Chamanism today is a multipolar landscape shaped by regular movements of ritual experts and practitioners, and by the mobility and constant reconfiguration of ritual practices. These transcontinental journeys and stays transform local communities, leading them to reformulate their own internal or regional rituals. Transcontinental shamanism is structured along an organizational continuum at various scales that opens, frames, and reproduces itineraries linking territories of so-called 'ethnic' shamanism with urban recompositions at national and international levels. This continuum sits at the intersection of national and international 'urban shamanisms' built around the dual figure of the 'indigenous' and the 'jungle' as revalued symbolic resources. The text analyzes the central role of shamanic capacity, reclassified as 'knowledge', in rethinking symbolic hierarchies of national and international validity established during colonization.
The article analyzes the composition of the contemporary Daime religious field and how discourses that legitimize the religion's practices are structured within its main groups: the set of Daime centers located in the Alto Santo region of Rio Branco and the churches affiliated with the Igreja do Culto Eclético da Fluente Luz Universal Patrono Sebastião Mota de Melo (Iceflu). It demonstrates how different political and ideological positions in these discourses are historically constructed and, more broadly, fit into the current social dynamics of religions.
In Argentine Zen Buddhist centers, meditation practitioners experience and give meaning to pain and suffering in culturally specific ways. Participation in these centers promotes a socially constructed psychophysical habitus, where somatic modes of attention are crucial. The intersubjective and intercorporeal dynamics of Zen communities, structured by ritual, produce this religious habitus through interrelation with others.