To Teach the Body What Is Not Good: Time, Space, and Embodiment in Religious Treatment for Drug Addiction

Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion · 2025-03-26

ABSTRACT From a cultural phenomenology approach, this paper analyzes the experiences of spiritual warfare lived in an Evangelical Rehabilitation Center. The ethnographic study was conducted in Tijuana, B.C., Mexico. The discussion focuses on three paradigmatic cases, allowing us to analyze the transition from “life in addiction” to the experience of transforming desires, which also implies a process of subjectivity. We argue that desire is a bodily phenomenon with palpable somatic manifestations. However, in an existential sense, desire is also the corporeal link between spatiality and temporality. We maintain that the corporeal subjectivity of addiction defines spatiality and temporality in a way that is particularly susceptible to formulation in religious discourse, leading to a transformative shift in orientational self‐processes of being in the world, where an existential struggle becomes spiritual warfare, simultaneously on the scale of embodiment and in a cosmic struggle between good and evil.

The journey of a living statue: Structural violence and a Honduran migrant woman's pathway toward asylum and wellbeing

Social Science & Medicine · 2024-10-09 · 1 citations

Approximately half of the world’s displaced migrant population are women, yet gender-specific analyses are often lacking. Such analyses are crucial for understanding migrant women’s unique experiences and informing policies that address their health and broader needs. This paper integrates the concept of structural violence with person-centered ethnography to examine women’s physical and mental health in contexts of displacement and migration. Using the triple trauma framework, we offer a holistic, temporal-spatial analysis of the health experiences and exposures faced by asylum-seeking women across three stages: places of origin, travel, and destination. Through the representative case of Anahi, a Honduran woman who fled to the US with her family in 2019, we identify four key themes: the persistence of structural violence and its constraints on health decisions and outcomes, the losses and suffering associated with women’s triple roles, the harms of racism and xenophobia, and the health implications of inadequate information on asylum and immigration procedures. We conclude with policy recommendations to reduce health inequities among migrant women. This study advances understanding by providing a comprehensive, gendered analysis of the structural forces shaping health outcomes for migrant women, offering insights that extend beyond a narrow focus on reproductive issues to address their physical, mental, and social well-being. • Women asylum seekers experience structural violence undermining health • Ethnographic narrative profile of a Honduran woman seeking asylum in the US • Triple trauma across country of origin, immigration journey, and relocation • Themes of decision-making, roles, racism, knowledge • Policy recommendations on women’s health, work, detention, information

Something other than its own mass: Embodiment as corporeality, animality, and materiality

Anthropological Theory · 2024-03-25 · 5 citations

Anthropological concern with embodiment began in part with consideration of Merleau-Ponty's theory of perception, and this essay continues in that vein by considering his theory of nature. Embodiment from this standpoint is our general existential condition and an indeterminate methodological field for a cultural phenomenology attuned to the immediacy of lived experience. Without claiming to define nature or human nature, the essay offers an outline of embodiment as a framework for integrating corporeality, animality, and materiality. These three domains have generated lively bodies of literature that do not always speak to one another, and that invite phenomenological critique in a world where the existential and ethical position of humanity is increasingly in question and precarious.

“Letting die” by design: Asylum seekers’ lived experience of postcolonial necropolitics

Social Science & Medicine · 2023-01-19 · 18 citations

Although the United States has been a nation of immigrants since its founding, the massive number of asylum seekers arriving at the US-Mexico Border is a relatively new phenomenon that requires attention and study. This paper describes the lived experience of three asylum seekers, demonstrating how physical and mental health are structured by US policies and politics. The in-depth accounts are informed by participant observation and policy analysis of humanitarian, non-governmental organizations advocating for asylum seekers. We focus on health and geographical trajectories using the triple trauma paradigm that includes trauma in the country of origin, trauma incurred during transit/flight, and the trauma of arrival and relocation/resettlement in the host country. We suggest that a form of necropower, understood as processes exacerbating the potentiality for death, is embedded in the structure of the US asylum apparatus.

El desafío de la sanación indígena para la Salud Mental Global

Revista de Antropología Social · 2023-11-20 · 1 citations

La psiquiatría y la antropología tienen una larga relación, de tal suerte que merece la pena examinar aspectos de cómo esa relación se traslada al campo en desarrollo de la Salud Mental Global (SMG). Un espacio en el que las dos disciplinas se solapan significativamente es en el tratamiento de los fenómenos religiosos y los rituales en relación a la salud mental, y uno de los mayores desafíos de la SMG es cómo tomar en consideración, de manera productiva, las formas de sanación indígena basadas en la religión y el ritual. En este artículo comparo textos recientes sobre SMG escritos desde el punto de vista de la psiquiatría y la antropología, observando que los textos psiquiátricos hacen hincapié en la determinación basada en la evidencia de la eficacia de los tratamientos, mientras que los textos antropológicos enfatizan una comprensión etnográfica de la experiencia del tratamiento. Conciliar estos dos énfasis constituye un desafío para el campo, atendiendo a las variaciones contextuales en los eventos de tratamiento, episodios de enfermedad, factores fenomenológicos tanto endógenos como intersubjetivos y factores sociopolíticos tanto interpersonales como estructurales. Al abordar este desafío, propongo una aproximación al proceso terapéutico que, a nivel empírico, pueda facilitar la comparación entre la diversidad de formas de curación y que, a nivel conceptual, pueda constituir un puente entre la eficacia y la experiencia. Esta aproximación se fundamenta en un modelo retórico del proceso terapéutico que incluye componentes de disposición, la experiencia de lo sagrado, la elaboración de alternativas y la materialización del cambio, que destacan la especificidad experiencial y el cambio gradual. Desplegar este modelo puede ayudar a afrontar el desafío de comprender la eficacia y la experiencia en la sanación indígena, y preparar el terreno para el reto posterior de cómo los profesionales de la SMG se relacionan e interactúan con tales formas de curación.

Language, Charisma, and Creativity

2023-04-27 · 1 citations

Exorcism in the Media

2022-01-01

Merleau-Ponty among the charismatics and peyotists

2022-06-29

This chapter brings the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty to bear on the religious implications of what the philosopher called the “sonorous being” of our embodied, fleshly existence. Csordas examines two ethnographic phenomena that extend the existential meaning of our sonorous being to the dimension of the sacred. These are the religious practices of Pentecostal-Charismatic singing in tongues and Native American Church peyote songs. The practices share the characteristic of singing without any semantic or lexical component, allowing us to reimagine vocalization, speech, and song as bodily secretions, or material emanations of sonorous being. The religious setting consecrates the natural act of vocalization. Csordas suggests that these sacred songs create a particular relationship between immanence and transcendence. Engendering this relationship in concrete experience is the significance of peyote songs and singing in tongues, and what they have most in common in addressing the imaginative force of sonorous being in defining our humanity.

Specter, Phantom, Demon

Central European University Press eBooks · 2022-05-31

7 Specter, Phantom, Demon

Central European University Press eBooks · 2022-05-31