Skill and Scale in Transnational Mediumship

national boundaries and cultural zones, the author asks "how do new mediums in development learn to manifest spirit guides from another culture according to specific modalities", thus tackling the question of how local mediumistic practices are learned and transmitted, and so scale up and reach new transnational audiences.In her account of the Afro-Brazilian religion Candombl, transnationalization, and settlement in Germany, Joana Bahia explores the role of dance, music, and theater in scaling down this religious practice in Berlin's cultural context.Ultimately, these creative and artistic practices can appear as mediums for the resettlement in an initially alien context, here understood as a scaling down process of Candombl.Considered is how artistic manifestations participate in the creation of transnational religious communities, claiming new understandings of how spirituality mixes with various aspects of social life.Aiming at the question of how enskilment embodies spirituality, Inger Sjrslev compares two ritual contexts in Brazil, one the ritual of Afro-Brazilian Candombl, in which possession by the Orixas is the core, the other a ritual session in The Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, in which possession is rare, but in which the ritual framework is significant as an illustration of the kind of embodied spirituality that the participants aim for.Besides the paradoxical link between these two religions, they both involve particular enskilment processes that relate in particular ways to globalized dynamics and subjectification.At stake are the different processes of subjectivation and its relation to ritual practice.Bettina Schmidt, too, considers the tension between local scales and global skills and argues that while Brazilian mediums consider mediumship a global skill, anthropologists should focus on the diversity of local scales.Reflecting on the evolution of her longstanding work on mediumship and her fieldwork among religious and spiritualist communities in So Paulo, she elaborates on these local diversities, taking gender as an example.Referring to the concept of globalization, she demonstrates how mediumship practices are global skills that have diverse local scales and equally are local skills that are scaled up globally.We would like to express our sincere thanks to all participants for the lively and insightful discussions during our workshops in Cologne and the following elaboration of their contributions.We apologise to our authors and publishers for the many delays in the publication process.The book coincided with a period of professional changes for the editors-we believe and hope that it was worth the wait.The Collaborative Research Center Media of Cooperation in Siegen, the Graduate