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

在非洲裔巴西人的精神占有宗教中，人们在痛苦的时候寻求治愈，通过恍惚、精神痛苦、仪式化的舞蹈动作和各种手势和姿势与精神接触。 这些参与代表了运动和感官体验的文化模式。 一个文化人类学的学生将通过深入研究个人的身体方式来研究这些模型，以研究在展示这些模型时的个体差异，并探索个人的身体风格如何与他们在精神治疗社区中的活动相互作用。 采用参与观察，以人为本和半结构化的访谈，排名任务，焦点小组，广泛的录像和日常和仪式生活中的运动和共识分析的符号，本研究旨在了解身体方面的社会文化生活。 该项目将评估这样一个命题，即媒介的身体展示越符合他或她所体现的精神的文化理解的身体特征，他或她的治愈能力就越强。 这测试的假设，即身体的参与是一个至关重要的组成部分，在知觉的愈合efficiency.Although有助于一个年轻的社会科学家的教育，这项研究将推进我们的理解愈合是如何完成的精神治疗师。 这些新知识将使所有社会中流行这种治疗做法的卫生和福利专业人员感兴趣。

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.