The politics of moral practice in psychotherapy and religious healing

T.N. Madan made the study of comparative moral systems into an important mainstay of Indian sociology. In this essay, we will be using the idea of ’moral practice ’ to compare notions of effi-cacy in psychotherapy and various forms of religious healing. We argue that the realm of ’the moral’ in ethnographic analysis consists not of abstract rules or ideologies, but of whatever has overwhelm-ing practical relevance in the lives of the people and communities we study. Both psychotherapy and religious healing systems define efficacy in terms of culture-specific understandings of personhood and moral order; these, however, are mediated by the irreducible contingencies of social position, political strategy, and life histories of both sufferers and healers, as well as by large scale economic and political forces. Healing efficacy emerges from this study as a shifting, multi-vocal, and sometimes unattainable value. By turning our attention from the language of moral concepts to that of moral stakes, therefore, we are attempting to accommodate a concern with the concrete experience of suffering and healing as they are embedded in lived worlds of human experience. Among the many contributions T.N. Madan has made to academic discourse in the social sciences are his writings on the relation of political and religious processes to everyday moral and medical practices. Whether his focus is th