the-re-enchantment-of-bodies-the-transformative-power-of-charismatic-healings-part-1-anna-magnasco

The following is the first of a two-part series. It was originally published in issue 22.1 of the Journal for Cultural and Religious Studies. Introduction Facing the great diseases of our time – unemployment, traumatic experiences, unequal access to healthcare, racism, chronic diseases, social exclusion, alcoholism, violence, and everyday difficulties – conventional medicine often proves to be ineffective. Frequently, medical science takes the form of an ‘élite practice’, unable to guarantee therapeutic treatments to all those requiring them. Furthermore, biomedicine appears as a ‘soulless science’: the rational discourses inherited from scientific naturalism reduce the body to a mere object, depriving the patient – as a subject – of the possibility of actively participating in the construction and elaboration of the meaning of his own suffering. In this scenario, the text reads the growing presence of Pentecostal churches, of new healing theologies: charismatic communities are configured today as alternative therapeutic spaces to the conventional ones – embracing the questions of care to which traditional medicine cannot answer. In the first part of the text, we explore the theoretical assumptions of medical science in its relationship with the body, disease, and health, and then move to its reductionist habit. Subsequently, after a brief overview of the religious movement, we examine Pentecostalism’s welcome to the unanswered demands for care. Through ritual charismatic healings, sick bodies are re-enchanted, re-appropriating the semantic network that the biomedical gaze had ignored. The ‘Medical gaze’ on the Disenchanted Body: Scientific Clinical Medicine: Knowledge, Practice and Limits In contemporary and urbanized nations, biomedical science is the reigning knowledge titled to managing the body, disease and health issues. Recognized as a “most sophisticated, convenient and affordable” system, clinical medicine emerges as a hegemonic practice starting from the 19th century. In fact, the nineteenth century was crossed by the optimistic climate of the modern project: the spirit of positivism and Enlightenment reason disenchant the world, made of infallible laws and universal truths, with no room for magical or metaphysical explanations. In this context, biomedicine is recognized as a natural science and, like the others, receives the primacy of the most valid tool for observing the ‘world of facts’ – clearly separated from the ‘world of values’. Indeed, “sciences of phenomena” follow the ancient paradigm which opposes what is from what is not, nature and culture, matter and spirit, res extensa and res cogitans – in Descartes’ vocabulary. Cartesian dualism establishes the premises of scientific investigation and clinical practice: “radically materialist”, interested only in ascertaining the facts and distrustful of all those “irrelevant” and “unreal” forms of knowledge that investigate the “experiences of the spirit”. Modern ars medica definitively renounces any theurgic vocation and takes the form of a pure “experimental and quantitative science of the organism”, obtaining exclusive status in the investigation of functions and dysfunctions of the body. Accompanied by the theoretical assumptions of modern physiology and pathological anatomy, medical knowledge develops a mechanistic conception of the body: a naturally given set of cellular structures, organs, and molecules. The human organism works like a machine, whose normal functioning must be promptly restored every time it runs into some alteration of a biological nature, manifested through physical ‘signs’ – symptoms. Thus, the main assignment of clinical medicine becomes the diagnosis of the disease: the physical dimension of suffering. Diseases are mere facts of nature – “biological \[and\] universal” – that emerge when regular vital mechanisms fail. This biomedical conception adheres to an “abstract, highly technical, impersonal” explanatory model, and provides the development of a specific analysis, etiology, and prognosis in order to re-establish the “proper functioning” of the organs involved. In addition to the diagnosis, biomedicine identifies the rational treatment of the disease: the patient will follow specific steps that will lead to the “regulation of the internal environment” and the re-stabilization of the regular parameters. At this point in the argumentation, we are dealing with what a large part of medical anthropology that literature understands as a ‘dehumanizing’ turn of biomedicine: observing disease and health as empirical evidence of physical realities; the growing reductionism in medical approaches rejects all remaining dimensions of suffering experience itself. In this context, the human being is framed as a bare organic entity – not as a person, including the moral, existential, cultural, and political aspects of illness and health. Without denying the enormous success in the identification, classification, and effective resolution of the empirical phenomena investigated, medicine has the defect of dwelling almost exclusively on the biological aspects, contributing to a process of disenchantment of the body, removing every symbol and subjective meaning: The patient becomes the docile body to be manipulated and explored; robbed of autonomy so completely as almost to obliterate the meaning of being an actor. Limited to the investigation of the physical symptoms of the disease, the ‘medical gaze’ reduces the patient from a socially and historically constructed person to a mere ‘biological subject’; and it is one of the reasons that determine therapeutic ineffectiveness. In fact, patients often configure the nature of their problems through multiple narratives and representations, which do not necessarily belong to the explanatory models of biomedicine. Neglecting the “multidimensionality” of the disease produces iatrogenic effects on the healing process itself contemplated by biomedicine: more and more patients do not adhere to prescribed therapies and also turn elsewhere, e.g. Pentecostal rituals and charismatic healing processes. Organic Bodies and Social Bodies     Medical non-compliance denounces the limits of the contemporary clinic: very effective in terms of classification and empirical identification of phenomena, it often leaves semantic and existential voids, offering ‘targeted’ and not holistic therapies. After deconstructing ontological and epistemological assumptions underlying biomedicine, the reflection continues by identifying exit strategies from this disenchantment. On a theoretical level, medical anthropology offers useful tools for rethinking the conceptions of biological reductionism: the body does not correspond to a natural fact; therefore, pain is not just a technical dysfunction and health does not merely coincide with its mechanical repair. Overcoming such perspectives is challenging since they are deeply rooted in Western dualistic metaphysics, but it is also inevitable: the survival of human beings is not possible simply with the genetic equipment, but there is a need for forging – or humanizing – individuals according to the cultural lines of the social group where they grow up. The reflection of medical anthropology begins here: recognizing the body as a cultural product, socially and historically constructed, crossed or constrained by practices and discourses. Such analytical overviews certainly encourage the overcoming of the concept of the body as a bio-physical entity but force it to a ‘passive ground’ on which to inscribe social values ​​and meanings. This is the equal point raised by feminist philosopher Judith Butler against contemporary philosophical literature. Even in the humanistic context, although separated from the natural world of determinism, the body remains passively subscribed to the “inevitably binary structure of the nature/culture distinction”. Instead, in the last decade of the twentieth century, a phenomenological perspective emerged and – without rejecting the historical-cultural approach – recognized the body as an active subject through which we live and resist the meanings imposed by the social order . With a ‘mindful body’, the subjects actively inhabit the world and contribute to shaping its meanings  – in other words, bodies have performative capacity. Divine healings’: the therapeutic functions of churches Finding a specific definition of Pentecostalism is a challenging – and in some ways counterproductive – undertaking due to the considerable variety of congregations within the movement spread throughout the world. Despite these difficulties, Joel Robbins attempts a definition of the movement to include all those “forms of Christianity in which believers receive the gifts of the Holy Spirit and have ecstatic experiences such as speaking in tongues, healing, and the prophecy”. For this reflection we will use the concept of “Pentecostalism” in this broad sense, including all different movements that emerged during the 20th century that experience the spiritual gifts, although in some cases it will be more appropriate to specify that we are talking about the Catholic Pentecostal movement (CCR). For a clearer comprehension of the Pentecostal movement in the world, it is appropriate to refer to a rough classification proposed by Allan Anderson. According to this scholar Pentecostalism can be divided into its ‘classical’ form in the global context; the ‘charismatic’ one; and all those ‘nondenominational’ churches spread in most of the world. This approximate arrangement follows a fairly linear historical chronology. Scholars agree that the birth of the Pentecostal movement dates back to the Asuza Street Revival in the early 1900s – when a group of Methodist believers in Kansas began speaking in tongues.                                              Always with the difficulty of finding points in common between the various congregations, it can be said that the ‘classical’ Pentecostal movement promotes an existential model of “ecstatic Christian life based on the experience of the Apostles”. In addition to ecstatic experiences, ‘classical’ Pentecostal theology follows the doctrine of the “Full gospel”, which insists on four aspects of the Gospel: ‘personal’ salvation through Jesus, divine healing, baptism in the Holy Spirit, and the second coming of Jesus Christ. Starting in the 1950s, many Pentecostals began to recognize themselves as ‘charismatic’, distinguishing themselves from ‘classical’ Pentecostalism for more flexible and inclusive doctrines. The entry of the ‘Charismatic renewal’ in the Catholic Church will be decisive: in the full cultural ferment of the sixties, the Second Vatican Council (1967), among other things, recognizes the doctrine of the gifts of the Holy Spirit, marking the “end of a regime of doctrine practice that lasted four hundred years”. From Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, where two young students formed the first Catholic Charismatic prayer group after receiving the baptism of the Spirit, the movement rapidly spread throughout North America and then throughout the world. In 1977 a great ecumenical meeting took shape – the Kansas City Charismatic Conference – in which, for the first time, not only the classic Pentecostals but Protestants, Evangelicals, Anglicans, and Catholics took part. Finally, the third wave of the Pentecostal movement spread as of the 1970s: numerous congregations took shape all over the world which detached themselves from the Churches to which they had always belonged and created “new Christian semantics”, liquidating the prospects of the first wave of Pentecostalism. These independent communities are characterized by giving less theoretical and practical relevance to the experience of glossolalia and by introducing the doctrine of the ‘spiritual struggle’ against the world and the devil and the theology of the “prosperity gospel”, which brings health closer to wealth. Pentecostal and Charismatic Global Expansion Although its origins can be traced back to the western continent, a century after its birth the Pentecostal movement has nine million faithful scattered throughout the globe, from Africa to Oceania. Pentecostalism in all its varieties is undoubtedly the fastest-growing religious force in the world. According to José Casanova, this exponential growth that began in the 20th century will lead Catholicism to cede the primacy of the “predominant global form of Christianity” to Pentecostal movements, which will become the heart of the Christian community. However, as we noted in the earlier paragraph, Pentecostalism is not an ‘exclusive’ movement: Catholic theology is not threatened, but rather the traditional institution of Catholicism. The ever-expanding wave, therefore, includes independent churches especially on the African and Asian continents – and many Catholics, who also identify with charismatic movements. Specific data for a more accurate understanding: Ari Pedro Oro notes that in the contemporary era the percentage of religious movements has grown by 22%. In addition, 80% of these movements recognize themselves as Pentecostal. Countless studies see the global success of Pentecostalism Christianity starting from its “cultural polyglotism”: the Pentecostal movement can adapt itself to different local contexts. From the congregations that arose almost spontaneously in the university campus, to the ‘multicultural’ Pentecostal churches that welcome the most marginalized subjects of society in the urban ghettos, up to all non-Western neo-Pentecostal communities built on the ruins of an unredeemed colonial past or in response to the institutional silence in the face of the violence of war. Anna Magnasco is a graduate student in Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology at the University of Turin. Her areas of research are within the urgent framework of the Anthropocene, a concept that is capable of uniting the environment, humanity and politics in a nexus of entanglements and frictions. On the one hand, she aims to deconstruct many of our paradigms, those that have brought us this far — such as that of nature, politics, health, progress, suffering, future. Footnotes * Straight forward lines of thought probably a little more on the de-naturalization and naturalising as a discoursive praxis (e.g. Butler) Synthesis/Conclusion by author?