Palpating history: Magical healing and revolutionary care in rural Serbia and Macedonia (original) (raw)
Related papers
“I was told to come here in the forest to heal” Healing Practices Through the Land in Transylvania
The paper explores alternative healing practices such as engaging with plants and spirit entities on the diverse landscapes of Transylvania. while plant medicines were an intrinsic part of communist Romania, traditional, alternative and spiritual healing practices have been suppressed, and only started to resurface after the revolution. In these practices mountains and forests acquire a significant role as landscapes that provide space for interactions between people, plants, and spirit entities. Through ethnographies with spiritual healers and people who use plant medicines for self-care practices, i will argue that healing is achieved through engagements between humans and nonhumans (land, plants and spirits), practices rooted in real and imagined ancestral knowledge. i will build on recent work on human and nonhuman interactions in anthropology to consider healing as deconstructing nature/culture dichotomies. Ábrán, Ágota. “‘I Was Told to Come Here in the Forest to Heal’: Healing Practices Through the Land in Transylvania.” Transylvanian Review XXV, no. Supplement No. 1, The Changing Romanian Healthcare System (2016): 91–106.
Preserving Traditional Healing: Some Political Questions
Priests and mediums associated with “healing” folk cults have also been viewed as empowered agents of alternative modernity, and outside the priest’s caste or class-based social context. In reality, the healer is often poor, and belongs to a lower caste. He or she is subject to the demands of the upper caste, rich clans, while ritually diagnosing the ailments of the latter’s dependents in return for fi nancial and political support.
This study focuses on the role of monasteries in the medical provision of the late eighteenth-century Hungarian Kingdom, with a special interest in monastery pharmacies located in rural environments. These pharmacies and their apothecaries were gradually disappearing agents of the medical marketplace from the 1770s as a result of the strengthening endeavor of the Habsburg rulers to control the professional standards and business activity of the medical personnel in their realms. This effort coincided with the introduction of new church policies that aimed at reducing the number of monasteries and channeling their resources into pastoral care. By pointing at the impact of ecclesiastical reforms on the medical oeconomy, I argue that state interference did not merely fill the gaps in the medical supply, but it also redefined the already existing networks and activity of various practitioners, as it can be seen from the examples of the apothecary-surgeon brothers of religious orders. I will present three case studies through which I will shed light on the local embeddedness of three monastery pharmacies, namely: the Franciscans of Keszthely, the Capuchins of Hatvan, and the Paulines of Lepoglava. I will explore how successfully (or unsuccessfully) the dissolution of these monasteries could put an end to the activity of the lay brothers who were in charge of running their pharmacies and often fulfilled the tasks of surgeons, too, both inside and outside their monasteries. By exploring the ambiguities surrounding these healers, who were simultaneously associated with a stable place and with the image of itinerant healers and who routinely crossed the borders between domestic and public, charitable and commercialized, professional and popular healing practices, I will also show why they could not be compatible with the standardizing endeavors of the state.
The article is dedicated to Sephardic popular medicine, more precisely to Sephardic feminine traditional healing incantations, the way these were preserved and perpetuated in the Sarajevo Jewish community. These incantations are set, meticulous magical formulas widely distributed among Sephardic communities, that have parallels in Christian Iberian culture (the land of origin of the community's members) as well as in the culture of Ottoman Muslims and Christians (the country of Sephardic resettlement). The authors perceive these incantations as a literary genre in all regards, and the article proposes a literary-cultural analysis of all such incantations that were preserved in Bosnian tradition. The limitation to one single communal tradition allowed for a more sharp distinction between the different sub-genres, as well as for a proposal of a model that could, in future, constitute a research instrument applicable to the genre in general.
Communication of Tradition(s): Narrative Templates of Magical Healing in Urban Shamanism
Traditiones, 2023
The paper examines how Slovak traditional concepts related to magical healing are used in a group around an urban shaman living in Bratislava (Slovakia). It is argued that practitioners' stories about spiritual healing are based on narrative templates which could be identified in Slovak traditional folk stories. It is concluded that folk tradition plays an important role in adapting alternative spirituality to local conditions because it contributes to better remembrance of spiritual concepts.
2022
This dissertation focuses on analysing the ways in which people in early modern Finland and Karelia encountered and interpreted their traditional healing practices and performances, and how they represented these interpretations in recollections and narratives that they told to folklore collectors. The Finnish-Karelian healing tradition was closely connected to a worldview in which otherworldly and supranormal influences were considered to be able to affect an individual’s health, and it included many magical and ritualistic performances. Earlier studies on the subject have mostly concentrated on the perspective of ritual specialists, whereas this study focuses on the perspective of the lay people. The material corpus analysed in the study comprises over 600 archive units from the Folklore Archive of Finnish Literature Society. These archive materials consist of recollections about traditional healing situations, incantation texts, and narratives about healers. The materials were collected via ethnographic interviews from all over Finland and Karelia between 1880 and 1939. Especially in the rural provinces, the period could be described as pre-industrial and early modern, since the consequences of modernization appeared rather late there. The theoretical background of the study combines the research fields of folklore studies, ritual studies, and the cognitive science of religion. In the analyses, the study focuses on cognitive theories about memory schemas and dual processing of the mind, medical theories about the placebo effect, and folkloristic performance theories. The research methods include contextualizing, schema analysis, and theory-based qualitative analysis. From a broader methodological perspective, the study aims to both understand and explain the studied phenomena. Via the analyses in three separate research articles, this study presents that the cognitive processes of the human mind have significantly guided the ways in which the healing tradition was interpreted and represented in recollections and narratives. The study proposes that the recollections and narratives about past healing performances can be considered as metacommentaries and representations of the healing tradition, reflecting many of the same cognitive schemas that were involved in the actual healing situations. Furthermore, the analyses conclude that certain forms of intuitive thinking connected to rituals and magical thinking have mingled with the cultural aspects of the healing tradition. Finally, the study proposes that certain functions stimulating the placebo effect – such as repetitions and elaborateness of procedures – have been emphasized in the healing tradition. This dissertation is a cross-disciplinary project that aims to introduce new theoretical and methodological perspectives to folklore studies. The study proposes that the theories about the human mind and its functions can enrich the folkloristic understanding about the Finnish-Karelian healing tradition, and that historical ethnographic materials can provide valuable research data for the application of cognitive theories. Most importantly, the study demonstrates how different cultural and cognitive aspects appear and mingle with each other in the context of traditional healing.
The_Indigenous_Healing_Tradition_in_Cala.doc
In 2003, the four of us spent several weeks in Calabria, Italy. We interviewed local people about folk healing remedies, attended a Feast Day honoring St. Cosma and St. Damian, and paid two visits to the Shrine of Madonna dello Scoglio, where we interviewed its founder, Fratel Cosimo. In this essay, we have provided our impressions of Calabria. Although it is one of the poorest areas in Italy, Calabria is one of the richest in its folk traditions and alternative modes of healing.