This article inquires how specific bodily movements, such as kneeling, crawling, bowing, and other forms of approach-oriented, low-posture locomotion, produce religious experiences and spatial public manifestations of the sacred. To address this question, I present and theorize kinetic rituals: the directional and counted sequences of embodied movement elicited by site-specific architectural...
This paper examines the relationship between women in the ger districts of Ulaanbaatar who visit and become shamans and the violence they experience. It shows that in many cases, women’s engagement with shamanism arises in the context of physical violence from their husband or male kin. Yet this paper also resists functionalist explanations that render violence as the sole cause of shamanic...
Notions of visualism and individualism have long been employed to elucidate the contours of Western subjectivity. It is therefore not surprising to find the indigenous Amazonian shamanic brew ayahuasca being adopted by Australian neoshamanic practitioners as a medicine that provides personalized visions delivering unambiguous moral import. While this adoption represents a radically new style of...