THETRANCE - Transnational Healing: Therapeutic Trajectories in Spiritual Trance
MARIE CURIE GLOBAL FELLOWSHIP 2019
THETRANCE – Transnational Healing: Therapeutic Trajectories in Spiritual Trance
Researcher: Dr Emily Pierini
Start date: 1 July 2020
End date: 30 June 2023
EU Funding. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 895395.
Partner institutions/supervisors. Sapienza University of Rome, Department of History, Anthropology, Religions, Art, and Performing Arts (Prof. Pino Schirripa); Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Brazil, Department of Social Anthropology (Prof. Alberto Groisman); and University of Oxford, Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology (Prof. Ramon Sarró).
The Project. THETRANCE is an anthropological study investigating therapeutic spiritual trance in a transnational perspective. It analyses how people learn and narrate about spiritual trance, with what kinds of consistencies and differences across cultures, and how trance-based healing practices may be relevant for therapeutic purposes.
Through an approach that combines social and medical anthropology, and the anthropology of religion, drawing parallels with research in psychology and psychiatry, THETRANCE focuses upon specific cases of people learning spiritual trance for therapeutic purposes, for physical and mental health and to recover from substance addictions. The methodology is grounded in a multi-sited comparative ethnographic research in temples of the Spiritualist Christian Order Vale do Amanhecer (Valley of the Dawn) in Brazil, the United States, Portugal and Italy. Firstly, it examines the transnational mobility of practices and concepts related to spiritual healing and trance. Secondly, it compares the use of trance-based healing practices in people’s therapeutic trajectories between spirituality and biomedicine in North and South America, and Europe. And thirdly, it investigates the role of religious/spiritual learning in patients' well-being.
THETRANCE is innovative in combining the analysis of therapeutic trajectories between spirituality and biomedicine with the focus upon the process of learning spiritual trance through a transnational perspective. In doing so, it unsettles the pathological reductions of spiritual trance to understand how these experiences are rather used therapeutically.
Dr Emily Pierini. Marie Curie Research Fellow in Anthropology at Sapienza University of Rome and visiting Professor at the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina. She holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Bristol with a research on spirit mediumship in Brazilian Spiritualist Christian Order Vale do Amanhecer, which received the Royal Anthropological Institute’s Sutasoma Award. She has conducted ethnographic research in the temples of the Vale do Amanhecer (Brazil and Europe), in Afro-Brazilian religions (Brazil), and on Goddess Spirituality (UK and Italy). Her work addresses spirit mediumship and possession, embodied knowledge, healing, religious experience and learning, body and self, emotions and senses, and transnational religions. Author of the book Jaguars of the Dawn: Spirit Mediumship in the Brazilian Vale do Amanhecer (2020, Berghahn), and several chapters and journal articles, such as Healing and Therapeutic Trajectories among the Spirit Mediums of the Brazilian Vale do Amanhecer (2018, International Journal of Latin American Religions), and Becoming a Spirit Medium: Initiatory Learning and the Self in the Vale do Amanhecer (2016, Ethnos); and co-editor of the special issue on Fieldwork in Religion: Bodily Experience and Ethnographic Knowledge (2016, Journal for the Study of Religious Experience). She is Honorary Research Fellow at the Religious Experience Research Centre, University of Wales Trinity Saint David. She is also coordinator with Alberto Groisman of ‘HEAL - Network for the Ethnography of Healing’.
Dr Pierini’s publications: https://uniroma1.academia.edu/EmilyPierini