Anthropologie religieuse de l'Afrique subsaharienne

Healing Matters. The Anthropology of Hybrid and "Traditional" Ritual Mediations in postcolonial contexts.

This monthly webinar aims to discuss contemporary healing practices, in which new forms of ritualization and ritual expertise intersect with technologized mediations and references to imagined and creatively reinterpreted traditions.

In order to define the scope of healing, we draw on research concerning the techniques and concepts of the body, the environment, new infrastructures, and power dynamics. We aim to compare phenomena such as healing practices associated with New Age and alternative spiritualities but also with new Christian movements like Pentecostalism, and as well as practices that straddle the boundaries of biomedicine and ritualization or those presented by the specialists which animate them as ancestral, which proliferate in various parts of the globe. We argue that many common features of these practices - despite their various labels and interpretations - are neither coincidental nor rooted in their archetypal nature. Instead, they are closely tied to the circulation of concepts, objects, subjects and practices within a postcolonial, globally integrated world and its center-periphery dynamics.