On Trance - with Michaela Schäuble

Our guest on episode #13, On Trance, is Michaela Schäuble. Her scholarly work explores innovative ways to engage with the experiences of trance through writing, film, and photography. This episode examines the transformative potential of ecstatic experiences of trance, the state of ecstasy and exuberance associated with mediumship. Our discussion centers on trance, forms of possession, and mediumship, which have long fascinated anthropologists and challenged their understanding and representational possibilities.

Michaela Schäuble, a professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Bern in Switzerland, is also an acclaimed documentary filmmaker. She is one of the co-founders and Co-directors of Ethnographic Media Space Bern, a creative collective of anthropologists engaged in audio-visual methods as part of knowledge production. Prior to her current position, she taught at the University of Manchester in England and the Martin Luther University in Halle Wittenberg, Germany. Schäuble's diverse research interests span media and audio-visual anthropology, religion, social memory, gender space, and nationalism, offering rich and engaging perspectives.

She is author of Narrating Victimhood. Gender Religion and the Making of Place in Post-war Croatia (2014). She is also the author of numerous articles and chapters on topics as diverse as Mediterranean anthropology, anthropology of post-socialism, ritual and commemoration, masculinity and placemaking, as well as ethnographic methods beyond the written word. One of her current projects focuses on the phenomenon of tarantism in southern Italy, an ensemble of bodily afflictions and healing practices that involve trance-like experiences.

Host: George Paul Meiu, Professor of Anthropology and Chair of the Institute of Social Anthropology at the University of Basel.
Production: Zainabu Jallo (Institute of Social Anthropology) in
collaboration with the New Media Center at the University of Basel.