Beschreibung:
Through the narration of two ethnographic vignettes and the examination of a film, the author tries to go beyond the typological meanings of the anthropologi-cal concept of religion, observing rather religious praxis. He starts with two important anthropological essays that allow him to go beyond the notion of «spirit possession» to make various human practices more legible. In such a conceptual framework, the religious question appears as a fundamental reference. Living relations of force related to what the article calls «the politics of spirits» emerge in the ethnographic examples described: they concern violence and anger or the ineffectiveness of anaesthesia in the hospitals explored, situated in central and southern Italy. Sub-disciplinary boundaries of anthropology are thus questioned, for example those that still separate medical anthropological study from religious study.