The Secular Care of the Self: Discipline and Its Discontents Across the Protestant Atlantic - Softcover

Ian Whitmarsh

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0826369537 ISBN 13: 9780826369536

Publisher: University of New Mexico Press, 2026

Synopsis

The modern desire to care for our health, so obvious to its proponents, has its discontents. Secular medicine denounces the work of those who claim the protective powers of spirits or the Holy Spirit. In this contestation over what it means to care for oneself, Ian Whitmarsh offers an unorthodox thesis: the modern secular desire toward health is founded in a Protestant congregationalism that shapes its refusal of spirit manifestation, revelation, and the power of deities to shape the world. This proper healthy ethics and aesthetics is then taught to those who lack choice in their continuing to live through these ontologies.

Whitmarsh explores these dynamics of power and spirit as they move across the Atlantic, from northern Europe to North America to the country of Trinidad and Tobago. Trinidad offers a broken mirror to the ostensibly secular global endeavor of the desire to be healthy. This mirror shows that the threat found in the spirits and practitioners of other religions, such as Pentecostal healing and orisha manifestation, reveals racialized Protestant commitments masked within a modern global “secular” care of the self.

About this title

About the Author

Ian Whitmarsh is an associate professor of medical anthropology at the University of California, San Francisco. He is the author of Biomedical Ambiguity: Race, Asthma, and the Contested Meaning of Genetic Research in the Caribbean.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
• Publication date: 2026
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0826369537
• ISBN 13: 9780826369536
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 184