The feeling of voluntary control and awareness of movement is fundamental to our notions of selfhood and responsibility for actions, yet can be lost in neuropsychiatric syndromes (e.g. delusions of control, non-epileptic seizures) and culturally influenced dissociative states (e.g. attributions of spirit possession). The brain processes involved remain poorly understood. We used suggestion and ...

The aim of this study is to investigate how divine worlds can be created, vitalized, and lived by people. Focusing not on cognition and operating through things but on bodily action with things, this paper examines the actuality of these actions, which occur prior to the cognitive articulation of the event and create novel experiences of the world. It reconsiders Alfred Gell’s theory of idolatr...

The behaviour of so called traditional patients has been the topic of anthropological research for the last thirty years. Myths have been and constructed and rejected, one being that patients with chronic and less incapacitating illness see rather traditional healers than allopathic medical treatment. The case study with which we are concerned in this paper is the illness of a young girl who is...

Transnational processes of stigmatization and criminalization of poverty associated to neoliberal models of development unfold locally in various modalities and intensities of depacification of everyday life. In this framework, this paper presents the case study of a well known spirit possession devotion in Venezuela, the cult of María Lionza, where the enormous symbolic, structural and repress...

" Doubtless," quoth the author of'Hudibras,' "the pleasure is as great of being cheated as to cheat." Is not this, in fact, the true philosophy of that dallying with the pseudo-marvellous which of late has been so much in vogue ? Credulity, indeed, as Dean Swift happily remarked, is a much more peaceful possession of the mind than Curiosity. It might have been supposed that, after the many expo...