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Paper short abstract:

The uncertainties that neoliberalism has created and that the Covid-19 pandemic has aggravated have led ordinary people to pursue new projects of remaining healthy. While these projects are commonly understood as personal, they are in fact deeply enmeshed in politics, whether overtly or covertly.

Paper long abstract:

Alongside the increase of insecurity about health and healthcare around the world since the 1980s, the concept of wellness has emerged as a new way of thinking about bodies and health in relation to the social and natural world. This multifaceted expansion deserves more systematic analysis than it has received to date. Its different manifestations all share a concern with maintaining the body in good working order and with preventing illness, and thus the Covid-19 pandemic placed it at the centre of public debates and day-to-day concerns. While many people experience the pursuit of wellness as a personal quest of self-improvement, it is everywhere a quintessential manifestation of neoliberal modernity. Wellness discourses and practices manufacture new ideas about what the body should look like and how it should function. In addition, wellness circulates both locally and globally in the form of commodities or gifts, as well as in the form of language that is laden with political and cultural meanings. An anthropological approach is particularly relevant to understanding how people strategize to maintain a healthy balance of the body with the mind, soul, and environment, however these may be defined, starting with people’s self-understandings and the structural conditions that shape their lives, rather than from the perspective of national institutions that aim to regulate illness. Wellness serves as a barometer of changes in experiences of the body in the new economy, relationships of citizens to institutions, and ways of coping with and adapting to change in an uncertain world.

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In the therapeutic movement practice called Eurythmy, Anthroposophists – a spiritual group originating from German-speaking Europe – claim to “work out” not only the physical body but also the spiritual bodies for health and wellness, cohabiting with spirits in the middle of “secular” Europe.

Paper long abstract:

Anthroposophy is a spiritual school founded by Rudolf Steiner in 1912 in German-speaking Europe, which he called “a spiritual science.” In founding the Anthroposophical Society, Steiner aimed at bringing together occult knowledge, natural science, and Christianity. Besides developing systematic programs for school pedagogy or organic farming, both of which are still very widespread all around the world, he also developed art and movement practices that suggest a different way of being in the world, than secular or Christian understandings of health and wellness. Anthroposophists also constituted one of the two largest groups during demonstrations against Covid-19 measures in Germany, along with Neo-Nazis. In this paper, I will focus on Eurythmy, a therapeutical anthroposophical movement practice that the practitioners believe to move not only our physical body, but also our etheric body, astral body, and the ego. In this constellation, humans have a fourfold body, with each responding to different human activities such as thinking, feeling, and sensing, but also creating realities, or being in touch with other beings. For humans to be healthy, according to Anthroposophy, it is important to balance these four bodies. Eurythmy is one of the modalities through which one can align one’s bodies. This paper will analyze how these different conceptions of the body, health, and wellness coexist with biomedical knowledge within the context of Anthroposophy, and what it means to cohabitate with spirits in post-pandemic/post-truth Germany and Europe.

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Specific notions of healthy and ailing bodies play an important role in the current conspiritual milieu. I unpack this ideal of healed body, imaginaries of Slavic and native identities which connect to it and show how it feeds into political projects of conspiritual scene in the Czech Republic.

Paper long abstract:

During the covid-19 pandemic, various forms of covid-skeptical activism and political mobilization emerged within the conspiritual milieu in the Czech Republic. Intertwining discourses of conspiracy, spirituality, and healing many of these covid-skeptical activists now attempt to move beyond the pandemic and to organize themselves into more coherent and stable political force – forming cells, activist groups, and organizations, no longer concerned only with vaccine resistance, but seeking to heal the Earth and fix the society.

Specific ideas about healthy and ailing bodies inform and shape their political projects. Participating in practices of healing and self-making rooted in alternative medicine and spirituality is a crucial part of the self-identified “awakened life.” The “awakened” see themselves as inhabiting a corrupted and toxic world. Cleansing and improving one´s body constitutes a necessary step towards further political action – the world can be healed only by healing oneself first.

I explore how these notions of a healthy, cleansed, awakened body are constructed and what role they play in the political mobilization of the contemporary conspiritual scene in the Czech Republic. Ableist imaginaries of whole and perfect bodies (and minds) meet strong personal identification with Native American bodies, dreams of the resurgence of the primordial Slavic race, concerns about vaccination and biomedical authority, as well as various practices of healing and cleansing. I pay specific attention to the performance and construction of masculinity within this context and unpack how a political action can be structured around the maintenance of a healthy body beyond biomedicine.

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Mindfulness is a malleable practice which expands into new terrains. One of those is contemporary childhood invested with a heavy load of adult anxiety. I propose ethnography of one mindfulness training for children to see how various agents navigate the novel ideas of health in Poland.

Paper long abstract:

Mindfulness is a travelling and malleable practice, constantly expanding into new areas. Contemporary childhood invested with a heavy load of adult anxiety is one of those terrains in which various regimes of wellbeing are competing for people’s attention. I propose ethnography of one mindfulness training for children to see how various agents navigate the novel ideas of health and body in contemporary Poland.

Following ethnographically one mindfulness program for children age 10-15 that was designed in Poland, I will look at the novel ways in which children’s health is being claimed outside of biomedicine, yet, remaining heavily based on scientific knowledge. Located in an ambiguous terrain – between education, pedagogy, therapeutic cultures and larger practices of wellness, mindfulness for children, when conducted in a form of a course, is being shaped by divergent discourses and power relations. The program itself is designed so as to cater for various imagined local needs defining the Polish context.

In a way, the program is an example of a “do-it-yourself” product exemplifying the notion of “McMindfulness”. Yet, on the way, it is also being hacked and reconfigured by the people involved in the process – including children. Hence, I would go beyond the neoliberal critique while interpreting the gathered research material.

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The paper examines the emerging wellness economy of rural Southern Transylvania, analysing recreational and healing practices as classed practices and discussing how they are embedded in the Transylvanian rural idyll.

Paper long abstract:

In the past years rural Southern Transylvania has been the site of a revivalist movement centred around the enactment of a projected local heritage, shaped by the exonostalgia (Berliner 2014) of a Western European imaginary for an ‘unspoilt’, bucolic Arcadia to be found in the remote foothills of Transylvania. The revivalism is mobilised by a complex and cosmopolitan network of social actors engaged in an entanglement of globalised practices and values associated to lifestyle experiences including back-to-the-land movements, retreat tourism, ecotourism, New Age spirituality. The leisurescape is doubled by a foodscape defined by locavorism, mindful eating, and an emerging New Transylvanian cuisine repertoire.

The paper examines how the fluxes of cosmopolitan knowledge extract value from local symbolic socio-ecological resources and explores the resulting hybrid practices of projecting the local value onto a global market of sustainability and restoration, in which 'slow', 'mindful', 'eco-consciousness', 'locavorism', 'clean eating' and 'wellness' are touted as buzzwords feeding middle-class taste and morality. Based on ethnographic research on a femininity retreat with Ayurvedic menu, a yoga workshop in a biodiversity-rich meadow and a herb-based healing barn retreat, the paper examines the emerging wellness economy of rural Southern Transylvania, analysing recreational and healing practices as classed practices and discussing how they are embedded in the Transylvanian rural idyll.

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In this presentation I consider the ongoing appeal of non-western approaches to health and wellbeing, and how experience in New York City medical settings has complicated the medical decision- making of aging West Africans, creating life-changing cultural dilemmas.

Paper long abstract:

During the 30 to 40 years they have lived in New York City most of my West African friends have gone to see American physicians. (See Stoller 2002, Abdallah 2013, Sawadogo 2022) Some of them have been to New York City emergency rooms and a few of them have sought treatment –for asthma, heart disease, diabetes, hypertension, and cancer at New York City hospitals. Even so, the men and women I’ve known over the years have never abandoned more traditional healing approaches to illness, health, and wellbeing—divination, herbal medicines, and healing rituals performed by itinerant specialists who travel from West Africa to New York City to serve their diasporic communities. What is it about these non-western approaches to health and wellbeing that compels these men and women to seek the services of marabouts (Islamic healers), diviners, and non-Islamic healers? In this presentation I consider the ongoing appeal of non-western approaches to health and wellbeing, and how experience in New York City medical settings has altered a West African immigrant’s medical decision -making. I also consider (1) the unappealing aspects of Western medical approaches to health and wellbeing and (2) contrast them to West African systems, which continue to inspire confidence among West African immigrants in New York City.

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This paper critiques the medical pathologization of menstruation in Kerala, India, highlighting women’s promotion of period positivity through self-care, Ayurveda, and transnational feminist principles, with grassroots initiatives for comprehensive menstrual health and environmental sustainability.

Paper long abstract:

This paper interrogates the modern medical discourse of menstruation in Kerala, India, construing it as a “health crisis,” marked by the pathologization of menstruation as primarily related to conditions such as PCOD, dysmenorrhea, and PMS. However, a recent shift from this discourse is noticeable in the socio-cultural milieu of Kerala, extending beyond health practices and reflecting a broader resistance against dominant medical, neoliberal, and patriarchal narratives surrounding the female body. For instance, fieldwork revealed that contemporary Keralan women are actively promoting “period positivity” by reimagining menstruation as an occasion for self-care, sensory rapture, and homosocial bonding. Concurrently, there is a revival of indigenous medical practices, particularly Ayurveda, in the realm of reproductive and menstrual care following the COVID-19 pandemic. Embracing alternative menstrual care approaches, women engage in meditation, yoga, and mindful dancing and resort to traditional concoctions like ashokarishtam and saptasaaram as alternatives to allopathic pain relief measures. Furthermore, an interaction between transnational feminist principles and local socio-political dynamics has resulted in a unique manifestation of menstrual activism in Kerala, addressing a wide range of issues, including health, wellness, consumer rights, and environmental sustainability. This is exemplified by organisations such as the Sustainable Menstruation Kerala Collective (SMKC), which advocates for eco-friendly menstrual products and influences policies on manufacturing and waste disposal. In essence, this paper delves into diverse dimensions of menstrual health in Kerala, India, shedding light on alternative medical practices, grassroots initiatives, and the emergence of a novel feminist politics rooted in everyday resistance and innovative menstrual care strategies.

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Reviving ancient Indian medical traditions is a political move increasingly being deployed to also facilitate a national discourse on new regimes of health and wellness. What processes entail such revival in India? How do these processes play out for practitioners of Sowa Rigpa?

Paper long abstract:

In a landmark move in 2010, the Ministry of Ayush (Government of India) recognized Sowa Rigpa as an ancient Indian medical tradition, thereby legitimizing the presence and traditional healing practices of Tibetan populations in India. With the recent establishment of the National Institute for Sowa Rigpa in Ladakh, Sowa Rigpa is now bureaucratically and politically oriented toward scientific research. This paper focuses on the aftermath of Sowa Rigpa’s recognition in India, exploring the motivations of the nation-state and its implicit effect on regional stakeholders of 'revival' as a political strategy. An anthropological exploration of these dynamics foregrounds a new set of frictions among policy, practitioners, and institutes, each (re)claiming intellectual ownership.

Delving into the political implications of revivalism, a salient irony emerges. Asian medical systems are historically entrenched in religio-spiritual dimensions, yet they are now expected to be modern, secular and scientific to cater to cosmopolitan health needs. This raises questions about how practitioners navigate state ideology and changing regimes of health and wellness. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in the remote Himalayan areas of Spiti, Lahaul, and Kullu, this paper investigates ongoing processes of revival of the Sowa Rigpa medical tradition in India from the perspective of a marginalized periphery. Investigating further the aftermath of recognition and how practitioners are aligning personal aspirations with that of the state and also birthing new ways of resistance, shedding light on novel discourses that aims to facilitate a forced marriage between traditional medicine, technoscience, and religion.

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More and more patients are exploring CAM therapies as a holistic approach to health. This paper looks at Sowa Rigpa treatment realities in Europe and asks what a holistic approach looks like in these contexts and how this interpretation contributes to a distinct European character of the practice.

Paper long abstract:

The idea of holistic medical treatments and care play an important role in attracting patients to CAM therapies in European contexts, arguing that biomedicine often fails to consider patients in their psychosocial dimensions. With its pronounced emphasis on mental and emotional wellbeing, diet and lifestyle, Sowa Rigpa appears to be an ideal of holistic medical care, and practitioners often claim to fulfil this ideal in their practice as a means to distinguish themselves from biomedical approaches and practitioners as well as to propagate the benefits of Sowa Rigpa consultations and treatments.

Acknowledging its basis as a medical system that intricately intertwines body and mind and which aims to cover many of the complex psychosocial dimensions of disease, health and healing, this paper seeks to look at more nuanced treatment realities of Sowa Rigpa medical care in Europe and asks how a holistic approach in these practice contexts looks like and to what extent it can possibly fulfil its own as well as patients' expectations with regard to holistic medicine. Additionally, it will explore how the specific settings of consultations in Europe as well as a perceived neediness of patients influence how holistic Sowa Rigpa care is interpreted and support its transformation as well as the emergence of a distinct European character and politics of practice.

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This article explores embodied practises of wellbeing and rhizomatic resistance by applying posthumanist and beyond-representational theory to ethnographic, visual and sound data on therapeutic sensescape experiences of refugees and asylum seekers in the UK.

Paper long abstract:

This article explores the sensory and embodied experiences of wellbeing within place for asylum seekers and refugees, using the therapeutic sensescape concept. It applies beyond-representational and posthumanist theory to observational, visual and sound data from two studies conducted in the North West of the UK. The first is an ethnography of an urban allotment, attended as an enrichment activity by refugees and asylum seekers, and a participatory photovoice project, including soundscaping and walking interviews, exploring refugee and asylum seekers self-representation of place, belonging and citizenship. The data is organised around three themes: Embodied presence and the capacity for the body to be affected; Sensory nostalgia and transnationalism and In, and of, nature. Through this data I will discuss two questions. Firstly, what role does the sensory and embodied play in urban encounters of place-based wellbeing for refugee and asylum seekers? Secondly, by drawing on post-structural theories of power and rhizomatic resistance, I consider in what ways do therapeutic sensescape experiences act as a site for contestation? The article offers new insights into how we define and understand ‘wellbeing’ as well as the links between wellbeing, the body and resistance.

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In the contemporary world, biomedical understandings are increasingly challenged by new ideas and practices of health. These developments are fuelled by such global processes as the increasing privatisation of institutional health care and the intensifying role of digital technologies in people’s health practices. Cuba creates a particularly interesting site for exploring such transforming health practices because for decades, its socialist government has maintained a state monopoly that politically prioritized a regime of biomedicine. However, recently, in the context of an ailing socialist state, the increasing liberalisation of Cuba’s economy, a continuously deteriorating institutional health care system and constantly growing inequalities, Cubans have been compelled to find new ways to care for their health. Privately run yoga studios and gyms have sprung up in Havana, various remedies are keenly sought after in digital discussion groups, and many people grow herbal remedies in their small, urban patios. This talk draws on long-term ethnographic and more recent digital research amongst racially mixed Havana residents to examine the new and not-so-new remedies that Cubans employ in their efforts to maintain health and cure illnesses in the context of scarcity. Often, such health solutions contest the biomedical monopoly that has been central to the claims for legitimacy of the Cuban revolution, carrying the potential to express profound political dissatisfaction in a country that has for long prided itself on its medical achievements. At the same time, the political implications of such health practices are ambiguous, intertwining complexly with local social and cultural understandings of bodies.

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Focusing on the interactive relationship between neoliberalism and the restructuring of the Turkish medical profession, this study scrutinizes how traditional medicine has become crucial in changing healthcare practices. Doing so offers a critical analysis on the development of the hybrid area known as "Anatolian medicine," which draws upon conventional therapeutic modalities. Drawing on literature on the sociology of expertise and professions, the research study examines how neoliberal policies have aided in the integration of alternative medical practices into mainstream healthcare. It is necessary to see these changes as a sign of a more extensive reorganization of Turkey's medical industry. Anatolian medicine is repositioning itself within a neoliberal framework and rebranding itself by incorporating alternative treatments such as herbal cures, spiritual therapy, and traditional therapies. The study uses ethnographic methods, participant observation at the hospitals and semi-structured interviews with policymakers, practitioners of complementary and traditional medicine, and healthcare professionals. It looks at how this reorganization fits in with neoliberal concepts of consumerism, individual choice, and healthcare driven by the market. The study also looks at how this change may affect professional relationships in the medical industry, with a particular emphasis on disputes and disagreements about the evolving responsibilities, roles, and jurisdictions of medical professionals. The way that the neoliberal agenda shapes the credibility and authority of medical professionals, both mainstream and traditional, is at the center of this investigation. The commodification of health, possible effects on patient care and public health policy are some issues that might come with this change.

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Whilst seeded in Europe and North America, modern “fitness” practices and discourses have since taken root in the urban centres of the Global South, where local soils produce different fruit. This paper draws on fifteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in the gyms of Medellin (2022-3), and my interrogation of how fitness interacts with the city’s specific historical, socio-cultural, and political contexts. Here, I will draw on “New Materialist” theory (Coole and Frost 2010), to examine connections between architectural “autoconstruction” and working-out, which become particularly apparent in Medellin’s many grassroots fitness spaces: outdoor “gimnasios urbanos” and improvised “gimnasios barriales”, hewn out of cement and appropriated steel by communities of owner-users. “Autoconstruction” has been used to describe the non-professional “informal” and “pirate” construction of housing in Latin America and, teasing out the connotations of the term, I argue this construction has as much to do with selfhood as it does with housing, and that we should not differentiate between constructions made of brick and those of muscle. I argue that grassroots fitness phenomena in Medellin constitute material practices of optimism, and not only reflect agency but produce it—especially amongst the disenfranchised and emasculated. I explore how entwined carnal-architectural practices reveal the importance of the strong, fit body in Medellin’s colonial history, inhabitants’ celebrated “entrepreneurial spirit”, the peace process, and modes of urban “insurgent citizenship” (Holston 2008). I’ll close by discussing the implications of the state’s efforts to formalise and control urban gyms, and the increasing incursion of multinational chains into popular neighbourhoods.

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This paper draws from anthropological research on rare inherited metabolic disorders (IMDs) in Finland and Poland and document analysis in rare diseases. I attend to notions of the body and metabolism in informational materials for patients and their caregivers. Focusing on recent presentations, I examine how metaphor is used to understand the body and metabolism in people living with LC-FAOD (long-chain fatty acid oxidation disorders). This body is described as a smartphone equipped with a “faulty battery” (Ultragenyx 2022). Following Landecker’s (2013) distinction between an industrial and postindustrial metabolism, I juxtapose previous informational materials that presented food as an energy source with more recent presentations in which food is depicted as a signal in the larger context of communication and regulation. I argue that this shift from understanding metabolism as a factory to the idea of metabolism as a regulatory zone (Landecker 2013) is indicative of broader changes in the field of IMDs and rare diseases. The development of technologies such as newborn screening and better management of rare diseases has influenced patient mortality and morbidity. Furthermore, the growing importance of information systems and global companies within biomedicine has engendered new vocabularies that are no longer rooted in biology. Thus, this understanding of the body and metabolism as a smartphone and its battery resonates with children and adolescents. While more user friendly, the smartphone metaphor obscures the importance of infrastructures (Star 1999) and agency, which are crucial for the wellbeing of the LC-FAOD body with its faulty battery.

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After World War Two, the US shifted to systems of governance, systems of medical research and healthcare, and systems for social management that relied on the values of stability and control. Psychology and medicine began to work together in the middle of the 20th century to engineer health within the individual by tweaking an individual biological system to match a range of “normal” performance (Jackson, 2013). Contemporary health cultures, including conventional medicine, psychology, complementary and alternative medicine, as well as wellness culture, sites of inquiry in this research, have all inherited this focus on the individual, rather than the environment, as the site for intervention.

Based on two years of ethnographic interviews with patients of chronic illness and participant observation with practitioners of complementary medicine in California, US, this paper examines what “sensitivity” can provide as source of information about the relationship between the individual and the environment, and how this impacts health. It explores how sensitivity gets devalued in US culture, medicine included. Centering narratives of chronic illness and health practice, this paper explores how mainstream medicine participate in encouraging healthy and abled people to think they can avoid vulnerability through individual effort and ‘fitness.’ In reality, as disability justice advocates argue, and as Covid-19 among other epidemics of chronic illness illustrate, chronic illness is a question of timeline, not fit versus unfit.

Jackson, Mark. The Age of Stress: Science and the Search for Stability. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 2013.