Opening an Anthropological Perspective
by Federico Scotti, President MyReiki Italy, Anthropologist.
This is the 1st part of the full article Reiki as Situated Practice
Abstract
This article inaugurates a series of anthropologically informed contributions within the European Reiki Group. Rather than defining Reiki in abstract or normative terms, it proposes a shared perspective for reflecting on Reiki as a lived, embodied, and culturally situated practice. By attending to bodies, narratives, social contexts, and modes of representation, the article outlines a set of conceptual tools for understanding how Reiki takes shape within contemporary European settings. Particular attention is given to cultural and national plurality, to the role of language and imagery in public communication, and to the analytical distinction between practice, spirituality, and religion. As a foundational contribution, this text opens a space for dialogue and further reflection, supporting ERG’s commitment to inclusivity, reflexivity, and responsible engagement with Reiki in the public sphere.
Anthropology and Complementary Healing: setting the frame
Over recent decades, complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) has become an increasingly significant component of contemporary health landscapes in Europe and other industrialised societies. Current estimates suggest that a substantial proportion of adults in developed countries engage with some form of CAM during their lives, indicating that these practices can no longer be treated as marginal or exceptional phenomena (Kristoffersen and Stub, 2025). Yet, despite their widespread presence, both scholarly and public debates around CAM often remain fragmented. They tend to focus predominantly on questions of efficacy or legitimacy, while devoting comparatively little attention to the social, cultural, and experiential conditions through which these practices are lived and made meaningful.
Anthropology approaches CAM from a different analytical position. Rather than asking whether a practice “works” according to external or dominant evaluative standards, it asks how practices become intelligible, credible, and valuable within specific social worlds. From this perspective, CAM is not defined through fixed categories, but through situated negotiations of meaning, authority, and knowledge. The very terminology of “complementary,” “alternative,” or “integrative” medicine reflects shifting power relations and epistemological hierarchies within healthcare systems (Gale, 2014). What is considered complementary in one national or institutional context may be regarded as marginal or illegitimate in another, revealing how definitions of healing are always historically and culturally situated.
Anthropological research has also drawn attention to the tensions that emerge when diverse healing traditions are incorporated into dominant biomedical frameworks. Processes of “integration” often require complementary practices to adopt biomedical language, metrics, and modes of justification, thereby privileging certain forms of knowledge while marginalising others (Gupta, 2025). While such translations may facilitate institutional recognition, they can also obscure the ontological and experiential dimensions through which practices like Reiki are understood by practitioners and recipients. Attending to these dynamics does not entail rejecting dialogue with biomedicine; rather, it fosters a critical awareness of the epistemological assumptions that structure such encounters.
Within this broader field, anthropology has long emphasised the importance of situated practice and embodied knowledge in healing. Healing is never abstract: it unfolds in concrete settings, through bodily engagement, relational processes, and culturally shaped expectations. Research on lived religion and spirituality has shown that meaning is generated less through belief alone than through embodied experience, sensory engagement, and affective attunement (Hauw and Halafoff, 2025). Related work in embodied cognition and narrative medicine similarly stresses that healing involves the integration of bodily sensation, emotional response, and meaning-making, rather than the application of isolated techniques.
This focus on embodiment challenges purely cognitive or text-based models of knowledge transmission. In many complementary and traditional healing contexts, learning occurs through apprenticeship, observation, and shared practice rather than through formalised curricula alone. These processes foreground relationality and presence, highlighting the limits of approaches that reduce healing to information transfer. Anthropology treats such modes of transmission not as informal residues, but as central to how practitioners are formed and how practices endure over time.
Reiki, which emerged in early twentieth-century Japan and later circulated through global networks, exemplifies these dynamics with particular clarity. Like other transnational healing practices, Reiki has been continuously reshaped through processes of localisation, adaptation, and reinterpretation as it has moved across cultural and geographic boundaries (Stein, 2023; Ko, Chang and Hu, 2025). Comparative research on the global circulation of practices such as yoga and Ayurveda shows that these movements often involve shifts in meaning, with increased emphasis on individual well-being and self-cultivation within contemporary wellness cultures (Leonti and Casu, 2013). Similar processes inform the diverse ways in which Reiki is practised and understood today.
In contemporary Europe, Reiki circulates within a public sphere characterised by simplified narratives, competing frameworks of legitimation, and growing pressure to render practices intelligible within biomedical, psychological, or wellness-oriented discourses. Narrative approaches to illness and healing have shown that the stories practitioners and recipients tell about their experiences are not merely descriptive; they actively shape how healing is understood and enacted (Saranya and Gupta, 2025). Attention to representation, framing, and communication therefore becomes central to understanding how Reiki operates in practice and how it is positioned within broader cultural and healthcare debates.
Anthropological discussions of medical pluralism further emphasise that the coexistence of multiple healing systems does not automatically entail equality or mutual recognition (Uibu, 2020). Plurality requires ongoing negotiation across epistemological, cultural, and institutional differences. For organisations operating at a European level, such as ERG, this raises specific challenges: how to acknowledge diversity without ranking it hierarchically, and how to foster dialogue without imposing uniformity. Anthropological frameworks attentive to cultural safety and reflexivity offer valuable resources for addressing these challenges in ways that support inclusivity and responsibility (Lokugamage, Ahillan and Pathberiya, 2020).
This article builds on these anthropological insights. It does not seek to provide a comprehensive literature review, nor to stabilise a single interpretive framework for Reiki. Instead, it introduces a set of perspectives that foreground situated practice, embodied experience, narrative processes, and plurality as key dimensions through which Reiki becomes real and meaningful. As a foundational contribution, the text opens a series of reflections intended to support dialogue, reflexivity, and ethical awareness within ERG.
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