The Magic Mountains

The Magic Mountains Synopsis

Complementary and alternative medicine are extremely popular in Switzerland. The Magic Mountains contextualizes these practices with respect to the Swiss way of life, gaining deeper insight into the conditions, policies, and culture that sustain this flourishing.

The book offers a window into the liberal ethos prevalent in Switzerland, one that values the positive freedom of self-determination and political and economic independence, including what advocates call the freedom of medicine. The unique political system of Switzerland is illustrated through its molding and governance of alternative medical practice.

The book provides a series of ethnographic interviews with practitioners, cantonal officials, and medical doctors, primarily, but not exclusively in the canton of Appenzell Ausserrhoden, considered a mecca of alternative healing. These illustrate a diversity of practices, from deeply rooted traditions like alchemy and phytotherapy, through transnational ones like acupuncture, to contemporary experiments with bioresonance machines and reflexology, showing how they are adopted, debated, and regulated.

In The Magic Mountains, anthropologist and award-winning author Michael Lambek demonstrates how healers exercise their creative, ethical, and political capacities in the face of challenges from biomedicine, the pharmaceutical industry, and insurance companies. These healers provide counterparts to scientific and bureaucratic rationality, thereby addressing the Weberian theme of the place of magic or enchantment in modernity.