Reviews for Firewalking and Religious Healing: The Anastenaria of Greece and the American Firewalking Movement

The average rating for Firewalking and Religious Healing: The Anastenaria of Greece and the American Firewalking Movement based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2008-03-28 00:00:00 Dustin Hoff I've read a number of books and essays on the topic of possession, trance states, and healing in the past couple of months (Wombs and Alien Spirits, Medusa's Hair, Peyote Hunt, Levi-Strauss's "The Effectiveness of Symbols," Kapferer's "Mind, Self and Other in Demonic Illness," Turner's "An Ndembu Doctor in Practice"), and I've found them all fascinating. Danforth's book is no exception. He spent over two years doing fieldwork in Greece on this phenomenon. While I found his writing to be less than stellar in places, I appreciated his insights into the firewalking cult and his presentation of the lives of the seemingly ordinary people that become the Anastenarides. In all of the above readings, the authors argue for a clear relationship between possession states and physical or mental illness. With Wombs and Alien Spirits, the possession state begins with reproductive ill health. In Medusa's Hair, Obeyesekere connected Freudian psychoanalysis and unconscious motivations with possession and asceticism. Levi-Strauss also featured psychoanalytic concepts in his description of a shaman's intervention in a woman's experience of difficult birth. Many of these authors, including Danforth, also make connections between spirit possession and social cohesiveness. The process of healing fixes not only the human body, mind, and spirit, but also serves as a mechanism to repair rifts in the wider social environment. Turner suggests that we in the West may have something to learn from the Ndembu people of Zambia: "Stripped of its supernatural guise, Ndembu therapy may well offer lessons for Western clinical practice. For relief might be given to many sufferers from neurotic illness if all those involved in their social networks could meet together and publicly confess their ill will toward the patient and endure in turn the recital of his grudges against them." [from The Forest of Symbols (1967), p. 393] Many have criticized a trend in postmodern anthropological writing towards first-person narrative and self-reflexivity, complaining that this tells us much more about the anthropologist than we want to know and not nearly enough about the people under study. I feel that Danforth has succeeded admirably in presenting a reflexive account that still keeps his subjects at centre stage. I particularly enjoyed his final chapter, where he describes his personal reactions, both during and after fieldwork and during his writing-up phase. Reminiscent of Janice Boddy's final chapter and her observations on the interpenetrating nature of ethnographic writing, Danforth also shows how the experience of studying "the other" brings as much understanding about ourselves as it does about them. I do hope there is a question on spirit possession on tomorrow's exam. If there is, I think I am well prepared!! P.S. I didn't know, or maybe I had only forgotten, that Anthony Robbins started his multi-billion-dollar self-help phenomenon with workshops on firewalking!!

Review # 2 was written on 2009-06-01 00:00:00 Rabin Sharma lost. subway