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When the Extraordinary Hits Home
and healing has allowed me to perceive the importance of the body
in these activities. At the same time, by doing healing myself, I have
been able to grasp what is not visible to an observer: that the “laying
on of hands,” or any other visible gesture, is epiphenomenal to what
is really happening: mobilizing and channeling a certain kind of en-
ergy. While such a statement might seem unverifiable to the skepti-
cal observer, it makes sense to those who do healing, including my
informants.
Furthermore, participation in the closed group has given me a very
different sense of what community can mean; religious community
is not necessarily a matter of structures that ensure sustained inter-
action outside of ritual activities. Communitas indeed seems a bet-
ter word to convey the special quality of the sharing that happens in
the closed group. For those I interviewed, these privileged moments
shared in the group occur outside everyday social relations but give
support and deeper meaning to them. Participating in Spiritualist ac-
tivities has been advantageous for the research, but beyond this it
has given deeper meaning to my work as an anthropologist, on the
level where anthropologist and person are indistinguishable.^22 Giving
and receiving clairvoyance, receiving and transmitting healing, feel-
ing spirit presence and experiencing occasional ecstatic moments have
enriched my life immeasurably and have greatly enlarged my sense of
human possibilities.
Notes
1. Fieldnotes have been slightly amended for the sake of clarity. Pseudonyms are used
for the individuals mentioned and for the church where the fieldwork is based so as to pro-
tect informants’ privacy. Short quotes are transcribed from field observations; longer ones
(indented in the text) are taken verbatim from tape-recorded interviews.
2. I spent a year in Cape Verde in 1972 and have visited several times since then, briefly
in 1986 and for some six weeks of fieldwork in 1998. I continue to do occasional research
among Cape Verdeans in Massachusetts and Rhode Island.
3. Financial support by the Social Science Research Council (through the Small Grants
Programme, administered by the Université de Montréal) is gratefully acknowledged.
4. The name of the church has been changed; however, the real name is often shortened to
“the Spiritual Church” by its members and so is used herein, along with the initials sch.
5 .sch ministers have announced at church services that gay marriages will be permit-
ted there.
