Alternative Medicine – Soul Healers Cover Image

Алтернативна медицина – исцелитељи душе
Alternative Medicine – Soul Healers

Author(s): Marko Stojanović
Subject(s): Customs / Folklore, Health and medicine and law, Sociology of Culture, Globalization
Published by: Етнографски институт САНУ
Keywords: traditional culture; globalization; social crisis; magical practice; healers; alternative psychiatry;

Summary/Abstract: The wars and subsequent crisis in the former Yugoslavia have brought about a different, distressed value system to the populations in Serbia. One of its reflections is seen in an establishment of the so-called alternative healing systems. The contemporary, modern medicine holds that illnesses are caused by various psycho-somatic agents, therefore, I take contemporary healers to be alternative psychiatrists and therapists which balance and cure individual distresses. Crisis in societies are psycho-physical triggers that initiate structural disturbances in personalities of active and passive participants, and initiate a search for psycho-therapeutic methods which include transcendental. The processes of globalization and urbanization have helped clear up the fact that the official/established and alternative/traditional medicines have structural determination and corresponding status with the prevailing value system and religious affiliation of the population. Cultural-historic processes are often established in the alternative, and the opposite.

  • Issue Year: LIII/2005
  • Issue No: 1
  • Page Range: 389-400
  • Page Count: 12
  • Language: Serbian