Paper short abstract:

The presentation deals with Danish MUS patients' experience of spiritual healing. I will try to understand how bodily experienced images of body and self during a healing ritual work to transform the patient and how meaning subsequently is constructed by healer and patient.

Paper long abstract:

How is a ritual able to transform a sick person into a healthy person? This question is touching on an old anthropological issue, namely the working of ritual and is also the topic of this presentation. More specifically it deals with Danish MUS patients' experience and benefit of spiritual healing. MUS or medically unexplained symptoms is defined by biomedicine as: complaints of physical symptoms for which no adequate physiological basis can be found. Diagnosis is thus problematic and ambivalent. As a consequence the reality of patients' subjectively experienced symptoms is often misbelieved and unrecognized. Suffering is one way to challenge the order of a person's worldview and creates problems of meaning. MUS patients can be viewed as liminal persons, 'betwixt-and-between' social categories and as such their condition as a 'double disorder'.

One way of managing social liminality and uncertainty is a quest for meaning and MUS patients with their double disorder are in special need of meaning. Rituals are traditionally connected with uncertainty in all areas of life and also with suffering as a way to create a sense of certainty, order and meaning in a seemingly chaotic world. With a point of departure in MUS patients' experience of 'bodily-lived-meaning' I will try to develop an understanding of how bodily experienced images of body and self during a healing ritual work to transform the patient and how a bodily experienced meaning subsequently is negotiated and constructed by healer and patient in common and play an important role in the patients' transformation process.