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Magic Circle seminar group

Fridays at 11:00 am
Piers Vitebsky's office, Scott Polar Research Institute, Cambridge

The Magic Circle originated in a pub conversation with graduate students and has grown into a long-running group for the informal discussion of research in progress on ritual, symbolism and the anthropology of religion worldwide, and its interface with theology, psychology and related disciplines. Participants and speakers include graduate students, senior scholars, and practitioners of religion and psychology.

Meetings are held on Fridays from 11 am - 1 pm in Piers Vitebsky's office or Seminar Room in the Scott Polar Research Institute, Cambridge, followed by a pub lunch. Brief papers are generally circulated a few days in advance.

As well as discussing the work of regular participants, we welcome presentations from visitors. If you would like to attend or present your material, subscribe or unsubscribe to the mailing list, please contact: mcircle@hermes.cam.ac.uk

Magic Circle programme 2012-2013

Any changes will be notified to those on the mailing list.

Friday 1st February 2013

Gilly Carr (Archaeology): Haunted by the Occupation: ghosts of war in the Channel Islands

Friday 8th February 2013

Rebecca Lynch (UCL Anthropology and Cambridge Medical School): Spirits and spiritual encounters on Trinidad's northeast coast

Friday 15th February 2013

Naor Ben-Yehoyada (Caius College): How to do things with bullets: Metapragmatic reframing and dialogic heteroglossia off the Gaza Shore

Friday 22nd February 2013

Nares Atto (Divinity): From sword to songs

Friday 1st March 2013

TBC

Friday 8th March 2013

Donatas Brandisauskas (Aberdeen/Vilnius): Mastery and Luck among Orochen-Evenki of Eastern Siberia

Previous meetings

Previous seminars have included:

  • Kamal Adhikari: Herbal Viagra and the Biopirates in the Himalayas
  • Olivier Allard: Laziness and Stinginess. Moral values and social dynamics among the Warao
  • Ross Anthony: A centre at the margin: notes on a city in north-west China
  • Françoise Barbira-Freedman: Shamanic networks in western Amazonia
  • Tim Bayliss-Smith: WHR Rivers' Ideas about Magic, Medicine and Religion
  • Frank Bille: Mongolian ethnicity. Idealisations and forceful inclusions
  • Frank Bille: Monumentality and the Colossal: On the seductiveness of totalitarian architecture
  • Barbara Bodenhorn: Re-animating Christianity
  • Stéphane Breton (École des Hautes études en Sciences Sociales, Paris): Non-fiction Film and the Ethnographer: The Northbound Journey of a Melanesianist
  • Marc Brightman (Oxford and Geneva): Maps and clocks in Surinam
  • Ludek Broz: On animal self-sacrifice in contemporary Altai
  • Carole J. Brown-Leonardi: Notions of Property: Migration and traditional boundaries in the Deh Cho region
  • Manduhai Buyandelger: Trouble with Female Shamans in Mongolia
  • Bernard Charlier: Hunting the wolf for 'wind horses'in Mongolia, and revealing the individual
  • Giovanni da Col: The view from somewhen: cosmological ethics, perspectivism and fortune among Yunnan Tibetans
  • Paul Connerton: Seven types of forgetting
  • Quinton Deeley: Revelatory experience: perspectives from neuroscience, psychiatry, and the humanities
  • Ven Vajira Dehiwela: Aspects of the dhamma in Sri Lanka (Ven Vajira Dehiwela is a Buddhist monk from Sri Lanka and a former field assistant of Piers Vitebsky)
  • Sabine Deiringer: Organising documents, polities and history: The Native Hawaiian Re-Organization Act
  • Polina Dessiatnitchenko: Why is sound central to religious ritual? performing a disruption of time in Ojibway shamanistic seances
  • Mary Douglas: Witch hunts and modern wars in Africa
  • Susan Drucker-Brown: Witchcraft and Hubris in Ghana
  • Alice Elliott: Cosmologies of migration from a Moroccan village
  • Rebecca Empson: Making mobility: separation and containment in northeast Mongolia
  • Janne Flora: Loneliness, suicide and reincarnation in Greenland
  • Janne Flora: Qivittoq: Encounters with the undead in the Greenland wilderness
  • Johanna Gonçalves: Pathway metaphors in Yanomami medical thought
  • Leila Gordon, with Janne Flora and Olga Ulturgasheva: Round table on young people's suicide in the UK, Greenland and Siberia: different causes, different senses of family, destiny and personhood? (Leila Gordon is a psychoanalytical psychotherapist specialising in adolescent suicide prevention)
  • Vanessa Grotti: Individual relationships: Trio and missionary perspectives on the sociality of conversion in northeastern Amazonia
  • Yarjung Gurung: Using anthropology and archaeology to retrace my trance soul-flight on the ground: would I find my land of the dead if I went to Tibet or Mongolia? (Yarjung Gurung is a shaman from the Annapurna region of Nepal)
  • Hannelore Hägele: Clothed with splendour and majesty: Light and colour in religious statuary
  • Guy Hayward: Chanting and its purpose
  • Jan Hennings: The Honour of Peter the Great and the 'Defect of the British Constitutions'
  • Paolo Heywood: Towards a Topography of Love: Discursive Chronotopes of the Russian "Mail-Order Bride" Industry
  • Holly High: Fear, Desire and the State in Laos
  • Mette High: Mongolian ideas about excessive drinking
  • Martin Holbraad: What is truth? Problems of divination and anthropology in Cuba
  • Martin Holbraad: Revolución o muerte: Self-sacrifice and the ontology of Cuban revolution
  • Yang Honglin: From Nuosu Animistic Religion to Native Anthropological Exegesis (Facilitated by Katherine Swancutt)
  • Jens Ivar-Nergård: Ghosts and Psychiatrists in Sapmi
  • Rev Tim Jenkins: The Anthropology of Christianity: situation and critique
  • Rev Tim Jenkins: Grimm's tale 'The Queen Bee' - an investigation of the problem of magic
  • Rev Tim Jenkins: Flying saucers over Chicago: parallel languages of sociology and evangelical Christianity
  • Prudence Jones: The Triple Universe: Mesopotamian stratification and the Graeco-Roman Moon Goddess
  • Prudence Jones: The Path, daughter of the great gods: possible Near Eastern influences on the Greek goddess Hekate in the Archaic age
  • Bruce Kapferer: Sinhalese exorcism and Kubrick's 2001: 'A Space Odyssey'
  • Chris Kaplonski: Forgetting the lamas: the politicization of death in post-socialist Mongolia
  • Adeel Khan: Humour in the Islamic University classroom
  • Lena Khlinovskaya-Rockhill: State-induced migration to the Russian North: identity, homeland and imagination
  • Riamsara Kuyakanon Knapp: On the Observance of a Mountain-Closure Ritual in Bhutan
  • Tania Kossberg: Mental Health in the Norwegian Arctic
  • Katya Krausová (Portobello Media, London): Traces of Cultural Memory of the Jewish Community of Slovakia
  • Evelyn Landerer: Walking with Reindeer: new experiences of place and movement
  • Alexandra Lavrillier: 'Spirit charged' humans and animals among the Evenki of southeastern Siberia
  • Linda Layne: How dead babies continue to participate in family life
  • Galina Lindquist: Neo-shamanism in Russia and Sweden
  • Jialing Luo: Hutong: a Disappearing Historical Neighbourhood in central Beijing
  • Robert MacFarland: Becoming One with the Universe and Walking the Harmonious Path
  • Jonathan Mair: Buddhism beyond good and evil: Morality and the ethics of self-cultivation in Inner Mongolian Buddhism
  • Jonathan Mair: Süjüg: faith in Inner Mongolian Buddhism
  • Emilie Maj: Mammoths and the government in Yakutia
  • Mireille Mazard: Ghosts of Ritual on China's Tibeto-Burman Frontier
  • Shane McCorristine: Spirits of Place in Arctic Exploration, 1818-45
  • Nick Megoran: Representations of Central Asia in film
  • Nick Megoran: Middle East Apology Tours: Evangelical Christians and the First Crusade of 1096-99
  • Carlos Mondragon: Ovens and persons in Vanuatu
  • Carlos Mondragon & Johannes Neurath: Shifting Ontologies: Rethinking transformation and reciprocity in Mesoamerica and Melanesia
  • Andrew Moutu: Returning to the origin in the time of Naven (Papua New Guinea)
  • Chloe Nahum-Claudel: Mutually predatory relationships between spirits, fish and humans among the Enawene of Brasil
  • Chloe Nahum-Claudel: Today we are like teenage girls: all-male seclusion at the heart of an Amerindian cosmogonic process
  • Vladimir Orlov: Metaphysics of death in the music of Russian Symbolism
  • Irene Peano: Property and people: some reflections on human trafficking
  • Eleanor Peers: Pop, Poetry and the Gods: Landscape, Beauty and Spirituality in Sakha community life
  • Anthony Pickles: How do Highland Papua New Guineans Relate to Slot-Machines?
  • Catherine Pickstock: Christian liturgy and the senses
  • Anastasia Piliavsky: Adjudication without dispute resolution among thieves in Western India
  • Anastasia Piliavsky: The Morals of Visibility and the 'Public Sphere' in Northern India
  • Monosi Raika (Sora elder, Tribal India): How I led my people into Christianity sixty years ago and now have mixed feelings
  • Rev Marcus Ramshaw: Devising a eucharist for young Goths
  • Madeleine Reeves: Clean fake: authenticity and contingency in migrant Moscow
  • Madeleine Reeves: Military violence and stately im-personation in Kyrgyzstan
  • Madeleine Reeves: Mourning, violence and political community in Kyrgyzstan
  • Hugo Reinert: Bio-power and necro-availability: the slaughterhouse as sacrificial altar in north Norway
  • Susanna Rostas: Conchas, Candles and Flowers in the Creation of the Concheros' Religiosity
  • Luís Guilherme Resende de Assis: Brasilian Antarctic scientists and their cosmologies
  • István Sántha & Tanya Safonova: Stories about Evenki people and their dogs: communication through sharing of contexts
  • István Sántha & Tatiana Safonova: Unaccountability among Evenki of East Siberia
  • Rupert Sheldrake: Recent Research on Telepathy
  • Sarah Shneiderman: Himalayan Origin Myths and Myths of Originality: Thangmi Gurus, Activists and the Power of Orality
  • Janet Soskice: The un-namability of God
  • Richard Spaul (In Situ theatre company): Seven archetypes for becoming a different person
  • Florian Stammler: An environmental anthropologist discovers spirits in Siberia
  • Katie Swancutt: Magical efficacy, fortune and time in two contrasting Mongolian villages
  • Katie Swancutt: How shamans and indigenous scholars reinvent animism
  • Diane Thompson: The Memory of Sacred Places in Dostoevsky' s 'Brothers Karamazov'
  • Dr Thomas Thornton: Environmental Change and Marinescapes: A Tlingit Perspective
  • Mark Turin: Mother Tongues and Language Competence: The shifting politics of linguistic belonging in the Himalayas
  • Olga Ulturgasheva: The patient reindeer as trope for human: how a child learns to be a person
  • Olga Ulturgasheva: Ontological clash of afterlives: Why Siberian Natives can't engage with the ghosts of Russian Gulag prisoners
  • Olga Ulturgasheva and Shane McCorristine (Conveners): Ghosts and Apparitions in the Field. With Contributions by: Donatas Brandiskaukas (Kaunas), marc Brightman (Oxford), Gilly Carr (Archaeology), Vanessa Grotti (Oxford), Ivan Peshkov (Poznan), Katherine Swancutt (Oxford), Piers Vitebsky (SPRI), Kostas Zorbas (Democritus University of Thrace / SPRI)
  • Minna Opas: Christianity and epistemological uncertainty in the Peruvian Amazon
  • Nikolai Vakhtin & Stephen Pax Leonard: Languages and Forms of Expression in the Arctic: urgent issues of endangerment
  • Laur Vallikivi: The silence of the reindeer and the conversion narrative of the Baptists
  • Aparecida Vilaça: Perspectivism: human and animal souls in Brasil
  • Aparecida Vilaça: Eating the dead: funerary cannibalism among the Warí (with film)
  • Piers Vitebsky: Repeated Returns and Special Friends:from mythic first encounter to endless historical change
  • Piers Vitebsky: Dreams of love and death
  • Piers Vitebsky: Dancing with alphabet worshippers
  • Rev Fraser Watts: Levels of Religious Meaning: Applying 'Interacting Cognitive Subsystems' to Religion
  • Joe Webster: The immanence of transcendence: God and the Devil on the Aberdeenshire coast
  • Rane Willerslev: God on trial: thoughts on sacrifice
  • Lee Wilson: The Anthropology of the Possible: the Ethnographer as Sceptical Enquirer
  • Xiaoxiao Yan: The internet in China: an anthropological approach
  • Michael Yorke: Eunuchs: India's third gender
  • Michael Yorke: Divine nudity
  • Astrid Zimmermann: Eating money in Mongolia
  • Kostas Zorbas: Post-socialist unhappiness and an epidemic of cursing in Tuva
  • Kostas Zorbas: Resorting to sorcery: filling in for the failure of judicial redress in Tuva