objectivism
and constructivism. Pathos does not mean that that which befalls us exists as something on its own, just as it does not mean that something is
understood or interpreted as something. We respond to that what befalls
us by referring to it in speaking and acting, by welcoming it or neglecting it. Waldenfels does not try to trace back one part of the experience to
an act of spontaneous inner freedom and the other part to a causal effect
from outside. Instead pathos and response have to be thought of together.
Waldenfels talks of a 'temporal diastase', an original division of pathos and
response, which are connected, but in a broken way. The chasm between
pathos and response cannot be closed. What befalls us does not just give
reason to think about it, it also forces one to think. Tryingto separate pathos and response would lead in the one case to objectivism or rather fundamentalism (emphasising pathos) and in the other case to constructivism
(emphasising response). Such a conception of experience as Waldenfels
proposes it leads to a foreignness of experience itself and a foreignness of
the Self itself. Corporality and foreignness are thus narrowly and inseparably connected. 'Not all of that which belongs to me is at my disposal.
We put forth our hands, quicken the pace, and look around, but we do not
stop breathing and change our blood-pressure like switching to another
program' (2006: 82-83). On the roots of expcrience 'where the things become what they are' for example, perception is not an act of observation
but it begins with attending to something which strikes us; furthermore
every act is shaped by something which attracts or disgusts uso The place

Interpretation of Bodily Experiences in Anthopology 173

of pathos is neither the things nor the soul or the mind, but the body
(or rather the Leib), which senses itself through sensing something and
through being vulnerable in its being-in-the-world.
Waldenfels claims: 'The challenge of a radical foreignness which we are
confronted with means that there is no world where we are completely at
horne and that there is no subject who is the master in his own house. But
even up to now there has always been a question of how far we meet that
challenge and how far we suppress it' (1997: 17). Foreignness is always
threatening because it questions one's own order, and there are different
ways in handling foreignness. On the one hand there is the possibility
of encountering foreignness in a way of openness which accepts the foreign as foreign; on the other hand there is the possibility of extracting the
thorn out of foreignness by excluding it or by normalising it through tracing back foreignness as having originated in one's ownness. Against the
background of the old and questionable dichotomy of 'the West and the
rest', Waldenfels claims that in the West there is a tendency to annex the
foreign as being a product of alienation of ownness. 4 In such a tradition,
all political, judicial and educational institutions in 'the West' are based
on the imagination of a - at least potential- sovereign subject which does
not have foreign aspects in its own self and thus is responsible for all its
actions. And there are many examples in anthropologicalliterature which
could be used to affirm that such an imagination is not the only way human beings can understand their subjectivity; for example Schfer (1999)
describes how among the Batemi in Tanzania, identity becomes an 'unutterable identity' when the adolescents are clearly shown an irreducible
difference within the Self.
And keeping in mind the perspective of Bernhard Waldenfels's outline
of a phenomenology of foreignness, the conception of Csordas (briefly
summarised above) also appears as one of the many ways of neglecting
foreignness through normalising it as originally based in ownness, when
he explains believers' experiences as 'sacralisation of the Self'.

Losing and Reinstalling Sovereignty Mediumistic Healers in Germany

Human beings who refer to themselves in contemporary Germany as a

medium for different kinds of entities seem to be predestined for finding
arguments against the thesis that in Western culture normalising foreignness as having originated in ownness is the one and only way of living.
And indeed listening to them, the world mostly appears as full of different kinds of entities such as gods, spirits, fairies, angels, aliens and so on,
which affect human beings and influence their lives through 'possession'
or 'guidance' that bring out doubts as to whether subjects could be seen in
this discourse as sovereign and identical with one's own.

:'

174 Ehler Voss

According to Waldenfels (1997: 44) foreignness always has an ambivalent character. On the one hand it is threatening because it questions the
familiar order, and on the other hand it is alluring because it promises the
possibility of different and cventually better orders and ways of perceiving. Thus foreignness is also a source for transformation because without
something beyond order there would be stagnancy (1997: 84). In the biographical reconstructions of the mediumistic healers I talked with, experiences often playa crucial role which could be interpreted as experiences of
radical foreignness. Foreignness often appears surprisingly as an extraordinary and uncontrollable foreignness which often exceeds the limits of
interpretability. Sometimes it appears threatening and sometime alluring.
Regina, a forty-year-old shamanic practitioner, reports having extraordinary or rather 'strange bodily perceptions' when she was young such
as 'seeing colours'. That was the reason her parents looked for a doctor,
yet the doctor did not find anything pathological. When she was a young
woman she took part in a spiritistic seance, during which she became familiar with the practice of table lifting. On the one hand it appeared very
attractive to her, but when she perceived a movement within the wood she
was frightened and stopped such kinds of practices. After this experience
she often saw wrinkles on her freshly made bed, and she permanently had
the impression that somebody was around her and that deceased persons
wanted to contact her. Although she had already heard of spiritistic mediums and such topics intercsted her very much, the threatening aspect of
her perceptions predominated. She had the feeling it could backfire. 'I felt
quite uneasy and tried to avoid such impressions by reading and listening to loud music and many other sensations. But it did not work. I felt
that it came closer and closer and it was absolutely impossible to classify
those experiences'. She also reported of a kind of effect a patient had on
her when she was working nights as a nurse in a psychiatric clinic. She
said she felt inundated with pictures which were obviously connected to
that man's life. Also this resulted in a defensive reaction: 'Then I thought I
should quit working nights. If I continue working the night shift, I would
become more and more sensitive. And I thought: If you don't take care,
who knows where this will end'. When she came into contact with shamanic practices during her education as alternative practitioner, she said
she learned to find a way to interpret and to handle her experiences.
Another example is Erika, a woman in her fifties who calls herself an
angel medium. She also reports uninterpretable and ambivalent experiences. She said she was a thirty-eight-year-old 'everyday entrepreneur'
when she laid in bed and 'suddenly all channels were open - overnight and
without preparation. SimuItaneously I was clairvoyant, clairaudient and
clairsensitive'. She said she was not able to understand what was going
on, and it took two years for her to bounce back from this 'spiritual accident' and recover. Even when she talks of 'cosmic orgasms' which were
not comparable with ordinary orgasms during sexual intercourse, she em-

Interpretation of Bodily Experiences in Anthopology 175

phasised the ambivalence of those experiences: 'Spiritual enlightenment is

no bed of roses, and it is difficult to continue your life'.
Both talk of forces which influence them in their actions, and they refer to these forces as impersonal energies or personified mainly as angels,
ascended masters or power animals. While Regina is convinced of the existence of external entities and says due to her experiences on shamanic
journeys, 'Maybe like the old shamans, I really believe in spirits', Erika
is not that sure concerning this matter. Although she said that all her actions would be guided by divine energy which flows through her, and
although she often refers to different angels and so-called ascended masters, she talks of 100 per cent responsibility of everyone for his or her
own life. In her argumentation this is rooted in the fact that God and the
Self are the same. Regina also speaks about 100 per cent responsibility for
her life as do many others. In these cases the argumentation is rooted in
the spiritistic tradition which separates the body from the soul and which
conceptualises the soul as an undividable entity which has removed itself
from the nearness to God. Through an ongoing pracess of new reincarnations the soul has to detect its own divinity and thus at the end of this
learning process will at some point find its way back to God. In all those
conceptions of 100 per cent responsibility, the outer appears as mirror of
the inner. As a result, everything that happens in life (people you meet,
accidents you have, illnesses you get and so on) is a message to yourself
about what you did right or wrang in life. Thus, all entities conceptualised
as entities outside of the Self become a helpful instrument for the Self in its
process of development towards more self-consciousness. The appearance
of foreignness is thus guided by the Self, consciously or unconsciously. It
therefore does not matter whether the spirits are conceptualised as 'real'
or as imagination. Through the metaphor of the mirror of the inner self,
the spiritual beings lose their autonomy in the way that they act as guided
by an autonomous Self - regardless their possible externality. In this way
foreignness loses its arbitrariness, its thorn and its threatening nature.
Thus in the discourse of the mediumistic healers in Germany, the Western
autonomous subject which knows foreignness only as something having
originated in ownness is reinstalled.

Inside, Outside or In-Between - Conclusion

In this essay the discussion about the subject-object dichotomy has led
tq the question of the Self and the non-Self, their relation to each other
and thus to the category of radical foreignness as it is presented by Bernhard Waldenfels in reference to Maurice Merlau-Ponty. Against this
background it has become apparent that among mediumistic healers in
Germany as weIl as in anthropologicalliterature, the alternative of interpreting bodily experiences seems to oscillate between finding their origin

176 Ehler Voss

inside or outside the self. Even some phenomenological approaches in anthropology -like the famous concept of emhodiment by Thomas Csordas
- which actually aim to conceptualise experiences beyond dichotomies
such as inner and outer or the Self and the Other tend to entangle themselves in such dichotomies and tend to trace back experiences of otherness
as having originated in the Self.
As an alternative to Csordas's approach, this essay introduces Bernhard Waldenfels's phenomenology of foreignness which offers a position
in between the alternatives of externalising or internalising the origin of
experiences. Keeping Waldenfcls's approach in mind, the question of how
people respond to appearances of radical foreignness turns out to be an
interesting and central question for comparison in anthropological research. Dealing with such a category spreads new light on human behaviour, and not only in religious contexts. The paradoxes in the discourse of
mediumistic healers in Germany, as for example when they move between
interpretations of bodily experiences as having originated in the SeIf or
outside the Self, become understandable as different ways of dealing with
foreignness. And the near domination of the interpretation as having originated in the SeIf could force the argument that Western culture tends to
neglect radical foreignness. But in the paradoxes of the healers' discourse,
in which contradictory opinions about the origin of bodily experiences
are often present, radical foreignness nevertheless could be discovered,
because according to Waldenfcls and the impurity of all categories, even
rationality is affected by radical foreignness: 'Where paradoxes are absent,
rationality sleeps' (1999: 151).

Notes
1. In the anthropological literature regarding the anthropologist's own society,
the legitimacy of emic usages of specific terms for self-description is often
discussed. Especially concerning the term shamanism it is common to deny
inhabitants of Western societics the right to refer to themselves as shamans.
In this case usually a pejorative distinction is drawn between 'traditional'
(implied 'real') shamans and 'neo-' (impliecl 'unreal') shamans (e.g., Jakobson 1999; Johansen 2001). Against the background of historical reconstructions of the term shamanism, e.g., by Ronald Hutton (1999) or Kocku von
Stuckrad (2003), which work out the complex interferences between science
and religion and in so doing show the influences anthropology has on the development of the term's meaning, it can be argued that nowadays doing anthropological research in the field of shamanism means being confronted with
a creation of one's own discipline which grew out of control (cf. Voss 2006,
2008). Thus the interesting and one and only way for current anthropology
to deal adequately with the term is not to judge the people of anthropological

Interpretation o[Bodily Experiences in Anthopology 177

interest by asking who is a 'real' shaman - in other words, who is allowed to

use the term for self-description - but by questioning how andwhy people use
the term shamanism and in which way they refer to themselves as shamans.
The same should of course be applied to all other mentioned terms used for
self-description as weIl.
2. However, Csordas's interpretation of Bourdieu's concept of habitus also bears
problematic aspects. At least it could tend to lead to a misunderstanding to
describe habitus as Csordas does as thc 'psychologically internalised content
of the behavioral environment' (Csordas 1990: 11) since Bourdieu emphasises
that there is no knowledge separable from the body. Thus the body is not a
thing through which something else expresses itself. Instead, 'What the body
has learned is not possessed as a kind of retrievable knowledge, rather one is
that embodied knowledge' (Bourdieu 1987: 135).
3. All English-Ianguage citations of German-Ianguage references have been
translated by Ehler Voss.
4. Similar diagnoses can be found in the work of other authors as weIl. For example, for Max Weber (1991 [1920]: 207) rationalisation means 'the ability to
control through calculation', and the development of industrialised societies
is for hirn characterised by a 'desire for controlling the world'. The German
anthropologist Hans Peter Duerr (1985: 201) claims that every culture borders
their own civilisation from the encircling wilderness, whereas 'our own' culture in opposition to 'archaic' cultures tries to shift the boundary posts more
and more into the wilderness. The Japanese anthropologist Akira Okazaki
(1986) confronts the modern idea of an individual, which is identical with its
ownness, with the widespread idea of a dividual as a collage of ownness and
foreignness, whose parts appear in agame of masks.

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10

Transforming Musical Soul

into Bodily Practice

Tone Eurythmy, Anthroposophy

and Underlying Structures

Andrew Spiegel and Silke Sponheuer

Introduction

A distinctive feature in the practice of anthroposophy - a philosophy

developed by Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925)1 that undergirds the pedagogical principles used contemporarily in Waldorf/Steiner schools, of which
there are now over nine hundred worldwide - is the development and
performance of eurythmy, and its use as a practical artistic expressive form
in those schools. 2 As a performed art form, eurythmy has the intention
to make musical and spoken sound visible (as distinct from audible) in
and through human bodily movement. Underlying that intention, moreover, is an anthroposophical understanding of the cosmos that associates
diverse cosmic, astronomical, earthly and indeed human and other biological structures one with another, and that works towards consciously
creating structural transformations to enable humans to experience those
structures sensually and thereby as feIt phenomena, and not only to imagine or conceptualise them intellectually.
Steiner explicitly saw eurythmy as a means to express the embodiment
of the human soul in its relationship with the human spirit and thus to
enable and make manifest experience of the interwoven intersections of
body, soul and spirit. That is the reason for his explaining, in 1924, 'In a
eurythmy performance, the whole body must have become soul' (Steiner
1984a: 238) and that each eurythmist's 'performance really becomes the
self-understood expression of the life of soul' (1984b: 10). Moreover, talking about eurythmy in 1923, he explained that 'the art of Eurythmy could

EASA Series
Published in Association with the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA)
Series Editor: James G. Carrier, Senior Research Associate, Oxford Brookes University

16. ENCOUNTERS OF BODY AND

SOUL IN CONTEMPORARY
RELIGIOUS PRACTICES
Anthropological Reflections
Edited by Anna Fedele and Ruy L1era
Elanes

15. HEADLINES OF NATION,

SUBTEXTS OF CLASS
Working Class Populism and the
Return of the Repressed in Neoliberal
Europe
Edited by Don Kalb and Gabor Halmai

14. POLICY WORLDS

Anthropology and Analysis of
Contemporary Power
Edi ted by Cris Shore, Susan Wright and
Davide Pera

'3. POWER AND MAGIC IN ITALY

Thomas Hauschild

12. CULTURE WARS

Context, Models and Anthropologists'
Accounts
Edited by Deborah James, Evelyn Plaice
and Christina Toren

11. ETHNOGRAPHIC PRACTICE IN

THEPRESENT
Edited by Marit Melhuus, Jon P. Mitchell
and Helena Wulff

10. POSTSOCIALIST EUROPE

Anthropological Perspectives from
Horne
Edi ted by Laszl6 Krti and Peter Skalnik

9. KNOWING HOW TO KNOW

Fieldwork and the Ethnographie
Present
Edited by Narmala Halstead, Eric Hirsch
ancl Judith Okely

Soeial anthropology in Europe is growing, and the variety of work being done is expanding. This series is intended to present the best of the work produced by members of the
EASA, both in monographs and in edited collections. The studies in this series describe
soeieties, proeesses, and institutions around the world and are intended for both scholarly
and student readership.
1. LEARNING FIELDS
Valurne 1

Educational Histories of European

Social Anthropology
Edited by Dorle Drackle, Iain R. Eclgar
and Thomas K. Schippers
2. LEARNING FIELDS
Valurne 2

Current Policies and Practices in

European Social Anthropology
Education
Edited by Dorle Drackle and Iain R. Edgar
3. GRAMMARS OF IDENTITY/
ALTERITY
A Structural Approach
Edited by Gerd Baumann and Andre
Gingrich

4. MULTIPLE MEDICAL REALITIES

Patients and Healers in Biomedical,
Alternative and Traditional Medicine
Edited by Helle Johannessen and Imre
Lazar
5. FRACTURING RESEMBLANCES
Identity and Mimetic Conflict in
Melanesia and the West
Simon Harrison
6. SKILLED VISIONS
Between Apprenticeship and
Standards
Edited by Cristina Grasseni

7. GOING FIRST CLASS?

New Approaches to Privileged Travel
and Movement
Edited by Vered Amit
8. EXPLORING REGIMES OF
DISCIPLINE
The Dynamics of Restraint
Edited by Noel Dyck

ENCOUNTERS OF BODY AND SOUL

IN CONTEMPORARY RELIGIOUS PRACTICES

Anthropological Reflections

Edited by

Anna Fedele and Ruy Llera Blanes

New York Oxford

Berghahn Books

Published in 2011 by
Berghahn Books

www.berghahnbooks.com

2011 Anna Fedele and Ruy Uera Blanes

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages
for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book
may be reproduced in any form 01' by any means, electronic or
mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information
storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented,
without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Encounters of body and soul in contemporary religious practices : anthropological reflections I [edited byJ Anna Fedele, Ruy Uera Blanes.
p. cm. - (EASA series ; 16)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-85745-207-8 (hardback: alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-85745-208-5 (ebook)
1. Human body-Religious aspects. 1. Fedele, Anna. 11. Blanes, Ruy
Uera, 1976BL604.B64E532011
202'.2-dc22
2011000408
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Printed in the United States on acid-free paper

ISBN 978-0-85745-207-8 (hardback)

ISBN 978-0-85745-208-5 (ebook)

Vll

Contents

List of Illustrations

IX

Acknowledgements
Introduction
Anna Fedele and Ruy Llera Blanes

Part 1. Bodies and Souls in Catholic Settings

23

Chapter 1. 'I want to feel the Camino in my legs'. Trajectories

of Walking on the Camino de Santiago
Keith Egan

Chapter 2. Holding the Saint in One's Arms. Miracles and

Exchange in Apiao, Southern Chile
Giovanna Bacchiddu

43

69

Chapter 3. Embodying Devotion, Embodying Passion.

The Italian Tradition of The Festa dei Gigli in Nola
Katia Ballacchino

Part H. Corporeality, Belief and Human Mobility

Chapter 4. The Body and the World. Missionary Performances

and the Experience of the World in the Protestant
Church in the N etherlands
]oo Rickli

vi
Contents

Chapter 5. 'How To Deal with the Dutch'. The Local and

the Global in the Habitus of the Saved Soul
KimKnibbe
Chapter 6. Is Witchcraft Embodied? Representations of
the Body in Talimbi Witchcraft
Aleksandra Cimpric

Part III. New Spiritualities Challenging the Body/Soul Divide

Chapter 7. When Soma Encounters the Spiritual. Bodily Praxes
of Performed Rcligiosity in Contemporary Greece
Eugenia Roussou

Chapter 8. Reenchanted Bodies. The Significance of the

Spiritual Dimension in Danish Healing Rituals
Ann Ostenfeld-Rosenthal

Chapter 9. The Struggle for Sovereignty. The Interpretation

of Bodily Experiences in Anthropology and
among Mediumistic Healers in Germany
Ehler Voss
Chapter 10. Transforming Musical Soul into Bodily Practice.
Tone Eurythmy, Anthroposophy and
Underlying Structures
Andrew Spiegel and Silke Sponheuer

Notes on Contributors

91

109

133

151

168

179

203

Illustrations

2.1.

Back from Caguach: a couple on the boat holding the saint,

a chicha demijohn to the fore.

Illustrations

2.2.
2.3.
2.4.

The paranza Fantastic Team transports on their shoulders

the giglio during the Feast of Nola, 2008.
The fatigue of carriers during the ballata of gigli in NoIa,
2008.

Holding the saint in one's hands: a novena owner carrying

the San Antonio upon his arrival in Apiao.
Another novena owner, a girl, with the saint, and one of the
mUSIClans.
Dancing the cueca in front of the saint and his altar.
The giglio and the boat dancing in Nola during the feast
in 2008.
3.1.
3.2.
3.3.

3.4. An extreme callo di San Paolino or pataniello of Nolan

carrier Vincenzo Giannini.
4.1. Giving to Kerkinactie: how you can contribute to
Kerkinactie's work.
4.2. 'To Get There'.
10.1. Opening bars of Mozart's Clarinet Quintet in A Major
KV581.
10.2. First half of bar one of Mozart's Clarinet Quintet in A Major
KV581 and image of eurythmical performance of same.

26

27

28
35

49

49

50

56

79
80

184

185

10.3. Bars seven and eight of Mozart's Clarinet Quintet in A Major

KV581 and sequential images of eurythmical performance
185
of same.
10.4. Eurythmy gestures for musical shifts from lower to higher
187
pitches (multiple exposure).

187

viii List 0/ Illustrations

10.5. Eurythmy gestures for the three tones comprising the

A-major chord - all set in the octave stretching across the
standard middle C in 'concert pitch'.
189

Figures
The threefold spirit-soul-body relationship.
Levi-Strauss's (1978: 490) culinary triangle.
Eurythmical musical triangle.
Eurythmical transformation in terms of threefold spiritsoul-body relationship.
193

181
190
192

10.6. Gestures for major and minor.

10.1.
10.2.
10.3.
10.4.

Acknowledgements

The original discussion regarding research on corporeality in religious

contexts began when the editors of this volume organised a workshop at
the 10th EASA Biennial Conference (Ljubljana) entitled "Body and Soul:
On Corporeality in Contemporary Religiosity." The enthusiastic response
from both participants and attendants at the workshop encouraged us to
prolong the debate and propose this edited volume. A few colleagues that
participated in the workshop could not, for several reasons, make it here,
but we appreciated their important contributions: Isabelle Lange, Konstantinos Retsikas and Sandra Santos.
As editors of this volume, we have accumulated many debts along the
way. First and foremost, with the authors here included, who have contributed with their fascinating research and stimulating discussions to the
overall theme of the volume. Many other colleagues have offered strategie
insights, both in the workshop and in different stages of the production of
this book that have helped us improve the project: William A. Christian
Jr., Elisabeth Claverie, Simon Coleman, Joao de Pina Cabral, Diana Espirito Santo, Arnaud Halloy, Tanya Luhrmann, Cedric Masse, Vlad Naumescu, Clara Saraiva, and, last but not least, Ramon Sarro.
Finally, we would especially like to acknowledge the contribution of
the !Wo anonymous reviewers of the manuscript who offered stimulating
feedback and allowed us, and the contributors to this volume, for fruitful
revision. We would also like to thank Berghahn for their involvement and
especially the editor of the Berghahn EASA series, James Carrier, for the
continuous patience, explanations, insights and encouragements.