Incorporação e transe na Umbanda: perspectivas de uma antropologia relacional como um modo para se pensar o fenômeno

Abstract

This paper is a proposal to approach the mediumistic religious phenomenon of incorporation in Umbanda through a contemporary relational anthropological bias. Called "psychophony" by the Kardecist spiritist doctrine and "possession" by the academic-scientific milieu, mediumistic embodiment can be thought of as a phenomenon that can be brought about and developed by individuals who produce and receive agency through bodily techniques such as analyzed by Marcel Mauss in 1925, and by Tim Ingold's (2000) theory of the "ecology of life", in a process of "ob- servation" and "attention education". To illustrate this perspective, I analyzed ethnographically the process of mediumistic development in a Umbanda´s terreiro in which I am a part, and in this way it was possible to apply the Ingoldian theory in my case. In the field, I observed that it is no longer a matter of explaining the phenomenon from a purely biological and psychopathological bias, or only by the sociological gaze, in the Durkheimian terms of the "social fact", it is rather a matter of looking at it in order to collapse The duality nature and culture and view it not as being composed of several categories of classification (sociological, psychological, biological), but as a process where all these things are fused, through the lines of life and the rhizome of Deleuze and Guattari.