Spiritual Agency Research Articles

Stone-agency: sense, sight and magical efficacy in traditions of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland

ABSTRACTThis article examines the materiality and mediality of sacred and ‘magical’ stones in Northern European vernacular belief practices (especially Gaelic traditions). In particular, it considers their attribution to specific deities and metaphysical beings, their role in healing rituals and in enabling humans to perceive metaphysical realms. The paper’s focus – via methodologies and theories recently developed in both religious aesthetics and ‘new materialism’ – is on the materiality and ontology of the objects and the associated visions and the ‘relations’ such stones are understood to have produced. As ‘sites’ of divine agency and efficacy the stones (including orthostats, amulets and prehistoric flints) were imbued not only with spiritual agency, but also placed within an invisible network of relations that linked individuals, non-human animals, the landscape and the metaphysical realms. This panoply of relations is crucial to the aesthetic logic guiding selection and ‘attribution’ to specific deities/spiritual beings. The theoretical framework for this discussion explores the degree to which such material culture can be considered ‘aniconic’ and the attendant conceptualisation of ‘efficacy’ and ‘agency’ as applied to interpreting the religious function of the stones.

The Ahmao (Miao) schism: the problem of spiritual agency in encounters between church and state in southwest China

The majority of Ahmao in southwest China have been Christian since a mass conversion movement took place in the 1900s. Throughout the century, Ahmao congregations have gone through several reforms and survived many political campaigns. After two decades of prosperity through China’s reform era, since the 2000s many Ahmao congregations in northern Yunnan have experienced schisms. This paper sets out to investigate a schism that took place in a medium-size Ahmao congregation between 2005 and 2015. Based upon several years of continuous fieldwork, I found that the alleged schism in this Ahmao congregation – rather than describing a long-standing fracture in the community – appears intermittently and should be considered as an effect of religious regulation that problematizes the agency of spiritual practice. Under the regime of religious regulation in contemporary China, Ahmao congregations have been delicately negotiating between different modes of agency as changes in Christian practice become necessary or inevitable.

Vernacular as a space: writing in the Deccan

ABSTRACTThis is not an essay about mysticism in the Deccan. The aim is neither to track the movement of holy men and cults into the Deccan, nor the expansion of their networks and the creation of sacred geographies; this essay is also not about the comparative textual and spiritual discourses of saints from different sects. Instead, the attempt here is to suggest that every geographical region had a complex world of religious domains and of life-worlds in which multiple faith-agencies were active, catering to different audiences. There were some spiritual agencies that were part of larger ‘global’ networks, and others which were ‘local’ or vernacular. The term ‘vernacular’ is a description not necessarily limited to the discursive language used. This vernacular life-world was shaped by a several factors, natural and cultural: geographical realities, shared political and historical memories. Even if such a vernacular region, in this case, the Deccan, was a part of an ‘Islamic frontier’ politically and spiritually, certain vernacular traditions such as the Marathi literary spiritual movement cannot be easily accommodated within such a model of frontiers, contact zones and interfaces. This essay considers literary and spiritual practices in the northern Deccan from the thirteenth to the eighteenth centuries, primarily in the Marathi language, to demonstrate a spatial and conceptual character that was not just linguistic.

When Illness is Cure: Spiritual Agency Over Humans Beings

When Illness is Cure: Spiritual Agency Over Humans Beings

W poszukiwaniu kobiecej sprawczości duchowej

In the paper, I explore the issue of female spiritual agency through ethnographic fieldwork conducted among Polish converts from Catholicism to a female dominated, Hindu rooted new religious movement, the Brahma Kumaris. My data show that reasons of conversion include dissatisfaction of gender relations. However, instead of becoming feminists, the women at the center of my research commit to strict ascetic discipline. The changes that this commitment entails totally reorganize their relations within their families and their social lives. Drawing on contemporary developments in anthropological approaches to agency, I focus on theorizing those elements of agency and identity that go beyond liberal feminist concepts of women’s emancipation. The Brahma Kumaris is a marginal group, but the general pattern of analysis of renegotiation of family life and relations beyond the private sphere may apply to other women’s groups.

African Pentecostalism as entrepreneurial space

Purpose – This study aims to intend to examine how African Pentecostals use the structure of their religion to re-enact their entrepreneurial ideals and uniqueness and develop enterprising attitude and altitude. Also to appraise how they manipulate their ethnic cultural assets and faith-based networks to stimulate and maintain their entrepreneurial activities. Design/methodology/approach – A case study of a specific religious organisation was exploited whereby a few number of adherents from a particular ethnic church in the UK were interviewed. The theoretical framework of Mead’s symbolic interaction was explored to accomplish the study’s objectives. Findings – Findings demonstrate the ability of an ethnic minority group to adjust to a secondary range of social conditions in the country of residence through adoption of a theology that tracks the contours of their culture. Research limitations/implications – This paper emphasises the significance of material expressions of spiritual agency that acts as instrument of establishing the active, progressing self of ethnic minority group in the country of residence, thus, illuminating the interconnections between religion and enterprise. Such understandings present great prospects to fabricate new sites of meaning among a particular minority group through understanding various contradictions embedded in their religious practices. Practical implications – The study stresses the significance of material expressions of spiritual agency that acts as avenue for disadvantaged group to engage in entrepreneurial activities. The Pentecostal enclave thus helps immigrants to keep body and soul together in an environment that is embedded with ethnic penalties. Social implications – The African Pentecostal movement serves, not only as instrument of converting others, but its Prosperity gospel emphasis the significance of material expression of spiritual agency. This acts as a means of establishing the active, progressing self, with capacity to produce law-abiding citizenry among ethnic groups. Originality/value – The study illuminates the interconnections between religion and enterprise that offer great opportunities to fabricate new sites of meaning among a particular minority group through understanding various contradictions embedded in their religious practices.

Sorcery and the Moral Economy of Agency: An Ethnographic Account

AbstractAn ethnographic account of sorcery accusation, violence, and subsequent community discussion provides a basis to explore the ‘moral economy of agency’ that shapes expressions and interpretations of personhood in Vanuatu. Mediated historically by transforming social, political, and economic circumstances, agency is demonstrated to be patterned according to culturally specific ontological and moral schemes. Key local categories of embodied personhood – including man ples (man place), man wan (man one), and jelus (jealousy) – are examined to elucidate two relationally entwined analytic categories, referred to as ‘distributive’ and ‘possessive’ agency. Such categories, it is argued, fundamentally shape expressions and interpretations of moral being and doing, including by providing a basis for identifying morally abject expressions of personhood. Taking seriously the important role of spiritual agency within such moral economies, this paper provides new ethnographically grounded insights into the ways in which communities and individuals negotiate moral being within transforming contexts of economic and sacred power.

The Post-Colonial Ecology of Siberian Shamanic Revivalism

The Sakha national revival in Sakha (Yakutia), Siberia, aims to recover dying elements of Sakha culture, in order to preserve the Sakha people’s distinctive identity. And yet this revival is itself imbued with assumptions rooted in the European cultures that initiated modernist colonisation. Contemporary Sakha shamanism reflects the tensions within the nationalist revival, in the contrasting tendencies for activists, firstly, to recover what is seen as the old, genuine shamanic practice—and, secondly, to assimilate foreign spiritual techniques. But when these two strands of endeavour are examined with reference to the perceptions of person and environment that formed the basis of pre-Soviet Sakha life, it becomes apparent that they complement each other. Both facilitate the intersection of contrasting knots of relationship, predicated on differing ontologies. Sakha people currently live and work within institutions that have their roots in European modernism. However, older Sakha relationships with a live natural environment have not entirely disappeared. The authors suggest that the persistent presence of an environment imbued with spiritual agency differentiates the Sakha shamanic revival from the European traditions that shape its central motivations. This case reveals the importance of attending to place and environment, in the discussion of post-colonialist identity politics.

Cards onKiriwina: Magic, Cosmology, and the ‘Divine Dividual’ inTrobriand Gambling

AbstractTrobriandIslanders adopted card gambling fromEuropeans in colonial times alongside a growing familiarity with introduced money and commodities. Most ethnographic reports of gambling elsewhere inPNGhave concentrated on its secular aspects. Here I focus on its ritual dimension summarized by the notion oflaki(‘lucky’) as expressed in the agentive capacities of a new player, the ‘divine dividual’, who synthesizes elements ofSahlins's ‘divine king’ and the ‘dividual’ of theNewMelanesianEthnography. In accord with the local understandings of spiritual agency, manyTrobriand men have adapted pre‐existing magical practices for courting,kula, fishing, sorceryetc.to gambling by seeking to encompass the perceived powers of exogenousEuropeans, acknowledged as the sources oflaki, money and commodities, into their own persons in ways analogous to traditional magicians' reliance uponbalomaspirits.Trobriand gambling thus exemplifies how change following from the introduction of novelWestern practices can be effectively accommodated to preexisting religious and cultural practices through indigenous modes of personhood and agency.

A Critical Exploration of African Spirituality and Democracy in Africa

Abstract This article investigates the spiritual dimension of African politics, a significant, real, and practical variable that has received little recognition in public discourse about the practice of democracy in Africa. I focus on the role of African spiritual agency and its cosmological implications in the development of African democracy. The article argues that African spirituality is pervasive but not sufficiently strong to meet the challenges of new political realities. Through the use of critical case analysis, the study concludes that African politicians exhibit a dual loyalty, affirming Western political theories in public discourse (in most cases) while adhering to African spiritual rituals and oaths in private. The consequences of this include undermining the dividends of democracy and encouraging the dereliction of the environment.

The Rise and Demise of Missionary Wives

The white missionary couple is an assumed presence in mission history; its mid-nineteenth-century ubiquity read back into the formation of evangelical mission. This article questions that assumption by creating a chronological and conceptual framework for the professional trajectory of missionary women, and demonstrates that it was on the issue of female mission engagement that complex debates about the nature of mission were negotiated and defined. The rise of the missionary wife shaped mission history, through both the complementary rise of the civilizing mission and through active female spiritual agency. By the mid-nineteenth century, however, it was clear that missionary wives had created a space they could not fill in the evermore institutionalized and secularized world of mission building. The rise of single female religious engagement in Britain meanwhile provided a timely alternative to wifely activism, and missionary wives were increasingly institutionally marginalized by the very single female missionaries who had come to “assist” them.

Codrington,Keesing, and CentralMelanesianmana: Two Historic Trajectories ofPolynesian Cultural Dissemination

AbstractMuch has been said aboutmanasinceRobertHenryCodrington's 1891 exegesis based mainly on ethnography from theBanksIslands in northernVanuatu. InPolynesian contexts, mana has been regarded as a cultural common denominator, with comparatively minor differences within the vastPolynesian cultural area. InMelanesian scholarship, however, consistent with the general emphasis on cultural diversity within the region, it remains a matter of considerable debate whether there is much to gain from approaching mana with generalising ambitions. In his seminal contributions to the discussion,RogerKeesing insists thatCodrington mistook mana for a noun and consequently derailed scholarship onMelanesian mana. ButCodrington's work is mainly based in the language of the island ofMota, whereCodrington spent several years during his almost three‐decade long tenure as a pioneer linguist and missionary with theAnglicanMelanesianMission. And in theMota language, mana is nominalised. In this article,Iargue that this is attributable to regular visits from thePolynesian outlier Tikopia in pre‐Christian times, intensified by the proclivity of theMaori‐speaking first leaders of theMelanesianMission to identify concepts that were phonemically familiar in their search for adequate translations of theological notions related to spiritual agency. When the language ofMota was chosen as thelingua francaof theMelanesianMission in the 1860s, theBanksIslands' version of mana, soon explicitly associated with the powers of theChristianGod, was disseminated through large parts of the south and centralSolomonIslands and northernVanuatu – includingTikopia. This has provided the islands exposed to Anglicanism with relatively new notions of agency and efficacy and created some common cultural denominators.

The New Orleans Sisters of the Holy Family: African American Missionaries to the Garifuna of Belize by Edward T. Brett (review)

Reviewed by: The New Orleans Sisters of the Holy Family: African American Missionaries to the Garifuna of Belize by Edward T. Brett Anne M. Butler The New Orleans Sisters of the Holy Family: African American Missionaries to the Garifuna of Belize. By Edward T. Brett. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012. 248 pp. $30.00. Edward T. Brett selects a little-known foreign mission managed by a little-known congregation of Catholic religious women for The New Orleans Sisters of the Holy Family: African American Missionaries to the Garifuna of Belize. Although the subject might appear narrow for monograph development, this publication is important for two reasons. First, in the recent flourishing scholarship concerning American nuns and sisters, the role of women of color remains under-explored. While Anglo-European members dominated the nineteenth-century rise of American sisterhoods, women of color from diverse cultures made significant contributions to Catholic religious life. Often these achievements were ignored, if not deliberately expunged from convent records. Brett's study marks one step toward correcting this scholarly oversight. An account of sisters of color planting their ministry on soil outside the United States adds to the growing recognition of and appreciation for the innovative efforts, pedagogical stature, and spiritual agency of African American professed women. [End Page 78] Second, Brett centers on the practice of sending missionaries of one country to proselytize among the inhabitants of another, a rocky past that has left the Catholic Church with a conflicted legacy among some peoples. The Sisters of the Holy Family, as the first African American religious to preside at a foreign mission, added to the overall impact of across-culture conversion policies. On the one hand, Brett demonstrates, the sisters brought educational leadership, personal inspiration, and religious comfort to a community of desperately poor people. On the other, the Belize mission did not avoid cultural insensitivity, theological conflicts, and strained relationships. Despite honorable work, the Holy Family Sisters generated their share of disquieting episodes connected to spiritual and ethnic inclusivity, even as they negotiated daunting barriers heaped on them as religious women of color. American racism is the rope twisting the Gordian knot of the Holy Family history. Organized amidst the convoluted world of antebellum New Orleans, the handful of sisters, led by Henriette Delille, a free woman of color, grappled with unrelenting religious and secular discrimination. Yet, racist social, legal, and political categories defining ancestry and color also permeated the congregation, tangling the fabric of the sisterhood (101-102, 181, n. 42). In 1898 those complications manifested themselves in Belize, where the sisters worked with the Garifuna, an indigent black community. The author asserts that the sisters and their charges quickly built a racial bond (47), but as late as 1978, the sisterhood endured a painful period that exposed deep resistance to the cultural identity of Garifuna women in the congregation. Some of the writing could be more forceful. For example, it seems disingenuous to use "gentlemen" for wealthy white men who trolled the Quadroon Balls, assessing young girls of color as potential mistresses (16-17); "sexual predators" would be more precise. The research, however, is meticulous. Extensive interviews with and letters from the nuns authenticate the humanity in the Belize mission story. This narrative calls for additional work in the records of the [End Page 79] Holy Family Sisters, whose voices must be more fully heard in American Catholic history. Anne M. Butler Utah State University Copyright © 2013 American Catholic Historical Society

Mapuche struggles to obliterate dominant history: mythohistory, spiritual agency and shamanic historical consciousness in southern Chile

The biographical mythohistory of Rosa Kurin, an ethnically mixed Mapuche-German shaman in southern Chile in the late 1800s, expresses a ‘shamanic historical consciousness’ that advances current debates over the dynamic relationship between history and myth and between indigenous and national history. Biographical mythohistory is a mixed genre that mediates among different memoralisations of the past to obliterate dominant Chilean history and to create alternative indigenous histories. Mapuche shamanic mythohistories are simultaneously linear and cyclical: historical personages are transformed into mythical characters and sometimes back again, and mythical happenings manifest themselves repeatedly in historical events. Mapuche people create mythohistories by mythologising such shamans and historical outsiders, prioritising spiritual agency over political agency and narratively reversing the usual colonial dynamics of subordination. Mythohistories are, for rural Mapuche, a means of conveying agency, ethnic identity and ontology. They also offer a way to decolonise Mapuche history and have the potential for political mobilisation.

Spaces of spiritual citizenship: children’s relational and emotional encounters with the everyday school environment

This article addresses the issue of children’s spiritual, relational and emotional encounters with the primary school environment, with reference to concepts and theories from both education studies and human geography. Drawing on mixed-method qualitative research in two case study institutions, the article examines pupils’ photographed ‘special places’ and the embodied spiritual practices that occurred within everyday informal spaces around the school environments. The significance of adult power and children’s spiritual agency is explored in the analysis, emphasising the potentially political nature of spiritual practices and processes. In so doing, the implications for spiritual citizenship are addressed as part of the current wider interest in children’s rights and participation in school ethos and decision-making.

The Magic of Others: Mari Witchcraft Reputations and Interethnic Relations in the Volga Region

Starting from the portrayal of a Mari-speaking soothsayer in the recent Russian television series “Ivan Groznyi”, this essay asks what the Maris’ longstanding reputation for witchcraft tells us about interethnic relations in European Russia, and about the place of magic in Russia’s popular imaginaries. A Finno-Ugric-speaking group that served as a buffer between Muscovy and the Khanate of Kazan’ until it was brought under Moscow’s rule in the sixteenth century, the Mari have had a reputation for sorcery from early travelers’ accounts up until the twenty-first century. Such a reputation is shared by numerically small and militarily powerless subject populations around the world, and is often interpreted as a mechanism of exclusion. Looking at accounts from non-Mari residents of the Volga region of how they encountered and interacted with Mari magical powers during the Soviet and post-Soviet eras, I argue that at least in recent times, the reputation for sorcery does not constitute grounds for ostracism. Rather, it provides Maris with a niche in a local system of ethnic interdependence, and occasionally, with recognition at a national scale. In a situation where the definition of officially sanctioned religion is fluid and open to contestation, labeling the assumed powers of not-fully-Christianized people as “magic” helps incorporate them into a larger imaginary of spiritual agency, where boundaries between religious systems are less important than the movement between complementary ways of enlisting superhuman help. Representations of Mari witchcraft at a national and regional scale emphasize familiarity, not insurmountable strangeness, and thereby construct a narrative of Russian national strength as rooted in the state’s ability to incorporate and bridge multiple ways of knowing and being.

Toward a Postsecular “Fellowship of Deep Belief”: Sister Edgar's Techno-spiritual Quest in Don DeLillo's Underworld

This essay argues that the spiritual thesis of Underworld is postsecular in nature and calls for an understanding of cyberspatial connectivity as a potential vehicle for spiritual agency within the state of late capitalism. Through a close reading of Sister Edgar's pseudo-religious quest, which culminates in the novel's epilogue, the article posits DeLillo's cyberspace as a potentially sacred locale that is deeply rooted in the postsecular agenda.

Zimbabwe genocide: voices and perceptions from ordinary people in Matabeleland and the Midlands provinces, 30 years on

Studies on genocide in Zimbabwe in particular, and the world in general, focus on the number of people who die. However, significant attention now needs to be directed towards understanding the conditions under which the people of Matabeleland and the Midlands live after Gukurahundi. It is imperative to consider the importance of the voices, views and perceptions of the surviving victims regarding how they move on with their lives. Furthermore, it is crucial to the new frames of aspirations that the victims have developed. This can be done without wishing away the painful past, but with a desire to project into a possible and safer future. Research on Matabeleland and the Midlands provinces needs to ascertain whether or not there have been changes in the voices, views and perceptions of the victims of Gukurahundi about the impact of this genocide, 30 years after the event. If the political, economic and social conditions of the people from these areas have not changed, this constitutes a continuing silent genocide whose dimensions must be understood with a view to stopping it. To evaluate the perceptions of some victims of genocide in Zimbabwe, using interviews and questionnaires in Tsholotsho, Gweru, Mberengwa, Nkayi and Umzingwani can elicit responses to the questions regarding what I call, the victim's spiritual agency that is important when considering how the people have forged ahead with their lives despite or because of a previous history of persecution.

Religious and/or Spiritual Practices: Extending Spiritual Freedom to People with Schizophrenia

It continues to be a challenge to define and utilize spirituality in client-centred occupational therapy practice. Dialogue about spirituality is especially problematic for occupational therapists working with people with schizophrenia. To explore the meaning of religion and/or spirituality for people living with a diagnosis of schizophrenia. Nine community-based individuals with schizophrenia engaged in interviews about the meaning of religion and/or spirituality and demonstrated self-defined spiritual practices. Phenomenology, hermeneutic theory, and a symbolic interactionism framework provided methodological and analytic guidance. Participants employed religious and/or spiritual practices to cope with schizophrenia symptoms and make meaning of their lives. Individuals used multiple systems of meaning to explain their experiences. Religious and/or spiritual agency, an individual's sense of freedom to choose among the spiritual options, renewed their sense of empowerment. Therapists can engage in spiritual negotiation with clients by using well-worded empowering questions toward a common goal of life enhancement.

Definitional ceremonies in Igbo Religion: A test of Robin Horton’s Theory

This study was initiated against the background of a challenge posed by Horton (1995), in which he concluded that despite the enormous output in terms of research and writings in the area of African Indigenous Religion, previous scholars have not been able to respond adequately to three chief questions focusing on the basic tenets of the religion whose answers are important for a proper understanding of the substance of African Indigenous Religion. These questions, according to him, are: What are the focal objects or the key spiritual agencies of African religious thought? What are the attitudes of the African worshippers to the spiritual agencies indigenous to their religion? What constitute the fundamental aims of African indigenous religious life? Inspired by this challenge, the researcher undertook the study of four definitional ceremonies in Igbo Indigenous Religion to gather data for responding to these questions. In this regard, two communities, Nri and Ihiala, among the Igbo culture area of Anambra State, Nigeria, were chosen for the study. The Culture Area Methodology (CAM) as well as the Participant Observation Method (POM) were the principal design of the study. A select group of elders from the two communities were interviewed for the study. The major findings show that: “Igbo Indigenous Religion is a religion of many faiths or the type of religion in which the Supreme Being is recognized and worshipped alongside other gods, spirits and ancestors”; “the attitude of the Igbo worshippers to the spiritual agencies of their religion is egalitarian, and multi-partial, or rotational in its sensitivity to the respect and worship accorded to the various agencies; each agency is assumed to count in the economy of the welfare of the people”; “Igbo Indigenous Religion is grounded on the Igbo worldview and assumption that attendance to the gods and ancestors of the religion bring good results, while neglect leads to chastisement, bad harvest, physical illness, and various other sanctions on the offenders”; and “there are multiple goals to Igbo Indigenous Religion, almost all of them this-worldly and other (ancestral) worldly centered.” The study equally discovered that orientation to meliorism is a major aspect of Igbo Indigenous Religion. These findings corroborate Horton’s theory of African Indigenous Religion as entailing a quest for achieving control of events in the current world, and for making an investment for eventual citizenship in the world of the ancestors; and therefore, essentially a pragmatic religion. Implications of the study were closely examined and a number of recommendations for further studies were made. Key words: Igbo, Nigeria, African/Igbo indigenous religion, definitional ceremony, rituals, ceremonies.