This presentation explores healing processes among spiritual healers in contemporary Okinawa (Japan). It focuses on situated affects, enskilled or habituated somatic modes of attention and intersubjective attunements with the environment. It shows that the employed spiritual healing techniques can be understood as affective technologies that contribute to reshape initial conditions of marginality.
Classic anthropological studies have long shown the role of spirit possession and spiritual or shamanic healing in empowering marginalized people by giving them an ‘idiom’ to (re-)negotiate their positions (e.g. Ong 1987). More recent anthropological research has analyzed experiences with spirits as based on bodily affordances that ground ‘the cultural kindling’ of spiritual experiences (Cassaniti and Luhrmann 2014), or emphasized the role of feelings and perceptions, as well as of processes of enskilment and entrainment as grounds for possession states (e.g. De Antoni 2022, Seligman 2014).
Relying on such approaches, I focus on healing processes among spiritual healers in contemporary Okinawa. These people tend to share a background of marginality, be it economic, social, or sexual. They become healers through the classic pattern of shamanic illness, learning and employing different healing techniques situated in specific (natural) environments. In this presentation I argue that 1) such techniques can be understood as affective technologies which elicit specific affects and foster the eskilment of somatic modes of attention related to feeling with the environment. 2) Such technologies allow trainees to develop a baseline to learn what is internal or external to them, such as in the case of one’s own thoughts or spirit messages. 3) Such process enables them to detach from and reshape their initial condition of marginality, by allowing for the development of new relations and spirit ontologies that empower them, by giving them a new role as spiritual healers.
