Fiona Bowie
I am a social anthropologist specialising in the anthropology of religion. In 2010 I established the Afterlife Research Centre (ARC), as a forum for ethnographic and anthropological research into the afterlife, mediumship, paranormal and religious experience http://www.afterliferesearch.co.uk/.
Orchid ID: 0000-0002-1261-4566
Supervisors: Edwin Ardener and DPhil examiners: EM Chilver, Godfrey Lienhardt
Orchid ID: 0000-0002-1261-4566
Supervisors: Edwin Ardener and DPhil examiners: EM Chilver, Godfrey Lienhardt
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(Bibliographical references are given at the end of the volume as a whole and are not reproduced here. For details readers will need to access the volume in which this paper appeared).
aware of our existence, assured of our position as
hunters rather than prey, without predators in the world in which
we live, and yet we remain ignorant of the world - of our place in
the delicate ecological balance which holds our existence in its
thrall - and powerless before the reality of death, the great
equalizer which puts paid to our specious notions of superiority.
Human societies and individuals have historically come to two
broadly contradictory conclusions concerning our predicament.
These contrasting emphases may be present within each person,
but the stress on each element varies from one culture to another,
across time and within individuals. The first approach is to
conceive of the world (the limits of which are culturally
determined) as existing in a delicately balanced state of
equilibrium, to which human beings, through their social and
religious actions, contribute. The forces of nature and human
misdemeanours threaten to upset this ideal harmony,
as may the actions of destructive gods or spirits, who must be
constantly opposed if chaos is to be averted. Such a view may be
combined with a notion of endless cosmic cycles of growth and
decay, mirroring the experience of life itself within a time-scale
set between the life-span of creatures on earth and the stars on
which they gaze. The main thrust of such a vision tends to be
this-worldly and life-affirming. Through constant struggle and
vigilance human beings can and must play their part in the great
drama of life on whi'ch fhe continued existence of the world
depends. By way of contrast we have the solution of those whose
eyes are set on a future utopia, or perhaps on a golden past which
they seek to recreate in a transformed world. The present
constraints of existence are eschewed in favour of a new world in
which suffering and chaos are finally overcome. This new world,
whether for the few or the many, recreated on this earth or in
some future existence, demands the destruction of the old order
and is therefore life-denying and transcendental. The notion of a
coming deliverer belongs to the latter scheme of things - a human
or divine (or divine-human) saviour will come who is stong
enough to take on the forces of chaos and evil and defeat them
once and for all, leading the chosen few to the new world beyond
the boundaries of the present age.
Adoption is currently subject to a great deal of media scrutiny. High-profile cases of international adoption via the Internet or other unofficial routes have drawn attention to the relative ease with which children can be obtained on the global circuit, and have brought about legislation which regulates the exchange of children within and between countries. however, a scarcity of research into cross-cultural attitudes to child-rearing, and a wider lack of awareness of cultural difference in adoptive contexts, has meant that the assumptions underlying Western childcare policy are seldom examined or made explicit. the articles in Cross-Cultural Approaches to Adoption look at adoption practices from Africa, Oceania, Asia, South and Central America, including examples of societies in which children are routinely separated from their biological parents or passed through several foster families. Showing the range and flexibility of child-rearing practices that approximate to the Western term 'adoption', they demonstrate the benefits of a cross-cultural appreciation of family life, and allow a broader understanding of the varied relationships that exist between children and adoptive parents.
The uploaded document includes the Preface and Contents, Glossary, Chapter One and Editor's Introduction to Chapter 2.
1. My first example is of a Cameroonian people known as the Bangwa. The Internet plays an important role in keeping families and communities together, and in the process reaffirms religious identity and ideas.
2. The Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids (OBOD) is a relatively new form of Druidry, a Pagan religion with ancient roots. It is based on the idea of creating a new community and form of religious identity.
3. The Focolare Movement uses the Internet to create a common identity and build a sense of family among members who belong to different countries, cultures and religions.
I will finish with some reflections from the perspective of religion on the power of thought and intention, and the role the Internet plays in this process.
Anthropologists have made some cautious moves towards validating personal and interpersonal experience as a respectable research tool (Briggs, 1974; Jackson, 1996; Jakobsen, 1999; Turner and Bruner, 1986), and have described their own uncanny experiences in the field, whether from a perspective of doubt in the interpretations offered by their hosts (Favret-Saada, 1980; Louw, 2015), by internalising emic explanations (Stoller, 1987; Turner, 1992), or while struggling to make sense of the challenge these experiences can pose to one’s settled view of the world (Clifton, 1992; Jenkins, 2015). The potentially transformative effects of fieldwork in general and extraordinary experiences in particular have also found their way into academic texts (Goulet & Miller, 2007; Young & Goulet, 1994). Having gained at least a glimmer of a very different psychic world and range of relationships with human and non-human others in Cameroon, I was taken aback by some of the continuities I later discovered among alternative healers in the United Kingdom, particularly when discussing forms of psychic energy, possession and the fluidity of the Self. This raised questions concerning the role of personal experience and its cultural manifestations and codifications on the one hand, and the challenges of interpreting uncanny or unusual experiences in a largely secular, rationalist society on the other. Along with David Hufford (1982), Michael Winkelman, (2016), Gregory Shushan (2018) and others, I suspect that first hand and recounted experiences of ‘magical’ phenomena, particularly near death experiences, encounters with the deceased, mediumistic and shamanic experiences, out of body travel, Psi (clairvoyance, telepathy, pre-cognition, psychokinesis), sleep paralysis and spirit possession, have profoundly shaped the ways in which human beings in all times and places have formed their religious ideas and cosmological outlook.
Taking the example of spirit possession, I explore some of the ways in which experiences that appear to be universal and ancient appear or reappear in Western society to be interpreted in ways that seek a sometimes uneasy accommodation with normative medical, scientific (and religious) models of reality. Ethnographic enquiry is based on a conference organised by the Spirit Release Forum (SRF) in London (Bowie, 2017), and some of the wider work of those involved in this event. Motivations for involvement in the work of the SRF and similar bodies vary, but simple curiosity and a research agenda (Haraldsson, 2012) seems to play less of a role than direct experience of the intrusion of spirits into an existing clinical practice, which then leads clinicians new and unorthodox directions (Fiore, 1995; Zinser, 2010). In some cases a first-hand haunting or possession experience leads those affected to search for an explanation and relief or release from an unwanted and disturbing intrusion. Engagement in a world of spirits is not seen as an alternative to or escape from religion, science, or the ‘ordinary’ world, but as a result of ghostly or spirit-related experiences the world as it was has often slipped from view. Rationalist explanations for extraordinary and often frightening and life-changing encounters with spirits cannot be wished away and, as Jeanne Favret-Saada’s Normandy peasant farmers informed her, the Church can generally only provide a small, and not very powerful means of combatting the power of witchcraft and other psychic phenomena (1980). The medical profession may well pronounce the sufferer insane and resort to chemical treatments and perhaps incarceration. A de-witcher, shaman, spirit release therapist or suitably trained and experienced medium is therefore sought out, often as a last resort, although they may come disguised as a regular psychologist, psychiatrist or alternative healer (almost certainly in private practice).
The focus of this particular SRF conference was mental health and ways in which a phenomenology of spirits and spirit possession can help provide clinical help for various types of mental illness. Much of the focus was on schizophrenia and hearing voices, conditions poorly understood and inadequately treated by conventional pharmaceutical and psychiatric methods, but which appear amenable to spirit release therapy. A range of other conditions, including obsessions and compulsions and Tourettes, which are similarly unresponsive to psychoanalytic treatment, are fertile ground for ‘magical’ healing methods (cf. Rapoport, 1989). Most of those taking part in the conference were both open to studying the effects of spirit release techniques in clinical situations and realistic about the barriers that such ideas openly expressed encounter within the NHS.
While the cosmology of spirit release might seem a strange mixture of European folklore, Jungian psychology, science fiction and Western esotericism, it is also fairly consistent among practitioners. As publications and practices continue to develop spirit release is gaining in
popularity and visibility, presenting an alternative to the more established church practices of exorcism.
This paper asks the question, 'to what is this tradition an alternative?' It looks briefly at some contemporary Western notions of the Self and that are challenged by the tradition of spirit release, before giving an overview of some of these trends and attempting to map the main features of contemporary Western spirit release.
Key Words: Ontology, Self and Other, cognition, Spirit release, exorcism, spirit attachment, therapy, possession.
Paper short abstract We need to reimagine our relationship with the world, and with one another, in a manner that takes account of trans-personal realities. Instead of neutralising or bracketing out alternative models of the world we can enter into a dialogue with them in a search for new syntheses.
Paper keywords Ontology, Spirits, Possession, Shamanism, Methodology
20th February 2016.
In this talk I will attempt to do three things:
(1) Outline a general approach to the study of non-ordinary reality through a form of cognitive, empathetic engagement;
(2) Briefly survey some of the cross-cultural and historical evidence for an experiential source for many non-ordinary phenomena, including after-death contacts, reincarnation, spirit possession, near death experience and out of body travel.
(3) Examine what narratives of personal transformation might tell us about encounters with non-ordinary realities.
The term ‘spirit release therapy’ and presence of individuals who advertise their skills as ‘spirit release therapists’ are relatively recent – gaining ground in the last couple of decades in the UK. The idea that spirits can cause problems to the living, can attach themselves to someone, attack them psychically, and even take over their minds and bodies to ‘possess’ them, is certainly not new. Spirits, usually but not only of the deceased, who continue to trouble the living and who may need help to ‘move on’ appear in one form or another in all cultures and geographical locations. As far as we can tell they also have an ancient pedigree and human societies have evolved various means of dealing with spirits, honing specialised skills of exorcism, ‘de-obsession’, soul retrieval, healing and spirit communication. Anthropologists have been interested in documenting such beliefs and practices since the inception of the discipline in the Nineteenth Century. Spirit practices and the unseen world of psychic forces, be they in the form of witchcraft in Africa, spirit possession in Brazil, shamanistic practices in Northern Europe or Australia, or the so-called folk beliefs of Europe that stubbornly resurface whenever presumed to be on the verge of extinction, remain ubiquitous. What is new is a particular configuration of ideas concerning spirit release as a therapeutic tool in the United States and the United Kingdom (and no doubt elsewhere) that currently finds expression in a range of publications, web sites, conferences, group and individual healing practices. It is this loose-knit community of healers and clients, very much dependent on modern means of communication and technology, and the ideas and practices that are in circulation within it, that I wish to discuss in this presentation.
Theoretically a priori as mistaken or inferior (Henare, Holbraad and Wastell, 2007), are all part of this wider engagement with interconnectivity and process. Whether we use terms such as ‘new materialism’ or ‘the anthropology of ontology’, similar ideas recur. For my purposes these trends sit comfortably with the views of contemporary spirit release practitioners and their clients. We live as modern, rational, scientifically educated individuals in a world that is constantly interacting with and open to the influences of external forces - spirits – and it is assumed in most instances that the processes involved can be explained in physical terms and studied scientifically by those who are sufficiently open-minded. It is a world of vibration, energy, frequencies, intention, experience and matter, constantly interacting with one another in ways that can be documented and described. There is an element of predictability, sufficient for the development of expertise and for healing practices to be tested and honed, and unpredictability, as life and experience are never wholly replicable, and each new event affects the composition of the whole.
In this talk I will give an overview of some of the key texts and ideas current among spirit release practitioners and their clients, and describe the ways these circulate and serve to build up overlapping networks than encompass both academic university departments and individual practitioners operating well outside the mainstream. Using case studies and illustrations of mediumistic readings and therapeutic encounters, we can approach more general questions concerning the ontological status of these practices – an area that has for long been taboo among social scientists - as well as giving a phenomenological account of contemporary spirit release therapies. In doing so I am indebted to the pioneering work of Edith Turner (1993). In opening-up the question of the ‘reality of spirits’, she enabled the sorts of discussions that take place in Young and Goulet (1994) and Goulet and Miller (2006), which acknowledge the extraordinary and transformative encounters that take place through an engagement with alternative world views. Like David Hufford (1982, 1995) and Gregory Shushan (2013, 2014) I find both the similarities and differences involved in comparative studies of anomalous phenomena (for want of a better term), including mediumship and spirit release, suggestive of a core of experiential data that is, as Jack Hunter remarks (2013, 2015) innately human, whatever its source.
References
Fuentes, A. 2017. The Creative Spark: How Imagination Made Humans Exceptional. Dutton: New York.
Goulet, J-G. & Miller, B.G. (eds.) 2006. Extraordinary Anthropology: Transformations in the Field. Lincoln & London: University of Nebraska Press.
Henare, A, Holbraad, M. & Wastrell, S. (eds.) 2007. Thinking Through Things: Theorising Artefacts Ethnographically. Abingdon & New York: Routledge.
Hodder I. (ed.) 2013: Humans and landscapes of Catalhoyuk: reports from the 2000-2008 seasons. Catalhoyuk Reseach Project Series Volume 8. British Institute at Ankara Monograph No. 47 / Monumenta Archaeologica 30. Los Angeles: Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press.
Hodder, I. 2014. The Entanglements of Humans and Things: A Long-Term View. New Literary History 45(1): 19-36.
Hufford, D. 1982. The Terror that Comes in the Night: An Experience-Centered Study of Supernatural Assault Traditions. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Hufford, D. 1995. Beings Without Bodies: An Experience-Centered Theory of Belief in Spirits. In Walker, B. (ed.) Out of the Ordinary: Folklore and the Supernatural. Logan: Utah State University Press.
Hunter, J. 2013. Numinous Conversations: Performance and Manifestation of Spirits in Spirit Possession Practices. In A. Voss & W. Rowlandson (eds.) Daimonic Imagination: Uncanny Intelligence. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press.
Hunter, J. 2015. ‘Between Realness and Unrealness’: Anthropology, Parapsychology and the Ontology of Non-Ordinary Realities. Diskus: Journal of the British Association for the Study of Religion. 17(2):4-20.
Ingold, T. 2011. Being Alive: Essays on movement, Knowledge and Description. Routledge: London & New York.
Ingman, P., Utriainen, T., Hovi, T. & Broo, M. (eds.) 2016. The Relational Dynamics of Enchantment and Sacralization: Changing the Terms of the Religion Versus Secularity Debate. Sheffield: Equinox.
Latour, B. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Translated by C. Porter. Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press.
Latour, B. 2010. On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods. Translated by H. MacLean and C. Porter. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Latour, B. 2017. Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Pina-Cabral, J.d. 2017. World: An Anthropological Examination. Chicago: Hau Books. Shushan, G. 2013. Rehabilitating the neglected ‘similar’: Confronting the issue of cross- cultural similarities in the study of religions. Paranthropology: Journal of Anthropological
Approaches to the Paranormal. 4(2):48-53.
Shushan, G. 2014. Extraordinary experiences and religious beliefs: deconstructing some contemporary philosophical axioms. Method and Theory in the Study of Religion. 26:384- 416.
Young, D.E. & Goulet, J.-G. 1994. Being Changed by Cross-Cultural Encounters: The Anthropology of Extraordinary Experience. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press.
Turner, E. 1993. The Reality of Spirits: A Tabooed or Permitted Field of Study? Anthropology of Consciousness. 4(1):9-12.
Organised by the Spirit Release Forum. Regent's College, London, 4 February 2017.
The online Word version has not preserved all the formatting, but downloaded should preserve the internal links, which the pdf version may not.
Bettina begins by outlining the aims and scope of the sessions, in which they hoped to bring together anthropologists, ethnographers and Religious Studies scholars with many different methodologies for looking at encounters with the non-ordinary. Fiona Bowie outlines her methodology for these kinds of studies, empathetic engagement, in which issues of ontological truth are set aside, but not ‘explained away’. She argues that such experiences may be at the root of “religious experience”, and are thus vital to the field. Davids Wilson and Robertson discuss whether the transformative nature of these experiences is epistemological at core. Remembering our critical approach, however, Jonathan challenges the emerging consensus that different methodologies require different epistemological postulates to be made sense of. It gets fairly heated.
The Anthropology of Religion: An Introduction by Fiona Bowie is a fascinating textbook that takes up subjects such as "The body as a symbol", "Sex, gender and the sacred" and Shamanism to mention a few. Bowie writes with authority on all the subjects and seems to truly know what she is writing about. In fact she inspires the reader to further ones knowledge in several fields and this is indeed a tall task as many textbooks are quite difficult and taxing to read and one does it merely to finish a class. The chapters that I thought were the best where the following, "Maintaining and transforming boundaries: the politics of religious identity" and the chapter that took up gender and the sacred was also great. I highly recommend this textbook and I will definitely buy the next edition whenever that is published.
Of particular value is the perspective of those who were themselves objects of missionary activity and who reflected upon this experience. Women actively absorbed and adapted the teachings of the Christian missionaries, and Western models are seen to be utilized and developed in sometimes unexpected ways.
The editors have assembled, organized and introduced a rich collection of the prose and poetry of Christians from Brittany, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. Although many of the works are translated from modern or ancient Breton, Irish, Welsh and Scottish Gaelic and from Latin, all flow with grace and feeling. The works from over a thousand years ago provide profound insights on the issues we face today and on how we can address our local problems through the love of all creation. The modern works are intensely personal but all have the ability to touch readers far from the Celtic homelands. A wonderful introductin to Celtic, Christian or Celtic Christian literature and an excellent springboard for wider studies.
Equinox Publishing Limited: Sheffield, 2016. Hardback pp.286 including 97 b/w figures.
ISBN: 9781781791677. £75. Paperback ISBN: 9781781791684. £30.
Humphrey J. Fisher
The Journal of African History / Volume 37 / Issue 01 / March 1996, pp 124 - 126
DOI: 10.1017/S002185370003485X, Published online: 22 January 2009
Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S002185370003485X
How to cite this article:
Humphrey J. Fisher (1996). The Journal of African History, 37, pp 124-126
doi:10.1017/S002185370003485X
FIONA BOWIE
The Journal of African History / Volume 55 / Issue 03 / November 2014, pp 510 - 512
DOI: 10.1017/S002185371400053X, Published online: 22 September 2014
Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S002185371400053X
How to cite this article:
FIONA BOWIE (2014). The Journal of African History, 55, pp 510-512 doi:10.1017/
S002185371400053X
DOI: 10.1017/S0021853710000101, Published online: 21 May 2010
Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0021853710000101
How to cite this article:
RALPH A. AUSTEN (2010). The Journal of African History, 51, pp 109-111 doi:10.1017/
S0021853710000101
I end with a case study of spirit possession in popular Chinese religion taken from Fabian Graham's book 'Voices from the Underworld: Chinese Hell deity worship in Contemporary Singapore and Malaysia', Manchester University Press 2020
http://www.uwtsd.ac.uk/sophia/
Featuring:
Fiona Bowie, Eddie Bullard, Charles Emmons, David Hufford, Jeffrey Kripal, Stanley Krippner, Tanya Luhrmann, Antonia Mills, Gregory Shushan, Paul Stoller and Ann Taves.
Available here:
http://anthreligconsc.weebly.com/esalen-interviews.html
My chapter addresses the use of mediumistically channelled material as ethnographic data, using the example of conventional and mediumistic accounts of sacred power associated with the Himalaya and Mount Fuji.
This panel will explore ethnographic approaches to relations between individual personhood, material and immaterial forms of existence.
http://afterliferesearch.weebly.com/iuaes-2013-congress.html
Featuring Fiona Bowie. Bettina Schmidt, David Luke, Paul Devereux, Nicholas Campion, David Gordon Wilson.
http://anthreligconsc.weebly.com/lecture-archive.html