DESCENDING WITH ANGELS

This book and film provide an account of the invisible dynamics of possession and psychosis, and of how the bodies and souls of Muslim patients are shaped by the conflicting demands of Islam and the psychiatric institutions of European nation-states.

Over several years, Christian Suhr followed Muslim patients being treated in a Danish mosque and in a psychiatric hospital. His analysis reveals how both psychiatric and Islamic healing work not only to produce relief from pain, but also entail an ethical transformation of the patient and the cultivation of religious and secular values through the experience of pain. Creatively exploring the analytic possibilities provided by the use of a camera, both the book and film show how disruptive ritual techniques are used in healing to destabilise individual perceptions and experiences of agency, so as to allow patients to submit to the invisible powers of psychotropic medicine or God.

Descending with angels addresses several timely topics – Islam in the West, mental health, intercultural cohabitation – and provides new theoretical perspectives on the agency of the invisible in human life. It will be of particular interest to scholars and students of anthropology, psychiatry, film and media studies, and the study of religion and Islam.

Christian Suhr is a filmmaker, Associate Professor, and the coordinator of the Eye & Mind MSc Track in Visual Anthropology, Aarhus University.

Purchase the book at Manchester University Press.

Paperback £25 – Ebook £25 – Hardback £80

The book comes with limited online access to the film.

© 2019

Readers of the book may access the film here: Descending with angels

For university and classroom use, screenings and public performance rights, and DVD purchases of Descending with angels please contact: 

Documentary Educational Resources
108 Water Street, 5A 
Watertown MA 02472

01 (617) 926-0491
orders@der.org
www.der.org

The film is directed and produced by Christian Suhr, Persona Film.

© 2013

In this stunning and beautifully written book, Christian Suhr offers unique insights into encounters between psychiatry and spirit possession in Islamic diasporic communities. Like the accompanying film, the book is caring and thought-provoking. This is a must-read (and must-see!) not only for students and scholars of Islam, and of psychiatry, but also for all who want to think seriously about how form can be put to work conceptually—how montage, for instance, can become a mode of analysis.

AMIRA MITTERMAIER, University of Toronto

This book and film plumb a boundary that counts above all others in Islam and arguably in every religion: the divide between the seen and unseen worlds. By focusing on jinn possession and exorcism, the author exposes the extent to which the ʿālam al-ghayb, or unseen world, informs the mundane, day-to-day existence of Muslims within it. Christian Suhr is a remarkably gifted auteur and a highly self-reflexive critic of audiovisual media. What he has to say regarding the possibilities and limitations of this medium for Islamic studies is far reaching. This book and film matter.

SIMON O’MEARA, SOAS University of London

A powerful contribution to anthropological understandings of spirit possession and Islamic exorcism and a groundbreaking work in the field of audiovisual anthropology. Exceptionally clear and well-written; a joy to read. In ethnographic approach as well as theoretical radicalism, this book sets new standards for contemporary visual anthropology.

MICHAELA SCHÄUBLE, University of Bern

This monograph and film constitute a challenging, thought-provoking, and insightful piece of scholarship that reflects an unusually deep engagement with a difficult field of research. With a strong sense of purpose, and respect for his subject and collaborators, Suhr has produced an impressively rich ethnography, often of a highly intimate nature. The core questions have to do with the nature (and the effectiveness) of neo-orthodox Islamic healing and Danish psychiatry, but also with the possibility of intercultural cohabitation: the urgent questions of today’s Denmark, Europe, and the ghettoized and globalized world in which we live.

LAURA U. MARKS, Simon Fraser University

Descending with angels delivers a compelling exegesis of the way that faith is integrated into secular society through the particular lens of psychiatric illness and spirit possession. Both elements of this work make a huge contribution to medical anthropology and Islamic studies. Suhr’s reflections on methodology contribute significantly to the development of film as a research method as well as a means for broadening scholarly expression. The accessibility of this work will be appealing to students and scholars as well as to professionals involved in the treatment of mental disorders.

ANDY LAWRENCE, University of Manchester

It seems to rain a great deal in Denmark. With the rain, angels descend to feed plants, bless homes, wash the city, and generally watch over its residents. Christian Suhr’s ethnographic film, Descending with angels, considers what comes down with the rain, as Suhr maneuvers between and through Islamic healing practices and the Danish psychiatric system. 

The film accomplishes something unique in participatory sequences in which Suhr and the doctors, shaykhs, Muslim patients, and Muslim youth attempt to make sense of what they are seeing, from footage Suhr has shot to online Islamic exorcism videos. 

Descending with angels provides a complex picture of Muslim life in Denmark, from the diversity of Muslim immigrant communities to the transcultural spaces between medicine, religion, social services, and community. It dives into and evokes the liminal and transgressive, avoiding totalizing narratives and burdens of information while also getting at what it means to believe, whether in magic or Western medicine.

The film offers a productive point for pedagogical departure for classes concerned with Islam and Islamic healing, immigration, consciousness and mental illness, religion and science, public health, ethnographic ethics and reflexivity, and visual anthropology.

MARYAM KASHANI, University of Illinois
American Anthropologist, June 2018