Encounter, Selfhood, and Multiplicity
Encounter, Selfhood, and Multiplicity
This chapter discusses some of the book’s main protagonists and their stories of spiritual encounter and discovery. Through ethnographic vignettes of both experienced and neophyte mediums, this chapter argues that the body is experienced as the site of often sudden complexifications of self, through illnesses, trauma, dreams, visions, and other marked events, which all call for a fracturing and reconfiguration of the person and her borders via the encompassment of spirits. Latour’s concept of “acquiring a body” is discussed, along with other primarily phenomenological approaches that stress orientational and intersubjective processes in the formation of selfhoods. The ontological underpinnings of espiritismo’s theory of self are analyzed, and new terms and analogies are proposed in order to more successfully describe it.
Keywords: Mediumship, Illness, Spirit guides, Dreams, Divination
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