When I started my undergraduate studies at Tel Aviv University I was planning on becoming a child psychologist. As I was advancing through my psychology degree I became increasingly interested in understanding how therapy actually worked, what made people get better or not, and I was becoming particularly intrigued with the role that the body, the senses, and the imagination had to play in these processes. This took me in two directions. On the one hand, I began exploring different therapeutic practices that engaged the body and the imagination within the broad field of healing practices that fall under the umbrella of “alternative therapies” or what used to be called “the new age.” These included yoga, meditation, breathing techniques, visualization, and shamanism. On the other, I also started reading on what anthropologists, people who have studied both therapy and indigenous healing across numerous social and cultural contexts, had to say on the matter.

The further I came to consider the question of therapy and healing from an anthropological perspective, the more I realized that I was coming to relate to “Western” psychotherapy as just another ethnopsychology - another system, theory, practice that answered the question “how can people heal?” in a way that made sense within its particular system cultural system. And it was then that I realized I was probably not becoming a psychologist. I was becoming an anthropologist. I was still clearly interested in the psychological aspects of human life, and so I enrolled in a PhD program in psychological anthropology at the University of California in San Diego, where I worked with Tom Csordas, one of the anthropologists that has written some of the most insightful things to date, about healing and the question of how people heal.

I followed up on my interest in healing while at UCSD, conducting an ethnographic study of contemporary Western practices of shamanism that served as the foundation of my Masters thesis. Some of the results of this study are published in the journal Ethos. While UCSD’s anthropology department is famed for its longstanding focus on psychological anthropology, during my graduate years there, it had also become a hub for the study of religion and particularly of Christianity, under the direction of Joel Robbins. Gradually, my interests in ritual and religious healing expanded into a general interest in religion and contemporary religious movements. I was becoming particularly interested in the question of how people’s experience and interaction with divine or spiritual beings was shaping their lives and the ways they lived with others. This led me to carry out an ethnographic study of a Catholic Charismatic intentional community and its two development NGOs, in France and in Rwanda. The study focused on the question of how their religious and ethical commitment to love found expression across social domains and to what relational consequences.

The doctoral research that was the basis of my dissertation was generously funded by the Wenner Gren Foundation, the Society for Psychological Anthropology’s Robert Lemelson Fellowship, and the University of California, among others. Articles based on this research have been published in American Ethnologist, the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, the Cambridge Journal of Anthropology, and I am now completing my book, based on that investigation, titled “Enchanted Social: Love and Community in Catholic Charismatic Development Missions.”

I graduate from UCSD with a doctorate in Anthropology in 2016, and have been living in Barcelona since, where I have been a Postdoctoral scholar at the Universitat Rovira I Virgili’s department of Anthropology, Philosophy, and Social Work (DAFiTS), winning both a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship, and a Beatriu de Pinos Postdoctoral Fellowship to fund my current research project on parenting in the age of the intelligent machine (TecWell). This project studies people's relationship to the future at times of crisis and social change by investigating their attitudes to child-rearing and to children's use of digital technologies. The study focuses on people’s reactions to technological innovation with particular reference to the ambivalent reception of AI, and the ways in which these reactions are shaping socialization practices across contexts.