Religion, Spirituality, and Public Health focuses on exploring the role of different 'ways of knowing' or arriving at truth, i.e. epistemes, particularly those found in religious and alternative health milieus. While biomedical solutions offer a dominant narrative, these are articulated differently in global contexts. Moreover, individuals often draw upon alternative framings that are sometimes oppositional to and at other times engaged with directives from medical and governmental authorities.
The focus is on worldviews and epistemes that are often marginalized or rejected in dominant discourses - from shamanism in Korea to African Pentecostalism in Britain, from global online 'AntiVax' narratives to traditional Siddha medicine in South India. Detailed case studies explore the contested, competing and strategically aligned relationships between mainstream and marginal epistemes; between religious healing, spirituality and biomedicine; and between politics and belief. These explorations promote greater insight into how marginalised religious epistemes were employed. Which beliefs and practices were drawn upon to create a meaningful and effective responses? How can we better understand the depth and breadth of these reactions to design more successful public health strategies for future global health crises?
Rezensionen / Stimmen
"The studies in this volume present deep, thoughtful and nuanced reflections on the difficult subject of medicine across cultures and across epistemes. It is too easy to approach health issues, especially public health, in oppositional terms, with hard boundaries regarding clinical testing, health insurance and professional licensing. All such boundaries are in various degrees permeable and imperfect. Nobody wishes to exclude the critical health support that can be provided by the priest, the mother, the friend, the herb, the prayer, the community. All these issues have been thrown into stark relief by the experience of COVID-19 that, if anything, has taught us all how complicated appropriate health care can be in practice. This volume offers some of the best contemporary thinking on these difficult subjects." Dominik Wujastyk, Professor Emeritus of Classical Indian History, University of Alberta
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Liverpool University Press
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Höhe: 234 mm
Breite: 156 mm
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978-1-83624-564-3 (9781836245643)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Klassifikation
Karen O'Brien-Kop is lecturer in Asian Religions at King's College London. She works on Hindu and Buddhist mind-body philosophies in South Asian Sanskrit texts as well as critical perspectives in contemporary religious cultures. She has published Rethinking 'Classical' Yoga and Buddhism: Meditation, Metaphors and Materiality (Bloomsbury 2021) and articles in peer-reviewed journals such as Journal of Indian Philosophy, Journal of the British Academy and Religious Studies. She is co-editor of the journal Religions of South Asia and co-chair of the Indian and Chinese Religions in Dialogue research unit at the American Academy of Religion. Suzanne Newcombe is a Senior Lecturer in Religious Studies at the Open University (UK) and the director of Inform, based in Theology and Religious Studies at King's College London. Much of her work has focused on investigating the popularization of yoga in the modern period. From 2015-2020 she was a researcher on the European Research Council project AYURYOG: Entangled Histories of Yoga, Ayurveda and Alchemy in South Asia. Since 2001, she has also explored different aspects of health and healing in a variety of new and minority religions through her work with Inform.
Section 1. Nuancing Concepts in Health Epistemology 1. Introduction: Complementary and Competing Epistemes - Religion, Science and Truth in a Healthcare Crisis Suzanne Newcombe and Karen O'Brien-Kop 2. Health Beliefs and Embodied Rationalities: A Pluriversal Philosophy of Lived Religion Karen O'Brien-Kop (King's College London, UK)
Section 2. Competing Ontologies: Elasticity of Truth and Meaning
3. Religion, Spirituality, Episteme: Transreligious Epistemologies in Health, Wellbeing and Covid-19 Eugenia Roussou (Centro em Rede de Investigacao em Antropologia, Portugal) 4. Trust and Doubt in the Internet Age: QAnon, Vaccine Hesitancy, and the Politics of Belief Quinton Deeley (King's College London, UK)
Section 3. Power, Authority and Contested Truths: Belief and Public Health
5. Experience, Knowledge and Expertise: Traditional Medicine and Infectious Fevers in Contemporary India V Sujatha (Jawaharlal Nehru University, India) 6. Iran's Clerical Power and Modern Medicine in the Age of Covid-19 Hormoz Ebrahimnejad (Southampton, UK)
Section 4. Pragmatic Complementarity: Healing and Marginalised Epistemologies
7. Pentecostal Africans and Divine Healing in 'Secular' Britain Abel Ugba (Leeds, UK) 8. COVID-19 and the Understanding of Illnesses in Urban Korean musok Liora Sarfati (Tel Aviv, Israel) 9. Spiritual Technologies: Afro-Brazilian Religious Epistemologies and Healing During Covid Joana Bahia (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil)
Section 5. Bridging Strategies: Experience and Biomedical Research
10. Placebo Effects, Qi, and Intention: How Biomedical Hegemony Polices Competing Paradigms Kin Cheung (Moravian, USA) 11. Daoist Meditation as Guided Framework in Psychedelic Self-Care and Therapy Dominic Steavu (Santa Barbara, USA) 12. The importance of Interrogating the Experiential Episteme: Yoga, Indian Medicine and Rhetorical Strategies of Epistemic Capital Suzanne Newcombe (Open University, UK) 13. Epistemes, Epistemologies and Public Health: Some Distinctions Ramprasad Chakravarthi (Lancaster, UK)
