Thomas Csordas is an anthropologist distinguished by his focus on medical and psychological anthropology, comparative religion, and the phenomenology of embodiment and cultural experience. His research delves into the intricate relationship between language, culture, and social change, exploring how individuals transform themselves and their understanding of the world. Through extensive ethnographic work, he investigates therapeutic processes in religious healing, the power of ritual language, and the embodied experience of illness and psychiatric conditions.
"Body, Meaning, Healing" explores the intersection of religion and medicine in 'religious healing.' It examines the human body as a cultural phenomenon, drawing on two decades of research across various healing practices. The book delves into how suffering and the sacred shape our understanding of the therapeutic process and human experience.
This study of the contemporary American faith healing movement, the Catholic Charismatic Revival, blends ethnographic details with case histories to provide a cultural analysis of the healing experience.
Students of culture have been increasingly concerned with the ways in which cultural values are 'inscribed' on the body. These essays go beyond this passive construal of the body to a position in which embodiment is understood as the existential condition of cultural life. From this standpoint embodiment is reducible neither to representations of the body, to the body as an objectification of power, to the body as a physical entity or biological organism, nor to the body as an inalienable centre of individual consciousness. This more sensate and dynamic view is applied by the contributors to a variety of topics, including the expression of emotion, the experience of pain, ritual healing, dietary customs, and political violence. Their purpose is to contribute to a phenomenological theory of culture and self - an anthropology that is not merely about the body, but from the body.