Transnational Body Sensibilities: Religion, Spirituality, and Moral Disputes In Contemporary Societies

How do contemporary sensibilities about the body intersect with religious and spiritual life? How do these intersections travel, transform, and generate conflict across national and cultural borders? This session invites sociological perspectives attuned to transnational dynamics to examine the entanglements between embodied practices, and religious or spiritual frameworks in turbulent times.

In contexts as varied as Latin American Pentecostalism, European wellness culture, and Asian Buddhist revivalism, the body has emerged as a key site where religious and spiritual meaning is produced, contested, and negotiated. Holistic health practices, mindfulness cultures, veganism, and human/ animal ethics reframe the body as a locus of purification and moral commitment. Ecological spiritualities intersect with religious cosmologies in ways that raise cross-cultural questions about purity, care, and the boundaries of ethical community. These questions are influenced by local traditions and power relations.

Beyond wellness and progressive spiritualities, the body also concentrates anxieties, fears, and sovereign claims that flow through transnational networks. Anti-vaccine movements and conspiratorial health discourses reveal one face of this phenomenon, but faith healing traditions, religious dietary laws, and cure, and cosmological frameworks that challenge biomedical ontologies also constitute alternative regimes of bodily truth. These diverse logics, whether rooted in Indigenous medicine, charismatic Christianity, Islamic ethical frameworks, or New Age spiritualities, coexist, hybridize, or collide with biomedical authority, raising questions about the governance of bodies.

The session welcomes empirical and theoretical contributions on body practices, food ethics, holistic health, alternative medicine, and religion-politics intersections, especially papers engaging cross-national comparisons or non-Western perspectives.