Encyclopedia of Latin American Religions

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-08956-0_3-1
# Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015

Alternative Therapies
Rodrigo Toniol*
Anthropology, Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, RS, Brazil

Keywords
Health; Holism; Energy; Harmonization

Definition
The term Alternative Therapies refers to knowledge, practices, and techniques for intervening in health
and sickness processes that diverge from the principles of modern Western medicine. This broad
denition becomes more precise when we recognize their historical connection to the counterculture
movements of the 1960s and 1970s. As one of the expressions of these movements, alternative
therapies despite their diversity share the following characteristics: (a) recognition of the principle
of a vital connection between the body, the world, and the universe; (b) a holistic approach to the body;
(c) rejection of the use of highly complex technologies in treatments.

Introduction
The term Alternative Therapies designates not a closed set of therapeutic procedures but rather a wide and
dynamic domain. In its most fundamental sense referring to knowledge, practices, and techniques for
intervening in health and sickness processes that diverge from the principles of modern Western
medicine the category has exceeded the bounds of the New Age movement and been adopted by
agencies like the World Health Organization (WHO) to refer to a broad set of health care practices that
are not part of that country's own tradition and are not integrated into the dominant health care system
(Zhang 2000, p. 1). Despite these different uses, though, here I shall describe alternative therapies as the
materialization of ideas relating to health formulated in a New Age context, the most common examples
of which in Latin American countries are Reiki, crystal healing, reexology, acupuncture, kinesiology,
craniosacral therapy, massage, visualization, meditation, yoga, homeopathy, nutritional and dietary
therapies, iridology, color therapy, dance and music therapy, hydrotherapy, osteopathy, chiropractic,
biodanza, polarity therapy, shiatsu, past-life regression or reincarnation therapy, healing by touch or
laying on of hands, aromatherapy, the Alexander technique, ayurveda, and herbal medicine.
Some of these therapies have historical roots in millennial practices. However, their popularization in
the West has been shaped by the New Age phenomenon. Authors like Wouter Hanegraaff (1998), Maria
Tighe, and Jenny Butler (2007) suggest that to understand the impact of specic therapeutic practices
during this period, we need to recognize the importance of the different emphases on curing processes
which the Holistic Health and Human Potential movements lent to New Age ideas of health. These
distinctions are, they argue, founded primarily on the type of therapeutic procedure favored by each, since
both movements share an approach to curing in which body, mind, and spirit form an indivisible whole.

*Email: rodrigo.toniol@gmail.com
Page 1 of 5

Encyclopedia of Latin American Religions

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-08956-0_3-1
# Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015

There is no space here to explore the characteristics of these movements in any detail, but it is worth
stressing how their different emphases promoted certain types of therapies.
The Human Potential movement centers on the idea that, especially in the second half of the twentieth
century, Western modernity imposed a kind of lifestyle that suppressed the natural human potential,
distancing people from their true selves. Recuperating this potential and the subjects connection to him
or herself is the movements main objective. To this end it has invested in the development of therapeutic
technologies inspired by the approaches of researchers and therapists like Carl Jung, Abraham Maslow,
and Wilhelm Reich. The set of therapies derived from this movement is wide ranging, especially if we set
it alongside others that also inuenced conceptions of health and curing in the New Age context, such as
transpersonal psychology and shamanic consciousness. All of these recognize self-improvement as a
condition for balancing the body, mind, and spirit.
In Wouter Hanegraaffs words, A central characteristic of Holistic health is the important role that the
mind plays in physical healing. The immunity system or, alternatively, the Indian chakra system, is seen as
the connection between the spiritual, mental and emotional faculties, on the one hand, and the physical
body, on the other (Hanegraaff 1997, p. 54). As well as emphasizing the impact that psychological
disorders have on physical health, the therapies that emerged from this perspective also shared the premise
that subjects are responsible for their own health and sickness processes. Feelings like anger and
bitterness, for example, are taken as potential causes of diseases like diabetes. To some extent, the person
is made an accomplice in their own illness, while also implying that he or she plays an active role in
staying healthy.
These observations on the emergence of alternative therapies from the movements that historically
forged the relationship between health and New Age philosophies indicate just some of the possible ways
of classifying them. Other heuristic and classicatory approaches have been systematically developed by
researchers studying the topic.
Leila Amaral (2000), for example, suggests the existence of two kinds of cure typical of New Age
therapies. The rst is harmonic curing, the goal of which is to harmonize the energies of bodies so that they
resonate with the other forces and laws of nature. In this kind of cure, bodies must vibrate in order to renew
their essential forces in synergy with cosmic laws. A recognizable afnity exists between this type of cure
and the esoteric and spiritualist ideas of the nineteenth century, which postulated the existence of relations
between the world and the heavens. Among the therapies most widely used in this group are reiki, ower
remedies, and even homeopathy. The reikian procedure of laying on of hands, for instance, is emblematic
of how connections between bodies are produced, its aim being to capture universal energy and, through
the therapists intervention, direct it to the patients more stagnant energy channels. The ow of energy
establishes a path of communicability that extends from the universe to the hands, from the hands to the
chakras, and from the chakras back to the universe. Floral therapy, in turn, involves the connection
between matter and energy with the aim of transforming a disharmonious energetic vibration into
something that enables the subject to connect with the whole.
Another kind of cure highlighted by Amaral is shamanic curing. This type of cure involves journeying
to the realm of the immaterial (the non-thing) were subtle forces transmute into material substance: in
other words, matter dissolves into energy and is recongured as matter (Amaral 2000, p. 65). This kind of
therapy may be guided by a facilitator, but it invariably depends on a set of resources and dispositions
possessed by the subject being treated. In this modality, there are constant references to the principles of
quantum physics, especially the idea that the cluster of particles forming matter is always provisional,
meaning that the world is in a constant state of becoming.
In developing her classicatory model, Ftima Tavares (2012) sets out from a description of the
unnished state of the New Age universe and the intense dynamic involved in the emergence of new
therapies and, consequently, of new therapists and user proles. Consequently, she opts to delineate the
Page 2 of 5

Encyclopedia of Latin American Religions

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-08956-0_3-1
# Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015

eld of alternative therapies through a double negation. First, Tavares writes, these therapies involve a set
of practices dissimilar to what we would recognize as the religious administration of the cure that is,
kinds of rituals and procedures designed to cure health problems performed in the context of religious
institutions. Second, another negation denitive of the practices understood as alternative therapies are
their differences to the biomedical paradigm dominant in Western societies. For Tavares, the network of
alternative therapies is situated in a mystical-esoteric nebula whose practices, although not necessarily
limited to New Age reference points, interconnect and coalesce with them.
Another potential classicatory model for alternative therapies is one that differentiates between
diagnostic practices and therapeutic treatments. The rst group includes practices such as the use of
pendulum radiesthesia, for example. The second group includes practices such as acupuncture and
phytotherapy. A third set can also be identied that includes techniques located between diagnosis and
therapy, such as therapeutic tarot (Tavares 1999).

Key Information
Alternative Therapy Circuits in Latin America
Until the mid-2000s, the distribution of centers offering alternative therapies in Latin America followed a
pattern similar to those described by authors studying the phenomenon in the United States and Europe:
these therapeutic spaces are there concentrated in large urban centers and, above all, in middle-class
districts with high levels of schooling. From the 1990s, researchers like Jos Guilherme Magnani (1999)
in So Paulo, Maria Jlia Carozzi (2004) and Maria Mercedes Saizar (2008) in Buenos Aires, and Rene
de la Torre Castellanos (2012) and Cristina Gutierrez Zuiga (2005) in Guadalajara worked to map these
circuits of alternative therapies, showing despite the local singularities the close similarities between
the phenomenon in Latin America and its manifestation in other parts of the world. This localization is
combined with a continent-wide dynamic interconnecting these spaces, shaped by the circulation of
books, therapists, and products. As Maria Jlia Carozzi observes, writing specically about the relation
between Argentina and Brazil,
In addition to the circulation of individuals and the practice of mutual referral (Amaral 1999; Carozzi 2000), in both
Argentina and Brazil, centres are also linked by a variety of New Age and alternative magazines as well as by the
organisation of New Age festivals and fairs. Brazilian literature on the topic strongly suggests that festivals and fairs play
a more important connecting role for the circuit in Brazil than they do in Argentina. In Buenos Aires, according to local
organisers, it was only in the beginning of the movement, during the 1980s, that large numbers of people attended
festivals. In the rst years of the following decade, mutual recommendation, gossip, magazines and books were the main
fuel of contacts and circulation from one discipline to another. (Carozzi 2007, p. 344)

This circulation of materials, people, and ideas enabled the rapid popularization of alternative therapies
in Latin America from the 1980s onward. As well as expanding the market in New Age consumer goods,
this dynamic also allowed holistic therapists to be trained on short courses run by masters and speakers
who toured the integrative centers, alternative communities, and other New Age spaces (Russo 1993;
Tavares 2012).
The landscape of therapies and therapist training quickly became transformed in the 2000s, however,
when a series of controls on these practices were introduced by ofcial bodies responsible for regulating
national health services. In 2006, for example, the Brazilian government introduced the National Policy
for Integrative and Complementary Practices, which altered the map of the spaces providing therapies by
making alternative therapies available in the countrys public hospitals as part of national policy (Toniol
2014).

Page 3 of 5

Encyclopedia of Latin American Religions

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-08956-0_3-1
# Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015

Alternative Therapies in Latin America: Singular Aspects

The diversity of New Age in Latin America prevents us from making sweeping generalizations about the
singular characteristics differentiating alternative therapies across the region. In each country, the
therapies became established in their own way, developing their own distinctive emphases. However,
authors like Rene de la Torre Castellanos (2012) have argued that the diverse range of beliefs forming the
New Age movement, with the many different alternative therapies being just one outcome, have not
evolved in parallel to or entirely disconnected from religious traditions: on the contrary, they reveal a
predilection for the traditional, ancestral, and pre-Columbian, since the references to the past enable
imaginaries to be redrawn without losing sight of the millennial religious heritage. In this case the singular
forms taken by alternative therapies in Latin America are related to the regions own traditions. This
allows us to theorize the regularities of the phenomenon of new religiosities and alternative therapies
without taking them to be invariable. At issue is the possibility of connecting the alternative therapies
practiced in Latin America to the regions popular religiosities. This would explain the continuity of Latin
American therapeutic practices and, simultaneously, their discontinuity as well: for example, while in
Brazil these therapies resonate with the tradition of Kardecist spiritism, in Mexico they developed
transversally in interaction with syncretic Catholicism and merged with indigenous ritualism.

Cross-References
CAM
Harmonisation
Health
Health and New Age
New Age and Native Spirituality
Professionalization of the New Age

References
Amaral L (1999) Sincretismo em Movimento. O Estilo Nova Era de Lidar com o Sagrado. In: Carozzi MJ
(ed) A Nova Era no Mercosul. Vozes, Petrpolis
Amaral L (2000) Carnaval da alma: comunidade, essncia e sincretismo na nova era. Vozes, Petrpolis
Carozzi MJ (2000) Nueva Era y Terapias Alternativas: Construyendo Signicados en el Discurso y la
Interaccin. Ediciones de la Universidad Catlica Argentina, Buenos Aires
Carozzi MJ (2004) Ready to move along: the sacralization of disembedding in the new age movement and
the alternative circuit in Buenos Aires. Civilisations 51:139154
Carozzi MJ (2007) A latin America new age? In: Lewis JR (ed) The Oxford handbook of new religious
movements. Oxford University Press, New York, pp 341358
Castellanos R (2012) Religiosidades nmadas. Creencias y prcticas heterodoxas en Guadalajara.
CIESAS, Guadalajara
Gutirrez C (2005) Congregaciones del xito. Interpretacin sociorreligiosa de las redes de mercadeo en
Guadalajara. El Colegio de Jalisco y la Universidad de Guadalajara, Guadalajara
Hanegraaff WJ (1997) New Age religion and Western culture: esotericism in the mirror of secular
thought. Suny Press
Magnani J (1999) Mystica urbe: um estudo antropolgico sobre o circuito neo-esotrico na metrpole.
Studio Nobel, So Paulo
Page 4 of 5

Encyclopedia of Latin American Religions

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-08956-0_3-1
# Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015

Russo J (1993) O corpo contra a palavra: o movimento das terapias corporais no campo psicolgico dos
anos 80. Editora UFRJ, Rio de Janeiro
Saizar M (2008) Todo el mundo sabe. Difusin y apropiacin de las tcnicas del yoga en Buenos Aires
(Argentina). Sociedade e cultura 11:112122
Tavares F (1999) Tornando-se tarlogo: percepo racional versus percepo intuitiva entre os
iniciantes no tarot no Rio de Janeiro. J Numem 2:97123
Tavares F (2012) Alquimistas da Cura: a rede teraputica alternativa em contextos urbanos. UFBA,
Salvador
Tighe M, Butles J (2007) Holistic health and new age in Britain and the Republic of Ireland. In: Kemp D,
Lewis J (eds) Handbook of new age. Brill, Boston, pp 415434
Toniol R (2014) Integralidade, holismo e responsabilidade: etnograa da promoo de terapias
alternativas/complementares no SUS. In: Ferreira J, Fleischer S (eds) Etnograas em servios de
sade. Editora Garamond, Rio de Janeiro, pp 153178
Zhang X (2000) General guidelines for methodologies on research and evaluation of traditional medicine.
World Health Organization, Geneva

Page 5 of 5