Healing and Spirituality

My research projects in this theme are focussed on the negotiations of power between biomedicine and other systems of healing, particularly spiritual healing. I am interested in how people in the Global North, who have access to the best biomedicine, have challenged its ‘dominative position’ (Baer 1995). Rather than curing ‘disease’ (pertinent to a part of the body) as biomedicine does, for them healing is holistic, involving the physical, emotional, spiritual and social aspects of one’s life. Holistic spirituality is also about removing blockages to find one’s authentic self. Thus, healing is experienced as a constant process of self-transformation. In favouring traditional forms of healing from the Global South, they express a nostalgia for a pre-industrial world and a desire to take control of their lives. As Duyvendak (2011: 22) noted that, “Nostalgia is rife for safe, secure and stable places – places of refuge in a rough and tumble world.”