The politics of moral practice in psychotherapy and religious healing

T.N. Madan,made the study of comparative moral systems into an important mainstay of Indian sociology. In this essay we will be using the idea of 'moral practice' to compare notions of efficacy in psychotherapy and various forms of religious healing. We argue that the realm of 'the moral' in ethnographic analysis consists nor of abstract rules or ideologies, but of whatever has overwhelming practical relevance in the lives of the people and communities we study Both psychotherapy and religious healing systems define efficacy in terms of culture-specific understandings of personhood and moral order: these, however are mediated by the irreducible contingencies of social position, political strategy, and life histories of both sufferers and healers, as well as by large scale economic and political forces. Healing efficacy emerges from this study as a shifting, multi-vocal, and sometimes unattainable value. By turning our attention from the language of moral concepts to that of moral stakes, therefore, we are attempting to accommodate a concern with the concrete experience of suffering and healing as they are embedded in lived worlds of human experience.