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Paper short abstract

Based on ethnographic research on eco-spiritual practices in Spain, this paper examines how embodied and sensorial practices reframe health as a relational and planetary condition, contributing to anthropological debates on bodies, embodiment, and climate change.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how contemporary eco-spiritual practices mobilize bodies and embodied experience to reconfigure understandings of health and human–environment relations in the context of climate crisis. Based on ethnographic research in Spain from 2024, including forest bathing (shinrin-yoku), workshops inspired by Joanna Macy’s Work That Reconnects, and related events, the study addresses the guiding question: how do eco-spiritual practices use the body and senses to produce alternative ontologies of health and care in a changing climate?

Drawing on the anthropological bodily turn, the paper approaches the body as an agentive site of subjectivity and social production (Scheper-Hughes & Lock 1987). Findings show that eco-spiritualities place the body at the center of ecological and ethical transformation in three ways. First, bodies are cultivated as sites of sensorial knowledge through slow movement, breathing, silence, and affective attunement, resonating with Csordas’s (1993) notion of somatic modes of attention. Second, health is reframed as a relational and planetary condition rather than an individual biomedical state, articulated through imaginaries of the Earth as a living or wounded body that link personal well-being to ecological degradation. Third, these practices generate embodied memories and dispositions interpreted as politically meaningful, fostering responsibility and resilience in the face of climate uncertainty.

By offering an ethnographically grounded analysis of embodied eco-spiritual practices, the paper contributes to anthropological debates on bodies and health in a changing climate, while also showing how attention to embodiment and sensorial knowledge can enrich anthropology’s methods and theoretical frameworks in the study of contemporary ecological transformations.