Eschewing the notion that people’s spirituality and their bodily materiality are in binary opposition, this chapter examines how people engage their material bodies in their religious and spiritual practices. Rather than looking at the practices of religious institutions, it asks: What might we see differently if we focused on the ordinary, everyday embodied practices by which people, individually and collectively, literally live their religions? Bodies (e.g., senses, postures, gestures, and voices) are at the very core of individual religious experience, as well as at the center of shared religious expression and community. Examples of specific embodied practices in gardening and dancing suggest how many contemporary patterns of lived religion involve embodied practices.
This paper examines instances of ritual use of words in a diverse selection of alternative healing groups in a modern society. These words are distinguished by their users' belief that they are endowed with a power, an effectiveness, separate from and in addition to their literal meaning. Three specific features of ritual language contribute to its effectiveness: (1) its function as an objectification of power, (2) its transformative functions -especially its metaphoric and metonymic usages, and (3) its performative aspects. This paper argues that one of the key factors in healing illness is mobilizing resources of power, especially enhancing the ill person's sense of personal empowerment. Ritual language use in alternative healing is one of the foremost elements in this empowerment, because it both represents and objectifies power. Within a belief system in which they are significant, words of power indeed have the power to effect healing.
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