Abstract

BELIVEAU, Verónica Giménez  and  FERNANDEZ, Natalia Soledad. “We are body, soul and spirit”: Person, disease and processes of healing and exorcism in contemporary Catholicism in Argentina. Salud colect. [online]. 2018, vol.14, n.2, pp.161-177. ISSN 1669-2381.  http://dx.doi.org/10.18294/sc.2018.1504.

At the intersection of religion and health, demands for healing, liberation and exorcism express undefined discomforts that span from physical and psychiatric conditions to relational and psychological problems. To understand this growing demand in the population, this study seeks to analyze, on the one hand, the underlying conceptions of person and disease and, on the other, the therapeutics that priests and their assistants put into action, based on an ethnographic study with participant observation and in-depth interviews carried out between 2013 and 2017 in parishes in the city of La Plata and other localities of the province of Buenos Aires. The results enable us to understand that the conception of person based upon which therapeutic actions are carried out involves an expansion of the individual to the physical, psychological and spiritual planes, and that the notions of disease and wellbeing include the person, their environment and past generations.

Keywords : Religion; Therapeutics; Argentina.

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