Healing beyond borders : well-being, religion, and migration in postcolonial Netherlands /
This book explores how people of Afro-Surinamese and Ghanaian backgrounds in the Netherlands pursue healing, showing that it is both a personal and a collective process. Healing takes place across physical, spiritual, institutional, generational, and cultural borders, which are continually contested...
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| Format: | eBook |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Cham :
Springer,
2026.
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| Series: | Religion, spirituality and health ;
v. 8. |
| Subjects: |
| Summary: | This book explores how people of Afro-Surinamese and Ghanaian backgrounds in the Netherlands pursue healing, showing that it is both a personal and a collective process. Healing takes place across physical, spiritual, institutional, generational, and cultural borders, which are continually contested and redefined through lived experience, creative practices, and communal care. The book highlights these borders as sites of struggle and transformation, positioning healing as political and urgent. Based on 13 months of ethnographic fieldwork, the book shows that healing involves resistance, hope, innovation, and restoration. Healing preserves cultural memory, strengthens solidarity, and supports individual and collective well-being. It is expressed through shared rituals, political engagement, artistic expression, as well as daily and mutual care, all of which are ways of questioning, creating and shifting the borders that shape and often limit lives and pursuits. Healing Beyond Borders challenges conventional views of trauma by showing that healing is neither linear nor limited to the individual. Instead, it is a communal, political, and creative process necessary for addressing and dealing with anti-Black racism and structural inequality. Communities adapt various practices, integrate diverse knowledge systems, preserve and examine certain traditions and practices. Practices such as rest, storytelling, and artistic expression are crucial for building resilience, fostering renewal, and confronting historical and ongoing violence. The book shows the complexity and urgency of healing as an embodied, religious, spiritual, social, and cultural process. It serves as a valuable resource for those seeking to understand Afro-diasporic experiences, cultural resilience, and the transformative potential of community-based practices. Healing Beyond Borders encourages readers to reconsider the meaning of healing and to reflect on how, where, when, and with whom healing may occur. |
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| Physical Description: | 1 online resource (xii, 207 pages) : illustrations. |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references. |
| ISBN: | 9783032178794 (electronic bk.) 3032178797 |
| ISSN: | 2627-602X ; |