The Offer of Alternative/Complementary Therapies in the Brazilian Public Health System and Considerations about the Limits of the New Age (original) (raw)
Anthropological criticism customarily identifies substantial ties between socalled alternative therapies and the new age. Two sets of parallel -although 1 connected -arguments reinforce this understanding. The first is the affirmation that there is a historic relationship between the rise and popularization of some of these therapies and the new age movement. After all, it had been in the realm of the countercultural movements that therapeutic practices such as meditation, yoga and oriental healthcare modalities expanded in the West (see . The second is that beyond a historic connection, there was an ontological compatibility between new age principles and the form of understanding the relationship between health and disease that supports alternative therapies. I have already closely addressed the delineation of these characteristics in other texts , here, I will merely indicate that alternative therapies constitute, according to a significant part of the literature, the privileged form of healthcare for subjects and groups identified with the new age. Moreover, the association made between the new age, health and alternative therapies, forms a type of tautological connection, in which the therapies themselves serve to establish the marks of what would be the new age and the new age is used to explain the phenomenon of alternative therapies. The attention that social scientists of religion have given to delineating new age phenomenon have benefitted studies about alternative therapies, given that it A previous version of this article was published in Portuguese in number 16, volume 2, of 1 the journal Revista de Estudos da Religião.
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