ABSTRACT
Patients medically diagnosed with chronic conditions of somatic illnesses or mental health issues seek support in Spiritist institutions which exist all over the country and also start to flourish abroad, like for example in the USA and Germany. Within the Brazilian Spiritist continuum, a veritable healing cooperation between health professionals, spirits, mediums, and clients constitutes a complementing space of medical and spiritual practices. Spiritists partly substitute the insufficient official (mental) health-care distribution in Brazil but also attract “incurable cases” as a last instance of hope for domestic and foreign clients. They create spaces of interaction where care and self-care, self and others, are interconnected. Based on qualitative field research in different regions of Brazil, this empirical chapter explores practices and narratives regarding the spiritual aspects of illness, cure/healing, and well-being. It will apply to people's lived experiences in the context of chronic condition and touch individual, social, cultural, political, and economic aspects. In an attempt to understand the capacities of Spiritist practices as a healing resource, the chapter will theoretically engage with approaches from the Anthropology of the Senses and Sensory Ethnography to develop a model of the “Aesthetics of Healing” which integrates different interpretative strands regarding spiritual and faith-related interaction (performance, embodiment, cognition, sensory perception) and how they shape aspects of the daily lived experiences of patients with a chronic condition.
