Deirdre de la Cruz is the Director of the Doctoral Program in Anthropology and History, and Associate Professor of History and Asian Languages and Cultures, at the University of Michigan. A cultural anthropologist by training, her current projects include a scholarly book on the history of faith healing in the Philippines.

This talk, a part of that work, first provides a broad historical outline of the esoteric movements in the twentieth-century Philippines that culminated in the convergence of New Age spirituality and Filipino Spiritism seen in psychic surgery, paying particular attention to the axial shift from Espiritismo (the science of communication with the dead codified by French educator Allan Kardec that made its way to the Philippines at the turn of the twentieth century), to transpacific New Age movements. It then digs deep into the spectacle of healing that drew thousands of patients from around the world at a time when the Philippines was under the influence of its most notorious head of state in the twentieth century, Ferdinand Marcos.