Articles by Ana Vinea
Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry, 2023
International Journal of Middle East Studies, 2023
Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, 2019
This article examines the notion of evidence (dalil) as it circulates in a revivalist religious t... more This article examines the notion of evidence (dalil) as it circulates in a revivalist religious therapy in contemporary Egypt to address current transformations of Islamic epistemologies, especially in relation to modern science. It focuses on Quranic healing, a Salafi-oriented therapy of spirit (jinn) exorcism that has become increasingly popular, visible, and debated in the public sphere beginning with the 1980s. By tracing the semantics and pragmatics of Quranic healing's evidentiary regime, the article shows that evidence is situated and crosses two domains of knowledge, bringing together a Salafi episteme that foregrounds unmediated induction from the Quran and sunna and forms of reasoning and practice, such as empiricism and experimentation, that pertain to modern science. In this manner, evidence functions like a hinge notion that hierarchically links the religious and scientific domains, giving precedence to the former over the latter. The article argues that the centrality of evidence in this novel Salafi therapy is indicative of an epistemology that unites Islam and science under a wider theory of knowledge as transparent, egalitarian, and public. This analysis suggests new ways of understanding Salafism beyond common depictions as critical of nontextual sources and intolerant of modern formations.
Medicine Anthropology Theory, 2018
This article examines the emergence and constitution of a new affliction category in contemporary... more This article examines the emergence and constitution of a new affliction category in contemporary Egypt: wahm, meaning (self-)illusion, locally defined as the condition of being falsely convinced one is possessed by spirits called ‘jinn’, all the while exhibiting real possession symptoms. As I show, wahm transcends the domain of revivalist Islamic healing from where it originates by mobilizing and entangling Islamic and psy concepts and practices. It both exploits the local dichotomy of jinn afflictions/mental disorders and grows from the cracking of this binary. In this manner, wahm provides a new idiom for critiquing current therapeutic practices, for understanding suffering, and for analyzing modern life in today’s Egypt. Through the analysis of wahm, this article contributes to scholarly investigations of ontology and the emergence of diseases by moving the lens from biomedical categories to the terrain where biomedicine meets religious healing, highlighting not only intersections but also the new formations they engender.
Book chapters by Ana Vinea
Beyond Cadfael: Medieval Medicine and Medical Medievalism, edited by Lucy C. Barnhouse and Winston Black, 2023
Book reviews by Ana Vinea
Other publications by Ana Vinea
Islamic Occult Studies on the Rise, 2022
Africa is a Country, 2021
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Articles by Ana Vinea
Book chapters by Ana Vinea
Book reviews by Ana Vinea
Other publications by Ana Vinea