5th ISA Forum of Sociology (6-11 July 2025)

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.