In the First Workshop of the research project ReSpell: Religion, Spirituality and Wellbeing. A Comparative Approach of Transreligiosity and Crisis in Southern Europe (FCT grant ref. 2022.01229.PTDC), its team members will present their ethnographic and methodological routes, ideas, challenges and reflections, based on their ongoing field research in the context of the project. Emphasis will be placed on two methodological directions that permeate each ethnographic approach, namely that of ‘auto-ethnography’ (Reed-Danahay 1997, 2001; Ellis 2004; Adams, Holman Jones & Ellis 2015) and ‘collaboration’ (Lassiter 2005; Rappaport 2008; Boyer and Marcus 2021). How does an ethnographer sense the field of religion, spirituality, healing, wellbeing? What kind of narratives are produced when ethnographers of contemporary religiosity study their own culture and/or use a personal/autobiographical approach to the field? How can encounters with ‘supernatural experiences’ change an ethnographer (Goulet and Young 1994)? In what ways can collaborative ethnography promote the methodological elasticity in the study of contemporary religiosity and CAM (Complementary and Alternative Medicine)? Are autoethnographic and/or collaborative approaches necessarily exhausted in sensing, adopting and better accounting for the ‘native’s point of view’ or is that view transformed accordingly? Those are some of the questions to be discussed and debated by the team members of ReSpell, in an attempt to offer a creative dialogue concerning the sociocultural transformations, transreligious affects and ethnographic reflexions in the field and beyond it.
Detailed Programme:
10h00 – 10h15: Welcome
Session I
10h15 – 10h30: Dancing and Sensing on the Paths of the Ancestors: Autoethnographic Explorations in the Context of Contemporary Paganism in Portugal (Joana Martins, ReSpell and CRIA - NOVA FCSH / IN2PAST)
10h30 – 10h45: The Worship of Dr Sousa Martins in Portugal: Materiality and Transformation. (Emily Pierini, Dipartimento di Storia Antropologia Religioni Arte Spettacolo, Sapienza University of Rome)
10h45 – 11h00: Facing the ‘Real Ontological Challenge’. Reflections on Radical Participation in an Autoethnography with a Catholic Spiritual Practice. (Luis Muñoz Villalon, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Seville)
11h00 – 11h15: Sensing, Resisting, Transforming ‘Home’: Elasticity, (Auto-) biography, Performativity in Religio-Spiritual Healing. (Eugenia Roussou, CRIA-ISCTE / IN2PAST)
11h15 – 11h40: Discussion
11h40 – 11h50: Small Break
Session II
11h50 – 12h05: ‘Dois te Botaram, Três Vão Tirar’: Feeling the ‘Benzimentos’ through Videoart. (Natasha Martins, ReSpell and CRIA-ISCTE / IN2PAST)
12h05 – 12h20: Co-creative Ethnography on Hip Hop and Other ‘Vibrationalities’. (Natalia Koutsougera, Department of Social Anthropology, Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences)
12h20 – 12h35: Who is the ‘Native’? The Limits, and their Transgressions, of the Senses, Autoethnography and Collaboration in the Study of Contemporary Religiosities. (Anastasios Panagiotopoulos, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Seville)
12h35 – 12h50: Collaborative Research with the Invisible and the Unseen: Methodological and Sensory Challenges. (Diana Riboli, Department of Social Anthropology, Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences)
12h50 – 13h15: Discussion II
13h15 – 13h30: Final Remarks
