Ways of knowing and healing. Mediumistic and ethnographic epiphanies in the Vale do Amanhecer

This chapter addresses the entanglements between tangible and intangible worlds in learning the practice of spirit mediumship in the Brazilian Spiritualism of the Vale do Amanhecer (Valley of the Dawn). Learning this practice is hereby approached as learning a way of knowing, in which the spiritual experience of other worlds and other selves is materialized through bodies, spiritual substances and visions are made tangible, and people are made aware of their own selves as extended beyond the physical body. In my analysis of this process of learning, I propose to move beyond the idea of propositional knowledge so as to embrace the dimension of affect and feeling. Along with the experiences of mediums, I also consider my own experience as ethnographer engaged in this process of learning a way of knowing through the body, expanding perception in a field of interactions and co-presence with other selves (human and non-human), materializing the intangible in and through my own body, which becomes a zone of encounter and transition between worlds where ethnographic knowledge is engendered relationally and through bodily experience. The entanglement between insight, skill, and craft, I argue, is transversal to these ways of knowing, so that epiphanies and co-presences are constitutive of both mediumistic and ethnographic knowledge.