ABSTRACT
In 1981, while still in Fortaleza, I received an invitation from a man named Paulo Schutz, then director of the Graduate Program in Education of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, to present a series of lectures. I soon learned that he had earned a PhD a few years previously at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Having become disillusioned with the contribution that the exclusively quantitative techniques he had been taught could make to his understanding of the culture and society of the children he was training teachers to teach, he wanted me to speak to his faculty and students about the qualitative approaches employed in anthropology. I could not know at the time that this brief sojourn would bring me into ever more interesting aspects of Spiritist endeavors.
