Spirits

Abstract: Absinthe, a strong alcoholic aperitif, is notorious for containing the compound ‘thujone’, which has been commonly regarded as its ‘active ingredient’. It has been widely theorized that the thujone content of vintage absinthe made it harmful to public health, and caused the distinct syndrome absinthism, which was extensively described in the literature prior to the spirit’s ban in 1915. The interdisciplinary research presented in this paper shows that 1) absinthism cannot be distinguished from common alcoholism in the medical research literature of the time, and that 2) due to the physical chemistry of the distillation process, the thujone content of vintage absinthe was considerably lower than previously estimated and corresponds to levels generally recognized as safe, as proven by analyses of absinthes from the pre-ban era. Due to the re-legalization of absinthe in the European Union and more recently in the United States, potential public health concerns have re-emerged...

The Journal of Distilling Science is the first truly dedicated organ for the publication of peer reviewed original works and reviews of relevance to the technological, scientific and production aspects of quality distilled spirits. An official publication associated with the Society of Distilling Scientists and Technologists. The inaugural issue was published in December 2021

This volume testifies to the unresolved contradictions built into both the possible solutions to the problem of the paranormal and into the controversy itself. Scientific and theoretical approaches to the field usually do not seem able to resolve the contradictions of mediumistic controversies but rather add contradictions of their own. Furthermore, they tend to forget that the core of the controversy, or rather controversies, lies in practical negotiations and negotiations about practical exigencies. That is why an ethnographic approach shows time and again how local actors use all the theoretical resources of academic life and academic reasoning available to them, and that theoretical distinctions are bound to appear highly convincing in discussions but deeply flawed on the ground. This does not mean that the theoretical controversy is particularly different from practical controversies-on the contrary, it is just one practical way of dealing with the controversies about mediumship and a strand of the controversy itself. But practical mediumism is not about resolving theoretical questions or theoretical contradictions. In fact, it may even thrive on those contradictions. Based on anthropological fieldwork in California, where I followed the controversies surrounding the testing of paranormal claims and ended up among a deeply intertwined network of parapsychologists, spiritualists, ghost hunters, and skeptics, I will present in this chapter a seemingly banal case of mediumism that remains "basic" in many senses of the term: touching the base of modern mediumism and especially spiritualism, and being nothing but basic. But even this basic case is controversial on the ground, and necessarily so. By focusing on a banal but controversial case, I will ask the complementary question: is there an equally banal basis for our theoretical controversies?

Debtera are Ethiopian Orthodox ritual specialists known for their advanced religious education, as well as for engaging in illicit magic. This article traces how their secret magical knowledge and practices emerge from the official Orthodox tradition. Yet, while drawing on this tradition, the debtera’s ritual repertoire also transgresses some of its central proscriptions. Transgression, in this context, does not abolish the boundaries it violates, but reinstates their legitimacy. This dynamic prompts debtera to engage in imaginative ethical reassessments of the unstable relationship between illicit knowledge and official tenets. Through their transgressive performances, debtera enable their clients to secretly address and actualise sinful desires that otherwise remain unacknowledged or are suppressed by the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. By examining this ritual management of covert desires, I conclude that the study of debtera’s secrecy illuminates fundamental complexities and contradictions in Ethiopian Orthodox sociality which operate beneath the surface of public moral discourse.

The "experts" with their Ph.D.s tell us that, for a variety of reasons, often having to do with loneliness, children manage to hallucinate their playmates, project them out into space, and enjoy them. But many of these children once they grow up and think back, insist that their little friends were real—the internet is full of such testimony. In this paper we'll try to decide which side is correct.

On a trip home last month to visit family, I met Brenda, aged 67, at a neighborhood gathering. The strange story she told us lit up the dinner table. I had just mentioned I wrote a middle-grade novel about a clairvoyant child, and Brenda’s husband said that Brenda, who was back in the kitchen, had three “imaginary friends” she constantly played with when she was a little girl.

I had done a lot of reading about children’s so-called imaginary friends, and I knew what the “experts” with their Ph.D.s said about them: for a variety of reasons, often having to do with loneliness, children manage to hallucinate their playmates, project them out into space, and enjoy them.

I also knew that many of these children, once they grow into adulthood, insist that their little friends were real—the internet is full of such testimony. They claim their friends were spirits, with a life of their own, not at all imagined. I decided to get at the truth about Brenda’s friends.
Two days later I interviewed her in depth.

Brenda turned out to be a past chapter president of an international woman’s organization, a past executive director of a child advocacy center, and a past executive director of a pro bono lawyer’s program. This highly intelligent and vital woman had impressive credentials. I knew she was someone I could trust, someone who wouldn’t make things up or even exaggerate. This is what she told me.

She grew up in a house with loving parents and a sister six years her senior. She had no playmates her own age and surmised that her loneliness drew her friends, three girls her own age, to her. Their names were Francie, Belikoma, and Gopi. She played with them everyday until she went to kindergarten. During the summer between kindergarten and first grade, they showed up again. They swam with her in the nearby bay. They wore their regular clothes, no bathing suits, but never seemed to get wet. One day the leader, Gopi, drowned.

I found this surprising claim intensely interesting and asked Brenda a series of questions. Did she, a child of six, witness the drowning? Was she upset, distraught? Were Francie and Belikoma distraught? What happened next? Her answer was not what you would expect. Brenda did not witness the drowning. Somehow she just knew that Gopi drowned. Brenda does not remember being distraught at all, even though she would never see any of the three again. Thinking back, she remembers feeling that her friends had become a little boring. It was as if their presence could not compete with her new school friends, and they knew it. The drowning was not literal; it was a symbol of their permanent departure.

But they played an important role for Brenda before kindergarten. They were always present, always accessible. And they constantly communicated, though not in words. Their mode of expression, as Brenda remembers it, was telepathic. Each of the playmates had a distinct personality, but Brenda doesn’t remember naming them. Their faces were mobile and fit the conversation. Brenda never doubted their love for her, and she returned their love.

How did her parents deal with the strange situation? They took her to a psychiatrist, who wisely counseled them not to worry. So they went along with their little girl’s demand that three extra chairs be set at the table. Brenda doesn’t remember their actually eating and is certain they didn’t “pass the bread.” Today she doesn’t recall a single episode of being embarrassed about her friends or disapproved of by anyone.

What does Brenda take away from her vivid early memories? Did the questions a professional like me bombarded her with loosen her belief in the reality of her friends? After all was said, might they have been imagined? “Not a chance,” she said. “I know what it means to imagine something. We all do. These were spirits with a life of their own. I believe they came to me because I was lonely, but I also believe they had something to gain by coming.”

What about all those dismissals by the professionals? Clinical psychiatrist Eileen Kennedy-Moore speaks for most of them. In Psychology Today she writes, “According to Marjorie Taylor and her colleagues at the University of Oregon, by age seven, about 37% of children take imaginative play a step farther and create an invisible friend.” She goes on to say, “On the other hand, if it’s not too much trouble, go ahead [and] play along. Set an extra place at the table for the imaginary friend, if your child asks you to do so…An imaginary friend is a unique and magical expression of your child’s imagination, so let your child be in charge of it.”

Rebecca Rosen comes to a different conclusion. In her blog she writes, “Children’s imaginary friends are often Spirits – usually guides or angels – who are making their presence known in a friendly, non-threatening way. I used to have them as a kid. My parents thought I was crazy at the time until I discovered my gift. Turns out I was talking with my spirit guides.”

Perhaps the most charming testimony for this other view comes from a girl whose mother posted her daughter’s eleven stick-figure drawings and running commentary on the net. Written in the child’s own hand, it reads, “This is Lisa. She is my friend. My mom and dad cant see her so they said she is an imaganery friend. Lisa is a nice friend.”

In my view there is a single overarching reason for the professional’s quick dismissal of Lisa’s realness: she doesn’t fit the materialist paradigm they learned in graduate school, and that paradigm says that spirits aren’t real. Brenda knows better, and she, and thousands of others like her, are, in my view, the true experts.

In the middle of the Asian crisis in the late 1990s, ghost-movies became major box-office hits. The emergence of the phenomenally popular ‘J-Horror’ genre inspired ghost-movie productions in Korea, Thailand, Taiwan, Hong Kong, the Philippines and Singapore in unprecedented ways. Most often located in contemporary urban settings, these films feature frenzy, ghastly homicides, terror attacks, communication with the unredeemed (un)dead, and vengeful (female) ghosts with a terrifying grip on the living: features that have since became part of the mainstream television and film entertainment narrative pool. Southeast Asian ghost movies reflect upon the identity crises and trauma of the living as well as of the dead. Since these movies explore and depict forms of postmortem existence in various ways, they fit in a very literal sense to the label ‘post-mortem cinema’ (Elsaesser & Hagener). Ghost movies are embedded and reflected in national as well as transnational cultures and politics, in narrative traditions, in the social worlds of the audience, and in the perceptual experience of each individual. As products of popular culture, ghost movies unfold affection and attraction in the border zone between amusement and thrill, secular and religious worldviews, trivial and meaningful questions, angst and existential dread. This makes the genre interesting not only for sociologists, anthropologists, media and film scholars, but also for scholars of religion.

Editorial CSIC, Colección Biblioteca de dialectología y tradiciones populares, 332 páginas, ISBN: 978-84-00-10347-7 ---  Resumen: Son numerosos los estudios sobre chamanismo, pero casi inexistentes las monografías que abordan directamente lo que hace el chamán o chamana, por qué y para qué lo hace. Basándose en seis años de trabajo de campo entre un conjunto de chamanes, tanto nativos de las regiones amazónica y andina como españoles formados en la selva tropical, Santiago López-Pavillard ofrece una novedosa aproximación a una antropología implicada en la que se entrelazan descripción etnográfica, debate teórico sobre conceptos y métodos, y reflexión experiencial sobre la práctica etnográfica y sus efectos en el investigador. Todo ello le permite desarrollar una reconceptualización de la figura del chamán y de la práctica chamánica en torno al uso ceremonial de «plantas maestras» como la ayahuasca y el tabaco, a partir de la cual construye una crítica de los paradigmas disciplinarios de la antropología social y cultural, y desde la que plantea, también, un debate de gran actualidad sobre la naturaleza y el alcance del conocimiento científico en general.

Chamanes, ayahuasca y sanación muestra un aspecto particularmente complejo de nuestra sociedad, como es la coexistencia de diversas racionalidades que obedecen a distintas concepciones de la Realidad. Para ello, se hace necesario distinguir con claridad un conjunto de nociones como son las de salud/sanación, religión/espiritualidad o creencias religiosas vs. conocimiento espiritual, desde las que tratar de entender cómo y por qué se da una progresiva introducción de concepciones animistas en la sociedad occidental.

This article is focused on the Kyrgyz folk practices known as spiritual blessings ("bata chygaruu") and the structural relations among elements of the issue. The empirical database is presented by the manuscript sources and field researches. The empirical procedure includes the ethnographic method. The results of the research demonstrate the existential significance of the spiritual-poetic improvisations.

This thesis is an interrogation into the epistemological structures which underpin modernity, the project and claim which has come to significantly shape the contemporary world. Following a line of inquiry which analyses the intersections between knowledge, power, and history, this paper examines how signifiers such as religion and culture have come to designate 'otherness‘ in the context of modernity. The assignment of such terms to beliefs, values, worldviews, and ideologies that are not readily assimilated by the epistemological framework of modernity is problematised as a central obstacle to mediating social and political difficulties in modern contexts.

The argument is that the issue of 'what counts for knowledge‘ has been progressively 'closed‘ through particular historical processes in which the shift a societal model based upon Judeo-Christian tenets (broadly defined), to secular modernity, has been rendered invisible. The other has, through these processes, become twice-removed from epistemological validity: in the first instance, as the pagan other in early Christian contexts; in the second instance, as the religious or cultural other within a secular that is falsely claimed to have been liberated from its theological roots. These epistemological marginalisations impact significantly on social life, especially in the areas of social justice, power flows, education, and medicine. The invisibility of the shift from Christianity to secular modernity is also perpetuated by the separation of social life and knowledge production into distinct 'spheres‘, as mirrored by the arrangement of disciplinary spheres established within the modern universities. The conclusion is that a transdisciplinary space is therefore required to engage philosophically and critically with the now internalised Christian bias hidden within what we might call modernity.

Konzepte von Geist und Atem stellen in verschiedenen Kulturen eine Einheit dar. Dies gilt etwa für den biblischen Hauch Gottes, das griechische pneuma und den lateinischen spiritus, das prana des Sanskrit, das chinesische Ch’i. Die Diskursivierung lässt den Geistatem jeweils als »absolute Metapher« im Sinne Hans Blumenbergs erscheinen. Er füllt eine Leerstelle im Wissenssystem und setzt eine ästhetische Gestalt an die Stelle rationaler Ergründbarkeit. Damit kann die Atemhaftigkeit des Geistes aus logischer Sicht nur ein Entwurf sein und unbestimmt bleiben. Der gleichzeitigen Bestimmbarkeit im Rahmen einer ästhetisch-motorischen Gestaltbildung (einem Morphom) gilt diese Untersuchung.

The 1965 killings in Indonesia brought about the incarceration, disappearances, and deaths of 500,000 to one million alleged members of the Indonesian Communist Party. This article concentrates on several suspected mass graves in Central Java reputed to have supernatural energy emanating from the violent deaths of the individuals buried there. These sites also have gatekeepers or juru kunci bridging the living and the spirits inhabiting these spaces. This research asks, How do these sites, through their juru kunci, elucidate a past which continues to be silenced? I posit that through contact with the souls of the executed, these gatekeepers utilize an ethereal connection to subvert the state’s enforced silence. These sites also provide a ritual space transforming these ghosts into ancestors worthy of remembrance. By reclaiming the identities of those murdered, the living and the dead can achieve a kind of localized spiritual reconciliation.

In modern-day Guyana (formerly British Guiana) residents of the coastal region of the country are susceptible to other-than-human powers: the spirits of Dutch colonizers, who claim ownership over the land, especially in areas where sugar plantations once operated. Regarded as the "masters of the land," or "boundary masters," Dutch spirits demand offerings and the recognition of land rights from their human co-habitants. Through a description of rituals towards the land performed by members of a heterodox Hindu sect, the worship of the goddess Kali, this article addresses territorial sovereignty through the lens of lived and embodied practices of co-habitation between East Indians and Dutch spirits, giving special attention to the processes of establishing proprietary rights over the land through such acts as planting trees.

The Clavicula Salomonis is one of the most emblematic texts of learned magic of the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and also one of the most sulphurous. This article updates our knowledge about the diffusion of this famous “nigromantic” art (especially in the manuscripts) and shows in a new way that it had a deep influence on both magical and canonical traditions of conjuring demons, especially in the 15th century. It also gives some leads for future research.

The article explores the legacy of the Gulag in Northeast Siberia by providing a detailed discussion of the space of the village built on the former site of the concentration camp haunted by the unhappy ghosts of former prisoners. Since, in local cosmology the latter are given the status of malevolent spirits – arinkael –, they create the context in which the memory of the Gulag is reproduced locally through the repetitive encounters of ghosts in the village buildings. The account illustrates that ghosts of the former violently killed Gulag prisoners charged with affective potential for contagion expand and modify the status of arinkael within the Eveny cosmology. This contributes to the process of “world-making”, in which the local population and Gulag ghosts are mutually expanding Eveny cosmology while simultaneously reactivating the memories about the Gulag.

1 Responses to Mozambique's 1976–1992 civil war and its multiple legacies have taken place in different social and political contexts over time. This article analyses responses developed during wartime and in the postwar context in Gorongosa, a district in the centre of Mozambique. Mainstream transitional justice literature has tended to ground analysis in linear temporalities, assuming that peace agreements or military defeats are the starting point of transitions and that justice and healing interventions with prede-fined lifespans transform societies. This article argues that indigenous understandings and practices of justice and healing are constituted by multiple temporalities that blend present, past and future in contingent and contested ways and on an ongoing basis. Culturally effective responses to wartime violations both shift and take prewar, wartime and postwar temporalities into account. Analysis based on recognition of multiple temporalities allows for a comprehensive understanding of the continuities and changes in the meanings of justice and healing. This type of analysis also reveals that from a cultural perspective, transitional justice is better interpreted as an open-ended process in that nobody can predict the lifespan of indigenous processes that address violations committed during major armed conflicts.

Among the figures of animality evoked in narratives of violence are the “beast” who
perpetrates acts of brutality and the debased creature who is subjected to captivity, forced labor, or slaughter. Yet a third figure of animality appears in the stories of animistically inclined emigrants who survived war and terror in Laos or Cambodia: the wild animal as transmigrated ancestor or capriciously sympathetic spirit who offers a powerful if unpredictable source of protection. Encounters with fantastic animals implicitly question the relationship between humanity and animality that often prevails in accounts of violence, opening possibilities for a zoopolitics of morality and animality.

The paper reviews the resurgence of interest in using UV-visible spectroscopy for the broad range analysis of alcoholic beverages, beer, wines and spirits for quality, consistency and authentication purposes. It specifically outlines the use of scanning, micro-well/micro-plate reading spectrophotometers for rapid analysis of small samples without the prior need to prepare such samples for analysis. Initial studies on a wide range of aged and un-aged distilled spirits (Whiskeys, Bourbons, Tequila, Vodka), Sherry samples, and Beer (including Barrel aged samples) are presented to show the types of applications available for this inexpensive yet powerful approach.

Tao (達悟 oder Yami雅美) ist der Name einer der sechzehn anerkannten indi-genen Volksgruppen in Taiwan. Sie leben auf der Orchideeninsel (蘭嶼) süd-östlich der taiwanesischen Hauptinsel. Ihre Sprache gehört zur austronesischen Sprachfamilie und wird oral tradiert. Somit steht das Singen bei den älteren Generationen der Tao im Zentrum der Überlieferung. Durch das Singen wird nicht nur die Kenntnis und Kategorisierung von Sitten und Bräuchen, Weltanschauungen, sozialer Kritik, und Geschichte weitergegeben, sondern auch ein nachhaltiger Umgang mit der Natur und ihren Ressourcen eingeprägt. Darüber hinaus gibt es viele Tabus, die regeln, wer was wann und wo singen darf. Im diesem Artikel werden ausgewählte Phänomenen in der tra-ditionellen Singpraxis der Tao und deren Bezug zu den Tabus, beziehungsweise die Rolle der traditionellen Musik mit dem Erlernen des Wissens über Tabus, thematisiert und diskutiert .

The 1965 killings in Indonesia brought about the incarceration, disappearances, and deaths of 500,000 to one million alleged members of the Indonesian Communist Party. This article concentrates on several suspected mass graves in Central Java reputed to have supernatural energy emanating from the violent deaths of the individuals buried there. These sites also have gatekeepers or juru kunci bridging the living and the spirits inhabiting these spaces. This research asks, How do these sites, through their juru kunci, elucidate a past which continues to be silenced? I posit that through contact with the souls of the executed, these gatekeepers utilize an ethereal connection to subvert the state's enforced silence. These sites also provide a ritual space transforming these ghosts into ancestors worthy of remembrance. By reclaiming the identities of those murdered, the living and the dead can achieve a kind of localized spiritual reconciliation.

For thousands of years the Indigenous peoples of the Arctic have produced astonishingly rich and diverse forms of tattooing. Long neglected by anthropologists and art historians, tattooing here was a time-honored practice that expressed the patterns of tribal social organization, therapeutic medicine, and religion, while also channeling worlds inhabited by deities, spirits, and the ancestors. This lecture explores the many facets of this ancient indelible practice with special reference to prehistoric ivory figurines.

NOTE: To register for this free May 1, 2021, online lecture hosted by the Amsterdam Tribal Art Fair, please visit:

https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_i0XuFkw1Sa6eIqzfelM8Lg