Ritual Care Research Articles

De-Exceptionalizing Pandemic Death in the United States: COVID-19’s Ambiguous and Layered Mourning

ABSTRACT: In the spring and early summer of 2020, mainstream media in the United States announced the “death of ritual” as public officials limited communities from gathering to care for their deceased—whether COVID-19 victims or people who happened to die during this first wave of pandemic restriction. From backlogged funeral homes and crematoria to bodies stacked in refrigerated trucks and families scrambling to find their deceased, headlines seemed to augur an unprecedented condition of interrupted or derailed mourning. But how singular was this moment? On the one hand, funeral directors were telling a different story, reminding us that they’d been here before when the stigma of HIV/AIDS robbed the deceased and their loved ones of expected ritual care. On the other, as scholars of post-conflict societies and missing migrants can attest, COVID-19 was by no means unique in disrupting the pace and order of mourning. This piece challenges the characterization of pandemic death in the United States, especially in the first waves of infection, as exceptional because of what it glosses over: the predictability of which bodies and whose lives routinely pay the highest tolls. Instead, we reflect on the temporality of incomplete and curtailed care by juxtaposing the pandemic’s seemingly singular chronotope—born from the politicized bodies of the living as much as the dead—with the exigencies of uncertain death that surround missing persons of conflicts and borders. Seemingly punctuated events like wars and pandemics that give rise to aberrant death throw timelines into disarray; they also expose what underlies and endures: longstanding inequities to conditions that secure life in the first place. Thus, challenging this notion of presumed exceptionalism, we argue that the US experience of pandemic death and mourning throws into relief—at least temporarily—its systems of domination and invites a closer look at the intertwining projects of memory and political transformation.

Ritual Care: How the Akha Take Care of Their Small Kids?

Ritual Care: How the Akha Take Care of Their Small Kids?

Interiority of caring relations in the mangokal holi ritual

This paper explores how Batak, one of Indonesia’s many ethnic groups, perform interiority by caring for the dead. It examines the fixing of social relationships, as an act of spacing, by considering the Batak mangokal holi tradition in North Sumatra, foregrounding indigenous knowledge, experience, and ways of being. It offers a reading of mangokal holi by crossing architectural theories of interiority with ethnographic theories of ritual and caring. Ritual passages define the progress and transitions of life (such as birth, marriage, and death), delineating a sociocultural order. In mangokal holi, ritual care for the dead fixes roles, relationships, obligations, and settings; it frames space, time, and bodies by marking thresholds.

Moral Injury as Loss and Grief with Attention to Ritual Resources for Care

Moral injury can be understood, in large part, as an experience of profound loss and grief with individual and systemic consequences. Through that lens, the author draws on several composite vignettes of veterans and their families situated in faith communities to explore the range of losses that is often entailed in an experience of moral injury and possible characteristics of grief arising from such personal, lifelong, relational, and generational loss. She also pursues the relevance and usefulness of theoretical concepts regarding grief such as ambiguous loss and resilience for understanding and responding to those affected by moral injury and their relational systems. The author also addresses theoretical frames such as intersectionality to illumine how contextual complexities of identity such as race and gender inform our understanding and strategies for responding to grief associated with moral injury. In addition to these theoretical resources, she draws on theological perspectives that are helpful in the face of radical, dehumanizing evil such as forms of lament and the relation between protest and hope. In particular, she explores the value of ritual for practices of care as resources for healing, both for veterans and their families affected by moral injury and for faith communities who may come to recognize their own complicity in moral injury. She also briefly considers the possibilities of public rituals for bearing witness to communal aspects of responsibility in moral injury. The author draws on Jewish, Christian, and Muslim resources for practices of ritual care.

Tools and world-making in the worship of Vishwakarma

ABSTRACTAcross India, and much of the rest of South and Southeast Asia as well, tools, machines, and other instruments are periodically set down or stilled to become the focus of worship. This worship is associated often – though not always – with the Hindu deity Vishwakarma, or ‘Maker of the Universe.’ Our essay, based on preliminary ethnographic and archival research in India, gathers together myths about tools as well as anthropological accounts of tool worship to demonstrate the great diversity of rationales and occasions for such worship. We suggest that heeding mythology, the ritual care of tools, and the worship of Vishwakarma may illuminate artisanship, manufacture, and the role of materiality in religious life throughout the Indian subcontinent.

Gardens of Rongo: Applying Cross-Field Anthropology to Explain Contact Violence in New Zealand

The scholarship of early-contact violence involving European voyagers and the first peoples of the Americas and Oceania is notable for divergent interpretations and debates around the methods and ethics of historical ethnography, as in the celebrated controversy over Captain James Cook’s 1779 Hawaiian death. Scholars agree that this divergence is exacerbated by reliance on fragmentary or tendentious documentary sources. New research on the “first contact” in 1642 between a Dutch expedition and South Island New Zealand Māori suggests the potential value of a cross-field anthropology to elucidate encounter violence. Archaeological, ethnobotanical, and anthropology of religion research results are reported so as to inform a cultural-landscape interpretation for the contact events of December 18 and 19, 1642. This provides for a new reading of the encounter around local perceptions of Dutch interests in kūmara (sweet potato) fields under tapu (a restricted, spiritually dangerous state) and the ritual care of ...

Vladimir Jankovic Confronting the Climate: British Airs and the Making of Environmental Medicine, Palgrave Studies in the History of Science and Technology (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. x $+ $ 227, $80.00, hardback, ISBN: 978-0-2301-0475-4.

Vladimir Jankovic Confronting the Climate: British Airs and the Making of Environmental Medicine, Palgrave Studies in the History of Science and Technology (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. x $+ $ 227, $80.00, hardback, ISBN: 978-0-2301-0475-4.

Explanation and relations. How do general practitioners deal with patients with persistent medically unexplained symptoms: a focus group study

BackgroundPersistent presentation of medically unexplained symptoms (MUS) is troublesome for general practitioners (GPs) and causes pressure on the doctor-patient relationship. As a consequence, GPs face the problem of establishing an ongoing, preferably effective relationship with these patients. This study aims at exploring GPs' perceptions about explaining MUS to patients and about how relationships with these patients evolve over time in daily practice.MethodsA qualitative approach, interviewing a purposive sample of twenty-two Dutch GPs within five focus groups. Data were analyzed according to the principles of constant comparative analysis.ResultsGPs recognise the importance of an adequate explanation of the diagnosis of MUS but often feel incapable of being able to explain it clearly to their patients. GPs therefore indicate that they try to reassure patients in non-specific ways, for example by telling patients that there is no disease, by using metaphors and by normalizing the symptoms. When patients keep returning with MUS, GPs report the importance of maintaining the doctor-patient relationship. GPs describe three different models to do this; mutual alliance characterized by ritual care (e.g. regular physical examination, regular doctor visits) with approval of the patient and the doctor, ambivalent alliance characterized by ritual care without approval of the doctor and non-alliance characterized by cutting off all reasons for encounter in which symptoms are not of somatic origin.ConclusionGPs feel difficulties in explaining the symptoms. GPs report that, when patients keep presenting with MUS, they focus on maintaining the doctor-patient relationship by using ritual care. In this care they meticulously balance between maintaining a good doctor-patient relationship and the prevention of unintended consequences of unnecessary interventions.

Social Change, Religion and Medicine among Brokpas of Ladakh

The present study focuses on relationship between religion and medicine in context of social change among Brokpa, a distinctive cultural ethnic community nestled in central Ladakh on an offbeat track. The Brokpas of Dah-Bema are the one of the last remnants of an ancient and unique culture known generally under the 'Dards'. For Brok-pa ethnicity is the only form of defining status. The socio-religious belief system of Brokpa has its basis in the concept of pollution. In the Brokpa villages, strangers were and are not welcome. Brokpa practice two contradictory religions side by side- traditional 'Minaro' religion (spirit worship) as well as Lamaism. Their religious beliefs and rituals were originally in essence demonolatry, ancestor worship and nature worship. With the passage of time, these religious beliefs have absorbed Buddhist ritual and practices as well. Brokpa's rites of exorcism are the use of prayers, fumigations (burning of juniper) and animal sacrifice. Brokpa place great emphasis on coercive rites of exorcising and destroying demons. Brokpa worship nature- mountains, flowers, water spirits, earth spirit and ibex horns a natural out come of their ecological conditions . According to Brokpa traditions, shepherds who come down from pasture grounds are permeating with purity. Traditions prohibit women from coming close to the Juniper shrine (Chillgi Deuha) at Dah-Drouk (pasture ground). One can best comprehend the Brokpa medicine largely in terms of cultural belief and definition in their environmental setting. The Brokpa village under study juxtaposed between two cultural, social and religious systems. Cultural values and context play a greater role in conceptual frameworks to understand health and illness perceptions. In Brokpa culture, the cause and effect of illness for all time rests on religious beliefs. Four systems of treatment are available to them: herbal; ritual care; biomedicine and amchi medicine beside home remedies. Brokpa admit personal use of herbs, spiritual cure and preventive measures. They integrate herbs, especially Chilligi (Juniper) into religious belief pattern and spiritual cleaning. The Juniper (Chillgi) tree holds a special significance for Brokpa, as it cleans the atmosphere of evil spirits. Brokpa make use of juniper in their religious ceremonies as anti-pollutant. In Dah, local discourse on causes on sickness is changing along with changing environmental and social conditions. The diseases not related to local environment are not treatable by local methods. Dah provides a striking example of a culture and society, which subjected to strong outside influences. The pressure of these outside influences has caused increase in their ceremonies of traditional folk religion as it provide a coping mechanism for Brokpa to deal with rapid changes that have occurred during recent decades. In Dah, the medical power, in the past transformed in to social power because of the Lha-bab's monopoly on therapeutic care and the people's dependency on them. Local accounts of health and sickness among Brokpa suggest that the explanations of ill health are undergoing subtle redefinition as they draw comparisons between past and present conditions. It is interesting to note that Brokpa of Dah, while remained within the traditional framework through dependency on each other, and through fear of supernaturals, yet in Dah, pragmatism proves stronger than belief, at least in the matter of health care. For health care, they mostly depend on biomedicine along with their precautionary rituals and taboos. However, in the past lha-bab were more important than amchi, because they specialised in centric modes of healing. The social relations of healing embedded in the local setting. The priestly officials- Lha-bdag, brongopa and lha-bab play an important role in being a means and channel to express and deal with social suffering involved in the Brokpa's loss of fear of loosing identity, ethnic discrimination and recent changes. Ritual taboos, complex of pollution purity and organised system of ritual prescription regulates the life within the village as well as between and within each household.

Restoration or transformation? Choosing ritual strategies for end-of-life care

Ritual care of the dying is an important aspect of end-of-life care that can help to comfort and support patients as they come to terms with their mortality. We identify two distinctive ritual strategies, those of restoration and transformation, which organize and interpret the experience of dying. Restorative strategies are associated with rituals of modern medicine that imply that science and technology can transcend the existential limits of human life. Transformative strategies are associated with the ritual practices of traditional healers and religious communities that openly acknowledge such limits and assist the dying by helping them to find sources of hope and meaning that transcend personal existence. This discussion examines medicine's use of a ritual of restoration that employs excessively optimistic prognoses and treatment-focused discussions to respond to the spiritual and existential needs of terminally ill patients by reframing dying as a serious, but potentially curable, illness. The flaws in and harmful effects of this ritual practice are identified, followed by the argument that traditional rituals of transformation, such as those found in the Psalms, can be adapted by medicine to improve end-of-life care.

Pastoral Care for the Sick in a Post-Secular Age: An Ignatian Perspective

This pastoral-theology-based reflection on hospital chaplaincy, set within the horizon of the pastoral situation of Germany in the post-secular (!) age, introduces the perspective of a consolation-oriented ministry, as this was developed by Ignatius of Loyola. Such a pastoral care for the sick, as integrated into the basic offices of the church, presents a graded model for action: while human accompaniment is offered to all, spiritual ministry is restricted, but realized in an ecumenically encompassing sense. Spiritual and ritual care for members of other religions, while these members are to be addressed according to the principles laid down by Vatican II, is severely limited for reasons of identity and alterity. In all cases, however, Christianity is presented as “therapeutic religion”.

Face and politeness: new (insights) for old (concepts)

The article re-examines Erving Goffman’s concepts of face and face-work and their roots in the ritual and sacred essence of the social order as expounded in the work of the French sociologist Emile Durkheim. Both Goffman and Durkheim are referred to in Brown and Levinson’s classic work on politeness but the originality of their ideas has become somewhat diluted. Using three of Goffman’s early essays, the article argues that his observations on the interactional order and his sophisticated notions of face and face-work could be the starting point for a re-appraisal of politeness and its fundamental role in the social order. Many gods have been done away with, but the individual himself stubbornly remains as a deity of considerable importance. He walks with some dignity and is the recipient of many little offerings. He is jealous of the worship due him, yet, approached in the right spirit, he is ready to forgive those who may have offended him. Because of their status relative to his, some persons will find him contaminating while others will find they contaminate him, in either case finding that they must treat him with ritual care. Perhaps the individual is so viable as god because he can actually understand the ceremonial significance of the way he is treated, and quite on his own can respond dramatically to what is proffered him. In contacts between such deities there is no need for middlemen; each of these gods is able to serve as his own priest. E. Goffman 1967 [1956]: 95

The Prevalence of Psychological Knowledge and the Consecration of the Heart

Psychological knowledge prevails in society today.The way people think and act is deeply influenced by discourses of the heart. People are greatly concerned about the state of their hearts and minds. They feel impelled to exercise care about its condition or maintenance, and be prudent not to hurt other people's feeling. In these circumstances, the heart is treated as sacred.The purpose of this paper is to examine from the viewpoint of sociology of knowledge why psychological knowledge flourishes and why the heart is regarded as sacred today. Surveying the theoretical development of E.Durkheim's conception of “culte de la personne, ” I try to clarify the sociological origins of this phenomenon.First, Durkheim's concept of “culte de la personne” is examined. According to Durkheim, the person is sanctified as sacred in modern society. They worship the notion of the person and revere the individual. Next, E.Goffman's essays on “face-work” and “interaction ritual” are considered. Informed by Durkheim's arguments, he applies them to mass society and points out that secularized society is in reality not “secular” One's “face” -that is, one's appearance?continues to enjoy sanctity, and the individual remains “godly.” Third, A.Hochschild's thesis on “emotion management” is discussed. She notes that people are required to perform “emotion work” conforming to “feeling rules, ” and also suggests that ritual care is given to the heart. Lastly, I illustrate the above discussion with a case study on lessons on mental care in a Japanese elementary school.By re-reading the seminal works of leading sociologists, I intend to show in this paper that the cult of individual led to the rise of psychotherapeutics and the worship of the heart.

Cost/benefit analysis of initial cultures in the management of acute burns

The use of burn clinical pathways has helped to improve quality of care and decrease costs in the Burn Center. However, despite implementation of these pathways, certain 'ritual care' persists as part of the 'burn culture'. Specifically, the collection of wound cultures of acute burns at admission and the collection urine, blood, sputum, and wound cultures ('pan-culturing') on patients with temperatures greater than 38.5°C in the first 24 hours of admission are considered standard of care despite the lack of scientific data supporting these practices.

Book Review: Ritual and Pastoral Care

Book Review: Ritual and Pastoral Care

Book Review: Ritual and Pastoral Care

Book Review: Ritual and Pastoral Care