New Geographies of Religion and Healing

Introduction

Photo by Linda Barnes. Satin yellow cover for a Sutra book in the Gold Mountain Buddhist Monastery in San Francisco, CA.

I take my title from a classic essay by T. J. Hinrichs who, over a decade ago, mapped critical developments in her own field, the history of Chinese medicine.1 Hinrichs flags, for example, a movement away from an almost exclusive reliance on documentary research to the integration of perspectives and methods from other fields, including a sensibility that privileges “contradictions, ambiguities, resistance, and the marginal spaces of life over system, coherence, and elite versions of culture.”2 Indeed, such an approach is necessary because there are as many ways to interpret and study religion and healing as there are approaches to religious studies.

In one sense, this assertion should come as little surprise. After all, the one can reasonably be considered a subset of the other and therefore open to interpretation through the full spectrum of its disciplinary methods. Second, there is a natural point of intersection between many, if not most, religious and therapeutic traditions insofar as each addresses, interprets, and constructs responses to the experiences of suffering and affliction.3 Third, the study of religion and healing permeates the larger discipline. However, because an explicitly defined subfield has been long in the making, it is rare that scholars have the opportunity to get a handle on the full range of fine work that has been accomplished.

Photo by Linda Barnes. Sutra book entitled, Medicine Master Buddha Repentence, in the Gold Mountain Buddhist Monastery in San Francisco, CA.

I am reminded of a visit I made years ago to the Gold Mountain Buddhist Monastery in San Francisco, California. The meditation hall housed long, low tables with meditation benches. Before each place, a sutra book rested on the table, covered with bright yellow embroidered satin.

After asking permission to lift the fabric, I discovered that the cover of the sutra book read “Medicine Master Buddha Repentance”.

This example has struck me many times as a classic illustration of how matters of healing often lie just beneath the surface of the religious. Lift the cover and there they are. In the following essay, I shall review new geographies of scholarship representing a range of foci and strategies under the rubric of religion and healing. My examples are in no way comprehensive but, rather, suggestive. As I shall show, in addition to the map not being the territory, the territory—such as it is—sometimes seems to call as much for charts to navigate shifting waters as it does for the tools of the surveyor.

I have organized this review of the field in the following manner:

• Introduction
• Part I - Early Days, Core Comparative Categories in Medical Anthropology, and Through Other Theories
• Part II - Through Traditions and By Regions and Transnationalities
• Part III - In Applied Domains, In Biomedicine, and Medicalizing the Religious
• Part IV - Physician Engagement, Building from a Biopsychosocial Model, and Culturally Competent Care
• Conclusion - Closing Thoughts, Acknowledgments, and Further Resources

• 1. T. J. Hinrichs, “New Geographies of Chinese Medicine,” Osiris, 2nd Series 13 (1998): 295. While attempting to include scholarship from around the world, I will focus some sections of this article on work within the United States. Because of my own work in the study of Chinese medicine and healing traditions in the United States, it may seem a peculiar omission, but this essay will not incorporate resources related to these traditions as these can be found assembled and discussed elsewhere. I refer readers first to the discussions and source materials provided first by Hinrichs, “New Geographies.” Second, for treatment of sources related to Western perceptions and interpretations of Chinese healing arts, see Linda L. Barnes, Needles, Herbs, Gods, and Ghosts: China, Healing, and the West to 1848 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005). For some of the most current scholarship on the broader topic, see T.J. Hinrichs and Linda L. Barnes, eds. Chinese Medicine and Healing: An Illustrated History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, in press [Spring 2012]), In press (projected publication, Spring 2012).
• 2. Henrichs, “New Geographies,” 295.
• 3. We arrived at this formulation independently, but for an eloquent discussion of this point, see Arthur Kleinman. “‘Everything That Really Matters’: Social Suffering, Subjectivity, and the Remaking of Human Experience in a Disordering World,” Harvard Theological Review 90, no. 3 (1997): 315-35.