Natacha Klein Kafer

Short presentation

I am currently researching how popular healing knowledge survived in the private sphere despite the efforts to suppress these practices, paying particular attention to the relationship between popular healing and “official” medical knowledge, witch trials, and the legal framing of healing practices in early modern Dresden and Glasgow. From 2006 to 2019, I researched ritual practices in immigrant communities in Southern Brazil and the connections between these practices and similar traditions found in the USA and historically across Europe. My focus was mostly on understanding popular ritual traditions found in Brazil in a transcontinental perspective, looking at how these forms of popular knowledge are transmitted and transformed across different historical periods and continents, exploring the entanglements with history of science and medicine, book history, history of migration, and religious studies. This intense research covered the long period from the 9th century until today, including an in-depth analysis of the presence of users of similar traditions in witch trials. My main research interests are in the fields of folklore, popular knowledge, and history of migrations.