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The description of healing provided in this book has cast a wide net, including much more than just physical healing but also healing in relationships with others, healing in relationship with one's own self, healing in one's relationship with God, and healing on the community or cultural level as well. The focus of biomedicine on the physical alone and the neglect of other parts of the person have improved physical well-being but not their emotional health and spirituality. The resurgence of interest in many forms of religious healing testifies to this failure of allopathic medicine to heal, despite its increasing capacity to cure. Understanding and respecting the unique contributions of allopathic medicine and religious healing systems, each supporting the work of the other in true integration, is what holds the greatest hope for the wholeness and healing of persons. According to physician Ralph Snyderman, dean and chancellor of Duke University Medical Center, a new field called “integrative medicine” will be the medicine of the future.

Contrary to predictions that biomedical advances soon would eliminate vestigial needs for religious healers, by the turn of the 21st century, spiritual and religious healing actually garnered new popularity, visibility, and legitimacy. One might view the perceived conventional separation of religion and medicine in 20th-century America as something of a cultural or historical aberration, and the reemergence of religious healing in the 21st century as a rather unsurprising re-recognition of the connection between body and spirit, and between individual, community, and cosmos. This book brings together, for the first time, a thoroughly multidisciplinary and multicultural discussion of religious healing in contemporary United States. Chapters in this volume look at religious healing among Native Americans, European Americans, African Americans, Asian Americans, and Latinos.

This chapter considers frameworks and practices of religious healing among Muslims in Chicago, primarily South Asians and Arab immigrants and followers of various American Sufi movements. It contextualizes approaches to illness and wellness from Islamic perspectives and then reviews some traditional Muslim religious healing practices. The focus, however, is on aspects of spiritual healing, dream interpretation, and Sufi psychology. The chapter takes the perspective of an academic trained in the study of Islam who has lived for extended periods in Muslim societies, in particular Egypt, India, and Pakistan. The chapter describes personal and academic interest in Sufism, based on experience being a participant-observer of Western Sufi movements since the 1970s.

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.

This chapter explores religious healing among recent Somali and Great Lakes/Congolese African refugees and immigrants in the United States. As part of the more than 600,000 African-born US residents, they come from all over the continent: Sudan, where thousands have fled civil war and the repressive regime; Somalia, following civil war and the collapse of the state; Nigeria, because of ethnic violence and government repression; Rwanda and Burundi, following ethnic cleansing and genocide; and Congo/Zaire, in the shadow of government repression, economic hardship, and civil war. Increasingly familiar in these groups are the stories of hardship and persecution, flight, and arrival in the United States, the quest for a means of livelihood, and the struggle to become established in a new home. For many, there is the gnawing question of return, although this rarely happens. This chapter argues that unresolved traumas and lingering memories of conflict not only threaten to exacerbate the cycles of violence within the immigrants' societies of origin but also have the potential to afflict the American social fabric.

At one time it was believed that traditional healing would disappear in light of the great success of biomedicine, especially since religion and religious healing are usually juxtaposed as mutually antagonistic to science and biomedicine. However, recent evidence refutes this assumption. In fact, more than thirty medical schools have introduced courses on the relationship between spirituality and medicine. This chapter examines the religious underpinnings of what is ostensibly a purely scientific enterprise, the Human Genome Project (HGP) and the new genetics that form part of contemporary biomedicine. It argues that ideologies of the HGP, which utilizes the most advanced technology of the times, are sustained by religious ideas based on Judaism and Christianity. Although it may appear that contemporary scientific ideas are far removed from religious beliefs, closer scrutiny reveals that Western religious notions undergird the HGP. The chapter begins with a brief overview of modern society's shift to the secularization of medicine and then turn to the new genetics, which became an integral part of biomedicine.

This chapter examines some of the many difficult issues arising in the medico-legal area insofar as they have a religious dimension or implicate the religious liberty of the persons seeking or refusing treatment. The law concerning medical treatment is discussed and the position of adults, adolescents or teenagers, and infants is examined. The chapter also looks at the underlying assumptions represented in the disputes between the law and certain religionists who spurn conventional medical treatment in favour of exclusive reliance upon prayer or other spiritual cures. A recent trilogy of cases involving the tragic deaths of children whose parents rejected conventional medicine for, in one case, alternative medicine, and, in the other two decisions, religious healing, is presented. The second example concerns the rights of parents to circumcise their male children, a traditional religious practice that is increasingly disfavoured by the medical profession. The discussion concludes with some observations on the extent to which a liberal state accommodates the wishes of believers when they seek to determine their own or their children’s health.

This chapter explores the ways in which the Conchero dance tradition in Mexico City, as well as in many urban areas in the United States, manifests a process of religious healing that is not only collective and individual but also earth-centric yet cosmic. The chapter itself is a story of recovery, by the Concheros themselves, and by the Chicano communities with whom they have connected over the last several decades. For the Chicanos from the United States who have sought out the Conchero elders and dancers, this story represents a vital healing step toward the retrieval of indigenous ways of knowing and being. This story is also one of solidarity and mutual respect between indigenous peoples in Mexico and the United States. Based in Mexico City, La Mesa del Santo Niño de Atocha is an established mesa of danzantes (dancers) who belong to the Conchero dance community and religious society in central Mexico.

In the last two decades of the 20th century, the presence of South Asian Indians in the United States and Canada has been felt in all major walks of life. The Indian immigrant community and its first-generation descendants are a relatively affluent minority in North America. Like most immigrants, Indian immigrants remain tied to their traditional preferences for food and cuisine. In a landscape of adaptation and acculturation, sexuality presents the main challenge for Indians, particularly to the parents of adolescent children. While the community is diverse, with many regional differences, most Hindus in the United States patronize Western medicine, especially in acute illness. Still, their native assumptive system regarding the body and health and illness derived from the principles of Ayurveda continues to thrive. Strategies adopted by Hindus when seeking help and healing may not appear to a non-Indian to be what is ordinarily understood as religious healing. For an Indian, however, religion typically means more than a connection with a deity or a religious order.

This book presents a transcultural and multiethnic history of curanderismo, the folk and religious healing arts and practices of Mexican Americans. It looks at the religious and cosmological foundations of curanderos as well as their impact on multiethnic communities in the United States. It also explores curanderismo's relationship to American religious, metaphysical, and alternative medicine and healing, suggesting that curanderismo has been a constant part of Mexican and Mexican American interactions with Anglo Americans since the Mexican–American War. It shows that the practices and beliefs surrounding curanderismo, and Mexican American religions more generally, occupy an integral and influential place in religious life in the United States.

This chapter examines the ongoing hybridization of healthways in the U.S.–Mexico border region, with particular emphasis on Anglo American uses of Mexican American folk healing and similar transcultural exchanges both in the United States and in other colonial border regions. It first considers how the folk saints and metaphysical therapies of borderlands' Mexican Americans sometimes operate effectively for Anglo Americans, and what these transcultural experiences tell us about the religious history of the border. It then discusses problems and possibilities arising from white and other non-Mexican American exchanges with curanderismo and other kinds of Mexican American religious healing. It also shows how the cultural exchange of healing from Mexican Americans to Anglo Americans has been facilitated in part by deep cultural predispositions of openness to such healing in the majority white culture.

This chapter examines the importance of metaphysical worldviews at play in the lives of multiethnic populations in both northern Mexico and the American Southwest. More specifically, it considers the emergence of spirit channeling, spirit communication, and religious innovation by focusing on the life and times of the Mexican curandero Niño Fidencio. It also looks at the cult of devotion that has arisen after Fidencio's death, with hundreds of healers in Mexico and the United States channeling his spirit to bring healing and comfort to their patients. The chapter concludes by discussing the influence of fidencismo on Mexican American curanderismo and placing it in the context of Mexican espiritualismo. It suggests that fidencismo is an instance of the boundary-defying hybridization of Mexican and Mexican American religious healing.

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 book has explored how transcultural exchanges have occurred between Mexican American folk healers and Anglo American patients. It has also discussed the impact of Mexican American religious and folk healing traditions not only on Mexican Americans but also on a small but significant number of non-Mexican American patients. It has shown that the narrative predispositions of Mexican American folk healing have encountered channels of convergence with the predispositions of the American metaphysical tradition, making transcultural healing a possibility. One positive outcome of this transcultural exchange is that curanderismo has established a place for itself in the expanding world of complementary and alternative medicine. It has also allowed some curanderos in the United States to reconnect with the perceived indigenous roots of Mexican American religious healing.

This chapter traces the history of the peoples and settlement patterns of the U.S.–Mexico border region, with particular emphasis on both the religious history of the area and the colonial nature of successive waves of population. In presenting a regional history of colonial encounter and change, the chapter focuses on healing during the first 400 years after European arrival. In particular, it looks at the Spanish arrival in the region that is now northern Mexico and the southwestern United States in the mid-sixteenth century. It also considers the borderlands as a remarkable site of continuous cultural contact and colonization, providing a fertile site for transcultural exchange. Finally, it examines the emergence of a religious healing tradition in the borderlands that has been essentially hybrid in nature, along with the factors that influenced Mexican Americans to maintain curanderismo in the new American Southwest.