Energy Medicine and Hybrid Knowledge Construction: The Formation of New Cultural-Epistemological Rules of Discourse

Abstract

Complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) is a socio-cultural phenomenon in the area of healthcare and lifestyle that has spread rapidly in recent decades. Using Latour’s nature–culture hybrid concept, the article addresses one of the most commonly and widely used, and at the same time puzzling concepts of CAM: ‘energy’. Based on research that analysed publications dealing with Energy Medicine, the article shows that this concept serves as the axis of an internal linguistic mechanism around which CAM knowledge is constructed as a hybrid of modern knowledge categories such as body–mind and objective–subjective. ‘Energy’ is used as the embodiment of intangible tacit knowledge and as a linguistic bridge between science and spirituality, and between nature and culture. ‘Energy’ in CAM is thus not merely a practical concept denoting a bundle of healthcare practices but serves to indicate the possibility of forming new cultural-epistemological rules of discourse. Proposing the concept of ‘hybrid knowledge’, which emphasizes a sociological-epistemological dimension, the article can contribute to both the sociological literature on CAM and to the ongoing development and application of the sociology of knowledge and Latourian theory.

Keywords

complementary and alternative medicine hybrid knowledge language sociology of knowledge Latour nature–culture

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