Spirituality, Healthcare And Social Movements In East Asia: A Transnational Perspective
CFP: 1st EANASE conference (held on Zoom every Saturday of November 2021)
This conference aims to offer the chance to reflect on the intertwined relationship between spirituality, healthcare and social movements in East Asia from a trans-national/local/cultural perspective. As a time of unprecedented changes and accelerated global interactions, the focus of the conference lies on the period between the nineteenth to the twentieth-first centuries. The emergence of new religious movements like Theosophy, Falungong and Taireido, or the popularisation of acupuncture, reiki and hypnosis worldwide, for instance, challenge reductionist binary views of East/West, tradition/modernity, science/religion. Likewise, the recent dissemination of New Age practices across East Asia or the ongoing study of Buddhist meditation by American and European psychiatrists seem to reflect broader concerns that, for the past two centuries or so, have ignored national and cultural borders – and whose wider social implications are more visible than ever.
– Potential themes and sub-themes could include but are not limited to:
– Interactions between global and local concerns in the emergence of new religious movements
– Connections of the above with modern corporate philosophies
– The popularisation of psychology and psychical research
– Mind-cure movements
– Spirituality, healthcare and the arts and literature; Orientalism, counterculture and the New Age;
– East Asian healing traditions as complementary and alternative therapies
– The dissemination of East Asian spiritual traditions
– Spirituality, healthcare and scientific disciplines
– Western esotericism in East Asia
For more information on the conference, please visit the dedicated website and please consider sending us a paper proposal by 1 September 2021. Paper proposals must include a short author bio (up to 50 words), a paper title and an abstract of no more than 300 words and 3-5 keywords about the proposed presentation.