Dr. Sidney Greenfield

Talk Summary: In this presentation I review the events in my career that happened prior to my beginning to study Kardecist Spiritist surgeries and healing in 1981. After showing examples of patients being cut into, reporting feeling no pain and recovering, I discuss my efforts to learn the emic explanation for the healings and then to find an etic or scientific explanation. The crux of the paper, however, is why I felt it necessary to seek a scientific explanation. Following on Marshall Sahlin’s questioning of anthropology’s need to replace the explanations of their behavior given by the people we study with scientific ones from our own culture, I ask is why I felt I needed to find a biomedical explanation for the behaviors I observed rather than accepting the one my teachers of Kardecism gave me. The argument leads me to conclude by apologizing to them.

Bio: Sid Greenfield is Professor of Anthropology Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and Co-chair of the Columbia University Seminars on Brazil, Studies in Religion and Contents and Methods in the Social Sciences. He is past president of the Association of Senior Anthropologists, the Association for the Anthropology of Consciousness and past vice-president of the Society for the Anthropology of Religion. He has conducted ethnographic research in Barbados and New Bedford, Massachusetts, but mostly in Brazil, and ethnohistorical and historical research in Portugal and the Atlantic Islands on problems ranging from family and kinship, patronage and politics, the history of plantations and plantation slavery and entrepreneurship to Spiritist surgery and healing, syncretized Brazilian religions such as Candomblé, Umbanda, and Kardecist Spiritism, and Evangelical Protestants in Brazilian politics. He is author and/or editor of nine books, producer, director and author of five video documentaries, and has published some 150 articles and reviews in books and professional journals.