, Praying for health is a significant Islamic custom alongside seeking medical treatment, and has become a vital part of Muslim culture. There are two areas of focus in this book: the methodology and criteria of praying for health, and the results of a study on the effect of prayer on Muslim patients' well-being. This study was conducted at Brigham and Women's Hospital, a Harvard Medical School teaching affiliate in Boston, MA. Twenty-Five Remedies, a work by prominent contemporary Muslim scholar Said Nursi, included in this book, further enriches the scope of the subject of prayer and healing. ,
Traces the Islamic healing tradition's interaction with Indian society and politics as these evolved in tandem from 1600 to 1900, and demonstrates how an in-house struggle for hegemony can be as potent as external power in defining medical, social and national modernity. A pioneering work on the social and medical history of Indian Islam.
In Tanzania, the Marian Faith Healing Ministry offers Catholic healing rituals under the patronage of the Virgin Mary. Exorcism and a special water service are central to the healing process. People bring physical, spiritual, and social afflictions before the group's leader, Felicien Nkwera. Combining the perspectives of the study of religions and medical anthropology, this book analyzes Nkwera's pastoral texts and the personal healing narratives of the members. Thus, a complex image of the healing process is created and framed within its Tanzanian interreligious context and its global conservative Catholic context. (Series: Beitrage zur Afrikaforschung - Vol. 47)
This volume on medical tourism includes contributions by anthropologists and historians on a variety of health-seeking modes of travel and leisure. It brings together analyses of recent trends of "medical tourism", such as underinsured middle-class Americans traveling to India for surgery, pious Middle Eastern couples seeking assisted reproduction outside their borders, or consumers of the exotic in search of alternative healing, with analyses of the centuries-old Euro-American tradition of traveling to spas. Rather than seeing these two forms of medical travel as being disparate, the book demonstrates that, as noted in the introduction ‘what makes patients itinerant in both the old and new kind of medical travel is either a perceived shortage or constraint at ‘home’, or the sense of having reached a particular kind of therapeutic impasse, with the two often so intertwined that it is difficult to tell them apart. The constraint may stem from things as diverse as religious injunctions, legal hurdles, social approbation, or seasonal affliction; and the shortage can range from a lack of privacy, of insurance, technology, competence, or enough therapeutic resources that can address issues and conditions that patients have. If these two intertwined strands are responsible for most medical tourism, then which locales seem to have therapeutic resources are those that are either ‘natural,’ in the form of water or climate; legal, in the form of a culture that does not stigmatise patients; or technological and professional, in the form of tests, equipment, or expertise, unavailable or affordable at home; or in the form of novel therapeutic possibilities that promise to resolve irresolvable issues’. This book was originally published as a special issue of Anthropology & Medicine.
Health and Healing in World Religions is a comprehensive introduction to the field that explores the research that links spirituality and well-being, including work with addiction and trauma. Each chapter includes an introduction to and summary of each tradition, questions at the conclusion, and boxes that highlight key ideas from the chapter using an example and interviews with medical professionals and other healers. Health and Healing in World Religions looks at cutting edge interfaces between spirituality and health such as mindfulness practices, addiction programmes, indigenous approaches to healing, traditional Chinese medicine, yoga and Ayurveda, and more. The text provides an overview of the research and practice all in one place and includes extensive bibliographies and resource guides for ease of reference. Health and Healing in World Religions is derived from over 20 years of teaching and research in health and healing and comes from an in-depth understanding of religion and spirituality. It is a vital guide to understanding cultural competency in the healing professions and the need to understand the cultural and spiritual traditions of clients.
Here, Thierry Zarcone and Angela Hobart offer a vigorous and authoritative exploration of the link between Islam and shamanism in contemporary Muslim culture, examining how the old practice of shamanism was combined with elements of Sufism in order to adapt to wider Islamic society. Shamanism and Islam thus surveys shamanic practices in Central Asia, the Middle East, North Africa and the Balkans, to show how the Muslim shaman, like his Siberian counterpart, cultivated personal relations with spirits to help individuals through healing and divination. It explores the complexities and variety of rituals, involving music, dance and, in some regions, epic and bardic poetry, demonstrating the close links between shamanism and the various arts of the Islamic world. This is the first in-depth exploration of 'Islamized shamanism', and is a valuable contribution to the field of Islamic Studies, Religion, Anthropology, and an understanding of the Middle East more widely.
In contemporary Turkey—a democratic, secular, and predominantly Muslim nation—the religious healer is a controversial figure. Attracting widespread condemnation, religious healers are derided as exploiters of the sick and vulnerable, discredited forms of Islamic and medical authority, and superstitious relics of a pre-modern era. Yet all sorts of people, and not just the desperately ill, continue to seek them out. After years of research with healers and their patients in working-class neighborhoods of urban Turkey, anthropologist Christopher Dole concludes that the religious healer should be regarded not as an exception to Turkey's secular modern development but as one of its defining figures. Healing Secular Life demonstrates that religious healing and secularism in fact have a set of common stakes in the ordering of lives and the remaking of worlds. Linking the history of medical reforms and scientific literacy campaigns to contemporary efforts of Qur'anic healers to treat people afflicted by spirits and living saints through whom deceased political leaders speak, Healing Secular Life approaches stories of healing and being healed as settings for examining the everyday social intimacies of secular political rule. This ethnography of loss, care, and politics reveals not only that the authority of the religious healer is deeply embedded within the history of secular modern reform in Turkey but also that personal narratives of suffering and affliction are inseparable from the story of a nation seeking to recover from the violence of its own secular past.
Touch may well be one of the least understood or talked about subjects in the helping professions. A discussion on the importance and ethics of positive, caring, and appropriate touch in professions such as teaching, nursing and counselling is long overdue. Touch in the Helping Professions delivers just that, weaving together scholarly evidence, research and clinical practice from a wide range of perspectives encompassing philosophy, theology, psychology, and anthropology to challenge assumptions about the role of touch in the helping professions. The contributors to the volume focus not only on the overarching roles of gender, age, culture and life experience, but go beyond to encompass canine-assisted therapy, touch deprivation, sacred objects, as well as key ethical considerations. The prevailing lack of dialogue, due to fear of contravening ethical boundaries, has stood in the way of an open and responsible discussion on the use of touch in therapy. Touch in the Helping Professions is a welcome and much needed contribution to the field—a window onto a fundamental need. This book is published in English. - Cet ouvrage offre un ensemble de données probantes et de résultats cliniques à l’appui du toucher dans le développement physique et émotionnel. Il est structuré selon trois axes : la théorie sur le toucher; la pratique du toucher dans un contexte de thérapie, et les questions éthiques. Il aborde la question du rôle du genre, de l’âge, de la culture et de l’expérience de vie, des sujets comme la zoothérapie, la privation sensorielle, des objets sacrés, et des considérations d’ordre éthique. Les approches variées – philosophie, théologie, psychologie, anthropologie – remettent en question les présuppositions, offrent un contexte historico-culturelprofessionnel, et font appel à des données primaires. Les collaborateurs soutiennent que le toucher sain et non sexuel n’est pas suffisamment enseigné dans le cadre de la formation professionnelle. Cette absence de dialogue – engendrée par la crainte de dépasser des bornes éthiques, fait en sorte qu’une discussion ouverte et responsable sur l’utilisation du toucher dans un cadre thérapeutique ne peut avoir lieu, alors même qu’elle contribuerait aux balises théoriques de notre compréhension de cet enjeu fondamental. Ce livre est publié en anglais.
Long ago – before there were doctors, pharmacists, and hospitals – religion and medicine were one, and physical and spiritual ailments were treated alike. Most world religions practised healing, including the early Christian Church, which followed Jesus Christ’s examples of miraculous healings of the lame and the blind. But, to its cost, the modern Church has largely forgotten its healing role, says Tom Harpur in The Uncommon Touch, a powerful and persuasive investigation of spiritual healing. Today in the West, medical science and bogus faith-healings have made the idea of spiritual healing almost laughable. Yet the ancient practice of the laying-on of hands is not only still performed, it is now gaining credibility, even among physicians and other sceptics, most notably in Britain. In The Uncommon Touch, Harpur investigates the religious roots of spiritual healing and looks at the remarkable work and ideas of modern healers. He also describes the many scientific studies that demonstrate clearly the healing and nurturing power of this astonishing phenomenon and verify that something more than the power of suggestion is at work. These include experiments showing increased growth in yeasts that have received the laying-on of hands and documentation of the effectiveness of Therapeutic Touch, a technique used by more than 30,000 nurses in North America. Using the spirit to help heal the body’s ills is an old idea – one whose time has come again.
