Paper short abstract:

Among the indigenous Huave population of south-western Mexico, Pentecostal healing through prayer is re-establishing the centrality of the social/moral dimension in dealing with illness, thus challenging the biomedical paradigm originally imposed by the state partly to contrast traditional indigenous medicine.

Paper long abstract:

Uncertainty and precariousness characterise all societies; they are nevertheless conceptualised and dealt with differently. Among many indigenous Mesoamerican populations the sense of uncertainty is explained by the consciousness of being only partly independent; one contributing factor is health, which is tightly linked to the wellness of social relations. Susto, vergüenza, invidia and brujeria are clear examples of this construction. This cosmology of health and illness is usually rejected by healthcare providers, who regard it, pejoratively, as a "folk belief". Thus, the strong presence of the state ideology through health programmes and the imposition of the biomedical paradigm have led to a twofold outcome: local people can choose between doctors or traditional healers but, in certain cases, conflict arises between the two different medical systems, considered incompatible.

Today this panorama is even more complex because of the presence of another thaumaturgic option, offered by the new religious alternatives, especially Evangelicalism and Pentecostalism. Most of the conversions from indigenous Catholicism to Protestantism result from an experience of illness successfully treated thanks to the miraculous intervention of the Holy Spirit attributed to the prayers of evangelicals.

In this paper I want to analyse how religious (Pentecostal) healing among the indigenous Huave population of south-western Mexico re-establishes the importance of morality and the connection between the individual and his/her social surrounding, albeit in another ideological framework determined by the binary dichotomy of faith and sin. The new evangelical wave attests to the failure to establish a separation between social/moral afflictions and disease.