GLORIA MORENO CONSTRUCTIVE NARRATIVES TRANSFORMATIVE WORDS

ALMA MATER STUDIORUM - UNIVERSITA' DI BOLOGNA SCUOLA DI LETTERE E BENI CULTURALI

Corso di laurea in Antropologia, Religioni e Civiltà Orientali

CONSTRUCTIVE NARRATIVES, TRANSFORMATIVE WORDS Performing one’s own path from sickness to health in curing rituals

Tesi di laurea in Antropologia delle Americhe

Relatore Prof: Davide Domenici

Presentata da: Gloria Moreno

Appello terzo Anno accademico 2015-2016



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CONTENTS

Abstract

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Introduction

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Chapter one. Performativity in ritual

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Framing ritual: a symbolic and performative perspective Performance: an inseparable constituent Ritual as a strategic way of acting The performativity of ritual language

Chapter two. An approach to ritual efficacy Problematising and systematising the biased concept of efficacy When a ritual WORKS When a ritual DOES NOT WORK

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Chapter three. The performative process of healing

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Performing narrative structures in healing processes The rhetorical power of persuasion in curing rituals

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Conclusion

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Bibliography

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Abstract – IT Nel mondo della medicina occidentale, o biomedicina, vige un approccio diagnostico e terapeutico, tendenzialmente basato sulla dicotomia mente/corpo, considerato universale e aculturale, come una lingua che, data la sua scientificità, è avulsa da interpretazioni soggettive e culturalmente determinate. Verrà dimostrato, in realtà, che ogni sistema medico, e di conseguenza le interpretazioni e le pratiche adottate nella gestione di una qualsiasi patologia, sono frutto di un corrispondente sistema culturale emerso attraverso specifiche dinamiche storico-sociali. Attraverso un approccio antropologico, intendo dimostrare come l’efficacia terapeutica non possa esser ridotta solo in termini di un’alterazione positiva a livello fisiologico. Esistono infatti altre dimensioni dell’esperienza di malattia di una persona da dover tenere in considerazione che spesso vengono oscurate da questo riduzionismo. Facendo speciale riferimento a pratiche mediche non bioscientifiche, basate sull’efficacia della voce e delle parole in contesti amerindiani, il processo curativo verrà qui riformulato in termini di partecipazione attiva sia del paziente che del dottore/guaritore. Grazie a questo processo, sarà possibile giungere ad una co-costruzione, trasformazione ed incorporazione di quella che verrà chiamata ‘la narrazione dell’esperienza di malattia’ attraverso la fusione delle forme di percezione individuale e culturalmente codificate di questo fenomeno. Infine, questa nuovo significato attribuito all’esperienza di malattia porterà ad una concreta trasformazione delle varie dimensioni della vita e modi di orientarsi nel mondo di un individuo, ovvero sia a livello organico che a livello sociale.

INTRODUCTION All therapeutic encounters entail some sort of negotiation. Culture and medicine are by definition closely intertwined, the latter being the result of and shaped by the former’s attendant socio-historical dynamics and phenomena. The meanings attributed to and the culturally diverse ways in which concepts of sickness and health are articulated have a profound impact on the terms under which processes of diagnosis and treatment are codified. Analogously, the outcomes of specific medical practices hinge on and are shaped by these cultural categories and collectively established meanings. To this regard, even Western medicine, based on the mind-body dichotomy and inseparable from experimental scientific thought, is nothing but the epitome of such a culturally based process. Biomedicine, however, draws from logical and experimental thought the pretence of ‘universality’, wielding the cause-effect relationship and reductionism to prevail over other medical systems. Science is naively held to be acultural, unquestionably efficacious and indiscriminately applicable to every circumstance. In spite of this, one’s understandings of sickness are children of their times and need to be placed and comprehended according to their context of origin. With special reference to Amerindian medical practices based on the efficacy of words and voice sounds, healing practices will be analysed as efficacious ritual performances capable of bridging the hiatus between symbolical and empirical reality. It will be demonstrated that



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therapeutic efficacy cannot be reduced to a mere positive change in physiological state, rather that both therapy and the experience of sickness are the product of multifaceted and negotiated cultural and personal perceptions. The process of curing will be thus reformulated in terms of an active participation by both patient and doctor/healer, culminating in the embodiment of a co-constructed narrative of the experience of sickness. Chapter one, “Performativity in ritual” provides an overview of the symbolical, yet nonetheless performative nature of ritual practices. By focusing on the interactive dimension of ritual performance, and in particular the ones mainly concerned with the use of language and voice sounds, I try to summarise the importance of participation and of experiencing the symbolical meanings one ascribes to in a practical and concrete way. Indeed, ritual is here conceived not as a staged performance by means of which a mere representation of a symbolical world can be produced, rather as a ‘framed’, yet dynamic environment, continuously shifting within and without (i.e. ritual/non-ritual dimension). To put it more simply, the performative nature of ritual is to be found in its capability to be practiced only from within yet to empirically and actively project its effects beyond its frame. Chapter two, “An approach to ritual efficacy” analyses the biased concept of ritual efficacy, condemned to be naively considered fictional, unreliable, or even inexistent because of the burden of biomedicine. Scholars have far too often sought to understand ritual dynamics and the implications of its efficacy by applying Western-coined standards. As will be demonstrated, efficacy is not a matter of degree but of selecting the culturally significant aspects attributed to efficacy itself. Based on this premise, one must interrogate oneself on the nature of ritual efficacy with an emic perspective, taking into consideration these contextspecific variables. Furthermore, both instances of when and how a ritual works or does not will be thoroughly discussed. Chapter three, “The performative process of healing”, examines the role of narrative construction and attribution of culturally recognisable meaning to the experience of sickness in the process of healing. In this regard, the experience of the Devil’s Lake Dakota community in dealing with diabetes will be thoroughly discussed. Moreover, the perlocutionary importance of tropes, words, and voice sounds will be investigated in the context of a patient’s journey towards health. To this end, I will analyse in depth a Warao ritual called hebu nisayaha (curing hebu-sickness).

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Chapter one

PERFORMATIVITY IN RITUAL Performance does not construct a symbolic reality in the manner of presenting an argument, description, or commentary. Rather, it does so by socially constructing a situation in which the participants experience symbolic meanings as part of the process of what they are already doing. Schieffelin, 1985: 709.

One of the most unnerving and perplexing aspects of human life is unarguably ritual. Scholars have assumed that ritual, just like symbolism, language, dance and music, might have developed during our transition from primates into men, implying that rituals possibly played a fundamental role in facilitating processes of adaptation (Kreinath, et al, 2006: xiii). The socially constructed symbolic significance placed upon ritual activities makes of them perfect carriers of messages. Hence, they are often used by humans as a means to communicate information and messages to other beings, whether real or putative (Platvet, 2006: 204), although it will become clearer that communication is not ritual’s only crucial feature. Ritual practices are seen as a universal component of culture and therefore they can be deemed as objects of sociocultural analysis. The investigation of ritual practices among different societies and cultures has proven the phenomena designated by the term ‘ritual’ to be incredibly complex and diverse. In this chapter I intend to analyse the chimera-like nature of ritual; symbolical and at the same time performative, where one does not exclude the other: on the contrary, it exalts it. This is meant to be a starting point from which to later address curing rituals as interactive experiences. Indeed, rituals stand as means humans often rely on in order to clarify and place order over illogical realities, among which we can find the experience of sickness. I aim to merge symbolic representations and performance into one, where symbolical meanings are more than mere communicative channels and performances are not reduced to representational enactments. Furthermore, ritual words and voice sounds will be approached as ‘causal actions’ in their own right, in that, as we will see in the last chapter, even the uttering of words or vocables fall under the purview of ritual performances.



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Framing ritual: a symbolic and performative perspective Giving a definition of ritual is, however, highly problematic. Ritual activity appears to be an extremely diversified category, very flexible and which includes a vast variety of characteristics. What we could agree on for now is that “the collection of all ‘rituals’ is a class of phenomena” (Snoek, 2006: 4). Although it is nearly impossible to delineate a firmly circumscribed realm of ritual activity, every society has demarcated certain enactments and events as different from others that we can recognise and label as rituals. For example, words such as “‘ceremony’, ‘service’, and ‘convention’ delineate particular events nonassignable to common and regular occurrences (Tambiah, 1979: 116). These events share a certain set of characteristics which marks them off as such. Some of these features, which, according to Tambiah (1979: 116-117), can activate altogether the extraordinary and extra-mundane, are: “an ordering […] that structures them, a sense of collective […] enactment that is purposive (devoted to the achievement of a particular objective), an awareness that they are different from ‘ordinary’ everyday events, […] and the charged use of certain vehicles and devices of communication”. Nevertheless, we should keep in mind that, as aforementioned, a strict definition of what a ritual is or is not can be misleading. The features that emerge in rituals could ideally be defined by the concepts of ‘fuzzy sets’ and ‘polythetic classes’, as Snoek (2006: 4) proposes. A ‘fuzzy set’ refers to a set of objects or phenomena wherein a certain number of characteristics involved are continuous. ‘Polythetic classes’, on the other hand, refer to a set of objects or phenomena in which the characteristics involved are not presented by all the members, but each characteristic is displayed by the majority of them (Snoek, 2006: 4). By deploying the two categories afore described, there is one relevant advantage which is the one of not falling in the rather arbitrary trap of circumscribing a slippery class, such as ritual activity, within certain borders. If we accept that the characteristics of this class of phenomena named ritual are indeed polythetic and fuzzy, it will become easier to sum up the features that are representative for most rituals (Snoek, 2006: 7). For instance, we can now say that the essence of rituals often resides in repeated, stereotyped and socially standardised enactments which are usually normatively regulated. These actions are commonly seen as custom or morality, and their violation is normally sanctioned by the community (Harth, 2006: 20). As a result, we could posit that rituals are formative and instructive for in them rests, at least in part, the roots of human learning: both observation and rehearsing a behaviour over and over, mainly through mimetic processes, lead to the acquisition of cognitive skills which underpin a

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specific symbolic system. And as a matter of fact, individuals are constrained and grounded within a series of symbolic representations which bring about a framework of cohesive existence. This socially constructed world-view structure provides people with what I would call an ‘interaction guide’ which works, in much the same way as a hint would, as a decisionmaking device or expert leading us in our daily activities. Rituals serve therefore as a means by which the world as it is can be interpreted. They frame social experiences and they enable us to clarify what we experience as the state of things, along with all its obscure issues, distortions and inexplicable voids. It appears however that the human eagerness to impose meaning upon repetitive performances can then be viewed as a way of clarifying a highly illogical and disordered reality, because “man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun” (Geertz, 1973:5). Notwithstanding the foregoing, in as much as rituals are hardwired with meaning, far be them from being mere systems of representation. Ritual behaviour falls in the realm of cultural performances and shall therefore be looked at and studied as such, as a process of practice. Although those involved in a performance may not consider it as such and label it, for instance, ‘work’ or ‘dancing’ or whatever that activity seeks to do, they are still taking part in something which is defined primarily by their technique, by how they do it, by the form they give to it and by the effect it has on others (Grimes, 2006: 379). It’s a framed performance, distinguished from common behaviour, which includes bodily actions and/or speech acts (Snoek, 2006: 13). Ritual practices find themselves dulled when analysed exclusively in terms of symbolic representations. As it is not unusual to assume, performances are not solely concerned with meaning and symbols by means of which a mere representation of reality can be conjured. Rather, they appear to be very practical, connected to bodily habits, to actions and to the concrete social construction of reality (Schieffelin, 1998: 194). The point to be made here is that performativity converges in every aspect of our existence, it being the tool necessary to human interaction. Such a claim purports to show that processes of communication and interplay between people come about expressively, by means of bodily expressions, movements and postures, voice and gestures (Schieffelin, 1998: 195). As Schieffelin (1998:195) suggested, “it would not be too much to say that without […] [performative activity] and social presence, there would be no culture and no society”.



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Performance: an inseparable constituent For the approach above mentioned, symbols are only one sphere of rituals. I won’t deny the importance of symbols for I believe them to be effective. As mentioned before, they represent a fundamental premise to the degree that they articulate specific socio-cultural and physiological issues (often perplexing and puzzling ones) into coherent cosmologies. Ritual activity and its symbolic meaning are however rather inextricable from performance and therefore must act together (Tambiah 1979: 120). When the two (symbols and performance) are held to be neatly polarised, the limitations of an approach focused only on extremes becomes clearer. Thought and action are not antagonists and a distinction between the two would result in a heightened devaluation of action. My intent is to combine both symbolic representations and performance into one inseparable and vital compound, like a chimera, key to a non-sectarian analysis of ritual activity. By merging these two issues together, symbols do not solely communicate meaning any longer nor does performance relegate itself to a mere enactment of a symbolical representation of reality. Symbols are revitalised and become effective in that they entice action. Through performance problematic circumstances and matters can be symbolically rediscussed by the community, recontextualised and addressed in a present ritually defined reality. Thus “meanings are formulated in a social rather than a cognitive space, and the participants are engaged with the symbols in the interactional creation of a performance reality, rather than merely being informed by them as knowers” (Schieffelin, 1985: 707). From the above considerations, I continue to insist on the importance of considering ritual and performance as implicated by one another and not as cleanly segregated. I argue, therefore, that a satisfactory definition of ritual must include in it performativity as an integral part of ritual activity. It must be clear, however, that they can persist in keeping their implicit differences, such as in the case of a non-ritualised performance, and that to view them as correlated fits our case in that it simply helps creating a more balanced concept of the two (Grimes, 2006: 392). Borrowing the words of Tambiah (1979: 119), we can say that a ritual is a culturally constructed system of symbolic communication which is formed by sequences of words and acts, whose content is characterised by formality, stereotypy, redundancy, fixity and performativity. Nevertheless, these features, just as fixity and others among them, are not intrinsic and universal qualities of ritual, on the contrary, they are, to a large degree, only frequent (Bell, 2009: 92). Tambiah goes on suggesting three different reasons why a ritual

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should be considered performative: first of all because it engages in doing things, even though it may be only through the utterance of words; second, it grants those who are involved an intense experience, in that its performers are at the same time its audience (at least partially); and lastly, being ritual a system of communication, it involves symbolic features that are related to the cosmos but nevertheless it involves also features that refer to social convention and practicalities. However, unlike Tambiah’s idea of performativity within ritual, which doesn’t cease to see it as the mere enactment of formalised social conventions, I believe ritual practice to be performative also because it bears some sort of intentionality (Rostas, 1998: 91). If one stays clear of the idea that a ritual action is the unquestioned fulfilment of a predefined and conventional intent, those who perform a ritual suddenly come under a new light. They don’t simply let themselves be passive authors of the ritual itself, rather, they have some sort of conscious intention to put a more personal effort in it. It only makes sense, however, to talk of intentionality if we keep in mind that not necessarily everything that emerges during a ritual performance is consciously intended (Schieffelin, 1998: 199). In a nutshell, by intentionality I intend to indicate the expressivity one puts into an enactment which intensifies the act’s significance, breaking it off from ordinary practice and rendering it ‘creative’. Just like Jean-Paul Sartre (1983: 524) postulated: “Every action is a creative project”. Once more, having discussed the features that may characterise ritual as a set of phenomena, it is now possible to note how a definition of ritual can be useful if we consider that the absolute presence of all of a set of attributes is not necessary for it to be labeled as such. There is considerable overlap in the list of characteristics I’ve mentioned above, as well as points of convergence and disvergence, which is why it cannot be complete in any way. It purports to give an overall idea of the collection of characteristics that can be taken into account to warrant a definition of ritual. A useful definition of ritual needs to be broad and provisional, for “each ethnographic instance of ‘ritual’ has validity in and of itself” (Handelman, 2006: 37).

Ritual as a strategic way of acting In order to talk about ritual in terms of performance, it is of the utmost importance to focus on the features of a ritual act. Bell (2009: 81) provides a clear explanation of the characteristics of this aspect of human activity and gives prominence to four main features, namely: situation; strategy; misrecognition; and reconfiguration of the order of the world. By stressing



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that an act is situational, she means that the importance of an act is specific to the context in which it takes place. As a second feature she names strategy, or technique, in that the logic underlying an act is “a ceaseless play of situationally effective schemes”. Misrecognition, on the other hand, is described as a distortion dynamic, an oversight or misinterpretation of what an act is doing.1 However it is precisely this ‘disguised and altered’ dimension of an act that instils meaning and value in it. Finally, the last feature is the will to have agency in order to bring about a change in the order of things. Truth be told, these characteristics are simply shared by ritual performance for they are proper of any act of human activity. Hence, it is of the utmost importance to determine the way in which ritual forms of behaviour can differentiate themselves from other activities. In Bell’s (2009:90) opinion, the significance of ritual behaviour is not determined on the basis of being an exclusive and completely separate way of acting. Rather, significance lies in how ritual performance can manage to be inherently intertwined with ordinary practices and yet be in discordance with normal activities. In other words, “acting ritually is first and foremost a matter of nuanced contrasts and the evocation of strategic, value-laden distinctions” (Bell, 2009: 90), which render the performance more powerful and important. Furthermore, the employment of specific techniques, as aforementioned in the key characteristics of ritual activity, can effectively differentiate the act from its conventional counterparts; for instance, Bell (2009: 91), with reference to a ritualised meal, proposes two strategies that could distinguish it from conventional eating, that is holding the meal very rarely, even once in a lifetime, or providing way more food it would normally be required. With reference to the need of a loose definition of ritual activity, this aspect is all the more obvious now that the importance of differentiation in ritual behaviour has been proven. The quality of distinction 1

Would it perhaps be more appropriate to talk about ‘contextual recognition’? I feel the urge to put forward this possible claim in that I fear that the prefix ‘mis’ has too much of a negative attribute. What may be coherent according to the cosmology of some, might not appear so to those outside of that specific cultural context and situation. And no one has the authority to render judgement. My argument relies on the idea that to see a certain ‘culturally constructed recognition’ of the ends and means of a particular act as a ‘mis’-recognition could perchance result in an apparent diminished concrete efficacy of the act itself. Quack and Töbelmann (2010: 23) argued indeed that “It seems that Bell quite agrees that one can identify a dichotomy between what participants ‘think’ ritual does, and what it does ‘in actuality’. We have identified two levels on which ritualization, according to Bell, is efficacious: on an aesthetic level, ritualization is efficacious in that it addresses, manipulates and creates the participants’ ritual sense. On a sociological level, it is efficacious in that it constructs, reconstructs and manipulates societal power structures. Another level remains completely uninvestigated, namely, the level that is directly concerned with the participants’ perceptions of what they are doing. By introducing Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, Bell can eliminate the participants’ perspective from the equation: Since, in her opinion, ritualization is “embedded in a misrecognition of what it is in fact doing” (1992: 81), the actual (non-mis)recognition of what ritual is (supposedly) doing, as seen through the participants’ eyes, goes missing”.

10 within ritual performance justifies the earlier claim for a flexible framing of ritual activity, which can be generally described only to a certain extent since acting ritually is culturally specific (Bell, 2009: 93). If ritual activity is interpreted on a situational and strategic level, it is possible to note that ritual performance stands as a practical way of handling and coping with socially and culturally circumstantial situations. The physical enactment of what is symbolically prescribed in a ritual through performance can be seen as a practical demonstration of the harmonising effect that a ritual can bring off when dealing with specific situations (Harth, 2006:28). In this context, the phenomenological action proves, in a sense, the performative dimension of ritual. Even though the aim of a ritual may not necessarily be display, performance is inevitable, even for the ones which are mentally rehearsed, in that rituals usually rely on oratory, gesture, posture and so on (Grimes, 2006: 380-392). As Grimes (2006: 392) proposes, the study of ritual behaviour should start from surfaces and bodies, for any method advocating for a mind/body dualism is destined to fail insomuch as it is deficient in a proper representation of human activity. Thus it is all the more obvious that the human body, through its symbolically coded gestures and presence, represents the core of ritual settings (Wulf, 2006: 397). According to Bell (2009: 93), any ritualised act is entrenched in the body, for “ritualisation is embedded within the dynamics of the body defined within a symbolically structured environment”. Hence, ritual activity can be said to be a technique by means of which certain problems can be addressed, and whose means and ends are the production of what Bell (2009: 98) calls a ‘ritualised body’. As she notes, the adjective ‘ritualised’ endows the body with a ‘sense’ of ritual, in that the body becomes the bearer of the skills and masteries needed in order to control and overpower the sociocultural situations in the symbolically constructed environment in question. These ritual masteries are acquired through the interaction of the ritualised social body with the structured environment, which indirectly means that the ritual raison d’être lies in the strategies embedded in the ritualised agent which are accepted by the cultural community that fostered them (Bell, 2009: 107). The features of ritual activity above mentioned appear even more manifest now as it can be said that ritual activity consists in the manipulation (strategic) of the specific context (situational) by which a body is being conditioned. Through ritualisation, the immediate reality affecting a community is reproduced in a misrecognised way and dealt with through the production of ritualised bodies and symbolically structured environments in which a ritualised agent can manipulate a certain situation. Following this view, one can assert that rituals offer special ‘frames’ in which ritualised agents, through the interaction with the other



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participants, can actively renegotiate experiences and meanings and succeed in the formulation of alternatives. Bell (2009: 108) speaks of a ‘circular phenomenon’: “the purpose of ritualisation is to ritualise persons, who deploy schemes of ritualisation in order to dominate other, non ritualised situations to render them more coherent with the values of the ritualising [techniques and strategies which are] capable of holding perceptions”.

The performativity of ritual language Rituals consist of both deeds and words, “but it is not the case that the words are one thing and the rite another. The uttering of the words is itself a ritual” (Leach, 1966: 407). Obviously, the ratio of words to actions in a ritual is context-specific and does vary from society to society and even between rituals pertaining to the same community (Tambiah, 1968: 175). On the one hand, there can be rituals solely concerned with words or utterances, whilst on the other extreme is the case of rituals focused and based purely on a visible display of actions, although words may not be excluded. Generally speaking, ritual activity finds itself in between, however, it is important to note that the main concern in this dissertation will be to provide an analysis of rituals in which the emphasis falls on words and utterances and their intrinsic efficacy, although actions may be part of it. Furthermore, it is necessary to stress that utterances, whether verbal or non-grammatical ‘noise behaviour’ (Leach, 1966: 407), will be argued to be ‘causal actions’ in their own right. In other words, utterances will be considered capable of producing intended ends and achieving specific aims, even on a psychophysical and practical level. This may appear unclear at the moment but the matter of ritual efficacy will be thoroughly addressed in the next chapter. The proposition I’ve just laid out, to wit: speech being a ritual activity in its own right, holds for every aspect I’ve gone through about ritual in general, which brings us back to the concept of ‘ritualised body’ but first and foremost, to the one of performativity. Indeed, speech can be interpreted as a performance if we see performance as a mode of speaking and its attendant phenomena (Bauman, 1975: 290291). For a valid performative approach to verbal and non-grammatical forms of utterance, we must not err by considering them as the products of necessary prerequisite textual sources, as it is not always the case. As Schieffelin (1998: 199) puts it, “while texts and performances may be produced out of one another, this is very different from saying they are reducible to one another. Text can never be ‘duplicated’ in performance, and performance is not reducible to text”. Such an approach can be liable to prevent us from elaborating a proper conception of speech as performance, in that the unit of analysis needs always to be the performance itself

12 and not a text. Furthermore, the nature of performance forces us to consider its inherent interactive quality which is diametrically different from the character of text. Texts and performances may have their share of some of the characteristic features of one another but this is no condition for them to be considered the same. According to Schieffelin (1998: 198), it is specifically the performative quality of performance that distinguishes it unequivocally from text. Unlike texts, performances are a social activity whose consequences are not foreseeable and cannot be anticipated because they are grounded in the presence, notwithstanding their link to the past or the future. In other words, “a performance-centered conception of verbal [and non-grammatical] art calls for an approach through performance itself” (Bauman, 1975: 292). Seeing as ritualised speech acts must be performatively approached, just as in the case of any ritual activity the process by which ritual language comes into existence and gains significance and force is no different. Drawing from what has been postulated earlier, ritual activity relies on a ‘ritualised body’ which is able to manipulate reality within the ritual frame that has been socially constructed. The ritualised agent is bestowed with a sense of ritual by the community, which indirectly means she/he/it is deemed competent and therefore entitled to act ritually. The inherent interactive feature of performance makes it necessary for the ritualised agent to possess the skills to actively involve the participants in the performance. In other words the performer must display a ritual competence, which consists in the knowledge and ability to carry out the ritual and, in this context, to speak in a socially and symbolically accepted way. “Thus conceived, performance is a mode of language use, a way of speaking” (Bauman, 1975: 293). The role of language in ritual is however of a problematical kind, especially if we frame it in terms of the conventional idea associated with communication, according to which communication occurs between people who must understand each other. Nevertheless, in ritual this is not always the case, as it is more or less frequent that through the use of specific linguistic techniques ritual agents undermine or even infringe the core base of communication function (Tambiah, 1968: 179). In western societies people are generally more familiar with the idea of a grammatically ordered speech in which any kind of information can be conveyed through words. There is however a large variety of information which is never truly verbalised but only articulated through a combination of actions and verbal elements. The verbal elements can consist of both grammatical and non-grammatical parts, the latter called ‘noise behaviour’ as mentioned above. Together, these elements combine permitting an exchange of information that is not necessarily conveyable through other means. The information however acquires meaning only to the extent in which these



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utterances are conventionalised thanks to a familiarity with the context in which they occur. Ultimately, context becomes the fundamental variable in order to avoid a loss of significance in communication (Leach, 1966: 407). As a matter of fact, Bauman (1975: 295) suggests that a performer, in order to incite and exhort the audience to participate and catch them up in his display, will “make use of a structured set of distinctive communicative means from among its resources in culturally conventionalised and culture-specific ways to key the performance”. He then goes on by making a list of examples of these communicative means, which can range from stylistic devices, such as forms of parallelism or rhyme, to elaborate onomatopeia, special patterns of vocalisation, stress or rhythm. This can result in modes of communication which need to be ethnographically investigated because they are culture-specific. For instance, they may appear condensed compared to western forms of speech, contributing to a misplaced sense of mystery to an outsider. Nonetheless, this can be a highly effective, albeit situational, means of expression as this practice doesn't hinder the intrinsic power that words are believed to be endowed with. As we will see, language is not only a vehicle to express ideas and concepts, such as with ordinary speech. A special use of language can be a means to achieve things: for instance, even distorted words that may result almost incomprehensible, by means of certain techniques, such as through rhythmic recitation, can be perceived as more effective than grammatically correct speech (Harth, 2006: 30). The more the performance is engaging, the more it will be considered qualitatively pleasing and satisfactory, but most of all, convincing. Furthermore, this dimension of rituals redirects us to the centrality of technique, in that a strategic use of language is one aspect of technique itself (Hüsken, 2007: 348). As Harth (2006: 31) suggests, “the emphasis is accordingly on design and the production that builds upon it. That which is ephemeral, the spoken word, receives - by way of special, formative artifices (or strategems) […] - a peculiar materiality, and these artifices shift perception away from the meaning of what is said to the speech event itself”. This further corroborates the idea that the presence and the performative strategies employed by ritualised agents, in this case linguistic and stylistic techniques above all, have a great persuading power among the audience in their delivery of authenticity to the ritual itself. With regards to language in rituals, these exploit several verbal and non-grammatical forms such as prayers, chants and spells (Tambiah, 1968: 176). Even if this may appear oversimplified, one could say that there are two main and different dimensions in which language can be used: one refers to the ordinary, and the other to the extra-ordinary. In the case of a non-ordinary use of language, which is the one pertaining to rituals, the performance of uttering may result heightened, at times redundant and lengthy, there may be an opening

14 and an ending, words, whether intelligible or not, may be chanted aloud or muttered. Yet, all these features do not necessarily account for their contradistinction from the language of ordinary use. Following what I said earlier, as speech itself can be deemed a ritual (Leach, 1966: 404), words detach themselves from their everyday form to take up one charged with significance by means of the same process as the one above mentioned with regards to ritual activity. That is to say, non-ordinary ritual language, which does not necessarily rule out the use of common or profane words, can afford to differentiate itself from everyday utterances merely by sharing the same exact features with the latter which are, however, strategically nuanced, fading to a subtle yet pivotal value-laden distinction. To further explain this point Bauman (1975: 297) draws from the ethnographic analysis of Chamula language performances carried out by Gary Gossen (Gossen, 1972, 1974). Chamula is a Tzotzilspeaking community of Maya Indians on the Chiapas Highlands of southern Mexico (Gossen, 1971: 146). According to their cosmology, the product of a syncretism between sixteenth century Spanish catholic and Maya beliefs, their community has been placed at the centre of the universe after the Fourth, and only successful Creation which must be protected from the doings of bad people, who reside at the edge of the world. To this end, language and, in particular, ritual oral speech, has the function to defend and maintain the navel of the universe (Gossen, 1971: 147). As Bauman notes, Chamula people distinguish among three main types of language use: namely, ‘ordinary speech’, ‘speech for people whose hearts are heated’ and ‘Pure speech’. Ordinary speech has no particular characteristics and is therefore of no use to our analysis, whereas both the second and the third ways of speaking are marked and clearly distinguished. I will however only examine the category of ‘pure speech’ as it is the most relevant one in terms of a performative use of ritual language. The category of ‘Pure Words’ is a stable genre of their oral tradition which subscribes to rules dictating their form, content and social setting (Gossen, 1971: 155). Pure speech is further broken down into ‘Recent Words’ and ‘Ancient Words’ and it is precisely this last class that can serve us well. This class is composed of ‘true ancient narrative’, ‘prayer’, ‘ritual speech’, and ‘song’. All of these genres refer to events that occurred before the Fourth Creation, and narrative in particular gives an account of the origin of the earth, people and most importantly, customs. Prayer consists in a ritual language whose aim is to talk to supernaturals. Ritual speech on the other hand pertains to those rituals not directed to supernaturals. Song, lastly, is a musical and/or instrumental accompaniment to nearly all public rituals and even private ones. All four genres present the same features: stylistic redundancy, parallelism, fixed order, prescribed and metaphorical content. These characteristics all serve the purpose of increasing the intensity of



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the ritual performance, marking it off from ordinary speech because the communicative means used by the performers make it clear that a context-specific mode of speaking is being performed (Bauman, 1975: 297-298). A great number of rules are indeed generally ascribed to speech act in order to regulate and organise them into coherent performances (Bauman, 1975: 299). Rules however are not only a matter of controlling: the purpose of these devices can go so far that these techniques can function in terms of recognition and characterisation. For the Chamula performative language is therefore a fundamental social fact in that by giving it socially sanctioned rules, by ascribing it to specific ritual settings and by using strategic techniques, these performances have become conventionally recognisable and patterned. Redundancy, for instance, is used as a device to place greater emphasis on the messages that are conveyed through this special use of language because they carry important information. Through these oral practices custom and popular knowledge necessary to hold the universe together come to be shared by the community and manage to be formally maintained (Gossen, 1971: 161). From this perspective, it would be true to say that “ritual repetition is one of the mnemonic devices that does not stop time but rather emphasizes it in order to establish that continuity of order called ‘tradition’ and that is meant to form a bulwark against the disintegration of community” (Harth, 2006: 31). On the subject of the performativity of ritual language, one further observation must be considered. The idea of performance calls to mind the suggestion that it stands for an unrealistic, or better, imaginary interpretation of reality, a fascinating theatrical trick which functions as a pleasurable getaway from everyday life for its audience. This kind of image is the product of typical western assumptions about the nature of theatre, which cast it as a form of illusion and inauthenticity (Schiffelin, 1998: 200-201). As a matter of fact, the acknowledgment of an intrinsic, yet only alleged, simulation in performance questions the truth status and efficacy of the performance itself. This can become extremely problematic when dealing with other culture’s performances, especially if they are referred to as ‘work’ by its participants. In the western tradition, a performance doesn't work simply because it posses some sort of inherent force to do so. It is, by definition, merely a representation. Rather, if it were to be considered successful, it would be only because both the audience and the performers, notwithstanding their awareness of the theatrical context in which the performance is occurring, willingly, or at least partially ‘forget’ the broader virtual reality that is being staged, driven by the quality of the performance, which enables a ‘suspension of disbelief’. This process makes of this constructed reality a convincing and plausible one (Schieffelin, 1998: 201). The emphasis placed upon this necessary ‘forgetfulness’ however

16 proves how western societies still assume performance to be ultimately fictional. Nevertheless, it is important to bear in mind that these kind of issues are culturally determined and cannot therefore be regarded as analytical categories and taken for granted on a general spectrum. According to Tambiah (1979: 127) the first variable to be taken into consideration in order to determine whether a performance ‘worked or not’ is context. Context must be investigated ethnographically, for the cultural conventions and social acceptance of any performative act as legitimate and relevant are indispensable to the making of the performance itself. Drawing from a case study mentioned by Schieffelin in his chapter Problematising Performance (1998: 203-204) may serve as a good empirical example of what has been said so far. According to the Word of Life Movement, a Protestant evangelical sect, sacred language is endowed with concrete power and the effects brought about by its usage are ‘tangible’ and physically visible. For the members of this movement to say is to do in the Austinian sense of performative, to the degree that a word can physically create that which is expressed. For instance, before embarking on the construction of a temple they would first and foremost speak to the ground to instil in it some sacred power. The performance of speaking power into the ground is nowhere near being symbolical or metaphorical, it is an instrumental performance, closer in relation to fertilising a land. In this case, Bell would probably assert that the ritual is successful because of a ‘misrecognition’ or ‘oversight’ of the ends and means of the causal function of ritual language. However, it is of the utmost importance to bear in mind that ‘misrecognition’ should not be mistaken for illusion or lack of authenticity, for if we were to regard this ritual as masked speech, merely as a metaphoric representation, we would reduce ritual action to “the impoverished version of a cosmology” (Severi, 2006: 584). It is evident, now more than ever, that ritual activity, and more specifically ritual language itself, does not only revolve around communication of information about a symbolically constructed reality. On the contrary, the performative power of ritual language lies on the capability of “socially constructing a situation in which the participants experience symbolic meanings as part of the process of what they are already doing” (Schieffelin, 1985: 709). It would not be correct to deem the Word of Life Movement’s ritual speaking to the ground as a staged performance in a western theatrical sense. The only thing that can be said about ritual performance is that it is able to produce a ‘frame’, a symbolically structured environment wherein it is coherent and makes sense to act in a ritualised way, which nevertheless is not less ‘real’, ‘authentic’ or ‘efficacious’ in its purpose.



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Chapter two

AN APPROACH TO RITUAL EFFICACY The key point here is that these medical systems are often seen as culturally constructed, subjective, and primarily symbolic. They are counterposed against a universal, acultural, and empirical biomedicine, shrouded in a scientific “aura of factuality” (Rhodes 1996), especially when the issue of efficacy is debated. Waldram, 2000: 604.

To mention ‘efficacy’ when talking about rituals can be daring. All the more so when in reference to the context of illness. The term ‘efficacy’ itself in Western thought is notoriously linked to an idea of tangible results which, in addition, need to be ‘accessible’. This follows from the fact that individuals often correlate efficacy with physical outcomes, something that can be touched and seen. People need their expectations to materialise in front of their eyes. In other words, they expected to be dazzled with overt effects, which must be obvious, palpable and observable in order to be true and real. It becomes clear that consequentially praeternatural methods of defeating and recovering from illness are at times looked at with an eyebrow raised in scepticism. Different medical systems’ techniques, or, if you want… ‘traditional’2 ones’, are often regarded solely in terms of ‘spirituality’, implying that a they cannot be instrumental and bring about a physical change in the patient. They are conceived as a means through which emotions and feelings can be expressed, addressing more of a psychological need than engendering ‘real’ physical healing. In short, this all goes to prove that we are still extremely and profoundly affected by several cultural assumptions that we are reluctant to shake off, or at least question for the sake of relativism. Clearly, both the controversial legacy of the Cartesian dualism (i.e. mind-body dichotomy) and the fact that the Western concept of efficacy rests upon a scientific construct, namely the biomedical one, lend strength to a biased perception of other healing and medical systems. This sort of attitude propels an endless flow of questions which tend to strip healing rituals of their complexities, but most of all, of their power: do rituals truly work? Are they only ‘expressive’ and therefore, empirically inefficacious? Are the performers of rituals misguided

2

Just for the sake of the discussion.

18 in terms of the ends they think they can achieve? Can ritual efficacy be scientifically proven? And so forth. These are just a few examples of the fallacious questions that can arise. Given that verbal healing rituals and their alleged efficacy will be the sole concern in the next chapter, a discourse around efficacy in ritual comes to the fore and becomes necessary. After all, “ritual healing provides the most interesting as well as the most problematic example of the problem of ritual efficacy. From the point of view of biomedicine, it is based on non- or even anti-scientific theories and practices, while biomedicine guarantees its own efficacy by systematically excluding ‘ritual’ from its therapeutic techniques” (Sax, 2010: 9). In this chapter I will therefore try to investigate the question of ritual efficacy and its implications.

Problematising and Systematising the Biased Concept of Efficacy As mentioned above, a radically rooted attitude of doubt clings to the very idea of ritual healing, and therefore, its efficacy. For a long time, rituals were crushed under the burden of being labelled as nothing more than expressive forms of action, suggesting that they could be identified as the ‘human capacity to symbolise’ (Boudewijnse, 2006: 123). This approach, however, stripped them of the possibility of being analysed as ‘instrumental’ and not merely as a human need (Quack and Sax, 2010: 5). After all, some scholars didn’t bluntly assert that rituals don’t work at all, and therefore imply that they are utterly inefficacious. Rather, they may have mildly posited that rituals don’t work in the way the native may believe them to (Sax, 2010: 3). Even today, it is still very common for rituals to be conceptualised solely in psychological terms and, to cap it all, even their ultimate function is often psychologically interpreted (Boudewijnse, 2006: 123). This disposition, however, doesn’t take us anywhere in our quest for ritual efficacy. It doesn’t question, rather it asserts. At its core lies the idea that efficacy must be determined strictly in empirical terms, and if something is assumed to be lacking the ability to affect the physical world, clearly it will result pointless to ask how it could accomplish such ends. According to Sax (2010: 3-4), some scholars have come to reify the conceptual category of ritual, because “they conduct research on rituals, they teach and write about them, and after some time they begin to think that ‘ritual’ is something out there in the world, whose characteristics can be classified, enumerated, and analysed, rather like a crystal or a virus. In other words, they mistake an analytic category for a natural kind”. The inherent contradiction in holding something as a ‘thing out there’, yet defining it merely in terms of what it symbolises and expresses rather than does, is unquestionably doomed to bring forth misplaced conclusions about that which is being affected.



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In my previous chapter, I posited that it makes sense to act ritually within the special frames that rituals engender. In these ‘socially constructed settings’ it is possible to actively trigger the renegotiation of certain non-ritualised experiences through a process of practice, which is absolutely empirical. To investigate rituals as the fictional representation of what would be the real psycho-somatic states of the body, or as the expression of emotions and symbolisation of the social structures and beliefs to which the members of a culture cleave to, is to fully supress their quality of being instrumental and capable of doing things in a given environment (Sax, 2010: 6). That is, denying ritual agency. On the contrary, I claimed that ritual acts are capable of socially constructing a concrete reality by “project[ing] the effectiveness of ritual action from the frame of the ritual performance itself to achieve effects beyond that frame” (Turner, 2006: 228). What spurred me to adopt such performative approach was indeed the necessity to call attention to the ‘doing’, functioning as a cause that has concrete and possibly far-reaching consequences. For these consequences to be ‘concrete’ does not necessarily require them to be unambiguous or clear-cut, especially for the observer. Ritual performance amounts to a tangled interaction among individuals and non-human agents, and the outcome of this experience can never be predetermined in any way due to its interactive features. The outcomes of a ritual performance must be seen as fluid and multilayered, as the result of diverse understandings which bring about negotiations that can ultimately appear, or even be, extremely contradictory (Rao, 2006: 148), particularly when analysed under the magnifying glass of Western, scientific rationalism. A case in point is the one illustrated by Sax (2010: 4) which proves the pitfalls of a so called acultural, scientific approach. Drawing from the studies of the sociologist Steven Lukes3, he stresses how some researchers and scholars are generally inclined to view ritual practices as linked to an overall idea of fundamental and garbled incoherence. For instance, when they see someone attempting to cure somebody by invoking ancestors, they label that activity as ‘ritual’ in that, according to their understanding, it appears irrational because it fails to achieve its ends. If anything, to them a ritual only addresses an intrapsychic need. Our medical system presupposes a priori that in time of illness a ritual may be held mainly as a desperate attempt to prove one’s control over the process of causality, by means of which a certain psycho-physical condition can be achieved. These practices however would be disproportioned to the ends they aim to achieve in that a healing ritual is not considered capable of reducing the symptoms nor eradicating the cause of someone’s sickness. In other 3

See Lukes, S., 1975. ‘Political Ritual and Social Integration’. Sociology, 9(2), 289–308.

20 words, it presents itself as a misrecognition. It is important to consider however that the problem of efficacy is not so clear-cut in that “some might argue that a particular healing ritual is ineffective if it fails to reduce the patient’s symptoms. Others may hold that symptom-reduction is not a necessary condition for ritual success, and that there are other things [it] has actually accomplished” (Quack and Töbelmann, 2010: 13). To this regard, it is important to bear in mind that between the terms efficacy and effectiveness underlie a rather small difference yet crucial to our understanding of this matter. By efficacy I intend to denote the ability to bring forth an effect, which is not necessarily only a desired one. On the other hand, effectiveness refers specifically to precise and planned outcomes which have been met by the performance. Effectiveness is always subject to perspective. To strictly separate these two issues however would be totally misleading since both efficacy and effectiveness are correlated in that, in terms of goals meant to be achieved, what may be interpreted as ‘effectiveness’ by one party could be understood as ‘efficacy’ by another (Hüsken, 2007: 349). Thus, it could be useful to avail oneself of an emic point of view. That is, focusing on the cultural factors that are significant and meaningful to those experiencing a given ritual. An emic perspective could contribute to our understanding of the importance of certain beliefs and practices which would otherwise be neglected or misjudged. To this end, one should always make sure to conduct “a sharp critical self-reflexivity, […] [and be constantly aware] of the inherent limitations our scholarly categories impose (Platvoet, 2004: 247 in Hüsken, 2007: 340). The evaluation of ritual efficacy in Western thought is further hindered by the epistemological difference between curing and healing, which together delineate sickness (Waldram, 2000: 604-607). According to Waldram, curing is generally thought as a biological process that aims at the removal of a certain pathology, or disease, whilst healing is conceived more as psychological process which mends the social and spiritual aspects causing distress and its attendant physical phenomena, or illness. It follows that this inaccurate understanding subsequently elevates biomedicine to the role of curing diseases whereas other medical practices that do not rely on bioscientific methodologies are denied the capacity of curing and are therefore relegated to the role of only healing illness. Furthermore, it is remarkable how this line of thought erroneously brings one to believe that illness and disease are two completely different phenomena and that only the experience of the former is culturally constructed. Biomedicine and non-bioscientific medicine represent different approaches to problem of sickness; yet, the hegemony of the Western medicine methodologies has come to dictate the standards and goals to be achieved for a ‘cure’ to be successful. The idea that the



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elimination of a disease must be the ultimate goal to be achieved can prevent us from considering that ‘biomedically legitimate’ results obtained according to such criteria may in fact bear the possibility to be perceived as inappropriate, deceitful or even erroneous from others who don’t make use of bioscientific methodologies (Waldram, 2000: 608). The assumption of the superiority of one’s ascertained knowledge and indisputable methods leads to dangerous conclusions over the efficacy of a certain ritual. Similarly, even the universally accepted use of the English language obscures and does not do justice to nuanced yet crucial aspects of other medical systems which must necessarily settle for approximations and delimit themselves to the lexical options the English language provides. For instance, Waldram (2000: 608) draws a particularly explicative example of this from Naomi Adelson’s study of the Cree of James Bay, Canada.4 According to her analysis, there is no word in the Cree vocabulary that corresponds to the English word health. The closest thing to our concept of health is represented by the expression miyupimaatisiiun, which can approximately be translated with “being alive well”. The explanation she gives of such concept is noteworthy and here are her precise words: “‘Being alive well’ […] is distinguished from ‘health’ in that it draws upon cultural categories that are not intrinsically related to the biomedical or dualistic sense of individual health or illness. That is, the articulation of wellness is made in relation to factors that may be distinct from the degree of one’s biological morbidity and are constituted from within as well as outside the boundaries of the individual body. Thus one might speak simultaneously of being both unwell yet feeling miyupimaatisiiu” (Adelson, 1998:10 in Waldram, 2000: 608). This account clearly exemplifies the difficulties encountered when trying to describe the diverse cultural perspectives of what we identify as ‘sickness’ which, on top of that, has no lexical possibilities to be defined as other than a biological or psychophysiological entity. In terms of understanding of efficacy, much of the consternation related to ritual efficacy similarly applies even to the ‘placebo response’ as they are believed to work in similar ways. Both rituals and placebos are suspicious to Western medicine because they are described as ‘nonspecific’ responses to therapy, that is they cannot be identified as the product of a chemical induced reaction (Brody, 2010: 151). Given their scientific inexplicableness they are usually marginalised and dismissed rather than being accepted as proof of the ability of the body to cure itself from within (Waldram, 2000: 617). As I will try to show in the next subsection, the placebo effect is one of the most significant and powerful means employed by

4

See Adelson, N., 1998. ‘Health Beliefs and the Politics of Cree Well-Being’. Health, 2(1), 5-22.

22 healing rituals and by declaring it invalid we would only contribute to the stagnation of research, which would come to a deadlock. Closely related to the bizarre and conflicting aspects of ritual which, as we have seen, often strike us as odd, is the concept of ‘emergence’,5 that is the intrinsic shifting quality of rituals, the flexibility which enables them to adapt to the circumstances. For instance, Köpping argues that even ‘ritual failure’ can be conceived in terms of efficacy. He draws his proposition from a Mishima ritual suicide which ‘failed’ in that it did not meet the goals intended to be achieved by its performer. However, the failure (or ineffectiveness) of the ritual does not necessarily nullify the performance as ritual because of the emergent quality of ritual itself, which adapts it to the situation and brings about changes in the social reality even if they are not the ones desired (Köpping, 2004: 101 in Hüsken, 2007: 351). According to Hüsken (2007: 351-352), “the contingent aspects of rituals can […] render the outcome rather unpredictable, ‘emergence’ is understood here as the effects of a ritual which are generally rather hard to predict and which stem from intricate causal relations across different scales and levels”. Given that ritual performance relies upon interaction and participation, ritual cannot not affect its participants notwithstanding the expectations they may have had. In other words, regardless of whether the effect is considered positive or negative. However, what stems from this discussion is that given the subjective feature of effectiveness, the only thing that can be ascertained is efficacy. Following Bell, I previously argued that ritual activity does not represent an exclusive way of acting. Instead, ritual performance should be seen as characterised by actions which share the same features of any human activity but are, however, laden with nuanced distinctions which contribute to its significance. If “we see ritual as a part of human action in general, [it will follow that it is] no less defined by its concern with efficacy than any other human action” (Quack and Töbelmann, 2010: 18). I stated that efficacy is the ability to bring forth an effect, any effect. Given that actions are irreversible, that they cannot be undone, and once the process of action has been set in motion they inevitably cause an effect, one could confidently claim that ritual efficacy, so defined, is beyond dispute. A sharp distinction between the veracitymisjudgement of the effects achieved or, as Quack and Töbelmann (2010: 16) would say, the differentiation between actual effects (i.e. those that are external and objectively undebatable) and asserted effects as causally linked to the ritual by its participants, is of no use in that no one possesses the authority to render judgement because “to state that a ritual is efficacious is

5

See Bauman, R., 1975. Verbal Art as Performance. American Anthropologist, 77(2), 290-311.



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to relate a particular effect or set of effects to the intentions, expectations and/or perceived functions of the ritual. Such statements are always necessarily relative to the perspective of the respective agent” (Quack and Töbelmann, 2010: 17). Nonetheless, to pose the right questions is still a determining factor in order to pursue a fair and unbiased understanding of efficacy. To this regard it is remarkable how the temptation to approach the issue of efficacy by employing arbitrarily established ‘universal scientific standards’ and to search for a correspondence in methodologies in other medical systems can be misleading (Waldram, 2000, 619). To evaluate the diverse assessments of efficacy it is therefore of the utmost importance to determine and choose the variables and aspects taken into consideration. Once again, an inquiry moulded upon models mistakenly taken to be universal can nevertheless only reveal what was already assumed to be known. More specifically, “the form each of these interpretations and evaluations takes is influenced by several aspects which might or might not be directly linked to the ritual event. While the researcher tries to give an ‘impartial’ account and analysis of the ritual under investigation, his or her theoretical assumptions nevertheless are children of their times and place of birth, and are guided by taken-for-granted assumptions and worldviews. ‘[I]t is wise to theorize as if the place where you do it matters’, says Grimes (2006: 12-14)” (Hüsken, 2007: 339). With the intent to overcome ‘the problem of ritual efficacy’, Quack and Töbelmann (2010: 16-18) proposed to tackle it by means of a set of questions which could help unfold the complexities of ritual efficacy itself. More precisely, they suggested to approach it by avoiding the notion of ‘ritual efficacy’, it being much too extensive and therefore vague and inaccurate, and instead pursue this inquiry by means of more specific questions on a certain ritual. This approach is remarkable in that it acknowledges that rituals and their attendant meanings and explanations can only be understood in the context of the cultural settings in which they occur. Quack and Töbelmann proposed a first question which should serve as a baseline: “In ritual, what or who affects what or whom and according to whom?”. In other words, one must find out: first, what or who produces the effects of the ritual, namely, the efficiens; secondly, what or whom is being acted upon, the efficiendum; and finally, the observer who determines the quality of efficacy. However, to properly grasp the differences of perspectives over efficacy one should consider a few more aspects. The major discrepancies are usually found in the different ‘levels’ or ‘spheres’ that the academic researcher and the practitioner refer to. For instance, they propose the example of a researcher and a shaman who find themselves in total agreement about the efficacy of a given healing ritual that has just been witnessed. Yet, the shaman may believe that the ritual worked

24 because he/she was able to restore harmony between the patient and the spirits that tormented the latter, which were the cause of the patient’s condition. The shaman is certain that the ritual acted upon a ‘spiritual sphere’. The researcher may instead ascribe the success of the ritual to the fact that it alleviated the patient’s anxieties and therefore places the efficacy on the level of the individual’s psyche. Therefore, “while the former attribute the efficacy of the ritual to the actions and intentions of supernatural beings, the latter invoke social and psychological factors instead, thus asserting (implicitly at least) that supernatural explanations […] are unscientific. So although the [researcher] take[s] the ‘radical step’ of taking seriously the notion of ritual efficacy, [he/she] remain[s] within the explanatory parameters of modern anthropology and psychology” (Quack and Sax, 2010: 8). In a similar way, this also brings us to the issue of the different means one may deem to be efficacious. For example, in the case abovementioned to the shaman the success of the ritual was attributed to the attenuated anger of the spirits, placated through the offerings that had been made. The researcher is likely to agree on the instrumentality of the offerings but would place them on a psychological level saying that they were symbolic to the patient and therefore of help in overcoming his fears. Lastly, it is important to be aware of the necessary conditions under which a ritual can be deemed efficacious by the partakers and which however may appear meaningless to others. The major ones usually are the place where and time when a certain ritual occurs, but even context, conventions, status and competence of the participants can reveal themselves to be extremely important. Quack and Töbelmann came up with a useful framework in which, by applying a set of questions, it becomes possible to systematise, but also problematise, a complex concept such as the one of efficacy. In conclusion, the necessary questions to ask in order to avoid making biased statement about efficacy are mainly five: who or what is held to be efficacious in the ritual? What is held to be affected in the ritual? In what sphere/on what level is the ritual efficacious? By what means is the ritual efficacious? Under which conditions is the ritual efficacious? Efficacy appears now in a new guise: it is not any longer a question of the degree to which a ritual can be deemed efficacious according to our standards, but rather a matter of how efficacy is identified in each specific case. It is important to note however that the foregoing discussion has yet to explain how rituals can also deal with the organic sphere of the body, for I will argue that rituals can affect both mind and body which are and should be seen as a ‘whole’.



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When a Ritual WORKS The patient’s comprehension of the medical system and understanding of the techniques employed during treatment by either a doctor, a healer or a shaman, are fundamental to the process of healing itself. To this regard, the concept of ‘faith’ is particularly important and shall be conceived as strictly separated from the one of ‘belief’. Faith “is an attitude toward religious things, not a proposition to which one assents” (Sax, 2010: 9), “it is not a ‘state of mind,’ still less a kind of arbitrary adherence to a set of instituted dogmas and doctrines (‘beliefs’), but rather a state of the body[mind]” (Bourdieu, 1990: 68 in Sax, 2010: 9). I added the word ‘mind’ because, in order to avoid and overcome the mind-body dualism, body and mind should be conceived as a single integrated unit. In my previous chapter, I stressed how the ritualised body is the core of ritual settings in that it is by means of the embodied practice acquired through the interaction within the ritually structured environment that the ritualised agent can act upon the ritual frame and project its effects beyond it. The cornerstone here is that, given the prominence of the sensory experience during ritual it would be extremely misleading to think of it purely in cognitive terms (Sax, 2010: 8). Rather, the mind-body complex should be analysed altogether. To this end, the concept of praxis appears appropriate to our case, in that “the concept is used to bridge the opposition between thought and action” (Wulf, 2006: 395). Ritual praxis focuses on the symbolically coded ways in which ritual action is presented by the body and is perceived during a performance, which is directly related to the importance of competence and knowledge of how to perform a ritual (Wulf, 2006: 395-411). Given the physicality of ritual performance, which can involve noise behaviour, utterances, gestures and movements, its aesthetic quality becomes decisive for its success. As afore stated, by engaging oneself in the ritual performance certain schemes and strategies slowly progress into the body, making of it the repository of ritual knowledge. In other words, “in mastering ritual praxis through bodily movement, the body itself is ‘mastered’ by ritual praxis: it is civilized and cultivated” (Wulf, 2006: 401). As a result of the physicality and figurative nature of ritual, the techniques acquired are extremely memorable and are therefore particularly suitable for repetition; their assimilation can thus be conceived as a mimetic process. Through this mimetic process the performer ensures to the participants that his acts draw from rituals that had been previously enacted and which bestow upon his performance some sort of authority. Yet, his performance is unique in its kind in that it is a re-enactment of a given ritual action in a different context, for “in mimetic processes an imitative transformation and formation of prior worlds is carried

26 out” (Wulf, 2006: 410). It is however the re-enactment of already known schemes that ensures a sense of social continuity across performances: that is, it stands as a means which provides familiarity with the core plot and proceedings of the ritual to the participants and ultimately contributes to a general idea of its efficacy. Through its interactive quality, that is the very participation of people, ritual performance imposes itself upon the participants as indisputably necessary and appropriate since “it is the performances themselves—the fact of doing them— that serve as the experiential grounds for the irrefutable yet difficult-to-define ‘truths’ they are held to enact” (Houseman, 2006: 421). The importance of an ongoing involvement and perceived agency over a situation has been proven even in placebo studies, for the “fulfilment of self-actualizing goals, by engaging in the therapeutic ritual, [can] lead to general therapeutic benefit” (Hyland et al., 2007: 338). Considering the above, one may conclude that thanks to participation, or the mutual sensory exchange carried out during a ritual performance and the undisputable competence that the performer has come to acquire, a state of the bodymind, or ‘embodied faith’ is born in both the performer and the participants. Given the similarity in the way they work, I will now draw on placebo response, or meaning response6 studies in order to further explain ritual efficacy. Inversely, one could also say that it is the performing of rituals itself that intensifies and bears the efficacy ascribed to placebos. The very fact that these two can easily trade places in a sentence proves how strongly correlated they are. Ritual and “the placebo response […] [are] subset[s] of a larger category that might be called ‘mind-body healing’” (Brody, 2010: 152). The mindbody narrative holds that the mind and the body are a single integrated unit, neither of the two can indeed be reduced to the former nor the latter, they interact and interfere with one another and by working together, they can achieve healing and cure an individual from within (Waldram, 2000: 617). For instance, it is well documented that after the administration of a certain drug the body can reproduce the effect of the former even in its absence, in other words by means of a placebo (Haour, 2005: 198-199). Just as proved by the experiments conducted by Benedetti7 on the conditioned response of patients who had been administered opioid analgesics, Haour (2005: 197) argues indeed that placebos can induce a conditioned response which follows the same pathway as the one of the unconditioned drug and ultimately release endogenous opioids. 6

See Moerman, D. E., 2002. Meaning, Medicine, and the “Placebo Effect”. New York: Cambridge University Press. 7 See Amanzio, M., Benedetti, F., 1999. ‘Neuropharmacological Dissection of Placebo Analgesia: Expectationactivated Opioid Systems versus Conditioning-activated Specific Subsystems’. Journal of Neuroscience, 19(1), 484–94.



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Now that I have outlined these premises, let’s try to understand and give an explanation of how a sick person can achieve healing, in Western society by taking a sugar pill or similar and in an indigenous community by undergoing a healing ritual (Brody, 2010: 155-157). The successful outcome of each of these two methods can be defined placebo response, or the “change in a person’s health status that is caused by the symbolic aspects of a therapeutic intervention” (Brody, 2010: 151). This process can be explained by means of two psychological mechanisms: expectancy8 and conditioning. These two mechanisms seem to differ only in terms of their process and not in relation to the kind of outcome they bring about. More specifically, Brody defines conditioning as a ‘backward-looking’ explanation whereas expectancy is ‘forward-looking’. Let’s see how. Brody argues that, according to expectancy theory, the desirability of a certain outcome can influence the body to the extent that it becomes capable of producing responses that equate the ones expected. An individual decides to undergo a healing ritual or to take a pill because he/she is motivated by the results they expect to get, that is the improvement of their health status. By taking part in a healing ritual or by performing the action of taking a pill, the imagined reality of the individual, or their expectancy, merges with the experienced reality (Rao, 2006: 146). This process can ultimately create a concrete socially constructed reality in which the symbolic meanings ascribed to those actions are experienced by the individual as part of the process of what they are doing (Schieffelin, 1985: 709). A scientific explanation of this is that “expectancy involves activation of specific areas in the brain that are in turn capable of activating other brain areas that alter peripheral physiology, via neural, hormonal, or immunological mechanisms. The final result is that alterations in bodily function occur that move the patient in the direction of restored health” (Brody, 2010: 155). For instance, in a recent study some researchers tried to test the effectiveness of flower essence treatment by advertising a free trial of Bach flower essence on the University of Plymouth campus (Hyland et al., 2006: 55). They came to the conclusion that, given the pharmacological inactivity of flower essence, it seemed that this type of therapy was effective because the individuals who took part in the test expected the purported benefits described in the leaflet to occur (Hyland et al., 2006: 54). This is further proven by Haour (2005: 195) who claims that the placebo effect is directly related the information the patient has about the treatment he/she is undertaking. Indeed, a placebo given as a stimulant will produce different 8

For a detailed analysis in support of expectancy theory, see Kirsch, I., 1999. How expectancies shape experience. Washington DC: American Psychological Association.

28 results than one given as an inhibitor on the patient’s heart rhythm. An important aspect related to the efficacy of expectancy is context. As Waldram (2000: 605) argues, the patient’s understanding of efficacy is directly linked to the idea of order. Sickness is a distorted dimension of one’s reality and therefore to properly conceptualise both the sickness and the healing process it is necessary to place them in their proper context. The idea of healing, as the one of sickness, is deeply rooted in the cultural, social, and historical context in which it occurs. Both illness and disease are culturally constructed and therefore it follows that even “every medical system is a cultural system” (Waldram, 2000: 605). As a matter of fact, a study (Whalley et al., 2008: 540) which aimed at testing the consistency of the placebo effect proved that it would be misleading to expect to find one consistent and generic placebo response in that even the faintest difference in the whole placebo context can determine fundamental changes and affect individual responses. More specifically, “there may not be one placebo response but several, […] there are multiple mechanisms involved and they differ as a function of the context in which the placebo is presented. For example, spirituality has been found to be a consistent predictor of a placebo when the placebo is contextualized as a spiritual therapy” (Whalley et al., 2008: 540). Conditioning, on the other hand, refers to a respondent learning procedure in which the patient is administered an unconditioned stimulus, in this case a chemical remedy, which results in an unconditioned positive result, such as the relief of symptoms of a certain sickness (Brody, 2010: 155). According to Brody, after this process is repeated, the patient will start to link the conditioned stimulus (the presence of a pill) to the unconditioned one (the chemical substance in the pill) and after several repetitions, the patient is very likely to exhibit a conditioned response similar to the one of the unconditioned stimulus even in the absence of the latter. In other words, the experience of a certain response can be reproduced even by taking a sugar pill. According to Haour (2005: 197), conditioning is not entirely separable from expectancy in that the very process of being conditioned eventually leads to a certain degree of expectancy. Given that conditioning is a form of learning, Brody (2010: 157) argued in the same vein as Haour that it would be a bit hasty to assert, for instance, that an asthmatic child who had been conditioned through vanilla aroma would not come to expect to improve when exposed to vanilla. In terms of healing rituals, this proves the importance of both the re-enactment of already known schemes in order to activate memory loops and the competence of the performer to induce a conditioned response in the participants. As Brody (2010: 165) suggests, “if, via conditioning, the performance of healing rituals over time produce positive changes in health,



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then the person will come to consciously expect better health outcomes whenever such a ritual is performed (such as when he swallows pills). Nevertheless, the fact that the operative neural pathways are strengthened by repetition, and that a newly performed ritual at a later date appears to reactivate a neural pathway that was previously laid down and stored in memory, suggests that some sort of conditioning process may be implicated”. As in healing rituals, the repetitive and overt action of taking or administering a pill or any other remedies is in turn very important in Western society. Brody (2010: 159) draws from the results of an experiment carried out by Benedetti9 and other researchers in order to test the different outcomes of covert and overt administration of medication. It resulted that in the case of the administration of an intravenous drug for postoperative pain, when the infusions were hidden, although identical to the previous ones which had been openly administered, the patient experienced half of the pain relief he had felt when he was aware of the amount of medication he was receiving. This experiment shows that if many powerful drugs were to be tested in similar ways it would not be possible not to acknowledge that part of their effectiveness also relies on the ritualised, repetitive and overt performance of taking them (Brody, 2010: 160). Furthermore, Brody (2010: 160-161) suggests that a patient is likely to improve his health status when the meaning of his sickness is altered in a positive way. This positive change is dependent on the presence of certain factors: for instance, the doctor or healer must provide the patient with an explanation for his sickness experience which coheres with the cosmology the patient subscribes to; the patient must feel cared about and listened to by the doctor/healer and those who surround him; and lastly, the patient must feel like he is in control of the illsituation and the sickness itself. As I had previously mentioned, through the performance of a ritual an individual can concretely experience the meanings he ascribes to ritual actions. “Rituals can be ‘meaning-making’”, says Brody (2010: 161). The act of performing a ritual gives order to the chaotic reality of sickness, it circumscribes it within the well-defined boundaries of what is socially considered to be necessary and correct to do in a given situation, and it ultimately gives a reassuring, culturally constructed explanation of the experience of sickness. Presence of the community, care displayed by the healer/doctor and explanation of the source of the suffering all contribute to a positive meaning response in the patient. By undergoing a healing ritual, the patient re-enacts empirically that which is inscribed in his cosmology and ultimately realigns him/herself with the community (Brody, 9

Amanzio, M., Pollo, A., Maggi, G., Benedetti, F., 2001. ‘Response Variability to Analgesics: A Role for Nonspecific Activation of Endogenous Opioids’. Pain, 90(3), 205–215.



30 2010: 162), he manages to alter his consciousness and reorient his body (Quack and Sax, 2010: 9). Determining the efficacy of these not totally predictable medical methodologies is not an easy task; yet, I believe I succeeded in giving an account of the ways in which they can work and examples of them working. However, the different standards employed to measure efficacy in different contexts for different purposes by different partakers makes it difficult to establish a universal understanding of efficacy. As Waldram (2000: 616) puts it, “it is easy to argue that the practice of traditional medicine is altered when removed from its own cultural and situational context”. Nonetheless, the same proposition holds for Western medicine in that every medical system is first and foremost a cultural system.

When a Ritual DOES NOT WORK According to the standards against which ritual efficacy is usually measured, that is the biomedical criteria, it may well be deemed ineffective. I previously argued that determining efficacy can be daring because it is difficult to avail oneself of an emic point of view, especially when one is directly and personally involved in the evaluation of a unfamiliar medical method. However, just as a Western physician would be reluctant or even totally unwilling to equate modern medicine efficacy with the one of rituals, the same may hold for a traditional healer because “in a great many cases, modern medicine is ineffective in meeting those needs that are addressed by ritual healing” (Sax, 2010: 9). At times, the fundamental goals meant to be achieved through healing and the ones of biomedicine are totally contrasting: the former treats the experience of sickness, the latter, on the other hand, is concerned with the chronic recurrence of medical conditions (e.g. diabetes, coronary artery disease) whose demands and management reduce the likelihood of recognising other contributing factors. As Broody (2010: 164) suggested, Western doctors need to be more aware of the importance of their attitude towards the patient and understand that performing rituals counts a great deal in the positive outcome of the treatment. This brings us to the issue of ritual failure. So, what happens if a healing ritual fails to cure a patient? Kleinman (1979: 24) once said that healing rituals ‘must heal’ because they rely on socially constructed paradigms legitimated by the community who agreed that ‘that’s the way to do it’. This is somewhat equal to say that even if the patient was to be found dead the next day the community would just turn a blind eye. After all, even “Western medicine has its own version of such an event, even if often spoken in jest: “The operation was a success but the



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patient died”” (Brody, 2010: 154). It would be misleading however to assume that ritual action can always work: ritual action can also fail, just as any other action, and granted that it is performed in order to achieve a certain goal, rituals are always laden with risk (Schieffelin, 1996: 80) because there is always something at stake (Howe, 2000: 67). Assuming that ‘failure’ is always ignored and disregarded in that it represents an undesirable result is to imply that ritual action possesses a ‘part-time’ causal function, as if it would bring forth consequences only occasionally. This kind of view also suggests that failure leaves the epistemological understanding of an individual completely unchallenged and unaltered, devoid of the capability of working out alternatives derived from the judgement of the evidence. According to Waldram (2000: 609-610) this would imply “a lack of empiricism; certainly, individual failures might be rationalised, but such failures are essential to the empirical nature of all medical systems […] [because it] deflects a challenge to the legitimacy of the system itself”. Similarly, Hüsken (2007: 363) argues that the effectiveness of ritual is dependent on its possibility of failure in that only through failure it can become consolidated and appraised. Earlier I suggested that the establishment of memory loops through the re-enactment of familiar schemes plays a fundamental role in conferring legitimacy over a certain performance. The same holds in the circumstance of ritual failure, because “failure directs attention, it makes us remember [the effectivity of rites]. […] Successful (i.e. durable/longlasting) representation of ritual performance in many cases shapes our notion of rituals more than ‘ritual-in-performance’” (Hüsken, 2007: 362). Failure is a means by which what truly matters can once again be reaffirmed before the eyes of the ones involved in the ritual. Furthermore, it is important to remember that healing rituals of whichever form always involve several partakers: the patient and the healer/doctor, but also other members such as the patient’s family, or even the whole community. The question as to who is considered eligible to determine whether a ritual has been performed correctly or not is difficult to answer. Waldram (2000: 613) points out that the experience of sickness is first and foremost subjective and that therefore it would be misleading to assume that a doctor and a patient should have the same opinion over the efficacy of a certain treatment. Let’s take into consideration this example: a member of the Coast Salish people once had been initiated into the Spirit Dance against his will. Given his overindulgence in alcohol, his marriage fell apart and his wife, according to Salish custom, demanded he undergo a healing ritual. As indicated above, the ritual was carried out without his consent, but in accordance to the Salish epistemological and medical system. He eventually sued them for their ‘assault’. Although

32 Waldram (2000: 618) uses this example with reference to the inseparable bond between state and biomedicine, I think it still is quite revealing of the difficulties encountered when trying to establish efficacy when the partakers hold different, or even extremely discordant perspectives. Moreover, it also draws attention to the different levels or spheres of illness employed by the patient and the performers, which inevitably give forth to discrepancies in perspective. An important factor often present in negative evaluations of a given ritual performance is what Hüsken (2007: 347) calls ‘relational aspect’, in other words the relation between participants, performers, and ritual action. This relational aspect can be marked by dissonance at times, for instance when a ritual is performed by an inappropriate person, or perhaps by the right person but at the wrong time or wrong place, or by the right person who however does not show enough competence and fails in capturing the audience’s attention. Context also plays a fundamental role in creating the ‘right atmosphere’ for ritual successes. As it may appear, ritual failure can occur mainly because certain preconditions have not been met. It remains true however that although the ritual’s expected effectiveness did not achieve its goals, it can still nevertheless cause other effects and changes (i.e. the emergent quality of ritual). This is even more evident in those rituals in which a person’s fundamental nature is supposed to undergo an immediate transformation: a ritual whose aim is to instil in an infertile woman the ability to conceive a child is likely to disappoint her and confirm her sterility, which will perchance worsen her social condition; nonetheless, it may as well have brought to an end the miserable situation that the families involved had to go through (Hüsken, 2007: 353). Hence, although this ritual performance failed, in this circumstance the emergent quality of this ritual spared it from being completely invalidated. One could conclude that “it therefore seems that ritual is not so much a method to create a single outcome by one single performance, but a field where postulated effects, participant’s intentions, and the social reality which emerges from a ritual process are negotiated” (Hüsken, 2007: 353).



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Chapter three

THE PERFORMATIVE PROCESS OF HEALING For the person who is sick, as for the clinician, the disease is experienced as present in the body. But for the sufferer, the body is not simply a physical object or physiological state but an essential part of the self. The body is subject, the very grounds of subjectivity or experience in the world, and the body as ‘physical object’ cannot be neatly distinguished from ‘states of consciousness’. […] The diseased body [...] is a disordered agent of experience. Good, 1994: 116.

The debate over whether health and illness are to be considered as psychologically or biologically determined, as we have seen in my previous chapter, has yet to be overcome. The experience of both health and sickness remains elusive and difficult to define precisely. What seems to be jarring in finding a way to satisfactorily analyse and then catalogue these experiences is their capability to resist, at times, scientific explanation: health, indeed, is not reducible to the absence of disease. People can have disease without showing any illnessrelated states; similarly, illness can be present without the intrusion of any disease or biologically determinable dysfunction, which can nevertheless even cause somatoform disorders. The deceitful nature of sickness ultimately contributes to the difficulty found in pinning it down. I argued that the experience of health and sickness are subjective and that many variables come into play in the process of healing, upon which the success of a given therapy depends. Among these determining characteristics one can identify: context, atmosphere, the ability and competence of the performer/physician, participation, community legitimisation, perspective, expectations, faith, familiarity, uncertainty, perceived control and order etc., all of which engender, and thus can ultimately be reduced to, the emotions and bodily processes of the patient, a state of the bodymind. Wellbeing is determined by social and biological factors because psychological states and biological processes are not so clearcut (Womack, 2010: 57). A debate based on the mind-body dichotomy “slice[s] through confusing categories with disarming ease” (Womack, 2010: 57) and it fails to consider that the above-mentioned factors, essential to the generation of a state of the bodymind, cannot be

34 reduced to either biology nor psychology. Although they may engender and be experienced as a psychological condition, a state of the bodymind is, nevertheless, also biochemical. This is to say that any pathology/illness is the product of implications of a transdisciplinary nature. Thus conceived, our experience of our body as either ‘healthy’ or ‘sick’ results from a chain of cause-and-effect which forms a circuit between our psychological states and somatic condition (Womack, 2010: 58). Earlier, I suggested that ritual performance obtains meaning and is the producer of meaning when it takes place by respecting certain conditions. To be successful, healing rituals must be convincing in their attempt at concretely re-constructing and transforming a symbolic reality into a performative one. In order to obtain a positive meaning response, they must provide a comforting and appropriate explanation of the experience of sickness for the patient to reorient his/her body towards health. In this vein, one could conceive of the therapeutic process and interactions between physician/healers and patients as narratively structured and co-constructed (Mattingly, 1998: 6-20). Just like narratives, therapeutic explanations of the experience of sickness say something: they communicate a cultural clarification of the cause of the sickness plaguing the patient and function as a coherent and logical model capable of counteracting the disordered reality he is experiencing. However, these explanations are not only important on a discursive level, for by defining the experiences that they try to shape they also provide the patient with the prime material to overcome sickness as a whole. We can see now that therapeutic narrative is correlated to action and experience because its ultimate goal is to achieve a new bodily disposition in the patient by altering and affecting his mindbody state in a phenomenological sense. Given its primary function, that of altering the patient mindbody state to reverse it towards health by means of the manipulation of symbolic meanings, narrative must be persuasive. To summarise, “if rhetoric, as practically any dictionary tells us, is ‘the art and science of persuasion which effectively influences thought and conduct’, we want to understand ritual in these terms. How does it persuade and what are the effects of its persuasions?” (Fernandez, 2006: 648). I will investigate two case studies through which I intend to elucidate three aspects of healing: the inherent need for a coherent narrative to make sense of one’s experience of sickness, the ways in which patients become engaged in the healing process and, finally, the ways in which through verbal persuasion and narrative reconstruction they ultimately achieve healing.



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Performing narrative structures in healing processes

Perhaps the most striking property of healing rituals I managed to bring to light throughout my research on their efficacy is their inherent quality of action. As I argued, rituals do more than merely label sickness and subsequently give a new name to the condition of the patient, such as cured or healed, like a price tag that needs to be updated (Kleinman, 1980:372). Rather, rituals can be ‘meaning-making’ in that, through the manipulation of their symbols, both the patient and the performer become engaged in an interactional and empirical transformation and creation of a new meaningful, culturally sanctioned reality. Therefore, one could argue that meaning cannot be viewed as a static process such as assenting to a ‘supplied’ reality; on the contrary, meaning in ritual performance is defined by its dynamic condition of execution in which both the patient and the healer continuously react and interact, ultimately shaping the seamless unfolding of the ritual action itself. To this extent, this overall relational dynamic taking place in ritual can be viewed as narratively coconstructed, in that “narrative is a fundamental human way of giving meaning to experience” (Garro and Mattingly, 2000: 1). Mattingly (1998: 1) argues that people feel an impellent need to narrate their experiences of sickness in order to be understood by others. Similarly, in my previous chapter I suggested that by undergoing a healing ritual the patient feels like he has realigned with the rest of the community. After all, the discourse generating from this process is created and adapted according to narrative structures that a given culture supplies and makes available (Frank, 1995: 75), although it undoubtedly preserves its uniqueness, that is its inherent subjective quality. Rituals function as a context-specific, collective and culturally sanctioned way to respond and deal with certain circumstances. By engaging oneself in a given ritual practice that has been culturally designated for that specific circumstance, one ensures to himself and to others that he/she still belongs to the community. This stems from the fact that rituals are practical social knowledge that the community shares, notwithstanding the subjective interpretations of the ritual process itself. Furthermore, narrative shares with ritual the quality of “ordering experience, of constructing reality” (Bruner, 1986: 11); in other words, they both place order over the disarming experience of sickness and generate a newly formed perception of one’s condition. Through narrativity one can therefore recall an experience but also “refigure one’s own experience of time” (Ricoeur, 1991: 9), making of narrative “a form of existence of memory itself” (Severi, 2004a: 327). Rituals do not amount to pure

36 representational performances of previously culturally constructed narratives, nor do they create completely new narratives. Rather, rituals are processes in the making, they are about transformation, an experience of conversion whose ultimate goal is to reformulate the patient’s perception of his own condition (Mattingly, 1998: 162-164). Thus conceived, healing rituals seem to deal with multiple dimensions of sickness: they may be performed with the aim of alleviating physical pain and distress, but, at the same time and above all, by repairing the patient’s emotional state and social relationships, they may also become a means of coping with the experience of sickness through the construction of a coherent narrative. It holds true however that ritual healing can be quite contradictory and difficult to conceptualise because it integrates a set of opposing conditions, namely illness and health, which need to be resolved through the renewal of the patient’s body during the course of the ritual generative process (Handelman, 2006: 47). This fact inevitably implicates the presence of uncertainty because “ritual is not […] the static illustration of a traditional ‘truth’, but rather […] the result of a number of particular inferences, of individual acts of interpretation, involving doubt, disbelief and uncertainty” (Severi, 2002a: 27). However, when a patient seeks for help and medical consultation, he/she is clearly in search of an outsider’s interpretation in that he/she can’t make up his mind over his inexplicable and uncontrollable experience. Regardless of the uncertain nature of ritual which can put the patient in a real quandary, it still holds true that his own condition is even more unsettling and difficult to picture in one’s mind in terms other than its own concrete enactment through ritual healing. One could call this a joint and interactive narrativepoiesis, for “a revised view of self and others […] reshapes the past [...] [and] creates new paths for the future” (Capps and Ochs, 1995: 176). The genesis of illness radically changes their relationship with the world but through the collaboration between patient and healer things finally fall into place. These commentaries, or self-reflective narrative reconstructions, involve not only individual, but also community identity at large (Lang, 1989: 305) and cannot therefore be reduced to a dyadic doctor-patient framework. A coherent narrative explanation of the experience of sickness is after all entrenched within the broader cultural context in which this invalidating state of being is given socially established meanings. As Lang (1989: 308) has remarked in an article concerning the narratives employed by Dakota Devil’s Lake Sioux people in an attempt to make sense of the spread and dramatic increase of diabetes in their community, the physical presence of a disease with all its attendant symptoms is not the only major concern for an afflicted person. Rather, as I previously argued drawing from the considerations put forward by Waldram (2000), the



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concept of sickness is first of all socially constructed. It follows therefore that sickness is not only regarded as a biological matter, it is on the contrary more of a phenomenon upon which a community constructs conceptual schemes and explanatory frameworks, which are subsequently assigned meanings that can bring about significant relational complications for the sick, ultimately affecting negatively their suffering. The case of the Dakota (Sioux) people and their struggle with diabetes is particularly relevant to this discussion because although diabetes is defined as “a new disease that has come to us” (Lang, 1989: 305), as an ‘exogenous’ disease that did not exist in their broader matrix prior to the arrival of ‘the white man’, it nevertheless calls for an endogenous explanation “imply[ing] a collective or shared biographical experience of the larger ‘Dakota’ or ‘Indian’ people” (Lang, 1989: 306). In other words, this is a great example of the ways in which a health problem can seldom be dealt with only by means of a biomedical explanation of the aetiology of a disease. Conversely, the Dakota case proves how a culture tends to absorb and mould the occurrence of sickness and related health conditions in a way that ultimately engenders the embodiment of such events in terms of an endogenously nurtured narrative. Self-culturally-reflective knowledge and understanding of sickness should be seen co-authored “tools […] available to navigate the ambiguity surrounding illness and other troubling experiences” (Garro, 2000: 306). For the Dakota diabetes represented a threatening ailment that needed to be aligned with their overall view of how a disease worked. They did not abstract diabetes from its context of origin but rather they drew upon and threaded together bodies of traditional and modern knowledge, although extremely diverse in their nature, so to allow an inclusive approach. This syncretic view of diabetes does not pose a contradiction; it rather expresses the search for an overarching understanding of a foreign ailment that however became part of their existence and that must therefore be interpreted and addressed according to the dogmas of their cosmology. As a matter of fact, even the ways in which the Dakota talk about diabetes itself are quite illustrative within themselves of this general blending of endo-exo explanations; although they are completely aware of the intrinsic relationship between sugar-centred dietary ways and diabetes, as proven by comments such as: “It is the foods we eat now that make us sick. We used to eat fresh food, wild game and all the plants that used to grow around here” or “It is all this canned food that gives us diabetes” (Lang, 1989: 305), this does not entirely replace traditional explanations of sickness. For Dakota, sickness does not only occur when one is physically debilitated, but also when the moral and social order are negatively affected. More specifically, sickness can be the result of breaking ‘spirit-taboos’, such as not keeping a promise or not following obligations imposed by spirits; by not taking on these

38 responsibilities one ultimately let himself be dragged into a morally and spiritually despicable life which affects even his social relations (Lang, 1989: 311). When an individual fears he has a disorder or gets sick, two different choices are available to him/she: he/she can either go to a mainstream clinic or undergo a Yuwipi healing ritual, which is fairly common among Western Dakota communities (Lang, 1989: 311). Yuwipi is a curing ritual usually carried out with the intent to cure mostly what are deemed ‘Indian sickness’, that is, those ailments that existed prior to the arrival of white men, such as any general feeling of emotional unease or physical discomfort (Powers, 1986: 71). However, if one frames sickness as capable of affecting not only the physical experience of the body, but even the mind and the overall social dynamics in which a person is embedded, it becomes clear that diabetes, apart from its strict biological nature, can cause all kinds of malaise; for instance, it can keep the sick from attending social events, or from reciprocating favours, or in general from attending to his duties, ultimately embittering the spirits which can worsen his condition. Under this light, it makes perfect sense to undergo a Yuwipi ritual even though it is normally designated for other kinds of ailments. With reference to the ways they verbalise and elaborate upon their ‘imposed’ canned diet, it is important to remember that “food is capable of symbolizing the manner in which people view themselves with respect to insiders and outsiders of society […]; food systems may be treated as codes, bearing messages relative to everyday social interactions” (Powers and Powers, 1984: 86). Relatedly, the interviews carried out by Lang (1989: 314-319) in the Dakota Community showed that the members generally attributed the causes of diabetes to moral mishaps. More specifically, it emerged that sickness was believe to be sent to them because some people were not acting properly: some did not attend to their responsibilities, others had forgotten their traditions and this eventually resulted in ‘punishments’ for lives not lived in the right way. These punishments can cause an endless series of misfortunes that can affect not only the individual but even one’s family, both in the present and in the future. Moreover, although some of the members seemed to be completely aware that their eating choices were contributing to the worsening of their condition in general, they would still not follow the diet they had been suggested to attend because “it is hard when you are cooking for a lot of people to eat a separate meal” (Lang, 1989: 316). Perhaps, this sort of attitude and behaviour further hindered their already fragile psychological state towards their experience of sickness. By not following a specific diet their condition worsened, as their condition worsened ‘the sugar in their blood kept on building up’, the sugar in their blood consequentially made them worry about their family because ‘it now runs in their blood’, and lastly the worrying was believed to cause diabetes because stress brings sugar up (Lang, 1989). It seems like a circular



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phenomenon causing feelings of disheartening powerlessness, ultimately making them feel like they’d befallen in moral misconduct because they brought diabetes on their families and displeased the spirits. Although they questioned the efficacy of traditional treatment for a non-Indian disease like diabetes, the poor adherence of the dietary modification treatment shows “that a patient (or community) is continually ‘making sense’ of and about illness in complex ways […] [and that] people [may] continually consider the potential for traditional or alternative treatments that circumvent some of the standard biomedical therapies” (Lang, 1989: 320-319). Powers (1986), in his description of Lakota Oglala’s Yuwipi songs, singing techniques and the ways they verbalise about songs and sacred language, brought to light some interesting insights on the relationship between sickness and the use of vocables and words to cure it. The Oglala believe that everything emanating from the body belongs to the natural world, that it is, any ‘extension’ of the body can have physical and physiological functions. It follows that speech and songs are conceptualised under these terms. The generic Oglala term for song is olowan, (w)o is the noun marker and lowan can be translated as ‘to sing a song’ (Powers, 1986: 53-54). What seems to be interesting about the term for song olowan is that “the radical element (lo) […] is the same radical element found in lexemes associated with human anatomy (the face and throat), and with food and methods of preparing food.[…] The manner in which the Oglala verbalize about song is analogous to the manner in which they verbalize about other bodily functions such as eating, as well as human anatomy involved in food ingestion” (Powers, 1986: 55). Moreover, Powers stresses that during a healing ritual a song can be repeated even up to twenty-five times and interestingly enough this act’s name is formed by two words, piya ‘to renew’, and lowan ‘to sing a song’ (1986: 57). Therefore, it appears that the Oglala conceive piyalowan metaphorically the same as to cure the body of the sufferer, which is renewed through the repetition (renewal) of songs (Powers, 1989: 57). Similarly, the morpheme lo described by Powers can be found even in Dakota words related to human anatomy and food: for instance, the word loté means both throat and food (Boas, 1941: 35); the term t’aló means meat/fresh food (Boas, 1941: 126); the word for lohé means jowl (Boas, 1941: 34) etc. Unfortunately, I have not been able to find an equivalent for piyalowan; however, the radical element lo appears in the word ‘olówq, song (Boas, 1941: 125). The characteristics these two languages share fairly justify the presupposition that it is a similar cosmological framework and understanding of the nature of songs leading the Dakota community to try out traditional therapies for diabetes.

40 Not surprisingly, songs are one of the most important means of a Yuwipi ritual because they are essential to summon, appease and communicate with the spirits (Powers, 1986: 7). Regardless of their esoteric nature (i.e. they are only understood by the healer), these sacred songs are taught to common people because all the ones present during a Yuwipi are invited to sing in order to get a better response from the spirits (Powers, 1989: 74). The spirits, once satisfied by the singing performance, will in turn inform and advise the healer as to the proper methods for curing the sufferer (Powers, 1986: 71). The responses to the problems posed to the spirits can range from explanations to reprehensions. The explanations suggested by the spirits can even clarify and describe the physiological processes of the sufferer, by stating that the disease is out of one’s body, or conversely that the cause of his pain is in his body, for instance in his kidney, which is polluting the rest of the body and his existence as a whole (Kemnitzer, 1976: 273). In summary, “the response to a problem by the spirits reduces the indeterminacy by offering an explanation of the problem [and] gives reassurance that the spirits are helping the supplicant” (Kemnitzer, 1976: 274). Finally, this can be seen as an extreme effort to make sense of their experience of sickness by bringing the foreign concept of diabetes into an ongoing co-creation of a coherent narrative. Although this co-authored narrative is comprehensive of the context from which it sprung, it adheres nonetheless to their social-cultural and traditional matrix. As a result, the conclusion drawn from the above argument suggests that “as narrative is constructed, narrative constructs. […] Narrative is something that is enacted in specific contexts and reflects culturally based constructive processes” (Garro and Mattingly, 2000: 16). Narrative stands as a way of shaping and recounting the past but also as a way of making sense of ongoing situations through which the course of future similar circumstances can ultimately be affected. “Narratives shape action just as actions shape [narrative]”, say Garro and Mattingly (2000:17). Furthermore, conveying meaning has shown itself to be a matter of technique and one must therefore learn the appropriate cultural forms befitting the task of recounting one’s experience of sickness. Creating a socially intelligible narrative requires one to pay attention to culturally established notions and processes for the creation of a comprehensible story. In other words, “narrative provides a way to approach the relationship between individual and culture by attending to the ‘role of cultural forms in the creation of meaning’ (Shore, 1996: 316)” (Garro and Mattingly, 2000: 25). The need for intelligibility pushes individuals to embody techniques that can align cultural meaning with the present circumstances. As will be discussed below, during the performance of a healing ritual, narrative is constructed through the use of certain media laden with social meaning, such as



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stereotypic narrative structures or linguistic instruments and techniques, that can have enormous sensory effects on the participants. These ethno-specific interactive and communicative patterns are indeed culturally determined and function as a means by which a ritual performance can be framed as such and therefore be recognised and acclaimed. As Severi (2002a: 23) argues, “what makes a representation part of a tradition is, first of all, its form. Shared knowledge is everywhere transmitted following traditional patterns as, for instance, in the form of a story […] [and] while being subjected to constant variations, these stories appear to be sustained by a number of underlying patterns of narration […] that acquire a certain stability through time, and thus preserve the general identity of a tradition”. In other words, “ritual is activity that frames itself as ritual. The framing is conveyed by signs or patterns of behaviour […] commonly recognized (e.g., specified places and times of performance, specific role-actors, clothing, speech patterns, music etc.)” (Turner, 2006: 235). As I already anticipated, the intersection of bodily presence and voice through the use of linguistic instruments is capable of bringing about the creation of a parallel dimension, a symbolically structured, ritualised environment. Here a healer, by employing certain schemes, such as the use of tropes, can ultimately manipulate and dominate the non-ritualised real experience of sickness through a ‘play of frames’ (Turner, 2006: 238).

The rhetorical power of persuasion in curing rituals Let us now focus and devote our attention to the ways in which vocal patterns and techniques used in healing rituals can transfer their meanings from the ritual frame to the real experience of sickness and ultimately project their efficacy and bring about physiological bodily changes in the sufferer. As a first step in this direction, one should always bear in mind that ritual efficacy lies in its veiled specialness, in its nuanced differentiation from ordinary actions. It is the very context-specificity of the materiality attributed to the ritual mediums that enables a recognition of the fluid shifting from a non-ritual reality to a ritualised dimension (Handelman, 2006: 571-572). Although framing affords for ritual reality to separate itself from a non-ritual dimension, it presents itself nonetheless as a highly dynamic process. Indeed, the movement from one frame to another is not to be thought as strictly clear-cut but rather as a continuous process of interpenetration and indwelling of a double-fold reality (i.e. ritual and non-ritual). This is directly related to the poietic quality of ritual narratives, embedded in a set of conventions yet inextricable from the uniqueness of the present context in which it takes place. In other words, “the ritual frame opens to the outside while enabling

42 itself to be practiced as relatively closed. […] The frame is ‘in process’ within itself, and in an ongoing relationship to its inside and to its outside” (Handelman, 2006: 578). This represents the performative aspect of ritual activity, the extent to which it does not formulate itself merely in terms of a deductive representation but rather as an active performance that empirically affects the world beyond its frame (Laderman and Roseman, 1996: 3). In order to comprehend ritual efficacy as determined by issues of experience, embodiment and imagination, one must remember that the transformative movements from illness to health are situated within an interactive dynamic, an engaging participatory poetics. At the beginning of this dissertation, I argued that spoken language is not only a vehicle for conveying words and concepts, but rather an instrument that one can avail himself of even to achieve and do things. A strategic use of language can indeed endue it with a far greater sharpness, marking it off from everyday speech. Through such artifice, ritual language can ultimately afford to be recognised as pertaining to the special context of ritual performance, or, as Turner (2006) would say, it frames itself as ritual communication. This proposition holds even for those phenomena I previously classified as ‘noise behaviour’ and in general for all those verbal forms which may or may not be grammatical or even comprehensible in terms of their specific semantic meaning. Sound, so intrinsically tied to any linguistic phenomena, can untie itself from words, redeem itself from his taken-for-granted relationship with semantic meaning, and emerge with unexpected autonomy (Severi, 2004b: 229). This is the paradoxicality of sound: although a vocable may lack semantic meaning, it may be nevertheless extremely meaningful. It is the precisely established patterns and instructions, along with the overt attention to the technicalities concerning the ways a therapeutic ritual discourse should be vocalised that lend to the sounds and words emitted during the ritual performance an extreme salience, a kind of materiality. This quality is central to our understanding of both language and the whole vocal repertoire as instrumental, that is, as a strategy whose aim is to engender a figuration and re-figuration of one’s experience of sickness (Severi, 2002a: 28). Apart from the manifold conditions determining efficacy, healing rituals can hold transformative potency only if the performer shows competence by accurately attending to qualitative techniques. When it comes to healing rituals concerned with the sole use of verbal means, these techniques generally vary from special linguistic forms and variations, to characteristic onomatopoeia or patterns of vocalisation (Bauman, 1975: 295), to changes in pitch, volume, and timbre (Weidman, 2014: 40), to stylistically elaborate forms of enunciation and parallelism (Severi, 2002a: 24). As we will see, the use of these techniques can most effectively structure the experience of healing in a way capable of



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persuading the patient into building a new tenable reality upon it. This transformation can be achieved because convincing narratives can have perlocutionary power and “produce certain consequential effects of the feelings, thoughts, or actions of the audience, or of the speaker, or of other persons” (Austin, 1975: 101). To this regard, central to our analysis of the rhetorical power of ritual persuasion in inducing a dispositional transformation in the patient (i.e. the way in which the ritual frame opens to the outside) is the concept of tropes (Turner, 2006: 238-240). “Tropes such as metaphor, metonymy and synecdoche […] can be understood as patterns of activity (in other words, schemas), that bring into association or transform relations among the elements of ritual action. […] The process of projection or transference of meaning and performative force from one frame to another […] may be understood as grounded, in many cases at least, in a play of tropes” (Turner, 2006: 239). The patient’s figurative understanding of the transformation achieved through ritual hinges on this play of tropes, which propels a disposition to be healed through the projection of the sufferer’s experience of sickness into the ritual frame. By engaging oneself in a healing ritual performance, the bodily experience of sickness is ‘phenomenologically attuned’ with a coherent narrative. As Garro and Mattingly (2000: 27) suggest, “‘the body’s insistence on meaning’ (Kirmayer, 1992) gains expression through metaphor and narrative. Narrative, as ‘extended metaphor’ (Ricoeur, 1984) draw upon rich connotative images to evoke a world”. Ritual performance must therefore be seen as a kind of poetics of persuasion which induces an imaginative play of figurative thought (Fernandez, 2006: 648). The rhetorical power of ritual transformation lies indeed in the ways the various tropes are brought into effective action through the embodied figurative representation of the truth values it carries. Simlarly, with reference to Catholic Charismatic healing practices, Csordas (1996: 94-107) talks of “sequences of imagery not as elements in healing performance but as performances in their own right, as a kind of performance within performance that may not even be observable”. This concept can serve us well to understand that imagination, or mental projection (Severi, 2004b: 232-237), being culturally constructed, can be conceived as an imaginal bodily practice of orienting and engaging oneself in the world that can be affected through the rhetoric of ritual transformation. Indeed the healer, by means of tropes, can guide and help the patient enter the realm of imageries where, together, they can ultimately transform the patient’s perspective and orientation in the world leading him/her towards the embodiment of a co-authored, new narrative. Central to our quest concerning the operational modes of ritual persuasion is therefore the investigation of tropes as both figures of speech and devices capable of transforming one’s

44 experience of sickness. A great example of this is to be found in Briggs’ (1996) extensive analysis of the hebu nisayaha (curing hebu-sickness) ritual practiced by the Warao people inhabiting the Delta Amacuro of Venezuela. The hebu nisayaha is a remedial practice in which vocables, words, songs, and more in general, bodily presence play a fundamental role in effecting a cure; I will now describe this ritual by drawing at length from Briggs’ ethnography (Briggs, 1996: 189-225). A vital figure in this ritual is represented by the wisidatu (healer), the only member of the community who, after a strict and thorough initiation, is entitled to communicate and authorised to negotiate with the hebu spirits. For the wisidatu to engage himself in a relationship with the spirits is fundamental for the wellbeing of the community: when the spirits are angry and they try to kill a member of the community, he is the one who must ‘talk them out of it’. The case described by Briggs refers to a curing performance enacted for a six-year-old boy who felt sick by the ‘hand’ of a spirit called Waba Sinaka Aurohi (the hebu of the fever that causes strokes). I will now report, letter by letter, the curing song performed by the wisidatu in this ritual just as Briggs (1996: 191-194) transcribed it: Section 1: ‘Starting up the song’ 1. 2. 3. 4.

Waiya ho ho ho ho hoi hoi hoi hi hi bohotoya, bohotoya botó You grabbed him, you grabbed him

5.

okó boto sinahiayasí you grabbed him by the head

6.

hiwabotuma isiko with your fevers

7.

hiwabotuma isiko with your fevers

8.

himonituma, hiburetuma isiko with your afflictions, your power for making one crazy

9.

kereko aurohi naminatuiné I myself am the one who knows the fevers of the little rocks

10.

hiahokwanaminatuiné I myself am the one who knows you

11. hiahokwaeturatuiné I myself am the one who softens you 12. hiahokwaehebaratuiné I myself am the one who makes you let go 13. tatuka abané mamohorabu abané I am immediately grabbing you with my hands 14. tatuka nakané



45 you are immediately falling into my grasp

15. mamohorabu aoatuiné I am the one who grabs you with my hands 16. hiteho aoané, hiehebaraneiné I am grabbing your body, I making you let go 17. hiahokwaehebarané, ehebarané I am making you let go, I am making [you] let go 18. hiahokwaehebarané, horoya ehebarané I am making you let go, I am making [you] let go all along the skin 19. horo mutanayá, atoma mutanayá ehebarané between the skin and the flesh, I am making [you] let go all long the flesh

Section 2: ‘Spanking the hebu’ 20. ho ho ho ho 21. waiya 22. (hebu) sebuatiné, waba sebuatuiné I myself am the one who takes out hebu,I myself am the one who takes out hebu 23. waba sebuatiné, ehebaratuiné I myself am the one who takes out hebu, I myself am the one who makes [you] let go 24. hiehebarané, hiahokwaehebarané I am making you let go, I am making you let go 25. mahokwarima isiko, oborebu aisiko with these helping spirits of which I am the father, with the spirits of diseased curers 26. urusi sanuka sinahiasí [the hebu] is lying on the little boy’s stomach 27. himonituma isiko, hiburituma isiko with your power to cause illness, with your power to make one crazy

Section 3: ‘The hebu reveals its words’ 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

ee:aa: ee:aa: ho ho ho ho ho hoi hoi ho ho iné, iné I myself, I myself

34. bohoto nauka siahinaené I myself grabbed his little head 35. yanomiahainé I myself was watching you 36. bohoto yanominiahainé I myself was watching his head 37. tamaha manatoro sanuka, domu hidoiné I myself, with this grandson of mine, with this young child 38. mehorokoya tuaturuaené I myself wanted to throw him on the ground [i.e., kill him] 39. maurohituma miané I myself saw my fevers 40. mawabototuma miaené

46 I myself saw my fevers 41. makwarika tatuka abanaené I myself put myself next to him 42. manana abanaené I myself put my filth on him 43. tamhasi ahokwaraisainé I myself ]grabbed the grandson of] this friend 44. domukatu hoebo ahokwarima oborebuiné who is a master of ‘bird magic’, who is a master of hoa, who is a wisidatu curer, I myself 45. diaka abané tatuka abaneiné I myself went outside [of the spirit hourse], and there I put those things [on the child] 46. deri karamunaené, deri karamunaené they played the esemoi, they played the esemoi 47. sabainé ewirikataené that’s how I myself got close to him 48. maurohituma isikoiné I myself with my fevers 49. mawabototuma isikoiné I myself with my fevers 50. mawabayaroko wabatuma isikoiné I myself, the one who loves to kill, with my ways of causing death 51. Waba Sinaka temonukwa abaené I myself, the Hebu Who Causes Strokes, have similarly struck him 52. diaka abané tamaha anatoro sanukainé I myself went outside [to grab] this little grandson of his 53. mehorokoya tuaturuaené I myself wanted to throw him on the ground 54. oborebuiné I myself am a curer 55. oborebu mamohorabu oanaené I myself, a curer, grabbed [you] with my hands 56. mamohorabu oanaené I myself grabbed [you] with my hands

The first thing that probably strikes the reader when reading this chant is the presence of persistent redundancy, continuous repetitions that one could easily believe to be needless, erroneously thinking that at least part of them could be eliminated without loss of essential information. In American Indian chants, a particular form of dialogical structure and enunciation called parallelism is fairly common.10 Parallelism is a technique “which designates the use of a limited number of repeated formulas, constantly modified with slight variations” (Severi, 2002: 24). Sometimes the repetition can even be reduced to single words 10

See for instance: Severi, C., 2004. Il percorso e la voce: Un’antropologia della memoria. Torino: Einaudi; Townsley, G. 1993. ‘Song paths. The ways and means of Yaminahua shamanic knowledge’. L’Homme, 126(128), 449–468.



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or grammatical elements (e.g. boto), but it can also be expanded to form (e.g. repetition of morphemes), content (e.g. repeatedly stating the actions performed), and function (e.g. stressing the power exercised by the action), to the formal organisation of the performance (Briggs, 1996: 204-205). However, “parallelism, can also be used in a reflexive way, in order to define not only the world described by the ritual language, but also the identity of the person enunciating it”, says Severi (2002: 30). If we take a look at section 3, the transcript reveals the absence of hi-, the second person prefix (Briggs, 1996: 205), and the sole and constant presence of –iné (I, myself), which shows that the healer and hebu have become one, the former giving voice to the latter. It is furthermore important to note that “if the hebu’s voice does not emerge at all [i.e. if the curer cannot expel the spirit from the patient’s body], the lack of parallelism signals the failure of the curing performance” (Briggs, 1996: 206). As I am about to discuss, the parts of this song may differ only in details but these details are nevertheless extremely crucial for the success of the healing ritual. What appears to be jarring however in understanding the efficacy of this healing practice is the fact that almost the whole song, although grammatically coherent, is still for the most part incomprehensible to the layperson because it consists of the curer’s lexicon (Briggs, 1996: 2006). One aspect to consider regarding the efficacy, given the unintelligibility of the curer’s language, is that it provides proof that he is a curer, that he possesses knowledge and power beyond any layman’s comprehension (Briggs, 1996: 211). In other words, unintelligibility is a tangible proof of his competence as a curer. That said, some words, although more complex than usual, are intelligible because based on ‘everyday’ Warao language: it is up to the wisidatu to strategically “manipulate the borderline between intelligibility and opacity” (Briggs, 1996: 207). As a matter of fact, even the series of untranslated sound-like words that recur systematically at the beginning of each section of the song can be, contrarily to expectations, extremely meaningful. These sequences of sounds lack any grammatical property and are generally termed vocables (Briggs, 1996: 198). Vocables are not meant to be understood by humans and are indeed separated, musically and grammatically, from the other verbal elements of the song. This is so because they are the wisidatu’s means of interaction with the spirts: only the wisidatu knows how to communicate with the hebu spirits and when he starts producing these sounds, everyone knows he is in contact with them. These phonological series are characterised by a rather raspy voice which is achieved through a constriction of the pharynx. It is no surprise that the Warao’s idea of sickness is conceptualised in pneumatic terms: one falls sick when a harmful odour enters his body. The sounds produced by the wisidatu are “believed to reflect the difficulty that the spirits encounter in passing through the

48 larynx and pharynx [which] indicates a change in the [wisidatu because] […] speech that bears these acoustic characteristics is believed to be intoned by spirits rather than by the curer himself” (Briggs, 1996: 199). Given the ethereal, airy essence of the malaise, along with the use of vocables, the wisidatu also smokes tobacco in order to remove the malevolent spirit in that ‘tabacco-breath’ is heavier, it softens the hebu and ultimately expels it from the victim’s body. As Briggs (1996: 199) suggests, “these voice qualities provide acoustic evidence for the status of the sounds as sonic embodiments of the movement of the helping spirits out of the curer’s chest, through his mouth and into the air – and vice versa. […] [These sounds are] audible traces of the participation of spirits. Since hebu are invisible, ee:aa:, ho and hoi provide crucial means of charting the curer’s success in extracting the hebu from the patient and expelling them”. In other words, with the aid of tropes employed while singing, these phonological patterns are capable of producing what Severi (2004a: 329) would call ‘sound images’. In order to better understand the meaningful function of ‘meaningless’ vocables, let us come back to the concept of ‘noise behaviour’11. Although vocables lack literal meaning, it does not mean that they are decontextualised. In this instance, the wisidatu is making use of culturally conventionalised means. These means are familiar to the community and are recognised as meaningful according to the context in which they occur. As Briggs (1996: 209) suggests, “Warao are clearly aware that such expressions lack denotative content […] and [that they] are only meaningful when uttered in context – that is, when spirits are entering or exiting the larynx of a wisidatu”. As I asserted earlier, the emission of vocables informs the patient and the rest of the participants that the wisidatu is in contact with helping spirits which are trying to get out from his throat. This is commonly known because everyone is familiar with the procedure of the ritual. Therefore, “vocables constitute implicit metapragmatic signs […]. They direct attention to the curer’s body, metanomically represented by his throat, as a locus of action that is being used simultaneously by a variety of agents. Vocables indicate to the […] [sufferer] that the helping spirits are assisting the wisidatu in effecting a cure” (Briggs, 1996: 209). And once again we can find another example of the flexibility of parallelism because “when ritually applied to the description of the experience of an ill person, it becomes a way to construct a supernatural dimension that is thought of as a possible world, possessing an existence parallel to that of the ordinary world” (Severi, 2002: 29). According to Mattingly (1998: 164), the transition from one state to another brought about by healing rituals is often metaphorically expressed through the vivid imagery and symbolism of

11

See chapter 1.



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a journey, which is capable of shifting and transporting the patient towards a new physiological and cognitive self. Similarly, the wisidatu provides a pattern upon which he coshapes with the patient a coherent, but most of all emergent narrative (Garro and Mattingly, 2000: 8). Throughout the performance, the wisidatu provides the patient with phonetic clues to picture the terrifying, invisible, yet extraordinary spectacle that is taking place before his eyes and within his mindbody. The culturally conventionalised narrative and the iconic familiar means employed by the wisidatu engage the mind and affect the emotions of the sufferer in significant ways. Familiar sounds and parallelistic structures lend to the song a uniformly alternating, recognisable form. These scattered hints ultimately create a vaguely defined, yet incomplete, sound image that guides the patient in projecting the missing dots to complete it. The sufferer, in other words, follows this auditory trail and projects a personal, yet culturally coded ‘sound image’ of his path towards health (Severi, 2004b: 232-237).

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CONCLUSION At the beginning of this dissertation, I set out to prove that performativity is inherent to any ritual practice, and to analyse the roles of personal engagement of agents and participants, their disposition and participation in the creation of a concrete new reality. Within the frame that ritual engenders, one’s experience of sickness can be renegotiated through the bodily enactment of a coherent narrative. This newly acquired state of the bodymind can however find itself at odds with the goals of western medicine, inasmuch as it does not necessarily entail an eradication of the causes of the pathology. As I have shown, rituals are processes concerned with transformation, a conversion of experience whose ultimate goal is to reformulate the patient’s perception of his own condition. Hence efficacy depends on the patient’s personal, yet culturally conditioned, objectives. Healing rituals may be performed with the aim of alleviating physical pain and distress, or even to help the patient come to terms and cope with their condition by realigning themselves with the rest of the community. Through a new narrative one can refigure their experience of sickness by making of this new narrative a new memory. Hence, rituals can be meaning-making because they provide a culturally coded explanation of the disordered experience of sickness, or, in other words, they provide the means through which the patient can alter his perception and ultimately reorient his body. To this regard, the healer plays a fundamental role in that he is the one in charge of guiding the patient in his path towards health. Meaning is therefore formulated through the dynamic interaction between patient and healer. I have called this a joint and interactive narrativepoiesis, for “a revised view of self and others […] reshapes the past [...] [and] creates new paths for the future” (Capps and Ochs, 1995: 176). One could conclude therefore that by engaging oneself in a healing ritual, one can ultimately merge this imaginative narrative with experienced reality. Narrative is therefore to be seen as a metaphor, a process that hinges on a play of tropes through which the patient can project and rewrite his experience of sickness. Ritual is nothing but a poetic of persuasion that leads the patient on the right path to figuratively reshape himself, embody this transformation and positively affect his experience.



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