This article traces the trajectories of psilocybin and ayahuasca in the context of the psychedelic renaissance. The bibliometric analysis reveals that academic publications on psilocybin fall primarily into the medical and scientific areas, whereas those devoted to ayahuasca derive mainly from humanities and social sciences. Second, the article argues that psilocybin and ayahuasca use is...
Social CompassJune 1, 2024Satoko Fujiwara, Hiroki Miura2 citations
This article discusses the transformation of religious and non-religious practices in contemporary Japanese youth culture. The article employs both western analysis of ‘nones’ and Japanese theories to explain this transformation. Three concepts characterize (non-)religiousness in Japanese youth culture: ‘practicing belonging’, ‘vicarious spirituality’, and ‘gendered fetishism’. These concepts...
This article analyzes the trajectory of the diagnostic category ‘Religious or Spiritual Problem’, included in 1994 in the 4th edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the main diagnostic manual of North American psychiatry. Three moments of this trajectory are highlighted here: the beginning with transpersonal psychology, the debate around its inclusion in the...
This article focuses on three different patterns of spirit possession in Mali, a country where spirits interact with human beings. Some Malian cases – but not all of them – comfort the well-received theory asserting that possession is a form of protest and is related to a historical crisis. African possession cults are generally considered as characteristics of marginal groups in response to...
Translations of the native notion of shamanic agency of the Siona Indians of Colombia is explored throughout different historical and social contexts. The polysemic concept rau is central to the shaman’s capacity for establishing relations of exchange and negotiation with humans and non-humans. As the embodiment of his power, it fits within a semantic field that conveys the waxing and waning of...
Religious experience can be a tool for the constitution of social subjects, the construction of symbolic meanings and values, as well as for shaping the subjectivity and corporality of the faithful. An ethnographic account and analysis of the Sufi ritual, the darb al-shish, as it was performed in the zawiya (Sufi lodge) of shaykh Mahmud in Afrin, Syria, shows how religious experience allows the...
Research in Quebec by a team that I direct indicates that religious collectivities still have very important roles to play despite the individualization of religion and the changing relations between individuals and religious institutions. The analysis focuses on the smaller, more marginal spiritualities that attract native-born Québécois, who often maintain some ties with the Catholic Church....
Social CompassAugust 28, 2008Sipco J. Vellenga1 citation
The author examines the development of the popularity of religious healing in the Netherlands since 1850 and the factors that contribute to its continuation. He focuses upon three traditions: devotional healing in Roman Catholicism, charismatic healing in Pentecostalism and paranormal healing in western esotericism. From 1850 to about 1965, interest in making a pilgrimage to holy places of...
Despite the fact that the Netherlands is one of the most secularized countries of Western Europe, different forms of religiosity have emerged, such as charismatic movements and alternative spirituality. Some people are seeking to find security and religious fulfilment in the complicated context of modern Dutch society through unusual, irrational and creative new spiritual practices. Neo-shaman...
Religious institutions created by the extraordinary efforts of a single founder—like the one examined in this essay—try hard to assure the preservation of charisma, and to guarantee its Weberian “routinization”. But this attempt does not always succeed, and quite often what originally looks like the “power of mysticism”, allowing resolute individual and social transformations, in the gradual...
It is misleading to claim, as do certain anthropologists, that there are two kinds of trance in the Maghreb, one Arabic or Islamic (sufi), and one “black African”. It is a question rather of the relation between mysticism and possession. This study is based on a survey I conducted in Annaba (Algeria) between 1987 and 1990. It shows how the mystic passion in this town is organized in a tight...