Neuerscheinung: Skill and Scale in Transnational Mediumship
„Skill and Scale in Transnational Mediumship: New Communities of Practice and Enskilment“
von Marcello Múscari, Ehler, Voss, Martin, Zillinger
What role do transnational communities and techniques play in knowledge acquisition, and to what extent are such practices communicated, learned, and transformed worldwide? This question is explored in an article by our members Ehler Voss and Martin Zillinger, which they published in collaboration with Marcello Múscari in the Springer Verlag book series.
About this book
„The contributors to this volume analyze how spiritual sociality and shared socio-material worlds are formed across social worlds, that is under conditions of heterogeneity and mediatized interaction.“
The open access volume “Skill and Scale in Transnational Mediumship” presents ethnographic inquiries into new communities of practice and enskilment that revolve around techniques of mediumship, spirit possession, and trance rituals in a globally interconnected world. The increased mobility of people, things, signs, and symbols that shape and reshape trance practices and spiritual experiences has significantly widened their scope and outreach. Circulating body techniques, symbols, and artifacts play a major role in the re-organization of spirituality and contribute to the emergence of transnational “spirited publics”.
About the article by Voss und Zillinger
Mediumship refers to practices that can be found in different cultures around the world and throughout history. Invoking, coming under the influence of, or engaging with disembodied powers can take various forms, which vary according to the local politics of religion, social context, and the personal circumstances of the people involved. In Europe, since the long 19th century mediumship has been archaized as “survivals” and premodern practices. Localized at the “peripheries“ of “modernity” and often ascribed to women, strangers, fools, and children, it has since gained new grounds in the trading zones of globalization. This volume brings together ethnographic research on emerging communities of practice centered on mediumship, spirit possession, and trance rituals in a globally interconnected world. We explore how these practices are taught, learned, reproduced, transmitted, and transformed across various contexts, while reflecting on the concept of “apprenticeship” as a process of enskilment.
Marcello Múscari is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Cologne. Ehler Voss is Managing Director of the collaborative research platform Worlds of Contradiction (WOC) and Private Lecturer at the Department of Anthropology and Cultural Research at the University of Bremen; Chair of the Association for Anthropology and Medicine (AGEM); Editor-in-Chief of the medical anthropology journal Curare; and Co-founder and Co-editor of boasblogs.org. Martin Zillinger holds the Chair for Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Cologne. He is Speaker of the Center for Research on Media and Modernity and of the Interdisciplinary Research Lab “Mediterranean Liminalities”, both at the University of Cologne; and Co-founder and Co-editor of boasblogs.org. He is also active as Principal Investigator for the Project B04 “Digital Publics and Social Transformation in the Maghreb”
The “Beiträge zur Praxeologie / Contributions to Praxeology” aim to place practice above all other explanatory variables and to gain, clarify or correct the basic theoretical concepts from this pre-ordering. Both the works of Wittgenstein and those of Schütz and Garfinkel refer to a common Central European genealogy of “praxeology”, which has, however, remained largely unknown to this day. The series therefore aims to develop in three directions: through philosophical theoretical work, through empirical contributions to theory formation and through contributions to the revision of the history of science.