Discourse Of Healing Research Articles

Disability, Medicine, and Healing Discourse in Early Christianity: New Conversations for Health Humanities ed. by Susan R. Holman (review)

Disability, Medicine, and Healing Discourse in Early Christianity: New Conversations for Health Humanities ed. by Susan R. Holman (review)

Rethinking Gender, Reimagining Healing in Minjung Theology: An Indonesian Feminist Theological Rupture

This article rethinks gender and its impact on a reimagination of healing in Minjung theology. I argue that rethinking gender in Minjung theology by reconnecting its three features of collectivity, art, and event from a feminist trauma perspective ruptures the dominant masculine, heterosexual, and liberation grammar in Minjung theology and creates a new imagination of Minjung theology as a discourse of healing. I call this oscillation between rethinking gender and reimagining healing a feminist theological rupture embedded in a grammar of trauma and resilience. This grammar is a theological addition to Minjung theology’s core emphasis on resistance and liberation. I intend to extend and complexify Minjung theology’s masculine and heterosexual grammar and make it more accessible to feminist, queer, and broader contemporary theological praxes for healing. Methodologically, I use a self-reflexive approach by weaving the feminist and queer voices of South Korea and Indonesia with my own voice as rupturing voices to examine the complex tapestry and relevance of Minjung theology. As a result, this article unveils the plausibility of Minjung theology as a grammar of healing that resonates with the rich and complex stories of trauma, witnessing, healing, and liberation in Asia.

Eating alone as psychological self-care: How the younger generation in Let’s Eat survives in neoliberal South Korea

TV dramas that focus on food and eating reflect the popular trend of single culture, with a rising number of single-person households among the younger generation in South Korea. Analyzing Let’s Eat (tvN), the South Korean food drama series that specifically focus on eating scenes, this paper uses the framework of survivalism and the popular discourse of healing to examine how eating alone as a social and cultural phenomenon represents the psychological turn in neoliberalism. In its three seasons, Let’s Eat reflects how eating alone becomes a practice of endurance and resilience that encourages the younger generation to stay positive, even during an enervated state of mind, to bounce back, and to ultimately spring forward. I argue that Let’s Eat reflects how survivalism especially requires the marginalized population of women in precarious employment to reflect and grow confidence without considering the problems of structural inequality. Let’s Eat shows the younger generation’s struggle and lack of societal support, perpetuating neoliberalism’s focus on individual effort and blaming individuals for their enervation.

The healer in the tower: Biddy Early and discourses of healing in the work of W. B. Yeats and Lady Augusta Gregory

ABSTRACT The folk healer Biddy Early (1798–1874) is perhaps now best remembered in association with a mythical curse on the Clare hurling side. This article explores her healing practices and the significance of her life and legend to William Butler Yeats and Lady Augusta Gregory. Writings by both these key revivalists, and their collaborative play The Pot of Broth (1904), testify to the continuing and ambivalent presence of Early’s memory in the decades after her death. Gregory and Yeats spread the fame of Early as part of their revivalist project, and the latter rebuilt the tower he christened Thoor Ballylee with, among other things, the “old mill boards” where she had once, according to local lore, gathered her ingredients. This article looks at the place of Early in Yeats’s and Gregory’s imaginations, and seeks to reposition this non-elite woman as one of the culture-givers of the Revival period.

Land and storytelling: Indigenous pathways towards healing, spiritual regeneration, and resurgence

This article aims to contribute to discourses of healing, Indigenous resurgence and spiritual regeneration within the context of the Indian Residential School Truth and Reconciliation Commission that took place in Canada between 2008 and 2015. First, it considers to what extent the TRC’s restorative justice process can relate to Indigenous ways of conceptualising healing. Secondly, it reflects on the Commission’s exclusive focus on the Indian Residential School system and its legacies, which, according to many Indigenous scholars, overlooks a much broader and more complex history of colonisation, political domination, and land dispossession still ongoing. I underline that, from an Indigenous perspective, land plays a fundamental role to achieve healing, spiritual regeneration, and resurgence. In the last section, I move the discussion to the literary dimension as I explore Richard Wagamese’s 2012 novel Indian Horse. In particular, I argue that fiction, especially that fiction produced during the years of the Commission’s work, can be a crucial site for challenging the TRC’s restorative process and for bringing out the significance of storytelling and of an Indigenous deep sense of connection to the land as a source of learning, spiritual reclaiming, and healing.

Reclaiming Emotions: Re-Unlearning and Re-Learning Discourses of Healing in a Tribally Placed Doctoral Cohort

This article is a “talk story” among three Indigenous women who are connected in various ways but most recently through the heartwork of a tribal–university partnership for a tribally based doctoral cohort program. The first tribally based cohort includes representation of tribal nations from Washington State, Utah and New Mexico and all women. The contributors of this talk story include voices of a Muckleshoot partner who is an Indigenous education advocate and two Indigenous faculty members. We share our talk story in identifying the powerful connection of reclaiming emotions through the ability of centering Indigenous narratives, honoring culture and community, and the powerful role of place and space in honoring tribal sovereignty through its existence.

Rethinking enhancement substance use: A critical discourse studies approach

BackgroundWe draw on both interdisciplinary enhancement substance use research and critical drug studies scholarship to reconceptualise enhancement substance use. Our critical discourse approach illuminates how a variety of substances are positioned as tools for self-improvement. In reconceptualising enhancement substance use, we ask what different substances can be positioned as providing enhancement? How are they positioned as tools for achieving enhancement or self-improvement goals? What discursive repertoires are employed to achieve these aims? MethodsForty interviews were conducted with people who use substances, such as ayahuasca, psilocybin, cocaine, alcohol, nootropics and non-prescription pharmaceuticals, including Adderall and modafinil. To explore the meanings of and motivations for substance consumption, we apply the sociocognitive approach (SCA) pioneered by Teun van Dijk (2014; 2015) and examine language through the triangulation of cognition, discourse and society. We analyse how different substances are positioned as tools for achieving enhancement or self-improvement goals. ResultsWe identify three distinct discursive repertoires that frame substance use as enhancement: the discourse of transformation, the discourse of healing and the discourse of productivity. When accounting for enhancement substance use, our participants employ a number of discursive strategies, including ideological polarisation or ‘othering’, analogies, examples, maxims, metaphors and figurative speech. We also find evidence of interdiscursivity with most participants drawing on more than one discourse when speaking about how substances are positioned as providing enhancement. ConclusionWe conclude that the concept of enhancement has wider applicability than current understandings allow. We argue that if we reframe all substance use as providing enhancement or achieving a self-improvement goal, we have the potential to destigmatise substance use and eliminate the over-simplistic binaries that surround it.

Transitional archives: towards a conceptualisation of archives in transitional justice

ABSTRACT This paper seeks to trouble and complicate core assumptions about transitional justice and archives and to critically examine the relationship between them. Understanding archives as a mere instrument of human rights obscures the silence of disenfranchised voices and the workings of power and exclusion that foreground the practice and discursive conditions of the transitional justice and human rights paradigms. Records about conflict and dictatorship are like records in general never only a reflection of realities, but they constitute these realities. 1 Following Harris’ plea to find ‘exigencies’ 2 to the transitional justice paradigm it suggests the term transitional archives to highlight the multi-layered afterlife of human rights records. It thereby emphasises the open-ended nature, ‘the in-becoming’, 3 of transitional archives. It argues that by including critical archival studies in our thinking of transitional justice and a violent past, we can push beyond the dominant discourse of healing, closure and reconciliation, and open up space to investigate not only how the past but also transitional justice itself is produced at the intersection of power, memory, narrative and violence.

Репрезентація лінгвокультурних кодів знахарського дискурсу

There is a need for linguistic studies of the linguistic and conceptual structure of folklore genres which constitute phenomena of linguoculture. Healing charms are examined by scholars from the standpoint of their structure as well as their voluntative and magical/mystical function. Yet the means and communicative mechanisms of linguocultural coding and its realization in the discourse of healing have never been studied in a focused manner. In particular, there is a need for the studies of verbal forms of expression of linguocultural codes. The present study uses the following methods of linguistic inquiry: semasiological procedure of field modelling; component and distributive analysis; and contextological interpretation. The article addresses the problem of representing spiritual, spatial, biomorphic and sensory linguocultural codes. It argues that their linguistic realization depends on the genre, thematic and structural features of folklore texts. “Desire” as an element of healing charms drives either positive or negative utilitarian and teleological evaluations of linguistic signs in the studied codes. The study analyses the recurrent linguistic images of healing charms. It describes their role within the linguocultural coding of the proper (anthroponyms, anthropomorphonyms, toponyms) and common names. It also examines how the potential of ethnocultural symbols is being used. It elucidates that the discourse of healing is produced due to the activization not only of the magical and the voluntative but also the aesthetic, axiological, expressive and suggestive functions of code verbalizers. A fruitful line of inquiry into the discourse of healing would also address the representation of the medical code of linguoculture.

Healing Discourse and Literary Education of Healing — Critical Reflection through 'Vulnerability' and 'Culture physician' —

Healing Discourse and Literary Education of Healing — Critical Reflection through 'Vulnerability' and 'Culture physician' —

Buddhism, Medicine, and the Affairs of the Heart: Āyurvedic Potency Therapy (Vājīkarana) and the Reappraisal of Aphrodisiacs and Love Philters in Medieval Chinese Sources

This article examines how discursive frames modify forms of knowledge and practice. More precisely, it considers the problem of categories in early and medieval Chinese sources through the lens of recipes designed to facilitate intercourse. In pre-Buddhist Chinese sources, such prescriptions traditionally fell either under the rubric of ‘nourishing life’ (yangsheng 養生) longevity practices or spellbinding (zhuzu 祝詛). While recipes that appear in the former bracket—referred to in this study as ‘aphrodisiacs’—were couched in a discourse of healing and classified as a medical undertaking, those associated with spellbinding—referred to as ‘love philters’—were filed under the heading of mantic arts and divination in bibliographic treatises. With the arrival of Āyurvedic medicine in China via Buddhist sources, this partition grew increasingly blurred. Āyurvedic medical taxonomy in general, and its discipline of potency therapy (vājīkarana) in particular, did not distinguish between aphrodisiacs and love philters since both ultimately facilitate intercourse, albeit through different means. The imprint of Āyurvedic categories in China can be ascertained in Buddhist manuscript sources from Dunhuang, but also, more surprisingly, in widely circulated medieval non-Buddhist medical treatises. However, in contrast to the emblematic medical treatises of the middle period and surveyed manuscript Buddhist materials, canonical Buddhist texts appear to have shied away from the topic of aphrodisiacs and upheld the indigenous Chinese understanding of love philters as spellbinding and mantic art.

"인지학의 신지학적 기원과 치유 오이리트미(Eurythmie)를 통해 본 독일 근대 신종교의 치유담론"

"인지학의 신지학적 기원과 치유 오이리트미(Eurythmie)를 통해 본 독일 근대 신종교의 치유담론"

Dorotheos of Gaza and the Discourse of Healing in Gazan Monasticism. By Kyle A. Schenkewitz.

Dorotheos of Gaza and the Discourse of Healing in Gazan Monasticism. By Kyle A. Schenkewitz.

Is Grassroots Justice a Viable Alternative to Impunity?: The Case of the Iran People’s Tribunal

What happens when the institutions responsible for doing justice fail the victims of mass-atrocities? While global justice is now a popular demand, it remains a fledgling venture, at the margins of power realities. Significant gaps remain, especially in situations where the International Criminal Court does not have jurisdiction to intervene. It is in these contexts of impunity that the proponents of justice are forced to either abandon hope, or to explore creative, informal alternatives that are not dependent on the narrow political whims and fortunes of decision-makers. A notable instance of such accountability entrepreneurship is the grassroots initiative that became known as the Iran People’s Tribunal (“Iran Tribunal”), inspired by the mourning Mothers of Khavaran, demanding truth and justice for the mass-execution of their children following the 1979 Islamic revolution. This article, written by the Prosecutor of the Tribunal, explores this unprecedented victim-driven initiative and its implications on global accountability, conceptions of power, and the discourse of healing and reconciliation in the wake of mass-atrocities.

‘Healed to imagine’: healing discourse in Korean popular culture and its politics

Healing culture is rapidly growing in the neoliberal late-capitalist context of modern Korea. This study proposes, by defining healing culture as a case of mediated religion, an alternative reading of the culture’s contribution to social change, although not disproving altogether the conventional readings that healing culture has ideological, status quo and conforming effects. First, since healing discourse tends to broaden and universalise the subjects of healing into the general society, it reveals that urgent remedies are required for many individuals and, more generally, for the entire society. Second, healing messages initiate a change within the repertoire of the society’s accepted discourses, specifically by providing post-materialist values that have been dismissed in the society and by enabling people to imagine an alternative society where post-materialist values are governing.

Horse as Significant Other

This essay examines Susan Richards’s memoir Chosen by a Horse: How a Broken Horse Fixed a Broken Heart (2006) by focusing on its affective representation of the human-horse relationship. The discussion shows how the story of the mare Lay Me Down in Richard’s work is intricately linked with the narrator’s changing identity. It contends that this relationship, represented in the text by the use of a discourse of healing and self-regeneration, seeks to reconstruct the traumatized autobiographical subject and negotiate her identity. The close bond with between the narrator and the ailing horse shows that the two participants are involved in a joint process of identity transformation, described by Donna Haraway (2008) as becoming with another species. The essay will also suggest that the affective representation of the horse and its significance to the self-transformation of the traumatized autobiographical narrator is also part of the therapeutic discourse of contemporary American culture.

A community-based treatment for Native American historical trauma: Prospects for evidence-based practice.

Nineteen staff and clients in a Native American healing lodge were interviewed regarding the therapeutic approach used to address the legacy of Native American historical trauma. On the basis of thematic content analysis of interviews, 4 components of healing discourse emerged. First, clients were understood by their counselors to carry pain, leading to adult dysfunction, including substance abuse. Second, counselors believed that such pain must be confessed in order to purge its deleterious influence. Third, the cathartic expression of such pain was said by counselors to inaugurate lifelong habits of introspection and self-improvement. Finally, this healing journey entailed a reclamation of indigenous heritage, identity, and spirituality that program staff thought would neutralize the pathogenic effects of colonization. Consideration of this healing discourse suggests that one important way for psychologists to bridge evidence-based and culturally sensitive treatment paradigms is to partner with indigenous programs in the exploration of locally determined therapeutic outcomes for existing culturally sensitive interventions that are maximally responsive to community needs and interests.

‘Chaos, restitution and quest’: one woman’s journey through menopause

Menopause, a natural stage in a woman's reproductive life, is not an illness; yet some women experience severe enough symptoms to cause a breakdown in the body similar to illness or other major health disruptions. As part of a larger narrative analysis investigation of distress during menopause, this case study presents one woman's transformational journey through menopause, analysed through Frank's health and illness narratives - chaos, restitution and quest. The narratives were retranscribed using Labov's elements of a true story and Gee's poetic restructuring. This report of one woman's experience of distress during the menopause transition describes a poetic chaos narrative of incessant night sweats resulting in a loss of physicality and a deep-rooted belief in self-healing; a restitution narrative of restored health that mandated the surrender to a new healing discourse, experienced simultaneously as a victory and a defeat; and a quest narrative of seeking meaning, insight and new-found values and identities.

Purifying Rhetoric: Empedocles and the Myth of Rhetorical Theory

The polymath Empedocles has not been considered a prominent figure in the history of rhetorical studies nor contemporary appropriations of antiquity, despite the reported attribution of his invention of rhetoric by Aristotle. This neglect is understandable, as the surviving fragments of Empedocles' work provide no significant reference to rhetoric per se. Attention to the folklore surrounding Empedocles (including legends of his deeds as a physician and politician, and his association with Pythagoras, Gorgias, and the god Apollo) is noteworthy, however, as it helps explain ways the ancient Greeks conceptualized rhetoric as a potentially healing discourse. Analysis of the Empedoclean tradition discloses a call to redress any human penchant for violence and to resist tyranny, themes relevant for critical rhetorical studies today. These contributions further demonstrate an affinity between Empedocles and Kenneth Burke's concern with the purification of war, and temper the recent interest in an Isocratean development of citizens by advancing a more ecumenical perspective on humanity.

A community-based treatment for Native American historical trauma: Prospects for evidence-based practice.

Nineteen staff and clients in a Native American healing lodge were interviewed regarding the therapeutic approach used to address the legacy of Native American historical trauma. On the basis of thematic content analysis of interviews, 4 components of healing discourse emerged. First, clients were understood by their counselors to carry pain, leading to adult dysfunction, including substance abuse. Second, counselors believed that such pain must be confessed in order to purge its deleterious influence. Third, the cathartic expression of such pain was said by counselors to inaugurate lifelong habits of introspection and self-improvement. Finally, this healing journey entailed a reclamation of indigenous heritage, identity, and spirituality that program staff thought would neutralize the pathogenic effects of colonization. Consideration of this healing discourse suggests that one important way for psychologists to bridge evidence-based and culturally sensitive treatment paradigms is to partner with indigenous programs in the exploration of locally determined therapeutic outcomes for existing culturally sensitive interventions that are maximally responsive to community needs and interests.