2015 Theses Doctoral

Haunted Legacies: Healing and Sorcery in a Visayan Community

Carter, Christina Verano

This dissertation is an analysis of the multiple legacies of one family's relationship with a spirit medium, and in so doing unpacks the historical and cultural mythologies around witchcraft, healing, envy, ghosts, unexplained accidents, stories of the supernatural, family curses, secrecy, and the gray spaces between religious faith and superstition in the small Visayan town of Santa Barbara, Iloilo, located in the central region of the Philippine Islands. My inquiry takes place at the intersection of two converging horizons of the unknown, healing and sorcery on the one hand and on the other the uncertain future posed by the forces of globalization and the acceleration of natural disaster due to rapid climate change in the region. It contextualizes the voice of the "native" ethnographer doing fieldwork among family, within a larger set of questions around inheritance, transmission, and ethics.