In the Western world, our conception of performance is intimately bound up with notions of “pretending,” “imitating” and “playing” (Foley, 1985: 27). When we see an actor on the stage, or in a movie, we do not assume that the actor actually is the character they are playing (even if we suspend our disbelief for the duration of the play or film). We implicitly assume that the actor portrays a role. A cross-cultural perspective, however, reveals that there are other ways of interpreting and understanding performance, which may provide alternative means for interpreting Western mediumship practices. For example, when in Candomble the medium “performs” as the Orisha, the movements are no longer understood to be under the medium’s direction; if this were not the case then the possession would not be a true possession. In fact, for the duration of the performance, the medium’s body is the body of the Orisha. Here performance is an actual transformation – not a simple role-play (Schechner, 1988). Similarly, for the Yanomamo Indians of the Venezuelan Orinoco Valley, when the Shaman incorporates the forest Hekura spirits, his body is transformed into a “cosmic body – the body is no longer under the control of the shaman’s consciousness but now the body of the Hekura spirit itself (Jokic, 2008). There is an understanding, therefore, that the body can be both a physical object and the locus of spiritual activity. In other words, the body is the point of contact between the physical and spiritual realms, and bodily performance is the means of expression for non-physical beings, just as Erving Goffman (1959: 253) suggests that the body is not only a “peg” on which a person’s self is “hung for a time” but also a primary means of self-expression for living human beings.[..]
Another interesting observation that the cross-cultural literature reveals is that in the mediumistic séance the altered states of the witnesses are very often just as important in establishing a dialogue with the spirits as the trance state of the medium. Indeed, it could be argued that the séance itself is a ritualized orchestration of consciousness: that the séance is specially designed to produce altered states in participants to enable this communication to take place.
