This book and film provide an account of the invisible dynamics of possession and psychosis, and of how the bodies and souls of Muslim patients are shaped by the conflicting demands of Islam and the psychiatric institutions of European nation-states. Over several years, Christia…
In her innovative new book, Kalpana Ram reflects on the way spirit possession unsettles some of the foundational assumptions of modernity. What is a human subject under the varied conditions commonly associated with possession? What kind of subjectivity must already be in place …
In her innovative new book, Kalpana Ram reflects on the way spirit possession unsettles some of the foundational assumptions of modernity. What is a human subject under the varied conditions commonly associated with possession? What kind of subjectivity must already be in place …
This dissertation is a historian of religion's approach to the repeated appearance of possessed women across time and cultures, informed by post-colonial and feminist perspectives on the study of the religious other. Beginning with a critique of the major comparative studies of …
Today there are over 70,000 Ethiopian Jews living in Israel, many of whom immigrated in two mass movements in the mid 1980's and early 1990's. Among the many cultural practices they brought with them is a spirit possession complex called zar. Zar centers around a class of invisi…
In the sixteenth-century, the phenomenon of spirit possession re-emerged as a prominent religious idiom in Jewish culture. While leading rabbis such as Isaac Luria, Hayyim Vital, and Joseph Karo generally enjoyed benign and beneficial penetrations of their bodies by divine spiri…
Zar (or zaar) is designated in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, fourth edition (DSM-IV; American Psychiatric Association, 1994) as a culture-bound syndrome. It is characterized by somatic and emotional symptoms such as generalized and persistent depress…
"Vietnam in the last two decades has experienced not only market reform and significant economic growth but also a related, symbiotic revival of popular religion. It is no surprise, then, that popular beliefs and rituals that once were attacked as wasteful and superstitious have…
"Vietnam in the last two decades has experienced not only market reform and significant economic growth but also a related, symbiotic revival of popular religion. It is no surprise, then, that popular beliefs and rituals that once were attacked as wasteful and superstitious have…
This study is about zar spirit possession as practiced in Cairo, mostly by Muslim women. The research is based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork. The word zar has two meanings. It refers to a number of spirits which have the capacity to afflict humans with physical and psyc…
This paper aims to compare the status of women in two cultures: specifically, women in white middle-class American society who have dissociative symptoms, and women who experience spirit possession in the Zar cult in the Sudan. This comparison is done from a multi-axial perspect…
Since the 1970s, new forms of spirit mediumship emerged in urban Thailand. Spirits and their mediums answered the modern needs of clients as the country underwent a major transition from an agriculture-based society to a globalized industrial economy. Meanwhile, there has been a…