Trance Mediums and New Media

Trance Mediums and New Media

Spirit Possession in the Age of Technical Reproduction

  • Author: Behrend, Heike; Dreschke, Anja; Zillinger, Martin
  • Publisher: Fordham University Press
  • ISBN: 9780823253814
  • eISBN Pdf: 9780823253838
  • eISBN Epub: 9780823253821
  • Place of publication:  New York , United States
  • Year of publication: 2014
  • Year of digital publication: 2014
  • Month: December
  • Language: English

Ongoing debates about the “return of religion” have paid little attention to the orgiastic and enthusiastic qualities of religiosity, despite a significant increase in the use of techniques of trance and possession around the globe. Likewise, research on religion and media has neglected the fact that historically the rise of mediumship and spirit possession was closely linked to the development of new media of communication.

This innovative volume brings together a wide range of ethnographic studies on local spiritual and media practices. Recognizing that processes of globalization are shaped by mass mediation, the volume raises questions such as: How are media like photography, cinema, video, the telephone, or television integrated in seances and healing rituals? How do spirit mediums connect with these media? Why are certain technical media shunned in these contexts?

  • Cover
  • TRANCE MEDIUMS AND NEW MEDIA
  • Title
  • Copyright
  • CONTENTS
  • List of Illustrations
  • Acknowledgments
  • Introduction: Trance Mediums and New Media
  • On the Subject of Spirit Mediumship in the Age of New Media
  • Trance Mediums and New Media: The Heritage of a European Term
  • Absence and the Mediation of the Audiovisual Unconscious
  • New Media and Traveling Spirits: Pentecostals in the Vietnamese Diaspora and the Disaster of the Titanic
  • Numinous Dress/Iconic Costume: Korean Shamans Dressed for the Gods and for the Camera
  • Rites of Reception: Mass-Mediated Trance and Public Order in Morocco
  • Media and Manifestation: The Aesthetics and Politics of Plenitude in Central India
  • Media Transformations: Music, Goddess Embodiment, and Politics in Western Orissa/India
  • Transmitting Divine Grace: On the Materiality of Charismatic Mediation in Mali
  • Spaces of Refusal: Photophobic Spirits and the Technical Medium of Photography
  • ‘‘Look with Your Own Eyes!’’: Visualizations of Spirit Mediums and Their Viewing Techniques in Tanzanian Video Films
  • Possession Play: On Cinema, Reenactment, and Trance in the Cologne Tribes
  • Trance Techniques, Cinema, and Cybernetics
  • Notes
  • Works Cited
  • List of Contributors
  • Index

Subjects

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