Skill and Scale in Transnational Mediumship

Skill and Scale in Transnational Mediumship

Veranstalter
Marcello Muscari Universidade de São Paulo; Ehler Voss, Universität Siegen, DFG research project Social innovation through the non-hegemonic production of knowledge; Martin Zillinger, Universität zu Köln, a.r.t.e.s. Graduate School for the Humanities Cologne
Veranstaltungsort
a.r.t.e.s. Graduate School for the Humanities Cologne Aachener Str. 217 | 50931 Köln 3. OG | Raum 3.A06
Ort
Köln
Land
Deutschland
Vom - Bis
25.09.2017 - 26.09.2017
Von
Leonie van Dreuten, Philosophische Fakultät, Universität zu Köln

Skill and Scale in Transnational Mediumship

This workshop zooms in on new communities of practice and enskilment that evolve around techniques of mediumship in an interconnected world. The increased mobility of people, organizations and media that take part in or reformulate trance practices and spiritual experiences has significantly widened the scope and outreach of adepts of trance, spirit possession and spiritual body arts. Their body techniques, symbols and artifacts play a major role in the re-organization of spirituality on site and the emergence of transnational spirited publics across time and space, co-producing the “local” and the “global” of religious and spiritual practice.

Components of shamanic journeys, afro-Brazilian rituals, trance mediumship and mystic traditions circulate, compete and merge with each other and are often combined with “alternative” healing procedures and body sports, reshaping individual experiences and cosmologies, mediating scales and contexts of situated communities of practices.

With this workshop we intend to bring together work on new communities of practices, which evolve around mediumship, spirit possession and trance rituals, by adressing how these practices are taught and learned, transformed and re-invented in different settings. In particular, we are intested in the discussion on „apprenticeship“ as a process of enskilment (Ingold) in context of co-participation that is increasingly transformed through technologisazion, standardization and interaction at a distance. Increasingly, people do not only co-operate across ‘social worlds’ (Strauss), they act simultaneously in different and only partially overlapping social relations. The communal practices of trance and mediumship do therefore not signify the existence of firmly established communities, rather communality has to be continuously produced through interaction. We invite participants to reflect upon how, under the condition of heterogeneity, spiritual sociality and a shared socio-material world is produced through the mutual recognizable production of practices and common situations among spirits, their mediums, experts and followers.

Programm

Monday, 25.09.2017

12:30 Opening
13:00 – 14:30 2 Presentations, 20 Minutes Discussion
Rodrigo Toniol: Capturing Spirituality and Setting Religion
Bettina Schmidt: Anthropology of Religious Experience: a Deictic Approach to the Study of Mediumship
14:30 – 15:30 Coffee Break
15:30 – 17:00 2 Presentations, 20 Minutes Discussion
Viola Teisenhofer: “Is It Me or Is It the Entity?” Mediumship, “Spiritual Development” and Ritual Interactions in the Temple Guaracy, a Transnational Umbanda Shrine House
Marcello Múscari: On African Spirits, Planets and Shamanic Journeys: Exploring Rituals as Scale Shifting Technologies among a German Umbanda
17.00 – 17.30 Break
17.30 – 18.15 1 Presentation, 20 Minutes Discussion
Fiona Bowie: Spirit Release Therapies. Healing Networks and Mediumistic Practices in Contemporary Britain

*18.30 – 19.30 Key-Note Lecture
Inger Sjorslev: New Skills New Rituals. From Possession to Precision in Two Brazilian Religions*

Tuesday, 26.09.2017

9:30 - 11:00 2 Presentations, 20 Minutes Discussion
Helmar Kurz: Tranformation of Spiritist Practice. A Journey from Germany to Brazil and Back
Emily Pierini: The Mediumistic Body. Learning Spirit Mediumship in the Vale do Amanhecer
11:00 – 11:30 Break
11.30 – 13.00: 2 Presentations, 20 Minutes Discussion
Anja Dreschke: How to Become a Shaman in Cologne. Spiritual Practices and Embodied Knowledge in Popular Reenactment
Aline Ferreira: Healing Skills. Non-Indigenous in the Search of Forest Technologies
13:00 – 14:30 Lunch Break
14:30 – 16:00 2 Presentations, 20 Minutes Discussion
Ruy Blanes: Silent Prophets. On discernment, Mediation and Anti-Aesthetics in Angolan Prophetism
Ehler Voss: Scaling the Skill. Learning Mediumship in a Spiritualistic Church in California
16:00 – 16:30 Final Discussion

Kontakt

Marcello Muscari
> mmuscari@gmail.com

Leonie van Dreuten
> ldreuten@uni-koeln.de

http://gssc.uni-koeln.de/node/1636
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Englisch
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