Abstract

VIOTTI, Nicolás. Beyond therapy and religion: a relational approach to the spiritual construction of wellbeing. Salud colect. [online]. 2018, vol.14, n.2, pp.241-256. ISSN 1669-2381.  http://dx.doi.org/10.18294/sc.2018.1519.

Taking into account the discontinuity between the body and the soul as a manifestation of the dominant “great division” of modernity, this paper intends to reflect critically on the scope of this division in the analysis of the therapeutic dimension of New Age style spirituality. Through participant observation, open-ended interviews and shared experiences with members of a spiritual movement of Indian origin, The Art of Living, carried out between 2012 and 2017 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, we describe two processes. First, the institutional discourse of the movement and its location within public disputes regarding the tension between the therapeutic and the religious. Second, we analyze regimens of everyday relationships that produce multiple agencies and a spiritual grammar. We then suggest the importance of attending to a relational and assembled framework that challenges the more conventional dualism between the therapeutic/religious in the light of a more general contemporary process of ordinarization in the management of well-being.

Keywords : Spirituality; Religion; Therapeutics; Argentina.

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