9 Supernatural Beliefs about Health and the Role of Religious Specialists in Hea
9 Supernatural Beliefs about Health and the Role of Religious Specialists in Healing
Chapter 9 audio can be accessed on Soundcloud. Instructor resources are available on Canvas Commons.
Chapter 9 Learning Objectives
At the end of this chapter, you’ll be able to:
- Examine the roles and responsibilities of religious specialists across cultures.
- Define “medical anthropology” and examine culturally-specific ailments using anthropological tools.
9.1 Religious Specialists
As you have learned in previous chapters, reinforcement of a society’s beliefs in the forms of its rituals and practices offer cohesiveness and guidance and solidify community bonds. Therefore, prescribed rituals and practices often require the leadership and authority of those who are willing and able to guide the community and its willing participants. Because the beliefs and ceremonies of religions will vary considerably from society to society and culture to culture, so do the people that guide others in the religious rituals.
All societies include people who guide and nurture the religious practices of others, people who are sought after for guidance and reassurance in an ever-changing world. Anthropologists call these people “religious specialists” and this category includes religious devotees, priests, rabbis, imams, monks, nuns, religious teachers, shamans, tarot card readers and self-help gurus, etc; all of these individuals are those that are people who seek them out for a sense of spiritual nourishment and reassurance.
These individuals are seen as being highly skilled and/or learned professionals who are experts in contacting and/or influencing supernatural beings and manipulating and connecting to supernatural forces. They are also seen as being able to convey messages to or from the supernatural being to assist their human clients. These ‘religious specialists’ may often display certain distinctive personality traits that make them well suited to offer guidance and perform the prescribed task or ritual.
We refer to people who define and/or lead a religious community as “religious specialists.” A religious specialist is typically viewed as an authority on religious and/or spiritual life. In many cases, a religious specialist is a gatekeeper to the religious community or, in other words, the religious specialist is someone who defines religious practice and spiritual life.
This can be a contentious area within the cultural realm as religious specialists might have more power than their followers to define morality, to establish facts/truths, and to decide who belongs (and doesn’t belong) to the religious identity.
As we discussed in the beginning of the semester, anthropologists use the term “enculturation” to refer to the process through which we learn our cultures. Religious specialists play a huge role in enculturation: they inform the public about “right vs wrong,” often share knowledge of the divine and the people’s history and shape the community’s overall worldvi