The Living and the Dead: Embodied Experience and the Making of a World

Record summary

Elizabeth A. Behar’s work on Haitian religious experience provides a route into questions of possession, personhood and the perceived permeability of boundaries between living humans, ancestors and spirits. This is relevant to folklore comparison because the crossing is enacted through bodies and ritual relationships rather than represented only as a trip to a fixed underworld. The lead should be checked bibliographically and read alongside Haitian scholarship, since English-language descriptions can simplify local categories. It documents interpreted religious experience, not independently verified spirit transport or survival after death.