Permeable Bodies: Posession in Dersim

Sociology of Health and Illness, 1981

Etnoantropološki Problemi Issues in Ethnology and Anthropology , 2024

It is virtually impossible to conduct a holistic study of any religious phenomenon without considering its relationship with health, healing, and the body. In the case of New Age or self-denominated "Spiritual" groups, the role of health takes on an even more prominent role, acting as a soteriology or a cultural ideal. This paper focuses on the conceptions of the body, healing, and well-being held by members of the Serbian group "Spiritual Technology," founded by Živorad Mihajlović Slavinski in 1996, and their associated practices. Through an in-depth analysis of various texts authored by Slavinski, healing practices are considered as religious practices, divided into prevention and remediation practices, along with their subsequent stages (diagnosis, treatment, and prescription). Based on an energetic view of the body, where well-being and unwellness are concepts constantly renegotiated between healer and patient, the body is understood as composed of entities, which have been classified and divided in terms of their origin and their influences on humans. This research concludes that these ritualized practices contribute to the creation of ritual bodies as well as common narratives of corporeality, health, and even a shared worldview, serving as an interpretative framework to interact with the self and the surrounding world and, therefore, playing an important role in the formation of contemporary subjectivities.

Esoteric healing in its approaches recognizes the need to differentiate between the states of consciousness of the one to be healed. Unlike modern medicine that is focused almost exclusively upon the healing of the dense physical body, the esoteric approach addresses primarily the causes of the disease or fiction, presenting themselves through some physically manifested discomfort or dis-ease. By doing that it is of utmost importance for the healer to realize the state of consciousness of the patient, or to word it otherwise, to know where lays the emphasis of the life force within him. In the following paper, we will, therefore, explore primarily the 3 Law of Healing and see how this relates to the states of consciousness that have been called the Lemurian, Atlantean and Aryan.

IT Nel mondo della medicina occidentale, o biomedicina, vige un approccio diagnostico e terapeutico, tendenzialmente basato sulla dicotomia mente/corpo, considerato universale e aculturale, come una lingua che, data la sua scientificità, è avulsa da interpretazioni soggettive e culturalmente determinate. Verrà dimostrato, in realtà, che ogni sistema medico, e di conseguenza le interpretazioni e le pratiche adottate nella gestione di una qualsiasi patologia, sono frutto di un corrispondente sistema culturale emerso attraverso specifiche dinamiche storico-sociali. Attraverso un approccio antropologico, intendo dimostrare come l’efficacia terapeutica non possa esser ridotta solo in termini di un’alterazione positiva a livello fisiologico. Esistono infatti altre dimensioni dell’esperienza di malattia di una persona da dover tenere in considerazione che spesso vengono oscurate da questo riduzionismo. Facendo speciale riferimento a pratiche mediche non bioscientifiche, basate sull’efficacia della voce e delle parole in contesti amerindiani, il processo curativo verrà qui riformulato in termini di partecipazione attiva sia del paziente che del dottore/guaritore. Grazie a questo processo, sarà possibile giungere ad una co-costruzione, trasformazione ed incorporazione di quella che verrà chiamata ‘la narrazione dell’esperienza di malattia’ attraverso la fusione delle forme di percezione individuale e culturalmente codificate di questo fenomeno. Infine, questa nuovo significato attribuito all’esperienza di malattia porterà ad una concreta trasformazione delle varie dimensioni della vita e modi di orientarsi nel mondo di un individuo, ovvero sia a livello organico che a livello sociale. ENG All therapeutic encounters entail some sort of negotiation. Culture and medicine are by definition closely intertwined, the latter being the result of and shaped by the former’s attendant socio-historical dynamics and phenomena. The meanings attributed to and the culturally diverse ways in which concepts of sickness and health are articulated have a profound impact on the terms under which processes of diagnosis and treatment are codified. Analogously, the outcomes of specific medical practices hinge on and are shaped by these cultural categories and collectively established meanings. To this regard, even Western medicine, based on the mind-body dichotomy and inseparable from experimental scientific thought, is nothing but the epitome of such a culturally based process. Biomedicine, however, draws from logical and experimental thought the pretence of ‘universality’, wielding the cause-effect relationship and reductionism to prevail over other medical systems. Science is naively held to be acultural, unquestionably efficacious and indiscriminately applicable to every circumstance. In spite of this, one’s understandings of sickness are children of their times and need to be placed and comprehended according to their context of origin. With special reference to Amerindian medical practices based on the efficacy of words and voice sounds, healing practices will be analysed as efficacious ritual performances capable of bridging the hiatus between symbolical and empirical reality. It will be demonstrated that therapeutic efficacy cannot be reduced to a mere positive change in physiological state, rather that both therapy and the experience of sickness are the product of multifaceted and negotiated cultural and personal perceptions. The process of curing will be thus reformulated in terms of an active participation by both patient and doctor/healer, culminating in the embodiment of a co-constructed narrative of the experience of sickness.

American Anthropological Association (AAA) 117th Annual Meeting, 2018

“Participation”, real or mystical, is used in this paper as an analytical concept in the study of the relationship between “agency” and practices/rituals dealing with traditional medicine in the Middle East. The paper proposes that “participation” creates a sense of agency, an aspect of conscious experience that indicates the feeling of control over practices or actions and their outcomes. Within the framework of participation, a traditional healer, shaikh or mystic (Sufi) leader, is represented as a conscious agent who exercises an impact on other persons including those suffering from physical and psychological problems such as illness, ecstasy, spirit possession or altered state of mind. Theoretically, this paper examines Stanley Tambiah’s concept of “participation” that may occur when persons, groups, animals, places, and natural phenomena are in a relation of contiguity and translate that relation into one of existential immediacy and contact and shared affinities. The paper investigates to what extent traditional healers manipulate this concept or belief (of participation) as an agency in impacting and healing people.

Religions, 2022

This article aims to analyze how the category ‘spiritual’ used by Hippocrates of Kos can help with a better understanding of the influence and reception of Hippocratic medicine the Christian self-understanding as a religion of healing, especially from the Hippocratic influence in Potamius of Lisbon, and at the same time this Christian understanding contributes to the desacralization of medicine as a medical art. For this purpose, it will be analyzed the category pneuma in the Hippocratic naturalism, and within the debate between the medical schools, Pneumatics and Empirics, around the various methods of treatment to maintain the dynamization of pneuma. With this, it is intended, then, to identify different forms of reception of Hippocrates in Christianity associated with the different perceptions that one has of the writings of the physician of Kos. Such contextualization aims to help understand the process of spiritualization of pneuma that paved the way for the radicalization of the Pauline duality between body and soul, as well as to identify another understanding of pneuma linked to the conception of stoic sympatheia and the reading of the empiricists of Hippocratic Naturalism, both present in the Christian reading of the Corpus Hippocraticum. In this sense, this article will take as an example the work of Potamius of Lisbon (4th century), in order to identify an epistemological model of spirituality and health that could works as a kind of antidote to the tendency towards spiritualization of the pneuma, to accentuate its aspect of integrating, vitalizing and unifying body and soul in a pneuma dynamism, connecting the notion of restoring the health of nature with the notion of Christian redemption.