The talk presents the first full-scale study of spirituality in Japanese martial arts (Budo) in the West. Taking Sweden as its case study, it will be argued that Budo can be framed as part of the international holistic-alternative milieu. Whereas the latter is traditionally seen as dominated by women, around 74% of Swedish Budo practitioners are male. By including Budo under the holistic heading, the project interrogates the claimed gender imbalance of said milieu and looks at ideals of spiritual masculinity in Budo containing a critique of hegemonic, secular Western masculinity. The talk will moreover propose that "Budo spirituality" is the product of multidirectional cultural transfers between “East” and “West”, involving, e.g., esoteric teachings like Theosophy as a bridge. It will also demonstrate how attention to such long-term intercultural entanglement lets us better understand the role of concepts like ki (a form of subtle energy), meditation, and selfdevelopment, as well as the strong perennialist-tinged focus on lineages in Budo as practised in Sweden. Analyzing Swedish Budo practitioners’ negotiations of the tension between secularity and spirituality (for example regarding ki as a spiritual, scientific, or entirely symbolic phenomenon), the project moreover deepens the understanding of the secular condition in today’s Sweden. The investigation encompasses discourse analysis of a large corpus of Swedish Budo texts from ca. 1900–2020, a survey, participant observation, and ca. 20 interviews. A discussion of this methodological approach will form the core of the talk.

What if one were to take seriously the proposition that advertising isn’t like magic, rather it is magic? And further, what if advertising isn’t just a matter of manipulation, but also, for the magician themselves, a question of entering a volatile relation with ambiguous powers? My talk explores this theme via the story of the rise and fall of Kersy Katrak – charismatic Bombay adman, published poet, and practicing occultist. The talk is at the same time, in a minor key, a meditation on the long tail of ethnographic enchantment.

The 2016 presidential election in the United States saw the emergence of political magic as one modality through which voters attempted to influence the results. Both right- and left-wing groups wielded magic: the right in support of Donald J. Trump, the left as a form of resistance once he had won the election. We documented this range of responses in a special issue of the journal Nova Religio published in 2020; my article focused on the use of magic as a form of resistance by modern Pagan witches and other magical practitioners. Drawing on the work of Italian ethnologist Ernesto de Martino, I argued that Trump’s victory created a “crisis of presence” for the left which pushed them to develop a range of artistic responses, one of them being magic. In these artistic expressions, the witch emerged as a figure who could counter the destructive powers of darkness, bringing about transformation and regeneration. This lecture reprises my findings in the context of the 2024 U.S. presidential election. Using both digital and in-person ethnography, and drawing on the work of Egil Asprem in the special issue cited above, I trace how the figures of the witch and the cat lady were deployed through memes and spells by a variety of left-leaning groups to create collective effervescence around Kamala Harris, the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate.