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Science and Medicine in Religious Movements
Religious movements are broad-based, long-term, change-oriented collective action that develops alternatives to the major world religions or to the dominant religions of first nations. Religious reform movements occur within the parameters of the existing religions, whereas religious social movements develop alternative institutions, beliefs, and practices. Although I continue to be interested in this area, most of my research took place during the 1980s and early 1990s.
During the 1980s I completed dissertation fieldwork in Brazil, where I examined the ways in which Kardecian Spiritists, the Catholic church, and the medical profession were reconstructing sciences, religions, and medicines originally developed in Europe and North America. The monograph that resulted from the research, Spirits and Scientists (Penn State University Press), was one of the first books at the intersections of medical anthropology and the anthropology of science. It explored how sciences, religions, and therapies developed in the northern hemisphere underwent changes as they were reinterpreted across countries, social movements, and institutions. I also published a fieldwork account based on the research, Samba in the Night (Columbia University Press), and a collection of essays on Brazil and modernity, The Brazilian Puzzle (coedited with Roberto DaMatta, Columbia University Press). On returning to the U.S., I wrote a parallel book on representations of science in the controversies surrounding the New Age movement: Science in the New Age (U. Wisconsin Press).
Selected Publications
2000 "Medical Integration and Questions of Universalism." [Portuguese] In Laura Graziela Gomes, ed. Twentieth Anniversary Commemoration of Carnavais, Malandros, e Heróis. Rio de Janeiro: Editora da Fundação Getúlio Vargas.
1995 The Brazilian Puzzle: Culture on the Borderlands of the Western World. Coedited with Roberto DaMatta. Columbia University Press. Introduction, Conclusions, and "Hierarchy, Hegemony, and the Construction of Brazilian Religious Therapies" by Hess.
1995 "Preface." Magico-Religious Healers of Brazil, by Nagato Azuma and Patric Giesler. Tokyo: Arechi-Syuppansha Inc.
1994 Samba in the Night: Spiritism in Brazil. Fieldwork account. Columbia University Press.
1993 Science in the New Age: The Paranormal, Its Defenders and Debunkers, and American Culture. University of Wisconsin Press. Chinese translation: Jiangxi Education Press, 1998.
1992 "New Sciences, New Gods: Spiritism and Questions of Religious Pluralism in Latin America." Occasional Papers of the Thomas J. Watson Institute for International Studies, "Conference on Competing Gods: Religious Pluralism in Latin America." Brown University.
1992 Knowledge and Society Volume 9: The Anthropology of Science and Technology. Coedited with Linda Layne; series editor Arie Rip. JAI Press. Article by Hess:"Disciplining Heterodoxy, Circumventing Discipline: Parapsychology, Anthropologically." Link to PDF file here. Link to Elsevier press here.
1992 "Umbanda and Quimbanda Magic in Brazil: Rethinking Aspects of Bastide's Work." Archives des Sciences Sociales des Religions. 79: 139-53.
1991 Spirits and Scientists: Ideology, Spiritism, and Brazilian Culture. Pennsylvania State University Press.
1991 "On Earth as It Is in Heaven: Reading Spiritist Otherworldly Ethnographies." In Roberto Reis (ed.), Toward Socio-Criticism: Selected Proceedings of the Conference "Luso-Brazilian Literatures, A Socio-Critical Approach." Arizona State University at Tempe, Center for Latin American Studies.
1990 "Ghosts and Domestic Politics in Brazil: Some Parallels between Spirit Infestation and Spirit Possession." Ethos: Journal of the Society for Psychological Anthropology 18(4): 407-38.
1989 "Disobsessing Disobsession: Religion, Ritual, and Social Science in Brazil." Cultural Anthropology 4(2): 182-193. Early version of chapter in Spirits and Scientists.
1989 "Spirit Infestation as an Idiom of Distress: Intervention Strategies and their Psychocultural Contexts" [Abstract]. Transcultural Psychiatric Research Review 26: 33-37.
1987 "O Espiritismo e as Ciências [Spiritism and the Sciences]." Religião e Sociedade 14(3): 40-54. Early version of chapter in Spirits and Scientists.
1987 "The Many Rooms of Brazilian Spiritism." Luso-Brazilian Review 24.2: 15-34. (Abstracted in the Newsletter for the History and Sociology of Marginal Science, 1.1, 1989, pp. 3-4.).
1987 "Religion, Heterodox Science, and Brazilian Culture." Social Studies of Science 17: 465-477. Portions appeared in Spirits and Scientists.
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