channeling

Invisible Partners and Strategic Information: Channeling as “Semiotic Ideology”

A significant aspect of religious practices and representations is the way information is handled. If we understand religion as a form of imagination assigning human properties to nonhuman agents (and vice versa), we would expect that the rules of communication and interaction with such agents would play a special role in religious culture. The concept of “semiotic ideologies” by Webb Keane is one of the analytical tools that allow us studying the norms, expectations and rules of such communications.