Within the modern Spiritualist movement, mediums are central figures who work to connect physical and spirit worlds. By attempting to provide evidence of the survival of the human spirit after physical death, conveying caring messages from the spirit world, and giving hope to recipients, mediums pursue a spiritual mission. In this paper, I consider two models of mediumship: Wilson's argument...
In April 2010, eleven months after the end of Sri Lanka's civil war, I participated in the Catholic Easter rite in a Tamil fishing village in the Vanni, where the last battle between the Sri Lankan government forces and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam was fought. This article explores the way in which the ritual enactments of the paschal mystery, called pasch, came to have enormously...
Over the last fifteen years the use of the indigenous Amazonian psychoactive beverage ayahuasca has been reimagined in alternative healing circles of Western countries. This paper explores the practice of ayahuasca neoshamanism in Australia and examines ways in which acts of vomiting and ecstatic trance‐visions involve heightened affective states and moral projects of healing. Aspects of...
In O ctober 2009, a dramatic event shook the existing sociolinguistic setting in K anjimei village in E ast S epik P rovince of P apua N ew G uinea. Possessed by a C hristian spirit, a woman harshly reproached the most important village leaders. The ensuing verbal fight between ‘the spirit’ and the village prayer leader became a battle of languages: the C hristian spirit spoke the community's...