Dissertation Research: Religious Healing and Cultural Models in an Afro-Brazilian Community

在非裔巴西人的灵魂附体宗教中，人们在痛苦的时候寻求治愈，通过出神、精神痛苦、仪式化的舞蹈动作以及不同的手势和姿势与灵魂接触。这些参与代表了运动和感官体验的文化模式。一名文化人类学专业的学生将通过深入研究个人的身体存在方式来研究这些模型，检查展示这些模型的个人差异，并探索个人的身体风格如何与他们在精神疗愈社区中的活动相互作用。本研究通过参与者观察、以人为中心的半结构化访谈、任务排序、焦点小组、日常生活和仪式活动的大量录像和记录以及共识分析，试图了解社会文化生活的身体方面。该项目将评估这样一个命题，即灵媒的身体表现与他或她所体现的精神的文化理解的身体特征越相符，他或她的治疗能力就越强。这项研究验证了这样一种假设，即身体参与是治疗效果认知中的关键组成部分。除了有助于年轻社会科学家的教育外，这项研究还将促进我们对灵疗师如何完成治疗的理解。这一新知识将引起所有社会中健康和福利专业人员的兴趣，因为在这些社会中，这种治疗做法很普遍。

In Afro-Brazilian spirit-possession religion, people seeking healing during times of distress engage with spirits through trance, spiritual afflictions; ritualized dance movements, and diverse gestures and postures. These engagements represent cultural models of movement and sensory experience. A cultural anthropology student will investigate these models through an in-depth study of individuals' bodily ways of being to examine individual variation in displaying those models and to explore how individuals' body styles interact with their activities in a spiritual healing community. Employing participant observation, person-centered and semi-structured interviews, ranking tasks, focus groups, extensive videotaping and notation of movement in daily and ceremonial life and consensus analysis, this study seeks to understand bodily aspects of sociocultural life. The project will assess the proposition that the greater the medium's bodily displays correspond with the culturally understood bodily characteristics of the spirits that he or she embodies, the greater his or her rank of healing power. This tests the hypothesis that bodily engagement is a crucial component in perceptions of healing efficacy.In addition to contributing to the education of a young social scientist, this research will advance our understanding of how healing is accomplished by spiritualist healers. The new knowledge will be of interest to health and welfare professionals in all societies where such healing practices are prevalent.