Angela Puca AP: Hello everyone I’m Angela and welcome back to my channel. We are here at Leeds Trinity University. It’s the second day of the Conference of the British Association for the Study of Religions and I’m extremely honoured to have here, as a guest on my channel, and to interview, Bettina Schmidt. Bettina is an Anthropologist and Professor in Religious Studies at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David. She has done an extensive amount of research and fieldwork in Brazil with ecstatic religions and spirit possession.

So I’m really, really happy to have you here on my channel today.

Prof Bettina Schmidt BS: Thank you very much for the invitation and it’s a pleasure to be here.

AP: Thank you I also have to mention that Bettina is the President of the British Association for the Study of Religions. So I imagine that for her it has been quite a busy conference.

BS: But also a pleasure. It’s always nice to meet colleagues. With some of them, I see only at conferences, so I’m always pleased to come to our annual Conference of the British Association Study of Religions.

AP: I have two books by Bettina here with me but, of course, many more will be referenced in the infobox to this video. So check out the info box for all the references and publications.

So there are a few questions that I’d like to ask you. So the first one is that basically, I read in this book “Spirits and Trance in Brazil” that one of your methodologies is to use a ‘deictic’ approach and the idea of ‘provincialising’ the understanding of religious experience. So could you explain to us what this is and how you came up with it here?

BS: Well I did research in Brazil in 2010 and different religious communities. I attended ceremonies and interviewed people in Candomblé, which is an Afro-Brazilian religion, Umbanda, another Brazilian religion, in spiritism, Kardicism. I also spoke with people involved in Christian denominations, including Pentecostalism and in order to gather their understanding of what happened when they are speaking, channelling spirits of the ancestors and they are embodying deities from Africa, or when they are enriched by the Holy Spirit and what does it mean for these people to experience these very intense religious phenomena. And so I interviewed people, I attended ceremonies and spoke with colleagues, I read a lot of books and I struggled to find a way to speak about it from an academic point of view.

And then, I think it was a year after came back from the field, I attended a conference in Hungary on spirit possession and I spoke about the phenomena that some Kardicists, Spiritists don’t want to use the term ‘spirit possession’ and/or any other terms linked to it. And I spoke about a Spiritist, you know, we are not possessed but then five minutes later spoke about channelling a Guardian Angel and then a colleague, Michael Lambek mentioned, afterwards in a discussion, that perhaps the concept of ‘deictic’ would be quite a useful way to look into it further. So I got home and I then ordered the book you mentioned when he wrote an article about Spiritualising God question mark. And the term deictic suddenly makes sense to me.

To explain, deictic comes from linguistic studies. So it refers to a term which we really understand only in the context. For instance, the term ‘here’ or ‘there’ can have different meanings. It can have the meaning of, here at Leeds Trinity, here in the UK, here in Europe. So it has a range of meanings and we understand only what I mean when I said ‘I’m here’ in the wider context.

And the same is also applied to aspects of religion and aspects of God, aspects of religious experience and including also spirit possession. The meaning we attach to the word can only be understood within the context and this allowed me to value the meaning, the believers, and practitioners, attach to the term. I do not need to make a decision about this is right, this is wrong, this is the correct version, a version to do it and this is the incorrect version because everything is correct, everything has value, and it always depends on the meaning attached by the practitioners, by the believers and therefore, I use, therefore, the determinate phrase deictic as a framework to demonstrate that religious phenomenon, religious experience or trance or spirit possession or the whole concept of deity and spirits can have a range of meanings and there is not a good or a bad meaning, meaning make sense to the group, to the believers.

AP: That’s really interesting. So basically, something that is understood from the deictic point of view means that it’s context-sensitive but also sensitive to the personal belief system of the individual that you are studying.

BS: Absolutely and so you need to learn quite a lot, you need to understand the context. The context does not mean only the religious context or the cultural context, there is also the social context. So when we look, therefore, at the meaning of context, within the discussion of deictic, we have to see the wide range of contexts. Not just the religious context or the cultural context, there is also the social context and the historical context. Looking at, for instance, spirit possession in Candomblé in the 1930s. There was an American anthropologist, Ruth Landes who wrote a book on “City of Women,” she called it and had quite a feminist interpretation of Candomblé communities in Salvadore de Bahia. Her interpretation made sense in her time period, in the 1930s but Brazil was very different than was it today, therefore when we use the term deictic or we look at phenomena from a deictic point of view, we have to keep all these different contexts into consideration: gender, social, historical, religious and cultural frameworks.

AP: Do you think that this kind of approach might present issues in terms of generalizing the definition of something? I mean, if you are studying, for example, spirit possession in Brazil and you are using a deictic approach which provincialises, somehow the religious experience and it is extremely sensitive to the context and personal belief system, does it mean that it is not possible to have a general understanding of spirit possession in Brazil? Do you need do you necessarily need to relate to one specific context which is quite small and one specific belief system which might relate to just one person or just one group of people?

BS: This is a very good question. When I wrote the book I had in mind, really showing the diversity of the definition of spirit possession and the way it is used. However, since then I looked much more wider, in the wider area of religious experience and I realized also coming back to the concept of trance or the concept of spirit possession that we also have to keep in mind global influences. So I’m, at the moment, playing a little bit with the term ‘glocalise.’

AP: Glocalise?

BS: Glocalise, which shows that we have local influences but also global phenomena. Because when we look at spirit possession or trance we also have to keep in mind wider influences and impacts on understanding of concepts. We cannot look at spirit possession without also having in mind all the negative stereotypes we have to address when we only do certain spirit possession. And therefore, when I wrote the book, I had in mind really the diversity of local expression, that even within one country, such as Brazil, the understanding is quite diverse. I come to an understanding that we, nonetheless, have to look wider, we have to open our viewpoint. It also investigates the impact of global influences. In definition, the petitioners in Brazil, in various different communities, all hate the term spirit possession. They don’t use the term spirit possession

AP: But they do spirit possession.

BS: They practice something and they use other terms, they use incorporation or mediumship.

AP: So it’s just a label…

BS: Yes and the label is negative because of the global influences, because of the negative picture of it with the ‘crazy possessed women’ and in reality, it is a totally normal experience for them but they use other terms. However, when we write about it as an academic term you usually translate terms, not only into English but also into academic phrases and the term spirit possession is quite a well-known term, such as Shamanism, your own research area. Therefore we are using terms which we then fill with different meanings. And on the one hand, we have to make sure that we are using the same term so that we can start comparing issues and comparing experiences. But we also may have to make sure that the people we write about are happy with the way they write about them.

AP: Yeah but sometimes there is a discrepancy between what people believe and what they actually do. At least that’s what I’m experiencing in my research. So, for example, there might be informants that could not be happy with the words I use because they have a certain connotation attached to that specific word but it’s actually their understanding of that word. It is just loaded with personal or culturally negative connotations which are not really linked with the academic… I mean the academic use of that word is not really loaded with that kind of connotations. So sometimes there’s a discrepancy between the understanding that academics have of certain words and the understanding that the practitioners have of certain words and so that can create a bit of a conflict between the researcher and the researched. Because you don’t know whether to be academically accurate or to respond to the needs of your informants and what your informants might like.

BS: There used to be a discrepancy between people experiencing religious experiences and people explaining religious experiences. However, Ann Taves even makes the point that they subvert a group the elders have to investigate. Referring to William James she speaks about the people who are the mediators, people who write books about the experience, who argue that what they’re writing is also a type of science, a type of study and we have to take it seriously. We cannot just say, oh this is believed, this is faith. No, this is for them a way to communicate about their belief system. So it’s even more complicated, it’s not just one group and one another group but it’s also a third group who describe their belief as, for instance, Spiritism. Spiritists describe what they are doing as communication with the spirits of ancestors, for them, it’s nothing to do with belief or faith. Some of them are atheists but they communicate with the spirits.

AP: That’s very interesting and I also find it to be true in my own research in Italy. So there seems to be a common thing among these kinds of practices which is also interesting in and of itself. So the second question that I’d like to ask you is what definition would you give of Shamanism? What is, in your opinion, the right or the closest to the right definition of Shamanism?

BS: Well, I always argue there is not a right definition and they’re always different ones. When I was a student we looked at Shamanism from Mircea Eliade’s point of view and we defined Shamanism as being involved with spirit guides and sending the soul up to a different level in order to find out what the problem of the patient is and then coming back and then communicating their solution to the patient. This, to some degree, made sense in the research area of Eliade and so Asia. In South America we are applying the term Shamanism also to the indigenous belief system where Shamanism again is, usually, there’s a Shaman in a community who takes the role of healer, as a doctor in order to communicate with the ancestors. But the communication is sometimes in a different way, they take ayahuasca, for instance, they initiate the journey with a certain set of ingredients. And nowadays we also apply the term Shamanism to these experiences, so the term Shamanism, from a very limited definition fifty years ago by Mircea Eliade, has widened and it’s no longer just applied to Siberia or to Asia, Central Asia but to various different phenomena. And the colleague David Wilson, who wrote his PhD in Edinburgh also applies it to Spiritualism. I had a discussion with him a couple of years ago when I organized a small conference on Spirit Possession in France, where he presented his ideas. At that time, it was before I did my own research in Brazil, I did some study on Spiritism in Puerto Rico for my own PhD many, many years ago and I was not convinced, at the time, that the application of the term Shaman on spiritualist healers make sense. However, since then and doing my research in Brazil and doing a lot of interviews with them, Spiritists and Brazilian participant Spiritists, I got to the understanding that David’s application of the term made sense because this is also what they are doing in their communication, a form of healing by channelling the spirit, for instance, of a doctor, they can heal the patients without touching them. And therefore, this is also a form of, what they are doing is a form of Shamanism. And therefore, I have come now to a wider understanding of Shamanism.

However the question was what is Shamanism and how can I define it and therefore my definition, but it’s really an ad hoc definition, would be that a Shaman and so Shamanism is experienced around one person, Shaman. It can be male or female. Then this person gains special powers via the interaction with this other world with our outer world. It can be that the world of ancestors can be a world of spirits, animal spirits, and spirits of nature.

AP: Saints.

BS: Saints and so can be various different entities but again, powers which then like channelling through them in order to heal.

AP: Do they need to be aware that they are channelling this power or can it happen even without the person acknowledging that they are in this kind of communication because, for example, in Italy, there are healers that use the prayers and the powers of the Saints but they are not always aware of what they are doing? So it is just kind of automatic. It’s been taught to them by their grandparents and they do it as a part of a tradition and not always they are aware that they are communicating within a different reality. Sometimes it’s just part of their lineage, so do you think it is necessary for them to acknowledge that they are diving into this, you know, non-ordinary reality?

BS: No, I think it is the same with my explanation of spirit possession. I think from an academic point of view, we use and apply academic terms and experience in order to categorize and analyse them but the practitioner, they use other ways to speak about it and even the Brazilian Spiritist usually, when it happened the first couple of times, they are not even aware what they are doing and only then, when they are then involved in a community and learn to speak about it, they suddenly find their terms to express what they are doing but this is then, more or less, taught by a community. They have an experience, they don’t understand the experience and then they, sometimes family members or neighbour or friend tells them, oh you need to speak with this and this person, this person can explain what you are going through and suddenly they find terms to express what they are doing. But without this community they would find, perhaps, different terms, just think about it.

AP: Or no terms at all.

BS: Or no terms.

AP: So basically, the experience comes first and the definition comes later and it may not come at all in some cases.

BS: Absolutely.

AP: Because the focus, really, in Shamanism is the experience. It’s just us scholars and we have to rack our brains to understand.

BS: And to write books about it.

AP: And then to write other books to say, well, actually there are other things to take into consideration. So it’s really a never-ending cycle but it is a fun one. It means that we know more and more things and we discover more and more things. And also the last question would be, what has your experience in Brazil taught you about Shamanism, Shamanism in general besides the Brazilian context?

BS: Well, I must admit, I learned from my research in Brazil to be, perhaps, more open-minded. I did research on ecstatic religion before my PhD was on Puerto Rico and Spiritism and Santeria and I did research in New York City among immigrant communities including Haitian Vodou, Chango of Trinidad and Tobago. There I was fascinated by the performance, by the spectacle of the performance. But my engagement in Brazil, with the people and my interviews with them, really opened my mind of how complex this experience is and how diverse the experience is but also how enriched people felt afterwards. And I really started… I’m still not sure that I fully understand what they are going through because I haven’t had the experience myself. But I started to acknowledge and to understand what it meant for them to channel the spirit of a doctor or to embody the African deity. This is a very powerful experience and it can be initiated by many indigenous Shamans who are doing that in the Amazon by taking ayahuasca or other, this can be initiated by drum music, and it can also happen just at the moment. And I felt this is a very powerful experience and I started to realize the power of experience.

AP: Yeah that’s very interesting. So you think that what your experience in Brazil taught you about Shamanism, in general, is to focus more on the experience itself if I’m understanding correctly what you’re saying?

BS: Yes and that we really need to engage the Shaman. I think we need to understand, often the research in Shamanism research about the patients who go to the Shaman, to consult with the Shaman. But I think what we also need to do is to work with the Shamans themselves and understand what they experience, what they see, the vision, the colour, these ideas which pop into their heads by not moving at all, lying just on the ground. This is, I think, what is fascinating and should be studied much more.

AP: So, you think we are going towards a new way of defining Shamanism or religious experiences in general here in Religious Studies?

BS: Yes, definitely. Shamanism, I think, has widened in the last couple of years, extensively. On the one side, of course, we have the movement with Michael Harner and the Neo-Shamanism but I think we have now a wider understanding of the diversity of Shamanism in general but with religious experience, we also have a wide understanding of religious experience. I’m also the director of the Religious Experience Research Centre at the University which is linked to Alistair Hardy and we have now also an understanding it’s possible to have a religious experience without being religious. Some people use the term religious and spiritual experience but some people don’t like the term spiritual and therefore I’ve used, in some publications, the term ‘non-ordinary’ as a way to really express, as an umbrella term, the diversity of this experience. It can be religious, it can be spiritual, it can be non-religious, it can be secular it’s non-ordinary. And I think this is what we are starting to realize, that also the study of religion is the study of various different forms of experiences: spiritual, non-spiritual, secular, atheism. This all is part of the study of religion.

AP: That’s very interesting and I quite agree that we are moving towards that direction. So I really thank you, Bettina, for this interview. It was extremely interesting and I’m sure that even our audience will find it interesting. So thank you again very much for being here on my YouTube channel and I thank you all for watching this video and do remember to stay tuned for all the Academic Fun.

Bettina’s Contact details:

Prof Bettina Schmidt

Director of the Religious Experience Research Centre

Institute of Education and Humanities

University of Wales Trinity Saint David

Lampeter, UK

Email: b.schmidt@uwtsd.ac.uk

STUDIES MENTIONED IN THE INTERVIEW

Lambek, M. (2009) ‘Provincializing God? Provocations from an anthropology of religion’, in de Vries, H. (ed), Religion: Beyond a Concept, Fordham Univ Press, pp. 120–138.

Wilson, D. G. (2013) Redefining Shamanisms: Spiritualist Mediums And Other Traditional Shamans As Apprenticeship Outcomes, Bloomsbury Academic.

BETTINA’S PUBLICATIONS

BOOKS

Schmidt, Bettina E.

2016, co-ed. with Stephen Engler Handbook of Contemporary Brazilian Religions (Brill Handbooks on Contemporary Religion, vol. 13) DenHague: Brill.

2016, edited The Study of Religious Experience: Approaches and Methodologies. Durham: Equinox.

2016 Spirits and Trance in Brazil: Anthropology of Religious Experiences. London: Bloomsbury.

2010, co- edited with Lucy Huskinson Spirit Possession and Trance: New Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Continuum Advances in Religious Studies series). London: Continuum.

2008 Caribbean Diaspora in the USA: Diversity of Caribbean Religions in New York City. Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate.

ARTICLES (each with DOI):

2017 Varieties of Non-Ordinary Experiences in Brazil – A Critical Review of the Contribution of Studies of ‘Religious Experience’ to the Study of Religion. International Journal for Latin American Religion, Vol. 1, pp.

DOI 10.1007/s41603-017-0006-5

2016 Contemporary Religions in Brazil. Oxford Handbooks Online, Editor-in-Chief Mark Juergensmeyer. New York: Oxford University Press. Online Publication Date: Jul 2016.

DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199935420.013.50.

2015 Spirit Mediumship in Brazil: The Controversy about Semi-Conscious Mediums. In: DISKUS: The Journal of the British Association for the Study of Religions, Vol. 17 (2), pp. 38-53. http://diskus.basr.ac.uk/index.php/DISKUS/issue/view/11

First uploaded 26 Oct 2019