The article argues that social scientists often treat mediumship inconsistently, viewing it as a phenomenon of people who "believe in spirits" rather than as a potential feature of the ethnographer's own experience. The author recounts a fieldwork event among daimistas in the late 1980s, during which they incorporated an entity. This experience led the author to develop and inhabit what they call a "(re-)flexible(-ive) ontology." The article explores the analogy between ethnographer and medium, addressing issues raised by the anthropologist's "formation" and the experience of "ethnographic incorporation."
The Vale do Amanhecer (Valley of the Dawn) is a Spiritualist Christian Order whose members practise spirit mediumship for healing by releasing trapped spirits. Mediumship is considered an intrinsic property of human bodies, potentially developed by anyone through a process of bodily enskilment. As the practice spreads transnationally, this chapter compares how new mediums in Brazil and Italy learn to manifest spirit guides in culturally recognizable ways, exploring the cognitive, bodily, and affective aspects entangled in developing a mediumistic body across borders.
The notion that spirits can attach to people and cause distress, requiring specialist healers, is uncommon in Western cosmology. This ethnographic study of spirit release therapists and clients in the UK describes practices for removing unwanted spirits and energy attachments. Unlike shamanic societies where individual apprenticeships are typical, Western practitioners acquire skills through books, technology, and courses. Despite differing methods, cross-cultural continuities exist in concepts of the self, the dead, and spirits, particularly spirits of the dead. The study discusses how therapists practice, how clients come to believe they are troubled by spirits, and the understandings of self and unseen worlds developed by both groups, drawing on first-hand ethnographic experience, workshop reports, and published accounts.
Mediumship and other non-ordinary experiences must be understood through a "glocal" framework that builds universal concepts from local contexts. Based on anthropological research in religious and Spiritist communities in São Paulo, the paper argues that while mediumship is regarded as a set of global skills, local communities have diverse scales that make local contexts equally important. The author reflects on methodological difficulties for an anthropologist, illustrates local scales of mediumship influenced by cultural contexts, traditions, and gender, and discusses the tension between local scales and global skill, highlighting the importance of both factors for understanding mediumship in Brazil.