Publication details
Alternative spiritualities as cultural resources for reframing unusual experience
| Authors | |
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| Year of publication | 2021 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | I will focus on a deeper understanding of alternative spirituality practices and their practical use in specific life crisis. I would like to show, that these practices can play an important role in coping with different complex difficult life situations. More specifically, I will analyze the coping strategies of my interviewees suffering from unusual mental and physical symptoms. By these symptoms, I mean phenomena like hearing voices, communication with non-human beings, strange feelings in the body, uncontrollable body movement or changes in sensory perception. These symptoms resulted in a variety of personal and professional problems such as losing their job or becoming socially isolated. However, new perspective on life have also been brought through these symptoms. The majority of my interviewees re-evaluated their position in the world, relationships, various everyday practices, and habits. My interviewees try to cope with these symptoms by mobilizing various resources, from classical biomedical psychiatry to different kinds of psychology, psychotherapy, alternative medicine, or alternative spirituality. I will demonstrate with empirical data from my dissertation research how my interviewees use different practices and concepts of alternative spirituality to cope with their unusual symptoms and how they can benefit from a complex interplay between different kinds of therapy. To do so, I have used methodological and theoretical approaches from various scientific fields, such as the anthropology of health and illness, transcultural psychiatry, and science and technology studies. |
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