Nicolás Viotti

This article analyzes psychological care in urban popular sectors from a decenteredperspective. Moving beyond debates on socio-structural barriers or socio-cultural distances, the study investigates the effective forms of “production of person” actually inexistence. Based on the study of trajectories and family networks, it shows how psychological language represents a minority option compared to other ways of managing suffering/well-being. By interpreting the articulations between the “mental,” “psychological,” and “spiritual,” the work accounts for a form of subjectivation significantlydifferent from that of the psychological subject, constituting a mode of ontologicalpluralism. Likewise, it concludes that the processes of autonomization and interiorization of personal experience—ideally associated with a psychologized ontology—are channeled through other devices (religious groups, networks, and self-help). These function as translation instances better adapted to the popular world and, therefore, endowed with greater social efficacy.

Las relaciones entre imagen y formas de vínculo con lo más que humano tienen hoy un lugar destacado en los estudios sociales sobre religiosidad. En ese horizonte, este trabajo dialoga con el análisis de Hugo Suárez sobre las relaciones devocionales inscritas en diferentes narraciones cinematográficas latinoamericanas que describen tópicos clásicos de la denominada “religiosidad popular”, es decir una relación de eficacia con personas supra humanas (Santos y Vírgenes), promesas, peregrinaciones, formas de mediación material, entre otras cuestiones que componen una configuración especifica ampliamente difundida en Latinoamérica. En base a ello, se discuten algunos presupuestos teóricos del análisis entre visualidad y religiosidad en relación con su estatuto pragmático, es decir los usos y las mediaciones materiales y/o visuales, o representacional, es decir la construcción de visualidades como un orden distante de la experiencia práctica. Finalmente, se recupera la propuesta de ampliar las ciencias sociales a los registros sensibles.

Este trabajo explora las relaciones entre una vertiente de estudios de la antropología de la religión en Brasil con una red de académicos especializados en Argentina a finales del siglo XX y comienzos del XXI. Para ello, reconstruye el lugar subordinado que la religión y, sobre todo, sus formas “encantadas” tuvieron en la antropología argentina y de qué manera, durante la década de 1990, en un contexto de consolidación de un espacio académico propio, una corriente de la antropología brasileña interesada en la religión fue movilizada en algunos trabajos y trayectorias académicas de antropólogos argentinos. Además, el trabajo reflexiona sobre cómo los espacios de intercambio académico sur-sur resultaron centrales en la promoción de encuentros-intelectuales en un contexto sociopolítico específico. Asimismo, estos intercambios consolidaron un modelo de interpretación virtuoso en el análisis contrastivo entre Argentina-Brasil, desarrollando una relación tangencial y comparativa en la circulación de saberes antropológicos que pone en tensión los flujos más convencionales entre “centros” y “periferias” académicas.

As many analysts of contemporary spirituality have pointed out, the renewed public presence of alternative non-denominational spirituality, generally identified with those who define it as ‘spiritual, but not religious’, is a process that forces us to rethink the more classical relationships between religion, public sphere, and politics. In this article, the author discusses in detail the relationships between holistic lifestyles and spiritualities in relation to public distrust of COVID-19 in Argentina. The strong presence of discourses and practices related to therapeutic holism in the trajectories and arguments of distrust of official expert politics will lead to establish a relatively unanalyzed and quite unexpected relationship in studies on the politicization of contemporary spirituality.

Various resources of the so-called traditional Chinese medicine, such as taijiquan, massage, diets, or acupuncture, have become widely available in the everyday therapeutic culture of contemporary Argentina. While these resources can be found in the first half of the 20th century, it is evident that from the 1960s onward their presence is more evident, with a strong emphasis from the 1980s on. This article aims to describe the reception and popularization of body and therapeutic techniques of traditional Chinese medicine in Argentina in the 1980s through the case of Daniel Alegre, a key figure in the dissemination of Chinese therapeutic techniques. To do so, it focuses on certain key mediators in the popularization of techniques such as taijiquan and Chinese massage: teachers, promoters, and specialized magazines. All these mediators are key artifacts in the processes of massification and dissemination of traditional Chinese medicine in a broader emerging horizon associated with two simultaneous processes, the Chinese cultural transnationalization and the boom of new forms of holistic management of personal well-being.

This chapter focuses on a heterogeneous group of providers of therapeutic services, with the purpose of analyzing how they construe and assemble their therapeutic networks, and the kind of actants they engage. In the particular case of the psychoanalysts, the chapter’s purpose is to contrast their view with that of the patients whose narratives will be discussed in the next chapter. This chapter is divided into two parts: the first one concentrates on practitioners whose therapeutic networks are constructed around thin actants, according to the distinction made in the previous chapter, while the second part shifts the analysis to those whose networks are constructed around thick actants. Throughout the analysis, the attention is shifted from therapeutic practices that might fall within the usual notion of “therapeutic culture” (such as Psychoanalysis or “therapeutic Astrology”) to others (like Afro-Brazilian religions) that fall clearly outside it.

This chapter provides a general overview of the problems inherent to accepted notions on “therapeutic cultures,” and outlines the theoretical concepts that ground the analysis. The chapter argues for the necessity of broadening the realm of “the therapeutic,” adapting a “bottom-up” approach based on the analysis of therapeutic narratives. As a result, instead of simply exploring the different forms of reception or appropriation of global “therapeutic cultures,” the analysis delves into the articulation between different ways of understanding and experimenting “the therapeutic.” It argues for conceptualizing the practices under analysis as assemblages and introduces a desubstantialized notion of subjectivation in order to account for the observed variety of ways of constructing personhood. Finally, it introduces a brief methodological note.

This Introduction delineates the conditions of emergence of this project upon the perplexity caused by some unexpected preliminary results of our own research on therapeutic resources in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The surprising results prompted us to broaden the scope of our original project, extending it to the city of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The Introduction discusses certain important aspects of the national narratives constructed in Argentina and Brazil, as well as some of the similarities and differences between the two cities where we carried out our analysis. It also introduces some fundamental topics that are discussed in more depth in chapter 1, such as the limits of the concept of “therapeutic culture” as it usually appears in current literature.

This chapter focuses on therapeutic networks built around “thick actants,” that is to say, actants endowed with a relatively high degree of intentionality, feelings, some degree of consciousness, and the capacity to become central actors of moral regimes, defining good and evil. In particular, it discusses the trajectories of three women (two from Buenos Aires and one from Rio de Janeiro) deeply involved in charismatic forms of Christianity, popular forms of Catholicism and curanderismo. Their therapeutic networks mobilize thick actants, constructing a highly relational notion of personhood that is in sharp contrast with fundamental concepts related to “therapeutic culture.”

This chapter elaborates on the previous discussion about the heterogeneous and diverse nature of actants delineated earlier. It concentrates on two different paths toward the autonomization of the self that mobilize different kinds of actants: one associated with the religious (Christian) world, and another linked to practices typically associated with the notion of “therapeutic culture.” Regarding the first path, the chapter concentrates on the therapeutic trajectories of women who belong to Pentecostal or Charismatic Catholic groups. As regards the second path toward autonomization analyzed here, the chapter looks at the appropriation of some concepts associated with popular Psychology and self-help, and the concomitant mobilization of thin(ner) actants. The chapter, therefore, analyzes both “enchanted” and “disenchanted” paths toward achieving autonomy.