Thresholds of Healing: Good and Evil in the Moral Imaginary, Ritual Medicine, and Symbolic Practice in Arbëreshë Traditions

This narrative review investigates the symbolic, ritual, and moral dimensions of traditional medicine as practiced among the Arbëreshë, an Albanian diasporic community settled in Southern Italy since the 15th century. Through ethnographic, ethnopharmacological, and anthropological approaches, the paper explores how healing practices are embedded in a cosmology where illness is not merely physical, but a sign of spiritual or social imbalance. Healing becomes a transformative act that engages bodies, plants, prayers, and sacred gestures within a network of relations involving saints, ancestors, and the natural world. Special attention is given to the role of elder women as custodians of ritual knowledge, the use of symbolic objects and medicinal plants, and the intertwining of moral codes with ecological wisdom. Drawing on extensive fieldwork and comparative literature, the review highlights the fragility and resilience of these traditions, threatened by modernization, folklorization, and cultural forgetting, yet still alive in everyday acts of care and belief.