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- Convenors:
-
Malgorzata Rajtar
(Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Polish Academy of Sciences)
Dominik Mattes (Freie Universität Berlin)
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- Formats:
- Workshops
- Location:
- R12 (in V)
- Sessions:
- Thursday 12 July, -, -, Friday 13 July, -
Time zone: Europe/Paris
Short Abstract:
Despite biomedicine's technological advancement, it still fails to address many physical, mental, and social afflictions. Resurgence in religious healing is a response to precisely this uncertainty. This workshop aims to address entanglements and mutual influence between religion and biomedicine.
Long Abstract:
Several authors have persuasively argued that the institutional and conceptual separation of medicine and religion is a historically and culturally constructed heritage of the Enlightenment (Barnes and Sered 2005, Foucault 1973, and Good 1994). They concluded that, though not surprising, a reemergence of religious healing in the twenty-first century remains understudied. Already in the 1970s it was observed that in Western societies "an ever increasing part of human existence" is subjected to biomedical jurisdiction (Zola 1972: 487), a phenomenon which could indicate that religion has been losing ground in the realm of healing. However, despite an ongoing technological advancement and considerable ability to cure or stabilize disease, biomedicine still fails to address many physical, mental, and social afflictions for the concerned. Hence, it has been argued that resurgence in religious healing and the importance of religion in coping with illness is a response to precisely this uncertainty (e.g. Dilger, Burchardt and van Dijk 2010). In dealing with illnesses, some religious groups and individuals entirely reject biomedical services and medications and prefer to rely on healing prayers, while others utilize therapeutic means of both domains in a constant transgression of the constructed boundaries in between. This workshop invites papers that creatively address entanglements and mutual influence between religion and health care/biomedicine as well as religious approaches to sustaining health, healing practices, and dealing with illness in contexts of social transformations and uncertainties of the present.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 12 July, 2012, -Laura Montesi (University College London)
Paper short abstract:
Among the indigenous Huave population of south-western Mexico, Pentecostal healing through prayer is re-establishing the centrality of the social/moral dimension in dealing with illness, thus challenging the biomedical paradigm originally imposed by the state partly to contrast traditional indigenous medicine.
Paper long abstract:
Uncertainty and precariousness characterise all societies; they are nevertheless conceptualised and dealt with differently. Among many indigenous Mesoamerican populations the sense of uncertainty is explained by the consciousness of being only partly independent; one contributing factor is health, which is tightly linked to the wellness of social relations. Susto, vergüenza, invidia and brujeria are clear examples of this construction. This cosmology of health and illness is usually rejected by healthcare providers, who regard it, pejoratively, as a "folk belief". Thus, the strong presence of the state ideology through health programmes and the imposition of the biomedical paradigm have led to a twofold outcome: local people can choose between doctors or traditional healers but, in certain cases, conflict arises between the two different medical systems, considered incompatible.
Today this panorama is even more complex because of the presence of another thaumaturgic option, offered by the new religious alternatives, especially Evangelicalism and Pentecostalism. Most of the conversions from indigenous Catholicism to Protestantism result from an experience of illness successfully treated thanks to the miraculous intervention of the Holy Spirit attributed to the prayers of evangelicals.
In this paper I want to analyse how religious (Pentecostal) healing among the indigenous Huave population of south-western Mexico re-establishes the importance of morality and the connection between the individual and his/her social surrounding, albeit in another ideological framework determined by the binary dichotomy of faith and sin. The new evangelical wave attests to the failure to establish a separation between social/moral afflictions and disease.
Dr. Komáromi Tünde (Károli Gáspár University, Budapest)
Paper short abstract:
Transylvanians of different ethnicity and religious affiliation ask for the help of the Romanian Orthodox priests in case of serious illnesses or troubles, supposed to be caused by witchcraft. Religious healing alternates with the biomedical investigations, healing processes and controls.
Paper long abstract:
Witchcraft beliefs are still powerful in contemporary Romania. While the capital city is hosting the newly emerging post socialist witch-business-women, advertising services in the TV, newspapers, journals and the electronic media, the countryside is more traditional. In the Transylvanian Aries region, where I conducted fieldwork for several years, professional magicians, fortune tellers do occur, but suspicions and accusations of witchcraft are mainly tied to the close ones, neighbors or relatives. People are supposed to do magic by themselves, making use of their own knowledge. Illnesses and social ills are interpreted and reinterpreted, depending on the results of curing alternatives. Biomedical treatment follows usually the domestic/popular ones (herbs, magical rites); if biomedical investigation ends without a diagnosis, or treatment turns out to be without effect, suspicions of witchcraft arise and the patient is taken to a 'stronger' witch or a Romanian Orthodox priest. The troubled person (or a relative) will fast and pray parallel with the priest, but the priest's prayers are believed to be the most effective cure in cases of witchcraft. The result is felt, but the patient usually returns to the medical doctor, as he/she considers important having a feedback from the biomedical side as well. Romanian Orthodox Church has clearly great advantages in caring of the sick and the troubled in Transylvania; all the ethnic categories and people of all the historical religions turn to the Orthodox for help. Their hegemony in this field is only challenged by the Charismatic Christians during the last decades.
Franziska Herbst (University of Heidelberg)
Paper short abstract:
The Giri medical landscape is characterised by a multitude of treatment options that range from indigenous and biomedical practices to Christian healing prayers and novel shamanistic rituals. This paper explores the creative employment of biomedical technology in therapeutic decision-making.
Paper long abstract:
This paper is based on extensive ethnographic research carried out in Giri (Papua New Guinea) since 2006 and investigates the ways in which Giri utilise biomedical technology to determine which therapeutic means will work for them. Aside from indigenous and biomedical practices, Christian healing prayers and non-indigenous shamanistic rituals are entangled in the local medical landscape. Patients and their therapy managers usually pragmatically employ multiple kinds of diagnostic methods and therapeutic procedures throughout an illness episode. Not uncommonly, formulated diagnoses and recommended treatment regimens differ significantly from one type of practitioner to another. This brings uncertainty for the patient and may also become a financial and emotional burden, especially for patients who suffer from long-term and chronic conditions. In order to gain clarity over their illness, Giri people make use of Western technologies in highly creative ways. A biomedical imaging technology, the X-ray machine, enjoys a certain popularity amongst the Giri where it has taken on an unexpected life. The images that the X-ray device produces can do a lot more to Giri patients than showing their anatomy to them. The X-ray is locally reinterpreted in such a way that it becomes an aid in revealing if an illness is a bodily disorder or grounded in disrupted social relations. The patient's choice of therapy depends to a large extent on these novel interpretations of X-ray photographs.
Dominik Mattes (Freie Universität Berlin)
Paper short abstract:
Despite the massive roll-out of antiretroviral treatment for HIV/AIDS patients continue to flexibly navigate the diverse therapeutic landscape on the search for a cure. This paper examines the articulation between biomedical therapy and religious healing practices in the context of an ambiguous national biopolitical agenda.
Paper long abstract:
In early March 2011 first Tanzanian newspapers featured reports on an herbal "miracle cure" for HIV/AIDS and other major chronic diseases. Hundreds of thousands have since flocked to receive the 'magic cup' from a retired Lutheran pastor who claims to act according to Godly instructions. Many have ceased to take their biomedical medications after supposedly being cured. The close entanglement of religious faith and scientific evidence in the form of the 'magic cup' has triggered a heated discussion among a plethora of stakeholders ranging from governmental and scientific bodies, religious leaders of various denominations to skeptical or approving Tanzanian citizens. Originating from this discussion on a national scale, this contribution localizes the conceptualization of distinguishable and interconnected healing domains (biomedical, herbal and spiritual/religious) in the experiences of HIV-positive people and traditional medical practitioners in urban Tanga. Despite the massive roll-out of antiretroviral treatment and respective efforts to promote it as the only effective remedy, patients continue to flexibly navigate the diverse therapeutic landscape on the search for a cure. It is argued that a more thorough scrutiny of the articulation between antiretroviral treatment and religious promises of healing is just as necessary as a closer examination of traditional healers' endeavors to develop medications against HIV/AIDS in order to fully understand patients' strategies to cope with the disease and their decisions to stop taking their "hospital medicine".
Ursula Read (University of Essex)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores competing discourses among biomedical and religious healers in Ghana to claim authority over the treatment of mental illness. It suggests that these polarising discourses may fail to engage with the social impact of mental illness as it experienced by those afflicted.
Paper long abstract:
Mental illness provides fertile ground for contested practices of diagnosis and healing since its causation remains unclear. Nonetheless, Ghanaian health professionals, supported by global psychiatric experts, overlook such uncertainty to present an authoritative knowledge of mental illness as a medical condition amenable to scientific intervention. In this discourse families are portrayed as reluctant to use psychiatric services out of 'ignorance' and mental illness is said to be viewed by the lay person as a 'spiritual disease'. Despite the poor conditions of the overcrowded psychiatric hospitals, and the damaging side effects of psychotropic drugs, psychiatric services are promoted as optimal and 'modern' treatment. However ethnographic research among people with psychosis and their families reveals that the causes of mental illness remain subject to conjecture rather than certainty, and the failure of antipsychotics to bring about a cure challenges the veracity of the psychiatric discourse. The gap between the claims of biomedical practitioners and the relapsing course of mental illness experienced by informants is filled by Christian, Islamic and 'traditional' healers who promise superior healing power. However attempts to claim either scientific or religious authority over mental illness set a false polarity between the spiritual and biomedical which may fail to engage with the experience of mental illness by those afflicted in which its impact is felt most as a disruption of the social self. The notion of 'social suffering' offers a contrasting approach to mental illness which encompasses spiritual, physical as well as social domains.
Aysecan Terzioglu (Sabanci University)
Paper short abstract:
Based on a fieldwork in Istanbul and Aydın, this talk explores how the Turkish women with breast cancer embrace an Islamic perspective and life style in order to cope with uncertainties in their life during and after their medical treatment. It compares this tendency with other ways of spiritual empowerment among breast cancer patients and survivors.
Paper long abstract:
Turkish breast cancer patients experience major uncertainities during and after their medical treatment, in terms of their treatment's outcomes and its side-effects. According to their illness narratives, coping with those uncertainties often brings out the patients' transformation into a better, spritually and emotionally stronger person. In some cases, this includes becoming more religious in terms of evaluating the issues of life, illness and death and living their daily life in accord with Islamic principles, such as praying regularly, wearing a headscarf and going to Mecca for pilgrimage. Based on a one-year ethnographic fieldwork in Istanbul and Aydın, a small, rather conservative city in the Aegean Region, this talk explores how women with breast cancer describe those transformations as a part of their survival strategies facing with breast cancer. How do those transformations influence their social identity and interactions? How do those women relate their transformations to the marginalization and stigmatization of cancer patients in Turkey? Which social and cultural dynamics lead to the formation of the narratives of spiritual empowerment or becoming (more) religious ? To what extent such narratives enable women to talk about their illness experiences in their own words and from their own perspective, while speaking about cancer in culturally and socially coded ways? Having a cross-cultural approach, this talks aims at providing answers to those questions, by comparing the Turkish women's narratives with similar transformation narratives of breast cancer patients from different societies, such as the U.S, European and Middle Eastern countries.
Malgorzata Rajtar (Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Polish Academy of Sciences)
Paper short abstract:
Jehovah's Witnesses refuse blood transfusions on religious grounds while they simultaneously insist on obtaining the best possible medical treatment. Drawing on an ethnographic research among the JW patients, the paper analyzes the intertwining of biomedical with religious discourse and practices.
Paper long abstract:
Despite their long held animosity of vaccinations the Jehovah's Witnesses, a millenarian movement established in the U.S. in the 1870s and present in Germany since the 1900s, expressed little initial interest in health and sickness. Nonetheless, in 1945, the organizations flagship magazine Watchtower, citing biblical references, denounced the movement of blood between bodies as "God-dishonoring" making them the best known religious proponents of the "no blood transfusion" policy. Interestingly, Witnesses are not against biomedicine as such: they refuse blood transfusions on religious grounds while they simultaneously insist on obtaining the best possible medical treatment. In order to support their religious stance they frequently draw on and utilize biomedical language, in which the newest biomedical results showing possible dangers of blood transfusions are explained, such as the transmission of HIV, syphilis, or hepatitis. They also make an efficient usage of modern medical technology such as blood salvaging machines and the heart-lung machine. Drawing on an ongoing (to be completed in April 2012) ethnographic research among the Witness patients in Berlin, the paper analyzes the intertwining of biomedical with religious discourse and practices that may shed a new light on the relationship between religion and (secular)biomedicine.