I have tried to make several points in this paper. The first is to distinguish between the notions of cure and heal. The first is limited to the biological model of disease in which the cure can be directly observed by external observation and is the instrumental result of therapeutic practices. Healing, on the other hand, is an embodied experience in which the sufferer is transferred to a new phenomenological reality. As discussed by other authors, it involves a higher and more holistic level of experience, which, in the case of many indigenous rituals, can include the unity of the environment, subject, cosmos and history (Wright 1998). Healing redirects attention and experience. Most authors cited here regard healing as a restoration of well being on the psychobiological, social and spiritual levels. It is in this respect that Young’s (1976) observation that most ritual practices succeed for the participants because they confirm ontological and existential propositions about the world.
In discussing the limitations of the semantic or meaning approach to ritual, I have not discarded the value of the contributions of symbolic anthropology to the understanding of healing efficacy, but I have tried to demonstrate certain limitations to the structural representational approach as well as to the psychoanalytic basis of ritual power. Both Turner and Levi-Strauss recognized that for a ritual to work, the body must be engaged, but it was others (Tambiah 1979; Schiefelin 1985; Laderman and Rosen 1996) who placed the sensorial, esthetic and emergence of experience in the center of the analysis of ritual healing.
Much of my discussion has been based on experiences with traditional shamanic healing, but it is relevant to the question of healing and rituals in the contemporary world, in which we find shamanic techniques being used and combined with other therapeutic practices in new contexts and where shared and normative cosmologies and symbols cannot be assumed. Although new cosmologies can emerge from the performance experience, many participants gain healing satisfaction from exotic therapies that contain a semantic
logic that they may not share or even understand. Models based on collective sharing are insufficient to explain the popularity of shamanic techniques in new-age religions and practices. At the same time, entheogenic substances are not the only factor of ritual efficacy; we have clear evidence of healing occurring in rituals without the use of substances.
It is not the substance that heals, but its contributions to the performative efficacy that results in a transformation of experience.
Healing can occur in the ways that we have defined it here, as a phenomenological embodied experience. However, the experience of being healed does not necessarily prevent death, as in the case of Reusch cited in the footnote and who felt better and slept better after shamanic healing, but died a few months later (Pereira 1989). Not all healing is efficacious in the biomedical definition of cure. And in fact, rituals can fail in both healing and curing, but that is another topic. In closing, I would like to conclude this article with an important paradox observed by the Argentinean poet, Almafuerte,
“Todos los incurables tienen cura cinco minutos antes de la muerte.”
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Footnotes
1 I would like to thank CNPp for its support to my research about performance and indigenous health during the years.
2 My first research extended from 1970 to 1973 and I have made several return trips to the region.
3 A similar paradox about healing and ritual was published in 1989 (Pereira 1989; Sullivan 1989) regarding a famous Brazilian ecologist who was diagnosed as an incurable illness due to frog poisoning which occurred many years earlier while he was doing research in the Amazon jungle.
Two Indian shamans were called in to perform their rituals while he was in the hospital. They rejected the medical physician’s diagnosis and performed their rituals, sucking out the evil. Afterwards, he claimed to feel better, indicating that he was sleeping better and feeling more comfortable. Several months later he died.
4 See Langdon 2000 or 2004b for an example of such images.
5 Embodiment, as a paradigm, was first coined by Csordas (1990) and is inspired primarily by Merleau-Ponty’s reflections and those of Bourdieu. It has become a well accepted notion that signifies the collapsing of the dualities of mind and body, subject and object to attend to the phenomenological reality of the body and its praxis.
6 Soul Vine Shaman, a record produced and distributed by Neelon Crawford. The folder that accompanies the record is by Norman E. Whitten, N.
E. Jr. Sacha Runa Research Foundation Occasional Paper No. 5. 1979. Urbana, Illinois.
Hallucinogenic vine - Ayahuasca
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Ayauhasca leaf
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