Social Healing draws on a transdisciplinary approach—bringing sociology, philosophy, psychology, and spirituality together—to understand health, social suffering and healing in our contemporary world. It shows how we can transform the present discourse and reality of social suffering by multi-dimensional movements of social healing. The author argues for the need for a new art of healing in place of the dominant and pervasive technology and politics of killing. It discusses manifold creative theories and practices of healing in self, society, and the world as well as new movements in social theory, philosophy, and social sciences which deploy creative methods of art and performance in healing our psychic and social wounds. It explores the spiritual, social, ethical, and political dimensions of health and healing. This pioneering work will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of social theory, sociology, politics, philosophy, and psychology.
Foreword
Mamphela Ramphele
Preface
Acknowledgment and Gratitude
Social Healing: An Introduction and an Invitation
PART I
The Visions, Calling and Challenges of Social Healing
1 Social Healing: Society as a Patient, Metapathology, and the Challenges of Self and Social Transformations
2 Social Healing: The Calling of Transformative Harmony
3 Life World and Living Words
4 Pragmatism, Spirituality and Society: Social Healing, Posthumanism and New Horizons of Theory and Practice and the Calling of Planetary Conversations
5 Healing the Dualism between Subjectivity and Objectivity: Transforming the Subjective and the Objective and the Calling of Transpositional Subjectobjectivity
6 Social Healing and Healing Epistemologies: With and Beyond Epistemologies from the South, Ontological Epistemology of Participation, Multi-topial Hermeneutics and the Contemporary Challenges of Planetary Realizations
7 Healing the Theoretical Pathology of Eurocentrism and Ethnocentrism: Social Theories, Asian Dialogues and Planetary Conversations
PART II
Global Social Healing and the Calling of Planetary Lokasamgraha
8 Interrogating, Confronting and Reconstituting Displacement and a New Politics, Poetics and Spirituality of Dwelling: The Ethics, Aesthetics and Responsibility of Home and the World
9 Healing Identities: Identity and Ahimsa
10 Social Healing and Circles of Gender Liberation
11 Social Healing and the Challenges of Transforming Caste Domination and the Challenges of Structural Transformations and Transformation of Consciousness: Ambedkar, Shankara and Beyond
12 Social Healing and Networks of Agape and Creativity: Learning Across Borders and the Calling of Planetary Realizations
13 Healing and the Challenges of New Institutions of Learning: Universities at the Cross-Roads and the Challenges of Experimental Creativity and the Challenges of Alternative Planetary Futures
14 Social Healing and a New Art of Border Crossing
15 Healing the Wounds of Roots and Routes: Cross-Fertilizing Roots and Routes, Ethnicity and the Calling of Socio-Cultural Regeneration and Planetary Realizations
16 Healing the Wounds of Religious Ignorance and Arrogance: The Multiverse of Hindu Engagement with Christianity and Plural Streams of Creative Co-Walking, Contradictions, Confrontations and Reconciliations
17 Social Healing and the Challenges of Transforming Suffering and Striving for Reconciliation and Peace
18 COVID-19 and the Challenges of Trauma, Healing and Transformations: Ethics, Politics and Spirituality, and Alternative Planetary Futures
19 Global Social Healing: Upholding our World, Regenerating Our Earth and the Calling of a Planetary Lokasamgraha
Afterword
FRED DALLMARY
Index
Biography
Ananta Kumar Giri is a Professor at Madras Institute of Development Studies, Chennai, India.
"This is the most important book I have read in many years. Social Healing represents a major intercultural engagement that supersedes in breadth and depth all the other attempts I have come across so far. In the best tradition of Indian scholarship, from Tagore to Gandhi, Ananta Kumar Giri masters different cultures, both Eastern and Western, North and South, and navigates through them in search of solutions that none of them in isolation could provide. I feel privileged that my epistemological proposal (what I call the epistemologies of the south) is taken into consideration by the book’s transdisciplinary approach. Giri takes epistemologies of the south very carefully into account in order to getto the deepest existential questions it addresses with the purpose of enriching the dialogue with other epistemic proposals, including Giri’s own. Social Healing is a timely book. It fully realizes that the web of life is indeed broken and cannot be repaired piece by piece, here or there, now or later. It must be healed globally, both at the national and the local level. And it must be healed right away, so that the past may be recovered as a taskto make the future of the human species possible. Social Healing is a transscalar and transtemporal book. Reading this book one gets the impression that the epistemic East and South, in all their diversity, millenarian wisdom, and collective experience of suffering under western centric capitalism and colonialism,are better equipped than the West to provide responses to the as yet unanswered existential questions of the meaning of life, as well as to facethe challenges aheadin a positive way. Giri engages both traditions, but his heart does not get confused or lost in hesitation. This is a book written with warm reason, a book that relies on reasonable emotions to lead us far beyond instrumental rationality. One does not have to agree with the exhilarating narrative offered by Ananta Giri in order to be truly overwhelmed by the great erudition and sharp thinking and feeling that underlies his scholarship. Social Healing is a transformative book, written in a time that badly needs personal, community, national, and global transformation."
Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Coimbra, Portugal, Distinguished Legal Scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA. 2022 & Recipient of Frantz Fanon Lifetime Achievement Award.
"Ananta Kumar Giri has authored and edited a number of pioneering and intriguing books already, but Social Healing may be his most insightful till date. With a grand and sweeping vision, the author has tied together ethics and epistemology, psychology and political theory, sociology and spirituality, and even poetics and public health, all in an elaborate effort to bring his readers toward a systematic understanding of deep and lasting healing — individual, social, and global. Engaging with Giri’s unique work affords us the opportunity not just to learn, but also to transform."
Aakash Singh Rathore, author of Becoming Babasaheb: A Definitive Biography of Dr B.R. Ambedkar, India
"Ananta Kumar Giri is a leader in thought and action at this crucial time for our planet and beyond. Whether in social or ecological or spiritual issues and insights, he is sharp in judgement and gracious in kindness and understanding. Whether coping with world conflicts, health and sadness, or paths toward survival, Ananta is a superb "guru" and a forgiving friend to whom we can always turn as we seek a path. I join many in looking forward to this new set of insights and guidance."
James Peacock, Professor emeritus of anthropology, University of North Carolina, USA, former president of American Anthropological Association
"The world is a conversation among its manifold inhabitants. If the world’s continuation is now in jeopardy, it is because the conversation has been broken. We need to mend it. That’s what social healing is about. The task will require thinkers of good will, from every continent, to join in a spirit of hope and reconciliation. In these gentle, gracious and generous essays, Ananta Kumar Giri sets a shining example. We should follow it."
Tim Ingold, University of Aberdeen, U.K.
"Hardly anybody will disagree that our present-day world needs healing. The prescriptions can differ but it is clear that what needs healing first of all is society — the system of relations between individuals and social groups. The book by Ananta Kumar Giri cannot become a panacea, as well as any other book. But Giri makes a correct diagnosis, and this is the first step to the patient’s recovery."
Dmitri M. Bondarenko, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russian Federation.
