Abstract
The globalizing culture of health and wellbeing flourishes both asdemand and supply, posing multiple intriguing and critical questionsboth to the individuals who face distress and suffering and to thesurrounding society. In the spirit of vernacular religion, this articleenters the discussion of ‘de-differentiation’ between religion andhealth, focusing especially on the role of otherworldly relations thatmay become part of complementary and alternative medicine and careand its healing agency. I propose that engagement with otherworldlyrelations may be understood in terms of ‘possibility work’ in complexlife situations when conventional healthcare and therapy are apprehendedas insufficient for some reason, or alternatively unavailable.I draw on two distinct ethnographic projects to exemplify the argument:care of the dying and contemporary angel spirituality. Thesetwo examples demonstrate how intimate otherworldly relations maywork as important and powerful, albeit also ambivalent and sociallyvulnerable, non-secular possibility work in the face of various formsof anxiety, distress, and suffering in contemporary lives.
Highlights
Is Secularism Bad for Women? – Social Compass 64 (4), 449–80. .Baer, Hans A. 2011 Medical Pluralism: An Evolving and Contested Concept in Medical Anthropology. – A Companion to Medical Anthropology, 405–23
The ethnographic cases that serve as my examples suggest that animism and a sense of destiny are not necessarily understood in terms of stable belief, identity, or worldview
Angel healing was one of the central rituals learned and practised by people engaging in angels and other new spiritual notions and beliefs when I was conducting my ethnography with Finnish women in the early 2010s
Summary
Various aspects of and attitudes to religious healing and CAM have been studied using several but usually quantitative methodologies in medical and nursing research (see e.g. Koenig 2009; Koenig et al 2012; Miller and Thoresen 2003; Ross 2006; Williams 2006; Krause and Pargament 2018). It is often difficult to relate animism to secular thinking, and to modern liberal Christian institutional religion, which understands such otherworldly figures and powers as angels mostly only metaphorically Both secular and religious critical positions may miss the very important point that animism can work as a subtle and fluctuating attitude in the course of life events in opening new perspectives and possible frames of interpretation when a situation otherwise looks impossible. The ethnographic cases that serve as my examples (the care of the dying and angel healing) suggest that animism and a sense of destiny are not necessarily understood in terms of stable belief, identity, or worldview Instead, they may be approached as relational and situational takes or attitudes that can in different degrees and often subtle ways cross and interact with more clearly secular ways of acting and knowing. The two examples intersect, since among the women interested in angels there were health professionals who introduced spiritual healing practices to medical contexts.
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