© HEAL Network for the Ethnography of Healing
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SYMPOSIUM
Healing with More-than-Humans:
Environment, Historicities, and Sacred Materialities
MARCH 26-27, 2026
YALE UNIVERSITY, US
This symposium explores the connections between sacred histories, historicities—i.e., the ways in which time and temporality are understood, experienced, and lived—and well-being by means of an engagement with more-than-humans through expressive and material cultures.
The notion of historicity is a key one in the “anthropology of history” subfield that emerged recently with the aim of offering ethnographic accounts of the many alternatives to the historicist “linear” approach to time and history (see, e.g., Stewart 2012, 2016, Stewart and Palmié 2016). This historicist framework that pervades academic disciplines is commonly and mistakenly perceived as the “natural” way to understand and experience time and history—when it is, in fact, a specific one and certainly not the only one.
A recent corpus of work on time and temporality has produced key contributions to the analyses of historical consciousness and to the deconstruction of mainstream Western approaches to time and history. This literature, by challenging prevailing embodied understandings and interpretations of time, also proves to be an important reference point for the study of contemporary spiritualities and relational ontologies (otherwise called “neo-animism”), also in relation to the pursuit of well-being (Parmigiani 2024).
The environmental crises and the threat of ecological collapse have prompted many spiritual traditions to direct their ritual practices toward environmental action. Spiritual cosmologies, particularly those embedded in Indigenous and animist worldviews, but also in modern reinterpretations of Judeo-Christian religions, emphasize relationality with the more-than-human world—plants, animals, and even landscapes as active agents. These cosmologies not only integrate nature into spiritual practice but offer alternative ways of living, engaging with time and temporality, encouraging actions that prioritize care and sustainable coexistence with the environment. In this way, ritual expressions and practices reconfigure themselves as a way to reconnect with more-than-human entities and re-act to the impending ecological collapse.
By following an understanding of performance as performative (Lowell Lewis 2013) and of interpretation as both understanding and performing (possibly, understanding while performing, see Lambek 2014), this symposium will dovetail academic research on more-than-human engagements and spirituality with experiential, body-centered, learning. In particular, through dance and embodied practices, sacred performances and art, and the creation of altars, we will explore ways to experience and engage with other-than-humans and to “interpret” sacred histories and historicities. The latter, by reframing our being in time, will offer insights into the connections between historicities and healing.
Convened by
Emily Pierini, Giovanna Capponi and Giovanna Parmigiani
Sponsored by the Institute of Sacred Music’s Religion, Ecology, and Expressive Culture Initiative
Yale University
Free to the public
Speakers:
- Ana Mariella Bacigalupo
- Debora Campa
- Giovanna Capponi
- Fadeke Castor
- Yael Dansac
- Saida Daukeyeva
- Eline Kieft
- Giovanna Parmigiani
- Emily Pierini
- Paul Stoller
- Martin Tsang
Contact: Katya Vetrov
Photo credit: Henk Kieft
PROGRAMME
THURSDAY 26
Morning: in person
10.00 am -12.00 am Workshop 1. Tuning the Body as Antenna: Somatic Pathways to the More-than-Human.
Led by Eline Kieft (anthropologist and dancer)
12:00 pm - 1:00 pm Lunch
Afternoon: hybrid (register for webinar)
2.00 pm - 4.00 pm:Session 1. Papers: Cosmologies, Materiality, Historicities and the Environment.
Contributions by:
Giovanna Parmigiani, Harvard University
Emily Pierini, Sapienza University of Rome
Fadeke Castor, Northeastern University
Géraldine Mossière, University of Montreal
4.00 pm - 4.30 pm Coffee Break
4:30 p.m.-6:00 p.m. Workshop 2. Stories for Healing in the Environmental Crisis.
Led by Paul Stoller, West Chester University
FRIDAY 27
Morning: hybrid (register for webinar)
10.00 am -12.00 pm Session 2. Papers: More-than-Humans and Environmental Action.
Contributions by:
Giovanna Capponi, Universidade Estadual de Rio de Janeiro
Yael Dansac, Université Libre de Bruxelles
Ana Bacigalupo, State University of New York Buffalo
Saida Daukeyeva, Wesleyan University
12:00 pm - 1:00 pm Lunch
Afternoon: in person
10.00 am -12.00 pm: Workshop 3. Sacred Beadwork: Adorning the Orishas as Energies of Nature.
Led by Martin Tsang, University of Miami
3.30 pm -5.00 pm Workshop 4. Pizzica Workshop. The Spider Dance.
Led by Giovanna Parmigiani and Debora Campa (dancer and practitioner)
5.00 pm -6.00 pm Closing circle