The The Routledge Handbook of

Religion Medicine and Health

Routledge Handbooks in Religion 1st
Edition Dorothea Lüddeckens
Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://ebookmeta.com/product/the-the-routledge-handbook-of-religion-medicine-and-
health-routledge-handbooks-in-religion-1st-edition-dorothea-luddeckens/
More products digital (pdf, epub, mobi) instant
download maybe you interests ...

Routledge Handbook of Religion and Politics 3rd Edition

Jeffrey Haynes

https://ebookmeta.com/product/routledge-handbook-of-religion-and-
politics-3rd-edition-jeffrey-haynes/

The Routledge Handbook of Religion Gender and Society

1st Edition Caroline Starkey (Editor)

https://ebookmeta.com/product/the-routledge-handbook-of-religion-
gender-and-society-1st-edition-caroline-starkey-editor/

The Routledge Handbook of Evolutionary Approaches to

Religion 1st Edition Yair Lior

https://ebookmeta.com/product/the-routledge-handbook-of-
evolutionary-approaches-to-religion-1st-edition-yair-lior/

The Routledge Handbook of Research Methods in the Study

of Religion 2nd Edition Steven Engler

https://ebookmeta.com/product/the-routledge-handbook-of-research-
methods-in-the-study-of-religion-2nd-edition-steven-engler/
The Routledge Handbook of Queer Rhetoric Routledge
Handbooks in Communication Studies 1st Edition
Jacqueline Rhodes

https://ebookmeta.com/product/the-routledge-handbook-of-queer-
rhetoric-routledge-handbooks-in-communication-studies-1st-
edition-jacqueline-rhodes/

The Routledge Handbook of Properties (Routledge

Handbooks in Philosophy) 1st Edition A R J Fisher

https://ebookmeta.com/product/the-routledge-handbook-of-
properties-routledge-handbooks-in-philosophy-1st-edition-a-r-j-
fisher/

The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy and Psychology

of Forgiveness (Routledge Handbooks in Philosophy) 1st
Edition Glen Pettigrove (Editor)

https://ebookmeta.com/product/the-routledge-handbook-of-the-
philosophy-and-psychology-of-forgiveness-routledge-handbooks-in-
philosophy-1st-edition-glen-pettigrove-editor/

The Routledge Handbook of Women s Work in Music

Routledge Music Handbooks 1st Edition Rhiannon Mathias

https://ebookmeta.com/product/the-routledge-handbook-of-women-s-
work-in-music-routledge-music-handbooks-1st-edition-rhiannon-
mathias/

Asian Philosophies and the Idea of Religion Beyond

Faith and Reason Routledge Studies in Religion 1st
Edition Sonia Sikka

https://ebookmeta.com/product/asian-philosophies-and-the-idea-of-
religion-beyond-faith-and-reason-routledge-studies-in-
religion-1st-edition-sonia-sikka/
 THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF
RELIGION, MEDICINE, AND HEALTH

The relationships between religion, spirituality, health, biomedical institutions, complementary,

and alternative healing systems are widely discussed today. While many of these debates
revolve around the biomedical legitimacy of religious modes of healing, the market for them
continues to grow. The Routledge Handbook of Religion, Medicine, and Health is an outstanding
reference source to the key topics, problems, and debates in this exciting subject and is the
first collection of its kind. Comprising over thirty-five chapters by a team of international
contributors, the Handbook is divided into five parts:

• Healing practices with religious roots and frames

• Religious actors in and around the medical field
• Organizing infrastructures of religion and medicine: pluralism and competition
• Boundary-making between religion and medicine
• Religion and epidemics

Within these sections, central issues, debates and problems are examined, including health
and healing, religiosity, spirituality, biomedicine, medicalization, complementary medicine,
medical therapy, efficacy, agency, and the nexus of body, mind, and spirit.
The Routledge Handbook of Religion, Medicine, and Health is essential reading for students
and researchers in religious studies. The Handbook will also be very useful for those in related
fields, such as sociology, anthropology, and medicine.

Dorothea Lüddeckens is Professor for the Study of Religions with a social scientific
orientation at the University of Zurich, Switzerland.

Philipp Hetmanczyk is a teaching and research staff member of the Department for the Study
of Religions at the University of Zurich, Switzerland.

Pamela E. Klassen is Professor in the Department for the Study of Religion at the University
of Toronto, Canada.

Justin B. Stein is Instructor in the Department of Asian Studies, Kwantlen Polytechnic

University, British Columbia, Canada.
ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOKS IN RELIGION

THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF DEATH AND THE AFTERLIFE

Edited by Candi K. Cann

THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF RELIGION AND ANIMAL ETHICS

Edited by Andrew Linzey and Clair Linzey

THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF MORMONISM AND GENDER

Edited by Amy Hoyt and Taylor G. Petry

THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF ISLAM AND GENDER

Edited by Justine Howe

THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF RELIGION AND JOURNALISM

Edited by Kerstin Radde-Antweiler and Xenia Zeiler

THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF RELIGION AND CITIES

Edited by Katie Day and Elise M. Edwards

THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF HINDU-CHRISTIAN RELATIONS

Edited by Chad M. Bauman and Michelle Voss Roberts

THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF RELIGION, MEDICINE, AND HEALTH

Edited by Dorothea Lüddeckens, Philipp Hetmanczyk, Pamela E. Klassen, and Justin B. Stein

THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF RELIGION, MASS ATROCITY, AND

GENOCIDE
Edited by Sara E. Brown and Stephen D. Smith

For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/Routledge-

Handbooks-in-Religion/book-series/RHR
 THE ROUTLEDGE
HANDBOOK OF RELIGION,
MEDICINE, AND HEALTH

Edited by Dorothea Lüddeckens, Philipp Hetmanczyk,

Pamela E. Klassen, and Justin B. Stein
 First published 2022
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa

business
© 2022 selection and editorial matter, Dorothea Lüddeckens, Philipp
Hetmanczyk, Pamela E. Klassen, and Justin B. Stein; individual chapters,
the contributors
The right of Dorothea Lüddeckens, Philipp Hetmanczyk, Pamela E.
Klassen, and Justin B. Stein to be identified as the authors of the editorial
material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted
in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested
ISBN: 978-1-138-63006-2 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-11653-2 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-20796-4 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781315207964
Typeset in Times New Roman
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
 CONTENTS

List of contributors x
Prefacexvi

Introduction: critical approaches to the entanglement of religion,

medicine, and healing 1
Pamela E. Klassen, Philipp Hetmanczyk, Dorothea Lüddeckens,
and Justin B. Stein

PART I
Healing practices with religious roots and frames 11

1 Afro-Atlantic healing practices 13

Maarit Forde

2 Ayurveda: the modern faces of ‘Vedic’ healing and

sacred science 27
Maya Warrier

3 Curanderismo in the Americas 41

Brett Hendrickson

4 Healing traditions in sub-Saharan Africa 54

Walter Bruchhausen

5 Homeopathy and chiropractic in the United States and beyond 68

Holly Folk

v
 Contents

6 ‘Mind Cure’ and mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs) 83

Wakoh Shannon Hickey

7 The hospice movement, palliative care, and Anthroposophy

in Europe 98
Barbara Zeugin

8 Spiritual healing in Latin America 113

Bettina E. Schmidt

9 Traditional Chinese medicine: history, ethnography, and practice 126

Elisabeth Hsu

10 Unani medicine: health, religion, and politics in colonial India 141

Seema Alavi

PART II
Religious actors in and around the medical field 155

11 Diagnosing materialism: Ayurvedic purification regimens

as spiritual cure 157
Jean M. Langford

12 Buddhist spiritual caregivers in Japan 171

Hara Takahashi

13 Chaplains and spiritual caregivers in American healthcare

organizations 186
Wendy Cadge and Michael Skaggs

14 Muslim healthcare chaplaincy in North America and

Europe: professionalizing a communal obligation 200
Lance D. Laird, Samsiah Abdul Majid, and Magda L. Mohammed

15 Charismatic healers: embodied practices in US

and Singaporean megachurches 215
Katja Rakow

16 Energy healing: Reiki, Therapeutic Touch, and Healing

Touch in the United States and beyond 229
Justin B. Stein

vi
 Contents

17 Gurus and healing: Amma (Mata Amritanandamyi) at the

intersection of miracles and medicine 244
Amanda Lucia

18 Medical missionaries and witch doctors: Protestant object

lessons in biomedicine in Africa and the South Pacific 258
Daniel Midena

19 Rabbinic authority and reproductive medicine in Israel 276

Tsipy Ivry and Elly Teman

PART III
Organizing infrastructures of religion and medicine: pluralism
and competition291

20 Digital tools for fertility awareness: family planning, health,

religion, and feminine embodiment 293
Florence Pasche Guignard

21 The Internet as infrastructure for healing: the case of spirit

possession in Japan 308
Birgit Staemmler

22 Markets of medicine: orthodox medicine, complementary

and alternative medicine, and religion in Britain 322
Mike Saks

23 Medical pluralism in policy and practice: the case

of Malaysia 336
Md. Nazrul Islam

24 Midwifery and traditional birth attendants in transnational

perspective 349
Sarah A. Williams and Janice Boddy

25 Postcolonial medicine in African contexts 363

Nolwazi Mkhwanazi

26 Religious entrepreneurs in the health market: opportunities

in a field dominated by biomedicine 376
Markus Hero

vii
 Contents

PART IV
Boundary-making between religion and medicine 389

27 Policing the boundaries of medical science: causality, evidence, and

the question of religion 391
Robert C. Fuller

28 Competing religious and biomedical notions of treatment: the case

of blood transfusion refusals 406
Małgorzata Rajtar

29 Ayurveda (re-)invented: engagements with science and religion in

colonial India 421
Poonam Bala

30 Nurses on the frontline of secular and religious knowledges 435

Sheryl Reimer-Kirkham

31 Religion, culture, and the politics of vaccine hesitancy: perspectives

of parents, pundits, and physicians 450
Paul Bramadat

32 The World Health Organization’s production and enactment

of spirituality 464
Rodrigo Toniol

33 Contemporary psychiatry and psychotherapy’s engagements with

religion/spirituality in Europe and North America 477
Dorothea Lüddeckens and Thomas Lüddeckens

PART V
Religion and epidemics 493

34 Religion, ‘the Chinese virus,’ and perceptions of Asian Americans as

a moral and medical menace 495
Melissa May Borja

35 Defying responsibility: modes of silence, religious symbolism, and

biopolitics in the COVID-19 pandemic 502
Britta Ohm

36 Christianity and the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States 509

Jonathan D. Riddle

viii
 Contents

37 The impact of COVID-19 on religion in Japan 515

Levi McLaughlin

38 A cultural map of the pandemic 521

Tamar El Or

Index 525

ix
 CONTRIBUTORS

Seema Alavi is a professor of South Asian history at Delhi University, New Delhi, India. She
earned her PhD from Cambridge University, UK. Her most recent book is Muslim Cosmopoli-
tanism in the Age of Empire (2015, Harvard University Press).

Poonam Bala is currently a visiting scholar at Cleveland State University, USA, a nomi-
nated fellow at UNISA, South Africa. She was a visiting professor at Jawaharlal Nehru
University, Germany, South Africa, and Greece, and professor at Amity University. She
published extensively on medicine and colonialism. Her select publications include Impe-
rialism and Medicine in Bengal: A Socio-Historical Perspective (Sage) and Medicine and
Colonialism: Historical Perspectives in India and South Africa (Routledge). She was
President of the First International Conference on Ancient Greek and Indian Medicine,
Greece.

Janice Boddy, PhD, University of British Columbia, is a cultural anthropologist whose

research focuses on Muslim Sudan and N.E. Africa. She is a fellow of the Royal Society
of Canada and Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology, University of
Toronto.

Melissa May Borja is Assistant Professor in the Department of American Culture at the Uni-
versity of Michigan, where she is a core faculty member in the Asian/Pacific Islander American
Studies Program. She is an affiliated researcher with the Stop AAPI Hate Reporting Center.

Paul Bramadat is Professor and Director of the Centre for the Study of Religion and Society
at the University of Victoria. He writes and teaches about instances in which religion appears
within public debates around citizenship, health, and public discourse.

Walter Bruchhausen, Dr med, DiplTheol, MPhil, endowed Professorship for Social and Cul-
tural Aspects of Global Health at the University of Bonn, has worked as a medical doctor in
several African countries, performed ethnographic field research in Tanzania, and currently
researches as well as teaches the history, anthropology, and ethics of medicine and global
health.

x
 Contributors

Wendy Cadge is a professor of sociology at Brandeis University. She is the author of two
books, Paging God: Religion in the Halls of Medicine and Heartwood: The First Generation
of Theravada Buddhism in America, and a co-editor of Religion on the Edge: De-Centering
and Re-Centering the Sociology of Religion. She recently co-founded the Chaplaincy Innova-
tion Lab.

Tamar El Or is the Sarah Ellen Shaine Chair in Sociology and Anthropology at the Hebrew
University in Jerusalem, Israel. Most of her work is done at the intersection of gender, culture,
and knowledge, while doing ethnographic research among three different Jewish orthodox com-
munities. As of 2008, El Or has been researching material culture and anthropology of style.

Holly Folk is an associate professor in the Department of Global Humanities and Religions at
Western Washington University (Bellingham). She is the author of The Religion of Chiroprac-
tic: Populist Healing from the American Heartland. Her research focuses on new religious
movements, alternative medicine, and globalization.

Maarit Forde is a senior lecturer in cultural studies and Head of the Department of Literary,
Cultural and Communication Studies at the University of the West Indies in St. Augustine. Her
research and teaching have focussed on the anthropology of religion and political anthropol-
ogy, particularly in the Caribbean and its diaspora. In recent publications, she has looked into
the government and politics of religion and healing in the colonial Caribbean, death and mor-
tuary rituals, and the civic engagement of the urban poor. Passages and Afterworlds: Anthro-
pological Perspectives on Death in the Caribbean was published last year by Duke University
Press. Maarit is currently finishing a book manuscript on subject formation and political activ-
ism in urban Trinidad.

Robert C. Fuller is Professor of Religious Studies at Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois.

Bob’s scholarship focuses on both the psychological study of religion and alternative spiritual
movements throughout American history. Among his thirteen scholarly books are Alterna-
tive Medicine and American Religious Life (Oxford University Press) and Spirituality in the
Flesh (Oxford University Press).

Brett Hendrickson is an associate professor of religious studies at Lafayette College in Eas-

ton, Pennsylvania. He is the author of Border Medicine: A Transcultural History of Mexican
American Curanderismo and The Healing Power of the Santuario de Chimayó: America’s
Miraculous Church.

Markus Hero, PhD, teaches and conducts research at the University Hospital of Heidelberg,
Germany. The sociologist and economist mainly focuses on societal aspects of health and the
health market. He has published on the religious and spiritual service sector and its implica-
tions for contemporary changes in religion and health.

Philipp Hetmanczyk is a teaching and research staff member of the Department for the Study
of Religions at the University of Zurich. His research focusses on religion in modern and con-
temporary China and interactions between religion, politics, and education.

Wakoh Shannon Hickey, PhD, is an independent scholar specializing in American religious

history, Buddhism in the West, religion and medicine, interfaith dialogue, and critical race

xi
 Contributors

and gender studies. She is also a Sōtō Zen priest and works as a hospice chaplain in Northern
California.

Elisabeth Hsu is Professor of Anthropology at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthro-
pology (ISCA) in the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography (SAME) of the
University of Oxford. She was employed in 2001 to set up two masters courses in medical
anthropology, which she has been teaching ever since. Her studies have been highly interdis-
ciplinary, after learning Chinese in Beijing in 1978–1979, including degrees in the natural sci-
ences (ETH Zurich), general linguistics (MPhil Cantab.), social anthropology (PhD Cantab.),
and Chinese studies (Habilitation PD, University of Heidelberg).

Md. Nazrul Islam is an associate professor in the General Education Office and JIRS Fellow,
BNU-HKBU United International College, in Zhuhai, China. He is the author of Chinese and
Indian Medicine Today—Branding Asia by Springer Nature (2017) as well as editor of Silk
Road to Belt Road: Reinventing the Past and Shaping the Future by Springer Nature (2019)
and Public Health Challenges in Contemporary China: An Interdisciplinary Perspective by
Springer (2016).

Tsipy Ivry is associate professor and chair of the graduate program in medical and psycholog-
ical anthropology in the Anthropology Department, University of Haifa. She is the author of a
comparative double ethnography, Embodying Culture: Pregnancy in Japan and Israel (2010).
Her recent project explores pregnancy, childbirth, and parenting following the 11 March 2011
disasters in Eastern Japan.

Sheryl Reimer-Kirkham is Dean and Professor of Nursing at Trinity Western University. She
teaches the interrelated fields of spirituality and health, health policy, knowledge translation,
and nursing philosophy. Her research is in the area of plurality and equity in healthcare, at the
intersections of religion, race, class, and gender.

Pamela E. Klassen is Professor in the Department for the Study of Religion at the University
of Toronto. Her current research focuses on religion, science, colonialism, and public memory
in North American and Turtle Island, engaging with Indigenous studies, museum studies, criti-
cal secularism studies, and legal studies.

Lance D. Laird, ThD, is Assistant Professor of Family Medicine at the Boston University
School of Medicine, USA, and Assistant Director of the master’s programme in medical
anthropology. He has published widely on Muslim identity in the healthcare professions, and
Muslim experiences with medicine and healing in North America.

Jean M. Langford, Professor of Cultural Anthropology at the University of Minnesota, is

the author of Fluent Bodies: Ayurvedic Remedies for Postcolonial Imbalance and Consoling
Ghosts: Stories of Medicine and Mourning from Southeast Asians in Exile. Her book in pro-
gress is entitled Animals Undone: Eccentricity and Creativity in Captive Life.

Amanda Lucia is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at University of California-­

Riverside. She is author of White Utopias: The Religious Exoticism of Transformational Fes-
tivals (2020) and Reflections of Amma: Devotees in a Global Embrace (2014). She is also
crafting a body of research on celebrity gurus and sexual abuse.

xii
 Contributors

Dorothea Lüddeckens is Professor for the Study of Religions with a social scientific orienta-
tion at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. Her research is focussed on the fields of religion/
spirituality and medicine, death and dying, and contemporary religion in Switzerland.

Thomas Lüddeckens, Dr. med., is Medical Director and Chief Executive of the Klinik im
Hasel, Switzerland, a psychiatric hospital for patients with substance use disorders with a
specialization in posttraumatic stress disorder.

Samsiah Abdul Majid, one of eight Muslims currently certified by the Association of Pro-
fessional Chaplains—Board of Chaplaincy Certification Inc., US, works in palliative care at
Westchester Medical Center, NY. She co-authored the report, ‘Mapping Muslim Chaplaincy:
Educational and Needs Assessment.’ Before chaplaincy, Samsiah had a long career with the
United Nations in Bangkok and New York.

Daniel Midena lectures in Pacific history at the University of the South Pacific and is an hon-
orary research fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University
of Queensland. His research explores the historical intersections of science and religion in
Pacific colonial contexts.

Magda L. Mohammed is a doctoral candidate in Islamic studies in the Department of Reli-

gion at Boston University. She earned her MDiv from Harvard Divinity School and has worked
in chaplaincy positions in healthcare and education.

Levi McLaughlin is Associate Professor at the Department of Philosophy and Religious Stud-
ies, North Carolina State University. He is co-author of Kōmeitō: Politics and Religion in
Japan (IEAS Berkeley, 2014) and author of Soka Gakkai’s Human Revolution: The Rise of a
Mimetic Nation in Modern Japan (University of Hawai`i Press, 2019).

Nolwazi Mkhwanazi is an associate professor at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic
Research (WiSER) and in the Department of Anthropology at the University of the Witwa-
tersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa.

Britta Ohm is an associated researcher at the Institute of Social Anthropology, University of

Bern. She researches, publishes, and teaches on the role of media, technology, and communi-
cation in processes of (de-)democratization, religious politics, and nationalism/neo-fascism.
Her geographical research areas are India and Turkey.

Florence Pasche Guignard is Assistant Professor in Religious Studies at the Université

Laval, Quebec City. Her research explores issues at the intersection of religion and ritual,
digital and material cultures, embodiment, and gender. She brings her interdisciplinary schol-
arship into conversation with anthropology, ritual studies, media studies, gender studies, and
women’s studies.

Małgorzata Rajtar, PhD, is Associate Professor and the Head of Rare Disease Social Research
Center in the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology at the Polish Academy of Sciences in War-
saw. Her ethnographic research with Jehovah’s Witnesses in Germany has been published in
Anthropology & Medicine; Bioethics; Social Science & Medicine, and Religion, State & Society,
among other places. Her current research examines rare metabolic diseases in the Baltic region.

xiii
 Contributors

Katja Rakow is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the Department of Philosophy

and Religious Studies of Utrecht University, The Netherlands. Her research focuses on mega-
churches in the US and Singapore with a special interest in material religion, technology, and
the transcultural dynamics of religious practices and discourses.

Jonathan D. Riddle, PhD, is a Visiting Assistant Professor of History and Great Books at Pep-
perdine University. His research focuses on the history of medicine and religion in the United
States. His current book project examines the confluence of physiology, Protestantism, and
marketplace capitalism in early nineteenth-century health reform.

Mike Saks is Emeritus Professor at the University of Suffolk and Visiting Professor at the
University of Lincoln, the Royal Veterinary College, University of London, the University of
Westminster, and the University of Toronto. He has published twenty books on health, profes-
sions, and research methods, and is an adviser to governments and professions.

Bettina E. Schmidt is a professor of the study of religions at the University of Wales Trinity
Saint David, UK. Her research area is the anthropology of religion with a special focus on
Latin America, the Caribbean, and its diasporas. Among her more recent publications is Spirits
and Trance in Brazil: An Anthropology of Religious Experience (Bloomsbury 2016).

Michael Skaggs is a historian of American religion and Executive Director of the Chaplaincy
Innovation Lab.

Birgit Staemmler is a researcher at Tübingen University’s Japanese Department and focuses

on new religions, spirit possession, and shamanism on the Japanese Internet. Her publications
include Chinkon kishin: Mediated Spirit Possession in Japanese New Religions (2009) and
Japanese Religions on the Internet: Innovation, Representation and Authority (2011, co-edited
with Erica Baffelli and Ian Reader).

Justin B. Stein is Instructor in the Department of Asian Studies, Kwantlen Polytechnic Uni-
versity, Surrey, British Columbia (Canada). He received his doctorate from the Department for
the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto. His research focuses on how transnational
exchanges between Japan and the West have shaped spiritual and religious practices.

Hara Takahashi is Professor in the Department of Death and Life Studies/Practical Religious
Studies, Graduate School of Arts and Letters, Tohoku University. He received his PhD from
Tokyo University in 2004. After studying Jungian psychology of religion and the history of
Japanese religious studies, he moved to Tohoku University to launch the project for training
interfaith chaplains.

Elly Teman is a senior lecturer and Head of the sociology and anthropology track, Depart-
ment of Behavioral Sciences, Ruppin Academic Center, Israel. She is the author of Birthing a
Mother: The Surrogate Body and the Pregnant Self (2010). Her research focuses on medical
anthropology, reproduction, surrogate motherhood, embodiment, and religion.

Rodrigo Toniol, anthropologist is Full Professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro,
Brazil. He is currently President of the Association of Social Scientists of the Religion

xiv
 Contributors

Mercosur and a visiting researcher at the Utrecht University, Netherlands, University of Cali-
fornia San Diego, USA, and CIESAS, Mexico. He is Editor of the journal Debates do NER.

Maya Warrier served until 2020 as Reader in Religious Studies at the University of Win-
chester, UK, before retiring from academia due to failing health. Her research and publica-
tions have explored Hindu identities and traditions in modern, transnational contexts. She has
published on aspects of modern guru traditions, Hinduism in the UK, and the transformations
undergone by Ayurveda in its contemporary Anglophone manifestations. Her publications
include Hindu Selves in a Modern World: Guru Faith in the Mata Amritanandamayi Mission
(monograph, Routledge-Curzon, 2005) as well as Public Hinduisms (co-edited volume, Sage,
2012) and A Cultural History of Hinduism in the Age of Independence: 1947–2017 (co-edited
volume, Bloomsbury, forthcoming).

Sarah A. Williams, PhD, is currently the Louise Lamphere Visiting Assistant Professor of
Feminist Anthropology and Gender Studies at Brown University. Her research is primarily
focussed on reproductive health, Indigenous rights, and midwifery in Mexico.

Barbara Zeugin is a lecturer at the Department of Religious Studies at the University of

Zurich. In her doctoral thesis, she explored alternative forms of hospice and palliative care.
Her research foci lie in alternative religion, religion at the end of life, anthroposophic medi-
cine, and qualitative research.

xv
 PREFACE

The idea for this handbook arose in the context of the Research Group on Religion and Medi-
cine (AKRM) of the German Society for the Scientific Study of Religion (DVRW), together
with my colleagues Bettina E. Schmidt (Wales, UK) and Jens Schlieter (Bern, Switzerland).
However, Bettina and Jens had other priorities at that time and therefore could not pursue the
initiative with me. A project like this handbook requires more than one editorial head, and it
was therefore a great stroke of luck that Philipp Hetmanczyk, from a Zurich office, and Pamela
E. Klassen, from a Tübingen café, got enthusiastic about the project. Thanks to Pamela, Justin
B. Stein, who was living and working in Kyoto at the time, joined us as a fourth member. I owe
Justin, Pamela, and Philipp for the stimulating and challenging discussions that were crucial
for our joint project (discussions that took place via email and Skype but also at the same table
over sake, whisky, and coffee). Only this joint international work by four scholars of the study
of religion with different networks and research foci has made it possible to attract such a
broad range of talented authors.
I would like to thank all our authors for their commitment, their willingness to engage
with old and new questions and to discuss and revise the texts of this handbook together! The
fact that this interdisciplinary and international exchange of inspiring ideas, critical enquiries,
and constructive suggestions was not only possible via email and online, we are indebted to a
small, special hotel and its staff in the Swiss mountains: the Piz Linard in Lavin. Our meetings
there were made possible by the support of the Swiss National Science Foundation and the
University of Zurich.
We editors worked together on this book in Kyoto, Vancouver, Toronto, and Zurich.
I would like to thank Jill Marxer and Hélène Coste in Zurich for their support with regard
to coordination and formal matters and Amy Doffegnies with the editorial staff from Rout-
ledge. We were happy to win Julianne Funk for copy-editing and taking care of the lin-
guistic quality, especially of those contributions that were submitted by non-native English
speakers.
I would especially like to thank all our authors who submitted their first drafts and chapters
in time and apologize that our volume was not published earlier. Some chapters took longer to
come out, mainly because their authors were very much affected by the current pandemic. It is
somehow fitting for a handbook dealing with medicine and therapy!

xvi
 INTRODUCTION
Critical approaches to the entanglement of
religion, medicine, and healing

Pamela E. Klassen, Philipp Hetmanczyk, Dorothea Lüddeckens,

and Justin B. Stein

A global pandemic shifts many things into new perspective, including the connections between
religion, medicine, and healing. The danger posed by a virus like SARS-CoV-2 (also known
as ‘the novel coronavirus’) reveals how the flow of people, their views of the body, and their
communal practices can have wide-ranging personal and systemic consequences. Whether
looking from the scale of a microbe in transit, bodies in contagious proximity, or a nation’s
porous borders, applying a lens of religion brings into focus how rituals, beliefs, and commit-
ments to community shape how we grow ill and heal, are born, and die. The pandemic has
revealed multiple ways that religion can represent a resource and a risk for the success—and
the very idea—of public health, which depends on how and whether people accept scientific
authority and value scientific evidence for guidance to live together in community (see chap-
ters in this volume: Borja; El Or; McLaughlin; Ohm; Riddle).
When we first began compiling this handbook, our primary goal as editors was to show the
diverse ways that religion, medicine, and healing intersect across the globe. We sought to provide
resources for researchers, professors, students, and healthcare practitioners who want to better
understand how religious beliefs, ritual practices, and ideas of spirituality matter for healthcare
systems everywhere, but in different ways according to place, time, and tradition. The chapters
in this handbook represent varying disciplinary approaches to the study of religion and medicine,
with contributions from scholars of religious studies, anthropology, history, and sociology who
research a diversity of biomedical and complementary healing modalities. With chapters written
by scholarly experts from almost every continent, on topics as varied as traditional Chinese medi-
cine (Hsu; Islam), postcolonial medicine in African contexts (Mkhwanzi; Bruchhausen), healing
through a guru’s touch (Lucia) or a meditation course (Hickey), digital tools for fertility aware-
ness (Pasche Guignard), and spiritual healing (Staemmler), we succeeded in our goal. Finishing
this handbook during the COVID-19 pandemic, at a time when the question of public confidence
in public health was so critical, reminded us anew of the importance of understanding religion as
a social determinant of health that shapes systems and practices of healthcare around the world.

Concepts of religion and medicine

This handbook works from the premise that medicine and religion are powerful concepts
that change depending on the political and historical context in which they are used. Most

1 DOI: 10.4324/9781315207964-1
 Pamela E. Klassen et al.

basically, the chapters take a socio-cultural approach to understanding medicine as the various
ways that people intervene in or treat the human body in order to eliminate disease, restore
health, or relieve suffering. The dominant form of medicine in the world today is biomedicine,
also known as ‘modern,’ ‘allopathic,’ or ‘Western’ medicine. Biomedicine roots its theories
and treatments in scientific and evidence-based methods of analysis, which generally do not
accept religious aetiologies, or theories of causation, that attribute illness or disease to trans-
cendent, spiritual forces. By contrast with biomedicine, other healing modalities are often
framed as ‘complementary and alternative medicine’ (CAM; on terminology see Koch 2015;
Ross 2012).
The line between biomedicine and CAM is not only a question of evidence: ‘biomedicine’s
overwhelming social, political, and economic authority—and many would argue, its bodily
efficacy—is what transforms other, non-biomedical therapeutic approaches into “alternative”
or “complementary” therapies’ (Klassen 2016: 404). Depending on the context, healing sys-
tems that are covered by the term CAM may also be referred to as ‘traditional,’ ‘holistic,’ ‘het-
erodox,’ ‘natural,’ ‘integrative,’ or ‘vernacular medicine,’ as well as ‘faith healing’ or ‘spiritual
healing.’ All these terms can be controversial and, like most aspects of medical care, the ways
these terms are used depends on particular political, cultural, and economic contexts. For
example, using one label may include a practice and its practitioners in a national healthcare
system while another label would exclude it (Lüddeckens and Schrimpf 2018).
Religion and medicine are intersecting discourses through which particular modes of heal-
ing are framed as differently legitimate, powerful, and effective. Religion may be understood
as ‘traditional’ or ‘authentic,’ as well as ‘spiritual’ or ‘holistic,’ sometimes in a way that makes
space for spiritual practices within biomedical discourse—for example, in hospitals that offer
acupuncture or spiritual care for end-of-life palliative medicine. Religion might also be a term
by which biomedical systems dismiss specific healing modalities as ‘superstitious,’ ‘magical
thinking,’ or ‘irrational.’ Designating healing modalities as ‘quackery’ often rests on concepts
and assumptions about religion, as well as legal regulations.
Several chapters in this book address the history, politics, and ongoing power of biomedi-
cine as a healing modality that grew in influence within European and North American socie-
ties, and then spread across the world along with Christian missions and colonial expansion.
Examples include the chapters on medical missions (Midena), religion and colonialism (Bala),
nursing (Reimer-Kirkham), and hospital chaplains (Takahashi; Cadge and Skaggs; and Laird,
Majid, and Mohammad). Other chapters focus on healing modalities that are alternative to,
but not necessarily excluded from, biomedicine, such as Reiki, a Japanese-influenced practice
often described as ‘energy healing’ (Stein); Ayurveda, a South Asian healing practice attrib-
uted to Vedic sources and practised across South and Southeast Asia (and elsewhere) (see
chapters in this volume: Langford; Warrior; Islam); or Anthroposophic medicine, a healing
system which was developed in Europe (Zeugin). All of these alternative practices have found
their way into biomedically-focused hospitals and clinics as complementary practices, even
sometimes covered by state health insurance.
CAM healing modalities are considered alternative in part because of their understanding of
how the human body works. CAM practitioners contend that assessing the material, physical
body is not enough to diagnose and treat suffering. Instead, they must also assess ‘subtle’ bod-
ies, undetectable through ordinary perception or scientific instruments. Animated by unquan-
tifiable forces, whether impersonal cosmic powers such as energy, prana, or qi, or personified
spirits capable of causing disease or facilitating healing, these ‘anthropologies of the spiritual
body’ understand the human body to be much more porous than the relatively contained,

2
 Introduction

individualized body of biomedicine (Klassen 2011). In their specific contexts, modern forms
of complementary medicine emerged through contests with biomedicine as a ­colonial—and
often quasi-Christian—way of organizing healing. Modes of healing considered complemen-
tary from a biomedical perspective often have deep connections to religious cosmologies
and traditions. Chapters in this book consider many of these modalities, including, Ayurveda and
Unani, another South Asian modality with Muslim connections (see Warrior, Langford, and
Alavi, this volume); traditional Chinese medicine (see Hsu, Islam, this volume); and heal-
ing systems from Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean (see, this volume: Bruchhausen;
Mkhwanazi; Schmidt; Hendrickson; Forde).
Just as this handbook takes a broad view of medicine, including modalities that often con-
flict over what is the best way to intervene in the body for the purposes of healing, we also
understand religion as a contested, but nevertheless helpful concept. At a common-sense level,
religion is marked throughout this book by specific traditions: for example, Jewish rabbis who
rule on women’s fertility practices (Ivry and Teman, this volume), Muslim chaplains who tend
to the sick in hospitals (Laird, Majid, and Mohammad, this volume), or charismatic Christians
who perform their healing in megachurches (Rakow, this volume). Each specific religion dis-
cussed in this book is itself internally diverse, varying by such factors as history, region, and
gendered experience. Accordingly, the authors do not talk about the Islamic practice of dealing
with illness, or the Christian perspective on healing, but only about specific Islamic, Christian,
or Buddhist practices, bounded by time and place.
Across this diversity, the chapters also treat religion as a form of authoritative knowledge
that people may turn to in a crisis. This knowledge might be embodied in human figures of
authority such as medical doctors, nurses, clergy, and spiritual healers, or flow through medi-
ated channels of authority, such as scriptures, rituals, sacred substances, or material culture, as
in a shrine or relic. Authoritative knowledge depends on relations of trust, credibility, and/or
coercion—it is social knowledge whether it is based on scientific or spiritual claims. For that
reason, one community’s authoritative knowledge about medicine and healing may appear to
those outside of that social circle to be quackery, charlatanism, or trickery, deserving of scep-
ticism or debunking. Concerns about religion and spirituality are often undercurrents within
debates over the legitimacy or efficacy of specific kinds of medical therapies. At the same time,
many practitioners of both biomedical and complementary models of medicine acknowledge
that healing is not simply the cure of a specific disease but also requires contending with suf-
fering and meaning.
Where there is authority there is also power. Religion must also be understood at the level
of the ‘body politic’ as a way that people organize themselves into collectives and are organ-
ized by others (Lofton 2017). The vulnerability of the human body—especially at the points of
birth and death—means that societies have a perpetual need to organize healing and healthcare
(Boddy and Williams’ and Mkhwanazi’s chapters, this volume). These forms of organization
are often shaped by intersectional networks that advantage some and oppress others, by way
of racism, sexism, class privilege, and religious discrimination. As the COVID-19 pandemic
showed yet again, communicable diseases are not true equalizers, but instead hit the poor, mar-
ginalized, and racialized harder than others (see chapters by Borja and by Riddle, this volume).
The fact that medical care—whether biomedical or complementary—costs money means that
access to it depends on how it is politically organized, as demonstrated by ongoing battles
about publicly-funded healthcare, especially in the United States. As several of the chapters
show, religious organizations have often played leading roles both historically and today, in
expanding access to healthcare around the world (see Midena; Toniol).

3
 Pamela E. Klassen et al.

Religion, the secular, and spirituality

What counts as religion and ‘not-religion’ changes depending on where you are, and the line
dividing the two is often fiercely contested. One dimension of this contestation is the binary
between religion and the secular. In the context of biomedicine, the language of secularism
has often been used to signal a scientific, non-religious, or even anti-religious perspective.
But as many scholars have shown, religion and secularity emerged in tandem as words that
helped to make sense of changes to understandings of the human body and existence in the
wake of massive technological change and scientific—including medical—innovation (Mod-
ern 2011; Klassen 2011; Scott 2017). Another familiar distinction is that between religion as
institutionalized, tradition-specific orthodoxy, on the one hand, and spirituality as something
that is individualized, experiential, and universal on the other. Like the distinction of religious
and secular, the binary of religion and spirituality is also historically constituted, with its own
gendered, racialized, and Christian connotations (Bender 2010).
The contested distinction of religion from non-religion is also a dimension of political
governance, with policies and jurisdictions that define religion in terms of duties, rights, and
freedoms that are often constitutionally granted and regulated (Sullivan et al. 2015). While
some states’ legal definitions of religion cover a relatively wide range of practices and beliefs,
others apply more narrow definitions. In the political context of China, for example, religion
is narrowly defined, rendering many forms of belief and practice that scholars would consider
‘religious’ to be outside the scope of official ‘religion’ and in the realm of ‘superstition’ (mixin)
or ‘evil cult’ (xiejiao). The Chinese state’s aim to eradicate these so-called superstitious or evil
practices in the process of state modernization led to exclusion of some healing modalities
(e.g. exorcisms, Falun Gong), as well as of aspects of traditional Chinese medicine (Goossaert
and Palmer 2011; Lei 2014). Such negotiations around the contested nature of religion are the
object of study in different academic disciplines interested in religion. Thus, when considering
terms such as ‘religion,’ ‘spirituality,’ ‘superstition,’ and so on, as analytical concepts, we must
also consider how they have been employed ‘on-the-ground’ and in different times and places.

Historical disentanglements of religion and medicine

The emergence of modern biomedicine is conventionally described as part of a process in
which medical sciences were separated from various religiously influenced explanations about
the causes of illness and disease, including explanations rooted in Christian theology as well as
those with more spiritually vague ‘subtle bodies.’ For example, when Franz Anton Mesmer’s
(1734–1815) idea of ‘animal magnetism’ gained prominence in the eighteenth century, it was
considered a victory of scientific medical diagnostics over religious ones. By the early twen-
tieth century, however, medical doctors dismissed Mesmerism as being founded on spiritual
assumptions rather than empirical evidence (see Fuller, this volume). More broadly, the pro-
fessionalization of biomedicine happened concurrently with boundary making that excluded
healing treatments based on vitalistic models of the body, such as homeopathy and chiroprac-
tic (Folk, this volume), as well as ‘magnetic healing’ performed via the ‘passing’ or the laying
on of hands (Stein, this volume). Medical authority and professionalism thus developed as a
scientific enterprise, which differentiated itself from competitors by labelling them quacks
(Starr 1982).
Scholars who situate the historical emergence of biomedicine within a wider process of sec-
ularization refer to a process of functional differentiation in which religion, law, and science
were compartmentalized as separate spheres of knowledge and authority (Casanova 1994;

4
 Introduction

Asad 1993). In this process, biomedicine came to operate within its own logic (Lüddeckens
2018). As a hard science of medical knowledge, biomedicine operates via practices of aeti-
ology and diagnosis, undergirded by epistemological premises and explanations of somatic
processes and functions that do not refer directly to religion, micro- and macro-cosmic cor-
respondences, subtle energies, or spiritual agents. From a strictly biomedical perspective, it
is irrelevant whether the doctor prays in addition to delivering acetylsalicylic acid or not,
because from a biomedical standpoint acetylsalicylic acid will have a biochemical effect on
the physical body either way. Though even biomedicine acknowledges that in many cases our
bodies are greatly affected by non-physical stimuli (as attested by the growing research on
placebos), and somatic and non-somatic therapies are used in conjunction with one another,
a biomedical perspective does not accord efficacy to forces considered non-empirical from a
scientific perspective.
That biomedicine is able to function on strictly non-religious terms, however, does not
mean that there are not numerous instances and contexts in which biomedicine and religion
intersect on personal and organizational levels. While some biomedical professionals may try
to separate their own religious sensibilities and practices from their work, others will engage
with patients’ families in prayers for healing (Reimer-Kirkham, this volume; Cadge 2012).
Although this may shape social practices, biomedicine nevertheless does not reckon with
divine intervention in its aetiology, clinical practice, or pharmacology. While hospital poli-
cies regarding whether to offer certain treatments may be based on religious principles—as in
the case of Catholic hospitals that do not offer access to contraception or abortion—­clinical
treatments performed in religiously-affiliated and non-religiously-affiliated hospitals will nor-
mally both be based on biomedical procedures. Finally, biomedical ethics may often refer to
religious pre-conceptions (a certain anthropology, ethics, and depiction of the meaning of a
‘healthy mind and body’). Ethical norms are often based on religious foundations, such as the
right to life or the prohibition of suicide (Zeugin, this volume). While such ethical foundations
often provide a social framework for which biomedical practices are considered desirable or
not, they do not usually alter the functional principles according to which specific biomedical
procedures are performed—although again, women’s reproductive health can be a significant
exception.
The functional differentiation of biomedicine from religion has been connected to narra-
tives of historical progress and of decline. Central to both types of narrative is the association
of biomedicine’s emergence from the wider scientific network of the European Enlightenment,
in which the increase of biomedical knowledge is understood as key to mastering nature and
its imponderability. As such, biomedicine is connected to science, modern rationality, and
progressive liberal hopes of increasing global health through fair access to effective medical
care for all humanity. The Enlightenment narrative has not only become one of the central
cornerstones connecting modern biomedicine with a progressive history of science and rea-
son, but it serves equally as a negative point of reference for those with critical assessments
of biomedicine. Accordingly, what some consider progress in healthcare, others understand
as hyper-medicalization, or even an ongoing history of medical decline, in which technical
and state rationalization transforms doctor-patient relationships into ‘rationalized’ formulas of
resource allocation, leading to the depersonalization and dehumanization of the art of medi-
cine. These critics propose a restoration of person-centred, ‘holistic’ treatments through the
integration of traditional forms of healing, including diversely conceived spiritual dimensions
of health (see Hero, this volume).
Such ambivalent histories influence current perceptions of biomedicine. Some critics of
medicalization reject biomedicine or certain biomedical treatments due to religious views.

5
 Pamela E. Klassen et al.

Vaccine hesitancy is among the most prominent of recent public debates rooted in a critical
perspective on medical authority (see Bramadat, this volume). However, there are also cases
where religious communities encouraged biomedical research to satisfy certain needs, such
as efforts to fulfil the Jewish value of having one’s own biological children through advanced
reproductive medicine (Ivry and Teman, this volume).

CAM as a field of (new) entanglements between medicine, religion,

and health
An important critique of biomedicine focuses on its role in strengthening the hegemony that
medical professionals have over patients. The same critique is made regarding national and
international healthcare systems, which are often criticized as prioritizing certain (especially
bio-) medical systems or perspectives over others, thus structuring and constraining the agency
of the individuals under those systems. Healers from many traditions, however, have specialized
knowledge and training that grants them authority over the sick. Such critical perceptions—
of biomedicine as hegemonic and a homogenized regime of knowledge over the human body
and its treatments—also create entrepreneurial opportunities for practitioners in the field of
alternative medicine (see, this volume: Hero; Staemmler; Saks). These spiritual entrepreneurs
offer treatments that they frame according to the personal experience and biographies of their
clients, informed by a view of ‘holistic’ spirituality that posits the oneness and complementa-
rity of mind, body, and spirit (Goldstein 2003: 29; Klassen 2011).
Importantly, practitioners of healing systems and modalities grouped into the field of CAM
may not consider their therapies religious. For example, contemporary practitioners of tra-
ditional Chinese medicine or Ayurveda might understand their profession to be completely
secular. However, specific concepts or practices in various healing modalities of CAM are
historically rooted in religious contexts. In many cases, they may not be directly connected to
a particular religion, but their conception of humanity, their concepts of illness and healing,
their explanatory models, are closely tied to religious traditions. These concepts are based on
the assumption of the existence of transcendent forces, immeasurable energies, and/or meta-
empirical subtle bodies.

(Re)Introducing spirituality in biomedical settings

Biomedical institutions (especially hospitals) were never entirely disentangled from religion.
A closer look reveals that religions are not only present in many church-run hospitals but also
those run by the state. The influence of bioethics, often rooted in religious traditions, also dem-
onstrates how the practice of biomedicine touches upon human dimensions in which medical
professionals and patients alike often give room to religious worldviews.
There is a growing interest (primarily in the USA) in empirical studies about the relevance
of spirituality with regard to health (Koenig 2008). These studies, like many actors in the
‘spirituality and health movement,’ have ‘borrowed the methods and language of biomedicine
for validation’ (Balboni and Balboni 2011: 18). Medical professionals such as nurses and
palliative care doctors increasingly write and speak out about religion, and even more so,
spirituality, as positive elements for health in the global North. Meanwhile, a growing number
of medical schools, especially in the United States and Canada, have begun to include courses
about religion and spirituality in connection with medicine. The aim of integrating these top-
ics into medical practice and education is supported by the Association of American Medi-
cal Colleges (AAMC), the World Health Organization (WHO), and the Joint Commission on

6
 Introduction

Accreditation on Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO) (Toniol, this volume; Lucchetti, Luc-

chetti, and Puchalski 2012). Reintroducing spirituality as a category in (bio)medical settings in
order to enrich supposedly narrowed and secularized understandings of wellbeing and health
can especially be observed in the context of nursing (see Reimer-Kirkham, this volume). The
integration of religion and spirituality into the healthcare system often works with a ‘comple-
mentary’ model in which chaplains are primarily considered to be specialists with regard to
the religious/spiritual needs of patients (and staff), who work collaboratively with nurses and
doctors (this volume: Cadge and Skaggs; Laird, Majid, and Mohammed). This recent upsurge
in spiritual care is an important example of how even within biomedical models, some profes-
sionals are tasked with caring for the spiritual needs of patients.

Handbook questions, themes, and intersections

This handbook approaches the complicated and fascinating entanglements of religion and
medicine as processes of negotiation over bodies, concepts, practices, authority, power, and
epistemologies. Across the five thematic sections of the book, we asked the authors to con-
sider a set of questions as they pertain to the specific focus of their chapter. At the level of
healers and the healed, we asked: How do power, professional legitimacy, and authoritative
knowledge (including epistemologies and aetiologies of sickness, health, and healing) shape
what different actors do in the name of healing? To draw attention to the economics and social
basis of medicine, we asked: What kinds of infrastructures (including political economies at
levels of state, media affordances, or religious institutions) support or hinder particular modes
of healing in specific regional contexts? To ground the chapters in a comparative historical
perspective, we asked: How does the history of biomedicine as a colonial and often Chris-
tian missionary project shape the interactions and entanglements of religion and medicine in
varying settings? And finally, to highlight the intersectionality of religion as one among many
social determinants of health, we asked each author to consider how norms of gender, race,
sexuality, ability/disability, and age have shaped the issues at the heart of their chapters. With
this shared set of questions orienting the authors, we assigned the chapters to thematic sec-
tions, each of which was designed to reveal the persistent entanglement of religion and medi-
cine throughout the world. These thematic sections were the basis for organizing face-to-face
authors’ workshops, held in Switzerland in the winter and spring of 2019, where many of the
contributors discussed their chapters. The fifth section was added in the spring of 2020 and
focuses on religion and epidemics, with contributions generously written by colleagues at the
beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The first section, ‘Healing practices with religious roots and frames,’ considers medical prac-
tices with religious origins or framing in local, national, and transnational contexts. The chapters
explore how these healing practices are oriented by aetiological, diagnostic, and therapy-
grounded attempts to systemically describe illness, disease, healing, and health. While some of
the healing practices under consideration are not biomedical in their diagnostic or therapeutic
modes, they all work with a specific method of inquiry and treatment. Special attention was
paid to the social or political status of the medical practice under discussion: is it an estab-
lished player in the market, is it marginalized or illegal, is it integrated into the public health
system (if there is a public health system in the specific context)? Is the practice legitimized
or delegitimized by association with a specific religious tradition or form of spirituality? In
terms of access and mobility, who are the providers and users of these medical practices, who
has access to the practice (including barriers of cost, initiation, membership, etc.), and has the
healing practice travelled to new places and contexts?

7
 Pamela E. Klassen et al.

The second thematic section, ‘Religious actors in and around the medical field,’ sought to
shed light on healers who engaged or grappled with biomedical authorities and institutions in
order to do their work. Chapters in this section focus on institutionalized religious actors in
the biomedical field, such as chaplains and spiritual care providers, as well as religious and
spiritual actors who work on an independent basis as therapeutic providers in a wider market
of healing. In this section, we asked each author to reflect on the self-understanding of actors
in their relation to biomedicine and healing, in terms of their roles and responsibilities in rela-
tion to accreditation bodies, the patient, and posited spiritual beings or forces. We asked: From
where do these actors derive their authority, either in biomedical or complementary therapeu-
tic fields, and how do hierarchy and power constitute this authority?
The third thematic section, ‘Organizing infrastructures of religion and medicine: plural-
ism and competition,’ explored entanglement through questions of material and conceptual
infrastructures of healing. When those seeking healthcare and those who provide it are both
operating in the face of medical pluralism and competition, what can we learn about the inter-
section of religion and medicine? Here, the authors each reflect on the infrastructural factors
that enable access to specific kinds of healthcare, including state or private funding, entre-
preneurial markets, and competition, law, national politics, and technical infrastructures such
as the internet and digital devices. Considering the issue from the perspective of healers and
their work, the chapters examine the role of entrepreneurship in both biomedical and spiritual
healing. And then, considering conceptualization as itself a kind of infrastructure, the chapters
discuss the epistemologies and normative frames that undergird the legitimacy or marginality
of a particular religious healing practice, enabling or hindering its ability to cross boundaries
between (and markets of) religion and medicine.
Boundary crossing and boundary maintenance is the focus of the fourth section, which con-
siders how boundary making across the fields of religion and medicine occurs through com-
plex processes of negotiating authoritative knowledge. Chapters examine the polemical use of
concepts such as ‘quackery,’ ‘science,’ and ‘spirituality’ as they continue to shape and reshape
the entanglements of religion and medicine (themselves contested concepts). In this section,
chapters address head-on how discourses of evidence and efficacy shape debates over religion
and healing in the public sphere. Focusing on how normative, often explicitly religious claims
are appealed to in both biomedical and complementary medical fields, these chapters ask how
methodological approaches to evidence and practices of care converge and/or conflict.
The fifth section came into being under the impressions of the first wave of the COVID-19
pandemic during the spring and summer months of 2020. Although this section had to be
organized and written at rather short notice, it seemed obvious that religion was a signifi-
cant factor in responses to the pandemic—and therefore to its trajectory—and these on-
the-ground reflections were important to include in the handbook. The section consists of five
shorter chapters that present snapshots of the pandemic in different national contexts around
the globe. Thematically, these different snapshots provide insights into the social challenges
posed by the extraordinary situation of lockdown policies, discrimination against religious
and minority groups regarded as responsible for spreading the coronavirus, how religion
facilitated the spread of COVID-19, as well as the role religious facilities played in helping
to manage the crisis.

Religion, medicine, and healing in a post-COVID-19 world

This handbook is a resource for critical thinking on the entanglement of religion, spirituality,
medicine, and healing from varying positions of inquiry. The chapters put into context why

8
 Introduction

such intensive debates about the relationship between religion and medicine continue to persist
within both ‘scientific’ and ‘spiritual’ settings. There are also some things that this handbook
is not. This is not a volume written by scholars who see themselves working with scientific
methods to demonstrate the positive correlation between health and religious practices such
as mindfulness, prayer, or sexual abstinence. This is also not a volume written by scholars
presenting theological perspectives on medical issues, illness, health, healing, and dying from
within religious traditions. Finally, this is a not a guide for best practices in clinical healthcare
practice within multi-religious societies.
Instead, this handbook approaches the entanglements of religion, medicine, and healing by
setting the questions of efficacy and orthodoxy in a broader context of history, authoritative
knowledge, power, and legitimacy. Our hope is to show the analytical benefits of humanis-
tic and social scientific approaches for understanding the varied entanglements of religion
and medicine, in addition to offering detailed case studies that encourage further interest and
research. Overall, these chapters show that the stakes are high when it comes to what counts as
healing and who has access to healthcare. For this reason, it is essential to better understand the
continued importance of religion for access to and delivery of biomedical and complementary
healing. This understanding requires a collective, interdisciplinary effort as represented by this
handbook. As this most recent pandemic has shown us, in a world where public health really
matters, we are all responsible for thinking critically and compassionately about the politics
and practices of religion, medicine, and healing.

Bibliography
Asad, T. (1993) Genealogies of Religion, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Balboni, M.J., and Balboni, T.A. (2011) ‘Spirituality and Biomedicine. A History of Harmony and Dis-
cord,’ in J.R. Peteet and M.N. D’Ambra (eds) The Soul of Medicine. Spiritual Perspectives and Clini-
cal Practice, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Bender, C. (2010) The New Metaphysicals: Spirituality and the American Religious Imagination, Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press.
Cadge, W. (2012) Paging God: Religion in the Halls of Medicine, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Casanova, J. (1994) Public Religions in the Modern World, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Goldstein, M.S. (2003) ‘The Culture of Fitness and the Growth of CAM,’ in M. Kelner, B. Wellman, B.
Pescosolido, and M. Saks (eds) Complementary and Alternative Medicine: Challenge and Change,
London: Routledge.
Goossaert, V., and Palmer, D.A. (2011) The Religious Question in Modern China, Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.
Klassen, P.E. (2011) Spirits of Protestantism: Medicine, Healing, and Liberal Christianity, Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Klassen, P.E. (2016) ‘Medicine,’ in S. Engler and M. Stausberg (eds) The Oxford Handbook of the Study
of Religion, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Koch, A. (2015) ‘Alternative Healing as Magical Self-Care in Alternative Modernity,’ Numen, 62(4):
431–459.
Koenig, H.G. (2008) Medicine, Religion, and Health: Where Science & Spirituality Meet, West Consho-
hocken, PA: Templeton Foundation Press.
Lei, S.H. (2014) Neither Donkey nor Horse: Medicine in the Struggle over China’s Modernity, Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Lofton, K. (2017) Consuming Religion, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Lucchetti, G., Lucchetti, A.L.G., and Puchalski, C.M. (2012) ‘Spirituality in Medical Education: Global
Reality?’ Journal of Religion and Health, 51(1): 3–19.
Lüddeckens, D. (2018) ‘Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) as a Toolkit for Secular
Health-Care: The De-differentiation of Religion and Medicine,’ in D. Lüddeckens and M. Schrimpf
(eds) Medicine, Religion, Spirituality: Global Perspectives on Traditional, Complementary, and
Alternative Healing, Bielefeld: Transcript.

9
 Pamela E. Klassen et al.

Lüddeckens, D., and Schrimpf, M. (eds) (2018) Medicine, Religion, Spirituality: Global Perspectives on
Traditional, Complementary, and Alternative Healing, Bielefeld: Transcript.
Modern, J.L. (2011) Secularism in Antebellum America, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Ross, A.I. (2012) Anthropology of Alternative Medicine, London: Berg.
Scott, J.W. (2017) Sex & Secularism, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Starr, P. (1982) The Social Transformation of American Medicine: The Rise of a Sovereign Profession
and the Making of a Vast Industry, New York: Basic Books.
Sullivan, W.F., Hurd, E.S., Mahmood, S., and Danchin, P.G. (2015) Politics of Religious Freedom, Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press.

10
 PART I

Healing practices with religious

roots and frames
 1
AFRO-ATLANTIC HEALING
PRACTICES
Maarit Forde

Introduction
Healers in the Afro-Atlantic world have acquired their therapeutic skills and treated their
patients in steeply hierarchical socio-historical contexts, where the commodification and
racialization of bodies, various forced and voluntary migrations, and the development of plan-
tation capitalism have produced culturally-specific forms of suffering and healing. This chap-
ter explores the social relations, cultural meanings, and experiences of healing and suffering
in the exceptional circumstances of Atlantic modernity, approaching social suffering in Arthur
Kleinman’s sense that includes and transcends the individual ‘as cultural representation, as
transpersonal experience, and as the embodiment of collective memory’ (1997: 316–317).
Inflicted by political and economic power, social suffering encompasses experiences related
not only to health but also to morality, law, religion, poverty, and other fields of social life
(Kleinman, Das, and Lock 1997: ix–x). The healing practices that have sought to address
social suffering in the Afro-Atlantic are best understood in this inclusive framework. In addi-
tion to physical symptoms, patients seek cures for suffering related to love, social conflicts,
moral transgressions, livelihoods, and other areas of social life.1 As in the African traditions
discussed by Bruchhausen in this volume, these multiple facets of suffering are often under-
stood as misfortune caused by external relations or agents. A healer in the Afro-Atlantic con-
text is ‘a combination of medical doctor, psychotherapist, social worker, and priest,’ as Karen
McCarthy Brown describes Alourdes, a popular healer and Vodou manbo, ritual specialist, in
Brooklyn (1987: 128).
I approach the Afro-Atlantic as a historical process rather than a geographical area, consid-
ering the hemispheric mobility, connections, and exchanges that began with fifteenth-century
Portuguese navigations along the West African coast and developed into a complex web of
material and cultural flows between the western part of central Africa, the Americas (includ-
ing the Caribbean), and Europe (Thornton 1998: 13–14). The migration of twelve million
enslaved Africans to the New World constituted this new, cross-oceanic cultural sphere, and
multiple subsequent mobilities and diasporas have added to its richness and complexity. The
chapter begins with a discussion of the early modern and modern Afro-Atlantic as a field of
exchanges and cross-fertilization. Instead of thinking about medicine as a European invention

13 DOI: 10.4324/9781315207964-3
 Maarit Forde

exported to the New World on the ‘civilizing mission’ of the empire, I consider movements
of people, knowledge, and resources that have shaped what has become understood as mod-
ern medicine and healing. Shifting the focus onto exchanges and multilateral learning helps
problematize concepts like European/Western medicine or medical pluralism. The chapter
approaches Africans and many other colonially-mobilized people as knowledge producers, not
only or primarily as victims or sufferers of colonial violence, and contributes to an understand-
ing of the history of ‘Western’ medicine, like the history of Atlantic modernity more generally,
as a collaboration between differently positioned practitioners across the Atlantic world. In the
first part, I discuss the specificities of the Atlantic world in regard to suffering and healing with
a particular focus on mobility, diversity, and violence. I also consider discourses of boundary-
making by healers, lawmakers, historians, and ethnographers who have pursued epistemologi-
cal purity and negotiated over orthodoxy and authenticity, for example by mobilizing ‘Africa’
as a symbol of cultural and historical origins. Part II is concerned with ontologies of healing.
I look into complex notions of personhood in Afro-Atlantic healing, introducing relational
subjects—healers, spirits, and patients—who complicate notions of orthodoxy and purity as
well as racial or religious boundaries. In the practices of relational subjects, biomedicine does
not appear as an independent or essentially different modality of healing against ‘alternative,’
popular healing traditions. This problematizes the analytical framework of medical plurality,
which implies separate, autonomous systems of medicine. Equally importantly, anthropologi-
cal research on ontologies of healing questions simplistic racialization of medical systems and
terms like ‘Afro-Atlantic.’

Healing across the Afro-Atlantic world: migrations of healers,

medicines, and therapies
Early modern European medicine was influenced by the medical knowledge and practices
of African and indigenous American people since the sixteenth century. Portuguese settlers
in West Central Africa disseminated local medicinal knowledge and methods to Lisbon and
beyond. Many important practices in early modern Angola, like bloodletting, the use of laxa-
tives and herbal remedies, and diagnostic knowledge of spiritually-inflicted suffering, resem-
bled Portuguese and other European medical practice at the time. Such commonalities fostered
an openness toward African medicine among the settlers, who adopted practices and rem-
edies, such as the use of kikongo wood, as early as 1565, and systematically sourced, com-
modified, and exported these to Portugal and Brazil to treat illnesses such as yaws and syphilis
(Kananoja 2015: 50–51; Walker 2013).2 Dutch traders exported takula wood, also used for
medicinal purposes, along the Loango coast and to Amsterdam and London. European set-
tlers in West Central Africa held a genuine interest in African remedies not as exotic curiosi-
ties but as means of survival, and by the early eighteenth century, several African medicines
were listed in Portuguese pharmacopeias (Kananoja 2015: 54–55, 59–61). Indigenous Brazil-
ian medical practices were used and disseminated in the Portuguese empire from the mid-
sixteenth century, as physicians and Jesuits learned about medicinal plants and techniques
from Tupí and Guaraní people, or when missionaries themselves were healed by shamans.
Jesuits were instrumental in the Atlantic spread of African and indigenous Brazilian medicine,
and physicians and surgeons in the colonies and in the port cities of Lisbon and Porto were
curious about this new medical knowledge. Cures for fevers were particularly sought after,
and cinchona bark exported from Brazil to Angola and elsewhere in the Atlantic world was
an ingredient of quinine, a valuable treatment of malaria (Achan et al. 2011; Drayton 2000).
Eventually, such knowledge spread across the Dutch, English, French, and Spanish empires,

14
 Afro-Atlantic healing practices

and colonists serving different European thrones began their own efforts at cataloguing medic-
inal plants in the colonies (Walker 2013).
African captives who survived the Middle Passage brought botanical knowledge and thera-
peutic skills to the colonies of the New World. Healers in the Afro-Atlantic developed their
understanding of the body, suffering, remedies, and therapies within an amorphous field of
meanings, learning, borrowing, and stealing from each other, and inventing diagnoses and
therapies for new kinds of suffering engendered in the violent regime of the empire. Central to
this field of knowledge were cosmological ideas about relations between humans, ancestors,
spirits, deities, material substances, and the physical world. West African and Central West
African religions were diverse and, like any system of beliefs and rituals, changed and shifted
emphasis in the period of the Atlantic slave trade. There were shared cosmological understand-
ings, however, of differently positioned spirits, their relevance in the world of the living, and
their potential influence on material reality. Included in these cosmologies were ancestral spir-
its, anonymous spirits of the dead, more distant and differently powerful deities, and spiritual
energy or life force. Ritual specialists communicated with spirits through dreams and divina-
tion and harnessed spiritual power to effect material changes in the bodies, relationships, and
material environments of the living. Ritually potent substances, such as powders, roots, bones,
hair, and various other materials, were important mediums for Central and West African ritual
specialists who used spiritual power, and along with various other elements of cosmological
and ritual knowledge, they became incorporated into religious and healing practices in the
New World (Thornton 1998).
Rather than a unilinear process of cross-Atlantic transplantation of African traditions in
the New World, knowledge and methods of healing circulated, developed and changed in a
complex network of migrations and trade (Matory 2005; Palmié 2006: 111). African women
and men from various parts of the continent, the Atlantic Islands, and southern Europe con-
tributed to diagnoses and treatments of suffering in the colonies, complementing and shaping
European medical knowledge and practice. Domingos Álvares, a Vodun specialist who had
been captured in the area of present-day Benin in 1727 and sold to Portuguese merchants,
developed a large clientele and an awe-inspiring reputation in Rio and elsewhere in Brazil.3 He
treated slave masters and other whites as well as enslaved and freed people, identified feiticei-
ros (malevolent spiritual practitioners) as culprits behind death and illness on plantations, and
cured their alleged victims (Sweet 2011). Healing practices in Candomblé in the nineteenth
century continued to draw clients and initiates of variously racialized positions in Brazilian
society, and ‘being a male, white, Catholic slave master represented no impediment to seek
a cure for himself or his family members with an African healer’ (Reis 2013: 57–58).4 Euro-
pean apothecaries, surgeons, licensed physicians, monastics, and other health specialists, and
also Amerindian healers, indios herbolarios, operated alongside African-descended healers in
Spanish Caribbean colonies (Gómez 2017: 49; see also Laguerre 1987 and Olmos 2001). This
is not to suggest that the early development of Afro-Atlantic healing was a harmonious process
of ‘mixing’: ritual specialists and healers worked in highly dangerous conditions, often fight-
ing for survival, and there was competition, spiritual attacks, and warfare also among subaltern
healers (Ochoa 2010: 175). Forced conversions to Christianity and violent state campaigns
against non-European religions reflected prolonged ontological and epistemological inequali-
ties underpinning the creolization of healing.
On New World plantations, healers of diverse backgrounds addressed the suffering and
high death toll among enslaved Africans, soldiers, sailors, and planters, caused by epidem-
ics and violence. A.J. Alexander, a plantation owner in Grenada, reported in 1773 about
an enslaved African man on his plantation whose cure for yaws—sweating, bathing, and

15
 Maarit Forde

decoctions—proved to be more efficient and less painful for patients than European surgeons’
therapies. Amerindians as well as West Africans were known to have cures for yaws, and
Londa Schiebinger suggests that in this case, it was likely that the enslaved healer had learned
his techniques from Amerindians via French colonists in Grenada. By the 1780s, such cures
circulated in the Atlantic world, and the Grenadian healer’s treatment of yaws patients was
adapted in other colonies, such as Jamaica (Schiebinger 2017: 50–63). African healers, mostly
enslaved women, were ‘indispensable’ to plantation hospitals (Bush 1990: 141). In Spanish
colonies, enslaved Africans provided care for enslaved as well as free patients in hospitals
and in slave traders’ infirmaries (Gómez 2017: 65). Afro-Cuban curanderos and hospitalières
in Saint-Domingue worked alongside plantation surgeons but were also healers in their own
right (Bronfman 2012; Weaver 2012). They taught medical techniques and methods, such as
bloodletting and inoculation against smallpox, to plantation surgeons and other members of
the planter class in the late eighteenth century (Weaver 2012: 109–111). Plantation physicians,
such as the French Henri Dumont, who worked in Cuba in the 1860s, noted the skills of the
‘curanderas negras’ in treating serious illnesses affecting enslaved Africans, and wished they
would share their knowledge with him (Bronfman 2012: 155).
Reproductive health became a concern for planters toward the end of the eighteenth cen-
tury. For most of the period of slavery, enslaved women had home births, assisted by enslaved
midwives (Bush 1990; Turner 2017). The ‘amelioration’ project—policies that sought to
improve the conditions on slave plantations in the British West Indies in response to abolition-
ism circa 1780–1830—included pro-natal reforms that would help sustain and increase the
enslaved population after the abolition of slave trade. Plantation owners hired doctors from
England to assist with childbirth and neonatal care, blaming enslaved healers and mothers for
the high infant mortality rate on the plantations (Turner 2017: 112 and Ch. 5). European physi-
cians and surgeons as well as enslaved healers and midwives drew on many shared principles
and techniques, including bloodletting, leeching, baths, massages, interpretations of ‘hot’ and
‘cold’ conditions, or associations between blood and red food and drinks (Bronfman 2012:
156; Laguerre 1987).
The branch of medicine that became known as tropical medicine developed in the pre-
carious conditions of the Afro-Atlantic, including plantation colonies, where African and
indigenous healers’ therapies contributed to developing treatments of fevers, yaws, and other
ailments. The maritime world was key to the accumulation and circulation of new medical
knowledge of malaria, yellow fever, and other illnesses contracted in tropical colonies. Naval
surgeons worked, learned, and disseminated knowledge on board ships, and in the nineteenth
century, in naval medical schools in port cities such as Brest or Toulon and the Seamen’s Hos-
pital Society in London (Cook 1990 and 2007; Osborne 2014).

Healers, suffering, and violence in the plantation regime

Healers in American and Caribbean colonies had to diagnose and treat forms of suffering
experienced within the dehumanizing and lethally violent system of Atlantic slave trade and
chattel slavery. They sought to alleviate suffering produced by relentless physical labour,
daily accidents in dangerous working environments, wounds inflicted by punishments such
as whipping and various other methods of torture, contagious illnesses, poor diets, lack of
sufficient housing and sanitation, and other structural features of plantation regimes. Not less
importantly, their therapeutic practices addressed the mental and social suffering caused by the
commodification of kidnapped Africans, expropriation of their freedom, social relations and
identities, and denial of their humanity. In the British West Indies, many such practices were

16
 Afro-Atlantic healing practices

lumped under the term ‘Obeah’ and criminalized by the colonial state. Whereas the planter
class saw Obeah as ‘witchcraft’ and ‘superstition,’ a malevolent practice connected to rebel-
lion and the infliction of sickness, archival material shows that healing was a major area of
the ritual practice designated as Obeah in the colonial Caribbean. For Surinamese Maroons
(descendants of enslaved Africans who escaped from plantations), Obeah means ‘a healing
and protective power’ (Bilby and Handler 2004: 155). Enslaved people in plantation socie-
ties used Obeah to protect themselves and others from harm and to treat various illnesses and
forms of suffering. Obeah specialists were respected members of the enslaved community and
‘sought after for their divination abilities, proficiency at diagnosing and healing illness, skill
in finding missing property, and powers to help avenge wrongs, including those inflicted by
slave masters’ (Bilby and Handler 2004: 158–160; emphasis in original). Healers and their
patients used a variety of other terms in reference to therapies, rituals, cosmological relations,
and divination, but as a legal term, Obeah became discursively entrenched in the region (Paton
and Forde 2012). Records of the actual healing practices during slavery are limited, but they
include references to herbal and non-herbal medicines, charms, amulets, dances, or methods
such as pulling bones or shells out of patients’ bodies (e.g. Fett 2002).
Life expectancy in chattel slavery was short in general, and untimely death was common
among the enslaved and also among Europeans in the Caribbean colonies, who succumbed
to illnesses such as yellow fever and malaria (Brown 2008: 17; Thornton 1998: 156–158).
Lethal epidemics documented in seventeenth-century Cartagena, Cuba, and Panama included
measles and smallpox, plagues of viruela and sarampión, tabardillo, and vomito negro, as well
as illnesses such as ‘heart disease (as defined by contemporary healers), tumours, poisoning,
skin disorders, mental illness, dental problems,’ leprosy, and syphilis. Jamaica, a major port in
the British slave trade, became ‘a principal node in the circuit of Atlantic disease,’ especially
smallpox (Brown 2008: 49). On plantations, the traumatic effects of slave raids in Africa and
the Middle Passage, malnutrition, exhaustion, poor housing and hygiene, and violence, as well
as epidemics and illnesses like yaws, smallpox, and diarrhoea added to suffering; sugar plan-
tations had the highest mortality rates of all (Brown 2008: 24, 49–51; Gómez 2017: 44–45).
Faced with this exceptional precariousness of life, planters—who saw it as a financial rather
than ethical problem—often suspected the enslaved of using ‘witchcraft’ to damage their
human chattel and livestock by bringing about sickness or death (Bilby and Handler 2004;
Paton 2015; Savage 2012). The elite took seriously what they saw as the spiritual power of
enslaved Africans, treating it as a considerable threat to their property and wellbeing as well as
the social stratification of the plantation regime. At times, they even sought the help of popular
healers, such as Domingos Álvares, to identify the ‘witches’ responsible for their misfortune
(Sweet 2011). The Inquisition persecuted healers like Álvares in early modern Brazil, and hun-
dreds of popular ritual specialists across the colonial Caribbean were incarcerated, tortured,
flogged, and transported to other colonies, or sentenced to death.5 The effects of epistemo-
logical and state violence have been longstanding, and in many contemporary societies in the
Atlantic world, healing practices understood as ‘African’ are still marginalized and ridiculed.

Healing across the Afro-Atlantic world: diversity

Caribbean plantation colonies became increasingly heterogeneous after the abolition of
slavery due to various labour migrations: multidirectional regional mobility between settle-
ments, colonies, and the United States; the influx of Africans ‘liberated’ from illegal slave
ships; indentured labourers from India and Southeast Asia; and migrants from China, the
eastern Mediterranean, and Portugal. Many free Africans in Brazil—students, pilgrims,

17
 Maarit Forde

merchants—travelled between Bahia and West Africa, bringing new African elements to the
rituals and cosmologies of the New World but also contributing to a cultural renaissance in
Lagos in the 1890s (Matory 2005). This cosmopolitan world, defined by captivity, control,
and confinement as well as dislocation, multidirectional mobility, and invention, engendered
medical encounters that ‘cannot be contained in simple dialectic terms of continuities, rup-
tures, or coarsely defined hybridities’ (Gómez 2017: 7, 41). The religious landscape resulting
from the increased mobility and diversity was shaped by West and Central African religions
and cosmologies; variants of Catholic and Protestant Christianity; indigenous cosmologies;
different branches of Hinduism and Islam; freemasonry and other fraternal organizations; and
European magic and pseudoscience. It fostered the development of religions such as Candom-
blé, Umbanda, Komfa, Orisha, Spiritual Baptists, Kabbalah, Myal, Revivalism, Vodou, Regla
Ocha, Palo Monte, and Espiritismo. Much of Brazilian and Caribbean healing has taken place
in relation to these ‘creole’ religions, either by healers who are ritual specialists or otherwise
informed by their cosmology and ritual practice, or within communal rituals framed by these
religions.
Healers have drawn on this wide and complex field of ideas and practices, repurposing,
reinterpreting, and recreating diagnoses and therapies that have responded to the needs of the
New World (Laguerre 1987). Their cosmologies have reflected various traditions that from
their perspective form a coherent and meaningful whole. Haydée, one of Raquel Romberg’s
main interlocutors in Puerto Rico, grew up in a household influenced by Catholicism, Spirit-
ism, and Protestantism, and her healing work is accordingly based on an ‘intimate, personal
relationship with a host of Catholic saints, African orishas, Spiritist entities, and Asian deities’
(2003: 19–20 and 2013: 3). The cosmology of Spiritual Baptists in the southern Caribbean and
diaspora is a complex spiritual world of various ‘nations,’ including India, Africa, and China,
and Spiritual Baptist healers draw on ‘gifts’ and knowledge associated with these nations. For
example, a healer might encounter St. Francis in a vision or ‘journey’ to the spiritual nation
of India and receive medical knowledge and therapeutic methods from the saint. Mother Cle-
orita, a popular healer who heads a Spiritual Baptist church in Tobago, operates with Chi-
nese, Indian, and African spirits when healing initiates and patients (Laitinen 2002: 176–177).
Indigenous (indio), African, and gypsy spirits, and also spirits of European colonialists, mis-
sionaries, Arabs, Haitians, or Chinese muertos work with healers in Espiritismo Cruzado in
Cuba (Espírito Santo 2015: 55–56). Caboclos, spirits of a wide ‘ethnic array ranging from
Tupí Indians to mixed-race cowboys, Turks, and Gypsies,’ along with African orishas, are
central to rituals of divination and healing in many Candomblé communities in Brazil (Matory
2005: 30–31).
Patients’ cosmologies can be equally porous and inclusive, as illustrated by rituals around
La Divina Pastora, a black Madonna housed in a Catholic church in southern Trinidad. Sha-
ron Syriac describes the family of an Indo-Trinidadian barber, who honours the Madonna by
performing a Hindu haircutting ritual in the church courtyard every year on Good Friday. The
barber, formerly a Hindu, and his wife, formerly Presbyterian, have both become Pentecostals,
and their grown sons are affiliated with Orisha and Pentecostal communities. Nevertheless,
they still assist their father in the haircutting ritual. One of the sons is married to a Hindu
woman, and their son attends a Catholic school. The family is connected to the Madonna
because of her healing propensities, and the menfolk wish to reciprocate her gifts of healing
through their ritual commitment to the ‘miracle mother’ (Syriac 2019: 123–125). As patients,
families like this can negotiate over and choose from a wide range of diagnoses, healers,
and therapies. Some practitioners may ‘belong’ to multiple religious communities at the same
time, while in other contexts, recipients of successful therapies are obliged to ‘convert’ to the

18
 Afro-Atlantic healing practices

healer’s religion. For this reason, patients of Brazilian Umbanda and Spiritist healers may end
up changing religion multiple times over their lives (Greenfield 2016; see also Richman 2008
on Vodou and Protestantism).

Epistemological demarcations: ‘Africa’

The different logics and histories of healing informing Haydée’s practice in Puerto Rico may
not be confusing or contradictory from her point of view. Lawmakers, ethnographers, and
practitioners have, however, sought to demarcate religious landscapes by locating histori-
cal and geographical points of origin, colliding notions of race, culture, and religion, or by
debating the borders of orthodoxy and heterodoxy as well as science and religion. A desire
to simplify culturally complex forms of healing by presenting them as ‘African’ has been
a longstanding feature in this boundary-making discourse. Travel writers and historians in
the Anglophone Caribbean began to represent Obeah as a symbol of Africanness (imply-
ing backwardness and superstition) in the late eighteenth and nineteenth century, when few
alleged Obeah practitioners were actually born in Africa (Paton 2015: Ch. 3). The invoking
of imagined origins served political purposes in proslavery discussions and debates about
self-governance. Associating the enslaved population with ‘primitive’ and ‘barbaric’ African
superstition justified the civilizing mission of the empire and reinforced the notion of African
sub-humanity in the ongoing construction of the ideology of race (see Fields and Fields 2012).
Thinking of Obeah as African and hence, temporally and geographically distant from, but also
culturally and morally alien to British colonies, continued to make political sense to the elite
after emancipation. The preservation of social order in British Caribbean colonies depended
on the cultural assimilation of the labouring population mainly through Christianisation and
the accompanying value complex of respectability (Hall 2002). Cultural practices understood
as African ‘relics’ went against this process of state- and church-led assimilation and the self-
making that protonationalist politics required, and they were systematically ridiculed and con-
demned in local newspaper reports of Obeah trials as well as in European travelogues and
novels. Obeah was designated as African, although complex symbols and rituals from many
traditions and sources of knowledge intertwined in healers’ therapies, and numerous ritual
specialists prosecuted for practising Obeah in Jamaica, Guyana, and Trinidad were actually of
Indian descent (Paton 2015). Lawyers and magistrates described the rituals of alleged Obeah
practitioners as ‘barbarous relapse into savagedom’ and ‘relic[s] of African savagery’ (Forde
and Paton 2012: 27). The Africanness of Obeah became further entrenched in public discourse
as anthropologists became interested in tracing African retentions in Caribbean cultures in the
1930s (Herskovits and Herskovits 1947).
Africa and African origins have been mobilized in a different, more positive way in Afro-
Atlantic healing since the 1980s. The introduction of more ‘authentically’ African, Yorùbá-
inspired cosmologies, diagnoses and therapies has further diversified the field of medical
knowledge and practice in societies like Brazil, Trinidad, Cuba, or the United States. In Trini-
dad, the orientation of mostly middle-class healers and religious practitioners toward ‘the
Yorùbá religion of Nigeria’ as ‘the source of knowledge, authority and authenticity’ and away
from the cosmological versions of Africa created in the New World, such as the Spiritual Bap-
tist ‘nations’ mentioned earlier, has produced two branches of practice, Trinidad Orisha and
Ifá (Castor 2017: 86). The pantheon of spiritual entities invoked by Trinidad Orisha healers is
often wide and eclectic, involving, for example, Hindu deities and Catholic saints in addition
to orishas, whereas in Yorùbá-centric communities—sometimes in the same village—healers
work only with orishas.

19
 Maarit Forde

Epistemological demarcations: ‘medicine’

Symbols, methods, and performances of biomedicine have been part of Afro-Atlantic healers’
repertoires, adding to the cosmological complexity of their practice. ‘Doctor’ spirits, often
understood to have been medical doctors during their lifetime, are frequent collaborators in
healing rituals from Brazil (Greenfield 2008) to Cuba (Espírito Santo 2015: 133) and Tobago
(Forde 2012: 212). The methods of doctor spirits range from the manipulation of ritual sym-
bols to external treatments like baths or massages all the way to internal medicines and intru-
sive operations. When Mother Cleorita’s Chinese doctor spirit, Su Ling, operates on patients
during Spiritual Baptist initiation rituals in Tobago, her movements are symbolic: she might
‘perform surgery’ by moving her hand or a wooden sword in the air around the patient, or use
external therapies like anointing or massage (Laitinen 2002). Brazilian Spiritist healers, on the
other hand, work with surgeon spirits who use scalpels, syringes, tweezers, gauze, and other
items reminiscent of surgical theatres, successfully operating on eyes, cysts, and tumours with-
out anaesthesia or prescribing medicine to their patients (Greenfield 2008: 35–37). Haydée’s
patients in Puerto Rico often visit biomedical doctors and bring the diagnoses to Haydée for
assessment. Some of the patients themselves are biomedical professionals. One such patient,
a doctor who had been diagnosed with cancer, needed Haydée’s help in evaluating the vari-
ous treatments he had been offered. The doctor trusted science and biomedicine, but this did
not exclude trust in other ways of knowing and healing (Romberg 2003: 224, 232). Similarly,
Paquita, a popular Espiritista healer in Havana, explained that she ‘would never reject medi-
cine.’ ‘I trust medicine entirely, but I also trust my gift!’ (Espírito de Santo 2015: 134). Vodou
healers in urban communities, like Alourdes in Brooklyn, recommend that patients see a medi-
cal doctor for example for X-rays or antibiotics (McCarthy Brown 1987: 136).
Epistemological debates about medicine and religion related to those about the Africanness
of working-class healing arose in early twentieth-century Obeah trials in the British Carib-
bean colonies. Healers prosecuted for practising Obeah or sometimes, practising medicine
without a licence, referred to legal therapies such as mesmerism, hypnotism, magnetism, and
electrical healing. As Diana Paton documents, a healer in British Guiana in 1903, ‘Professor’
E.J. Hall, claimed to specialize in ‘electro-therapeutics, radiotherapy, phototherapy, thermo-
therapy, hydrotherapy, diaduction, vibratology.’ Complaints about healers like Hall were fre-
quent in Caribbean newspapers in the first decades of the twentieth century, as public health
professionals wrote derisive accounts of ‘obeah doctors’ who attracted patients from trained,
biomedical doctors (Paton 2015: Ch. 6). More recently, in the context of revolutionary Cuba
and its world-class healthcare system, Espiritistas who appropriate biomedical methods have
faced government scrutiny (Espírito Santo 2015: 133–134; see also Greenfield 2008: 27–33
on Brazil). In Puerto Rico, public attitudes toward popular healing transformed in the 1980s,
when newspaper articles about local herbal medicines attracted patients toward healers operat-
ing within previously shunned religious systems, like Espiritismo. Instead of making Espirit-
ismo socially acceptable, however, this discursive shift allowed patients to think of its methods
as part of the New Age paradigm of ‘wholeness’ and ‘natural healing’ (Romberg 2003: 182).
These examples of criminalization, discursive othering, and ridicule speak of continued
attempts by the state and biomedical health professionals to draw a line between biomedicine
and other types of healing in the Afro-Atlantic. However, separating biomedicine from ‘alter-
native’ medicine does not align with the cultural logics of healing in the religious contexts dis-
cussed earlier, where healers, spirits, and their patients do not necessarily think of suffering and
cures in terms of differentiated systems of ‘medicine’ and its ‘alternatives.’ Conceptualizing
biomedicine as an autonomous field of European knowledge disregards the co-development

20
 Afro-Atlantic healing practices

and cross-fertilization of various traditions of healing, including European medicine, in the

long history of the Afro-Atlantic. Discursive insistence on epistemological divisions and hier-
archy between (European and white) biomedicine and heteropraxic alternatives speaks to the
ideology of race, which relies on white supremacy in knowledge production; and a Eurocentric
history of modernity, where only European agency and inventions led to the development of
the modern world.

Ontologies of healing
Afro-Atlantic slavery as a ‘foundational institution’ of modernity contributed to an ontology
that deprived enslaved Africans of their full humanity while reproducing the notion of (the
European) individual as a sovereign and autonomous agent (Johnson 2014a: 5; Trouillot 2003;
Wynter 2003). Violence was key in the process of turning free human beings into slaves, com-
modities without rights of ownership. On the other hand, the cosmologies of enslaved people
included relations to spirits that complicated the idea of sovereign subjectivity and individual
agency. Spirit possession, a concept mobilized at various points of the history of Christianity,
recurred in chronicles of colonial encounters in the Americas in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries and in Africa in the eighteenth century. The trope of possession eventually became
ubiquitous in ethnographic literature of African ritual practice in the New World and the dis-
course shifted to African American religions, particularly in the Caribbean (Johnson 2014b:
27–28).
A closer look into the relationship between healers and spirits problematizes the conven-
tional understanding of ‘possession’ as an occupation of an otherwise sovereign body by an
external agent, a spirit. Afro-Atlantic healing is a fundamentally relational process, where
patients and healers are better understood as relational instead of autonomous individuals (see,
for example, Espírito de Santo 2015; Ochoa 2010). Espiritista healers work with an assem-
blage of spiritual entities, entidades (powerful, personified spirits), from whom they receive
medical and medicinal knowledge of plants, potions, and therapies. These muertos, spirits of
the dead, support healers in the pursuit of their livelihood and prosperity. The assemblage of
‘entities’ is part of the healer’s cuadro, or their personal spiritual potential and power, skills,
and resources, which must be nurtured and built throughout the healer’s life (Romberg 2003:
143–154). Muertos are equally central to the Cuban Palo healer Isidra’s work, and instead of
‘possessing’ her body, the dead ‘float together’ with the living in a ‘dense and indistinguishable
mass’ or sea, Kalunga. Isidra feels them in her body and on her skin and sometimes shares her
body with them, as the dead ‘permeate’ or ‘saturate’ her (Ochoa 2010: 34, 38). The dead flow
in matter such as blood and paleras like Isidra know how to create healing—or ­harming—
substances out of such matter (Ochoa 2010: 96). In limpiezas (cleansings), Palo healers use
brooms made of medicinal herbs to brush away malevolent spirits of the dead afflicting their
patients (Ochoa 2010: 156–157). Diana Espírito Santo describes similar immanence and flu-
idity in her work on Cuban Espiritismo, where healers are part of a cordon spiritual, a fluid
sociality of spirits that guide their work. The relationship between healers and spirits is mutu-
ally constitutive in that healers do not learn their skills from external spirits; instead, the heal-
ing subject transforms and develops over the years along with the spirits she lives and works
with. For example, Marcelina, who worked with the spirit of a Haitian healer, had ‘learned’ a
permeable, shifting body during the more than five decades of their collaboration. The healer’s
sense of self takes shape as she learns to interpret bodily sensations and perceptions caused by
the muertos, and her subjectivity as a healer forms through an openness to such interaction.
This subjectivity is porous and fluid, relational rather than sovereign. Likewise, the spirits, as

21
 Maarit Forde

experienced by the healer, develop over the course of their relationship to the healer (Espírito
Santo 2012: 254–258).
In addition to the co-development and collaboration between healers and the various spirits
who work with and through them, collective effort by ritual practitioners is essential to creating
the level of ‘collective effervescence’ required from successful, communal rituals of healing.
Voduisants speak of ‘heating up,’ the enthusiasm of singing, drumming, dancing, and clapping
of hands that helps bring about communion between healers and spirits. ‘The spirits will not
come to help us until the ceremony is byen echofe, well heated up’ (McCarthy Brown 1987:
133). Similarly, in Tobagonian Spiritual Baptist healing rituals the ‘hotness’ of the communal
dancing and music-making is crucial, and ritual specialists sometimes scold their congregations
for not putting sufficient effort into creating a favourable setting for spirits. Such a communally
produced, spiritually intense ritual environment can frame more than one healer’s practice.
Mother Cleorita and another ritual specialist, Teacher Audrey, sometimes worked together on
patients, each healer manifesting their respective doctor spirits and communicating through a
stylized choreography of surgery (Laitinen 2002: 127). An openness to spirits demands detach-
ment from the everyday, moving ‘beyond the fatigue and preoccupations of [the practitioners’]
difficult lives’ through enthusiastic communal ritual practice, which can also be achieved by
healers through concentration in solitude (McCarthy Brown 1987: 133–134).
Diagnoses of suffering in Afro-Atlantic systems of healing often identify external causes
and sources of misfortune and illness. Sometimes the cause of suffering is traced to a malicious
spiritual attack by a competitor or adversary, but often it is the moral offence of neglecting
family, ancestors, or loved ones that has brought about suffering. The patient herself may be
culpable, but the effects of neglecting familial and reciprocal obligations can transcend gen-
erations and bring suffering onto the original offender’s children and grandchildren (Romberg
2013: 147; see also Thoden van Velzen and van Wetering 2004: 26–27 on avenging kunu
spirits in Surinam). In Vodou, the moral and relational context of suffering and healing is
particularly nuanced. The religion includes a complex notion of personhood consisting of
multiple, complementary components of ‘self.’6 In addition to this ‘internal’ complexity, rela-
tions to family, an eritaj of living and dead kin, are central to moral personhood (McCarthy
Brown 2001: 46–50; Richman 2018: 139). A disruption in the relational matrix that comprises
a person—relations between people, the dead, and the lwa or spirits—is the ultimate cause of
affliction and can bring about physical as well as mental suffering (McCarthy Brown 1987:
129). In larger rituals, spirits can address this suffering and ‘process the problems of the com-
munity, fine-tuning human relationships’ (McCarthy Brown 2001: 54). Such healing of rela-
tionships is at the centre of a mortuary ritual known as wete mò nan dlo, retrieval from the
waters, performed at least one year after death. A ritual specialist invokes the lwa in order to
convene with the spirit of the dead and bring catharsis to the bereaved family by shedding light
on the causality behind tragic death (Richman 2018). Ritual specialists also resolve problems
with social relations in private consultations. The process begins with divination, for example,
by reading cards or gazing into a candle flame, and a diagnosis emerges gradually in dialogue
between the specialist and the client (McCarthy Brown 2001: 61–63). Suffering and healing
are relational processes, and suffering is caused, experienced, diagnosed, and treated in rela-
tion to other people and spirits.

Conclusion
The relationality of Afro-Atlantic healing subjects, their mutual constitution, and collabora-
tion with spirits, the social causes of suffering and the communal production of healing in

22
 Afro-Atlantic healing practices

rituals rely on notions of self, body, and illness that seem radically different from the tenets
of biomedicine. From the perspective of healers like Alourdes, Mother Cleorita, or Haydée,
however, the ontological and epistemological divides in understanding subjectivity, suffering,
and healing do not seem insurmountable. Healers and their spirits draw on biomedicine as well
as other traditions—which, as I have shown previously, have intertwined with biomedicine in
the long history of the Afro-Atlantic—and both healers and their patients consult biomedical
professionals, when necessary. Rather than practitioners, it is anthropologists and other schol-
ars of Afro-Atlantic healing who may find themselves struggling to make sense of differently
valued ontologies and epistemologies and representing them in ways that do justice to healers
and their patients. Terms like ‘medical pluralism’ or ‘marketplace,’ connoting a selection of
separate and distinct healing traditions, fall short of representing the social and cosmological
relations of suffering and healing in the Afro-Atlantic.
The term ‘Afro-Atlantic’ itself can be similarly problematized. Healing in the Atlantic
world has been a collaborative effort between people from different nodes of transatlantic
networks of migrations and trade and, as such, it has not been limited to healers and patients
of African descent, although their knowledge and skills have been centrally important to
the development of medical traditions in this cultural sphere. Healers claim various locally
meaningful racial identities, which reflect nuanced systems of classifying bodily difference,
culture, and ‘mixing.’ The spirits involved in affliction and healing may have travelled across
the ocean and taken new forms in the New World, or they may have developed in American
and Caribbean contexts ranging from slave plantations to maroon societies, bustling cities,
peasant villages, battles, rebellions, or maritime travels. The racialized positions and geo-
graphical origins of these spirits, as manifested in ritual discourse and practice, are therefore
highly diverse. Given that healers often work with numerous, differently racialized spirits,
the combinations of cultural and physical difference performed in Afro-Atlantic rituals of
healing are countless. The term ‘Afro-Atlantic,’ then, seems limited in describing the fluidity
and diversity of the people, spirits, and cosmologies that constitute ‘Afro-Atlantic’ healing.
On the other hand, the social suffering that healers have addressed has largely reflected the
physical and structural violence of slave trade and slavery, the plantation regime, and the
social stratification of past and contemporary societies in the Americas and the Caribbean,
where the lowest rung has been, without exception, occupied by people of African descent.
Exploitative capitalism and its accompanying ideology of race in the constitution of the Afro-
Atlantic have engendered particular types of suffering, diagnoses, and vocabularies of afflic-
tion and healing. Perhaps it is at this level that Afro-Atlantic can best serve as an analytic
category.

Notes
1 See, for example Ferretti 2003 on Afro-Brazilian religions; McCarthy Brown 1992 on Vodou; Paton
2015, Ch. 6 on Obeah; Ochoa 2010: 63 on Palo; Romberg 2013 on Espiritismo.
2 Yaws is a chronic, disfiguring bacterial infection that affects skin, bone, and cartilage. www.who.int/
news-room/fact-sheets/detail/yaws
3 On the Vodun religion in eighteenth-century Ouidah (in contemporary Republic of Benin), see Norman
2009.
4 On the Candomblé religion in nineteenth-century Brazil, see Matory 2005; Parés 2013; Reis 2013.
5 On church- and state-led persecutions of healers in Brazil, see for example Reis 2013; Sansi 2016;
Sweet 2011; Thornton 1998. On similar persecutions in the Caribbean, see for example Paton 2015;
Paton and Forde 2012; Ramsey 2011; Román 2007.
6 Karen McCarthy Brown’s 1992 discussion of complex selfhood remains important. For a recent
review of anthropological literature on personhood in Vodou, see Strongman 2019.

23
 Maarit Forde

Bibliography
Achan, J., Talisuna, A.O., Erhart, A., Yeka, A., Tibenderana, J.K., Baliraine, F.N., Rosenthal, P.J., and
D’Alessandro, U. (2011) ‘Quinine, an Old Anti-Malarial Drug in a Modern World: Role in the Treat-
ment of Malaria,’ Malaria Journal, 10(144): 1–12.
Bilby, K., and Handler, J. (2004) ‘Obeah: Healing and Protection in West Indian Slave Life,’ The Journal
of Caribbean History, 38(2): 153–171.
Bronfman, A. (2012) ‘On Swelling: Slavery, Social Science, and Medicine in the Nineteenth Century,’
in D. Paton and M. Forde (eds) Obeah and Other Powers: The Politics of Caribbean Religion and
Healing, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Brown, V. (2008) Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery, Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Bush, B. (1990) Slave Women in Caribbean Society, 1650–1838, London: James Currey.
Castor, N.F. (2017) Spiritual Citizenship: Transnational Pathways from Black Power to Ifá in Trinidad,
Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Cook, G.C. (1990) ‘Early History of Clinical Tropical Medicine in London,’ Journal of the Royal Society
of Medicine, 80(1): 38–41.
Cook, G.C. (2007) Tropical Medicine: An Illustrated History of the Pioneers, London: Academic Press.
Drayton, R. (2000) Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain and the ‘Improvement’ of the World,
New Haven: Yale University Press.
Espírito Santo, D. (2012) ‘Imagination, Sensation, and the Education of Attention among Cuban Spirit
Mediums,’ Ethnos, 77(2): 252–271.
Espírito Santo, D. (2015) Developing the Dead: Mediumship and Selfhood in Cuban Espiritismo, Gaines-
ville: University Press of Florida.
Ferretti, M. (2003) ‘Religiões Afro-Brasileiras e Saúde: Diversidade e Semelhanças,’ paper presented at
the conference Religiões Afro-Brasileiras e Saúde, São Luis, Brazil, 20–23 March.
Fett, S.M. (2002) Healing, Health, and Power on Southern Slave Plantations, Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press.
Fields, K.E., and Fields, B.J. (2012) Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life, London: Verso.
Forde, M. (2012) ‘The Moral Economy of Spiritual Work: Money and Rituals in Trinidad and Tobago,’
in D. Paton and M. Forde (eds) Obeah and Other Powers. The Politics of Caribbean Religion and
Healing, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Forde, M., and Paton, D. (2012) ‘Introduction,’ in D. Paton and M. Forde (eds) Obeah and Other Powers.
The Politics of Caribbean Religion and Healing, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Gómez, P.F. (2017) The Experiential Caribbean: Creating Knowledge and Healing in the Early Modern
Atlantic, Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press.
Greenfield, S.M. (2008) Spirits with Scalpels: The Cultural Biology of Religious Healing in Brazil, Wal-
nut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press.
Greenfield, S.M. (2016) ‘The Alternative Economics of Alternative Healing: Faith-Based Therapies in
Brazil’s Religious Marketplace,’ in D.C. Wood (ed) The Economics of Ecology, Exchange, and Adap-
tation: Anthropological Explorations, Bingley, UK: Emerald.
Hall, K. (2002) Civilizing Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830–1867, Cam-
bridge: Polity Press.
Herskovits, M., and Herskovits, F. (1947) Trinidad Village, New York: Octagon Books.
Johnson, P.C. (2014a) ‘Introduction: Spirit and Things in the Making of the Afro-Atlantic World,’ in P.C.
Johnson (ed) Spirited Things: The Work of ‘Possession’ in Afro-Atlantic Religions, Chicago: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press.
Johnson, P.C. (2014b) ‘Toward an Atlantic Genealogy of “Spirit Possession”,’ in P.C. Johnson (ed) Spir-
ited Things: The Work of ‘Possession’ in Afro-Atlantic Religions, Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
Kananoja, K. (2015) ‘Bioprospecting and European Uses of African Natural Medicine in Early Modern
Angola,’ Portuguese Studies Review, 23(2): 45–69.
Kleinman, A. (1997) ‘ “Everything That Really Matters”: Social Suffering, Subjectivity, and the
Remaking of Human Experience in a Disordering World,’ The Harvard Theological Review, 90(3):
315–335.
Kleinman, A., Das, V., and Lock, M. (1997) Social Suffering, Berkeley: University of California Press.
Laguerre, M. (1987) Afro-Caribbean Folk Medicine, South Hadley, MA: Bergin and Garvey.

24
 Afro-Atlantic healing practices

Laitinen, M. (2002) Marching to Zion: Creolization in Spiritual Baptist Religion and Cosmology, Hel-
sinki: University of Helsinki.
Matory, J.L. (2005) Black Atlantic Religion: Tradition, Trans-Nationalism and Matriarchy in the Brazil-
ian Candomblé, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
McCarthy Brown, K. (1987) ‘The Power to Heal: Reflections on Women, Religion, and Medicine,’ in
C.W. Atkinson, C.H. Buchanan, and M.R. Miles (eds) Shaping New Vision: Gender and Values in
American Culture, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
McCarthy Brown, K. (1992) Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn, Berkeley: University of Cali-
fornia Press.
McCarthy Brown, K. (2001) ‘Afro-Caribbean Healing: A Haitian Case Study,’ in M. Fernández Olmos
and L. Paravisini-Gebert (eds) Healing Cultures, New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Norman, N.L. (2009) ‘Powerful Pots, Humbling Holes, and Regional Ritual Processes: Towards an
Archaeology of Huedan Vodun, ca. 1650–1727,’ African Archaeological Review, 26(3): 187–212.
Ochoa, T.R. (2010) The Society of the Dead: Quita Manaquita and Palo Praise in Cuba, Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press.
Olmos, M.F. (2001) ‘La Botánica Cultural: Ars Medica, Ars Poetica,’ in M. Fernández Olmos and L.
Paravisini-Gebert (eds) Healing Cultures, New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Osborne, M.A. (2014) The Emergence of Tropical Medicine in France, Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
Palmié, S. (2006) ‘A View from Itia Ororó Kande,’ Social Anthropology, 14(1): 99–118.
Parés, L.M. (2013) The Formation of Candomblé: Vodun History and Ritual in Brazil, Chapel Hill: Uni-
versity of North Carolina Press.
Paton, D. (2015) The Cultural Politics of Obeah: Religion, Colonialism and Modernity in the Caribbean
World, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.
Paton, D., and Forde, M. (eds) (2012) Obeah and Other Powers. The Politics of Caribbean Religion and
Healing, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Ramsey, K. (2011) The Spirits and the Law: Vodou and Power in Haiti, Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
Reis, J.J. (2013) ‘Candomblé and Slave Resistance in Nineteenth-Century Bahia,’ in L.N. Parés and R.
Sansi (eds) Sorcery in the Black Atlantic, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Richman, K. (2008) ‘A More Powerful Sorcerer: Conversion, Capital, and Haitian Transnational Migra-
tion,’ The New West Indian Guide, 82(1–2): 3–45.
Richman, K. (2018) ‘Mortuary Rites and Social Dramas in Léogâne, Haiti,’ in M. Forde and Y. Hume
(eds) Passages and Afterworlds: Anthropological Perspectives on Death in the Caribbean, Durham,
NC: Duke University Press.
Román, R.L. (2007) Governing Spirits: Religion, Miracles, and Spectacles in Cuba and Puerto Rico,
1898–1956, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Romberg, R. (2003) Witchcraft and Welfare: Spiritual Capital and the Business of Magic in Modern
Puerto Rico, Austin: University of Texas Press.
Romberg, R. (2013) Healing Dramas: Divination and Magic in Modern Puerto Rico, Austin: University
of Texas Press.
Sansi, R. (2016) ‘Miracles, Rituals, Heritage: The Invention of Nature in Candomblé,’ The Journal of
Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, 21(1): 61–82.
Savage, J. (2012) ‘Slave Poison/Slave Medicine: The Persistence of Obeah in Early Nineteenth-Century
Martinique,’ in D. Paton and M. Forde (eds) Obeah and Other Powers: The Politics of Caribbean
Religion and Healing, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Schiebinger, L. (2017) Secret Cures of Slaves: People, Plants, and Medicine in the Eighteenth-Century
Atlantic World, Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Strongman, R. (2019) Queering Black Atlantic Religions. Transcorporeality in Candomblé, Santería, and
Vodou, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Sweet, J.H. (2011) Domingos Álvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World,
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Syriac, S. (2019) Contesting Boundaries in Shared Sacred Space: Women’s Rituals at La Divina Pastora
Roman Catholic Church, Siparia, Trinidad, doctoral dissertation, University of the West Indies, St.
Augustine.
Thoden van Velzen, H.U.E., and van Wetering, W. (2004) In the Shadow of the Oracle: Religion as Poli-
tics in a Surinamese Maroon Society, Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press.

25
 Maarit Forde

Thornton, J. (1998) Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800, 2nd ed., Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press.
Trouillot, M. -R. (2003) Global Transformations: Anthropology and the Modern World, New York: Pal-
grave Macmillan.
Turner, S. (2017) Contested Bodies: Pregnancy, Childrearing, and Slavery in Jamaica, Philadelphia:
University of Philadelphia Press.
Walker, T. (2013) ‘The Medicines Trade in the Portuguese Atlantic World: Acquisition and Dissemina-
tion of Healing Knowledge from Brazil (c. 1580–1800),’ Social History of Medicine, 26(3): 403–431.
Weaver, K.K. (2012) ‘Surgery, Slavery and the Circulation of Knowledge in the French Caribbean,’
Slavery & Abolition, 33(1): 105–117.
Wynter, S. (2003) ‘Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, after
Man, its Overrepresentation—an Argument,’ The New Centennial Review, 3(3): 257–337.

26
 2
AYURVEDA
The modern faces of ‘Vedic’ healing and sacred
science

Maya Warrier

Introduction
Ayurveda, which means the sacred knowledge (veda) of longevity (āyus), is an Indic medical
tradition with a history spanning more than 2,000 years. It is very much a living tradition and
is widely practised in contemporary India and Sri Lanka, where it receives recognition and
support from the respective governments. Recent decades have seen a growing interest in this
tradition beyond South Asia, and the international market for Ayurvedic services and products
is fast growing. Ayurveda’s foundational texts situate it in an early Brahmanic socio-religious
context and claim for it the status of Vedic (divine, revealed), as opposed to worldly or mun-
dane knowledge. As such, its characteristic features are ‘inerrancy and paramount authority’
(Pollock 1985: 503). In the traditional understanding, this is not speculative knowledge, and
it is not provisional in the way that scientific truths are provisional, valid only so long as they
have not been shown to be false or incomplete; instead, Ayurveda as contained in the earliest
texts is truth. It is this legitimizing claim, especially in relation to its deployment in modernity,
that is the central focus of this chapter.
Ayurveda’s encounter with modernity, and particularly with science and biomedicine in
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, led to a radical reinterpretation of this tradition, and
an attempt to cast it within a largely secular and scientific medical framework. Despite this,
the Vedic motif has persisted to the present and remains central to modern representations of
Ayurveda. In the postcolonial Indian context, this motif is inflected with ethno-nationalist and
religious sentiment. In transnational Anglophone networks, it is associated with ‘spirituality,’
‘holism’ and the optimization of human potential. The term ‘Vedic’ as deployed in relation to
Ayurveda in modernity shows a remarkable elasticity and stretches to subsume a range of new
meanings and connotations as appropriate to different socio-religious contexts. The ‘Vedic’
appellation is deployed both as a basis for securing Ayurveda’s legitimacy and authority in
modernity, and as a means to assert its superiority over modern science and biomedicine. It
is thus critical to defining Ayurveda’s identity as a valid medical tradition alongside, and in a
complex relation of assimilation-cum-resistance vis-à-vis, the hegemonic biomedical system.
The discussion to follow starts with an exploration of legitimising claims made on behalf of
Ayurveda in its earliest texts before going on to examine the strategic deployment of the term
‘Vedic’ to legitimize and promote this tradition in twentieth and twenty-first century narratives.

27 DOI: 10.4324/9781315207964-4
 Maya Warrier

Ayurveda in the classical texts

Early knowledge about Ayurveda is contained in ancient Sanskrit texts, the Charaka Samhita
(Charaka’s compendium) and Sushruta Samhita (Sushruta’s compendium), both dating back to
the latter half of the first millennium CE. These texts lay the foundations of Ayurveda and, along
with a third, the Aṣtāṅgasaṃgraha (600 ce), are often described as the ‘great trio’ (bṛhat-trayi).
Three later texts are described as the ‘little trio’ (laghu-trayi). This categorisation indicates an
early attempt to identify and organise the Ayurvedic canon (Benner 2005: 3). The texts provide
detailed discussions of (among other things) types of disease, disease causation, methods of
diagnosis, remedies, and the curative properties of different herbs and other medicinal sub-
stances. They also provide guidelines on daily routines necessary for maintaining good health,
and specify the moral attitudes and values that are conducive to healthy and harmonious living.
It is not easy to pick one simple set of ideas as central to Ayurveda, given this tradition’s
complex history and its multiple interpretations over the centuries. Nevertheless, the triad
comprising humours (doṣa), body tissues (dhātu), and waste products (mala) is often seen
as foundational to understandings of health and disease (Wujastyk 2003a: xvii). In Ayurve-
dic terms health prevails when the three humours in the body (vāta or wind, pitta or bile,
and kapha or phlegm), in their interactions with tissues and waste products, are in a state of
equilibrium. When this equilibrium is disturbed and the doṣas are aggravated and displaced
from their usual locations in the body, normal body functioning is disrupted. This leads to
disease. Treatment may entail alterations in diet and lifestyle, and the use of mainly herbal
remedies. Traditionally, Ayurvedic therapeutic procedures include enemas, massage, bloodlet-
ting, douches, sweating, and surgery.1 Ayurveda has both preventative and remedial aspects.
It offers practical advice on most aspects of day-to-day living (Alter 1999) and emphasizes
moderation in all one’s activities, desires, and ambitions.
The ancient texts, especially the two earliest compendia, reflect the religious, moral, ethi-
cal, as well as literary and aesthetic sensibilities of the early Brahmanic world with its empha-
sis on ritual purity, social order and harmony with the cosmos. The early Ayurvedic texts claim
that the knowledge they contain developed directly from the Atharva Veda, a collection of
hymns and material in prose detailing rituals for such things as cures, fertility, healthy cattle,
abundant crops, and victory over enemies. This claim has been contested by scholars on the
grounds that that there are marked conceptual and epistemological differences between the
material of the Atharva Veda and the bulk of the literature in the early Ayurvedic compilations
(Chattopadhyaya 1979; Wujastyk 2003a, 2003b; Zysk 1991).
There is some evidence to suggest that Ayurveda may in fact have developed outside Vedic
society, among bands of ascetics who were indifferent, even antagonistic, to Vedic ritual ortho-
doxy. Buddhist ascetic groups in particular would seem to have offered a hospitable environ-
ment for the practice and development of the healing arts based on empirico-rational methods.
The vast storehouse of medical knowledge that developed among these ascetic groups may
well have been the source of what we now know as Ayurveda, designated as such after appro-
priation and assimilation by the Vedic Brahmans, possibly around the fourth or fifth centuries
of the common era, when Buddhism was declining in India and there was a resurgence of
Brahmanism (Zysk 1991).

Brahmanism and early Ayurveda

Ayurveda’s appropriation by Vedic Brahmans would appear to have resulted in the superim-
position of a Brahmanic religious veneer over what was already a well-established medical

28
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
grew angry and the gentle mother had all she could do to keep him
from killing little White Wing.
Every night the little fellow would bury his head close to his beautiful
mother's ear, and say:
"Don't you think, perhaps, dear mother, that I'll be pink in the
morning?"
And she would tell him to hush and be quiet and go to sleep.
But when morning came he would be as white as ever, and his long
sad day would begin. No one would play with him and he was soon
shifting for himself. Somehow he picked up a living of tiny fish in the
long pools of tide-water that the waves left in the soggy lagoon, and
when all his playmates had gone to bed and it was safe to come
among them, he would step home, picking his way between the
nests, and trying to reach his own without calling attention to himself.
All this was hard, but it speedily grew worse. The King of the
flamingoes said that the white offspring must die.
"Begone, my child, begone!" the mother whispered to him, for she
had heard that little White Wing was to die. "Go away, as far as you
can. Sometime it will be all right. Remember that your mother loves
you."
So that ended White Wing's childhood. Even before the first streak of
dawn, the beautiful young bird flew out and away. Across the lagoon,
miles and miles to the westward, over a wide stretch of sea he flew
until his wings could hardly bear him up. Then he sighted land, and
he strained every nerve to reach it. When at last he wheeled down to
the sands in the shade of a great mangrove tree, his first day's flight
was finished and he was a lonely, famished bird on a strange shore.
But a deep, sweet voice suddenly came to him. At first he could not
place it. Then he saw to his astonishment a huge turtle only a few
yards below him on the beach.
"Ah, ha!" she was saying in her most affectionate way. "So there you
are! I've heard of you. They drove you out, did they? Didn't want any
variety in the family. Well, well, Sonny, cheer up."
Then this large and hearty creature pawed her way heavily up the
sands, and continued her remarks:
"Funny creatures, you birds. Now look at me and consider the
difference. I don't care a clam what my children look like. I'm on my
way up to that sand dune this very blessed minute to lay about nine
pecks of eggs. And I hope they hatch and the young ones won't get
eaten up. But they can come out of that shell any color they please,
for all I care. We turtles don't worry. We just float along easy. That's
the way to live."
Then she gave a hearty laugh and settled down to digging a pit in
the white sands.
"S'pose you run along, Sonny, and pick up your supper. I rather like
my own company when I'm laying eggs. But just come back a little
later and I'll tell your fortune."
No one had ever called him Sonny before, and never had he
dreamed that such high good humor existed anywhere. The good old
turtle and her cheerful ways had suddenly made life worth living. And
poor White Wing, on coming to himself, realized that he was very
hungry. He feasted, indeed, ravenously on fiddler crabs, which he
otherwise would have despised, and the moon was high and he was
heavy with sleep when Mrs. Turtle, after hours of scratching and
pawing, had patiently buried her eggs, and was ready to talk. What
she had to say was brief, but it cast the life of White Wing in strange
places, and it was on her words that he made his great journey.
"You're bound to be somebody," she began. "Probably a king. But
this is no place for you around here. You must go where you are
wanted. And that is a long ways from this quiet spot. There's a great
Emperor who has a palace by the smoking mountains. He's been
wishing for a white flamingo all his life. If you can get there, why,
your fortune is made. If you fly with your feet to the sunrise until you
come to the great river mouth, and if you follow that river long
enough, you'll see the mountains with the fiery tops. That's the place.
And you want to walk right in as though you owned the kingdom.
Don't be scared when you get there. Just forget about those saucy
cousins of yours back home and be as grand as you know how."
Poor White Wing was almost dizzy at this unexpected vision of good
things. He did not reckon on what the journey meant. But the
motherly old turtle was particular to tell him of the many islands he
must pass, and the dangers that he would encounter. Then she bade
him God-speed, and began her toilsome way down the sands, for
she was intent upon reaching deep water again.
"I have a long way to go," she said; and added that sometime they
would be sure to meet again.
The second morning found White Wing far out at sea once more,
straining his eyes for the island where he was to get food and water,
and cherishing to himself but one idea—to reach the great Emperor
who wanted a white flamingo.
After many days and nights of lonely travel, he came to a mountain
solid green and black, with palms and forest trees; where there were
no white shores, but a heavy marshy line of wonderful vegetation.
And from the height at which he flew he could discern the muddy
strip of river water which stained the blue sapphire of the ocean.
This, then, was the river, and far up its course must be the
mountains and the city of the great Emperor.
He was right in his conjectures. For a black bird, with a yellow bill as
big as a cleaver, greeted him with familiar and jovial laughter, and
told him that he was indeed on the right path. This bird was a toucan
and he told many things of his family to White Wing, adding much
good advice. He was distressed that the beautiful stranger would not
eat bananas, and explained that he owed his good health to an
exclusive fruit diet.
"But then," he admitted with a noisy laugh, "somebody must eat the
fish, I'm sure. And I'm glad if you like them."
Also this happy-go-lucky toucan volunteered to guide White Wing on
his flight up the valley. But, like so many guides, he fell out before he
accomplished all that he had promised. For scarcely had the two
traveled a day's journey when they came upon a prodigious growth
of wild figs, and the greedy toucan would go no farther.
Those were hard hours for poor White Wing. The river valley was
dark and hot, and in the night he was perpetually wakened by the
startling sounds around him. Such noisy parrots he had never
dreamed of, nor such millions of burning insects that flashed and
flashed their lanterns till the heavy vines and palm leaves seemed
afire with them. And the screams of terror that rose from the dark
depths of the forest when the great cats or the powerful snakes
seized their prey, chilled his blood.
But the days brought him at last to higher ground, and finally to a
wonderful plain where it all seemed but so many miles of lawn and
clear smooth waters. He took heart. Suddenly the mountains came
in sight. Yes, and one of them was sending out a thin stream of
smoke into the cloudless sky. Another day, possibly that very night,
he would reach the city of the Emperor.
Very wisely he waited for the dawn. He had seen the high walls, and
the housetops, and the glittering armaments of the palace as they
glowed in the sunset, and he had heard strange music, a sweet
confusion of lovely sounds. But from the cliffs above the river he
watched and waited and preened his beautiful white suit.
When morning came, just as the mountains were pink and the city
was cool and gray, a grand procession mounted a great rock above
the Emperor's palace. Trains of slaves and priests there were, the
sounds of drums, and a heavy, solemn chanting. The Emperor was
to greet the sun and they were all to worship the great light, for it was
their deity.
Then White Wing soared high above them all. His great white form
was suddenly thrown against the rising sun, and it was beautiful
beyond comparison. No living bird had ever seemed so lovely. He
could see the crowds of men and women and the ranks of priests
start back in one motion of surprise. Then he floated down, slowly
and with great calm, alighting on the stone altar where the Emperor
was staring upward in amaze.
From that hour, after the court had recovered from its surprise, White
Wing was almost an emperor himself. A park was made for him and
slaves were in attendance. The tenderest of tiny fish and juicy snails
were given him to eat, and he was a familiar of that barbaric
household whose slightest inclination was taken to be law, and
whose smallest preferences were translated into royal commands.
He was ceremoniously tethered with a golden chain and a clasp of
blue jewels to his thin leg, but even such a regal restraint was
abandoned and the jewels and the beaten gold and the turquoise
were made into a neck chain which he wore with great dignity.
Never could the Emperor enter into his councils and audiences
without the Prince of the Dawn, as he was called; and White Wing
was a sage and judicial counselor. He would stand for hours on one
leg, his jewels flashing upon his breast, his head turned at a knowing
angle, as if in the profoundest thought, a very embodiment of
wisdom beside the throne. In reality he was sound asleep, a
condition wherein he set an immortal example for ministers of state.
For years he dwelt in splendor and acquired great wisdom. And for
the little princes and princesses, who were many and lovely, he had
great affection.
But of his love for one princess in particular and of the jealousies
which grew up so that his life was plotted against and he was at last
to be undone, there is another story which the wonderful Mrs.
Leatherback is always slow to relate.
She has been known to depart and pursue her business in foreign
lands, returning at her leisure, before she will be induced to relate
the rest of the story of Prince Flamingo.
 XIV
PRINCE FLAMINGO'S TRIUMPHANT RETURN
In the gorgeous court of the Emperor, where White Wing had come
into such great good fortune, the one person whom everybody
feared was the splendid ruler himself. For rulers have been notable
in history for their fickle ways and shifting affections, and this
emperor was no exception to the rule. First it was one favorite who
fell into disfavor, and then another, and even the priests and the
councilors, who were the closest to him, were as unsafe as the
meanest slave. For while an underling could be made away with
quickly and at a word, the Emperor was no less willing to let his
anger smolder through a long and carefully plotted revenge in the
case of some person who might be next to him in rank. So there
were mysterious things happening in the great stone palace, and
White Wing observed soon after he came there that nobody seemed
really to enjoy the wonderful splendors of the court itself but, on the
contrary, they seemed always anxious to be in the parks or the city,
or even out on the lonely plains around it, rather than in the vast
rooms of stone and silver.
Nevertheless, White Wing had nothing to fear from the stalwart and
imperious ruler, for the bird was truly his most treasured possession;
and if he were in an evil mood, the Emperor would often betake
himself to White Wing's splendid garden, and there he would toy with
the bird, asking him many questions, and seeming always content to
find his answer in the flamingo's sagacious looks, or a chance nod of
the creature's head.
There were the troops of lovely children, too, whose quarters were a
whole part of the palace itself, and these were a delight to White
Wing, for they were gentle with him and fed him all sorts of dainties
from their little brown hands.
Among these was a lovely little girl who grew to be a favorite of the
Emperor's and was deeply attached to White Wing.
One day, to the latter's great distress, he saw traces of tears on the
child's face as she came hurrying across the enclosed garden to the
sunken pool where White Wing was looking down into the water at
the gold fish. There happened to be no one in the great courtyard at
that moment but the child and the stately bird. She looked around
first, to be sure that what she was about to say would not be
overheard.
"Oh, Prince of the Dawn, dear Prince," she began, "do you know
what has happened? I have run away from the others just to tell you.
It's the saddest thing in the world. The Emperor is sending all the
children away to the farthermost corner of the land to keep them in
hiding. And only the soldiers and the priests are to live here now.
There is only one hour left, for down below the great walls there are
thousands of bearers and mules laden with everything, and a whole
army of escorts. Maybe we shall never come back."
Then she threw herself at White Wing's feet and clutched the flowers
on the border of the fountain as she cried.
But this was only the beginning of the troubles in that great palace.
What the princess had told White Wing explained much that he had
observed, but what the child did not know, and what the Emperor
feared the most, was the plotting that went on against his own life
and the rivalries among his generals. The kingdom was being
attacked to the eastward. Up that same valley that White Wing had
followed in his flight, a terrible army was marching against the capital
of this realm. It was an army of men from the other side of the world.
Such conquerors they were as even the Emperor himself had never
dreamed of.
But now excited slaves came rushing in and bore the child off. She
had scarcely time to say farewell, and poor White Wing heard her
sobs as they died away through the courtyards and arched corridors.
Yes, his palace was being deserted, and he could walk through
empty rooms and suddenly stilled hallways without meeting a soul.
Everybody was in the lower courtyard watching the departure of the
household.
But just as White Wing, much depressed and filled with wonder,
came to a little doorway in a corner of the great upper hall, he heard
voices. They were the Emperor's councilors, he knew, but why they
should be there now when everybody was so busy elsewhere, he
wondered. They were not talking as usual, but whispering, and a
great curtain had been drawn across the doorway.
White Wing knew that the chamber was lighted by a window that
opened to a tiny courtyard of its own. To reach this court without
passing through the room was impossible to any one but such as
White Wing. He could mount the walls by a short flight from the
garden, and descend within the secret yard.
This he did, for he was bound to learn what the priests and
councilors were up to. The Emperor was not with them, and he felt
sure that it was something treacherous that they were doing.
He was just in time as he settled down on the stone copings outside
the great window. First he looked to make sure that his shadow was
not visible across the pavement. He was assured of his safety, and
knew that his arrival there had not been betrayed by so much as a
ruffle of his beautiful wings.
The voices were deciding the fate of the Emperor and of White Wing
too. The priests were to tell the Emperor that he must sacrifice the
thing that he loved the most and that he must do it with his own
hand. And it was to be arranged that as he knelt at the great altar of
black stone to kill the bird, an arrow should be sent from a secret
place on the walls, so that the Emperor with his back turned to the
court should perish then and there.
White Wing's blood ran cold. This, then, was why his great master
had always been fearful and morose, and often cruel. His own house
was full of men that hated him and were yet his own brothers. They
were ready now, just as the kingdom was rallying to save itself, to
seize it all into their own hands. They would be rid of him, and his
mysterious bird too, for they feared in a childish way that White Wing
had been sent to the Emperor by some divine agent, and they hated
the innocent creature because they were both fearful and jealous of
him.
They were now deciding which one of them should let fly the arrow
which should kill the Emperor. White Wing could hear them rattling
the jeweled discs or dice with which he had often seen them playing.
Evidently the process of making the decision was a complicated one,
for he heard the little carved discs rattling in their box a number of
times. Then there was silence and a voice which he knew was that
of the Emperor's half-brother spoke in clear tones:
"I am glad that it has fallen on me!"
Suddenly the sound of drums and horns and a great deal of shouting
broke the silence. The Emperor had said farewell to his household,
and in great clamor the slaves and the favorites and the troops of
beautiful children were departing from the city. The Emperor's
heralds were calling his councilors to the great audience chamber.
White Wing heard the treacherous creatures scuttle from the little
room in haste, and he heard the dice which they had been using
rattle to the floor as they upset a table in their hurry to get out. Slowly
and cautiously, he looked into the room. It was deserted. Then he
went in and looked around him and picked up one of the little dice. It
was a small, black jewel, curiously engraven. He tucked it under his
wing and stalked quietly through the curtained doorway, and down
the long corridor with its shadowy arches until it brought him to the
sunny courts that bounded his own walled garden.
What he achieved by this simple act of sagacity is quickly told. The
Emperor, who had known nothing of the secret council, guessed
immediately that it had taken place when White Wing dropped the
black counter at his feet. They were alone in the garden, and it was
late in the evening. The bird little knew that this was not one of the
gaming dice at all, but the sacred dice used to settle life and death
decisions in the Emperor's secret debates with his court.
Puzzled as the Emperor was at first, he was not long in establishing
his conclusions. He had just been told by the priests that he must
sacrifice the white flamingo, and his half-brother had been alarmingly
affectionate, having even caressed his shoulder as he thanked the
great ruler for having placed him at the head of certain troops which
were of the greatest importance in the forthcoming battles.
Then the Emperor knew what to do. He said nothing but was
exceedingly watchful. Coming early in the morning to White Wing he
bade the great bird good-by.
"You must fly over to your own people, dear bird," he said. "My
enemies will eventually kill you if you do not go. And perhaps, when
these great invaders have taken my city, I shall be reduced to
slavery. You have been my greatest pleasure, and you have served
here all that you were intended to. You have saved my life, for the
scheme to kill me while I was to be offering you in sacrifice has all
come out. I drew confession from certain of the councilors when I
had them in the dungeons but an hour ago. Never would I have
suspected them but for your wonderful means of warning me."
Then, in the earliest dawn, before the blazing sun had blanched the
palace walls, White Wing soared slowly into the air, leaving the great
Emperor standing alone by the deserted altar. There were no
cheering crowds as there had been when he came to that terrible
city, and in their stead were camps and tents and all the sights of
preparing war upon the plains. But the Emperor's hands were
upraised and his face was very splendid as he gazed off into the
heavens whither his wonderful white flamingo was disappearing.
All that consoled the bird in the sorrow of leaving his master was the
thought of having saved the great man's life. But for that, he would
have died from misery, believing that he should have stayed there
until his own life was taken. He little knew that thousands of his own
kind were waiting for him. But such was the case, and he soon
learned as he flew toward the setting sun, retracing his journey, that
he was already the prince of birds. Whole flocks of beautiful parrots,
and great orioles, and tropic thrushes would greet him and fly in
hosts ahead of him. From the great city down through the wide valley
and the dark forests to the coast, he traveled with couriers to tell all
the birds of his coming. And as he passed, at last, out over the
ocean to find the island whence he had come, there were flocks and
flocks of flamingoes overtaking and surrounding him.
One strange thing he saw, and that was a fleet of ships with sails
greater than ever he had dreamed of. These were galleons of the
conquerors, come to destroy the city of barbaric splendors where
White Wing had been a courtier. But he did not know this, and only
marveled at the sight.
At last, when his escort had grown to such numbers that, flying as
they did in single file, the line of birds seemed to arch the sky from
east to west, he came to the coast which he knew to be his own.
Then to the selfsame stretch of coral beach, where the palms were
leaning over the dunes exactly as he had left them. With slackened
speed and flying lower and lower until he caught the scent of the old
familiar earth, he skimmed above the lagoon and was suddenly over
his home! White Wing flew straight to his mother.
The thousand relatives and as many new ones were there too, and
with the arrival of White Wing's friends, who had glided in, one after
another, the confusion of greetings in Flamingotown was deafening.
From then until his death, which was not to be for many, many years,
White Wing, whose adventures had become known until they were
household words, was the ruler of all flamingoes everywhere.
That he was beneficent, you may be sure. And for one thing, quite
the greatest thing in his life, he instituted a change in family life by
decreeing that all the gentlemen should take their turn in helping the
lady birds to hatch their eggs. It is from his reign that this admirable
custom dates, as Mrs. Leatherback will assure you.
As for that generous lady, she came to have her part in the history of
the times. For the great explorers who came to ravish the kingdom
where White Wing received such honors, happened to take Mrs.
Leatherback captive on one of the islands. They took her aboard
ship and were all for taking her back with them to the great court of
Spain. But even after they had branded her with the arms of the
court of Castile and Aragon, and had secured her to the deck of the
galleon, she eluded them and fell into the sea. Consequently she
has lived these hundreds of years a member, as she is pleased to
think, of the greatest court in Europe. She soon came in the round of
her journeys to White Wing's island and there she visited him a long
time. So they could recount their adventures; and he has never
ceased to love her for the cheer she gave him that first night of his
lonely journey. For her part, she is only too proud of her Prince
Flamingo, as she calls him, thereby disputing honors with the gentle
mother bird, who has always been too happy to talk much about her
little White Wing.
So all the above is just as the Heron tells it. And he is the one who
knows Mrs. Leatherback the best, and he has had it from her many
times. Moreover, he always ends with the wish that in some way that
old turtle could have the last desire of her life fulfilled. Strange as it
may seem, she has never seen the wonderful device of the Spanish
Arms which was branded and carved upon her back. It gives her a
wry neck to attempt it and she has given up trying. So she always
lives in hope of finding a looking-glass some day at the bottom of the
sea.
But meanwhile she contents herself with getting her friends to tell her
how it looks, and it is because the Heron is very particular to do this,
and do it well, thereby making the old lady feel comfortable, that he
can always get her to relate the story of Prince Flamingo.
 XV
MOTHER FOX'S HOSPITAL
Virginia was a very little girl when she visited the home of the
animals under the garnet hill. She was the only person who had ever
been there, as the good Mrs. Fox assured her, and the only way,
indeed, that she can prove that she had actually been there at all is
to ask her pet cat, who accompanied her, whether it is all true or not.
Always the cat blinks his eyes with the most knowing air, and nods
his head. So that is proof enough.
Virginia was gathering blueberries and she had strayed farther and
farther away from the farm house until she suddenly found that she
could no longer see the top of the red chimney, nor the peak of the
barn. Never had her little feet carried her so far into the pastures as
this. To make it worse, she could not seem to find her way back. The
low birch trees and the sweet fern seemed taller, and the light
beneath them was not so warm and bright.
Virginia started to run, but she had taken only a few steps when she
tripped and fell. It almost seemed that the briary vine in the grass
had reached out and entangled her. But she was a brave little girl
and would sooner do anything than cry out. It was discouraging to
have all the berries in her pail spilled over the ground, but she set to
work picking them out of the moss and leaves, while she kept
wishing that somebody would come to help her.
Then she pricked her finger on a thorn. It was then, she knows, that
she began to hear lovely voices; for no sooner had she felt the sharp
scratch than she heard a sweet sighing song all around her.
Of all the wishes in her life the greatest was to know what the trees
and the birds were saying. Now she knew.
For on all sides the voices were as sweet as music. "What pretty
blue eyes she has!" and "How lovely her cheeks are!" and "Just see
her golden hair!" were remarks she caught between the sounds of
silvery laughter.
She jumped up, leaving her berries on the ground, and started again
to run. For she was suddenly afraid of these voices, even though
they were so sweet.
A familiar Me-ew greeted her. It was her pet cat, Tiger, who then
began talking to her as plainly as though he had been to school and
could read and write.
"How fine this is!" he exclaimed. "To think you can hear at last!" and
he went on explaining that no one had ever understood what he was
saying before.
"How often," he purred, "have I followed you into the pasture, hoping
that you would prick your finger on the right sort of thorn, so that at
last we could talk things over! My, but won't all the world be glad to
know of this!" he added. "Why, it doesn't happen once in a thousand
years!"
With that the beautiful gray cat ran off into the woods, only to return
accompanied by troops and troops of beautiful little creatures: the
field mice, who didn't seem to object to the cat at all, and the
squirrels, even the shiny moles, and some very excited birds, who
flew round and round the little girl, calling her name, and telling her
how they loved her.
Why she should have followed the cat into the woods, Virginia did
not know, but he ran ahead and bade her follow, and she seemed
only too willing to do so. The trees spoke so pleasantly as she
passed them that it was impossible not to go on.
"How she does resemble her great-grandmother!" said one of the
trees. It was an aged oak who had known Virginia's family ever since
it had settled in those parts. She felt that she must stop and return
the greetings, for she was always carefully polite to old people.
"Why, it was my little brother," the tree continued, "who was ordained
to the ministry in your grandfather's church. Your grandfather did the
preaching, and my brother held the floor up. He also was cut by the
builders to carry the major load of the roof. You see I have known
your family a long while. I am the oldest white oak in this woodland."
But before he could say another word, a beautiful red fox jumped out
of the bushes and told the tree to stop talking.
"Don't weary that little girl with all your memories," Red Fox said. "If
you get started, you'll never stop. And she has an invitation to
Mother Fox's Hospital. She must come immediately."
All this was very strange. Virginia wished to talk to the good old oak
some more, but Red Fox gave her a knowing look and held out his
hand in such a cordial way, and so urgently, that she bade the
venerable tree good-afternoon and ran to catch up with her new
friend, who was already beckoning to her from some distance ahead.
Bounding along the path beside her came Tiger Kitty, whom Virginia
was indeed glad to have with her.
She was no longer on familiar ground. The woods were dense, and
she felt that she was running a long way from home.
But suddenly Red Fox stopped. They had come to what appeared a
jagged and moss-grown rock. It was the side of an old pit that had
been dug into the shoulder of the hill, and at any other time Virginia
would have remembered it as the old quarry where once she had
been taken by her brothers and sisters on a picnic. But now she saw
that it concealed in reality a doorway. Moss-grown and dark, the door
was hardly discoverable, but it opened easily enough when Red Fox
applied his key. And standing there to greet Virginia and Tiger Kitty
was a wonderful old fox, with spectacles and a frilled bonnet and the
kindliest face in the world.
"This is my mother," said Red Fox; "she's the matron."
"Yes," the good old soul admitted, "I am Mother Fox, and this
charitable home for the destitute of the field and forest is named after
me."
Virginia was embarrassed, but only for a minute, for sweet old
Mother Fox invited her into the parlor and then, after she had been
offered the most delicious of cakes, and the creamiest of milk, and
had eaten a refreshing supper, she was shown through the home.
Living there was every poor animal that Virginia had ever known.
And they were all in such supreme comfort and having such a good
time that she was sure she had never seen so many people so
happy all at once, never in her whole life.
"Our only discontented inmate is Mr. Wolf," said the matronly Mrs.
Fox. "Would you like to see him?"
She led the way down a long hall to where Mr. Wolf was seated in a
little room of his own, gnawing and snapping at his nurses, who were
none other than the hedgehog and the big snapping turtle.
"Two rather sharp people for nurses," Red Fox remarked, almost in
apology; "but you see it takes some one with a good deal of
character to handle him."
In a great room which was a dining-hall, with high tables for the big
animals, and low ones for the little folk, she saw the animals that
were privileged to be there eating the most tempting dishes. There
was lettuce salad for the rabbits, and corn-bread for the field mice,
and blackberry pudding for the whole partridge family, and
persimmon jam for the 'possums, and even lily roots creamed and
on toast for the poor old muskrats.
"All charity," said Red Fox. "All charity! Out in the world every one of
these poor animals was cruelly hurt, or starved. Of course, we're
hunted and stoned, and chased, and shot at. That's all men want—a
chance to kill us. Here's where we take care of our cripples and
paupers."
Virginia was wonderstruck and was about to ask a question, when a
lame but beautiful lady tapped Mother Fox's shoulder and asked her
to introduce the visitor.
"Oh, surely! Pardon me, Lady Orchid."
Lady Orchid put the sweetest, tenderest hand into Virginia's, and the
little girl looked into the loveliest flower face in the world.
"I'm Lady Arethusa," the wonderful creature breathed, as she
curtsied very low to the little girl. "You see I'm crippled. I was pulled
up by the roots in such a careless way. You did it yourself, if you
remember, only the other day."
The little girl wanted to cry, but the lovely orchid repented having
come too close to the truth, and quickly added:
"No; it was your brother, possibly. At any rate, I beg you never to pull
any of us out in that violent way again. I am sure we all love you too
much. We Arethusas have lived on your place a great many years.
The small white violets, by the way, that live by the door-step at your
home, tell me that they can't get close enough to you and your sweet
mother, they love you so. And there is a lovely begonia living here
whom your mother lost, despite her care. Some one neglected it,
and it died of thirst. Your mother was visiting at the time, I believe."
"Yes," said Mother Fox; "that is so often the case. Fathers and
brothers are very careless in such matters. They are not so tender
as a rule with their plant cousins under their roof."
Then, as they left the dining-room, where the animals were just
reaching the dessert, who should come flying up to Virginia but a
beautiful oriole. He too, it seems, knew the little girl.
"Yes, indeed, dear child," he sang out to her; "I have known you a
long time. I live in the elm-tree. And I want to thank you for those
lovely threads that you put out on the lawn for me when I was
refurnishing my house. I am here to call on some relatives, but I will
sing to you by your window in the morning."
Then Virginia remembered that a ball of beautiful worsted had been
missing from her mother's work-basket after it had been left on the
porch. This explained it all. She was astonished, but the gray cat
laughed out merrily:
"Yes, he stole it; but the dear bird thinks you left it there for him. If
you look out of the attic window when we get home you can see his
nest in the elm. It's mostly blue worsted."
"Why didn't you tell me before, if you knew it?" Virginia asked, really
grieved at Tiger Kitty's lack of confidence.
"Why," repeated the cat, and then he only smiled very broadly,
"because you were always deaf, my dear."
Presently, while they were walking down the corridor, the merriest
music burst on Virginia's ear. In a room all to themselves, the rabbits
were rehearsing for a minstrel show. They were dancing in the most
giddy fashion, and she could not help laughing aloud as she watched
them.
But as she laughed, something happened, and the cat, who had just
opened his mouth to say something, closed it with a sudden look of
disappointment.
"You see, she spilled the berries, and fell asleep while trying to pick
them up."
It was a familiar voice. Virginia turned around. Her mother and big
brother and little sister were kneeling beside her in the ferns. It was
evening and she could hear the cows calling to be let through the
farm gate.
"And I never said good-by to Mr. Red Fox!" she exclaimed. Then she
rubbed her eyes and smiled, for they were all kissing her, and big
brother was putting her on his shoulder.
Her strange experience she kept to herself for a long time. But she
talked it all over with Tiger Kitty, and he seemed to understand it,
every word. Most of all when she climbed the attic stairs and looked
at the bird's nest, it was of blue worsted, as plain as plain could be.
And she was sure then and for the rest of her life that the birds and
the flowers loved the old home with its trees and its gardens as
much as she did.
And she always thought of sweet Lady Orchid when she gathered
wild flowers.
 XVI
WHY MRS. CROW IS BLACK
It was the dead of night. Old Mr. Fox left his cozy den and went to
call on his friend, the wise old Mrs. Owl. For many years it had been
his custom to do this, for he found her the most engaging company.
Her home was in a hollow tree and she was always obliging enough
to put her head out the window and inquire who was there, if any of
her friends knocked hard and long at the basement door. It was
useless to call in the daytime: she was always asleep while the sun
shone, and in the early evening she would be abroad hunting her
supper. But after the cocks crew at midnight, and people in their
beds were turning over to get their best sleep, Mrs. Owl would come
flying through the woods and across the river, and up the hill to her
own great tree, having eaten heartily of whatever she may have
found. Then she was ready to sit on her window ledge for a visit with
her friends.
So it was very late, and the woods was still as death, when patter,
patter, through the underbrush came Mr. Fox to call on Mrs. Owl.
Arriving at the bridge across the river, he jumped nimbly to the hand-
rail and trotted on that narrow board as easily as a cat walks over the
fence. For he was sure some dog would pass that way, come
morning, but no dog would ever scent the wise fox who walks the
rail.
"Always sniffing at the ground, these foolish dogs," thought Mr. Fox;
and he laughed to himself as he jumped down into the bushes and
ran on to the hill and the great cottonwood tree, whither Mrs. Owl
herself had just returned.
With a big stick he hit the tree a hard blow. Then he barked politely
and sat down to wait.
Way up in the top of the dead tree the window was open. Two great
eyes looked out.
"Who's there? Who's there?" came in the most dreadful tones.
"Only your friend, a brother thief," laughed Mr. Fox; for in the
company of Mrs. Owl he could afford this slanderous admission.
"Ha, ha!" screamed Mrs. Owl, who didn't mind being called a thief at
all. In fact, she laughed so hard and long that every living being
asleep in those woods awoke and shivered with a sudden terror. For
it was the laughter of Mrs. Owl, you know, that made the
blacksnake's blood run cold, and never has he been able to warm it
up again, even by lying all day in the sun.
She scratched her ear and leaned a little farther out. After controlling
her mirth, she grew very solemn and whispered down to Mr. Fox that
she had discovered but an hour ago a certain roost with the most
enticing hole in the roof.
"Easy and safe, you know," she giggled. "Two broilers and a fowl I've
had this very night." Then she laughed again, "Ha, ha! Hoo, hoo!"
But Mr. Fox knew she was lying. She was only trying to get him into
trouble.
"Thanks for the hint," he barked; "but it is easier to get in by the roof
than out by the roof, you know, unless one is gifted as you are with
wings, Mrs. Owl."
"True, true," she said, in her wisest tones.
"And I really came, dear Mrs. Owl, to ask a question of you. Can you
tell me why the crows are black?"
There was a long silence, for Mrs. Owl must have time to think. All
things were known to her, but she revealed her knowledge only with
the greatest deliberation.
First she looked all around, then she laughed again, this time so loud
and long that Mr. Fox thought she never would have done, and at
last she exclaimed: