Health, Religion, and Spirituality. Interstices in a Complex Field of Knowledge. (Part I)

Monday, 7 July 2025: 13:00-14:45
Location: SJES003 (Faculty of Legal, Economic, and Social Sciences (JES))
RC22 Sociology of Religion (host committee)
RC15 Sociology of Health

Language: English and Spanish

The relationship between health, religion, and spirituality has existed in various contexts worldwide since ancient times. However, this relationship has been eroded through processes of colonization. These have privileged biomedical perspectives and marginalized other knowledge about health, illness, care, and well-being. This has given rise to the configuration of legitimization strategies by biomedicine, from which a system of institutions, specialists, and hegemonic knowledge has been established in the complex health field. Following Good (1994) and Kleinman (1973), biomedicine can be understood as a cultural system and, as such, is intertwined with subjectivity. Therefore, we can identify a power arena in the health field where diverse understandings about health, illness, and wellbeing co-exist, some of them carrying a religious and spiritual component. We argue that several interstices persist, and new ones emerge where health, religion, and spirituality overlap. This session proposes to discuss the different forms and fields in which such interstices are configured. This can include but is not limited to papers focused on analyzing legitimation strategies where the relationship between health and religion is institutionalized; the study on the configuration of therapeutic assemblages either in the illness trajectories of some social groups or by the treatment provided by specialists; religious and spiritual practices as coping strategies for emotional and mental wellbeing; and the growing expansion of healing rituals and practices related to new spiritualities.
Session Organizers:
Olga OLIVAS HERNANDEZ, CONAHCYT/ El Colegio de la Frontera Norte, Mexico and Lorena NUNEZ CARRASCO, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa
Oral Presentations
Beyond the Diagnosis: The Role of Spirituality in the Care of Patients with HIV
Daniel VALDEZ, El Colegio de la Frontera Norte, Mexico
Religious – Spiritual Coping and the Therapeutic Role of Reflexivity on Mental Health: Focus on Young Adults’ Mental Illness
Kyuhyun JUNG, Sogang University, South Korea; Seil OH, Sogang University, South Korea
Religiosity, Biopower and Comprehensiveness in Palliative Care: A Field of Tension
Mabel VIANA KRIEGER, Instituto Nacional de Câncer, Brazil
Distributed Papers
Harmonizing Worlds: Indigenous Healing and Psychological Wellbeing in South African Rural Communities
Thembeka SDINANE, South Africa; Yaseen ALLY, University of Western Cape, South Africa