Transnational healing: therapeutic trajectories in spiritual trance
This multi-sited comparative ethnographic research has three objectives: 1. to examine the transnational mobility of practices and concepts related to spiritual healing and trance; 2. to compare the use of these practices in the therapeutic trajectories between spirituality and biomedicine of patients in North and South America, and Europe; and 3. to investigate the role of religious/spiritual learning in patients' health and well-being. In order to achieve these objectives, THETRANCE asks the following questions: how do therapeutic practices involving spiritual trance move and settle transnationally? How do trance-based healing practices become part of the therapeutic trajectories of people moving between spirituality and biomedicine? How do participants learn and narrate about spiritual trance, with what kinds of consistencies and differences across cultures, and how are these relevant for therapeutic purposes? Through an approach that combines social and medical anthropology, and the anthropology of religion, drawing parallels with research in psychology and psychiatry, THETRANCE focuses upon a specific cases of people learning spiritual trance for therapeutic purposes, for physical and mental health and to recover from substance addictions. The methodology is grounded in a multi-sited comparative ethnographic research in temples of the Spiritualist Christian Order Vale do Amanhecer (Valley of the Dawn) in Brazil, the United States, Portugal and Italy. THETRANCE is innovative in combining the analysis of therapeutic trajectories between spirituality and biomedicine with the focus upon the process of learning spiritual trance through a transnational perspective. In doing so, it unsettles pathological reductions of spiritual trance to understand how these experiences are rather used therapeutically in industrialized societies, contributing to the current debates on the discernment between spiritual and pathological experiences.