O corpo em ação: processos de transe mediúnico e incorporação na umbanda

Abstract

Man‘s first instrument‖, the Body gets space in the Social Sciences field, since Marcel Mauss (1925) analyses and understanding. Taken as the primary investigation target, the Body does not cry out for passive listening and observation, but for action thru participation in studies that allow its nature, (or maybe it‘s better to say) its culture to be examined. In between the notorious anthropological debate that now opposes both instances, nature and culture, and regards these ―complimentary opposites as eternal‖, this thesis truly talks about an attempt to ―collapse dualities‖, comparing and reintegrating constitutive elements of this dimension of being that we call ―the Body‖. I used as background for this research into the apparently ambiguous relationship between innate bodies that at the same time, build themselves, in the intriguing continuous process of becoming manifest in the means called Mediumistic Incorporation. I chose the apparition witnessed in the Umbanda Yards religion is as a fertile field for ethnographic investigation. Through ―psychic development‖, a process where the body is gradually built and is perceived hierarchically, I searched to analyze the most important ways in which this construction shows up. Than I attempt to prove the authenticity of the phenomenon and to understand how this happened. The plurality of ―incorporators bodies‖ exposed over this work, talks directly to the reader: everything starts and ends with the body, it‘s the perfect way, whereby the countless different histories can be told in a whole and effective way.