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…
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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…
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…
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…