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- Convenors:
-
Antti Lindfors
(University of Helsinki)
Clara Gargon (Université Laval)
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- Format:
- Panel
Short Abstract:
This panel examines how vernacular and alternative practices of health- and self-care challenge and reconfigure biomedical narratives. It highlights how these practices "unwrite" mainstream models and intersect with power, identity, and autonomy in both historical and contemporary contexts.
Long Abstract:
Contemporary notions of health, wellness, and illness are increasingly complemented and contested by vernacular and alternative practices and authorities. These counter-narratives challenge not only the dominance of biomedical models but also the underlying assumptions about gendered, racialized, and marginalized bodies, as well as broader onto-political frameworks. The panel will address how alternative health cultures critique and “unwrite” dominant medical discourses by offering forms of counter-knowledge rooted in embodied experience, community, and non-institutional expertise.
Some of the questions this panel aims to address include: how do alternative health cultures and practices, whether rooted in traditional approaches or supported by contemporary technological interventions, challenge and destabilize the biomedical narrative? How do these practices provide avenues for agency and empowerment, especially for those whose bodies or symptoms have been marginalized by mainstream medicine? What are the implications when personal experience and self-experimentation take precedence over established scientific authority in alternative health and wellness cultures?
Additionally, the panel will explore how the global wellness industry appropriates and commodifies vernacular and traditional practices, potentially “unwriting” their cultural specificity while simultaneously reinforcing neoliberal ideals of self-optimization and individual responsibility. We will also consider how collective, community-based practices may act as counter-narratives to contemporary emphases on individual agency and personal responsibility.
Ultimately, the goal is to offer critical perspectives on how health, wellness, and therapeutic knowledge are constructed, contested, and reconfigured in contemporary and historical contexts, while addressing the ways these discourses intersect with issues of power, identity, and autonomy.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper Short Abstract:
Through fieldwork and interviews with imams, psychiatrists, complementary and alternative medicine practitioners and patients, this article explores how the concepts of “ruh” (soul) and “akıl” (mind) are understood and addressed within both biomedical and alternative healing frameworks.
Paper Abstract:
This article examines the intricate relationship between biomedicine and alternative healing methods in contemporary Turkey, with a special focus on the role of jinnist imams in mental healthcare. Through fieldwork and interviews with imams, psychiatrists, complementary and alternative medicine practitioners, and patients, this article explores how the concepts of “ruh” (soul) and “akıl” (mind) are understood and addressed within both biomedical and alternative healing frameworks. It specifically highlights the varied understanding of the concepts among patients and psychiatrists, with patients often perceiving the soul as the eternal essence given to them by Allah, while psychiatrists' perception of the concepts comes through a strict biomedical lens. This disparity in understanding results in miscommunication and misunderstandings, which in turn lead to the patients’ cultural and spiritual needs not being met. As a result, patients then turn to alternative healing methods. This article also explores the role of imams in mental healthcare, especially those with expertise in jinns, highlighting the cultural and religious aspects of mental health. Despite the dominance of biomedicine in contemporary Turkey, alternative healing practices are still commonly utilized due to their cultural resonance and perceived efficacy. This article advocates for integrating biomedicine and alternative healing practices to establish a truly holistic, culturally sensitive mental healthcare system in Turkey
Paper Short Abstract:
Drawing on two cases of local health services (Brazil and the United States), we explore how health professionals develop educational processes for promoting self-managemet among people with diabetes, try to explain why those programmes fail and show how users look for alternative ways of self-care.
Paper Abstract:
According to the International Diabetes Federation, diabetes is “a pandemic of unprecedented magnitude” now affecting one in ten adults worldwide (IDF, 2021). An adequate self-management plays a key role in its treatment. Nevertheless, diabetes self-management is a hard goal for people suffering the disease and an educational challenge for health teams. Health professionals must lead successful educational processes, but social research has also shown that they often become a crucial barrier for self-management due to diverse causes (lack of interdisciplinary teams, prejudices, individualist bias…) (Usman & Pamungkas, 2018). In this paper, we try to better understand the processes of formal education for diabetes self-management through the comparison of two cases: one located in the Global North (a private hospital in Massachusetts, USA), the other in the Global South (a public Family Health Support Center in Minas Gerais, Brazil). In both cases, we find a clear gap between programmes’ aims and real implementation, as well as a biologicist approach that leads to identify certain biomedical parameters (basically, A1c, Body Mass Index and carbo-hydrates intake) as the main factors regarding therapeutic and educational proposals. Both cases are caractherised by professionals with lack of knowledge about patients’ social background and everyday habits, resulting in unsuccessful health providing practices. In this context, the users of both health systems autonomously search alternative learning ways and develop bricolage practices of self-management.
Paper Short Abstract:
This paper examines the alternative health culture among Russian-speaking residents in Germany with a Soviet or post-Soviet background. My research reveals a prevalent low level of trust in the German healthcare system and government, viewed as a rational adaptation strategy to uncertainties. This distrust is exacerbated by significant differences in healthcare systems and difficulties in accessing medical care, leading individuals to adopt unconventional practices such as self-diagnosis and importing medications. Ultimately, my research highlights a distinct culture of health that emerges from these alternative approaches to care.
Paper Abstract:
In my paper, I would like to discuss the alternative health culture developed by Russian-speaking people in Germany. My research focuses on individuals from the Russian-speaking community with a Soviet or post-Soviet background currently residing in Germany and their attitudes toward the German healthcare system. The data I have collected indicates a prevalent low level of trust among this group in the social system and the government. I view such distrust as a rational adaptation strategy to frequent crises and uncertainties, leading to the habitual circumvention of formal rules and a destabilization of the classical biomedical narrative, accompanied by a shift in doctor-patient roles.
This distrust is worsened by significant differences between healthcare systems in post-Soviet countries and Germany, along with difficulties in accessing medical care due to system overload. Shadow exchanges, importing prescription medications from other countries, self-diagnosis, self-prescribing therapies, and trips to third countries for treatment that may not always be appropriate - these practices, which are “unwritten” and remain invisible, can be interpreted negatively on one hand, while on the other hand, they (unexpectedly) prove to be effective in some situations.
As a result, my research participants resort to an alternative culture of caring for their bodies and health. This culture emphasizes not the dichotomy between traditional and non-traditional methods of treatment, but rather the emergence of a distinct shadow reality of medical practices.
Paper Short Abstract:
This paper questions whether the written birth plan has deviated from its intended use by current technocratic medical institutions. Additionally, it will explore whether writing a birth plan is ultimately beneficial for women in the context of the unpredictability of childbirth and labour.
Paper Abstract:
Labour and childbirth are liminal spaces that are widely considered to be vulnerable and unpredictable experiences for women. The written birth plan has aimed to give women the power of choice and a semblance of control during these processes. However, I ask the question: ‘is a written birth plan actually in a woman’s best interest?’ Maternity services in the UK, and who has held the power of choice therein, have historically gone through several pendulum swings. After the introduction of the National Health Service in 1948, childbirth practice was heavily male led until the second feminist movement of the 1970s that demanded autonomy be placed back in the hands of women. This led to an increase in midwives and natural birth practices, and the creation of the written birth plan. While created with good intentions, there is often a difference between what looks good on paper versus the unwritten experience of real life. Grounded in my own ethnographic field work, and supported by current quantitative and qualitative medical research, I aim to evaluate whether creating a birth plan is ultimately beneficial for women within the reality that labour and birth experiences are innately unpredictable and rarely follow a script. Additionally, I want to explore whether the birth plan--once a counterhegemonic response to the patriarchal medical treatment of childbirth--has now itself become a tool used by technocratic medical institutions as a safe-guarding tick box exercise.
Paper Short Abstract:
In the Quebec context, women's choice to circumvent the limits of the biomedical system by adopting the holistic approach is reflected in their desire to assert their agentivity in their health and encourage the process of empowerment of their bodies.
Paper Abstract:
In an attitude of resistance to biomedical care in the West today, women are increasingly turning to a network of holistic medicines, including acupuncture, osteopathy, massage therapy and naturopathy. These practices consider the individual as a whole through psychological, physical, environmental and societal factors, etc., in order to offer the most comprehensive support possible. However, female therapists and users of holistic medicines have noted numerous comparisons between the biomedical and holistic approaches, which point to certain forms of limitation. For this reason, I propose to explore the ideological, economic and material limits of two healthcare systems, the biomedical and the holistic, according to female therapists and users of holistic medicines in Quebec today. Data collection includes seventeen interviews with holistic medicine female users, twelve interviews with female therapists, a participant observation of a sacred cocoa ceremony and a dataset based on online ethnography. Preliminary results suggest that, on the one hand, the choice of a holistic approach among female users stems mainly from a high level of disappointment with biomedical care. The reasons for this disappointment include a paternalistic attitude on the part of doctors and a failure to listen to women's experiences and feelings, particularly regarding menstrual health. On the other hand, female holistic therapists recognize the various forms of limitation inherent in both approaches to health, and so encourage collaboration for the health and well-being of individuals.
Paper Short Abstract:
This paper will explore how women in contemporary paganism in Portugal utilize both vernacular and scientific knowledge about the therapeutic use of plants, alongside their lived spirituality, to contest, re-signify, and resist biomedical and patriarchal approaches to health, well-being, the body, and power.
Paper Abstract:
"Plants are not alternative medicine, they are the original medicine" has become a popular phrase on social media. Interest in the therapeutic properties of plants has been growing in Portugal in recent years, as evidenced by the number of courses on phytotherapy, natural cosmetics and herbalism that have arisen in various circles. This type of knowledge is not new. Plants have served as a therapeutic resource in different socio-cultural contexts worldwide and have been the basis of Western pharmacology. However, local knowledge about its uses has been stripped of its authority by the rise of biomedicine as an institutional and hegemonic expertise.
Practitioners of contemporary spiritualities are among those more active in utilizing this form of healing. Particularly within the context of contemporary paganism, it has grown among women of diverse generations and socio-economic backgrounds as a response to dominant medical discourses, perceived as patriarchal. This practice is seen as a means of fostering their connection with nature, reclaiming power over their bodies and health, and emphasising the importance and legitimacy of local knowledge regarding the benefits of plant use.
Drawing on research conducted within the ReSpell project - Religion, Spirituality and Wellbeing: a Comparative Approach of Transreligiosity and Crisis in Southern Europe, ref. 2022.01229.PTDC - this paper discusses how pagan women utilize plants to promote their healing and well-being, while at the same time resisting, contesting, constructing and reconfiguring biomedical, religious and heteronormative practices that highlight power relations and embodied individual and collective understandings of health, illness and well-being.
Paper Short Abstract:
The thesis analyzes representations and meanings of 'self-awareness' in individuals’ self-care practices, discusses the construction of ‘health’ and ‘illness’ narratives, and examines power relations between alternative and biomedicine from a sociocultural perspective.
Paper Abstract:
Via the insider’s (anthropological, ‘emic’) perspective, the thesis analyzes representations and meanings of 'self-awareness' in individual’s self-care practices, discusses the construction of ‘health’ and ‘illness’ narratives, and examines power relations between alternative and biomedicine from a sociocultural perspective.
Ethnographic research (2016-2019) among systematic practitioners and supporters of alternative healing in Lithuania revealed the tendency of alternative healing (and/or self-care practices) to be anticipated with the ideas of self-awareness, self-education, ‘inner self’/spiritual development’, and similar. In this thesis, the meanings of ‘self-development’ and ‘self-awareness’ within the field of non-conventional healing/self-care practices in Lithuania in the last decades will be analyzed.
Results will discuss what ‘self-development’ and ‘self-awareness’ mean in the context of self-care/healing. Why are mentioned practices important (for practitioners)?
In which ways is alternative healing culture is positioned in comparison with biomedical discourse? Might ‘self-awareness’ act as a form of ‘autonomy’ for alternative healing culture supporters? What does this autonomy represent? How is it intertwined with the identity of alternative healing culture enthusiasts?
Paper Short Abstract:
Since prenatal screening was integrated into the Swedish maternity care program, many have come to see it as a natural part of pregnancy, and while strictly voluntary, to decline is unusual. However, for those who do decline screening, their refusal challenges biomedical narratives of disability as fundamentally negative and as meant to be overcome.
Paper Abstract:
Since being added to the national maternity care program in the early 2000’s, prenatal screening has become available to most expecting parents in Sweden, informing them of the likelihood of their expected child having a congenital impairment. As noted by scholars on disability such as Alison Kafer, the medical model has long presented disability as inherently tragic – as something to be mourned if not cured or overcome. Thus, under the current biomedical narrative, refusing prenatal testing would seem like jeopardizing the happiness of your future child. Indeed, while screening is voluntary, declining the offer is uncommon and many expecting parents in Sweden see screening as a given part of pregnancy. Under such circumstances, what does it mean to refuse screening?
In this paper, I present material from interviews with parents who have declined the general offer of prenatal screening and argue that such a refusal challenges longstanding biomedical narratives of disability as fundamentally negative. While biomedicine frequently presents it in terms of deficiency, these parents instead draw on lived experiences of disability to insist on disability as a natural aspect of human diversity, and on disabled lives as worth living. By refusing to see disability mainly as a clinical issue affecting individual families, instead emphasizing its social aspects, they frame disability as a political issue, calling on the state to take responsibility for the care of all citizens, rather than handing the issue over to individual parents-to-be. Thus, through refusing prenatal screening, these parents unwrite biomedical narratives on disability.
Paper Short Abstract:
The presentation will discuss the consumer-driven medicalization of burnout. To avoid it, practices such as meditation and mindfulness should help the individual to unlearn culturally conditioned expectations and values. As one of them, at least in Slovenia, diligence is discussed in particular.
Paper Abstract:
Burnout is related to the total depletion of one’s own energy reserves. And since there is still no scientific insight into a person’s energy in the Western world – except by measuring calories – Neckel and Wagner (2017) emphasise, that contemporary burnout is an example of the “Buddhist spirit” of its consumer-driven medicalization. Indeed, Eastern practices that take (human) energy into account, such as acupuncture, yoga and qigong, are widely used when facing and recovering from the condition. They are said to help change culturally determined values and behaviours that lead individuals to burnout. One of these culturally determined values and behaviours, at least in Slovenia, is diligence. After a brief introduction to the anthropological burnout research, the author will therefore explain, how and why burnout is also associated with diligence in Slovenia. A brief historical insight into the meaning of diligence will be given, as well as its contemporary rejection, which will be further explained by presenting diligence as one of the reasons for burnout. The author will show how unlearning of certain behaviours and values is supposedly related to mindfulness, awareness and other various and globally recognised self-help techniques. In addition, the “old-faith” (staroverstvo), which emphasises the forces of nature, has recently been recognised as a culturally rooted traditional belief system with its own healing practises. It’s local roots and current popularity are therefore also briefly mentioned.
Paper Short Abstract:
Functional disorders offer a compelling lens for exploring therapeutic polarization, exposing tensions in agency, responsibility, and the limits of medical knowledge. This paper presents an ongoing ethnographic study of the contemporary onto-politics shaping these contested conditions.
Paper Abstract:
This paper examines therapeutic polarization through an ethnographic study of the contemporary onto-politics of functional disorders. These conditions—encompassing fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, and hypersensitivity—feature physical symptoms without clear organic or psychiatric causes. Characterized by complex biopsychosocial interactions and underlying nervous system dysregulation, functional disorders are resistant to simplistic explanations, posing an intriguing challenge for an ontologically nonreductive (Latour 1991) ethnography.
In a time of deepening divisions around health, science, and personal responsibility, these disorders may both mirror and fuel societal tensions and cultural anxieties—whether through the contested nature of their diagnosis, the polarized attitudes toward their treatment, or the cultural narratives that surround them. These dynamics are particularly evident in the psychosocial model for treating functional disorders, which I investigate not just as a clinical framework but as a space of negotiation where patients, professionals, and institutions grapple with the moral, epistemological, and political stakes of these conditions. The concept of therapeutic polarization captures the ideological and ethical conflicts that arise as diverse interpretations of health and illness collide.
Based on a project in its early stages, this paper draws from engagements with diverse stakeholders—patients, activists, healthcare professionals, scientists, policymakers, and journalists. By examining how functional disorders are co-produced across biomedical and sociocultural contexts, this research sheds light on how therapeutic polarization shapes contemporary perceptions of health, well-being, and moral accountability.