Talking with the Spirits: Ethnographies from Between the Worlds - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0987422448 ISBN 13: 9780987422446

Publisher: Daily Grail Publishing, 2014

Synopsis

Talking With the Spirits is a cross-cultural survey of contemporary spirit mediumship. The diverse contributions to this volume cover a wide-range of ethnographic contexts, from Spiritualist séances in the United Kingdom to self-mortification rituals in Singapore and Taiwan, from psychedelic spirit incorporation in the Amazonian rainforest, to psychic readings in online social spaces, and more. By taking a broad perspective the book highlights both the variety of culturally specific manifestations of spirit communication, and key cross-cultural features suggestive of underlying core-processes and experiences. Rather than attempting to reduce or dismiss such experiences, the authors featured in this collection take the experiences of their informants seriously and explore their effects at personal, social and cultural levels.

About this title

From the Author

Talking With the Spirits is a cross-cultural survey of contemporary spirit mediumship. 

From the Back Cover

'This is an important collection of essays, which makes a significant contribution to a growing body of research and literature challenging existing scientific paradigms by reiterating the universality of spirit mediumship in human experience. The individual contributions offer fascinating insights into knowledge traditions that have accepted the challenge of exploring the range of phenomena mediumship gives access to. More importantly for the academy, this book highlights the extent to which one particular knowledge tradition, namely western scientific materialism, together with the particular disciplines influenced by that attitude, has substantially failed in this task. Fiona Bowie's opening contribution is a careful but blunt articulation of why this failure matters, and why it needs to be addressed. When the scientific community ceases to explore in favour of policing a historically-conditioned political boundary between acceptable and unacceptable knowledge, it risks finding itself in the service of those who prefer to cramp intellectual endeavour rather than face a possible diminution in their authoritative status, or other personal fears. A good scientist accepts that knowledge, especially her or his own, is provisional; by contrast, a poor scientist is content to remain a theologian of the old religion. The contributors to this book are good scientists.' -- David Gordon Wilson, PhD, author of Redefining Shamanisms: Spiritualist Mediums and Other Traditional Shamans as Apprenticeship Outcomes

About this edition

• Publisher: Daily Grail Publishing
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0987422448
• ISBN 13: 9780987422446
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 366
• Editor: Hunter Jack, Luke Student (Fellow) And Tutor In German Christ Church David