Notions Of Healing Research Articles

Navigating the Divide: Healing Practices and Collective Wellbeing in a Nairobi Clinic

This paper analyzes ethnographic and historical data to emphasize the importance of framing health as collective wellbeing. Exploring missionary medical campaigns during the colonial period in East Africa, I connect the institutional legacy of Euro-American Protestant missions on the contemporary frameworks of US global public health provisions at my research site, Mwana Mwema Program. At this network of faith-based, USAID clinics in Kenya that provide treatment for children living with HIV, practitioners care for the wider community within a global health system that bases donor funding on epidemiological criteria. This narrow framing conflicts with practitioners’ notions of healing as collective wellbeing and can exacerbate communal divisions. I argue that Mwana Mwema’s notion of collective wellbeing offers a healthcare framework that faith-based providers can embrace. It yields more holistic care for entire communities and offers an opportunity for those of us in the United States to rethink our notions of health.

La enfermedad en discursos religiosos novohispanos del siglo XVII

This article is the result of a brief study of the place that the concept of disease occupies in the Novo-Hispanic religious 17th-century discourse, based on three documents proposed to represent the survival of the three genera causarum of Antiquity: deliberative, panegyric and judicial, a collection of Jesuit talks, a Carmelite chronicle, and a treatise on the extirpation of idolatries. I argue that disease can function in these discourses as either punishment or as purification, facing two notions of healing that are somewhat opposite: one that trusted the arts of pre-scientific medicine, and the other that defended the quasi-magical power of healing religious – i.e., use of cédulas, prayers or sacraments. I also claim that the rhetorical use of disease was not only accessory in these discourses, but it was also a concept that made up one of the essential oratorical causes of Christianity: that which associated – sometimes conflictingly – bodily health with the salvation of the soul. Finally, I contend that the place of disease in these discourses is still limited to the moral conception of health, cultivated from medieval medical traditions, and embodying notions of malicious corporality and virtue as a quality not limited to the soul.

Reimagining the Healing Service

Services of healing and wholeness need to be reimagined so that they better represent various experiences of disability. This article begins with a brief historical survey of the ways in which healing services and anointings have been understood in the Christian tradition. While far from exhaustive, this history reveals the Christian notion of healing to be contentious and evolving. Next, I analyze how these historical understandings have come to shape the ways Christians understand disabilities in our modern culture as well as the mechanism by which healing is carried out. Finally, I provide tips for constructing non-ableist services of healing and wholeness.

Conceptualizing Illness: Nodding Syndrome in Northern Uganda


 
 
 This paper presents an ethnographic study of conceptualizations of nodding syndrome (NS) in Uganda. NS is a poorly understood condition characterized by repetitive nodding of the head, mental retardation and stunted growth, which affects thousands of children in northern Uganda, South Sudan and Tanzania. Although extensive research for causative agents has been conducted, no convincing single cause has been reported. This study establishes an understanding of different representations of NS and argues that the episodes of head nodding are related to the socio-political body in which they are manifested. Three interwoven approaches towards NS take main stage whereby the syndrome is presented as a biomedical, spiritual and/or political problem. The conceptualizations are linked to different notions of healing and affected families combine various forms of therapy. Through the examination of different narratives, this study disrupts the idea of a singular perspective on illness and pleads for a focus on motion and plurality.
 KEY WORDS: NODDING SYNDROME, UGANDA, HEALTH, CONCEPTUALIZATION, ANTHROPOLOGY
 
 

Conceptualizing Illness: Nodding Syndrome in Northern Uganda

This paper presents an ethnographic study of conceptualizations of nodding syndrome (NS) in Uganda. NS is a poorly understood condition characterized by repetitive nodding of the head, mental retardation and stunted growth, which affects thousands of children in northern Uganda, South Sudan and Tanzania. Although extensive research for causative agents has been conducted, no convincing single cause has been reported. This study establishes an understanding of different representations of NS and argues that the episodes of head nodding are related to the socio-political body in which they are manifested. Three interwoven approaches towards NS take main stage whereby the syndrome is presented as a biomedical, spiritual and/or political problem. The conceptualizations are linked to different notions of healing and affected families combine various forms of therapy. Through the examination of different narratives, this study disrupts the idea of a singular perspective on illness and pleads for a focus on motion and plurality.

Stanley Nattel.

Stanley Nattel.

“Healing is a Done Deal”: Temporality and Metabolic Healing Among Evangelical Christians in Samoa

ABSTRACTDrawing on fieldwork in independent Samoa, in this article, I analyze the temporal dimensions of evangelical Christian healing of metabolic disorders. I explore how those suffering with metabolic disorders draw from multiple time-based notions of healing, drawing attention to the limits of biomedicine in contrast with the effectiveness of Divine healing. By simultaneously engaging evangelical and biomedical temporalities, I argue that evangelical Christians create wellness despite sickness and, in turn, re-signify chronic suffering as a long-term process of Christian healing. Positioning biomedical temporality and evangelical temporality as parallel yet distinctive ways of practicing healing, therefore, influences health care choices.

Laplante, J.Healing Roots: Anthropology in Life and Medicine. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books. 2015. 302pp £60 ISBN 978–1782385547 (hbk)

Laplante, J.Healing Roots: Anthropology in Life and Medicine. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books. 2015. 302pp £60 ISBN 978–1782385547 (hbk)

Violence, Disability, and the Politics of Healing: The Inaugural Nancy Eiesland Endowment Lecture

Ancient and contemporary communities frequently portray the ideal, utopian society as a place without disability. Christian, Jewish, and secular eschatologies are often potent sites of disability erasure, forms of eugenic imagination that envision liberation through the denial of bodily and sensory difference. This lecture examines the complex relationship between violence, disability, and domination—and contests notions of healing that depoliticize disability or devalue the integrity of disabled lives. Bringing sacred texts into conversation with feminist disability studies and the lived experiences of disability justice activists, the lecture offers resources for religious voices seeking to reimagine disability, healing, and liberation.

Notions of Healing and Transcendence in the Trajectory of African Traditional Religion: Paradigm and Strategies

This paper examines the import of transcendence in illnesses and misfortunes as well as the place of healing in African traditional religion. The belief in medicine among Africans is the art of using available forces of nature to prevent disease and to restore and preserve health. It occupies a prominent position in the religious lives of African people. This article draws attention to the practice of several healing activities in African traditional religion in its attempts to restore health, exploring the indigenization of health care procedures and the role and function of God in African medicine and healing. This work shows that the concept of God is central in African religion and plays a prominent role in its healing ministry. The paper concludes with a suggestion about what could constitute a collective synergy for Western orthodox and African traditional medicine.

WITNESSING EMBODIMENT

As theories of trauma and narrative appeal to notions of healing, they tend to imply a) that narrative itself can bear adequate witness to the body and b) that in so doing, narrative can, autonomously, enable healing. Giving examples from my experience, I argue that these assumptions encourage us to overlook embodied experiences of violence both in research and the classroom. I conclude by proposing a pedagogy that avoids stigmatizing subjects by consciously performing the knowledge that instructors and students themselves may have been, may be, or may become victim-survivors of violence.

Love and Healing

This article develops the theme of healing as removing that which is alien to the human being. This notion of healing is consonant with two aspects of love: affirming the self in its proper or authentic state, and restoring the wounded self to that state. Christianity owes much to the contributions of the ancient Greeks on this subject, but greatly surpasses them in its recognition of the critical importance of the body and the supreme value of love.

Dodo Birds, a Golden Thread, and Empirically Supported Therapy

The revised edition of Jerome Frank's (1975) seminal text Persuasion and Healing: A Complete Study of Psychotherapy that I own is badly worn. It is yellowed, the pages are dog-eared, and the binding has long been broken, so much so that I keep the book in a plastic bag so that I will not lose any of the pages. I have purchased updated editions over the years; indeed I own a copy of the updated edition (Frank & Frank, 1991) that he revised with his daughter. But I preserve this original book because it opened me up to the notion of healing as an art as well as a science. A professor of mine, a rigidly trained psychoanalyst, made the book required reading because, as he said, it showed him that it was OK to speak to behaviorists.

Medicine through the artist's eyes: before, during, and after the Holocaust.

Pre-Holocaust German art celebrates the doctor as a hero, triumphant over disease and poor hygiene. It emphasizes the ontological conception of disease and the ability of medicine to cure pathology or remove it. Some New Objectivity artists question this conceptualization by pushing it to the extreme of realistic representations. However, the clinical encounter has virtually disappeared from post-Holocaust art. Medicine is depicted in three main ways: as an ambiguous and alien Faustian craft; with a focus on holistic notions of healing, thus avoiding biomedicine altogether; or with a focus on the subjective experience of illness, thus ignoring the interaction between medicine and the diseased person.

Individual rights and the human good in hospice.

Hospice care today faces economic, cultural, and social challenges that will force it to rethink its basic ethical mission and its basic values if it is to grow and prosper. Three different values can be said to inspire the hospice movement: palliation and the relief of suffering, enhancing individual control and autonomy at the end of life, and the value of healing or maintaining meaning and personal integrity in the dying process. An emphasis on palliation alone will not be sufficient to sustain a comprehensive hospice benefit in the future. An emphasis on patient autonomy alone is not in keeping with the history or spirit of the hospice movement, which in fact has had a vision of "good" dying. The notion of healing or making whole provides the richest and most adequate concept upon which to ground the social and ethical case for hospice care in the future.