[Symposium 6] Remodelling Religious Remedies: An Anthropology of Healing Through "Feeling with the World"

[SY-6] Remodelling Religious Remedies: An Anthropology of Healing Through "Feeling with the World"

Andrea De Antoni¹, Chia-hui Lu³, Xinzhe Huang⁴, Fumihiko Tsumura² (1.Kyoto University(Japan), 2.Meijo University(Japan), 3.I-Shou University(Taiwan), 4.Ritsumeikan University(Japan))

Keywords:

Religious/Spiritual Healing,Socio-Cultural Anthropology,Affect/Feeling,Environment,Comparative Phenomenology

This symposium examines the theoretical intersections between religious and spiritual healing, phenomenology, and intercultural psychiatry. It addresses how certain conditions which resist biomedical treatments may improve through religious and spiritual ritual practices that engage sensory, affective, and embodied experiences. Drawing on comparative phenomenology, the symposium explores “feeling with the world” as a methodological lens to analyze religious and spiritual healing practices. This lens emphasizes contingent interactions between bodies and environments through practice. From these interactions, specific feelings and perceptions emerge as situated within healing practices and constitute the phenomenological ground for healing.Anthropological research has criticized biomedicine's tendency to isolate illness within the individual, often overlooking the broader social, emotional, and cultural dimensions of suffering. Cultural phenomenological approaches to healing emphasize lived, bodily experience as the transformative ground of healing processes, highlighting how perceptions, feelings, and selves are transformed through culture-specific and intersubjective relations with specialists and members of the sufferer’s community.This symposium proposes a phenomenology of feeling that goes beyond narrative-based approaches. Rather than focusing solely on the stories people tell about their illnesses, this perspective prioritizes the sensory and affective experiences that unfold through practice. By focusing on situated engagements and correspondences between feeling bodies and (ritual) environments, the symposium sheds light on how healing emerges as a contingent and dynamic process. These bodily experiences, shaped by interactions with spiritual and social contexts, provide valuable insights into how individuals navigate suffering and seek well-being.By relying on ethnographic data in four different contexts, this symposium proposes a novel understanding of how an analytical focus on "feeling with the world" contributes to a comparative phenomenology of healing. It invites psychiatrists and anthropologists to consider how an understanding of the embodied, sensory, and affective dimensions, and how they are shaped by the environment, can complement and extend beyond biomedical models of healing processes.