On Spirit Writing: The Powers of Transduction across Semiotic Modalities

Through anthropological examples which are taken from contexts that are far from one another (contemporary New York and Sumba, Byzantine empire), the article shows the importance of the cognitive role played by reading and writing in the relationship they have with what is considered as the realm of the beyond. Reading and writing are not only channels through which the realm of the beyond appears as having already an independent existence ; they are at the heart of the religious content itself and of the symbolic nature it is endowed with.