Charismatic Healing Research Articles

Medical pluralism in the United States: a review.

Healing Powers: Alternative Medicine, Spiritual Communities, and the State. Fred M. Frohock.American Health Quackery: Collected Essays by James Harvey Young. James Harvey Young.Chiropractic: History and Evolution of a New Profession. Walter I. Wardwell.Chiropractic in America: The History of a Medical Alternative. J. Stuart Moore.The Sacred Self: A Cultural Phenomenology of Charismatic Healing. Thomas J. Csordus.Walkin’ Over Medicine. Loudell F. Snow.Folk Wisdom and Mother Wit: John Lee‐An Akican American Herbal Healer. Arvilla Payne‐Jackson and John Lee.Herbal and Magical Medicine: Traditional Healing Today. James Kirkland, Holly F. Mathews, C. W. Sullivan 111, and Karen Baldwin, eds.

The Sacred Self: A Cultural Phenomenology of Charismatic Healing

How does religious healing work, if indeed it does? In this study of the contemporary North American movement known as the Catholic Charismatic Renewal, Thomas Csordas investigates the healing practices of a modern religious movement to provide a rich cultural analysis of the healing experience. This is not only a book about healing, however, but also one about the nature of self and self- transformation. Blending ethnographic data and detailed case studies, Csordas examines processes of sensory imagery, performative utterance, orientation, and embodiment. His book forms the basis for a rapprochement between phenomenology and semiotics in culture theory that will interest anthropologists, philosophers, psychologists, physicians, and students of comparative religion and healing.

Psychiatry on Tobago in 1989

An unstructured observation concerning low rates of observed psychological disturbance was explored by estimating rates of suicide, and psychotropic drug use. Recorded suicide, overdose, and ‘minor’ tranquilliser and antidepressant use were strikingly low on Tobago, when compared with the United Kingdom. Tobagonians were unlikely to medicalise distress by presenting with overt psychological symptoms. Most local doctors felt that patients preferred spiritual support, e.g. from charismatic religious groups and traditional healers (some using obeah). A rich network of social and recreational groups may also give important support, as may ‘liming’ (a local conversational pastime). Tabanka (a local culture specific syndrome) may also be a non-medical outlet.

The Sacred Self: A Cultural Phenomenology of Charismatic Healing

The Sacred Self:. Cultural Phenomenology of Charismatic Healing. Thomas J. Csordas. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. 327 pp. $35.00 (cloth).

: The Sacred Self: A Cultural Phenomenology of Charismatic Healing . Thomas J. Csordas.

American AnthropologistVolume 97, Issue 1 p. 171-171 The Sacred Self: A Cultural Phenomenology of Charismatic Healing. Thomas J. Csordas Robert R. Desjarlais, Robert R. Desjarlais Sarah Lawrence CollegeSearch for more papers by this author Robert R. Desjarlais, Robert R. Desjarlais Sarah Lawrence CollegeSearch for more papers by this author First published: March 1995 https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.1995.97.1.02a00480Citations: 2AboutPDF ToolsExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL No abstract is available for this article.Citing Literature Volume97, Issue1March 1995Pages 171-171 RelatedInformation

The Sacred Self: A Cultural Phenomenology of Charismatic Healing

The Sacred Self: A Cultural Phenomenology of Charismatic Healing

The sacred self: a cultural phenomenology of charismatic healing

The sacred self: a cultural phenomenology of charismatic healing

Divinatory failure: the religious and social role of Gisu diviners

AbstractThe literature has tended to deal with diviners only where they have been seen to play a notable role in the transformation of social relationships. This leads us to overlook their relative social invisibility in many African societies. Yet we may gain insight into the rise of prophets and charismatic healers by looking at the other side of this story in the multitude of very humble practitioners plying their trade. This is the context in which this article explores the role of diviners among the Gisu of Uganda.The privacy of consultation, the search for distant diviners, the way they are approached only at times of crisis and as agents of private counteraction or vengeance, go some way towards explaining why it is difficult for diviners to gain recognition. Added to which are the difficulties of another order which relate to what might here be regarded as divinatory success. For divination may be seen to fail at a number of different levels: in the lack of credibility of a given practitioner, i n a lack of unanimity among those consulted and in the multiplicity of causal agents evoked.An argument put forward here is that scepticism is endemic to the system and, possibly, distinctive to it. We should ask not, as Evans-Pritchard did, how belief i s sustained despite the presence of scepticism but what it is about these beliefs which encourages scepticism. It is not useful to explore this issue in terms of the rationality question or the ‘truth’ of belief systems. If we are to draw a comparison with modern attitudes, of greater significance are the organisation and differentiation of knowledge and its relationship to power. It is suggested that diagnostic systems used by societies such as the Gisu encourage an agnostic attitude in a way i n which those of the modern West do not.In the final part of the article the social role of divination is reconsidered and some of the positive functions proposed for it are questioned. Gisu divination can be seen to have evolved into a very narrow niche whose parameters are bound, on the one hand, by the limits of belief and, on the other, by a system of interpersonal vengeance. We may say that the socially marginal attributes of diviners, exclusively concerned with the negative aspects of social relationships, represent a real social marginality. At best they are agents by which the individual may be reconciled with harshnesses imposed by his own destiny, of ancestral affliction; at worst they are agents of individual vengeance and retribution. This may be taken as more or less disqualifying them from articulating a positive, future-oriented vision on behalf of the community. Clearly it is not impossible but it is a huge jump from these humble practitioners, interpreting the present in terms of the past and trading evil with evil at an individual level, to prophets capable of formulating a positive social vision, a means forward, on behalf of a wider moral or social community.

Cults and New Religious Movements: A Report of the American Psychiatric Association

Cults and New Religious Movements culminates a three-year project by the Committee on Psychiatry and Religion of the American Psychiatric Association. Its editor, Marc Galanter, is a household name to psychiatrists interested in religious, cultic, and secular charismatic healing groups. The contributors are not limited to Committee members, and several are laypersons— psychologists, social scientists, and attorneys. Perspectives, interpretations, and attitudes are diverse. As Galanter (p xiv) says, this allows readers to weigh, sift, and form their own conclusions. The book treats a number of topics in 16 chapters. The social context is discussed by Galanter (Cults and New Religious Movements), E. M. Pattison and R. C. Ness (New Religious Movements in Historical Perspective), and H. Work (Contemporary Youth: Their Psychological Needs and Beliefs). The impact of membership is covered by S. V. Levine (Life in the Cults), D. A. Halperin (Families of Cult Members: Consultation and Treatment), and B.

The psychotherapy analogy and Charismatic healing.

The psychotherapy analogy and Charismatic healing.

A Discussion About “Discourse”

he articles in this issue were submitted independently. Each one derives from a different research setting and a different research agenda. From a certain perspective, therefore, each stands on its own. Yet from another vantage point four of the five articles are interrelated and tell us something about contemporary thinking in medical anthropology, for all four focus in one way or another on the topic of discourse. Brown, Rapp, and Nash and Kirsch employ this term overtly and use it as an organizing concept for their articles. While not doing precisely this, Csordas directs his attention toward understanding how people make sense of the conversations they have had across discourses with their Charismatic healers, their psychotherapists, and their families. Discourse, in short, appears to be in the anthropological air we breathe these days. Given the popularity of the concept, I wish in this introduction to begin discussing how we currently use it in the discipline at large and in our own field of medical anthropology. To present the larger view, I have asked a linguistic anthropologist to prepare a review article on the concept for a subsequent issue of the journal. Here, I would like to examine how discourse seems to me to enter into the four articles in this issue.

Psychosocial wellness among spiritual healing participants

The findings reported are based on an exploratory, comparison group study of participants in spiritual healing practices carried out over a 2-year period (1981–1983) in Baltimore, Md. In this study, participation in such forms of healing, which generally occurs in small groups, is related to various measures of psychosocial wellness defined as the emic construct of ‘subjective health’. Interview data from regular participants in two types of healing group, charismatic ( n = 83) and metaphysical ( n = 93), were compared with regular utilizers of primary care ( n = 137), using the same data collection procedures. Members of the two types of healing group differ on some social attribute data. Members of charismatic healing groups tend to be of slightly lower SES overall than members of metaphysical healing groups. Members of both types of healing groups, however, had significantly more positive scores on wellness measures than primary care patients, even when sex, age, marital status, illness severity and religiosity were controlled statistically. Findings suggest that such groups play a social support function among regular participants, and that participation in specific healing systems can be seen as a contextual variable which has an effect on subjective self-reports of health or, as defined here, wellness.

Holistic cancer therapy

Medical technology has not reduced the death rate from cancer for 50 yrs, in spite of its physical and psychological morbidity. A broader approach is required and investigation of certain apparently successful unorthodox holistic cancer therapies suggests that the personality of the therapist is crucial. The spiritually convinced, charismatic healer has all the qualities of a meditator, and physiological measurement demonstrates that such a healer induces the state of meditation in his patients. Meditation is associated not only with physiological rest and stability, but also with the reduction of psychological stress and the development of a more positive attitude to life with an inner sense of calmness, strength and fulfilment. Holistic cancer therapy should include meditation, especially by the therapist; and psychosomatic research, like physics, should include the study of consciousness.

The Case of the American Jezebels: Anne Hutchinson and Female Agitation during the Years of Antinomian Turmoil, 1636-1640

B n ETWEEN i636 and i638 Massachusetts boiled with controversy, and for more than three centuries scholars have attempted to define and redefine the nature, causes, and implications of that controversy. Commentators have described the rebellious Antinomians as heretics of the worst and most dangerous sort who were guilty of holding absurd, licentious, and destructive opinions,1 as mob scrambling after God, and like all mobs quickly dispersed once their leaders were dealt with,2 and as the innocent victims of inexcusable severity and unnecessary virulence.3 Other narrators have called the most famous Antinomian, Anne Hutchinson, a charismatic healer, with the gift of fluent and inspired speech,4 another St. Joan of Arc,5 a rebel with a confused, bewildered mind,6 and a woman whose stern

Deviant illness behaviour: Patients of mesmerists

The findings reported are based on an exploratory, comparison group study of participants in spiritual healing practices carried out over a 2-year period (1981–1983) in Baltimore, Md. In this study, participation in such forms of healing, which generally occurs in small groups, is related to various measures of psychosocial wellness defined as the emic construct of ‘subjective health’. Interview data from regular participants in two types of healing group, charismatic (n = 83) and metaphysical (n = 93), were compared with regular utilizers of primary care (n = 137), using the same data collection procedures. Members of the two types of healing group differ on some social attribute data. Members of charismatic healing groups tend to be of slightly lower SES overall than members of metaphysical healing groups. Members of both types of healing groups, however, had significantly more positive scores on wellness measures than primary care patients, even when sex, age, marital status, illness severity and religiosity were controlled statistically. Findings suggest that such groups play a social support function among regular participants, and that participation in specific healing systems can be seen as a contextual variable which has an effect on subjective self-reports of health or, as defined here, wellness.