Call for Essays: Circulations of Religion and Medicine in North American Culture
Call for Essays: Circulations of Religion and Medicine in
North American Culture
As twenty-first-century critics we are inclined to think
of medicine and religion as oppositional disciplines with incompatible
approaches to the world. The “secularization thesis,” promulgated in the work
of Max Weber and other early-twentieth-century sociologists, has positioned
scientific objectivity as replacing religious superstition, with medicine
“switching sides” from a spiritual discourse controlled by ministers and
shamans to a scientific one produced by doctors and researchers. But this
relatively new thesis elides how, as anthropologist Linda L. Barnes notes,
“religious and medical practices often converge in that both deal with pain and
suffering, birth and death, and sexuality, growth, and decay.” This points to
an exciting new avenue for cultural studies scholarship that takes seriously
the confluence of these ostensibly exclusive disciplines.
We are seeking contributions for an edited collection
that challenges the secularization thesis as it has been applied to religion
and medicine in the United States since colonization. We are particularly
interested in cultural studies approaches that engage written
texts--literature, autobiography/life writing, sermons, poetry, creative
nonfiction, and the like--as well as film, music, and the visual arts.
Recent scholarship, flourishing particularly in fields
that study American literature before World War II, has begun to uncover how
for many Americans medicine and religion have constituted one capacious body of
knowledge. Studies from a range of disciplines, such as literary critic Justine
Murison’s The Politics of Anxiety in Nineteenth-Century Literature (2011) and
religious historian Christopher White’s Unsettled
Minds: Psychology and the American Search for Spiritual
Assurance (2009), eschew an analytical approach that presumes practical,
cultural, or epistemological conflicts between matters of the spirit and
matters of the flesh. Instead, new scholarship in a range of fields underscores
how medical knowledge was used by Americans to undergird new definitions of
morality and systems of faith.
We are interested in essays that articulate overlooked
relationships between these two discourses and their attendant vocations.
Additionally, we are looking for pieces that continue to
interpret colonial and nineteenth-century contexts, during which confluences
between religion and medicine were more readily apparent, but also pieces that
consider the uneven disaggregation, in the twentieth- and twenty-first
centuries, of medical knowledge and institutions from religious authority and
practice. Contributions are encouraged from scholars with interests in the
representation of religion and medicine across a range of fields, including but
not limited to literary criticism, history, cultural studies, religious studies,
critical and cultural theory, anthropology, and medical humanities.
Proposal Guidelines and Projected Timeline:
Please send 750-word abstracts or completed essays (no
more than 10,000 words including notes and bibliography) and a brief c.v. by
July 1, 2012 to Ashley Reed (reeda@email.unc.edu)
or Kelly Bezio (bezio@email.unc.edu).
Notification of acceptance will be sent by July 15, 2012, with completed essays
expected by January 15, 2013.
Suggested topics might include (but are not limited to):
Religion and medicine in historical-cultural context:
Medicine and religion in the colonial era: missionary
movements and disease networks, discourses of colonization and conversion
(incorporation, repudiation, assimilation), inoculation, quarantine
Nineteenth-century innovations in medical-spiritual
practices:
mind-cure, homeopathy, spiritualism, mesmerism,
phrenology, water-cure
Networks and nodes of spiritual and medical care: circuit
riders, country doctors, hospital chaplains, travelling reformers, patent
medicine shows, religious revivals, medical missionaries
Religion and medicine in mental health discourse:
psychoanalysis, behavioral therapy, Christian counseling, “reparative therapy,”
and spiritual anxieties
Addiction, self-help, and the “higher power”
Medicine and religion in reproductive medicine and the
abortion debate
Distribution of medical and spiritual knowledge: advice
books, talk shows, childrearing manuals, Oprah Winfrey and Dr. Oz
Richard Selzer and the rise of medical
narrative/narrative medicine
Medicine and religion in popular culture
Professionalization and its discontents:
Credentialing and quackery
Women in contexts of physical and spiritual healing:
midwifery, nursing, temperance, health reform
Religion, medicine and the rise of social work
Slave religion, slave medicine, and plantation science
Folk religion and folk medicine
Shamanism, faith healing, the laying on of hands
Institutionalized medicine, institutionalized religion,
and their repudiation
Cross-cultural borrowings, adoptions, and appropriations:
acupuncture, herbal medicine
Structures of meaning-making:
Narratives of physical and spiritual healing: religious
revival as spiritual cure, illness narrative as conversion narrative (and vice
versa)
Rhetorics of testimony and veridiction
Forms of charismatic authority among healers
Ritualized medical practice and (re)enchantments of
science
Secularism and secularization
Religious values/norms in American biopolitics
Defining “life” and “soul” in religious and scientific
contexts
Religion vs. science vs. pseudo-science vs. superstition
Locating the body in medical and religious discourses