Religious beliefs, worldviews and theories of knowledge vividly intersected with public health during the Covid-19 pandemic and continue to shape the post-Covid healthcare landscape. The book focuses on exploring the role of different ‘ways of knowing’ or arriving at truth, i.e. epistemes, particularly those found in religious and alternative health milieus. While biomedical solutions offer a dominant narrative, these are articulated differently in global contexts. Moreover, individuals often draw upon alternative framings that are sometimes oppositional to and at other times engaged with directives from medical and governmental authorities.
The focus is on worldviews and epistemes that are often marginalized or rejected in dominant discourses – from shamanism in Korea to African Pentecostalism in Britain, from global online ‘AntiVax’ narratives to traditional Siddha medicine in South India. Detailed case studies explore the contested, competing and strategically aligned relationships between mainstream and marginal epistemes; between religious healing, spirituality and biomedicine; and between politics and belief. These explorations promote greater insight into how marginalised religious epistemes were employed. Which beliefs and practices were drawn upon to create a meaningful and effective responses? How can we better understand the depth and breadth of these reactions to design more successful public health strategies for future global health crises?
Section 1. Nuancing Concepts in Health Epistemology 1. Introduction: Complementary and Competing Epistemes – Religion, Science and Truth in a Healthcare Crisis Suzanne Newcombe and Karen O’Brien-Kop 2. Health Beliefs and Embodied Rationalities: A Pluriversal Philosophy of Lived Religion Karen O’Brien-Kop (King’s College London, UK)
Section 2. Competing Ontologies: Elasticity of Truth and Meaning
3. Religion, Spirituality, Episteme: Transreligious Epistemologies in Health, Wellbeing and Covid-19 Eugenia Roussou (Centro em Rede de Investigação em Antropologia, Portugal) 4. Trust and Doubt in the Internet Age: QAnon, Vaccine Hesitancy, and the Politics of Belief Quinton Deeley (King’s College London, UK)
Section 3. Power, Authority and Contested Truths: Belief and Public Health
5. Experience, Knowledge and Expertise: Traditional Medicine and Infectious Fevers in Contemporary India V Sujatha (Jawaharlal Nehru University, India) 6. Iran’s Clerical Power and Modern Medicine in the Age of Covid-19 Hormoz Ebrahimnejad (Southampton, UK)
Section 4. Pragmatic Complementarity: Healing and Marginalised Epistemologies
7. Pentecostal Africans and Divine Healing in ‘Secular’ Britain Abel Ugba (Leeds, UK) 8. COVID-19 and the Understanding of Illnesses in Urban Korean musok Liora Sarfati (Tel Aviv, Israel) 9. Spiritual Technologies: Afro-Brazilian Religious Epistemologies and Healing During Covid Joana Bahia (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil)
Section 5. Bridging Strategies: Experience and Biomedical Research
10. Placebo Effects, Qi, and Intention: How Biomedical Hegemony Polices Competing Paradigms Kin Cheung (Moravian, USA) 11. Daoist Meditation as Guided Framework in Psychedelic Self-Care and Therapy Dominic Steavu (Santa Barbara, USA) 12. The importance of Interrogating the Experiential Episteme: Yoga, Indian Medicine and Rhetorical Strategies of Epistemic Capital Suzanne Newcombe (Open University, UK) 13. Epistemes, Epistemologies and Public Health: Some Distinctions Ramprasad Chakravarthi (Lancaster, UK)
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