ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on examining the contemporary healing beliefs and practices that prevails the debates and the discourses about fraudulent and the quack' healers. It examines the folk-healing practices in the UK, exploring in particular the example of crystal and spiritual healing, and it offers the ethnographic data that help to ground some of the discussion. The chapter highlights the anthropological perspectives on health and healing, which are inevitably linked with the discussions about cosmology, spirituality and magic, and it offers some relevant discussion about the ways in which authenticity has been constructed in the pre-modern and modern era. Bolton discusses the self-belief that is required to carry out healing acts, and the notion of belief in the performance of medical practice. The ethnography referred to here was based on research into the lives and practices of crystal and spiritual healers in the North of England.
