Medicine and Religion are Not

This paper considers the relationship between religion, medicine and the secular by paying attention to the sensory dimensions of knowledge practices in shiatsu, a Japanese manual therapy. Strongly shaped by the secularist ethos of the postwar US occupation, shiatsu in Japan has been rationalized according to biomedical models. Yet a reaction to this development would see the emergence of “Zen Shiatsu”: a shiatsu style emphasizing meditation and compassionate touch as foundational acts of medical assessment, and one that would migrate successfully to American shores. Ethnographic engagements with contemporary North American practitioners of Zen Shiatsu illustrate how their sensory economies of knowledge enable expressions of subjectivity that trouble the visualistic and objectivist dimensions of biomedical knowledge that are crucial to maintaining the boundary between biomedicine and its others