Yael Dansac (Mexico City, 1984) is a postdoctoral researcher at the Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Religions and Secularism at the Free University of Brussels. She holds a PhD in Social Anthropology and Ethnology from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. She has conducted ethnographic research in Mexico, France, Belgium and the United Kingdom. Her topics of study include ritual interactions between humans and non-humans, religion and ecology, anthropology of the body and contemporary sacralization of archaeological sites. She was a visiting researcher at the University of Glasgow and a fellow of the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions European Research Excellence Program. Among her numerous publications is the book she co-edited with Jean Chamel entitled Relating with More-than-Humans: Interbeing Rituality in a Living Word (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022).

Realidades socioculturales

Learning to see and feel the invisible: somatic pedagogy in alternative spiritual practices.

  • Yael Dansac

The article exposes a progressive somatic learning process aiming at the production of a sensitive body capable of interacting with non-human agents promoted in spiritual practices of New Age and neo-pagan inspiration. Contemporary rituals performed at the archaeological site of Carnac, France, are taken as ethnographic and empirical basis by considering them as sensory learning spaces where participants develop their bodily attention to verify the efficacy of the implemented techniques. The analysis shows that the main elements that compose the applied somatic pedagogy are the learning of an alternative sensory language, the execution of body techniques, the practice of visualization and the incorporation of somatic imaginaries.