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This chapter discusses a way to conduct anthropological fieldwork and research on religious healing that involves experience. It shows how undertaking studies of religious healing using the anthropology of experience can bring about the loosening of the usual boundaries of social science. The chapter narrates experience with energy healing during the American Anthropological Association annual meetings in San Francisco, California; also a curious shamanism episode that had bearings on the primary function of shamanism; and some of the experiences of a group of healing practitioners who call themselves Alternatives. Alternatives is a group of inquiring people who explore alternative healing methods: African, Alaskan, north and south Native American, Chinese, and Philippine. In addition Alternatives include those who engage in healing via the following: nutrition, herbs, vitamins, homeopathy, exercise, laying on of hands, dreams, art therapy, music therapy, rebirthing, chiropractic, personality tests, stress management, and many other alternatives to chemical medicine.

The influence of secularization has been greater in the field of medicine than in most any other area of modern cultural life. It is for this reason that contemporary fascination with alternative healing systems that postulate the power of “subtle energies” is of particular interest to the cultural historian. Practitioners of therapeutic touch, acupuncture, traditional chiropractic, and various other forms of “energy medicine” all espouse belief in healing powers recognized by neither the religious nor the scientific traditions that have historically dominated Western cultural thought. The popularity of contemporary “energy medicine” testifies to how fully the American metaphysical tradition has filtered into the vocabulary with which middle-class Americans interpret their lives. The beliefs (doctrines) and practices (rituals) that constitute alternative healing systems enable persons to establish an interior connection with sacred powers that go well beyond the conceptual worlds of either orthodox science or orthodox religion. This chapter also discusses chiropractic medicine, the holistic health movement, and New Age energy healing.

This chapter examines pentecostals' and charismatics' participation since the 1970s in a widespread U.S. diet culture and their increasing commodification of divine healing. Whereas believers' fascination with the interconnections among diet, health, and physical perfection initially manifested most clearly in the writings of weight-loss gurus in the pentecostal-charismatic movement, by the 1980s and especially the 1990s, more and more professional healers had emerged who zeroed in on the importance of a natural diet for both health and healing. Key figures spurring this transition included Maureen Salaman, Reginald Cherry, Don Colbert, and Jordan Rubin. Their writings, which often promoted forms of healing closely tied to naturopathic medicine, sought to establish biblical justifications not only for specific diets but also for a wide range of alternative healing methodologies. The chapter concludes with discussion of the commodification of divine healing. In making the healing process more predictable, healers at the turn of the twenty-first century learned that they could make the healing process profitable as well.

This chapter examines New Age interest in curanderismo and Mexican American folk healing. It considers how the more “traditional” curanderos extend their practice to Anglo clients who almost always participate in alternative healing and have been impacted by the American metaphysical religious tradition and New Age spirituality. In order to elucidate contemporary curanderismo's convergence with New Age and alternative healing communities, the chapter focuses on the continued development of American metaphysical religion into the twentieth century. It also looks at one of the most prominent contemporary curanderos, Elena Avila, and her way of practicing Mexican American religious healing to show that curanderismo continues to undergo hybridization. Finally, it discusses the use of the concept of chakras by curanderos to explain how Mexican American as well as Mayan and other Mesoamerican healing traditions work.

This chapter examines the ways that contemporary curanderos as well as neo-shamans have endeavored to continue to “import” knowledge from Mesoamerica and South America. It shows that contemporary curanderos, in an act of cultural memory and reclamation, reconfigure their healing tradition as one that is largely indigenous rather than the result of colonial contact and oppression. It also considers new directions in curanderismo by focusing on the University of New Mexico's course on curanderismo and the growing role of neo-shamanism in contemporary Mexican American metaphysical healing. The chapter suggests that contemporary curanderismo combines an overt return to an imagined indigenous Mesoamerican and South American past with attempts to incorporate with other common alternative healing traditions such as ayurveda, Reiki, and massage therapies.