ABSTRACT
The ethnographic research underlying this paper was conducted with people in Mexico, England, Germany, and Austria who share an interest in magico-therapeutic ways of becoming ‘healthy’ and producing ‘health’, and who engage in apprenticeships in groups led by a curandera (practitioner of Latin American folk medicine) (Graf, 2009, 2013). 2 This field of social actors is characterized by a strong desire to push and transform their own concepts of ‘sociality’ (‘real-world sociality’) in ‘new directions’ (see Long and Moore, 2013, p. 3)—and, in particular, in animistic directions. According to Whyte (2009, p. 7), the allegiance to one particular medical subsystem can be seen as ‘a kind of medicinal cultural politics that places a person by expressing loyalty to one system in opposition to another’.
