Spirit possession involves the displacement of a human's conscious self by a powerful other who temporarily occupies the human's body. Here, Seligman shows that spirit possession represents a site for understanding fundamental aspects of human experience, especially those involved with interactions among meaning, embodiment, and subjectivity.

Spirit possession involves the displacement of a human's conscious self by a powerful other who temporarily occupies the human's body. Here, Seligman shows that spirit possession represents a site for understanding fundamental aspects of human experience, especially those involved with interactions among meaning, embodiment, and subjectivity.

"The characteristics of possession are numerous and vary between different socio-cultural and historical contexts. Different ideas of possession can be observed within different cultural and social contexts both past and present. This makes defining possession all the more difficult. Various approaches to "ideas of possession" in different academic disciplines and in different cultural contexts allow the discourse(s) to benefit from insights that would otherwise remain confined to the society under discussion or the field that determines the method of study. The introduction presents an overview of recent interdisciplinary research on possession and scholarly attempts at a working definition, followed by a brief outline of the individual case studies in this volume"--

How evangelical churches in the United States convert migrant distress into positive religious devotion Why do migrants become more deeply evangelical in the United States and how does this religious identity alter their self-understanding? In the Hands of God examines this question through a unique lens, foregrounding the ways that churches transform what migrants feel. Drawing from her extensive fieldwork among Brazilian migrants in the Washington, DC, area, Johanna Bard Richlin shows that affective experience is key to comprehending migrants’ turn toward intense religiosity, and their resulting evangelical commitment. The conditions of migrant life—family separation, geographic isolation, legal precariousness, workplace vulnerability, and deep uncertainty about the future—shape specific affective maladies, including loneliness, despair, and feeling stuck. These feelings in turn trigger novel religious yearnings. Evangelical churches deliberately and deftly articulate, manage, and reinterpret migrant distress through affective therapeutics, the strategic “healing” of migrants’ psychological pain. Richlin offers insights into the affective dimensions of migration, the strategies pursued by evangelical churches to attract migrants, and the ways in which evangelical belonging enables migrants to feel better, emboldening them to improve their lives. Looking at the ways evangelical churches help migrants navigate negative emotions, In the Hands of God sheds light on the versatility and durability of evangelical Christianity.

This volume addresses the diversification of mental healthcare provision and patients’ health-seeking behavior by putting Brazilian Spiritism and its translocal relations at the center of its inquiry. Comparative chapters document and critically assess the affective arrangements of Spiritist spaces in Brazil and Germany and how practices contribute to healing and the diversification of a globally circulating mental health agenda. The book addresses the human experience within Spiritist psychiatric clinics and affiliated Spiritist centers in Brazil, which in migratory contexts also have connections to Germany. Chapters interrogate the spaces where people inside and outside Brazil engage in implementing Spiritist practices in mental healthcare, introducing the Aesthetics of Healing as a conceptual tool to understand interactions between religion and medicine more broadly. Establishing a novel analytical and interdisciplinary perspective on embodied aspects of sensory experience and perception, this compelling volume will be of interest to scholars, researchers, and postgraduate students involved with mental health research, medical anthropology, Spiritualism, and cross-cultural psychology. Practitioners in the fields of transcultural psychiatry and the sociology of religion will also find the volume of use.

Transcendental Medication considers why human brains evolved to have consciousness, yet we spend much of our time trying to reduce our awareness. It outlines how limiting consciousness—rather than expanding it—is more functional and satisfying for most people, most of the time. The suggestion is that our brains evolved mechanisms to deal with the stress of awareness in concert with awareness itself—otherwise it is too costly to handle. Defining dissociation as “partitioning of awareness,” Lynn touches on disparate cultural and psychological practices such as religion, drug use, 12-step programs, and dancing. The chapters draw on biological and cultural studies of Pentecostal speaking in tongues and stress, the results of our 800,000+ years watching hearth and campfires, and unconscious uses of self-deception as mating strategy. Written in a highly engaging style, Transcendental Medication will appeal to students and scholars interested in mind, altered states of consciousness, and evolution. It is particularly suitable for those approaching the issue from cultural, biological, psychological, and cognitive anthropology, as well as evolutionary psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and religious studies.

An Anthropology of Biomedicine is an exciting new introduction to biomedicine and its global implications. Focusing on the ways in which the application of biomedical technologies bring about radical changes to societies at large, cultural anthropologist Margaret Lock and her co-author physician and medical anthropologist Vinh-Kim Nguyen develop and integrate the thesis that the human body in health and illness is the elusive product of nature and culture that refuses to be pinned down. Introduces biomedicine from an anthropological perspective, exploring the entanglement of material bodies with history, environment, culture, and politics Develops and integrates an original theory: that the human body in health and illness is not an ontological given but a moveable, malleable entity Makes extensive use of historical and contemporary ethnographic materials around the globe to illustrate the importance of this methodological approach Integrates key new research data with more classical material, covering the management of epidemics, famines, fertility and birth, by military doctors from colonial times on Uses numerous case studies to illustrate concepts such as the global commodification of human bodies and body parts, modern forms of population, and the extension of biomedical technologies into domestic and intimate domains Winner of the 2010 Prose Award for Archaeology and Anthropology