Trance Mediums and New Media: Spirit Possession in the Age of Technical Reproduction - Softcover

Dreschke, Anja; Zillinger, Martin

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0823253813 ISBN 13: 9780823253814

Publisher: Fordham University Press, 2014

Synopsis

Ongoing debates about the “return of religion” have paid little attention to the orgiastic and enthusiastic qualities of religiosity, despite a significant increase in the use of techniques of trance and possession around the globe. Likewise, research on religion and media has neglected the fact that historically the rise of mediumship and spirit possession was closely linked to the development of new media of communication.

This innovative volume brings together a wide range of ethnographic studies on local spiritual and media practices. Recognizing that processes of globalization are shaped by mass mediation, the volume raises questions such as: How are media like photography, cinema, video, the telephone, or television integrated in seances and healing rituals? How do spirit mediums connect with these media? Why are certain technical media shunned in these contexts?

About this title

About the Author:

Heike Behrend, previously a Professor of Anthropology and Media Studies at the Institute of African Studies at the University of Cologne, Germany, is now retired and lives in Berlin. She has conducted intensive research in Kenya, Uganda, Ghana, and Nigeria. Since the early 1990s, she has been studying media in Africa, in particular photography and video, and has continued to investigate the relationship between religious change, violence, and war in Uganda. She has been teaching as a Visiting Professor at the E“cole des hautes e“tudes en sciences sociales in Paris; in the African Studies Program of Northwestern University; and at the University of Florida. In 2007, she was Senior Research Fellow at the IFK in Vienna. She has published extensively on photographic practices in eastern Africa and on religion, violence, and war. The most recent of her books are Resurrecting Cannibals: The Catholic Church, Witch-hunts, and the Production of Pagans in Western Uganda (James Currey, 2011) and Contesting Visibility: Photographic Practices on the East African Coast (Transcript-Verlag, 2013).

Anja Dreschke, an anthropologist and filmmaker from Cologne, received a degree in cultural anthropology, history of arts and theatre, and film and television studies from the University of Cologne. From 2007 to 2012 she worked as a researcher on the project ‘‘Trance Mediums and New Media’’ at the University of Siegen. Currently she is Research Fellow at the graduate school Locating Media at the University of Siegen and Lecturer for Visual and Media Anthropology at the University of Cologne. Recently she released the documentary film Tribes of Cologne, which is concurrently part of her Ph D. dissertation intended as a three-fold project combining text, video, and photography.

Martin Zillinger is Assistant Professor at the Research Lab ‘‘Transformations of Life’’ at the University of Cologne. A former graduate student of the University of Constance, he received his Ph.D. from the University of Tubingen and was a postdoctoral research fellow in the research project ‘‘Trance Mediums and New Media 1900/2000’’ and a Lecturer at the Department of Media Studies at the University of Siegen. He conducted extensive fieldwork in North Africa, especially in Morocco, and in Europe, particularly in Belgium. His research interests include media anthropology, anthropology of religion, and migration, with a special focus on the Mediterranean. He has published several articles and edited volumes. His dissertation, ‘‘Die Trance, das Blut, die Kamera. Trance-Medien und Neue Medien im marokkanischen Sufismus,’’ received the Frobenius Research Award of the Frobenius Society.

Review:

Trance Mediums and New Media is a highly significant intervention in the growing literature on religion and media. Unusual in its comparative, interdisciplinary character, the volume deals with a broad range of case-studies – including, amongst others, Sufi, Pentecostal, shamanic and Hindu communities - and drawn from geographical regions as diverse as Mali, Vietnam and Germany. The volume’s editors and contributors probe the well-worn polarities of matter and spirit, artifice and nature, which frequently dominate studies of both religion and media. In place of these juxtapositions, the collection instead makes a persuasive argument for the complementary roles of both spiritual mediumship and new media in reconciling the not-so-distinct realms of nature and spirit. (―Joel Cabrita University of Cambridge)

This is a highly original and thought-provoking addition to the study of the interrelations between media and religion. Geographically wide-ranging and well-informed both historically and theoretically, the volume explores affinities and synergies between technical mediation and spirit mediumship while also recognizing ruptures and limitations. It succeeds in developing alternatives to styling the encounter of media and mediums as one of modernity and tradition. (Felicitas Becker University of Cambridge)

“The main theoretical issues – what is becoming of trance and trance mediums in the media saturated societies of today? And in extension of that question: what is becoming of ‘the religious’ and ‘the mediatic’? – are challenging ones, and merit the in-depth exploration that this volume has on offer.” (―Mattijs van de Port University of Amsterdam)

About this edition

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0823253813
• ISBN 13: 9780823253814
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 392
• Editor: Behrend Heike