THOMAS J.

CSORDAS

HEALING AND THE HUMAN CONDITION: SCENES FROM THE PRESENT MOMENT IN NAVAJOLAND

THE 2001 ROGER ALLAN MOORE LECTURE

ABSTRACT. The encounter of Navajo spirituality and healing practice with modernity in the present moment must be understood within an existential appreciation of temporality, tradition, domination, and immediacy. Examining the practical exigencies and experiential nuances in a performance of the Navajo Nightway ceremony allows us to elaborate this insight. KEY WORDS: experience and intersubjectivity, modernity and the present, Navajo ritual healing

I shall begin with three stories, each one a scene from contemporary Navajoland. 1. NASA and the Old Man. When NASA was preparing for the Apollo project, they did some astronaut training on the Navajo Indian reservation. One day, a Navajo elder and his son were herding sheep and came across the space crew. The old man, who only spoke Navajo, asked a question, which his son translated: What are the guys in the big suits doing? A member of the crew said they were practicing for their trip to the moon. The old man got really excited and asked if he could send a message to the moon with the astronauts. Recognizing a promotional opportunity, the NASA people found a tape recorder. After the old man recorded his message, they asked the son to translate. He refused. So they brought the tape to the reservation, where the tribal leaders listened and laughed, but refused to translate the elders message to the moon. Finally, NASA called in an ofcial government translator. He reported that the moon message said, Watch out for these guys; theyve come to steal your land. 2. The Navajo Nation Flag in Space. A NASA ofcial had a cousin who had spent time on the Navajo reservation. He was impressed by her stories and thought it would be a wonderful gesture of respect if he could arrange for the ag of the Navajo Nation to be taken into space on one of the Space Shuttle missions. He proposed this to the tribal government, and caused an immediate restorm of protest. The fact is that traditional Navajos are highly skeptical of space travel, on the grounds both that humans were created to dwell on the earths surface and hence it is unnatural for us to venture beyond, and that the blackness of
Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 28: 114, 2004. C 2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers.

T. J. CSORDAS

space is a realm of evil, in fact the realm to which evil is often dispatched by ceremonial means. To send a symbol of the Navajo people into this realm would create a terrible risk for all Navajos. On the other hand, some Navajos said go ahead, it cant hurt because a ag is a white mans symbol, and furthermore a symbol of a tribal government which was instituted by white men and therefore is in reality a white mans institution. Theres no such thing as a traditional Navajo ag. 3. JFK and the Space Shuttle. Among Navajo, acquisition of sacred knowledge requires an exchange, a kind of honoric payment in which the apprentice acknowledges the value of the knowledge bestowed. If the knowledge is of an evil nature, say knowledge that allows one to perform witchcraft, one must pay with the life of a loved one. A sacrice must be made in which a relative will fall ill and die in consequence of the exchange of knowledge. Given this background, recall that during the summer of 1999 an event occurred which had an impact on the American national psyche in a way from which Navajos were hardly immune: the death in a plane crash of John Kennedy, Jr. For Navajos the question of why such an event occurred is not an idle rhetorical one, and among some of my acquaintances the answer was readily at hand, as I discovered one evening while watching the news on television with some Navajo acquaintances at home on their reservation. The report was of an historic launching of a NASA space shuttle captained for the rst time by a woman. As we discussed this event it became clear that it was no coincidence that the shuttle mission was taking place within a week of the Kennedy death. The equation was elegant: if one must pay for evil knowledge with the death of a loved one, then a nation must pay for unnatural knowledge from an evil realm with the death of someone loved by the entire nation. Kennedy was sacriced by the nation for knowledge from spacesuch is the Navajo philosophy of balance and harmony in nature.

THE NAVAJO, OUTER SPACE, AND MODERNITY

What is the rationale for relating these stories? Is it because they are all about outer space? In fact, it is because outer space is still a powerful symbol of the future (I want to use the term futurity as a construction parallel to modernity) while for non-Indians, Native Americans are still a powerful symbol of the past (here I refer to the bygone of vanished or vanishing civilizations, perhaps clinging to remnants of an ancient vitality, but not regarded by the dominant society as being of the present). So the idea of American Indians encountering outer space appears at rst incongruous, an oxymoron juxtaposing futurity and the bygone. In fact, this apparent oxymoron collapses into a simple equation: futurity plus the bygone equals the present, and hence the appeal to the present in the title of this

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piece. More precisely, futurity and the bygone serve no descriptive purpose, but are both rhetorical gures deployed in the construction of the present. In short, these stories begin to tell us something about the Navajo encounter with modernity in the present moment. They tell us something about Navajo spirituality. They offer a Navajo scenario of local religious reasoning in dialogue with cosmopolitan current events. They tell us that what we take for granted about what is good and noble and honorable can be called into question from a different cultural standpoint. And really, why should we be surprised that our dreams of exploring space as the nal frontier, of colonizing space with a pioneer spirit, would not be looked on askance by Navajos? What investment do Native Americans have in ideas like frontier and pioneer? But I want to be even more precise with regard to what I mean by a concern with the present in my work with the Navajo. There are four aspects of this concern. The rst is that of temporality: just as we could say that to live fully in the present does not mean to live without memory, so to problematize the present does not mean to abandon temporality or historyquite the contrary. It is dramatically different from what we used to call the ethnographic present, an artice based on the distinction between synchronic and diachronic constituting an abstract present on the methodological presumption of a frozen cross-section of time that existed only within the convention of ethnographic writing and not in any concrete sense of today. The manner in which the present is conditioned by temporality is compellingly evident if we compare the Euro-American and Native American appreciation of history. For example, in my Euro-American education, the story of General Custer and the Battle of the Little Big Horn was something that belonged to the distant past of the nation, the frontier days when Indians and buffalo wandered the prairie. The arbitrariness of that form of historical consciousness was brought home to me when I heard the Lakota folk singer Floyd Westerman talk about listening to his grandfather tell stories about ghting against Custer. What to me had been an event in the misty past had for him the vividness of the narrative present. The second is that of tradition, something presumed to contrast with modernity, to be bound to the past, and often to be frozen and inexible. Life in Navajoland today proves the outdatedness of any simple dichotomy between tradition and modernity/postmodernity. On the one hand tradition cannot be regarded as something frozen, arthritic, simply because it engages reality in the challenge of everyday life in the present. On the other hand, tradition itself often becomes a rhetorical token in the strategic maneuvering of identity politics. Many of those who explicitly dene themselves as traditional Navajos do so in full awareness of the contemporary contextto say nothing of using cellphones and emailwhile the anomalies of contemporary life are often taken very much in stride by even elderly, monolingual Navajo people. At the same time the rhetoric of tradition and

T. J. CSORDAS

identity exists in tension with the realities of the present. An example is the comment made by a young woman who began work for the Navajo Healing Project (Csordas 2000) as a transcriber and translator of audio taped interviews. On returning her rst batch of tapes, she said, I thought this was a Navajo healing project, but these interviews are all with Christians. Here is a sense in which the present, where Navajos use traditional ceremonies, peyote meetings, and Christian faith healing in addition to conventional biomedicine as resources for healing, came into conict with a sense of Navajo culture that included only the elements of traditional Navajo ceremonialism. The third inescapable aspect of the present is domination, a reality surrounded in the discourse on Native Americans by a cluster of terms like assimilation, integration, biculturalism, sovereignty, and decolonization. To speak of true decolonization with respect to any so-called fourth world nation, especially any of those within the United States, is a kind of joke. There is little possibility of a disentanglement of cultural and power relations in these situations. The Navajo are perhaps in the best situation among North American peoples because of the geographical integrity of their land base, the existence of mineral and some agricultural resources within their reservation, their relatively large population of about a quarter million, and the continued viability of their language. A limited autonomy euphemized as sovereignty allows for the existence of institutions that give a measure of tribal self-government, ostensibly established by treaty between political entities, but not even beginning to mask the reality of dependence and subjection. Meanwhile, many rhetorical eggs are placed in the basket of preservation of traditional culture. Health care is a domain in which issues of entanglement have often been played out. I refer to episodes such as the building of a ceremonial hogan-shaped chamber into an Indian Health Service hospital, the repeated call for the cost of traditional healing ceremonies to be covered by insurance, and the attempt to subsidize and institutionalize schools or training programs for medicine men. With respect to decolonization, Navajoland is at this moment in the throes of 638-ing their biomedical health care system. As my colleague Mick Storck has noted, to 638 (referring to the implementation of Public Law 93-638 that allows transfer of federally provided services to tribal jurisdiction) is one of the more peculiar verbs to enter the English language, and it refers to a provision that allows tribes to take over administration of health care from the Indian Health Service. Particularly interesting in this rather agonizing process are the divided loyalties of Navajos who work for the IHS and are wary of the tribes ability to effectively administer health care. A fourth aspect of my concern with the present is its immediacy. In the heyday of the ethnographic present the textual strategy was a self-portrayal of the ethnographer as having been there as a sign of authority. What we are talking about is the ethnographers presence, and also the presence of the people who encounter

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and are encountered by the ethnographer, as well as the potential presence of the reader, who is, to borrow the usage of Alfred Schutz, a contemporaryall these as a sign not of authority but of immediacy. This is the immediacy of experience. For experience is (and I submit this as a denition) what makes meaning meaningful. This meaningfulness of meaning lies not only in symbols, concepts, representations, but also in the way we stand, the way we move, in our sinews, the way we deploy our senses across the eld of perception, in how we orient toward and take up the material conditions of our existence, how we resist or yield to the external forces that seek to dominate our lives, how we inhabit space and make it our own, the way we touch each other, dance with each other, wound each other, suffer alone or with each other. What I mean to say is that in my view experience is concrete, material, embodied, and not abstract, interior, or mentalistic. It is immediate both in the sense of its concreteness, its subjunctive openness, its breakthrough to the sensory, emotional, intersubjective reality of right now; and in the sense in which it is unmediated, unpremeditated, spontaneous, or unrehearsed upwelling of raw existence. The challenge of the present is, accordingly, not to capture experience in our work, but to give access to experiencethe meaningfulness of meaningon the wing. Now the stories about Navajos and space travel do not originate in a study of space travel, and my reection on temporality, tradition, domination, and immediacy does not originate as a philosophy of the present (though I will touch on the latter in my concluding comments). They are fruits of an effort to understand ritual healing in a way that recognizes that healing is not just about health, but about emotion, identity, religion, self, suffering, modernity, and the colonial situation. I am going to discuss only a fragment of what I learned during the ten years of the Navajo Healing Project, which spanned the entire Navajo reservation and took into account the reality that the contemporary situation can best be understood in terms of the interaction among three religious healing forms: Traditional Navajo ceremonial healing, Native American Church peyote healing, and Navajo Christian faith healing (Csordas 2000, 2002). In this work, my assistants and I have undertaken to create a dialogue between Navajo and non-Navajo ways of knowing, so that we could produce not a brute translation of Navajo experience into academic discourse, but instead an intertwining or braiding of the two ways of thinking and knowing. Each year from 1993 to 1996, the members of the project staff gathered for a weekend to share our insights, and we have published papers coauthored by Navajo and non-Navajo staff members. During the rst six years of the project we worked with 84 patients and 95 healers. In the second phase we returned to talk to approximately 60 of the same patients, and spent intensive time with seven of the healers who proved to be the most articulate and engaged in the work we did together. In this paper I will discuss a ceremony I attended with one of those seven, a Traditional chanter who specializes in the nine-night Nightway.

T. J. CSORDAS DIVINITY AND EXPERIENCE IN THE NAVAJO NIGHTWAY

Navajo ceremonialism has typically been portrayed as highly liturgical, necessitating rigidly precise and awless performance in order to be deemed successful. Studies of Navajo ceremonies concentrate almost invariably on the meaning of symbols and almost never on the experience of participants. The most inuential accounts of the Nightway Chant, with which I am concerned here, have consisted either of a documentation of songs, prayers, and myths (Mathews 1995), or a genealogy of variant forms (Faris 1990). My aim here is to present the Nightway with a twofold appreciation. First, the chanter is not a rote liturgist, but someone who responds to unpredictable contingencies and adapts his practice to the individual needs of his patient. He does these things not as a bricoleur juggling ceremonial elements, but as a deeply committed healer, a highly skilled craftsman, and a sensitively engaged performing artist. Second, the patient is not passively incidental to the ceremonial process, but is possessed of an active desire to be healed, responding to the ceremony at different moments with hope, frustration, confusion, uncertainty, understanding, relief. The patient has something to say, and there can be no understanding of healing as a cultural and existential process without hearing that voice, engaging that voice. Not to appreciate these subject positions in an account of ritual healing is to abdicate a responsibility to the present.
Monday, December 4th, the fourth night of the ceremony. Its about 2:00 am; Im standing around the bonre outside the hogan with four Navajo men ranging in age from 18 to 53. They are smoking cigarettes, notable because cigarette smoking is rare among Navajos. But these are not ordinary Navajos, theyre the chanters apprentices. Its a stressful position. Were waiting for the all night vigil for the gods, which in principle should have started at midnight on this fourth night of the ceremony, to begin. No one could nd the crockery water jar of a certain type thats needed for this part of the ceremony, and the chanter wont begin until someone goes to nd an acceptable one at a neighbors house. Some people leave because nothing is happening, including one of the apprentices. I notice that there are four other res at least 50 yards remote from the hogan at the four cardinal points. I havent noticed those before, maybe just tonight for the all night ceremony, to form a kind of perimeter of safety. A Navajo tribal policeman stops by to check because there was a drunk hanging around, but someone already took him away by car. He shines his ashlight in my non-Indian face and asks if Im all right. We go into the hogan at about 2:30, and the proceedings begin.

The Nightway is one of the jewels of the Navajo religion, a nine-night ceremony that culminates in the appearance of masked dancers impersonating deities, the Y eii Bicheii. The ceremony has a rhythmic structure, on one level symmetrical and on another cyclical. The nine nights fall symmetrically into a pattern of fourone-four, with a regular cycle of activities within each of the four-day periods. Within the rst four days is a cycle in which the patient is subjected to sweat lodge treatment every morning and chanting in the hogan at night. A sweat lodge

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is built every day at a distance of 30 or 40 yards from the hogan at one of the cardinal points beginning in the east and processing in a circle around the hogan over the course of the four days, and each site is returned to its natural state when the treatment is complete. The principal rite that accompanies both the morning prayers at the sweat and the evening prayers in the hogan is the unraveling of the patients afiction performed by masked impersonators of the deities, which I describe below. During the fourth night prayer and chanting continue until dawn, and the fth day is one of rest and recovery, literally a liminal day within the liminal period of nine days. The succeeding four days are marked by the preparation of the elaborate and renowned sand paintings on the oor of the hogan, each of which is erased after being used. The evening ceremonies focus on the patient, who is seated on the sand painting while being administered to again by the masked deities. There is a further symmetry within these four days, as the nal two are marked by the presence of teams of Y eii Bicheii dancers who perform outside the hogan till the wee hours of morning, often observed by large groups of spectators and supporters. The ninth night is the ceremonial climax, with chanting inside the hogan and dancing outside continuing till dawn, just as the activities of the nal night in the rst set of four nights continued till dawn. The chanter (he adamantly dislikes being called a medicine man) learned through 12 years of apprenticeship with a single teacher, his grandfathernot by accumulating bits of knowledge from various medicine men, and certainly not by listening to tape-recorded versions of the songs, a present-day travesty that he deplores. He has been singing for 20 years since then. He is quite strict both with his own apprentices and with outsiders about what can and cant be talked about. When I ask to set up a schedule of daily interviews about how the ceremony is going, evolving, the philosophy, he says at rst he cannot talk about it. With a little intervention from his wife he relents, but the point is that he doesnt think or philosophize, he just lets the ceremony unfold, doing exactly as his grandfather taught him. Of still greater concern is that hes had many experiences with people who have heard his lectures or been to his ceremonies and then started doing it on their own without acknowledging him as the source. This is to say nothing about the spiritual danger of exposing ritual knowledge. He tells about how the famous medicine man Hosteen Clahs grandson, who went blind and had a leg amputated, said, I blame my grandfather for this. It has to do with exposing sacred knowledge in books. He gives another example in which the chanter died within a year of exposing sacred knowledge in a lm. Yet again two white men came into his own hogan and had the presumption to start helping out with the sand painting, and he eventually had to (politely, he emphasizes) ask them to excuse themselves. Flying home, one guys plane had an accident on the runway and couldnt take off. Im dealing with the supernatural here, the chanter says. As an ethnographer I am uncomfortable even turning on my tape recorder when

T. J. CSORDAS

I talk to him, forget about taking photographs with people or ceremonial activities in them. When the rst sweat lodge was being built for the patient, there was a certain point at which I could no longer help out. The poles were covered with boughs and then earth, and then paths were outlined down the sides, ending in little earthen platforms. I asked what the paths and platforms were for and the chanter said Sand paintings! I told you white man is not supposed to see that. I want to live to be a hundred, Tom! I was sent off to help build a separate sweat lodge for the healing team to use later while the patient sweat went on. Wilson, my Navajo eld assistant, was allowed to observe, and later reported that the chanter told him and the apprentices that my temporary banishment was not actually for protection of the ceremony but for protection of the Anglome.
Friday, December 1st, the rst night of the ceremony. This is the rst time I will have seen the unraveling rite. Two and three-quarters hours are spent in preparation, the ceremony will only last one-half hour. The chanters assistants arrange a Navajo wedding basket with four jish or medicine bundles in it, along with a rattle and two shell dippers; they ll a second with a bed of cornmeal and in it place at least a dozen small hoops made of plant stems, each hoop wound about with a string that has a small feather tied to its end. Much of the preparation is for gods costumes and particularly the mask-headdress of Talking God, the hero of the Nightway. It has twelve feathers, as in the twelve months of the year, and they span all the way around the semicircle like a rainbow. The assistants carefully lay out the feathers, looking for one in particular that is a bald eagle feather from Alaska. They painstakingly tie each feather to a circle of basket ber, and the chanters elderly uncle disparagingly comments that nowadays some people use articial material like a sponge to stick the feathers in. Two of the healers apprentices have dressed and transformed themselves into Y eii, and are waiting outside the door of the hogan. The patient, in his underwear, is guided to sit on a cornmeal outline on the ground in the middle of the hogan, his legs stretched out in front of him. As the chanter begins rattling and singing, Talking God announces his entrance with a long, high-pitched call, Wooo-ooo! He enters and places a square hoop made of slender, supple pieces of wood over the patient four times, rst down to his knees and each time farther up till just above his head, then exits. Talking God wears the feather headdress with a wolf pelt over the back of his neck, a white leather mask, a deerskin cloak, silver belt, ankle and arm bracelet, and moccasins with bells. The second Y eii, representing a female counterpart (House God) is naked but for black kilt with an animal tail coming out the back, boots, brown leather mask, his upper body and legs whitened with damp clay. This Y eii performs the same treatment, but with a low, short call sounding like Woo-woo given only after he is inside the hogan. On their successive entrances each takes a hoop from the basket held by an assistant seated just to south of the chanter and blesses from feet to head, touching eighteen points of the body, then pulls out the string with a longer woooo! and gives it to another assistant seated at the north, who lays the separated parts out on a blanket. Each time a string is pulled, it is at a point farther up the body from the feet, and a longer wooo-ooo accompanies the unraveling. This is unraveling of the pain and suffering of the patient. Suddenly for a brief moment Im struck by the strangeness of the sacred being in front of me, his inscrutable masked presence and otherworldly call, and in spite of myself, in spite of my carefully cultivated ethnographic equipoise, I revert to the young Catholic altar boy I once was, silently exclaiming to myself, My god, this is really a pagan ritual! In fact, what I self-consciously and skeptically glossed as an unsophisticated moment on my part was a momentary breakthrough into encounter with alterity, the otherness of the Y eii Bicheii as enactment of raw existence, or what Eliade called hierophany, the manifestation of divinity.

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As the chanter told me in a candid moment, Sometimes I think those Y eii Bicheiis are in another dimension, and are always all around and just reveal themselves sometimes. The two gods take turns treating the patient till all the little hoops are gone, then Talking God again comes in with the big square hoop. The patient stands and walks to the door maybe goes out in other cases, but not here. After the hoop ceremony the chanter sings and blesses everyone present with water from one shell. The patient drinks from this shell, water is applied externally from a second shell then is blessed with smoke from a few coals taken from the replace. The healer says, At dawn Ill go out and give the hoops back to nature. But the strings with feathers tied to the ends are carefully stretched out alongside one another lengthwise and looped into a knot together, to be saved for subsequent unravelings during the next three days. This is a neat structural contrast: the hoops correspond to nature; the stringsconstantly knotted and unraveledcorrespond to culture. But the contrast is too neat and simple, since the human-made strings themselves have feathersnaturally attached to their ends.

But what of the patient? Before anthropologists and clinical researchers began to understand the importance of patientdoctor relationships, and the pervasive power of the placebo effectrecently relabeled the meaning response by Daniel Moerman (2002)it was common to think that biomedical treatments were effective regardless of what the patient experienced, while religious treatment were only effective if the patient experienced something or had sufcient faith. We now understand that meaning is important in medical healing, and conversely that ritual healing can have effects on levels that cannot be articulated by a patient. Nevertheless, I have always thought it peculiar that it never occurred to Levi-Strauss (1966) to ask the pregnant Cuna woman if her delivery was somehow made easier by the healers efforts. In my work I have always followed what I feel is common sense, enhanced by the kind of method used by researchers on the process of psychotherapy, to ask at least what patients regarded as most signicant about their healing. When I asked this patient the next morning what had been the most signicant thing for him the previous night he said it was the singing, bringing the gods in from the spirit world. He said he felt more relaxed already, and that the healing had already begun. When I asked about the unraveling of the strings from the loops, he said that observing when they pulled the string allowed him to know when to blow or puff away the evil spirits. I had expected a report of some physical analog of relief and release of tension, or perhaps untangling of an internal knotwhat I learned was that the apparently passive patient had a part in his own treatment, and that was to expel the evil that the gods were releasing through their actions. The patient was a 49-year-old man, the eldest of 12 siblings and a nephew of the chanter. He had worked for 24 years at an industrial job as a heavy equipment operator, and was a union steward and member of the safety committee. He was injured two-and-a-half months previously while driving his tractor, when the wheel slipped in soft earth at the edge of a graded road, and he was thrown back and forth, his kidneys jamming against the curved kidney-high seat back. A week later he went to the hospital and was put on dialysis with kidney damage. Since then he has lost 65 pounds. He is distressed that his company will not support his claim

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for workmens compensation, claiming his problem is one of diseaseprobably diabetesrather than injury. He can hardly see more than shadows due to cataracts, and it is not clear that he recognizes any connection between the cataracts and his kidney failure. Twice during the nine-night ceremony, on Tuesday and Thursday, he traveled to the Indian Health Service Hospital for kidney dialysis. Somehow this brings biomedicine to coincide with the ceremonial rhythm: one dialysis during the four days of sweat lodge treatments, one during the four days of sand painting within the hogan. Either that or we must be struck by the incongruity of the patient occasionally departing from the realm of the traditional to a vastly different cultural space. But the cultural space of dialysis is no less a part of the present than is outer space, where we began. The issue is not assimilation but accommodation: Navajos observe a four-day postceremony period of reverence in which one is not supposed to travel or expose oneself to any stress or dangerthe patient had scheduled cataract surgery for the fth day after the ceremony. The patient says that a traditional diagnosis performed by two of the chanters helpers indicated that his problem originates with his stepfather, who was active in the Y eii Bicheii ceremony before he was born and would come home bringing some of its powerful and improperly neutralized inuences with himfor example, not completely removing the white clay worn by impersonators of the deities. As the oldest sibling he is the one affected most, and the effect spreads through him to the rest of the family. Family is very important to the patient, and it became clear in our talks that it is as much a priority for him to bring his family together through the ceremonial activities as it is for his own health problems to be alleviated.
Thursday, December 7th, the seventh night of the nine-night ceremony. The patients aspirations for family unity have received a setback. When everyone had gathered in the hogan for the evening singing, the chanter announced that they needed to have a discussion and not go on with the ceremony yet. He asked his wife to speak, and she said that for the past two nights she had been hearing rattles outside. This had happened once before in a ceremony and they had done nothing about it, and something tragic happened right after that, so it was imperative that it be discussed in order to prevent any unforeseen events. She then told those assembled that earlier in the evening one of the patients sisters had fainted and was taken by ambulance to the IHS hospital. She invited comments, and the patient spoke out to say that he was hearing the same rattling sounds, and in addition had seen some sort of image, which he later described to us as white like a Hopi kachina, dressed in turquoise, and accompanied by a small owl. So he said, We need some help. We need your help. You guys help us. Do something for us. My sister fell over. Over at the cookhouse, I found out. It was agreed that a diagnosis was required, and six people experienced in that art assembled in a small circle within the hogan, including two of the chanters assistants, the father of one of these assistants, the chanters brother, a sister of the patient, and one of the patients aunts. The hand trembling [a traditional technique of spiritual diagnosis and divination] continued for thirty minutes, and when it was done the chanter asked what the team had found out. They all agreed that there was witchcraft going on right there at the ceremony. Someone had been cursing us, a crowd of skinwalkers out there in the night who didnt want the

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patient to get well or just wanted the family to be disrupted. And it was a family member or members, someone over at the cookshack where food was being prepared. They didnt want the patient to improve, but in fact the patient was being helped by the ceremony, so they sprinkled witchcraft powder on his sister instead, putting her in his place. And at the same time they buried a witchcraft object inside the hogan. At this, the chanter said Go ahead and diagnose it again, maybe you can take it out. One of his young apprentices took the lead this time, and when his hand started shaking it led him toward the back of the hogan. He groped around among the ceremonial paraphernalia in the alcove there at the west end, and pulled out a small dark object which he placed on a Kleenex that his father had ready back in the corner of the hogan. All of the discussion among the diagnosticians and with the chanter was done in low, murmuring voices, in case someone working with the other side was in the hogan observing their countermeasures. The ceremony then recommenced, with chanting and some dancing outside. By the time the ceremony had concluded for the evening, at about 1:00 am, the woman who fainted had returned from the hospital. The patient and his family felt the need for additional help, and the chanters wife told them they should take up a collection and make a donation for it this time. The chanter, somewhat disgruntled and with an air that indicated his feeling that the family was somehow creating problems for themselves, packed up his paraphernalia and said, You guys, do whatever you have to do. Im goin home. The young apprentice, assisted by his father, then diagnosed and removed from her body three small objects that had been shot into her in addition to the corpse powder with which she had been sprinkleda bone, a piece of turquoise, and another small stone. They placed each object on Kleenex, then wrapped them in a cloth, and took them outside. She had at rst seemed quite pale and in pain, perhaps dizzy, but afterwards she seemed calm and quite improved. She went to see about her mother and sisters, and the rest of the family went out of the hogan as well, leaving only a few of the healers assistants to clean things up for the next day.

The next morning the patient spoke about the event as follows:
I think the main thing is to ruin this ceremony. Its usually like this in some cases with a person going around thinking negative thoughts due to envy and jealousy . . . [the diagnostician] didnt tell me clearly everything but I kind of understood it myself. I was suppose to be the one to fall over but instead she was the one who fell over, but she recovered from that anyway. . . . Thats what I thought of in that way. They were telling me that there was something underground. We witnessed one being taken out from inside here. I dont know what it is. They say its kind of risky if you see it, they used the ash. I dont know how they work with that . . . and then the ceremony started again after that. . . . I dont remember that [next part of the ceremony] because of what happened to my younger sister. That was giving me more problems and I kept thinking I hope they dont do that to any of my younger sisters again or my younger brothers. . . . [Later on with the singing] it sounded real good and the naming was beautiful. It was showing you, I think thats what it means, giving you a vision. And the reason why youre saying that is because you want to get well, that was the main thing, and I really like it . . . and I was thinking that I wanted to get well and I was just sitting and praying alongside and singing also.

In this brief discourse one moves with the patient through the immediacy of his experience of a disruption due to witchcraft, an attempt to understand that disruption hampered by unwillingness of the healers to expose the patient to details, disillusionment with respect to enhancing the bonds among participating kin, dissociation from the proceedings, then recovery and reengagement in the process as he begins again to sing along with the chanter. I insist that these ne-scale

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modulations of experience are critical to understanding healing as an existential process, and note that without this kind of attention to detail it would be likely that we would hear only the last, ritually correct assertion that I was thinking that I wanted to get well and I was just sitting and praying alongside and singing also. More generally, this kind of event, one that opens a temporal parenthesis in the proceedings, emphasizes that in Navajo healing the inverse of what Gladys Reichard (1944) called the compulsive word is an aversion to chaos that can descend on ritual proceedings, as on everyday life, at any moment. In psychological terms this is hardly surprising, for such an aversion to chaos is precisely the inverse of obsessive and compulsive actions. But there is another level, a level in which part of the ceremonial rhythm includes an oscillation between periods of chanting and periods of diagnosing the signicance of the unexpected. Episodes requiring diagnosis occurred twice in this nine-night ceremony, and we were told that it is not unusual. This goes beyond any implicit reference to the portrayal of Navajo culture as obsessive/compulsive that characterized writing of the culture and personality school. It bespeaks a deeper polarity between a preoccupation with order and a tolerance of ambiguity, a tension between the need for correctness and precision and the recognition of open-endedness and subjunctivity.
WHOSE/WHOS PRESENT?

I would like to elaborate more about divinity and experience in the Navajo Nightway. From other moments of our research, I would like to write about the man who in his younger days was a patient in the Lightningway when a bolt of lightning struck through the stovepipe into the hogan and killed the chanter, and for whom this event has become the central enigma of his life. I would like to tell about the young woman who went to Japan as a member of the military and returned home in a deep depression, having been exposed to the peculiar smell of a crematorium near her army base and thus exposed to one of the most pathogenic agents to Navajos, the dead. I would like to talk about the family from which we interviewed four members as patients, three of whom later died in an automobile accident, and the struggle of the young woman who survived to keep her life together. I would like to describe the Navajo Roman Catholic nun who once met the pope and who synthesized her devout Christian faith with participation in both peyote meetings and traditional Navajo ceremonies. Certainly I would like to narrate the story of the Native American Church road man and his wife who were married for 65 years and could not stand one another, who successfully raised ve children but who adamantly disagreed about their philosophy and experience of peyote. I would like to discuss the difference between the way patients describe their troubles in an ethnographic interview administered by an

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anthropologist and in the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV administered by a psychiatrist; the relation among three religious systems of healing; the kinds of sensory imagery experienced in Navajo healing; the gendered nature of Navajo healing practice; the way Navajo Christian evangelists talk about healing via humor and condemnation; our study of attitudes toward the hanta virus outbreak; a Navajo philosophy of color elaborated by an indigenous thinker; a Navajo cult of water that is a highly particular variant of the peyote religion; and about Navajo embodiment. But I cannot do any of those things in this space (see Csordas 2000, 2002), so I will conclude by coming back to the present. How and why should we understand the present to be a problem? On one hand, Norbert Elias (1987) took sociologists to task for a retreat into the present. On the other hand, Michel Foucault cited Baudelaires admonition that You have no right to despise the present (Foucault 1994: 310), and discussed Kants interpretation of the Enlightenment from the standpoint of someone for whom the Enlightenment was the present. Foucault called attention to a type of philosophical interrogation that simultaneously problematizes mans relation to the present, mans historical mode of being, and the constitution of the self as an autonomous subject (1994: 312). This autonomous subject is indeed a problem, as one of the principal features of that peculiar and pervasive attitude we call modernity, and for Foucault it inspired a series of questions: How are we constituted as subjects of our own knowledge? How are we constituted as subjects who exercise or submit to power relations? How are we constituted as moral subjects of our own actions? (1994: 318). The critical question that is absent, perhaps characteristically, from Foucaults agenda is How are we constituted as subjects capable of and dened by intersubjectivity? In the situation I have been discussing, intersubjectivity is critical in the meaningful therapeutic encounter between healer and patient, in the perpetually vexed encounter between ethnographer and Indian, and in the violent historical encounter between European and indigenous North American civilizations. Each of these questions is vitally about the present, and requires that we recognize studies such as this one as not just about health and healing, and not just about the ethnography of Native Americans, but also, in Foucaults phrase, about the critical ontology of ourselves (1994: 319). This is not a matter of cultural narcissism in which by studying others we are really only studying ourselves as reected in the other, but a matter of asking where we stand with respect to the issues of temporality, tradition, domination, and immediacy I raised earlier in connection with the present moment in Navajoland. It is a matter of good faith in recognizing that there is indeed something at stake in an attempt to reach an existential understanding of suffering and healing across cultures.

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T. J. CSORDAS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This article is based on the Navajo Healing Project, funded by National Institute of Mental Health grant 1RO1 MH50394. The project was carried out under Navajo Nation Cultural Resources Investigation Permit C9708-E and with the endorsement of ve Community Health Advisory Boards in regions of the Navajo Nation where the research was conducted. This article has been reviewed by the Navajo Nation Human Research Review Board. I thank the members of the research team for the Navajo Healing Project, and especially my assistant Wilson Howard who worked closely with me during the ceremony discussed in this article. Special thanks are due to Byron Good and Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good for their invitation to deliver the Roger Allan Moore Lecture at Harvard Medical School.
REFERENCES

Csordas, Thomas J. 2002 Body/Meaning/Healing. New York: Palgrave. Csordas, Thomas J., ed. 2000 Ritual Healing in Navajo Society [Theme issue]. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 14(4). Elias, Norbert 1987 The Retreat of Sociologists into the Present. Theory, Culture, and Society 4: 223 247. Faris, James 1990 The Nightway: A History and Historical Documentation of a Navajo Ceremonial. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Foucault, Michel 1994 What is Enlightenment? In Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. Paul Rabinow, ed., pp. 303320. New York: The New Press. Levi-Strauss, Claude 1966 The Effectiveness of Symbols. In Structural Anthropology, pp. 181201. New York: Basic Books. Mathews, Washington 1995[1902] The Night Chant: A Navaho Ceremonial. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. Moerman, Daniel E. 2002 Meaning, Medicine, and the Placebo Effect. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Reichard, Gladys 1944 Prayer: The Compulsive Word. Monographs of the American Ethnological Society, Vol. 7. New York: J.J. Augustin.

Department of Anthropology Case Western Reserve University Cleveland, OH 44106 USA e-mail: txc9@po.cwru.edu