My research interests lie at the juncture of the anthropology of religion, gender, and health. Specifically, my research to date has addressed the interrelationships among (1) popular religious belief, power, and gender; (2) health, illness, and religion; and (3) notions of what constitutes authentic religion. I have focussed on both participants within the Jewish Renewal Movement and Palestinian Muslims.

Jewish Renewal Participants

My current research examines the experiences of participants in the Jewish Renewal Movement. The Renewal Movement has its origins in the ethos of the counter-culture of the 1960s and aims to reinterpret and reconstruct Jewish practices in order to achieve individual and community healing and restoration. To date, I have carried out fieldwork in a variety of Renewal activities, including a Jewish healing prayer group (Toronto, 2003-04), Jewish yoga group (Vancouver, 2004), the Renewal Movement’s biennial week-long retreat (summer 2005), and an intensive three day workshop in Arizona with a Jewish shaman (October 2005). In each of these activities, the relationships among text, interpretation, and practice; authenticity, tradition, and identity; and between healing and transformation for Jews in North America today are being negotiated and articulated in important and innovative ways.  

Palestinian Muslims

A second strand of my current research examines stories of the jinn, or spirits, that circulate in the virtual spaces of Internet communities, including chat rooms and Web sites. I am interested in comparing these stories with those I collected during my more traditional doctoral fieldwork in the West Bank and as a postdoctoral researcher in Toronto. In the West Bank spirit possession episodes often provide commentaries on a range of power structures at work in village life, including most centrally the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and particular village social norms that women and men at times experience as oppressive. Stories of the jinn also often address health-related issues including infertility, undiagnosed ailments, and a general sense of malaise among women. Women who grew up in villages in the West Bank (where they knew of and believed in the jinn) often reject these beliefs in the Toronto context. In the multicultural Islamic community in Toronto, women are particularly encouraged to adhere to a kind of normative Islam that does not encourage stories of the jinn. Indeed, Palestinians in Toronto often described jinn stories as a product of ignorance. For women, feelings of malaise—feelings that in the West Bank would be treated with a combination of aspirin and spiritual advice from a sheikh (a Muslim holy man)—are likely to be increasingly and solely medicalized in Toronto. They are not likely to be seen as symptomatic of social concerns, such as the influence of a problematic neighbour or family member, nor are they likely to be treated and/or discussed in ways that address both the body's aches and the mind's discomforts.

The lively, on-going discussions of the jinn on the Internet suggest that cyberspace citizens may be more flexible in their practices and beliefs than their peers in multicultural communities such as Toronto. I am interested in how the Internet may foster the continued existence of jinn stories, a fact that suggests a consideration of how the impact of globalizing technologies can preserve and/or intrinsically change the so-called "Little traditions" of religious practice and belief.