Contemporary Sufi-inspired healing practices in German-speaking contexts draw on concepts and practices whose meanings are reshaped as they enter contemporary healing discourses. Drawing on historical and conceptual scholarship on Sufi traditions and on previously published qualitative findings from a doctoral study of contemplative and healing practices in Germany, the analysis focuses on four practitioners with biographical or institutional connections to the Inayati tradition. It examines how concepts such as the heart (qalb), the self (nafs), purification (taṣfiya), and divine proximity are reinterpreted within contemporary understandings of healing. Healing is approached both as an emic category and as an analytical lens through which bodily experience, spiritual meaning, and therapeutic interpretation can be examined together. The analysis shows that Sufi-derived concepts are reconfigured in contemporary healing contexts through their connections with therapeutic understandings of health and well-being. These processes illustrate how religious resources can become part of contemporary healing discourses while retaining their specific historical and conceptual backgrounds.
This article examines the healing spring of ʿAin el-Haniya and its rapidly expanding pilgrimage among Ethiopian Israelis of diverse religious backgrounds. Although associated with the baptism of the Ethiopian eunuch, the site attracts pilgrims who often do not identify as Christian yet attribute healing power to its waters. Based on more than a year of ethnographic fieldwork, the study shows that healing rituals at the spring are shaped not only by the water itself but also by charismatic healers who construct and mediate ritual meanings. Rather than functioning as a meeting site of traditions, ʿAin el-Haniya emerges as a dynamic space in which religious boundaries are blurred and reconfigured. Through embodied practices, narrative reinterpretations, and social interaction, past and present, text and performance, and ideology and corporeality converge to generate new religious forms and communal identities. The site thus exemplifies the transformative potential of pilgrimage, healing, and lived religion in a complex socio-political context.
This contribution offers a review of Multicultural Religious Interactions in Ancient Central and South Asia, edited by Marc Mendoza and Ashwini Lakshminarayanan.
The Lingsar Temple and its annual festival, Pujwali, serve as a unifying event for the local Sasak Muslims and Hindus of Balinese origin. Constructed above abundant water springs in Lingsar, West Lombok, Indonesia, the temple complex holds significant religious importance due to the sacred properties attributed to its waters. This article explores recent developments in the multireligious festival. My fieldwork spans from 2017 to 2023, a period marked by significant changes. Analysing these changes provides insights into the entanglements of multicultural religious encounters during Pujawali and the ambivalence of majority–minority relations. The festival has navigated challenges such as earthquakes, the COVID-19 pandemic, shifts in power dynamics, evolving gender relations, the empowerment of the local Muslim community, and intrareligious crises within Hindu leadership. This article introduces an intrareligious perspective on the festival centred around sustaining interreligious unity and culminating in collaborative efforts between the two religious communities.
Informed by ethnographic fieldwork with humans, nonhumans, and the materiality of living traditions, this collection encourages comparative analysis, interdisciplinary collaboration, and cross-pollination among scholars of religion and Tantra across South Asia, Southeast Asia, the Himalayan region, and Europe. With its premodern origins in South Asia, Tantra has emerged as a repertoire of ritual and spiritual knowledge that has been adopted and adapted by new religious movements and spiritual-but-not-religious (SBNR) groups in both Asia and the Global North. The articles examine the complexities of Tantric careers in relation to labor, gender, embodiment, temporality, and more-than-human environments, highlighting the circulation and exchange of knowledge across and beyond geopolitical Asia. These careers unfold across domains such as ritual, meditation, healing, bodily technologies, gender and sexuality, political economy, and the negotiation of social prestige. A shared methodological focus on ethnography frames Tantra as a field of practice—what we describe as “tantricking”—understood as specialized forms of labor and relational work that mediate between humans, deities, forests, political power, and fragile ecosystems. Collectively, the contributions argue that Tantra should be approached not as an esoteric or abstract system, but as a set of pragmatic practices embedded in specific ecological, political, and multispecies contexts. By centering the work, skill, and livelihoods of practitioners, this collection demonstrates how Tantric traditions operate within entangled networks that shape both self and society, challenging anthropocentric tendencies in Tantric studies and pointing toward new directions for the ethnography of Tantra.
