Situating Religion and Medicine in Asia: Methodological Insights and Innovations - Paperback

by Michael Stanley-Baker (Editor)

This edited volume presents the latest research on the intersection of religion and medicine in Asia. It features chapters by internationally known scholars, who bring to bear a range of methodological and geographic expertise on this topic. The book's central question is to what extent 'religion' and 'medicine' have overlapped or interrelated in various Asian societies. Collectively, the contributions explore a number of related issues, such as: which societies separated out religious from medical concerns, at which times and in what ways? Where have medicine and religion converged, and how has such knowledge been defined by scholars and cultural actors? Are 'religion' and 'medicine' the best terms by which scholars can grapple with knowledge about the sacred and the self, destiny and disease?

Back Jacket

Situating religion and medicine in Asia illuminates how Asian practices for health, healing and spiritual cultivation were mobilised in their originary times and places. Although many such practices have survived today, they circulate in new forms - within a burgeoning global marketplace, in the imaginaries of national health bureaus, as the focus of major scholarly grant initiatives and as subjects of neurological study. Labels such as 'alternative', 'complementary' and 'wellness'- privilege medical authority and a detachment from religion writ large, implying a distance between 'medicine' and 'religion' that is not reflective of the originary contexts of these practices.

This volume makes a critical intervention in the scholarship on medical and religious practices in East, South and Southeast Asia and the Himalayas, inviting a new comparative frame outside the history of science and religion in Europe. It illustrates how practices from divination and demonography to anatomy, massage, plant medicine and homeopathy were situated within the contours of the medicine and religion of their time, in contrast to modern formations of 'medicine' and 'religion'. The book assembles empirical data about the construction of medicine and religion as social categories of practice, and enables comparison across the geographic, temporal and conceptual range, providing readers with a set of methodological approaches for future study.

Author Biography

Michael Stanley-Baker is an Assistant Professor in History at the Lee Kong-Chian School of Medicine, Nanyang Technological University