The IUAES Portraying Religion and Health Award is a Photo contest that invites visual explorations of the multifaceted relationships between religion, spirituality, and health across geographical and cultural contexts, through a plurality of methodological, theoretical and aesthetic perspectives. We seek photo essays that capture the experiences, actors, contexts and materialities that emerge from these relationships.
Theme: The relationship between religion/spirituality and health is an expanding area of anthropological research, prompted in part by the global spread of alternative, complementary and nonconventional medicines, the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic, and greater public interest in the intersection of religion and health.
Various forms of collaboration, intersection, negotiation, competition and conflict between religions and spiritualities on one side and biomedicine, and alternative, complementary, non-conventional and traditional medicines on the other side continue to exist and form. Religions and spiritualities may also include not only healing rituals, but also harmful practices to oneself or the others, like collective suicide, witchcraft, ingestion of harmful substances, and extreme body practices.
Submit entries by email to iuaes.photocontest2025@gmail.com by 28 February.
More information about the “Portraying Religion and Health Photo Essay Award”.
More information about the World Anthropological Union Congress 2025.
