The Routledge Handbook of Religion, Medicine, and Health

The Routledge Handbook of Religion, Medicine, and Health offers scholars of religion an impressive collection of chapters that interrogate not only the relationships among the three topics named in the volume’s title, but also the respective construction of each within contexts of historical, social, and political development. As the editors suggest in the introduction, the realities of the Covid-19 pandemic have brought questions regarding the efficacy of biomedicine to the fore in ways that indicate that the transnational consensus around the authority of modernity and its scientific edifice have become, or remain, remarkably tenuous. This capitalist and materialist authority is captured in the contemporary binary wherein biomedicine serves as the presumed default against which the vast range of religious/spiritual healing/medical practices are considered “alternative” or “complementary.” From this perspective, scholars of religion can frame many chapters with related subjects such as colonialism, indigenous knowledge, and Orientalism as they survey the epistemological hegemony of modernity. Additionally, in several chapters, cultural commodification and the effects of digital communication loom large in pointing toward an anxious future. There is, then, a sudden urgency to the larger questions surrounding the very foundations of knowledge and authority illuminated in this book that not long ago might have appeared beyond doubt.

The book is organized into five thematic sections, the last (“Religions and epidemics”) representing early responses to the Covid-19 pandemic, which appears to most authors to have exacerbated many of the longstanding social and political tensions within and among religious communities that earlier chapters explore. These brief chapters serve as reminders of the capacity of religious communities to adapt to apocalyptic challenges with novelty disguised as tradition. A standout of this section is Britta Ohm’s chapter on Indian Prime Minister Modi’s strategy to amplify his persona from ascetical yoga enthusiast to quasi avatar, showing how a dominant political group (here, Hindu nationalists) could employ religious symbolism to exploit such an apocalyptic event in real time to consolidate power.

The first section, “Healing practices with religious roots and frames,” explores the genealogy of several traditions of medical or health practices and, often, how these traditions have negotiated with colonialism and/or modernity together with biomedicine. Frequently, as these chapters indicate, the result is a divesting of religious/spiritual significance of rituals from the practice of healing, in line with the materialist understanding of biomedicine, as a way of asserting authority consonant with a reductionist epistemology. The chapters here cover a breadth of traditions and interrogate the extent to which those traditions, whether originating in China, India, or Africa, were closed systems that assimilated European (or other foreign sources of) knowledge only out of necessity. Bettina Schmidt’s “Spiritual Healing in Latin America” offers a succinct overview of the complexity of traditions emerging from indigenous, Christian, and African sources and involving special powers attributed to herbs, spiritual persons, or prayer in the maintenance of wellbeing that exemplifies the balance of general and specific across the volume.

The second section, focused on religious actors, is particularly useful for teaching settings, as it complicates the sites of alternative healing by juxtaposing analyses of Protestant Christian and Israeli Jewish contexts with more typical (i.e., non-Western) ones, such as those addressed in section one. This juxtaposition is relevant in an undergraduate setting considering the fundamental existential concerns of illness and death are presented as universal truths—biological, social, and psychological—rather than issues strictly for a putative premodern, underdeveloped world. Such complications animate the third section more acutely, for many of its chapters focus on the ubiquity of capitalism and internet mediation as forces in decision making regarding health. Internet mediation, a new but pervasive element, further complicates issues of divergent or intersecting flows of sources construed, whether accurately or not, to be traditional or novel.

The fourth section, “Boundary-making between religion and medicine,” examines divergence and distinction more overtly than the earlier sections, which understood, generally speaking, intersectionality or hybridity to be unquestioned or tacitly accepted among their subjects. Again, here a more contemporary focus also proves fruitful, with a chapter on vaccine hesitancy likely to resonate with undergraduates, as might—given the increasing prevalence of mental illness among youths—the chapter (33) examining the relationship between psychiatry/psychotherapy and religion/spirituality in North America and Europe. It should be noted that the first chapter of this fourth section, “Policing the boundaries of medical science: causality, evidence, and the question of religion,” could be considered the foundational chapter of the volume, because its presentation of the rise of biomedical professionalism and its presumed authority over the religious/spiritual forms of healing serves as the prefatory matter needed to appreciate the context of the rest of the book, at least for students who are new to these topics.  This chapter serves as something of an extension of the introduction by placing in context the default dominance of biomedicine that students taking up this book are likely to assume and experience.

Overall, there is much to recommend this book to scholars working at the crossroads of religion and medical anthropology or on any topic that takes notions of healing—broadly construed to include bodily transformation of any sort— into account. Recent political events in the United States have demonstrated the importance of the body as a site of tension between certain religious communities and biomedical perspectives. This  book does much to highlight the range of conceptions of the body, beyond the dominant models, with which religion scholars should be acquainted.

 Edward Arnold is assistant editor with the American Institute of Buddhist Studies, Columbia University Center for Buddhist Studies.

Edward Arnold

Date Of Review:

December 17, 2022