Mesturini Silvia
Postdoctoral fellow, ERC Healing Encounters
Contact: silvia.mesturini(at)cnrs.fr
Research
Biographie en anglais (10 à 15 lignes): Silvia Mesturini Cappo has a BA degree in social sciences from the Université Libre de Bruxelles, a master’s degree in social science of religion from the Ecole Pratique d’Hautes Etudes of Paris (EPHE-Sorbonne), and a PhD in anthropology from the Université Libre de Bruxelles, obtained in 2010.
She has spent most of her post-doc years teaching anthropology for UCLouvain in Belgium, initiating mental health professionals to social science inductive research practices and conducting collaborative and project oriented research for the social work sector in Bruxelles. Her thesis, “Espaces Chamaniques en Movement: Itinéraires Vécus et Géographies Multiples” (Shamanic Spaces on the Move: Life Itineraries and Multiple Geographies between Europe and South America) was based on multi-sited fieldwork including European (France, Belgium, Holland and Spain) and South American locations (Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador) conducted between 2004 and 2010.
Her research on ayahuasca rituals and their internationalization was part of a wider interest in shamanic practice at large. Her ethnography had a special focus on : ritual interaction, indigenous ontologies and epistemology of science, humain and other-than-human relationality.
Her participation to Healing Encounters comes as a second chapter of fundamental research on indigenous praxis and their internationalization. At the heart of her approach today is (1) a deep commitment to political and ecological awareness within the relations and the subjets that anthropological research brings together and puts to work as well as (2) the ambition of broadening the study, the comprehension and the respect for indigenous, resilient, non productivist and decolonized ways of life. She is mostly active in the « Healing in the Forest » part of the projet, she adresses issues of indigenous and colonial production of knowledge, of meaning and of healing. She is mostly working with Shipibo urbanized communities in the Peruvian Amazon.