Scientific collaborator of the CIERL, and Ph.D. in Social Anthropology and Ethnology


Avenue Franklin D. Roosevelt, 17 – CP108

1000 Brussels

Belgium


@yael.dansac@ulb.be

ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2681-2301

Website: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Yael-Dansac

 

 


Info

 

Yael Dansac is currently (2025) scientific collaborator at the Centre for the Interdisciplinary Studies of Religions and Secularism (CIERL) of the Université libre de Bruxelles, Belgium. Prior to this, she was CIVIS3i-Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the same institution.

Dr. Dansac studied anthropology, sociology, and archaeology in France and Mexico. She obtained her PhD in Social Anthropology and Ethnology in the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris, in 2022. In the same year, she was the recipient of a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions Fellowship. She has conducted long-term, intensive ethnographic fieldwork in Mexico (2007-2012), France (2014-2019), Belgium (2022-2024) and United Kingdom (2017 and 2023). In the past twenty years, she has been affiliated to Mexican and European universities, and has also been visiting researcher at the Department of Theology and Religious Studies of the University of Glasgow (2023). Her research has been supported by numerous external grants and fellowships from prestigious programmes and institutions including the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the EHESS’s Aires Culturelles Funding Programme.

            Dr. Dansac’s main research fields are anthropology of religion, and ritual studies with a focus on ethnology of contemporary European societies, ritual creativity, phenomenology, folklore, ethno-knowledge, and interreligious studies. Her research interests encompass topics ranging from secularisation processes and contemporary spiritual practices to Western esotericism, from archaeological heritage appropriations and identity movements to cultural heritage politics, from embodiment and phenomenology to somatic pedagogies and ritual design, from nature-based spiritualities and more-than-human ontologies to environmental humanities, and from eco-politics and ecological spiritualities to interreligious environmentalism. These themes have been studied applying a multi-disciplinary and multi-sited approach, and explored theoretically and empirically, either comparatively (at the pan-European or global level) or with a special focus on Atlantic Europe.

            Yael Dansac’s research outputs to date (2025) include one authored book, two edited volumes, three edited special issues, some twenty peer-reviewed articles and chapters in books, and a dozen of diverse pieces of writing (reviews, reviews, reports, non-peer-reviewed articles, etc.) Her work has been published in English, Spanish and French, and her research has also been presented orally in more than 60 keynote talks, invited lectures, and conference presentations in more than 20 countries. Harvard University, Humboldt University in Berlin, University of California in Santa Barbara, University of Tartu, University College London, University of Barcelona, Arizona State University, University of Pisa, and University of Buenos Aires are among the institutions where she has presented research papers. 

For the last fifteen years, she has been teaching courses in Anthropology of Religion, Ethnographic Methods, Archaeological Heritage, Pre-Columbian Cultures, and Intangible Heritage. She is member of the most important international scientific societies in her fields and currently holds important positions, including Co-convenor of the Contemporary Spiritual Practices Network at the European Association of Social Anthropologists (https://easaonline.org/), and Social Science Board Representative at the International Society for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture (https://www.issrnc.org/). Besides her research and teaching duties, she is book reviews editor of the Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture (https://journal.equinoxpub.com/JSRNC), and evaluator of European Union’s research projects.

Latest Publications

 

Edited Volumes:

Special Issues:

  • Dansac, Yael and Boissière Nicolas (Eds.) (2023). “Contemporary Paganism and New Age during the COVID-19 Pandemic: Creativity, Adaptation, and Innovation”. Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions 27 (2). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/nr.2023.27.2.5

  • De la Torre, Renée, Gutiérrez, Cristina and Dansac Yael. (Eds.) (2021). “Neo-Paganism, Neo-Indianism and New Age: ritual creativity, heritage challenges and identitary uses of archaeological sites”.  Revista Ciencias Sociales y Religión / Revista Ciências Sociais e Religião 23. DOI: https://doi.org/10.20396/csr.v23i00.15882

Articles:

  • Dansac, Yael. (2024). “Extraordinary Bodies, Invisible Worlds: Somatic Pedagogy in Neo-pagan Ritual Practices”. Approaching Religion 14 (2): 240-247. DOI: https://doi.org/10.30664/ar.138268

  • Dansac, Yael. (2023). “Quand l’expérience ‘spirituelle’ s’éprouve dans et par le corps : pédagogie somatique et transformation identitaire dans le Morbihan”. Anthropologica, Journal of the Canadian Anthropology Society, 65 (1): 1-22. DOI:  https://doi.org/10.18357/anthropologica65120232600

  • Dansac, Yael. (2021). “The enchantment of archaeological sites and the quest for personal transformation”.  Revista Ciencias Sociales y Religión / Revista Ciências Sociais e Religião 23: 1-27.  DOI: https://doi.org/10.20396/csr.v23i00.14912

  • Dansac, Yael. (2020). “Embodiment Engagements with the megaliths of Carnac: Somatic Experience, Somatic Imagery and Bodily Techniques in Contemporary Spiritual Practices”. Journal of Religion in Europe 13 (3/4): 300-324.   DOI: https://doi.org/10.1163/18748929-20211492
Mis à jour le 7 juillet 2025