Anthropology of Healing and Ritual

Catalog description

This course engages a cross-cultural study of healing rituals, emphasizing how social relations and power shape the experiences, roles, practices, and interactions of patients and healers. How is healing—and its related concepts of suffering and illness— defined, managed, and understood in different social and cultural contexts? What is the relationship between healer and patient/client and the public? How are rituals, as social performances, transformative ? How do rituals designed to help manage suffering, enforce, reproduce or challenge cultural ideas about power, gender, and social order? Students will critically examine these questions through reading ethnographies, critical theory and historical essays in order to gain a deeper understanding of healing modalities throughout the world and over time. Readings for this course will examine a wide array of healing rituals and modalities including shamanism, curanderismo, Vodou/Voodoo, western biomedicine and others. Specific aspects of healing rituals will also be analyzed, including symbolism, the role of music and soundscapes, altered states of consciousness, as well as the socio-economic and political dimensions of healing. Because this course zeroes in on anthropological inquiry around the social performance of healing, it is an excellent complement to courses in health and medicine which focus on health systems. Lastly, students will reflect on what healing means in their own local communities, by composing their own research project on a healing ritual including an (optional) auto-ethnographic component.