Homeless healers and the production of landscapes of healing and wellbeing on the Venice Beach boardwalk, Los Angeles

This paper examines spiritual and healing practices of homeless people on the Venice boardwalk in Los Angeles. Combining scholarship on geographies of homelessness, spirituality, and therapeutic landscapes, this paper makes three contributions. First, drawing on interviews and ethnographic fieldwork, it examines the ways in which spiritual healing (such as crystal therapy, psychic reading, Tarot card reading and therapeutic touch) can generate temporary and more enduring landscapes of healing and wellbeing. Second, the paper considers the performative work of such practices in negotiating existing, and affirming new, homeless subject-positions. In doing so, it highlights the potential of spirituality in bringing homeless people's inner worlds to the surface, challenging their agency, performativity and self-perceptions. Lastly, the paper concludes by calling for geographers to study the intersection of homelessness, therapeutic landscapes, and geographies of spirituality in order to better understand the body/mind/place/spirit imbrications for homeless people.