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The uncertainties and scale of the Covid-19 pandemic has mobilised global anxieties and insecurities, and many cultural groups have conjuncturally embedded conspiracy theories within millennial and apocalyptic thought to explain and find meaning in the pandemic. The apocalypse lends itself well to conspiratorial thinking because conceptually it is flexible enough to reflect any crisis. To this end, the global development of Covid-19 conspiracism is what the authors term 'contagious conspiracism' which is defined as viral global cultural conspiracism. The paper explores how millennialist responses to Covid-19 in various media outlets transcend academic categories of analysis and cultural boundaries between, say, religious and secular, far-right and radical left. First explored is how the crisis became embedded in established (mainly American) contemporary millennial beliefs and prophecies through selected far-right, evangelical and radical left narratives. Second, it is shown how these theories have been 'improvised' to include 5 G and also travelled to Europe and taken on geographical significance in Belfast and Berlin. Third, the authors illustrate the shared ingredients, motivations, and semiotics across apocalyptic conspiratorial Covid-19 narratives, all of which resonate with concerns about power, specifically emergent surveillance technologies, governmental abuse of power, and neoliberal capital, with divergent truths about who is blame from 5 G/vaccine theories to corporate technocapitalism. The paper concludes that these shared discourses across apocalyptic and conspiratorial Covid-19 narratives mean many of us are conspiracists and/or conspiracy theorists at some level and is therefore both revealing of the similarities and has the potential to create democratic constituencies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Alternative health care and holistic spiritual practices have become increasingly popular in many Western countries, especially among women, who often claim them to be deeply transformative. This paper presents an ethnographic study of women's tantric retreats in Northwest Europe that aimed to help women reconnect with their vital sexual energy, rediscover the sacredness of their female bodies, and possibly heal from damaging and even traumatic experiences regarding their femininity and sexuality. It draws on Turner's influential view on ritual as a liminal space in order to account for the transformative potential of these workshops. Specifically, it applies Hinton and Kirmayer's flexibility hypothesis, which suggests that healing rituals shift people's mode of being-in-the-world, including their cognitive, emotional, and physical state or stance, towards openness to new ways of being. First, it highlights different ontological domains where shifts took place, notably somatic state, self-image and relationality. Subsequently, it identifies the main modalities that were used for enabling transformation: the embodiment of the metaphor of the goddess/the divine as present in each woman and the use of intimate, loving touch and meditative awareness. The process of transformation and healing elucidated in this way engaged the physical, emotional and cognitive levels as interacting dimensions, relying foremost on the activation of a vital energy that both gave participants a deep sense of self and connected beyond the self. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the diversity in patients' experience of biomedicine and contrasts it with the normative view characteristic of health professionals. Ethnographic fieldwork among Polish migrant women in London, Barcelona and Berlin included interviews about their experiences with local healthcare and health professionals. Themes drawn from the narratives are differences between the cities in terms of communication between patients and health professionals, respect for patients' choices and dignity, attitudes to pregnancy and birth (different levels of medicalization), and paediatric care. It is argued that patients continuously negotiate among their own views and expectations based on previous experiences and knowledge from personal communication; internet forums and publications; and the offer of medical services in the countries of their settlement. Patients experience pluralism of therapeutic traditions within and outside bio-medicine. In turn, representatives of bio-medicine are rarely aware of other medical practices and beliefs and this leads to various misunderstandings. By highlighting the pluralism of medical practices in European countries and the increasing mobility of patients, this case study has useful implications for medical anthropologists and health professionals in a broader Western context, such as raising sensitivity to different communication strategies and a diversity of curing traditions and expectations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most research on migrants examines what makes them ill. Inspired by Antonovsky's salutogenic approach, this study shifts the perspective and asks why migrants stay healthy. At the centre of interest are sub-Saharan Africans living in Switzerland who consider themselves and/or are considered by others as mastering problems affecting their health. The mixed Swiss-African research team explored meanings of health and resilience in 20 case studies in Zurich and Basel and five group discussions in Bern, Biel and Geneva. The data show that migrants with resilient trajectories have a dynamic and multi-dimensional understanding of health. Moreover, they have learnt to interpret difficulties as 'stress': a popular illness concept in Switzerland and Europe but less known in their home countries. The paper argues that resilience is closely related with the appropriation of 'stress' as an illness concept: it not only gives meaning and helps to explain diffuse symptoms of ill-health, it also offers an agenda for action and contributes to their feeling of social belonging in the host country. These findings have important implications for policy and practice in the rapidly changing field of migration and health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper concerns a pre-modern 'science of touch' - Chinese pulse diagnostics - and it discusses four different means by which Chinese physicians represented and described the tactile experience of sensing different pulses: (a) by use of similes, (b) with descriptive verbs and adjectives, (c) by comparing one pulse to the other and contrasting the two from each other, and (d) by a visual representation of the tactile experience. The material for the article is taken from treatises in early modern Europe, which contain translations of works on Chinese pulse diagnostics, but the questions with which I approach this textual material relate to an 'anthropology of sensory experience'. It is argued that - unlike other modalities of perception - tactile perception arises from a mutual involvement of touching subject and touched object. While such melding between subject and object makes touch an excellent non-verbal means of communication, one would expect that it is difficult to assess in an objective way. Yet the article shows ingenious ways with which Chinese physicians tackled the problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is about a pre-modern 'science of touch' - Chinese pulse diagnostics - which was the aspect of Chinese medicine most admired by physicians in early modern Europe. The paper first provides some historical information on Chinese pulse diagnostics in Europe and then details how it was presented to an 18th-century readership. At last, it points out that Chinese physicians had developed an elaborate system for distinguishing between various experiences of touch. From an outsider's viewpoint, one could say that they already had an idea of calibration and made measurements in respect of a calibrated condition. Since they put their fingertips on the wrist of their patients and actively palpated it, one can say that their 'science of touch' was developed in respect of 'active touch'. This in contrast to the 'science of touch' developed by psychophysicists of the modern West, who have been interested primarily in 'passive touch'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]