According to a widely circulated story, the celebrated anthropologist Margaret Mead was once asked by a student what she considered to be the earliest sign of human civilization. To this Mead supposedly replied that the earliest sign of civilized society was an archeologically excavated healed human femur. This is because, the story goes, while a wounded animal would simply not live long enough for its limb to heal, the healed human femur is an indication that another person took the care and time to ensure the wounded person’s survival. And it is this, the care for another and the act of healing that went with it, that marks humans as unique from animals and is the starting point of civilization. We would never know for a certainty whether or not this is something Mead actually said, although it’s very possible she did not. The human exceptionalism it implies is also today broadly contested. For example, we now have plenty of evidence that animals care for each other, including through self-medication. But what this anecdote’s broad circulation and appeal remind us of, is how central healing is to the question of what it means to be human.

How exactly healing works, or how people heal are questions that have always intrigued us, whether asked by healers, therapists, or clinicians that sought to improve their treatment’s efficacy, or by researchers that sought to uncover the underlying mechanisms explaining healing. In medicine or in reference to healing of a physical nature - for example, in trying to understand why some people healed from cancer while other did not - quite a bit of consideration has been given to the question of the “placebo effect,” and the idea that the mind somehow affects the body’s capacity to heal. The recognition that the human mind can somehow self-induce a healing response in the body is such that it led to the design of the double-blind study for medical trials. Within anthropology, the questions of healing efficacy and process have been explored through ethnographic studies of what anthropologists have called ritual, indigenous, symbolic, or religious healing. In other words, healing or curing practices that are not included in what we consider to be mainstream Western medicine or psychotherapy.

My own interest in these questions has focused primarily on contemporary shamanic practices, specifically because I find the technique they utilize to be interesting in and of itself. Shamanic journeys are exercises of the imagination, but of the imagination as an embodied practice that fully engages the senses in interesting ways. How do shamanic journeys work? Why do so many people feel so strongly impacted by their experiences during the shamanic trance? How can shamanic journeys help us understand the human imagination as a bodily function or practice, and the ways in which it is related to our health and wellbeing? I have written on some aspects of these questions, considering the healing process of the particular neo-shamanic practice of soul-retrieval here.

In the late 19th century, the German sociologist Ferdinand Tonnies drew a contrast between two ideal types of social organization, which he termed Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft. By Gemeinschaft, which is usually translated into English as “community,” Tonnies referred to the kind of spontaneous ties that are formed between people as a natural result of physical and social proximity. Gemeinschaft type relations include bonds between family members, between neighbors in a small village, or even speakers of the same language or occupations that share a sense of kinship or identity based in a similarity of experience. Contrasted with Gemeinschaft is Gesselschaft, a social organization where individuals enter into relation with others to satisfy their own selfish interests, where relations are instrumental, almost contractual. Tonnies certainly romanticizes the sociality implied in Gemeinschaft, just as he disparaged of Gesellschaft relations, and considering that he was writing in a time characterized by rapid urbanization and growing social alienation, this makes some sense.

Tonnies’s typology became highly and broadly influential, and as anthropologist Rupert Stasch argues, the idea at the base of Gemeinschaft, the notion of close social bonds as based on similarity of experience and identification became quite embedded in anthropology. Stasch himself challenges this idea in his ethnography of the Koroway of Papua New Guinea, showing that the Koroway actually constituted social bonds through difference, by considering the ways in which they were Other to each other. The question of otherness and similarity in the formation of communities touches on many of the core questions of anthropology and some of the most vexing issues of our time. The current worldwide rise of populism and the challenge it represents to liberalism and liberal democracy, for example, bring to the fore the question of community as an idealized social organization based in identity.

My own research brings to the fore the question of community as it is lived by people who elevate the craft of community into a spiritual task. The need to create community among the members of Emmanuel, the Catholic Charismatic community I studied in France and in Rwanda is more than idealized. It is nearly sacralized. The making of community is understood in Emmanuel as a “school for love” - a means through which people demonstrate and attest to their relationship with God, as well as an opportunity to practice and hone their capacity to love, which they see as a means of both coming closer to and imitating God. This communitarian effort raises many interesting questions. In my research so far I have focused specifically on two broad sets questions. One has to do with the ways in which people think of and relate to the notion of community in and of itself. This, for example, touches on the ways in which making community is perceived as a spiritual task, or the ways in which the concept of community is understood as a challenge to liberalism. The other set of questions has to do with the craft of community itself, the question of how a community is actually made. If we understand communities to arise organically or naturally in contexts of proximity and similarity, how, then, are communities made when no such proximity is available, as is the case of intentional communities such as Emmanuel? What are the actual, pragmatic strategies that make community? And what role do the establishment of similarity, identity, or difference play in this effort?

I have written more about community making and relationalism here.

Lots of people today seek alternative forms of healing and therapy, and one particular practice that seems to be gaining a lot of ground is shamanism or neo-shamanism. The actual term “shaman” originates with the Tungus-speaking tribes of Siberia, but it is used today by many people to refer to any individual making use of particular trance techniques for healing. The scholar that is most responsible for the universalization of the term is religious historian Mircea Eliade. In his book, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, published in 1964, Eliade uses extensive cross-cultural comparative data to argue that shamanism is both an ancient and a universal phenomenon. Anthropologists today shy away from universalizing claims of this types, but it was in fact anthropologists, such as Carlos Castaneda and Michael Harner, who were largely responsible for the universalization and popularization of shamanic practices, decontextualizing and transforming them into Westernized therapeutic practices popularly known today as neo-shamanism, core-shamanism, or neo-paganism. We might say that the contemporary Western shamanic landscape today can be roughly divide into two groups: practices that follow Michael Harner’s cultural decontextualization principle - what he calls “core shamanism” - that tend to have a stronger therapeutic focus, and those practices that are more nature-oriented and magic-oriented, including Wicca, white witchcraft, and Godess religions, and increasingly in light of growing concerns for environmental collapse, eco-shamanism.

Some anthropologists have been critical of what they consider to be an appropriation and commoditization of traditional or local practices by people practicing neo-shamanism. Contemporary Western practitioners of shamanism have been called “wannabe Indians” or “plastic medicine men”, and accused of distorting and diluting original shamanic practices, simultaneously marginalizing and romanticizing indigenous people in the process. Certainly, neo-shamanic and neo-pagan practices are based in an undeniable romanticization of indigenous cultures and practices, and they also borrow and take out of context specific cultural practices in ways that are certainly worthy of critique. But neo-shamanism is also today very much a practice in its own right, and if we wanted to understand it, along with its undeniable and growing appeal, then we need to move beyond this type of critique, and consider neo-shamanism in its own right rather than as a perversion of indigenous shamanisms. In fact, an interesting question to ask here, especially considering the role that anthropologists have played in bringing neo-shamanism into being, has to do with anthropology’s general distaste or at least indifference to contemporary Westernized forms of shamanism and similar practices.

I have studied neo-shamanism and other “New Age” or alternative therapies over the past twenty years or so, and I still find this field of study fascinating, whether we consider it primarily through the lens of religion (as a kind of religious or spiritual movement) or that of medicine (as a type of healing practice). What anthropological reflections we have on neo-shamanism, witchcraft, and the New Age more broadly have tended to focus on trying to account for the fact that supposedly rational and modern individuals were increasingly engaging in magico-religious practices. This continues to be an interesting question, even as anthropologists have established without doubt that contra to what many scholars predicted in the earlier 20th century, modernity and the advancement of science have definitely not done away with religion or other practices that maintain an enchanted view of the universe. In fact, if anything, in spite of organized religion losing ground in some areas of the world (primarily Western Europe), the vast majority of people keep maintaining a view of the universe as very much enchanted. One area in particular which I find interesting in this respect, and which has been in the focus of my current ethnographic investigation, has to do with the anti-tech reaction that some people have had to the many rapid changes - technological and otherwise - that our society is undergoing today, exemplified in some cases in a “return to nature” reaction.

Christianity is often called a religion of love, and love may have always been central to its theology. But the Christian preoccupation with love has certainly not always been as intense as it currently is. As many ethnographic accounts of Christianity show, the current preoccupation with love among practicing Christians extends across denominations, whether in its various iterations as charity or compassion, or in shaping believers’ relationship with God as close and loving. This preoccupation with love, however, is perhaps most evident today within Catholicism, where especially following the changes introduced by the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s, love has taken center stage theologically, in the context of the Church’s social doctrine, in the very conceptualization that “God is Love” (go no further than Pope Benedict XVI’s 2005 encyclical bearing this very title), and in shaping the ritual practices and daily lives of Catholics.

One obvious question that all this raises is why? Why is it that love has become at this particular moment in time a concept through which so many people make sense of their lives and their faith? Another interesting question is how? How do people live an ideal of love across the different domains of their lives? How do they go about trying to realize this ideal, and what is the shape that different relationships take within this project? And finally, what are the implications that this particular ethical orientation has - relationally, socially, possibly even politically? These are some of the questions that I explore in Enchanted Social, the book manuscript I’m currently finishing writing.

Enchanted Social is an ethnographic account of the Emmanuel Community, a transnational Catholic Charismatic intentional community founded in France in the early 1970s, and its two affiliated humanitarian NGOs, Le Rocher Oasis des cités and Fidesco International. Love find varied expression in Emmanuel’s community and ritual life - as the act of making community, as friendship, as charity, and perhaps above all, as the divine gift of grace - and it is through ethnographically exploring how these expressions of love are lived that the book also asks whether love could also have an analytical or heuristic value for anthropology. Love, of course, especially in its Christian iteration, is a tricky thing to write about, not least because throughout history, Christian love has often been invoked to violent or harmful ends. Within anthropology, this meant that love and the projects carried in its name have tended to be treated with suspicion and come under special scrutiny. Justified suspicion and needed scrutiny. Still, the premise of my book is that there is merit in allowing ourselves to go beyond this hermeneutic of suspicion.

I have written love as charity, in the context of Emmanuel’s development NGO projects here (link to Signifiers of Divine), and about love as the divine gift of grace, in the context of post-genocide healing in Rwanda, here.