SFAAs in Albuquerque

For the 2014 SFAA conference I organized a panel with Rochelle Rosen titled "Temporalities of Metabolic Disorders: Considering time in illness experience and interventions."  Panelists include Amy Moran-Thomas and Emily Mendenhall; Carolyn Smith-Morris will serve as a discussant. I will present a paper titled:  “The Chronicity of Healing: Conflicting Biomedical and Christian Healing Temporalities."

Abstract: Christian healing is ideologically constructed as instantaneous, individual, and efficacious because of divine intervention. However, for metabolic disorders in Samoa healing emerges as processual and efficacious because of the cultivation of interdependence between believers and the divine. Biomedical healing requires consistent and constant interventions, including pharmaceuticals, regular primary care, at times dialysis or insulin. This temporality of regular intervention suggests interdependence with technology and physicians. Many of my interlocutors refused biomedical healing temporality placing greater efficacy in Christian healing temporalities.