“Healing is a Done Deal”: Temporality and Metabolic Healing Among Evangelical Christians in Samoa

ABSTRACT

Drawing on fieldwork in independent Samoa, in this article, I analyze the temporal dimensions of evangelical Christian healing of metabolic disorders. I explore how those suffering with metabolic disorders draw from multiple time-based notions of healing, drawing attention to the limits of biomedicine in contrast with the effectiveness of Divine healing. By simultaneously engaging evangelical and biomedical temporalities, I argue that evangelical Christians create wellness despite sickness and, in turn, re-signify chronic suffering as a long-term process of Christian healing. Positioning biomedical temporality and evangelical temporality as parallel yet distinctive ways of practicing healing, therefore, influences health care choices.

KEYWORDS:

• Christianity
• diabetes
• healing
• metabolic disorders
• temporality

Notes

1. I use the category of metabolic disorders, which includes diabetes, hypertension, cardiovascular disease, and kidney disease, because these disorders were often talked about interchangeably and were often co-occurring.

2. Nearly 99% of the population in Samoa identifies as Christian (Samoa Bureau of Statistics 2012). The majority, three-quarters of the population, officially identifies with the mainstream Christian churches, including Congregational, Methodist, and Catholic. Evangelical churches have been rapidly growing since the 1950s, most notably the Assemblies of God (Thornton, Kerslake, and Binns 2010; Ernst 2012).

3. Scholars are also increasingly concerned with the bi-directional relationship between stress, depression, and diabetes (Schoenberg et al. 2005; Weaver and Hadley 2011; Rock 2003; Mendenhall et al. 2012, 2013; Weaver and Mendenhall 2014; Mendenhall 2012).

Additional information

Funding

A Wenner Gren Foundation Dissertation Grant made this research possible.

Notes on contributors

Jessica Hardin

Jessica Hardin is an assistant professor of anthropology at Pacific University. Her research examines the intersections of Christianity, metabolic disorders, and wellbeing in Samoa. She is co-editor of the 2013 volume Reconstructing Obesity: The Meaning of Measures and the Measure of Meanings (with Megan McCullough).