This panel examines how diverse communities, in their quests to alleviate suffering, pursue ritual and interpretative transformations of sickness as a way to negotiate or transcend medical frameworks. The first paper explores the transformative power of ritual songs through Hindu deathbed chanting, Jewish pre-burial recitations, and Shipibo Amazonian plant medicine songs. It examines “the ritual song paradox” as the productive tension within which physical affliction coexists with metaphysical perfection. The second paper focuses on the healing ritual of ayahuasca in the Church of Santo Daime in Brazil, arguing that healing results from community, bodily discipline, and a collective understanding of ayahuasca as sacred. The third paper studies Ghanaian immigrants in the US and their interpretative transformations around health as a result of migration. The final paper frames the psychiatric injection of antipsychotics as a "secular sacrament" administered within the modern "liturgy of the clinic" for schizophrenic patients within South Korea.
The comparative religious category of efficacious ritual singing offers a paradigm for considering and crafting healing futures. These songs, delivered by ritual specialists, seek to enact metaphysical transformations in physically afflicted subjects, ushering forth exalted, divine realities without disrupting pre-existing conditions of death and decay. My study is grounded in the long-standing practice of three autoethnographic contexts: Hindu deathbed chanting; Jewish pre-burial recitations; and Shipibo Amazonian plant medicine songs. Within the observable logic of such rituals, physical affliction coexists with metaphysical perfection—futures which are ritually accessible beyond linear time, although not yet fully manifest. This productive tension can be called the ritual song paradox. These healing songs are powerful tools for confronting unbearable realities without bypassing them, while encompassing them with attention and care that magnifies a more perfect world. This moves beyond biomedical paradigms of cure and provides access to perfection even in the face of suffering.
This presentation examines the processes of healing in the Church of Santo Daime in Brazil, where religious practice, indigenous knowledge, and biomedical science converge around the psychoactive brew called ayahuasca. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted across multiple Santo Daime communities, I investigate how ritual, forms of embodiment, music, vestment, space, community, and lore shape the experience and the perceived healing outcomes of ayahuasca ceremonies. My presentation will argue that the healing processes in the Church Santo Daime, although centered around the consumption of the brew ayahuasca, cannot be achieved solely through the chemical properties of the psychoactive brew. Instead, healing is the result of communal experience and support, sustained bodily discipline, and a collective understanding of ayahuasca as sacred.
Research on religion and health has shown that religious beliefs and practices are associated with both positive health outcomes and, in some cases, delays in seeking medical care. This study examines how Ghanaian immigrants in the United States draw on religion and medicine to interpret health and make health-related decisions after migration to a context where medical authority is institutionally dominant. Drawing on in-depth interviews with seventy Ghanaian immigrants and participant observation in Ghanaian churches in Houston, the study will analyze narratives about illness, healing, and medical authority across physical and mental health domains. By foregrounding religion as an interpretive framework, the study contributes to scholarship on religion, health, and migration and highlights how immigrant congregations shape approaches to health, healing, and care.
This paper explores the religious, ethical, and epistemological dimensions surrounding Long-Acting Injectable (LAI) antipsychotics for severe schizophrenia in South Korea. Moving beyond pure bioethics, this study analyses LAIs through Religious Studies, framing the psychiatric injection as a "secular sacrament" administered within the modern "liturgy of the clinic." By deconstructing the supposedly objective framework of Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM), the paper utilises the concept of "meaning response" to reveal how psychiatric efficacy heavily depends on the therapeutic alliance and "secular faith." We evaluate this ritualised clinical encounter against the WHO QualityRights framework, investigating whether LAIs function as inhumane "chemical restraints" or as instruments of empowerment. Ultimately, this research argues that EBM and traditional Faith-Based Healing (FBH) are not fundamentally opposed. Both operate on parallel mechanisms of belief, authority, and meaning-making, demonstrating that true psychiatric recovery requires a collaborative synthesis of biological intervention and faith-based trust.