Deirdre Meintelbiomedical setting. Moreover, Stoller makes it clear that he has used
the divination skills learned in Niger to help friends in the United
States from time to time. Edith Turner et al. ( 1992 , 1996 ) allows her
readers to see that healing and spirituality were not only field expe-
riences for her and her late husband, Victor Turner, who apparently
had considerable healing gifts. Moreover, the couple’s conversion to
Catholicism gave them a means to understand religious symbolism
among the Ndembu, and for Victor Turner to develop the concept
ofcommunitas. All the aforementioned works show in various ways
that the separation between the research context and the home con-
text is not complete for the experiential ethnographer, even when the
two are geographically distant from one another.
In another research project now under way, interviews with young
parents in ethnically mixed marital unions has revealed that many of
the subjects function with a view of world culture as one vast repos-
itory of human symbolic resources to which their children, by virtue
of their multiple possible belongings, have wider access than if they
were not of mixed origins. While their logic is not without contradic-
tions (Meintel 2002 ), I see a similarity with the reasoning of anthro-
pologists who find resources of value for themselves in their “real”
lives in their contacts with “others.” Such resources are likely to be
all the more relevant to one’s daily life when they are drawn from a
symbolic system that is of modern origin and adapted to one’s own
society, as is the case with Spiritualism and the sch.
ConclusionI have tried to show here that the glimpses of the extraordinary Spiri-
tualism has offered me have led to new understandings about healing
and clairvoyance. Becoming an apprentice medium has allowed me
to see that clairvoyance is a capacity that everyone has experienced
at least to a small degree, one that can be developed, provided one is
ready to suspend disbelief in one’s own perceptions. Moreover, clair-
voyance is a social experience. Apart from the fact that several people
may perceive the same invisible phenomenon at the same time, there
is the unspoken communion that is necessary in order to give clair-
voyance to another. Participating as an actor in giving clairvoyance