Religions, Medicines, and Healing Unit
The Religions, Medicines, and Healing Unit welcomes paper and/or panel proposals that explore specific intersections of religious and other healing traditions and practices. Proposals should address the social context of the topic, as well as theoretical and analytical frameworks, such as how this analysis helps us to understand religions, medicine, and healing in new ways. For 2026, we welcome any proposal that addresses our goals, and we have a particular interest in the following themes:
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The Past & Future of Shamanisms
75 years ago, historian of religion Mircea Eliade published his seminal Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (1951). Ambitious, provocative, and imperfect, Eliade’s work irreversibly established the terminology and phenomenon of the shaman, the “specialist of the soul,” within the study of religion. Despite controversies surrounding his positionality and research, Eliade has proven deeply influential in the study of shamanic practice as well as the study of religion. Decades later, what space and perspective does the “shaman” still occupy within scholarly communities? We invite proposals that unpack the academic employment, evaluation, and understanding of shamanism—broadly defined. How has shamanism troubled our artificial boundaries of religion/science, material/spiritual, health/illness, power/vulnerability and more? How has the study of marginal and subaltern shamanic practices enhanced our broader understanding of religion, culture, healing techniques, and cosmological beliefs? Is there something unique and distinctly religious to the shaman’s techniques of ecstasy, or can these healing technologies be isolated, marketed, and commodified as capitalist forms of “alternative medicine”? Must shamanism be defined by a sense of the archaic, or can it also be “new,” embracing emerging techniques and practices, and gesturing to potential “futures” for the study of religion? How does “shamanism” remain a useful label and heuristic and, alternatively, how does it further the colonial project: a technique of power for othering and delegitimizing religious practices?
- Healing Future/s: Experience, Expertise, and Expectation
In keeping with the 2026 AAR presidential theme of FUTURE/S, the Religions, Medicines, and Healing Unit invites proposals that grapple with how medical and religious healing traditions imagine and work toward healthier futures. Healers, patients, and their communities do not simply wait for the future to arrive; they diagnose it, plan for it, worry about it, and occasionally try to coerce it into being. Whether it is the discipline of daily care, making interpretative sense of illness, or the hope invested in an unexpected recovery, both medical and religious approaches to healing anticipate what has not yet happened. Yet the “future” invoked in these practices is rarely neutral. It is shaped by the lived experiences of those who seek care, the authority of those who offer it, and the moral visions and social pressures that organize communities. How do people imagine a healthy future that they do not yet inhabit? Who gets to speak with authority about what that future should look like? And what happens when religious understandings of healing clash with medical ones, not only in principle but in the very practical work of tending to the unwell? Where do healing traditions resist potential futures—tacitly acknowledging the future inevitability of death and yet actively seeking to delay (or deny) its arrival? We welcome historical, ethnographic, and/or theoretical papers that take up these or related questions as we think together about how healing traditions help make, resist, and/or reinterpret the very futures that they anticipate.
The Religions, Medicines, and Healing Unit is committed to the value of diversity, equity, and social justice in our standards of excellence. For pre-arranged panels, we especially welcome proposals that reflect diversity of gender, ethnicity, race, field, method, and scholarly rank and directly address such within the proposal.
The study of religions, medicines, and healing is a growing field within religious studies that draws on the disciplines and scholarship of history, anthropology (particularly medical anthropology), phenomenology, psychology, sociology, ethnic studies, ritual studies, gender studies, theology, political and economic theory, public health, bioscientific epidemiology, history of science, comparative religion, and other interdisciplinary approaches to interpret meanings assigned to illness, affliction, and suffering; healing, health, and well-being; healing systems and traditions, their interactions, and the factors that influence them; and related topics and issues. As a broad area of inquiry, this field incorporates diverse theoretical orientations and methodological strategies in order to develop theories and methods specific to the study of illness, health, healing, and associated social relations from religious studies perspectives. Although religious texts serve as important resources in this endeavor, so do the many approaches to the study of lived religion, religious embodiment and material culture, and popular expressions of religiosity. Finally, like its sister field of medical anthropology, the field of religions, medicines, and healing encourages examination of how affliction and healing affect social bodies through fractured identities, political divides, structural violence, and colonialism. We support the work of graduate students, religion scholars, scholar-activists, and scholars in allied fields. We promote collaboration with other interdisciplinary Program Units and those focused on particular traditions and/or regions.