Healing with More-than-Humans: Environment, Historicities, and Sacred Materialities

Ana Mariella Bacigalupo is Professor of Anthropology at SUNY Buffalo. Through her work on the consciousness and transformational politics of more-than-humans (sentient landscapes, spirits, shamans, the undead), Professor Bacigalupo rethinks previously theorized epistemologies, politics, and forms of power to produce decolonial knowledge. She shows how more-than-human places challenge traditional ideas of personhood and drive collective ethics and social and environmental justice. She is the author of Thunder Shaman: Making History with Mapuche Spirits in Patagonia (University of Texas Press, 2016); Shamans of the Foye Tree: Gender, Power and Healing Among the Chilean Mapuche (University of Texas Press, 2007); The Voice of the Drum in Modernity: Tradition and Change in the Practice of Seven Mapuche Shamans (Universidad Católica de Chile press, 2001); Hybridity in Mapuche “Traditional” Healing Methods: The Practice of Contemporary Mapuche Shamans (PAESMI 1996). She has also published over sixty peer reviewed articles and book chapters.

Debora Campa is a pizzica dancer and holistic practitioner based in Southern Italy.

Giovanna Capponi has a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Roehampton (London, UK) and is currently Assistant Professor at the State University of Rio de Janeiro (Brazil). with a particular interest in environmental anthropology, human-animal studies, and material culture. She worked extensively on Afro-Brazilian religion, developing perspectives in the fields of anthropology of ritual and more-than-human ontologies. She also worked on the management of wild boars and human-wildlife conflicts in Central Italy and on feral cats in Rome.

Fadeke Castor is Assistant Professor of Religion and Africana Studies at Northeastern University. Dr Castor is a Black Feminist ethnographer and African diaspora studies scholar, with research and teaching interests in religion, race, performance and the intersectional politics of decolonization. As a Yorùbá Ifá initiate of Trinidadian heritage they are inspired by African spiritual engagements with Black liberation imaginaries and the Black radical tradition. Her current research focuses on an exploration of the spiritual ontologies and epistemologies of Black spiritual praxis as shifting our centers of being and ways of knowing towards collective care, healing, and social transformation. As part of this larger project, they are building Digital Ancestral Altars: Remembrances of Trinidad Ifá/Orisha Elders (funded by a Community Stories grant from The Crossroads Project, Princeton University). She is the author of Spiritual Citizenship: Transnational Pathways from Black Power to Ifá in Trinidad (Duke University Press, 2017; Clifford Geertz Prize, 2018).

Yael Dansac is an anthropologist specializing in nature-based spiritualities and Research Fellow at Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Religion and Secularism of the Université Libre de Bruxelles, in Belgium. After obtaining her PhD at the EHESS in Paris, she obtained a CIVIS3i-Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship. Her numerous publications address ritual creativity, embodiment, non-human beings’ ontologies, and Pagan spiritualities. She is the co-editor of Relating with More-than-Humans: Interbeing Rituality in a Living World (Palgrave Studies in the Anthropology of Sustainability, 2022).

Saida Daukeyeva is Assistant Professor of Music at Wesleyan University. She holds a doctorate in Musicology from Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory and a PhD in Ethnomusicology from SOAS, University of London. Her research explores the social and political dimensions of music and sound in Central Asia with a focus on Kazakhstan and the Kazakh diaspora. She is the author of Abu Nasr Muhammad Al-Farabi’s Philosophy of Music (Soros Foundation 2002, in Russian) and a co-editor of The Music of Central Asia (Indiana University Press 2016). Her current book project, based on fieldwork in Kazakhstan and Mongolia, examines dombyra (two-stringed plucked lute) performance as a vehicle of history and social memory among Mongolian Kazakhs. She has also conducted ethnographic research on the revival of shamanic healing practices in Kazakhstan and their primary musical instrument, the qyl-qobyz (two-stringed bowed lute). 

Eline Kieft holds BA Cultural Anthropology, MA Medical Anthropology, and PhD in Dance Anthropology (University of Roehampton) with research on the contribution of Movement Medicine to participant’s wellbeing and empowerment. She was a Research Fellow at the Centre for Dance Research at Coventry University. As a medical anthropologist, she has conducted studies on health and wellbeing, working with people with learning disabilities, burnout and depression, and other long-term chronic conditions. She is a professional performer and dance facilitator, chronic pain expert, Qigong and shamanic practitioner and founder of Wild Soul Centre. She is the author of Dancing in the Muddy Temple: A Moving Spirituality of Land and the Body (Lexington Books, 2022).

Giovanna Parmigiani is Lecturer on Religion and Cultural Anthropology at Harvard Divinity School and Research Associate at the Center for the Study of World Religions (Harvard University). She is an anthropologist of religion and magic, a scholar of Contemporary Paganisms, the co-chair of the Contemporary Pagan Studies Unit at the American Academy of Religion, and a founding co-convenor of the Network for the Anthropology of History at the European Association of Social Anthropologists. Her work is firmly grounded in ethnographic and auto-ethnographic practices, and her main focus of interest is the relationship between religion, politics, gender, and the environment. Her first monograph, Feminism, Violence and Representation in Modern Italy: We Are Witnesses, Not Victims (Indiana University Press, 2019) dealt with violence against women. Her second, The Spider Dance: Tradition, Time, and Healing in Southern Italy (Equinox Publishing, 2024), deals with contemporary pagan women and healing. She writes about conspirituality and conspiracy theories and has a forthcoming book on this topic, Lived Conspirituality: Researching Conspiracy Theories and Alternative Spiritualities (Routledge). Parmigiani is the host of the Gnoseologies series at the CSWR. At HDS, she teaches courses on contemporary paganisms; earth-based religions; New Age spiritualities; the anthropology of magic, religion, and healing; and religion, materiality, and the senses.

Emily Pierini is Associate Professor in Anthropology at Sapienza University of Rome, Italy. Co-founder and coordinator of the HEAL Network for the Ethnography of Healing. PhD in Social Anthropology (Bristol), she has been a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at Sapienza, visiting professor at the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, and Affiliate of the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, University of Oxford. She has conducted ethnographic research in the temples of the Spiritualist Christian Order Vale do Amanhecer in Brazil, Europe and the US, in Afro-Brazilian religions, on Goddess Spirituality in the UK and Italy, and faith healing in Portugal. Her work addresses healing, spirit mediumship and possession, mental health, learning and embodied knowledge, religious images and materiality, and transnational religions. Author of the book Jaguars of the Dawn: Spirit Mediumship in the Brazilian Vale do Amanhecer (2020, Berghahn) and co-editor of volume Other Worlds, Other bodies: Embodied Epistemologies and Ethnographies of Healing (2023, Berghahn) and of the Berghahn Book series Epistemologies of Healing.

Paul Stoller is Professor of Anthropology at West Chester University and a Permanent Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies/FAU-Erlangen. In his more than 35 years of anthropological research and writing, Stoller has conducted ethnographic research Songhay religion, magic, sorcery and spirit possession practices in Niger and the life of West African street traders in New York City. Stoller’s work encompasses the study of economic exchange, religion, ethnographic film, and the human quest for well being in turbulent times. In his most recent work, he investigates how indigenous wisdom can not only enhance social well-being but also help to heal a troubled world. Author of Sensuous Scholarship (1997, University of Pennsylvania Press), Wisdom from the Edge: Writing Ethnography in Turbolent Times (2023, Cornell University Press).

Martin Tsang holds a BSc in Environmental Sciences (Queen Mary University), MA Social Anthropology (SOAS), PhD in Global and Sociocultural Studies (Florida International University) and is a beadwork artist. Dr Tsang is the Cuban Heritage Librarian and Curator of the Latin American Collections at the University of Miami. He has researched the history, use and making of beadwork in Cuba, Brazil, and Nigeria orisha practices, examining the place and role of bead in the larger context of movement, activism/identity-making, and the aesthetics and symbolic meaning. He conducted applied medical anthropology projects on Afro-Cuban religious practitioners’ responses to HIV and recovery from drug addiction through training in documentation of their realities through images, voices and exhibitions. He publishes, teaches and curates exhibitions and programming on Afro-Atlantic religions, health, and healing in the Caribbean and sacred Afro-Cuban beadwork. He edited the volume Spirited Diasporas: Personal Narratives and Global Futures of Afro-Atlantic Religions (Florida University Press, 2023).