Daniel Ellwanger

Daniel Ellwanger's dissertation project is concerned with the bodily-affective cultivation and discursive negotiation of healing expectations and practices in contemporary Catholic devotional culture. The project focuses on the discourses, media and ritual performances of healing at the Marian pilgrimage site of Lourdes in southern France, a Catholic sanctuary that since its inception in 1858 has maintained a reputation as a place where acts of divine grace and miraculous healings occur. The project is concerned with the ways in which Catholic practitioners engage with authorized narratives and ritualized sets of religious practices and performances, while encountering these narratives and performances with their own desires, stories and expectations. From an ethnographic research perspective, the project employs an integrated approach that draws on insights from sociology, anthropology and media theory.

The project examines the performative and material-sensual mediations, as well as the narrative framings, of healing rituals used by ritual participants, church authorities, and lay experts in order to render visible a Catholic style of devotion and cultivation. These actors utilize a combination of religious knowledge, media, and emotions in the cultivation of these practices. The aim here is not to establish a psychological link between religion, spiritual practices, and health. The objective is to examine how a religious community cultivates bodily and emotional practices under the term healing, as well as how religious knowledge and religious narratives are affectively staged and circulated.  The practices and discourses of healing, along with the contested concepts of the porosity of the religious body, attributions of agency to material objects and religious media, rituals, and ways of speaking, are situated within a particular Christian tradition of Catholic institutions in the history of European religion. Consequently, in addition to examining the contemporary aspects of religious healing within the Catholic tradition, the research project also considers the legacies of both secular criticism and religious polemics from within the Catholic tradition and other Christian denominations directed towards the sanctuary of Lourdes. This approach permits an examination of both the performances and the mediated staging of these practices, as well as the continuities and ruptures in the institutionalization of healing.