1 Introduction

How does religious healing work, if indeed it does? What is the nature of its therapeutic efficacy? WThat is actually being healed by the performances of the shaman, the medicine man, or the faith healer? What is particularly religious about them in the first place? These questions have preoccupied anthropologists for a long while, and there have been two broad types of answer offered. Many early studies were primarily concerned with whether healers or shamans were themselves mentally ill, typically with schizophrenia or epilepsy. Whatever healing occurred was thought as likely to benefit the healer as it would those who came to him or her for help. Later, the question of whether healers were like mental patients was superseded by that of how they were like psychotherapists. This theme, present as early as Leighton and Leigh-ton's (1941) discussion of Navajo healing and Messing's (1958) analysis of the Ethiopian zar cult, was given impetus in the 1960s and 1970s by the seminal works of Jerome Frank (1973, Frank and Frank 1991). For some, the efficacy of religious healing came to be assumed on the basis of what we may call the psychotherapy analogy: religious healing works because it is like psychotherapy, which also works.

This is hardly a satisfactory place to leave the issue, and not only because psychotherapy itself is a healing form whose efficacy cannot be taken for granted. Insofar as every culture must contend with emotional distress and mental illness, each is likely to develop its own forms of psychotherapy, some of which we can identify as religious healing. Like­wise, most religions develop some stance toward human suffering, and

2 INTRODUCTION

may go a step further and develop explicit systems of healing practice (cf. Numbers and Amundsen 1986, L. Sullivan 1989). It has become commonplace to observe that efficacy is contingent on the nature of problems addressed by different forms of healing, how those problems are defined in cultural practice, and what counts in cultural terms as their successful resolution. Given this set of issues, it has been argued on the one hand that ritual healing is invariably and necessarily effective due to the manner in which it defines its goals (Klcinman and Sung 1979), and on the other that it necessarily fails insofar as it is a treatment more of lifestyle than of symptoms (Pattison, Lapins, and Doerr 1973). Between these positions we are left with a disturbing lack of analytic specificity and a repertoire of hypotheses about how healing works. Let us briefly summarize.

The structural hypothesis posits an inherent power of correspondence or homology between symbolic acts and objects, metaphors, or cosmo-logical structure on the one hand, and the thoughts, emotions, behavior, or diseases of those treated on the other. Research in this tradition, of which the paradigmatic example is Levi-Strauss's (1966) discussion of a Cuna Indian birth ritual, are often successful at demonstrating the existence of a homology, but not in establishing why or whether the homology has an effect. The clinical hypothesis is based most strictly on the analogy between the religious healer and a doctor treating an individual patient with a specific procedure in expectation of a definitive outcome, as in Prince's (1964) paradigmatic discussion of indigenous Yoruba psychiatry. However, not only is it difficult to demonstrate definitive outcomes in religious healing, but a clinical approach tends to downplay the explicitly religious elements of such healing that give it its distinctive character. The social support hypothesis, best character­ized by V. Turner's (1964) analysis of Ndembu healing and Crapan-zano's (1973) discussion of the Moroccan Hamadsha brotherhoods, holds that the principal therapeutic effects of healing lie in enhancing community solidarity, resolving interpersonal tensions, providing an emotionally safe environment for suffering individuals, or providing the security of identity with a group defined by its healing practices. While these effects may in fact occur, studies that emphasize social sup­port often go no further toward defining efficacy, remaining satisfied with a generalized functionalist understanding of healing. Finally, the persuasive hypothesis owes much to J. Frank's (1973) formulations about the cultivation of expectant faith through the personal influence of a healer and the rhetorical devices that bring about a shift in the

INTRODUCTION 3

patient's "assumptive world." Healing ritual is understood not as liturgi­cal repetition, but as intentional social action directed toward the quality and content of experience. However, while it thus takes account of meaning, it is less attuned to clinical issues such as the kind of emotional disorder addressed by healing.1

These hypotheses are not mutually exclusive. To be sure, although they represent different descriptions of how therapeutic efficacy is evoked, they tend to share a common understanding of how that efficacy is actually constituted by a limited repertoire of global mechanisms. These mechanisms include trance, catharsis, placebo effect, and suggestion. With few exceptions (e.g., Scheff 1979), accounts of healing under the hypotheses sketched above are based on inference from procedures carried out by healers to a nonspecific efficacy presumed to be inherent in one or more of these mechanisms. The mechanism itself remains unelaborated, a kind of biocultural "black box"—perhaps the patient goes into trance, but what it is that makes the trance therapeutic remains essentially ambiguous.

The reason for the lack of specificity' is astoundingly simple: although anthropologists have produced volumes of descriptions of healing rit­uals, they have virtually never systematically examined the experience of supplicants in healing. The Navajo Chanter sings for nine nights, and we have a transcription of the songs; he creates an elaborate sandpaint-ing, and we have a detailed description of it. Where experience comes into question, it is usually that of the healer. But what is happening for the Navajo supplicant who is repeating line for line after the chanter and who is made to sit upon the sandpainting? We may learn the nature of the supplicant's complaint and whether there is any apparent effect of the ritual, but that is about all. We will learn nothing about the imagery processes which, as I discovered when it occurred to me to ask, may occur during the ceremony. Of course, if we neglect to ask, we will conclude that the efficacy of healing is nonspecific.2

A premise of this book is that there is an experiential specificity of effect in religious healing—that transformative meaning dwells, to borrow a phrase from the poet Wrilliam Blake, in the "minute particu­lars" of human existence taken up in the healing process.3 To approach that specificity, we must identify the locus of efficacy, and this requires taking a step back toward generality before making a leap forward. My argument is that the locus of efficacy is not symptoms, psychiatric disorders, symbolic meaning, or social relationships, but the self in which all of these are encompassed. Our task is then to formulate a

4 INTRODUCTION

theory of the self that will allow us to specify the transformative effects of healing. What is more, we require an idea of self that will be valid for comparative studies of healing forms ranging from conventional psychotherapy to the more exotic forms of shamanism and spirit posses­sion cure. Finally, we require a theory of self that will allow for the experience of the sacred as an element of therapeutic process, indeed an element that constitutes one kind of the specificity that wc seek. Our discussion, in short, must be an account of the cultural constitution of a sacred self.

Let me say a few things about my orientation to the problems of "self' and "sacred." I have become convinced that a turn to phenomenol­ogy may go a long way toward answering the need wc have just seen for a concept of self sensitive to experiential specificity. As M. Singer (1984:53) observes, the phenomcnological approach to self has never been thoroughly developed, and in the 1960s was overshadowed by understandings of both culture and self as systems of symbols and mean­ings. Singer's observation is certainly correct, and I think it can be accounted for by the fact that we have not discovered the most useful variant of phenomenology for our purposes. At one end of the contin­uum, Husserl's work is dense enough that by the time an anthropologist made readers familiar enough with its terminological subtleties, the cul­tural substance of any account would be obscured in a whirl of method­ology. Perhaps Hallowell (1955) sensed this when he went only so far as to acknowledge a phenomenological attitude in his important works on the self. At the other end of the continuum, the phenomenology of Schutz is perhaps the most formalist variant, such that Gecrtz's (1973) attempt to use it on Balinese material remains suspended between being a true phenomenological description and an exercise in applying analytic categories. If I were to claim a contribution for the present argument, therefore, it would be the grounding of culture and self in the phenome­nology of the body—"embodiment"—a variant of phenomenology more identified with the work of Merleau-Ponty. Yet my intent is not to offer a strict alternative to the semiotic approach, but to bring phe­nomenology out of the shadow referred to by Singer. In other words, I understand cultural phenomenology as a counterweight and comple­ment to interpretive anthropology's emphasis on sign and symbol.4

The problem of the sacred also falls within a cultural phenomenology of self. Phenomenologists of religion have defined their understanding of the sacred as a kind of modulation of orientation in or engagement with the world. Eliade (1958) defined the sacred as a mode of attending

INTRODUCTION 5

to the world, and van der Leeuw (1938) observed that the object of religion is a "highly exceptional and extremely impressive Other." The tenor of anthropological discussion, however, when not preoccupied with debate about the rationality or irrationality of religious "belief," has again been predominandy semiodc. Every anthropologist is familiar with Geertz's (1973) definition of religion as a system of symbols, and most would unhesitatingly add that these symbols are articulated in a system of social relationships. For a cultural phenomenology, the sec­ond, more obscure part of Geertz's definition must be given equal weight—that religion acts to establish long-standing moods and moti­vations. I submit that the method to get at these moods and motivations is to be found in the phenomenologists' notion of Otherness. The sacred is an existential encounter with Otherness that is a touchstone of our humanity. It is a touchstone because it defines us by what we are not—by what is beyond our limits, or what touches us precisely at our limits. In addition, and of primary importance for the coherence of our argument, we will discover that this sense of otherness itself is phenomenologically grounded in our embodiment.

We can now restate the theses advanced in the preface, specifying that this book is a cultural phenomenology of healing that seeks the locus of therapeutic efficacy in the self. The next step before introducing our empirical case is to elaborate our phenomenological approach to self and the specificity of self processes in cultural context.

The Self: Embodiment, World, and Situation

Let us begin by venturing a working concept of self, and then spend the rest of this section unpacking its theoretical meaning and methodological consequences.5 Self is neither substance nor entity, but an indeterminate capacity to engage or become oriented in the world, characterized by effort and reflexivity. In this sense self occurs as a conjunction of prercflective bodily experience, culturally constituted world or milieu, and situational specificity or habitus. Self processes are orientational processes in which aspects of the world are thematized, with the result that the self is objeaified, most often as a "person" with a cultural identity or set of identities.

Hallowell (1955) was the first anthropologist to propose a protophe-nomenological theory of the self based on "orientation" with respect

6 INTRODUCTION

to self, objects, space and time, motivation, and norms, and this is a good starting point for what I mean by orientation in the world.6 To understand how this orientation comes about, wc must identify two concepts implicit in Hailowell's argument. Perception is the key concept implicit in his definition of the self as self-awareness, the recognition of oneself as an "object in a world of objects." Hallowell saw self-aware­ness as both necessary to the functioning of society and as a generic aspect of human personality structure. However, in defining the self as the product of a reflexive mood, he cast his analysis at the level of the already-objectified self. As we shall see in a moment, a fully phenomeno-logical account would recognize that whereas we are capable of becom­ing objects to ourselves, in daily life this seldom occurs. Hailowell's implicit concern with what in more contemporary terms we would call practice (cf. Ortner 1984) is summarized in the term "behavioral envi­ronment," borrowed from the gestalt psychology of Koffka. Hailowell's protophenomenological approach accounts for an essential feature of the behavioral environment, namely that it includes not only natural objects but "culturally reified objects," especially supernatural beings and the practices associated with them. Understood in terms of percep­tion and practice, Hailowell's concept of self thus did more than place the individual in culture. It linked behavior to the objective world, but defined objective in terms of cultural specificity. It linked perceptual processes with social constraints and cultural meanings, but added self-awareness and rcflexivity.

Here we reach a critical point for our argument. For if perception and practice arc central to the self as a capacity for orientation, we can identify the locus of the self as identical with the locus of perception and practice. For help we turn directly, as Hallowcll could not, to the phenomenological thinkers. The philosopher Zaner, drawing on the phenomenological work of Hans Jonas, Erwin Straus, and Aaron Gur-witsch, suggests an answer:

My embodying organism is thus constituted as my orientational locus in the world, amy place," complexly articulated and membered by means of its ("my") sensorium. In the diversity of my sense I am oriented to the Other [in this case the other person] as one and the same, and the Other is positioned and oriented by (referenced to) my bodily placement (body attitudes, stances, place, move­ments, etc.). Hence the arrangement of the environing milieu of things is func­tionally correlated with my organism: the latter is the organizational, sensorial center for the actional and sensible display of surrounding objects. (1981:38, emphasis in original)

INTRODUCTION 7

The critical point, and one which Hallowell missed in his discussion of orientation, is the grounding of the self in embodiment, our essential existential condition. And here is our answrer: the specificity we are looking for can be found in the way self processes grounded in embodi­ment take up or engage fundamental psychocultural issues in the experi­ence of ritual healing. The processes of orientation are the same as those which move experience from indeterminacy to what Hallowell referred to as "culturally reified objects." Yet it is essential to note that Hallowell did not place the self outside the list of elements with respect to which it is oriented. Again implicitly, he recognized that the self is always already in the cultural world. However, for some reason he excluded the presence of other selves from his oudine, and we will have to reinsert them.

We will take up the issue of other selves along with that of objectifica-tion, to which we have already alluded. For this, we turn to the contribu­tions of Merleau-Ponty and Bourdieu. Merleau-Ponty (1962) can help understand embodiment with respect to perception and objectification. Bourdieu (1977, 1984) situates embodiment in an anthropological dis­course of practice, and interaction with other selves. For Merleau-Ponty, the body is a "setting in relation to the world" (1962:303), and con­sciousness is the body projecting itself into the world. For Bourdieu, the socially informed body is the "principle generating and unifying all practices" (1977:124), and consciousness is a form of strategic calcula­tion fused with a system of objective potentialities. I shall briefly elabo­rate these views as summarized in Merleau-Ponty's concept of xhepreob-jective and Bourdieu's concept of the habitus.7

Merleau-Ponty objects to the empiricist position that the object we perceive is a kind of stimulus and that perception is an intellectual act in response to that stimulus. This is because the object of perception conceived as an intellectual act would have to be either possible or necessary, when in fact it is real. That is, "it is given as the infinite sum of an indefinite series of perspectival views in each of which the object is given but in none of which it is given exhaustively" (1964^:15). The critical "but" in this analysis requires the perceptual synthesis of the object to be accomplished by the subject, which is the body as a field of perception and practice (ibid.: 16). Stated another way, Merleau-Ponty wants our starting point to be the experience of perceiving in all its richness and indeterminacy, because in fact we do not have any phenomcnologically real objects prior to perception. To the contrary, "our perception ends in objects" (1962:67). This is to say that objects

8 INTRODUCTION

arc a secondary product of reflective thinking. On the level of perception we "have" no objects, we are simply "in the world." But if perception ends in objects, where does it begin? Merleau-PontVs answer is, in the body. In other words, he suggests that we step backward from the objective and start with the body in the world.

However, since the subject-object distinction is a product of analysis, and since objects themselves are end results of perception rather than being given empirically to perception, we need a concept to allow us to study the embodied process of perception from beginning to end (instead of in reverse as would the empiricists). For this purpose Merleau-Ponty offers the concept of the "preobjective" or "prereflcc-tive." His project is to "coincide with the act of perception and break with the critical attitude" (1962:238-239), for the latter mistakenly begins with objects. Phenomenology is a descriptive science of existen­tial beginnings, not of already-constituted cultural products. If we can capture those existential beginnings in healing, we will be well on our way toward understanding its experiential specificity. Our goal is to capture that moment of transcendence in which perception and objecti-fication begin, constituting and being constituted by culture.

It may be objected that a concept of the preobjective implies that embodied existence is outside or prior to culture. This objection would miss what Merleau-Ponty means by the body as "a certain setting in relation to the world" (ibid: 303) or a "general power of inhabiting all the environments which the world contains" (ibid.:311). In fact, the body is in the world from the beginning:

Consciousness projects itself into a physical world and has a body, as it projects itself into a cultural world and has habits: because it cannot be consciousness without playing upon significances given either in the absolute past of nature or in its own personal past, and because any form of lived experience tends toward a certain generality whether that of our habits or that of our bodily functions.

It is as false to place ourselves in society as an object among other objects, as it is to place society within ourselves as an object of thought, and in both cases the mistake lies in treating the social as an object. We must return to the social with which we are in contact by the mere fact of existing, and which we carry about inseparably with us before any objectification. (1962:137, 362)

By beginning with the preobjective, then, we are not positing a precul-tural, but a preabstract. The concept offers to cultural analysis the open-ended human process of taking up and inhabiting the cultural world

INTRODUCTION 9

in which our existence transcends but remains grounded in de facto situations.

In effect, Merleau-Pontes existential analysis collapses the subject-object duality in order to more precisely pose the question of how the reflective processes of the intellect constitute the various domains of culture. If we begin with the lived world of perceptual phenomena, our bodies are not objects to us. Quite the contrary, they are an integral part of the perceiving subject. This has a very important methodological consequence. That is, on the level of perception it is thus not legitimate to distinguish mind and body. Instead, beginning from perceptual real­ity it becomes relevant to ask how our bodies may become objectified through processes of reflection. Merleau-Ponty felt that it was necessary to return to this level of real, primordial experience in which the object is present and living, as a starting point for the analysis of language, knowledge, society, and religion.

We have not yet arrived at other selves, however, and this is becoming urgent as we recognize that isolated reflection does not account either for the emergence of objects or for the way we become objects to our­selves. Others play a prominent role in objectifying us. In order to begin to grasp this issue, we must elaborate the idea of practice alongside that of perception. We have just seen that Merleau-Ponty's goal is to move the study of perception from objects to the process of objectification. Bourdieu's parallel goal for a theory of practice is to move beyond analysis of the social fact as opus operatum, to analysis of the modus operandi of social life. He finds this modus operandi in the concept of habitus, defined as a system of perduring dispositions.8 This system constitutes the unconscious, collectively inculcated principle for the gen­eration and structuring of both practices and representations (1977: 72). His definition holds promise because it highlights the lived, acted content of the behavioral environment. We could in fact say that the notion of habitus synthesizes behavior and environment in a single term. In Bourdieu's work, this synthesis is possible for the same reason that allows him to state that the habitus does not generate practices unsys-tematically or at random. This reason is his recognition that there is a

principle generating and unifying all practices, the system of inseparably cogni­tive and evaluative structures which organizes the vision of the world in accor­dance with the objective structures of a determinate state of the social world: this principle is nothing other than the socially informed body, with its tastes and distastes, its compulsions and repulsions, with, in a word, all its senses, that is to say, not only the traditional five senses—which never escape the structuring

10 INTRODUCTION

action of social determinisms—but also the sense of necessity and the sense of duty, the sense of direaion and the sense of reality, the sense of balance and the sense of beaut)', common sense and the sense of the sacred, tactical sense and the sense of responsibility, business sense and the sense of propriety, the sense of humor and the sense of absurdity, moral sense and the sense of practical­ity, and so on. (ibid.: 124)

For our purposes, the principal point is that behavioral dispositions are collectively synchronized and attuned to one another through the medium of the body. Bourdieu maintains this groundedness in the body even in discussion of the "sense of taste" as the cultural operator in his social analysis of aesthetics, insisting that it is "inseparable from taste in the sense of the capacity to discern the flavors of foods which implies a preference for some of them" (1984:99).

The cultural locus of Bourdieu's habitus is the conjunction between the objective conditions of life and the totality of aspirations and prac­tices completely compatible with those conditions. To be consistent with what we have learned from Merleau-Ponty, we must recall that what Bourdieu refers to as objective conditions must already be the product of perceptual consciousness. This fact is implicit in Bourdieu's recognition that objective conditions do not cause practices and neither do practices determine objective conditions:

The habitus is the universalizing mediation that causes an

individual agent's practices, without either explicit reason or signifying intent, to be none the less "sensible" and "reasonable." That part of practices which remains obscure in the eyes of their own producers is the aspect bv which they are objectively adjusted to other practices and to the structures of which the principle of their production is itself a product. (1977:79)

In other words, as a universalizing mediation the habitus has a dual function. In its relation to objective structures it is the principle of generation of practices (ibid.: 77), whereas in its relation to a total reper­toire of social practices it is their unifying principle (ibid.:83). With this concept Bourdieu offers a social analysis of practice as "necessity made into a virtue" (ibid.: 77), and his image of human activity is Leib­niz's magnetic needle that appears actually to enjov turning northwards (1984:175).

Our methodological "step backward" has now led us to the core of a theory of self grounded in embodiment. The question about therapeutic efficacy as an operation on the self now appears continuous with the question of how orientation takes place upon the ground of embodied

INTRODUCTION 11

existence. One consequence of this formulation is to recognize a conti­nuity among normal experience, emotional distress, and psychiatric ill­ness.9 The self processes of orientation and engagement are the same in all cases, and what we are concerned with is the redirection of those processes, taking embodiment as our starting point. Here we must elab­orate another theme in our definition, namely that the self is an indeter­minate capacity of orientation. Above all, it is not a question here of biocultural nonspecificity, but of experiential indeterminacy. To consol­idate this idea let us follow Merleau-Ponty as he argues that existence is indeterminate

in so far as it is the very process by which the hitherto meaningless takes on meaning, whereby what had merely a [for example] sexual significance assumes a more general one, chance is transformed into reason; in so far as it is the act of taking up a de facto situation. We shall give the name "transcendence" to this act in which existence takes up, to its own account, and transforms such a situation. Precisely because it is transcendence, existence never utterly outruns anything, for in that case the tension which is essential to it [between objective world and existential meaning] would disappear. It never abandons itself. What it is never remains external and accidental to it, since this is always taken up and integrated into it. (1962:169)

This transcendence described by Merleau-Ponty is not mystical, but is grounded in the world, such that existential indeterminacy becomes the basis for an inalienable human freedom (1962, part 3, chapter 3).

For Bourdieu, as for Merleau-Ponty, the synthesis of practical do­mains in a unitary habitus is predicated on indeterminacy, but this var­iant of indeterminacy does not lead to transcendence as it does for Merleau-Ponty. Instead of an existential indeterminacy, Bourdieu's is a logical indeterminacy, which

never explicidy or systematically limits itself to any one aspect of the terms it links, but takes each one, each time, as a whole, exploiting to the full the fact that two "data" are never entirely alike in all respects but are always alike in some respect.

[Ritual practice works by] bringing the same symbol into different relations through different aspects or bringing different aspects of the same referent into the same relation of opposition. (1977:111, 112)

Logical indeterminacy is the basis for transposition of different schemes into different practical domains, forming the basis for the polysemy and ambiguity that allows for improvisation in everyday life.10

Although a shared paradigm of embodiment thus leads both theorists

12 INTRODUCTION

to a principle of indeterminacy, there remains a critical difference insofar as Bourdieu's logical principle becomes the condition for scmiotic im­provisation whereas Merleau-Ponty's existential principle becomes the condition for phenomenological transcendence.11 In sum, Mcrleau-Ponty sees in the indeterminacy of perception a transcendence which does not outrun its embodied situation, but which always "asserts more things than it grasps: when I say that I see the ash-tray over there, I suppose as completed an unfolding of experience which could go on ad infinitum, and I commit a whole perceptual future" (1962:361). Bourdieu sees in the indeterminacy of practice that, since no person has conscious mastery of the modus operandi which integrates symbolic schemes and practices, the unfolding of his works and actions "always outruns his conscious intentions" (1977:79).

Whereas they are both predicated on the ccntrality of embodiment, there is an important difference between these two notions of indetermi­nacy, a difference that is relevant for how we construe orientation among selves or within a collectivity. The locus of these differences is Bourdieu's rejection of the concepts of lived experience, intcntionality, and the distinction between consciousness in itself and for itself. Although we need not elaborate each of these notions, we must observe the methodo­logical consequence of this wholesale rejection of fundamental phenom­enological concepts. In effect, it requires Bourdieu to ground the condi­tions for the intelligibility of social life entirely on homqgenization of the habitus within groups or classes (1977:80), and to explain individual variation in terms of homology among individuals. The result is that individuals' systems of dispositions are structural variants of the group habitus, or deviations in relation to a style (1977:86). Merlcau-Ponty, in contrast, insists on the a priori necessity of intersubjectivity, pointing out that any actor's adoption of a position presupposes being situated in an intersubjective world, and that science itself is upheld by this basic doxa. This is perhaps the methodological moment at which semiotics and phenomenology diverge, but it is by the same token the moment where they meet, and we will have occasion to return to this moment at various points in our argument.

For the present I will argue for preserving the notion of intersubjec­tivity, and speak for the reconcilability of the two positions. Again I do so following Merleau-Ponty, for whom intersubjectivity is not an interpenetration of isolated intentionalities, but an interweaving of fa­miliar patterns of behavior:

INTRODUCTION 13

I perceive the other as a piece of behavior, for example, I perceive the grief or the anger of the other in his conduct, in his face or his hands, without recourse to any "inner" experience of suffering or anger, and because grief and anger are variations of belonging to the world, undivided between the body and consciousness, and equally applicable to the other's conduct, visible in his phe­nomenal body, as in my own conduct as it is presented to me. (1962:356)12

In short, because body and consciousness are one, intersubjectivity is also a copresence.13 Another's emotion is immediate because it is grasped preobjectively, and familiar insofar as we share the same habitus. To paraphrase Merleau-Ponty, another person is perceived as "another myself that tears itself away from being simply a phenomenon in my perceptual field, appropriating my phenomena and conferring on them the dimension of intersubjective being, and so offering "the task of a true communication" (iVlerleau-Ponty 1964^:18). Just as we do not perceive our own bodies as objects, other persons can become objects for us only secondarily, as the result of reflection. The conditions under which selves become objectified can only be identified empirically, as we are about to do in our cultural phenomenology of the self in religious healing. Finally, this notion of intersubjectivity offers an insight into the relation between self and sacred. That is, the preobjective character of another person as "another myself' is a major part of what distin­guishes our experience of the social other from our experience of the sacred other, for the latter is in a radical sense "not myself."14

We can consolidate this understanding of self as the indeterminate capacity for orientation by comparing our notion of indeterminacy with Fernandez's concept of the inchoate. For Fernandez the inchoate is "the underlying (psychophysiological) and overlying (sociocultural) sense of entity (entirety' of being or wholeness) which we reach for to express (by predication) and act out (by performance) but can never grasp" (1982:39). As a first approximation we could say that whereas a concept of the inchoate is essentially concerned with the problem of form out of formlessness, a concept of indeterminacy is concerned with that of specificity out of flux. Likewise, as a matter of emphasis we could sug­gest that the inchoate is a starting point for examination of affect and identity, whereas indeterminacy leads us to issues of perception and practice. At a deeper level, the difference is in Fernandez's emphasis on the sense of entity that we reach for but can never grasp. The notion of indeterminacy accounts precisely for why we cannot grasp it—"it" being the self itself—because there is in fact no "entity" as such to be grasped.

14 INTRODUCTION

This is not to say, however, that the self as indeterminate capacity for orientation and engagement has no characteristics, and this brings us back to the inclusion in our definition of reflexivity and effort, which Zaner (1981) refers to as "fundamental moments of self" The self-rcferentiality of the whole that is composed of bodily experience, habi­tus, and world is a kind of "inwardness" that results in the awakening of the senses of presence in the world and of coprcsencc with others. This situated reflexivity is accompanied by an effort which is precisely the effort to become oriented in the face of the vertigo of essential indeterminacy encountered in this awakening. Reflexivity and effort are necessary characteristics of self. One advantage of identifying them the way we have is that it allows us a better feel both for the proper place of self-awareness and objectification in our understanding of self It shows why we eschewed self-awareness as a starting point in our consid­eration of Hallowell, and the already-constituted world of objects as a starting point through our reading of Merleau-Ponty. A second advan­tage is that is recognizes self-awareness and objectification (i.e., the creation of culture) as inevitable—there can be no other consequence of reflexivity and effort. Yet, and this is its final advantage, insofar as rcflexivity and effort are respectively grounded in the indeterminacy of perception and practice, the orientation process is never complete. Zaner summerizes this point with a term borrowed from Gabriel Mar­cel, suggesting that the self is constantly "en route."

Having identified reflexivity and effort, we are prepared for the last element of our definition, that self processes achieve the self-objcctifica-tion of persons. We turn again for contrast to Fernandez, for whom the inchoate is the ground of emotional meaning, moral imagination, identity, and self-objectification, all of which are characteristics of per­sons. The person already objectified is a culturally constituted representa­tion of self. The preobjective self, however, is a culturally constituted mode of being in the world. In the constitution of persons, Fernandez's functions of predication and performance are parallel to the domains of perception and practice that we have identified as loci for the constitu­tion of self. To be precise, with predication we recognize that perceiving is perceiving as, and with performance that practice is practice as if. With predication reflexivity becomes self-awareness, and precisely because it is based on predication it is necessarily self-awareness of a specific cul­tural kind (cf. Shweder and Bourne 1982). With performance effort becomes agency, but again, because it is based in the efficacy of pcrfor-

INTRODUCTION 15

mance, it is not necessarily the agency of a solitary ego often presup­posed in our own culture.

Recognizing the inchoate as the existential ground of the person means emphasizing that there is always some form in which the self is objectified. Acknowledging indeterminacv' as the ground of self means emphasizing that form itself is indeterminate. On both analytic levels one must admit, along with Fernandez, the critical importance of meta­phor as the epitome of what Merleau-Ponty referred to as our human "genius for ambiguity" (1962:189). For present purposes we need not elaborate the notion of metaphor other than to observe how it relates differentially to person and self.15 Because the person is a kind of repre­sentation, however, the feature of metaphor likely to be stressed is a textual one, namely its richness of meaning. Because the self is a mode of being in the world, the feature that must be stressed is a feature of embodiment, namely the instability of attention directed toward any one dimension of a metaphor's meaning. To observe self processes, or processes of self-objectification, in perception and practice is then not only to observe a striving for a sense of entity through predication and performance, but to examine a series of shifting construals of relation­ship among bodily experience, world, and habitus.

The Sacred Self in a Charismatic World

No matter how much conceptual sense our definition of the self makes, it remains empty theorizing unless it is capable of dia­logue with concrete phenomena. We must then work out our insights in the empirical thickness of healers' and supplicants' experience, specify­ing the transformation of suffering16 and distress as the transformation of self. This will require phenomenological description of particular culturally elaborated self processes as they are addressed to situationally relevant psychocultural themes. Yet it was important that we present it first, before our description of the Charismatic Renewal as an "object" of analysis. To do otherwise would have been disingenuous, presuppos­ing that we could somehow describe the movement in terms devoid of theory before then subjecting it to analysis. Since all description is implicitly theoretical—the result of objectification—our dialogue has necessarily already begun. Accordingly, our introduction to the move­ment in this final section of the chapter already bares the conceptual

16 INTRODUCTION

scaffolding on which it is constructed. As an introduction, however, it is the first step toward grounding our argument in Blake's "minute particulars" of existence.

The Catholic Charismatic Renewal is a movement within the Roman Catholic Church which incorporates Pentecostal practices into Catholi­cism. Contemporary Pentecostalism began around the turn of the pres­ent century, and until the 1950s was a predominantly working-class religion practiced in denominations such as the Assemblies of God (Bloch-Hoell 1964, Hollenweger 1972, Synan 1975). Through the in­fluence of these "classical" Pcntecostals, Catholics and "mainline" de­nominational Protestants occasionally underwent the spiritual experi­ence of being "baptized in the Holy Spirit." These neophytes would typically leave their churches and join Pentecostal ones. Beginning with the Episcopalians in the 1950s and culminating with the Catholics in 1967, however, many of those who underwent the Pentecostal experi­ence decided that it was not incompatible with their faith. They began to join together in "neo-Pentecostal" groups, originating "charismatic renewal" movements within their denominations.

The moment in which the Roman Catholic movement originated coincided with the beginning of the "post-Tridcntinc" epoch of church history. The Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) marked the end of a regime of doctrine and practice that had lasted four hundred years since the Council of Trent (1545-1563). Changes instituted in the wake of Vatican II created the conditions of possibility for the Charis­matic Renewal in several respects. The Council's position on the theo­retical possibility of "charisms" or "spiritual gifts" opened the way for the adoption of the Pentecostal phenomena in their already-developed ritual forms. Reinterpretation of the sacraments, wherein penance or confession became the sacrament of reconciliation (rather than of guilt) and extreme unction, or the last anointing, became the sacrament of the sick (rather than of the dying) opened the way for Charismatic faith-healing. Changes in liturgical form such as turning the altar to face the congregation and adopting vernacular language in place of Latin opened the way for paraliturgical innovation such as the Charismatic prayer meeting. The new biblicism has been taken up wholeheartedly by Charismatics, sometimes to the point of fundamentalism, and the movement is a stronghold of lay initiative and ecumenism.

These changes within Catholicism also coincided with the culmina­tion of the post-World War II era in the cultural ferment of the 1960s. Its racial strife, the morally devastating Indochinese war, and mass col-

INTRODUCTION 17

lege enrollments of the "baby boom" generation spawned movements of black power, feminism, and eventually the "new age." Catholics had a variety of options ranging among the Christian Family movement, marriage encounter, the Cursillo, the Christian Worker movement, the "underground church," discussion and encounter groups, home masses with avant garde liturgies, and the political thought of liberation theol­ogy. Many of these were characterized by motives of community and renewal. Pentecostalism was a catalyst that added a totalizing enthusi­asm and experience of the sacred, precipitating a new movement out of postwar, post-Vatican II Catholicism.

The movement attracted a strong following among relatively well-educated, middle-class, suburban Catholics (Mawn 1975, Fichter 1975, McGuire 1982, Neitz 1987). Since its inception it has spread through­out the world wherever there are Catholics.17 The Church hierarchy has cautiously but consistently recognized the movement's legitimacy, apparently tolerating its theological radicalism for the sake of encourag­ing its increasing political conservatism. Although it has been predomi-nandy a movement of the laity, substantial proportions of nuns and priests have participated, including several bishops and one cardinal.

From 1967 to 1970 the movement was a collection of small, person-alistic groups emphasizing spontaneity in prayer and interpersonal rela­tions, and loosely organized via networks of personal contacts. From 1970 to 1975 it underwent rapid institutionalization and consolidation of a lifestyle including collective living, distinctive forms of ritual, and a specialized language of religious experience. From 1975 to the end of the decade the movement entered an apocalyptic phase based on prophetic revelation that "hard times" were imminent for Christians. The turn of the decade brought recognition by the movement that its growth had virtually ceased, and marked an increasingly clear divergence between Charismatics gathered into rightly structured intentional com­munities who wanted to preserve the earlier sense of apocalyptic mission and those who remained active in less overtly communitarian parochial prayer groups. By the end of the eighties some among the former con­sidered themselves a distinct movement. Among the latter, boundaries between Charismatics and conventional Catholics became somewhat ambiguous, as many who no longer attended regular prayer meetings remained active in their parishes, while many Catholics with no other movement involvement became attracted to large public healing services conducted by Charismatics.

Over the course of its twenty-five-year history the movement has

18 INTRODUCTION

also undergone a demographic transition. Not only have Charismatics themselves aged, but they have attracted increasingly older members such that the modal age of participants is at present in the fifties. The Charismatic Renewal is no longer the vanguard movement it conceived itself to be in its first phases. It has a stable bureaucratic organization, and by the late 1980s had become one among other conservative move­ments in contemporary Catholicism.

What constitutes an identity as a Catholic Charismatic? The first element is cultivation of a particular style of relationship to divinity. The Charismatics claim to offer a unique spiritual experience to individ­uals, and promise a dramatic renewal of Church life based on a spiritual­ity of "personal relationship" with Jesus and direct access to divine power and inspiration through a series of "spiritual gifts" or "charisms." Directly relevant to the issue of a sacred self, the notion of a relationship to the deity is a template for orientation in the world, and the exercise of spiritual gifts is a template for self processes that bring about that orientation. Despite the currency of the notion of being "born again," Charismatics are more likely to say that religious experience allows them to discover their "real self1 than to claim that they have been given a "new self."18 Identity is expressed as a sense of coming to know "who I am in Christ."

This sense of orientation and of self process docs not exist in a cultural vacuum, however. The Charismatic sacred self is elaborated with re­spect to psychocultural themes already salient in the North American milieu. These are themes in the sense introduced by Oplcr (1945) to describe global preoccupations of a culture. In a phenomcnological sense they are also issues thematized or made salient in the orienting processes of sclf-objectification. The themes of spontaneity and control were already identified by Clow (1976) as central to traditional Pente-costalism, and have been preserved and elaborated in the Catholic move­ment. In addition, the theme of intimacy is vivid both in the notion of a personal relationship with the deity and in the emphasis placed on a sense of community in Charismatic groups. Let us briefly elaborate these three psychocultural themes and their relevance to Charismatics.19

Participants experienced the Charismatic Renewal as an opportunity to achieve that spontaneity sought after in American culture both as a personal trait and as a feature of interpersonal relations. The notion that mental health is related to the "spontaneity of the self' is found in some versions of professional psychological theory (Grcenberg and Mitchell 1983:200). The kind of American who initiates or at least

INTRODUCTION 19

participates in "impromptu gatherings" or events is valued, and middle-class Americans often lament not having the kind of personal relations where friends feel free to "drop over anytime" (cf. Varenne 1986).20

One may even see the desire for spontaneity in the current popularity of comedy clubs where patrons seek to be startled or shocked into laughter. Charismatics, also reacting to the ritualistic Catholicism in which many were raised, are highly motivated by the ideal of spontaneity in spiritual experience as well as interpersonal interaction. Indeed, in the early 1970s when I began fieldwork among them, Charismatics would react negatively if I referred to an interest in their "ritual" life, associating the term with formalism and lack of spontaneity' or freedom. Some movement participants would reject being labeled as such because it violated their sense of spontaneity, saying that they could not be Charis­matics because it was "not an organization but a movement of the Spirit."

The theme of control is likewise prominent in the cultural psychology of Americans. Crawford (1984), for example, has analyzed the Ameri­can concept of health as a symbol that condenses metaphors of self-control and release from pressures. It is consistent that the popular imagination has been captivated by an illness like anorexia nervosa, in which "the main theme is a struggle for control, for a sense of identity, competence, and effectiveness" (Hilde Bruch, quoted in Bell 1985:17). Gaines (1992) has identified control as a prominent cultural theme in formal psychiatric diagnosis, and Lutz (1990) shows that the language of control pervades everyday emotional discourse. A common complaint by middle-class Americans when their affairs are not going well or they feel under stress is that "my life is out of control." My impression is that Americans are less bothered by the breach of decorum in losing control of their own behavior than they are in not being able to control their situation: one may indeed "fly off the handle" if it appears impossi­ble to "do something" that is causing frustration.21 Charismatics the-matize both positive and negative aspects of control. On the one hand, they learn not only that they should "surrender" themselves to the will of God, but that overwhelming situations can be "given to the Lord." On the other hand, the influence of evil spirits is suspected precisely when negative behaviors or emotions are out of control.

Finally, intimacy is a prominent American psychocultural theme. It is vivid in the ideal for relations between spouses, summarized in the notions of romantic love and close communication (Bellah ct al. 1985, Levine 1991). When an American refers to a group of friends or co-

20 INTRODUCTION

workers as "like a family," the connotation is more likely to be that members are intimate and so close that one can "tell them anything" than that they are loyal solely because an obligatory social relationship exists. This contrasts with Japanese culture, for example, in which inti­macy is cultivated among peers of the same age group but not typically between spouses, and where in general the values of continuing nurtur-ance and harmony often "take precedence over the actualization of inti­macy in relationships" (Devos 1985:163,165,167). Although intimacy is not an exclusively "Western" cultural characteristic, it has been de­scribed, especially among Americans, as the "most precious commodity in life" (Hsu 1985:36). Charismatic self processes of intimacy arc found in their motive toward community, in the body technique of laying on hands, in the form of an intimate relationship (cultivated by means of a private "prayer life") with a divinity conceived explicitly as a "personal God," and in the genre of ritual language known as "sharing" the inti­macy of one's life experiences and thoughts. Westley (1977) has shown that speaking in tongues is not a necessary and sufficient criterion of being Charismatic. In her study, "individual members saw the moment that they began sharing as the moment of their rebirth," and members stated that until they began sharing their prayer group was not a Charis­matic one (ibid.:929).

Charismatics are not unique among Americans who address their preoccupation with such self-related psychoculturaJ themes through rit­ual healing. Meredith McGuire (1982, 1988), who has studied a wide spectrum of middle-class American healing groups including that of Catholic Pentecostals, points out that for many of them " 'health' is an idealization of a kind of self, and 'healing' is part of the process by which growth toward that ideal is achieved" (1988:244). She suggests that Christian healing is relatively distinct in that it cultivates a self in a subordinate relationship to a transcendent deity and in conformity to group norms, while many other forms of contemporary religious heal­ing cultivate a flexible self freed from learned constraints and open to new possibilities and potentials (ibid.:238). Nevertheless, for McGuire the general condition for this concern with self is that contemporary society has approached the "limits of rationalization" of the body, emo­tional experience, and styles of moral evaluation and legitimation, limits at which there is change in "the very practices by which self is symbol­ized, shaped and expressed" (ibid.:251-252). Her argument suggests that these limits are not being retreated from, surpassed, or abolished, but that internal social system tensions occurring at those limits generate

INTRODUCTION 21

a basic reorientation. Whether or not one accepts the hypothesis about limits of rationalization, McGuire's observations reinforce our premise that therapeutic specificity can be identified in orientational self pro­cesses addressed to psychocuitural themes such as spontaneity, control, and intimacy in ritual healing.

Among Charismatics, the self processes addressed to these three themes become operative within a coherent ritual system. Catholic Charismatic ritual performance is characterized by a marked linguisti-cality, in that most of what goes on is verbal. In this sense it is a religion of "the word." Bound by the mortar of oral performance, ritual events become the building blocks of Catholic Charismatic life in a manner distinct from societies typically encountered in the anthropological liter­ature. Anthropological accounts of traditional societies customarily treat ritual as a window on the nature of society, as events that throw light on underlying cultural and structural patterns: society creates ritual as a self-affirmation. In a movement like Catholic Pentecostalism, this rela­tion between society and ritual is inverted. Ritual events like prayer meetings are both historically and structurally prior to the generation of distinctive patterns of thought, behavior, and social organization. The events provide the earliest models for the organization of commu­nity life: ritual creates society as a self-affirmation. Prayer meetings, initia­tion ceremonies, and healing services are the three main classes of ritual event.

The prayer meeting is the central collective event for Catholic Charis­matics, and indeed the organization of prayer groups and communities evolved directly from the organization of prayer meetings. A small cas­ual prayer group is likely to gather around a lighted candle in the living room of a private home. A large group may meet in a gymnasium, with several instrumentalists to accompany group singing, a public address system for the speakers, and control by leaders over which participants will be allowed to "prophesy" or "share."

Initiation to the Pentecostal experience of baptism in the Holy Spirit is intimately tied to initiation into the Charismatic group. Initiation typically occurs in a series of seven weekly "Life in the Spirit" seminars. The first four weeks explain the "basic Christian message of salvation" and the meaning of baptism in the Spirit, the fifth week is devoted to prayer with laying on of hands for the baptism, and the final two weeks are "oriented towards further growth in die life of the Spirit."

Healing may take place in large public services or in private, one-on-one sessions. In the former, each supplicant is typically prayed for

22 INTRODUCTION

briefly with the laying on of hands. The latter are similar to sessions of psychotherapy, although of a form that aJtcrnates periods of counseling with periods of prayer. Healers tend to specialize in one of several forms of healing, including healing from physical illness, "inner" or emotional healing, and "deliverance" from the influence of evil spirits.

Ritual language within any of these classes of events is constituted by a system of four major genres. These genres are named, formalized speech varieties used with regularity in ritual settings, and frequently regarded as verbal manifestations of the sacred. They include prophecy, teaching, prayer, and sharing. Prophecy is a first-person pronouncement in which the "I" is God; the human speaker is merely the divinity's mouthpiece. For Catholic Charismatics prophecy is a kind of divine revelation, a means of access to the mind of God. Teaching is under­stood as ritual utterance that clarifies some spiritual truth, and thus enables its hearers to lead better Christian lives. Teachings arc often detailed elaborations of key terms and concepts that recur in less elabo­rated form in the other ritual genres. Prayer includes four basic types: worship (with subcategories of adoration, praise, and thanksgiving); petition or intercession on behalf of another for a special purpose such as healing; "seeking the Lord," or prayer for divine guidance; and "taking authority," or praying in the form of a command for evil to depart from a person or situation. Finally, sharing is similar in form to ordinary' conversation except that its contents must have some spiritual value or edifying effect. These contents may be experiences, events, problems, or thoughts that have some significance for a religious understanding of daily life.

Whereas performance of ritual genres can be understood as a rhetori­cal means of ordering experience and directing attention, the concrete character of the Charismatic world can be found in the movement's specialized vocabulary of motives (Mills 1940). The motives are words with specialized religious meaning which are constantly circulated in the genres of ritual language. They play a role in orientational self processes insofar as their use both anticipates the situational consequences of par­ticipants' actions and implies strategies for action. The motives of Char­ismatic ritual language name and identify the following features of Char­ismatic life: (1) forms of relationship among individuals or between individuals and God; (2) forms of collectivity or collective identity; (3) qualities or properties of individuals or relationships; (4) activities or forms of action essential to life within the movement; (5) negativities or countermotives that refer to threats to the Charismatic ideal.22

INTRODUCTION 23

The Charismatic ritual system is embedded in a behavioral environ­ment that includes several types of culturally objectified persons. We have already briefly mentioned the sense in which the person can be understood as a cultural representation, specifically as an objectification of self. Parallel to the way in which the self extends beyond the biological individual to encompass relations among body, habitus, and world, the person as representation extends beyond human beings to play a major role in the semiotic constitution of the behavioral environment. Hallo-well (1960) showed that among the Ojibwa persons are many phenome-nologically real beings that inhabit the cultural world, and with which human beings presumably may come into interaction. Among Charis-matics, the domain of person includes not only human beings, both adult and child, but fust of all God. The Charismatic deity is really three persons, each with a character corresponding to one of the three parts of the tripartite human person. Thus Father, Son, and Holy Spirit corre­spond with mind, body, and spirit, and implicitly each divine person is most congenial with its matched subfield within the human person.23

Also considered persons in this sense are deceased human spirits, and at the opposite end of the life course, human embryos and fetuses. Relative to societies in which they are actively propitiated, ancestral spirits are largely neglected, except insofar as they are occasionally the cause of some affliction (see chapter 2). Unborn spirits are, however, a cause celebrc that lead Charismatics to intense political involvement in the North American cultural debate about abortion.

Evil spirits or demons also populate the Charismatic behavioral envi­ronment, though Charismatics would doubtless prefer not to grant them the "dignity" of being persons, and instead use a term like "intelli­gent entities." One healer was on such disrespectfully familiar terms with her adversary (ultimately Satan, despite the multiplicity of individual demons under his dominion) that she referred to him as "the old boy" and "the creep." Other spiritual persons are of decreasing salience for interaction with humans. The importance of the Virgin Mary is propor­tionally less in "ecumenical" groups where Catholic devotees demur out of politeness to their Protestant fellows, whose traditional culture excludes defining Mary as a person who interacts with humans. Saints are not prominent actors even in predominantly Catholic groups, in this case not out of deference to Protestants, but largely because they become relatively superfluous as intermediaries in a religion that culti­vates direct "person-to-person" interaction with the deity. Michael the Archangel is invoked as a protector against evil spirits or as a reinforce-

24 INTRODUCTION

ment in episodes of "spiritual warfare" against them, but angels as a class of spiritual person are conspicuously absent from the Charismatic world, appearing but rarely in healing or prophetic imagery.

Our search for specificity of therapeutic process in Charismatic heal­ing can only succeed by taking into account the features of the Charis­matic world that we have sketched out in these too-brief paragraphs. In the following chapters we will identify culturally elaborated self pro­cesses of imagination, memory, emotion, and language. We will exam­ine how, in the conjunction of these self processes and the three psycho-cultural themes with respect to which they are oriented, the indeterminate self is objectified and represented as a particular kind of person with a specific identity. This self is sacred insofar as it is oriented in the world and defines what it means to be human in terms of the wholly "other" than human (van der Lccuw 1938, Eliade 1958, Otto 1958). The sense of the divine other is cultivated by participation in a coherent ritual system. This ritual system is embedded in, and helps to continually create, a behavioral environment in which participants embody a coherent set of dispositions or habitus. These are the elements that constitute the webs of significance—or of embodied exis­tence—within which the sacred self comes into being. To be healed is to inhabit the Charismatic world as a sacred self.

2 Ritual Healing: Affliction and Transformation

Among Catholic Charismatics, the practice of "praying over" people with the laying on of hands was first used for "baptizing in the Spirit." It soon came also to be used to consecrate prayer-group leaders and for informal healing prayer. For the first several years ritual healing had a relatively low profile in the movement. People learned by doing, discovering how others responded to their ministry and what kind of prayer appeared to be most effective. Sometimes they consulted books on healing by Protestant authors. Starting in 1974 with then-Dominican priest Francis MacNutt, Catholic Charismatics began pub­lishing books describing their own experience as healers. In a very short span of years a profusion of books, cassette tapes, and workshops for healers became available. Virtually every Catholic Charismatic healer is familiar with writings by MacNutt, the Jesuit brothers Dennis and Matthew Linn, and Barbara Shlemon, to name only a few. The result has been a fairly uniform diffusion of practices throughout the move­ment and the evolution of a remarkably consistent and distincdy Catho­lic system of ritual healing.

Charismatics do not hesitate to ask for divine healing, for they are convinced that God wants them to be happy. They participate in the late-twentieth-century shift away from embracing suffering and self-mortification as an imitation of Christ's passion, and toward the relief of suffering through divine healing as practiced by Jesus in the gospels (Favazza 1982). Yet healing is not only the relief of illness and distress, and not only a "sign to unbelievers" of divine power, but an instrument

25

26 RITUAL HEALING

for molding the sacred self for both healers and patients. This ideal self is inherently healthy, both for its own sake and for its capacity to con­tribute to the divinely appointed collective mission of bringing about the "kingdom of God." Our goal is to grasp the self processes mobilized to constitute the sacred self.

Charismatic ritual healing presumes two closely interrelated capaci­ties of self: the capacity to be "wounded" or "broken" and subsequently healed by divine power in a way that roughly corresponds to the profes­sional medical system's notion of cure; and the capacity to achieve spirit­ual "growth" and "maturity" in a way that roughly corresponds to the aspirations of contemporary holistic and New Age healing. The Charis­matic sacred self is, in McGuire's (1982) phrase, both "whole and holy." In order to remove obstacles to spiritual growth everyone requires heal­ing whether or not they are diagnosably ill in medical or psychological terms. The idea behind this is that everyone suffers from the weaknesses of the "flesh" and the spiritual residue of Adam and Eve's "original sin." In contrast to religions in which incorporation into a phenomenological world may be a condition for relief of affliction, as in the "symbiotic cure" of the Moroccan Hamadsha (Crapanzano 1973), Charismatic healing's motive of growth makes creation of a sacred self programmatic from the outset.

In this chapter we will first offer an ethnographic profile of Charis­matic healers and patients. We then describe Charismatic healing as a system of ritual performance constituted by types of healing event, gen­res or forms of healing prayer, and ritual acts of empowerment. It is these events, genres, and acts that mobilize and organize the self pro­cesses. We conclude the chapter with a phenomenological analysis of self processes experienced by healers in two types of ritual acts.

Healers

To formulate a profile of Charismatic healing ministers I will call on data from my interviews in the late 1980s with eighty-seven experienced healers in New England. A veritable hierarchy of renown exists among healing ministers within the movement. Some "Charismatic stars" bear international reputations, others are known nationally or regionally, some among the prayer groups of a particular city, some only within a particular prayer group. The reputations of

RITUAL HEALING 27

Table 2.1 Professional Training Among 87 Catholic Charismatic Healers.

Ph.D.

M.D.

Masters

psychology ministry (pastoral counseling psychology)

(3 priests and 1 ex-priest) psychiatry internal medicine counseling psychology social work

Nursing degrees Other training (spiritual direction, clinical pastoral education,

pastoral counseling) Total

2 4

1 1 6 3 6 3

26

the healers I interviewed spanned the entire hierarchy of renown.1 Most were in their forties or fifties. Whereas many had been involved in the Charismatic Renewal for ten or more years, all but a few had partici­pated for at least a year prior to becoming healers.

The eighty-seven healing ministers included eighteen priests, seven nuns, seventeen laymen, and forty-five laywomen. Of the lay healers all but four women were married. The majority, or fifty-three (60 percent) of the healers, practiced in the setting of a prayer group or covenant community, and of these only ten served people outside the membership of their group.2 A second group of twenty-one healers, independent of any group affiliation, served a broader clientele.3 Finally, another group of thirteen healing ministers were affiliated with counseling centers. Of the eighty-seven healers interviewed, twenty-six (30 percent) had some form of professional training in health or mental-health care, though not all of these integrated healing into their professional work (table 2.1). On the other hand, of fourteen interviewees who worked profes­sionally as healers (that is, were paid for their services), not all had professional training. Finally, seven healers, generally at higher levels in the hierarchy of renown, devoted full time to their "ministries" without receiving professional compensation.

Several of the healers belonged to the Association of Christian Thera­pists, an organization founded in 1975 and composed largely of Catho­lic Charismatic health-care professionals. Based on their sense of com­patibility between religion and science, such professionals integrate healing prayer into their therapeutic repertoires, while at the same time some healers are inspired to pursue professional training. Even among strictly religious healers referral networks include not only more experi-

28 RITUAL HEALING

enced Charismatic healers, but also mental health professionals and phy­sicians. Some healers admit learning to make mental-health referrals from unsuccessful and even unintentionally harmful attempts to help severely disturbed persons. Healers typically are unable to articulate clear criteria for when to make such a referral, but report attending to behavioral and interactional cues as well as to unresponsiveness or lack of engagement in the healing prayer. A referral docs not preclude contin­uation of healing prayer, especially if the referral is to a psychiatrist, regarded primarily as a source of medication.4

How does one become a Charismatic healing minister? The answer to this question is critical because of what it may tell us about the dynamics of the healing system in relation to other such systems docu­mented in the anthropological literature. One of the most common patterns in the literature is the initiatory illness, signifying that the af­flicted is to become a healer. It does happen that Charismatics enter the "healing ministry" by being healed of a problem or illness themselves. Thereupon they may discover a special gift in praying for the healing of others similarly afflicted. Such an initiatory illness is by no means required, however. Strictly speaking, it is the healing that is taken as a sign rather than the illness itself (e.g., alcoholism or the trauma of sexual abuse), and in fact its importance to their adopting the role of healer was cited by only six of our healers. Nevertheless, as "spiritually mature individuals who have lived the "life of the Spirit" for a number of years, virtually all Charismatic healing ministers can narrate incidents in which they have been healed, and may regard such experiences as increasing their ability to pray sensitively with others. With regard to other initia­tory patterns commonly documented cross-culturally, only two healers began their ministry because of the spontaneous manifestation of a di­vine gift of revelation (two others stated that they were encouraged by such manifestations after they tried healing prayer with others). Only two reported beginning in response to a vision (in one case her own vision, in another a vision by another prayer-group member). Only one reported actually "asking for" the gift of healing from God, and three others expressed having had an "interest in" ritual healing prior to hav­ing the opportunity to practice it. Only five healers reported having been in any kind of formal or scmiformal "apprenticeship" to a more-experienced Charismatic healer.

The majority of Charismatic healers begin their ministry in one of several less-dramatic ways. First, they may gravitate toward healing be-

RITUAL HEALING 29

cause of a preexisting role. Based on a scriptural injunction that commu­nity "elders" should pray for the sick among their faithful, group leaders (n = 8) may find themselves "naturally" beginning to pray with others for healing. A priest (n = 9) by virtue of the additional access to divine power conferred by his ordination and his accustomed role of minister­ing to others (including performance of the Sacrament of the Sick), and a health-care professional (n = 12) by virtue of training and interest, may also be expected to play a role in healing. An even more common pattern of becoming a healer is to be invited to do so by others (n = 25). This may begin with informal requests for prayer and growing recognition of a healer's giftedness by word of mouth, or by formal invitation to join a healing team based on recognition of "spiritual matu­rity" and other personal qualities by community leaders. Others, know­ing that they should be involved in some "service to the community," search about among several possible "ministries" until, often guided by the recommendation of others, they find that prayer for healing suits them.

Still others reported that during the course of their involvement in the movement the practice of praying together with and for people "naturally" evolved into healing prayer. Some groups maintain the origi­nal emphasis by insisting that theirs be called simply a "prayer ministry" instead of a "healing ministry." Individuals may report the naturalness of their earliest experience in statements like, "When people needed prayer I'd just pray," or, "that was very natural for me because I'd been a member of ALANON,"5 or again, "all along in my life people would come to me and talk to me about their problems." A combination of these patterns may appear in the account of a single healer, such as one woman who became involved because she was healed herself, but who also was someone "others always came to with problems," who was a trained psychotherapist, and who was asked by others to formulate teachings about healing prayer.

Perhaps more than anything else, these patterns of selection and rec­ognition reinforce a conception that, insofar as the "gift" to heal others is a capacity of the sacred self, it is so in its aspect of the collective self. This self-in-creation is best conceived not with respect either to its egocentric "boundedness" or sociocentric "permeability," but in terms of its disposition within a whole-part relationship between person and community. One does not only pray for others because one is gifted; one can receive the gift because one prays for others.

30 RJTUAL HEALING

Patients

Let us turn from healers to patients in Charismatic heal­ing, drawing on data from our 1987 survey of 587 participants in 5 Catholic Charismatic healing sendees. The socioeconomic status of par­ticipants (table 2.2) is unremarkable, showing relatively even distribu­tion across educational and occupational categories. However, one de­mographic feature is relevant to defining the structure of the healing system and its historical development. That is, not all who attend large public healing services can be considered "Charismatics." This conforms to the pattern of many religious healing systems described by anthropol­ogists, which are typically exoteric in the sense that the*/ are available to any member of the society who wishes to consult them (Janzen 1978, Kapferer 1983, Kleinman 1980). Even those systems associated with relatively exclusive sects or movements are seldom restricted only to members. Studying Mexican spiritualists, Finklcr (1985) observed a distinction between those who were devotees and those who made cas­ual or periodic use of ritual healing, and Crapanzano (1973) noted a similar distinction between Moroccan Hamadsha participants who

Table 2.2 SociocconotHic Status by Occupation and Education of Participants in Catholic Charismatic Healing Services.

Occupation Category

Professional

Skilled

Semi-skilled

Housewife

Student, Retired, Unemployed

Total

6-8 N %

4 .79

4 .79

6 1.18

6 1.18

7 1.38

27 5.31

Years of Education

9-12 N %

43 8.46

63 12.40

42 8.27

54 10.63

50 9.84 252

49.61

13-16 N %

44 8.66

43 8.46

16 3.15

38 7.48

35 6.89 176

34.65

17+ N %

24 4.72

7 1.38

7 1.38

12 2.36

3 .59 53

10.43

Total

N %

115 22.64

117 23.03

71 13.98

110 21.65

95 18.70

508 1O0.O

Frequency missing = 79.

RITUAL HEALING 31

experienced a "symbiotic" cure by being absorbed into the brotherhood and others who received a "one-shot" exorcistic cure. Whereas Catholic Charismatics began praying for healing only with one another, over the past two decades ritual healing has become more accessible to those with only a marginal exposure to the movement. Public healing services are invariably run by Charismatics, but in some of them the use of charisms such as speaking in tongues and prophecy is intentionally muted, out of concern that participants may be frightened or alienated by such unfamiliar practices.

Among respondents to our questionnaire, while 30.6 percent of heal­ing-service participants can be considered fully active Charismatics, an­other 34.8 percent have virtually no involvement in the movement.6

Furthermore, because healing services take place in different settings, the proportion of active charismatics in the five services observed ranged from a low of 17 percent to a high of 56 percent. The five settings represent a typical range, including one at a large suburban shrine cen­ter, one at a large urban shrine center, one sponsored by a well-estab­lished prayer group but that was not widely publicized, one by another established group that was publicized and focused on healing of "emo­tional problems," and one at a small city parish featuring a healer nation­ally renowned for the healing of "physical illness." Overall, active Char­ismatics differed from non-Charismatics in two important demographic features: Charismatics were more likely to be married (62 percent as opposed to 47 percent), and were more likely to have some degree of education beyond high school (53 percent as opposed to 44 percent). Perhaps the most impressive difference was that whereas 86 percent of active Charismatics reported having experienced divine healing at some time in their lives, only 59 percent of non-Charismatics did so.7 The relatively high percentage among non-Charismatics reflects the fact that on the one hand they do not represent the general population, but that on the other hand they are not fully integrated into a Charismatic world in which healing is expected as part of spiritual growth in a Christian life.

Women accounted for 77 percent of participants whereas 23 percent were men, a proportion similar to that observable in most Charismatic prayer groups, excluding "covenant communities."8 In general, the pre­ponderance of women appears to be the rule in devotional religions. It has also been documented that in our society women report having "religious experiences" more often than men (Valla and Prince 1989), and that across cultures women participate to a greater extent in reli-

32 RITUAL HEALING

gions involving possession by spirits or deities (Lewis 1971, Bourguig-non 19766, 1983).9 We will not enter this difficult debate, but will instead add some data relevant to it. What draws our attention is that, despite the high ratio of women to men, the proportions of participants of both genders appear to be remarkably similar across several critical dimensions of experience and practice. First, the frequency with which the respondent speaks in tongues (daily or weekly, from once a month to once a year, or never) were virtually identical among men and women. The proportional frequency of attending Charismatic prayer meetings varied only a bit: 44.4 percent of women and 38.9 percent of men attended weekly, 31.6 percent of women and 35.9 percent of men less than weekly, 16.2 percent of women and 12.2 percent of men never attended.10 When these two variables were combined to determine Charismatic identity as described above, there was virtually no statistical difference between genders (p = .812). The number of times a person reported having had prayer for healing (none, 1-5 times, more than 5 times) was again virtually identical between genders. Moreover, 67.9 percent of women and 63.8 percent of men reported having at one time or another been healed at a healing service.

Perhaps most interesting in relation to the anthropological literature on trance and altered states of consciousness are the reported frequencies of "resting in the Spirit," the sacred swoon in which one is overwhelmed by divine power and falls in a state of motor dissociation (see chapter 9). A total of 23.8 percent of women and a slighdy higher 30.5 percent of men reported never having had the experience. 61 percent of women and 54 percent of men reported having had the experience at some time. However, this moderate discrepanq' in proportions across gen­ders becomes even less when the number of times a person has under­gone the experience is taken into account: 30 percent of women and 26 percent of men had rested in the Spirit 1-5 times, whereas 31.3 percent of women and 28.2 percent of men had done so 6 or more times.11 The point in question is the Charismatic notion, grounded squarely in the North American ethnopsychology of gender, that women are more "open" to the spiritual and hence more easily "over­whelmed." One informant, a leader of a covenant community, confi­dently stated that in any service 90 percent of women as compared with 40 percent of men would rest in the Spirit. This does not conform with our results.

Finally, we consider the kinds of problems brought for healing by men and women. For purposes of analysis, we collapsed the responses to

RITUAL HEALING 33

our questionnaire into categories that correspond with the Charismatic division of the person into body (physical/medical problems), mind (emotional/relationship problems), and spiritual renewal.12 Among re­spondents who reported only one problem, or problems from only one of these categories, the proportions of men and women were virtually identical. Only among the 18 percent of respondents who reported problems from two or all three of the categories did women predomi­nate, suggesting that they either had a slight tendency to bring multiple problems or conceived of their problems more broadly. None of these data controvert the insight of recent feminist theory that "religious expe­rience is the experience of men and women, and in no known society is this experience the same" (Bynum 1986:2). Neither do they contro­vert the importance of the overall preponderance of women in healing events. They suggest only an absence of gendered difference in the frequency of certain practices and experiences among men and women who do undergo them.

Let us take a closer look at the kinds of problems participants bring to healing services. First we must note that whereas most participants are in search of healing for themselves, some come to request divine intervention for a friend or loved one—they become supplicants in a "healing by proxy" of the absent and perhaps even unknowing benefici­ary. Our interest, however, is in the overall range of problems submit­ted. A total of 24 percent of respondents reported no specific problem that led them to the healing service, but among the remainder the three categories proved relatively distinct. For those whose problems fell only into one of the three principal categories, 24 percent sought only physi­cal healing, 22 percent sought only emotional/relationship healing, and 12 percent sought only spiritual renewal. As noted above, only 18 per­cent of respondents reported problems from more than one category. Of those who reported no specific reason or the nonspecific "spiritual renewal," active Charismatics and non-Charismatics were represented in equal proportions. Non-Charismatics accounted for higher propor­tions of those who sought healing for physical problems (40 percent as opposed to 24 percent) and for emotionaiyrclationship problems (34 percent as opposed to 26 percent). In contrast, of those who combined categories, active Charismatics accounted for 30 percent, whereas non-Charismatics accounted for only 23.4 percent. The most frequently mentioned category for non-Charismatics was physical problems, whereas active Charismatics most frequently reported no specific prob­lems. These results suggest a greater specificity and problem-oriented

34 RITUAL HEALING

attitude on the part of non-Charismatics toward healing services, and on the part of active Charismatics a relatively more global attitude to­ward the role of healing, combined with generalized interest in the religious milieu.

The appeal of Catholic Charismatic healing beyond the ranks of movement participants does not negate the fact that, like other forms of healing, it appears adapted to address the needs of a particular popula­tion (Kakar 1982). Those who enter Charismatic healing enter a perfor­mance setting defined in religious terms so that, especially if they have not been associated with the movement, its formulations must make sense on some a priori grounds of shared culture. For example, problems common to this population such as depression, weak self-image, and marital difficulties may be linked by healers to "anger with God." This formulation can only roughly be glossed in terms of the common "why me?" question, or generalized resentment over state in life. What the healer is identifying in such a situation is that some individuals quite literally blame the deity for misfortunes, and quite literally argue with or shout at him. Again, Charismatic Christians have elaborated a con­cern with the religious significance of sex and reproduction, and empha­size the need for healing emotional consequences of abortion, or from the habit of masturbation.13 Feelings of "unworthincss" and "scrupu­losity" are endemic in the generation of Catholics prominent among Charismatic participants. In addition, hypcrrcligiosity is a not-uncom­mon consequence of being "born again" or "baptized in the Spirit." Healers themselves recognize this problem in exaggerated devotion-alism and unhealthy abdication of life responsibilities to divine provi­dence.

Mainstream Catholic Charismatic teaching is that ritual healing is compatible with conventional health care. Healers sometimes encourage supplicants to abandon their wheelchairs or crutches and walk, but they are just as likely to sense or even directly inquire about supplicants' fear of seeking medical care and encourage them to do so. It is sometimes the case that, adopting the older Protestant Pentecostal practice known as "claiming the healing," some people will abandon prescribed medica­tion or cancel a planned surgery as an act of faith without any evidence that they have in fact been healed. However, they are more likely to pray that the results of conventional medical tests will be negative, that the adverse side effects of their medication will be muted, that an up­coming surgical procedure will have a positive outcome, or that a person who is terminally afflicted will die peacefully. Table 2.3 shows the pro-

RITUAL HEALING 35

Table 2.3 Proportion of Supplicants in Catholic Charismatic Public Healing Services Reporting Use of Alternate Healing Forms by Type of Problem Submitted to Ritual Healing.

Type of Practitioner

Family doctor or surgeon Psychiatrist or psychologist Counselor or priest Chiropractor Acupuncturist Fortune-teller Astrologist Other

Supplicants Reporting Physical/Medical

Problems

79% 15% 17% 24%

5% 2% 2%

16%

Supplicants Reporting Emotional/Relationship

Problems

49% 39% 38% 11% 2% 7% 5%

20%

portions of respondents who sought healing for physical/medical and emotional/relationship problems who had in addition consulted one of several other types of practitioners about that same problem.14 Fully 79 percent of those with physical/medical problems had consulted a family doctor or surgeon, and 39 percent of those with emotional/ relationship problems had seen a psychiatrist or psychologist. Moreover, these mental-health professionals were equally as popular as counselors and priests. Finally, a minority reported consulting fortune-tellers or astrologers. This is significant insofar as, according to mainstream Char­ismatic teaching, such healers utilize "occult" or demonically inspired practices. They are regarded not only as incompatible with Christianity, but also as potential causes of affliction or exposure to evil influences.

This preliminary glimpse at healers and patients suggests that Charis­matic ritual healing is an engagement with basic life problems defined in a particular religious and cultural milieu, and that it interacts with psychotherapy and other forms of healing and medical care. We now turn to a description of Charismatic healing as a system of ritual perfor­mance comprised of specific ritual events, stylistic genres, and aas of empowerment.15 As ritual event, the several types of healing sessions objectify the self in its capacities for growth and affliction, and provide a model for individual contact with the divinity and divine power. The different genres of healing articulate the dynamics of the tripartite per­son in its most intimate interpersonal relationships. Finally, acts of illo-cution and predication in ritual healing constitute an explicit repertoire of empowerment.

36 RITUAL HEALING

Events of Ritual Healing

Healing services were introduced to Catholic Charismat-ics in 1974, when Francis MacNutt presided over an efflorescence of healing that "broke out unexpectedly" in the Notre Dame football stad­ium among massed participants at the movement's annual conference. Within a few years the popularity of healing services on the older Protes­tant model began to increase. Such services arc "Catholicized" in that they are typically (but not always) conducted by Charismatic priests, and especially in the less-ecumenical Northeast are often preceded by a mass. Conferences remain an occasion for large healing services, for workshops on different types of healing prayer, and for private healing encounters of all types. Conferences, retreats, and periodic "days of renewal" constitute spiritually charged atmospheres in which people may be inspired to pray with others for healing, or ask for healing prayer, at virtually any moment. Not unusual, for example, is the instance of a priest who left his room in a retreat house with the "sense" that he should go to a particular area of the house. He paused, returning to his room to retrieve a vial of holy water, just in case his "sense" meant that he was about to encounter the need for healing prayer. The careful priest was well prepared to augment his prayer with the added blessing obtained with the sprinkling of sacramental holy water.

We can identify four relatively distinct types of Charismatic healing events: large public services with multiple patients, small services follow­ing prayer meetings, private services for the benefit of a single patient, and solitary healing prayer for oneself or absent others. In large public healing services the principal healing minister, unless he or she is travel­ing as a guest in an unfamiliar region or country, is typically assisted by a staff. Members of this staff serve as ushers for those coming forward to receive prayer, "catchers" for those who may be overwhelmed by divine power and fall in a sacred swoon (see chapter 9), musicians, and members of small prayer teams. Each patient receives at least a few moments of personal attention from either the principal healer or one of the prayer teams. Staff members of several well-organized "ministries" are identified during services by a sash or jacket worn over their clothing, or by regular street clothing with a common color scheme.l6 In a typical scenario, the service begins with the leader walking up and down the aisles of the church, using a liturgical instrument known as an aspergil-lum to sprinkle holy water on the assembly and pausing periodically to

RITUAL HEALING 37

lay hands on a person's head or shoulder. Returning to the front of the assembly the leader delivers a sermon on divine healing, and a music ensemble composed of members of the staff leads the group in Charis­matic songs. Several participants are solicited to share or "witness to" previous healings they have experienced. The body of the service con­sists in each participant coming forward for a minute or two of private prayer, much as they come forward for the Eucharist in a mass. Each is anointed with sacramental oil and "prayed over" with laying on of hands. Some healers ask the person to name the problem to be prayed for, others do not and "leave the entire matter to God." Still others (apparendy fewer) diagnose the problem by inspiration, learning through the results of an inspiration or "word of knowledge" that, for example, a supplicant is "angry and should forgive her husband." Ser­vices typically last three or four hours if preceded by a mass. Daylong or two-day healing retreats may include "workshops" on spiritual gifts prior to the mass and a healing service proper.

In prayer groups healing prayers for self or others may occur in a segment of the weekly prayer meeting. Better-organized groups may have a selected team of "healing ministers" who, following the meeting, conduct prayer for individual supplicants in a separate "healing room." Several pairs of team members dispersed through the room each see one patient at a time. They listen, talk, lay on hands, and pray for healing. Other patients wait outside the prayer room and are admitted one by one by another healing team member who acts as gatekeeper. The post-prayer meeting healing-room session stands in contrast to the large service in its relative privacy, in the increased amount of time spent with each patient (10-20 minutes instead of 2-3), and in the greater likelihood of healers and supplicants having an ongoing relation­ship within the group.

Based either on the recommendation of the healing-room prayer team, on the recommendation of another prayer-group member who senses that a person is troubled, or on one's own initiative, a person may arrange a private session with a more experienced healer or healing team, within or outside the group.17 Private healing sessions typically take place in a home or counseling center, but sometimes occur over the telephone or in hospital visits. Private sessions may last an hour or more and may be conducted by healers within the group or by those with broader reputations. Healers either stand over the seated supplicant with hands laid on head, shoulder, back, or chest; or they sit facing the supplicant, sometimes holding hands. Private sessions are informally

38 RITUAL HEALING

structured into alternating segments of talk or "counseling" and of actual "healing prayer," though some healers regard the entire session as prayer. Multiple sessions over time on the model of psychotherapy are performed by more "psychological" healers who hold that healing can be a divine augmentation of gradual, natural processes. Some more "fundamentalist" healers object that God's power or willingness to heal is slighted if lengthy multiple sessions arc held. One such healer com­mented that so many people were in need of help that it was unfair to hold private sessions. Consistent with the conviction that it is better to reach as many as possible and leave the details of each person's problem to God, this priest confined his ministry to large public healing services.

Finally, healing prayer for oneself or others may be practiced in the solitude of private devotion. To my knowledge there is no formal proce­dure to such prayer, and it can obviously not be observed direedy. The possibility for ritual healing in the absence of a ritual healer has, how­ever, been known since the time when healing was carried out by dream "incubation" in the ancient Greek temple of Acsclepius. This feature of healing should be kept in mind as a caution against overestimating the contribution to therapeutic efficacy of the therapeutic "relationship," a tendency derived from the pervasive scholarly analogy between psycho­therapy and religious healing. Whatever efficacy inheres in solitary heal­ing appears to be founded on the way in which ritual, with or without a healer, activates endogenous self processes (Prince 1980, Csordas 1983).

Along with prophecy and speaking in tongues, healing is regarded by Charismatics as one of the "spiritual gifts" or "charisms." However, the structure of healing events as cultural performances is essentially different from that of the prayer meeting and its variants. This is because the gift of healing is understood as the mediation of divine power through specific individuals rather than as collective access to the divin­ity through worship and inspiration. Even though prophecy is also a mediation of divine power by an individual, and even though its mes­sage may be uniquely interpreted by each listener, anyone in a prayer meeting may be inspired with prophecy and everyone hears the same prophetic utterance. The asymmetrical relationship among participants in healing, constituted by one person "ministering to" others, persists even when there is a group of healers working in teams. Only rarely is divine power given a collective locus, with the leader instructing all participants to lay hands on each other.18 Thus, although movement leaders exhort participants to "focus on the gift not the man," there is

RITUAL HEALING 39

nevertheless a perception that some healing ministers are more gifted than others, and those in attendance at public healing services often show a preference to be "prayed over" by the service leader instead of by one of the teams of assistants.

Especially in healing regarded as spiritually dangerous or sensitive, such as casting out evil spirits, healers at any level of the hierarchy of renown may work in teams of up to half-a-dozen people. The principle behind team healing is that there is not one healing gift, but a series of complementary gifts, all of which not every healer necessarily possesses. These gifts include that of being able to verbalize the healing prayer itself, the gift to "discern" the presence of spirits, the "word of knowl­edge" that reveals unspoken facts about the supplicant, or "prophecy" to encourage and exhort the patient, the gift of "authority" to com­mand spirits to depart, and the gift of "love" by which the patient feels the intimacy and support of the team, and which keeps him or her from becoming frightened. One man, who often took responsibility as "doorkeeper" of his group's healing room, felt that his gift was the inspiration to direct each patient to the team of healers whose gifts would be most suited to the supplicant's as-yet-unspoken problem. The "spontaneous coordination" of these gifts in practice—a kind of team habitus—has become second nature in healing teams that have been together for as many as fifteen years.

Genres of Ritual Healing

Essential to the Charismatic healing system is a concept of the person as a tripartite composite of body, mind, and spirit. Con­ceptualization of a tripartite person creates a decisive cultural difference between Charismatic healing and conventional psychotherapy and med­icine, insofar as the latter are predicated on a concept of the person as a dualistic composite of body and mind. For Charismatics the spiritual is, paradoxically, ineffable and empirical at the same time. Its ineffability was captured by an informant who said that the reason the spiritual could not easily be discussed was only because we have no language for it, and hence we are forced by default to describe it in the language of emotions. On the other hand, the spiritual is empirical in the sense that phenomena such as evil spirits, or the sense of divine presence, are

40 RITUAL HEALING

experienced as real in their own domain, just as are viruses in the somatic and emotional traumas in the mental domains.19

Corresponding to each component of the tripartite person is a type of healing: physical healing of bodily illness, inner healing of emotional illness and distress, and deliverance from the adverse effects of evil spirits. Each genre includes distinctive concepts of affliaion and elements of technique. The genres tend to occur in different frequencies across events that range from large public services to private one-on-one en­counters, and healing ministers tend to specialize in one genre. How­ever, most Charismatic healers recognize a necessity at times to combine genres, insofar as the components of the tripartite person are holistically related in, as they say, a "pneumopsychosomatic" synthesis. In this way Charismatic healing participates in the broader cultural discourse in which one finds popular notions of the "psychosomatic" and "holistic healing."

Physical healing is the most widely known in American religious culture, and Catholic Charismatics arc relatively more influenced by the model of Protestant healers such as Oral Roberts and Kathryn Kuhlman than by the models of miracles performed by saints and pilgrimage to healing shrines such as Lourdes. As was evident in our summary of problems presented by healing service participants, physical healing ad­dresses a full range of medical complaints. Yet, as we have also men­tioned, in comparison with some forms of Protestant faith healing, patients rarely feel required to abandon medical care as a sign of faith. The technique of physical healing typically consists in the simple laying on of hands accompanied by prayer that the condition be healed, though in cases such as the mending of broken bones and the reversal of cancer, patient and/or healer visualization of the healing process might be in­cluded.

Inner healing was introduced to Catholics largely through the influ­ence of the Episcopalian Charismatic Agnes Sanford, regarded by some as the "mother of the inner healing ministry." It is relevant for all kinds of emotional problems, and subsumes what Charismatics sometimes label the "healing of relationships." Inner healing is also often referred to as "healing of memories," a term that reflects its underlying theory of affliction. This theory holds that emotional "woundedness" or "bro-kenness" is the result of traumatic life events. From this premise, a kind of popular religious psychodynamics is elaborated: since the origin of affliction is attributed to interpersonal trauma, emotional and psycho­logical problems are dealt with by searching for biographical causes

RTTUAL HEALING 41

embedded in "memories." The typical technique is to pray for the sup­plicant's entire life stage by stage, from the moment of conception to the present. Events or unreconciled relationships that emerge in this review of life history are given special attention in a period of prayer, and the supplicant is asked to forgive the offending person. The prayer may include an imagery process, either spontaneous or suggested by the healer. In this process the painful situation is reconstructed and the human form of Jesus is introduced as an actor who touches, heals, and reassures. In the words of one healer, inner healing is "praying the presence of Christ into the moments of their lives." Some conservative classical and nondenominational Pentecostals reject this form of healing, especially the use of imagery, as "practicing psychotherapy without a license," and as "nonbiblical," since the healings of Jesus included only physical healing and casting out evil spirits.20

Deliverance was introduced to Catholics by the nondenominational neo-Pentecostal healers Donald Basham and Derek Prince as well as through writings by the Episcopalian Charismatic Michael Harper and the nondenominational Frank and Ida Mae Hammond. Charismatics distinguish between demonic possession, in which a demon takes total control of a person's faculties, and lesser forms of influence in which demons do not gain complete control, but are regarded as having a detrimental effect on the person's life and spiritual growth. The Catholic Church requires that full possession be dealt with only by a priest using the formal rite of exorcism, under the explicit permission of a bishop and following a lengthy inquiry that rules out alternatives to demonic activity, including mental illness. Thus, by addressing only what are defined as lesser forms of demonic influence, deliverance prayer legiti­mates an engagement in "spiritual warfare" with the minions of Satan which would otherwise be restricted. Charismatics also distinguish their practice of deliverance from that of their Protestant brethren, attempt­ing to moderate what they regard as relatively "violent" manifestations of demonic activity in the supplicant's behavior. The presence of evil spirits is identified or discerned either by the healer or supplicant through the uncontrollable persistence of sins or negative forms of thought, emotion, and behavior. The spirits are then commanded to depart in the name of Jesus. Charismatic ethnotheory holds that because divine authority is absolute, evil spirits cannot resist obeying this com­mand, though in certain cases a spirit may create disruptive "manifesta­tions" such as uttering verbal abuse through the mouth of its host, or physically upsetting the host.

42 RITUAL HEALING

That the genres of healing are related as a coherent system is evident not only in the way they are distinguished from related forms among Protestants. Just as a "pneumopsychosomatic" interrelation exists among the components of the tripartite person, so arc the healing genres related because of possible interactions among their underlying etiolo­gies of affliction. Thus, whereas physical illness may be attributed to physical or biomedical causes, it may also originate in biographical trauma, such that inner healing becomes prerequisite to physical heal­ing. This position would be maintained regardless of whether that phys­ical healing was achieved through prayer, medical treatment, or a combi­nation of the two. Again, a person afflicted by evil spirits is also often said to have become so as a result of a vulnerability created by a traumatic past event. For example, emotional scars from childhood sexual abuse may later provide a point of entree for the spirit Lust. Physical illness may provide entree for evil spirits, though in other cases evil spirits may be the principal cause of physical illness. In a finely wrought example of contemporary' scholastic reasoning, one renowned healer explained that if a cancer originated in natural causes but was exacerbated by demons, deliverance by itself would be insufficient to effect a healing; however, one could be certain that the primary cause of the disease was demonic if deliverance prayer resulted in a cure. Others point out that arthritis, for example, may not only be a physical illness requiring prayer for physical healing, but the result of "resentment" over having been wronged. Therapeutic success would then require inner healing and forgiveness of the offender. Deliverance might also be deemed necessary insofar as the evil spirit Resentment could have a hold on the afflicted person. Because of this "holism," although healing ministers tend to specialize in one or another genre, most recognize a necessity at times to use all three forms in varying combinations.

The earliest formulation of the Catholic Charismatic healing system by Francis MacNutt (1974) included a fourth genre called "spiritual healing." This form never developed a technique of its own, but al­though it bears a peripheral relation to practice it plays a role in the religious rationale of healing. Unlike deliverance, it has no elaborated content with respect to the spiritual component of the tripartite person, but is residually concerned with the general well-being of the soul. One rhetorical function of this protogenre was to assure the recognition of sin as a possible cause of illness, a function largely appropriated by deliverance in the theory that habitual sin provides the occasion for the assertion of demonic control over the "area" of one's life affected by

RITUAL HEALING 43

the sinful behavior. Spiritual healing also provided an anchor for the healing system in conventional Catholic ritual practice, with the doxa that a primary source of spiritual healing should be the sacrament of reconciliation (confession). Perhaps most importantly, this healing form serves as a kind of "consolation prize" for those who receive no relief from performance of the principal genres. Thus it is said that if the all-benevolent Lord does not see fit to grant a physical healing, he will at least grant a spiritual healing constituted by a sense of peace and accep­tance of the divine will. Spiritual healing is therefore an important hedge against the failure of healing prayer, sidestepping the thorny issues of theodicy in a religion that has largely abandoned a notion of redemptive suffering in favor of the notion that God desires everyone to be healed.

If spiritual healing has remained an implicit residual genre in the healing system, a quite different significance has been borne by a genre added to the system well after it was established among Catholics. Alter­natively called ancestral healing, intergenerational healing, or healing the family tree, it was introduced in the early 1980s by British Charis­matic psychiatrist Kenneth McAll (1982). The integration of this new genre demonstrates both the coherence of the tripartite system under-girded by the tripartite person concept, and the possibilities/limitations for change/innovation within the system of healing practice. The theory of affliction in ancestral healing is that problems can be passed to succes­sive generations through the "bloodline." Whereas in some societies the attribution of illness to ancestors is commonplace, in contemporary North America it is somewhat awkward and ambiguous. Thus among those who practice this genre of healing there is a persistent conceptual indeterminacy. Consensus is lacking as to whether the affliction is caused primarily by learned and transmitted behavior patterns, by the spiritually transmitted effects of emotional woundedncss or sin, by the influence of evil spirits that prey upon successive generations of a family, or by the unrestful spirits of forebears themselves. The latter explanation is quite controversial, since the notion of earthbound spirits or ghosts does not square with conventional Catholic theology. For this reason, and based on the objection that affliction transmitted through the "bloodline" undermines the principle of divinely granted free will, heal­ing of ancestry has not found unanimous acceptance among Charis-matics.

Rather than argue that the ambiguous place of this genre is the result of the absence of sufficient "logical space" within a tightly bound and conceptually coherent tripartite healing system, I will point out how

44 RJTUAL HEALING

ancestral healing is in fact a hybrid of several ritual forms. First, it appears to be an elaboration of the traditional Catholic practice of pray­ing for the repose of souls in Purgatory. It extends the underlying prem­ise by praying for the actual healing of ancestral souls, understood to remain afflicted after death, as well as for healing of the living patient. This interpretation is supported by the fact that a key element in the technique of ancestral healing is performance of a mass, also a very common traditional way of "remembering the deceased/' Second, it in effect extends the biographical scope of inner healing or healing of memories in a reverse temporal direction. That is, whereas inner healing typically begins its biographical review with conception and proceeds through culturally defined stages of the life cycle to the present, ancestral healing begins with the patienfs parents and proceeds backwards in time to earlier generations. This is borne out by another element of ritual technique, the construction by the supplicant of a genealogy or "family tree," the successive generations of which guide the stages of healing prayer. Third, the genre shares elements of deliverance, and sometimes is even thought of as a form of deliverance in which the influence of evil spirits is traced back through a "bloodline." However, it can also seen as a kind of "domestication" of deliverance insofar as the source of affliction is shifted from unpredictable demonic spirits to more manageable human spirits. This interpretation is supported by a third principal element of ritual technique, the "cutting of bonds" be­tween supplicant and afflicting ancestor. Sometimes performed in imag­ination with an imagined sword, it presumes that the relation between ancestor and afflicted, like the relationship between evil spirit and af­flicted, is one of "bondage."

The severing of bonds is of interest for a comparative reason as well. Affliction by ancestors is commonly recorded as a cause of illness in the ethnomedical systems of diverse societies (Murdock 1970). By and large, however, the ancestors are thought to take action in response to having been offended or neglected by living descendants. Therapy often consists of reestablishing bonds by appeasing, meeting the demands of, or fulfilling obligations toward the ancestor. That Charismatic ancestral healing requires the severing of bonds is strikingly concordant with a North American ethnopsychology that objectifies the healthy self as a discrete, bounded, entity. Healers emphasize that it is only bondage and not relationship that is ritually severed, especially where the "ancestor" is a still-living parent. The sacred self is thus created by a performative act that powerfully enacts the cultural ideal of ego integrity and psycho-

RITUAL HEALING 45

logical differentiation, in vivid contrast to ritual healing in societies where boundaries between selves are not so definitively drawn.

Acts of Empowerment and Transformation

Within the ritual events and genres we have described, Charismatic healing includes a repertoire of discrete acts, like the sever­ing of ancestral bonds, that can be understood as kinds of "performative acts." The notion of a performative speech act was developed by Austin (1962/1975) to refer to instances in which "saying something" is a way of "doing something." It is relevant to apply this formula in return to nonverbal acts, as for example shaking hands is a way of greeting some­one, or of confirming a contract. In this sense the performative acts of Charismatic healing, both verbal and nonverbal, are ways of doing spe­cific things essential to the healing process.21 In table 2.41 have summa­rized the repertoire of specific, named Charismatic performative acts of healing and have grouped them analytically according to what they "do"

Table 2.4 Performative Repertoire of Charismatic Healing.

' Anointing Laying on of hands Holy water, consecrated oil, blessed salt Tongues (glossalalia) Resting in the Spirit Soaking prayer

{ Calling down the blood of the lamb Lifting someone up to the Lord Calling on St. Michael and the Virgin Mary

{Words of knowledge, wisdom Prophecy Vision (imagery)

! Discernment of spirits Binding of spirits Calling out spirits Prayer of command Cutting ancestral bonds

{Mass Eucharist (communion) Reconciliation (confession)

Emotional release Forgiveness

Empowerment

46 RITUAL HEALING

or contribute to healing. Wc will encounter many of them again in subsequent discussion, but here I will do little more than define their place in the healing system.

Under empowerment I include those acts in which divine power is experienced or brought to bear in a particular environment or on a particular individual. An anointing is typically a physical sensa­tion—trembling, lightness, heaviness, heat—that indicates the activity of divine power. Laying on of hands is a physical touching of the suppli­cant that focuses prayer and channels divine power into the supplicant. Water, oil, and salt are the three substances known as "sacramentals" in traditional Catholicism. Holy water and salt may be sprinkled in a home or on a person and oil may be used to anoint a person's forehead. Not only substantial vehicles for divine power to heal, they could also be included under our category of protection, especially protection from evil spirits; blessed salt is in fact mostly used as a form of protection. Speaking in tongues is used as a more powerful mode of prayer for healing than vernacular language. However, healing ministers also ac­knowledge using glossolalia when they are unsure what to say, when they are opening themselves to divine revelation, and when they want to surrender control of the healing process directly to divine action; when the healer speaks in tongues she may be "getting out of the way so that God can work." Resting in the Spirit is a spontaneous experience (and thus from the emic standpoint not really an "act" at all) on the part of the patient in which she is overwhelmed by divine power and falls in a semiswoon to the floor, there lying in a state of "total peace and relaxation" with the sense of being in the divine presence. Finally, soaking prayer is intensive intercessory prayer lasting for hours or even days, with members of a prayer team alternating shifts. In soaking prayer language is virtually a ritual substance in which the supplicant is im­mersed.22

Like several of the other performatives of healing, those of protection are accomplished not through physical actions but through either verbal or imaginal acts. Calling down the blood of the Lamb mobilizes the divine power inherent in the blood shed by Jesus. Like soaking prayer, it suggests immersion in a substantivized divine power, but that power is given explicit symbolic form as divine blood. But whereas in the use of sacramentals actual water, oil, or salt is applied, the person for whom one prays is only symbolically covered, drenched in a protective coating of divine blood.23 The presence of St. Michael the Archangel and his band of militant angels and the Virgin Mary with her maternal vigilance

RITUAL HEALING 47

can also be invoked. An elaborate prayer of protection for family and home may result in the entire house being covered by blood and sur­rounded by legions of angels. Finally, the symbolic act of lifting some­one up to the Lord is a way of commending that person to divine providence, though in addition it is also a way to pray for a person or petition the deity on someone's behalf.

The category of revelation includes several "spiritual gifts" that again from the emic point of view are not acts but spontaneous experiences of inspiration. Word of knowledge, word of wisdom, and prophecy are collectively known as "word gifts." The first consists in "receiving," through divine inspiration, information about a person, situation, or problem that the healer had no "human" means of knowing. Word of wisdom is a gift of being able to say just the thing that a patient "needs to hear" at a particular point in the healing process. Again, the content is perceived by the healer as beyond his or her normal capacity to advise and counsel. It may be an apparently Solomonic statement that appears to come to mind "out of the blue," or something that appears wise only in retrospect, based on feedback by a grateful patient. Prophecy, one of the principal genres of ritual language discussed in chapter 1 (see also Csordas 1987) occurs somewhat infrequently in healing. One prominent healer's public service for a time included the feature of a brief prophecy to each supplicant by an assistant who followed behind the principal healer as he moved from person to person laying on hands. Where prophecy occurs in a private session for a single supplicant, it is most often uttered in an informal, conversational style. The overall rarity of prophecy is consistent with the prominence of the psychocul-tural theme of intimacy in ritual healing, both in the relation between healer and supplicant and between divinity and supplicant. Insofar as prophecy is a modality of divine authority, it is somewhat out of place when the ritual focus is on divine intimacy. Even where divine power is most immediately felt, in the experience of resting in the Spirit, it is the intimacy of divine presence that is emphasized in healing. Finally, among revelatory acts, vision or imagery may occur to either healer or supplicant. Despite their name, and as we will discuss in detail in chapter 4, any of these "word gifts" may be experienced as a nonverbal sensory image. A burning sensation in a healing minister's ear might indicate that someone in the assembly is being healed of an ear problem, or the visual image of a beating heart might indicate the healing of coronary disease. Patients "receive" imagery either spontaneously during prayer or in a guided imagery process. Such imagery is typically formulated

48 RJTUAL HEALING

as "memories" of traumatic life events, the effects of which arc then transformed through additional imagery processes in inner-healing prayer.

Under deliverance are included those performative acts concerned with identifying, controlling, and dispatching evil spirits. Discernment is one of the "spiritual gifts" and allows its recipient to sense the presence and often the identity of a demon. Binding is a verbal technique (i.e., it is usually not acted out either physically or in imagination) that in­vokes divine power to constrain a demon from "manifestations" such as physical violence, screaming, or profanity. Calling out spirits is a practice in which the healer identifies the demon by name or commands the demon to name itself through the voice of the afflicted. The prayer of command is a performative act in the strict Austinian sense, an utter­ance in which a demon is, "in the name of Jesus," commanded to depart. In theory the "saying" is the "doing," since because demons are under the ultimate authority of the divinity they arc unable to refuse the com­mand. In practice, however, they are sometimes recalcitrant, especially when faced with a healing minister who is inexperienced or lacking in confidence. Finally, cutting ancestral bonds is a symbolic act, performed either verbally or through imagery, of severing ties of affliction within the "bloodline." As noted above, it is sometimes referred to as "deliver­ance" from the bond to a predecessor, but also more literally may be deliverance from a demon that afflicts successive generations within a family.

As Catholics, Charismatics see traditional liturgy and sacrament as sources of divine power for healing. Mass and Eucharist are opportuni­ties for exposure to the divine presence, whereas Reconciliation is an opportunity to remove the spiritually pathogenic effects of sin. Finally, forgiveness is an act by which supplicants unburden themselves of re­sentment or hatred against those who have wronged them. Presuppos­ing an essentially merciful deity, the act of forgiveness is regarded by some healers as inherendy efficacious in both a spiritual and psychologi­cal sense and an essential feature of healing process.

In the chapters that follow, we will encounter a variety of these acts in the context of their use. At present I will elaborate the phenomenol­ogy of two of them: the anointing and the laying on of hands. The first is characteristically a spontaneous bodily experience, the second a gesture or technique of the body. Along with the discussion in chapter 4, these analyses will represent the healer's voice in the existential dia­logue of ritual healing. From the healer's standpoint they will offer an

RITUAL HEALING 49

initial sense of the experiential specificity we require from a cultural phenomenology of therapeutic process.

Phenomenology of Performative Force

For Charismatic healers, experience of an anointing is taken as a sign that a healing is occurring or is about to occur. This sign may be evident only to the healer as a sense or image, but in some circumstances may also be evident to a patient. For example, once a healer approached me at a service and laid his insistendy vibrating hand on my shoulder as he prayed. I recognized the vibration as the manifesta­tion of an anointing—in the Charismatic world, I had been direcdy exposed to divine power. What is the meaning of this? A simple func­tionalist account would be that the vibration, as a manifestation of divine power, enhances the "expectant faith" (J. Frank 1973) of both healer and supplicant. Although perhaps accurate, this account hardly approaches an ideal of specificity, so instead of stopping there I took the opportunity in subsequent interviews to recount my experience to other healers and solicit their response. I found them quite divided on whether the vibrating hand is an authentic, naive, misguided, theatrical, or even feigned sign of divine anointing. It also became clear that, to most, an anointing held more significance than a simple sense that something divine was happening. Here is a segment of my interview with a healer who was particularly articulate about the phenomenology of anointing, based on long experience conducting public healing ses­sions:

Fr. P: Well, you pray for the anointing and then you become bold. You have to get from the natural to the supernatural because of your human condi­tion, because we're trying [inaudible] our type, body, mind and spirit. So, I guess it's through hit and miss, you have to work yourself into it. So, you have to begin to walk on water, the way Peter walked on water. It is something that cannot be learned or taught. It's something that you have to kind of go through.

TC: How can you tell when you get the anointing? For example, some people kind of feel a tingling in their fingers?

Fr. P: That happens sometimes. You have the tingling, you have the feeling. You just feel that, there might be a heaviness sometimes on you or a heaviness sort of stuns, comes on you. It's the anointing. It's the Spirit hovering over you, over the assembly; and if you are very sharp and

50 RITUAL HEALING

discerning sometimes my, your sixth sense as it were, your spirit, it's very, very sensitive and when you get revelation knowledge, its intuitive, it's not so much up here, its through the heart. And you kind of flow with that, you kind of flow with that. And there are other times, though you might be dead emotionally, and mentally just exhausted, and yet you still have the anointing. In other words you don't get locked into feelings as such because feelings are the language of the body. Thoughts are the language of the mind, concepts. Your conscience is telling you what God wants, but your heart on the deepest level, the real you, is where God lives within you. And He works in you on that level. He's Spirit. Spirit gives witness to spirit. So you are working on this deep, deep level.

TC: It seems that in order to tell if you have an anointing, your body, mind, and spirit would have to experience it somehow simultaneously. I mean, Pm trying to see the way you can tell. Sometimes, there's a tingling but not always. Then that happens in the hands. Or it happens elsewhere on the body?

Fr. P: Well, you might feel lightness. Sometimes you feel different phenomena and sometimes you might feel like you're going to levitate too.

TC: As against the feeling of the heaviness? Fr. P: Sometimes when you feel heaviness, heaviness to me—and also on a

feeling level, if I feel very empathetic towards you, a lot of compassion, sympathy, and I can pass you [inaudible word] and it's a sign to pray over you, but if you feel very indifferent or you're cold, distant, apathetic, I won't tell you that. To me, on that feeling level, it's not the time for you to get the healing. I'm not the person, or there are blocks or their hindrances, but I wont share that with you [i.e., I won't mention that I feel that way about you].

From only this much evidence we can state that although it may be analytically accurate to conclude that a healer under anointing is in a "state of trance," it is phenomenologicaily inadequate. Perhaps more satisfactory than trance would be Blacking's notion of protoritual, a "shared somatic state of the social body that generates special kinds of feelings and apparendy spontaneous movements and interaction be­tween bodies in space and time" (1977:14). This concept allows us to make some sense out of the healer's description of the anointing as "the Spirit hovering over you, over the assembly," and appears to describe a state that is consistent with the capacity of a shared habitus to generate apparently spontaneous movements and interaction.

Yet the goal of a cultural phenomenology is not merely to categorize and define the healer's "state." Note first the way experience articulates the cultural concept of the person. The healer frames his response to a series of questions aimed at the phenomenology of the anointing explic-

RITUAL HEALING 51

itly in terms of the tripartite person. Emotions/feelings belong to the body, thoughts to the mind, but the "heart" is the seat of the spirit. Anointing calls into play a "sixth sense" of revelation and intuition that may operate despite emotional lassitude or physical exhaustion. Furthermore, we see the way the experience is constituted as an experi­ence of the sacred. Here we uncover the existential primacy of the body, for the anointing is recognized both in physical sensations such as tin­gling, heaviness, or levitational lightness, and in those emotional feel­ings of empathy, compassion, or sympathy that indicate whether a per­son is receptive to divine intervention. Finally, the experience can contribute to therapeutic process by serving as a sign not only that healing will occur, but that healing will not occur for certain persons. The pragmatic implication is that in a large healing service the healer may invest less time in those whose time for healing has not arrived.

Before making any general conclusion about performative acts, let us pass from anointing to that most characteristic act, the laying on of hands. Laying on of hands is more than a simple transfer of divine power from healer to supplicant. The act bears, in Victor Turner's (1974) term, the polysemic symbolic properties of touch. To understand the way these properties are actualized in practice, we must understand the lay­ing on of hands as an act that lies midway between a gesture and a fully elaborated "technique of the body" (Mauss 1950£).24 As a gesture, its performative efficacy is inseparably linked with the prayer to which it is an accompaniment. It implicidy enacts two important psychocultural themes upon the afflicted person: it is a gesture of intimacy and protec­tion as well as a gesture of control and the application of power. As a technique, the laying on of hands is variable, and these variations can be described as follows: a hand, or two, on top of the head; a hand on the forehead, sometimes touching with the fingertips only and some­times such that a supplicant's face is virtually covered by the healer's palm; a single hand on the shoulder; a hand on the chest and one on the back, or on the forehead and behind the head such that a virtual axis of divine empowerment runs through the supplicant's body; or a hand laid directly over an afflicted body part. Aside from the specificity in the last of these notions and a proscription against touching areas of sexual privacy, for most healers the cultural meaning of these varia­tions is only minimally elaborated, if at all. I would interpret this lack of meaningful elaboration as an implicit allowance for bodily spontaneity in contact between healer and patient. Leaving variations in touch to

52 RITUAL HEALING

the spontaneous coordination of the habitus thus bears the implicit significance of enacting another of our key psychocultural themes.

There is another sense in which laying on of hands can become speci­fied as technique, however, but only among the most highly specialized segment of Charismatic healers. Here there is an opportunity tor a post­modern synthesis in which laying on of hands is juxtaposed to other forms of healing touch. As we relied on a particularly articulate healer for our hermeneutic of the anointing, so wc now call on a Charismatic healer trained as a psychotherapist. This "cultural specialist" (M. Singer 1972) distinguishes among massage, laying on of hands, and therapeu­tic touch. For her, laying on of hands becomes technique insofar as it is systematically distinguished from other forms. "Massage" is character­ized by touch plus moving the hands with physical pressure, "laying on of hands" by touch without movement or pressure, and "therapeutic touch" (a technique originating in the nursing profession) by moving the hands over the person's body without physical contact. Here is how laying on of hands becomes a therapeutic technique of the body in this healer's practice:

H: When I don't use laying on of hands, I'll use therapeutic touch and just move away from the energy field of the person, and just move into a space where they're comfortable. To be with them without laying my hands direcdy on. [The difference is] the directness. My experience has been that in moving with therapeutic touch I can allow Jesus to be in touch and heal that person, wherever that negative energy is around them, in a similar fashion as with laying on of hands. So depending on how I move, [how I decide, or am inspired, to proceed] that's what I will do.. . . Do I move to directly touch that person? Is there an issue in their life that touch would inhibit inner healing? I think that's really something to be sensitive about. The therapeutic touch would not violate or be as confirmative. Especially in the area of sexual abuse, I'm talking now. . . . Instead of making contact with one's flesh with the body, one just expects healing energy to move through the body based on just certainly where your hands are, removing the negative energy away from that area, wherever that might be. and asking God to come in with positive energy. So, it's really not too much different, but it can be profoundly useful with people who are intimidated by touch.

TC: Now what you've just described was the use of therapeutic touch? Now what does the actual laying on of hands . . . I don't know what word to use . . . accomplish?

H: Well, I would imagine, at least I imagine that Jesus' energy is moving through my hands through their body, connecting them with their mind, connecting them with their heart and spirit. And I see that as just calling forth the power, just to be there to bring up the negative energy in the

RITUAL HEALING 53

body, so that as love is put on the body, healing energy moves that negative energy or that negative mass up. And so it's a different way of accomplish­ing the same thing. And so then whatever comes up, whether it be an impulse toward anger or fear, whatever, would need to be healed.

TC: And the energy comes up, emerges from within their body? H: Emerges from within the person. Wouldn't want to just limit it to the

body.

TC: Okay. And then the energy that's coming from Jesus through your hands . . .

H: Is the love. And love brings up anything unlike itself, is what I borrowed from a woman who wrote on healing. And so as I lay down my hands on that person, Jesus' love energy brings up what needs healing. And that's when we deal with healing of memories, healing the true self, validating the true self.

TC: So it brings it up in the sense of bringing to consciousness and bringing it into [what] you can talk about.

H: Exactly.

TC: I see. Whereas, the therapeutic touch is your hands moving the energy that's within them . . .

H: And around them. And calling forth God's positive energy as you remove that, for the same purpose . . . that the positive energy will then soak and penetrate that being and bring up to the surface. It's the same purpose.

TC: Well, therapeutic touch is not directly derived from the Christian tradition, is it?

H: That's right. That's right. That's right. And you'll find that we (JLO that with a lot of things. That we will take the best of what they have to offer and allow them to become our own.

TC: How about massage then? A third way of touching. H: Well, with massage, what's really important is the intention. So, for in­

stance, we were doing a human sexuality group and we moved into allow­ing to look at the fear of intimacy through massage of their hands, their neck, so forth. And I see that as something you need to be very careful with in the way of intention. Cause what that can stimulate is a person can become overwhelmed by the energy that's set free . . . that negative energy that's set free. For instance, if I am moving with [using] massage with you, and my intendon is to bring up, I need to watch out for the amount of stuff that we're bringing u p . . . . I think I need to reverence the impact of touching another person's body, so that that brings up whatever needs to be healed so that the)' will not be overwhelmed by the amount of AFFECT that comes with it.

TC: When you use massage this way, is it for the same purpose of bringing things up so that they can be discussed?

H: Sometimes. Not always. Not always. And it's not massage that you would get from massage therapists either. It's just the use of massage and touch, in healing touch. One of our therapists is moving more in the way of

54 RITUAL HEALING

massage from a more formal perspective, and I think that will be a marvel­ous breakthrough to have someone who is Christian. . . . I guess the differ­ence would be that in laying on of hands, I usually keep my hands in one place. So massage welcomes me to move WITH the person in a different way.

In this passage the healer is discussing the performative act specifically within the genre of inner healing or healing of memories. Evident in her discourse is the biographical self process of healing, premised on the folk psychodynamic model of bringing unconscious contents into awareness, and including overall concern with the "true self or identity. Also evident is the ubiquitous psychocultural theme of intimacy. The elements of technique that distinguish the three forms of touch are relevant precisely to intimacy in the relation between healer and suppli­cant. Massage allows the healer to "move with" the supplicant, but the supplicant's fear of intimacy may be manifest in intimidation at being touched at all. Touch may evoke potentially harmful affective reaction along with releasing the hidden contents of mcmon', and the force of sexuality is never far from the surface of the healer's concern. Beyond these variations in technique, the performative force of all three forms of touch has to do with the evocation of "energy," an explicitly Christian formulation of an ethnopsychological notion shared with New Age healing. In this version the hands arc more than an instrument for applying divine power, but a kind of energy interface where divine love enters and negative energy exits the person.

The importance of this interface is suggested in T. Turner's ethnolog­ical observation that "the surface of the body seems everywhere to be treated, not only as the boundary of the individual as a biological and psychological entity but as the frontier of the social self as well" (1980: 112). In this respect one must also consider the family resemblance, to borrow Wittgenstein's phrase, between laying on of hands and the congratulatory pat on the back or sympathetic hand on the shoulder. Within the Christian tradition this family of gestures includes the heal­ing touch of Jesus as portrayed in the Bible. In the European Middle Ages the gesture was enacted as the "royal touch," when monarchs laid hands on their subjects for the ritual healing of diseases such as scrofula (Bloch 1973). This practice ended in the eighteenth century, coincident with the beginnings of the Wesleyan tradition that eventually spawrned Pentecostalism. Pentecostal laying on of hands can in a sense be under­stood as a Protestantization or democratization of the divine monarchs' healing touch. The historical continuity is evident in contemporary

RITUAL HEALING 55

Charismatics' emphasis on motives of kingship, lordship, authority, and submission, and on their role as builders of and subjects in the divine kingdom.

As an enactment of intimacy, laying on of hands bears both historical and psychocultural connotations. It is first a metonym of the solidarity of the Christian community, as the unity of bodies touching is the unity of the church as "mystical body of Christ" (O'Neill 1985:70-74). In this respect, laying on of hands also connotes shielding and protecting the distressed supplicant. Perhaps as much of the performative efficacy in the gesture comes from the appeal to totality enacted by physical contact as from the transfer of substantivized divine power from healer to supplicant. Phenomenologically, touch surpasses an interpersonal barrier, a barrier culturally constructed on the premise of the person as a discrete, independent entity, on the cultural notion of "privacy," and on the injunction "don't touch" in most North American social settings (Montagu 1978, Shvveder and Bourne 1982). Laying on of hands is thus an instance in which the relative values of sociocentric and egocen­tric self are problematized. Montagu (1978) has argued that tactile stim­ulation in childhood is important to healthy development, demonstrat­ing in cross-cultural perspective the relative lack of such stimulation for North American children. Such considerations suggest that laying on of hands may, in its rhetorical move toward a more sociocentric self, also help compensate for a developmental deficiency. The value of the egocentric self also comes to the fore in acknowledgments by some Charismatics as well as by some of those who have rejected Charismatic ministries that persons can at times feel smothered and coerced instead of loved and supported when hands are laid on them. This is especially the case when an uncertain or reluctant subject is surrounded by a group, all of whom are laying hands upon him or her and ardently praying for healing or baptism in the Spirit.

A general conclusion can now be drawn from our discussion of the repertoire of performative acts in the Charismatic healing system. First, they can bear not only an illocutionary but a predicative force. In partic­ular, acts of revelation, of discernment and calling out spirits, and of forgiveness specifically thematize autobiographical events, emotions, thoughts, and behaviors. This will become increasingly evident in suc­ceeding chapters. Second, as we have seen in our discussion of anointing and laying on of hands, these acts must be understood multidimension-ally in terms of their place in ritual practice, their implicit cultural mean­ing, and their explicit experiential content. It will not do, as some have

56 RITUAL HEALING

proposed, to separate elements of religious experience from the essential process of therapeutic persuasion and gloss them as "therapeutic prel­udes," the purpose of which is primarily to establish a therapeutic rela­tionship based on paradox (Dow 1986). It is certainly as a therapeutic prelude that Dow would classify the Charismatic anointing. This both overestimates the importance of the healer-patient relationship, espe­cially in the relatively impersonal public healing services (cf. Finkler 1985), and underestimates the transformative importance of ritual per­formance. In terms of performance, the anointing not only confirms the healer's conviction of efficacy, but enhances phcnomcnological en­gagement in the process, consciousness of the sacred, disinhibition of cognitive barriers to apparently spontaneous inspiration, and insofar as the assembly participates in the protoritual state, a rhetorical hold on the audience. These are neither preludes nor side effects, but elements of specificity essential to cultural performance as therapeutic process.

3 Therapeutic Process and Experience

In the last chapter we became familiar with Charismatic healers and patients and with the manner in which Charismatic healing coheres as a system of ritual performance. In examining the self processes of healers performing two kinds of ritual act, we also got a preliminary glimpse at the kind of experiential specificity we are trying to identify. Having described the Charismatic healing system, we must now proceed to an understanding of how it works. In order to get started properly, we must first distinguish therapeutic process from therapeutic proce­dure and outcome. In brief, procedure is the organized application of techniques with a particular goal in mind, whereas outcome refers to the disposition of participants at a designated endpoint of treatment. Process is more complex and has been understood by anthropologists in a variety of ways: as the unfolding or performance of a specific treat­ment event or ritual; as experiential or intrapsychic transformation; as the progression or course of an illness episode defined by a sequence of treatment decisions; and as a form of social, ideological, or political control.1 It is the dimension of experiential transformation that is closest to our interest in self processes. Only by closely tracing this transforma­tion can we approach the issue of efficacy that lies at the center of debate about religious healing practices. In this chapter we will present two accounts of specificity in therapeutic process, concentrating on the Charismatic genre of ritual healing for physical illness. We conclude by formulating four elements of therapeutic process that may be useful in future comparative studies.

57

58 THERAPEUTIC PROCESS AND EXPERIENCE

Sacred Self, Postural Model, and Leg-lengthening

In a conversation with a prayer-group leader, I once asked if, in addition to his leadership responsibilities, he ever prayed with others for healing. He responded that he did so only occasionally and only "for easy things like leg-lengthening." Leg-lengthening is indeed one of the most common forms of physical healing for Pcntccostals and Charismatic*, and is understood as the spontaneous growth of a leg that is shorter than a person's other leg. My strategy in this section is to juxtapose three texts on leg-lengthening. The first is extracted from the description by a research assistant, a sociologist who had minimal familiarity with the Charismatic Renewal, of a healing service conducted by a Charismatic priest. The second is from an interview with a woman whose husband experienced a leg-lengthening in a similar service. The final text is from an interview I conducted with the healing priest himself.

First, here is the description of a portion of the healing service, writ­ten in the genre of ethnographic prose:

Father P asked that five people who had had pain or trouble walking come forth for healing. A chair was placed in front of the altar [the service is in a church}. At this time, he beckoned me [the research assistant] to join him and his healing team, as four women came up to the altar [for prayer]. The healing team consisted of two men, one woman, Fr. P, and myself.

Fr. P asked the congregation to pray for each person and to lift their arms in prayer toward the supplicant as the team performed its task. Each supplicant went through the experience separate from the others. The supplicant sat in the chair facing the congregation. Fr. P stood facing the supplicant. The woman stood to his left with one hand on his left arm and the other on the supplicant's right shoulder. The two men squatted behind the supplicant with their hands on her shoulders and upper back. I stood to the right of Fr. P with both hands on the supplicant's left shoulder.

The congregation held out their arms toward the supplicant and prayed in tongues out loud. Fr. P asked one of the male team members if he could pray in English as Fr. P performed his task. The male healer prayed out loud in English. Fr. P asked the supplicant in a very low voice several rapid questions about troubles in primary relationships, particularly about husbands and fathers, kneeling before the person with his hands placed firmly on her, usually on the upper legs. Once the problem relationship was identified, he firmly grasped the supplicant's feet (shoes still on) and made a firm, determined tugging motion on the supplicant's outstretched legs. Keeping his eyes closed, he prayed in a

THERAPEUTIC PROCESS AND EXPERIENCE 59

deep, commanding voice ordering any evil from the supplicant and asking God's grace in healing that person. Meanwhile, the woman and other male healer prayed in tongues out loud. During prayer for one of the four supplicants, Fr. P asked the woman team member for a discernment, which she rapidly gave, and he agreed with her assessment.

After each healing, Fr. P asked the supplicant to walk as fast as she could down the church aisle. In two of the cases, he walked with the supplicant. In all four cases, the supplicant returned to the altar to attest to having been healed, at least partially, though Fr. P was seeking total healing. In cases where a full healing hadn't taken place, he said that that would be the request made when the supplicant's turn came to be anointed along with everyone else, during the last part of the service.

By way of comment, the session with each supplicant was rapid and some­what confused given Fr. P's interaction with the supplicanc and the congrega­tion's vociferous participation in the healing. Fr. P spoke to each person in a deep, unswaying, yet gentle tone—a voice filled with authority. He asked ques­tions rapidly and fired another question, often a clarifying question, as soon as the supplicant responded. He looked intensely into the eyes of the supplicant while speaking to her, hardly blinking. The words in his prayers flowed rapidly, with a staccato style, and accompanied by commanding gestures (the leg tug­ging). Regardless of where he laid his hands, his grasp was very firm. There was a sense of his absolute presence with the supplicant and his unquestionable command of the situation. The congregation's vocal prayer in tongues, with hands outstretched toward the supplicant, undoubtedly added a powerful di­mension to the drama of the situation. The combination of these factors evoked a sense of total encompassing, a sense that there was no exit from the moment. The moment was filled with drama.

Our familiarity with the structure of event, genre, and act in healing performance allows us to make immediate sense of this description. The segment can be placed within a sequence of periods of worship, instruction, healing, and postservice socializing (ritual event), within which we can identify the use of prayer, song, and "witnessing" (genres of ritual language), problem-focused healing of selected individuals and general healing of others (genres of ritual healing), laying on hands and anointing participants with oil (performative acts). The participating cultural specialists included the principal healer and his team, while the assembly at various points had roles as performers (praying for others or giving testimony to their own healing), audience, and patients.

Let us make this analysis more precise. We note that all three principal healing genres are in evidence within the reported episode: each patient is worked on for physical healing of difficulties with walking that implic­itly require leg-lengthening, for inner healing of biographical trauma and relationship difficulties identified in the healer's rapid questioning,

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and for deliverance as the healer commands evil to depart from each supplicant. From the repertoire of performative acts we recognize first the "anointing" as the principal healer intensely, dramatically, and un-blinkingly engages each supplicant. It is worthy of mention that while psychologists typically regard absence of the blinking reflex as a sign of trance, the healer is also described as being commandingly in control of the performance. The rapidity of questions suggests that he is inspired with "words of knowledge" about each supplicant that he then confirms by questioning. His female assistant participates in the diagnostic/revela­tory process by exercising the gift of "discernment." Other performative acts that figure prominently in this segment arc the "prayer of com­mand" against evil spirits, prayer in tongues, and laying on of hands.

The ethnographer perceives the production, through performance, of a sense of "total encompassing." Yet patients who exercise their heal­ing by walking up and down the aisle do not necessarily claim to be totally healed. The totalizing experience of healing thus does not corre­spond to a total healing, but to a kind of incremental efficacy. This correspondence is enhanced when the healer makes it a point to mention the upcoming anointing portion of the service as an opportunity to augment the effect of leg-lengthening. We will make more of this incre­mental efficacy below, but for now let us pass to our second text.

This text is a narration from a fifty-five-year-old Charismatic house­wife about a healing experienced by her husband in a similar healing service. He had suffered an industrial accident and had undergone three surgical operations for his damaged back and shoulder. Following a spinal fusion, calcium deposits began to form on his vertebrae, pinching the sciatic nerve to his left: leg and causing pain so bad that he "couldn't drive more than four miles without getting out and resting on the hood of the car." Sometimes, she said, he even cried from the pain. According to their doctor, the only remaining procedure was to cut the nerve. She told her husband she would take him to a healing service, and he responded positively—although not a Catholic, he "believed in mira­cles" and had accompanied his wife to Catholic shrines where he had gotten a "feeling." They attended services even' month for a year, but he gradually became discouraged and began to remain in the pew as his wife and daughter approached the altar for prayer. Finally he again decided to go forward with them. In contrast to the ethnographic prose of our last text, his wife's narration of what transpired is in the speech genre of Charismatic "witnessing":

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So he was prayed on and he "rested in the Spirit," like they say, and then he got up and he went to the seat. But he said that when they prayed on him, it was like a heat that was coming from above that went right through his body, that he had never felt anything like that before. He never felt it after. And he was there awhile and he came to the seat, and there's a woman that came, and she said, "Would you come in front with me?" So he said, "Yeah, okay." So he went in front, and she sat him on a chair, and I saw him. She said, "Did you know you had a leg shorter than the other one?" And he said yeah, because he had gone to a doctor for compensation, and his leg was almost an inch to a quarter of an inch shorter. The doctor had said that his leg was getting atrophied—I didn't know what atrophied means, so I asked his doctor here, and he said the leg was shrinking because of the lack of using and whatever. So she put both heels in her hand and they were stretched, and she was praying, and he saw his leg stretch right in front of his own eyes to the same length as the other one. He came home and he said "I can't believe it, but it has to be so," and he would look at his legs, and he would put his feet on the chair in front of him and look. But then when he would get up and walk, I had to shorten his pants one shorter than the other and it was showing, the length. That day also he had pain like you wouldn't believe, and the next day, and then it subsided, subsided, and it went away. And now that man does everything.

Characteristic of witnessing as a genre of ritual language, the narrative concerns a chronic problem upon which the resources of professional medicine appear to have been exhausted as well as a history of disap­pointment with ritual healing such that the patient's "expectant faith" also appears to have been virtually exhausted. When he relents and approaches the altar for prayer, the supplicant experiences the empow­erment of resting in the Spirit and an "anointing" of heat flowing through his body, and later undergoes the leg-lengthening technique. (Note that this reverses the sequence described in Fr. R's service, where supplicants approached the altar subsequent to the leg-lengthening.) The critical moment is when, incredulously, "he saw his leg stretch right in front of his own eyes." The narrator emphasizes the persistence of the change in recounting that she had to alter her husband's pants. His pain, however, did not vanish immediately, but remained intense for several days, only gradually subsiding and removing his disability.

We can now triangulate the ethnographic description of ritual perfor­mance and the ritual narrative of healing with a native exegesis, to borrow Victor Turner's phrase, of leg-lengthening practice drawn from an interview I conducted with the healer Fr. R. The excerpt includes an impromptu demonstration of leg-lengthening and related techniques on a woman who was present during the interview as well as a demon­stration performed on me:

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Fr. R: Usually what I do is pick up [receive a word of knowledge about] who they need to forgive and whisper it in the person's ear. Now, M will be there tonight and she'll do the whispering in the person's ear. Because she'll pick up. Because I pray on the legs in a special way, and it's hard for me to lean up to get the person's ear, because there are other people there [sur­rounding the person]. I generally like to keep it as quiet as possible and tell them who they need to forgive.

TC: You said that you have a special way of praying over people's legs?

Fr. R: Yeah, I'm in [I perform] leg adjustment. The Protestants call it the growing of legs. Basically, it's a chiropractic adjustment done through prayer. But much, much more powerful than chiropractic. We have a lot of people chiropractic can't do anything with, and we use this method, and [he snaps his fingers to indicate spontaneous healing, then calls to a woman in the next room]. You're willing to donate yourself to science?

Woman: Yeah, you bet my body!

Fr. R: Just sit up nice and straight. Hips back to the chair. No, the other way. Push your hips right back. So I can get a measure­ment on your legs. The nose is the center of the body, we draw an imaginary line. We get under the shoes, pushing up against the feet to get a good reading. Now, look at the devia­tion right in here, on the bottom of her heels. Can you see the bottom of this heel, what is that, almost three-quarters of an inch deviation. Which means her pelvic frame is seated, it's not flat, it's on an angle, and it's drawn up that leg. So what I'm going to do is command the pelvic frame, to [he snaps his fingers] to go back into normal position. And as that comes down, those heels will equal, will equalize right up. Okay. So, now just like this, Jesus, command that pelvic frame to go into normal position. In Jesus' name, immediately, line up the muscles on the vertebrae. Pelvic frame [snaps] jumps right back into position. Now, that's from the waist down. Basically, again, this is the chiropractic adjustment, that's what a chiro­practor does, measures your heels and we do it through prayer.

TC to woman: Did you feel anything happen during the prayer? Woman: Sort of relaxing.

Fr. R: Now we're going to do the upper frame. The nose is the center of the body, arms full length like that. Okay, now we bring them together and get a measurement. See, you can see, there's a bit of a deviation there. So let's just go ahead. We're pretty equal there. But I'll just command that, this gets the first cervi­cal, which is a key, because all the nerves coming from the brain come through the first cervical area, and if that's out of whack, it impinges on the nerves. That's why chiropractors

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claim they can do so much, because they straighten the cervical, and it takes the pressure off the nerves and sends the energy' through the whole body. In Jesus' name, we just command that first cervical, muscles, vertebrae go back into normal posi­tion. Doesn't seem to be too much there. But I catch it. Stand up, and I'll do it, we call this the head adjustment. Fingers behind the neck, right on the nerves, going up and down the spine.

TC: The two middle fingers together.

Fr. R: Yeah, in other words, the closer your hands are to the affected area, the more energy, spiritual energy you get. Thumbs in front of the ears, palms right on the jaws, which is a nerve area too. Okay, kid, I'm going to command the first cervical to go back in normal position. Head back. In Jesus' name, command that cervical to go back into normal position. Chin to left, chin to the right, rotate three times, in Jesus' name, command that cervical muscles vertebrae, line up. In Jesus' name. How do you feel right now?

Woman: Relaxed.

Fr. R: More relaxed than you did before?

Woman: Uh huh.

Fr. R: A lot more or just a little?

Woman: Well, medium.

Fr. R: Medium more. Yeah, as the frame straightens, it takes the pressure off the muscles. Oh, okay, there's one I didn't do called a hip, the hip adjustment. Just, this is rather interesting. Just put your toes together, and the side of hips here, put our hands, and command the pelvic frame. In Jesus' name, we command that pelvic frame to line up. Now, in Jesus' name . . . do you feel yourself moving out? Can you feel yourself rotat­ing? Just let it happen. It's okay, it's not you and it's not me, it's just happening. Don't be afraid. In Jesus' name, we com­mand you to [his voice drops to a whisper]. Go ahead, just let yourself rotate. I'm behind you. Sometimes, if s like a Ha­waiian hula when you see it. Don't . . . just let it happen, let it happen. She didn't seem to need too much. [Pause.] How does that feel?

Woman: Good. Good.

Fr. R: Have you had any pains in your back at all?

Woman: Lower back.

Fr. R: You've had, your lower back was healed, all that was out. How's it feel right now? Test it, see how it feels.

Woman: It seems to be a lot of improvement. But my equilibrium does go off on me sometimes. And . . .

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Fr. R: But this head adjustment is good for that. It gets you a lot better.

TC to woman: What kind of movement did you feel in your hips there? Woman: Sort of a . . . you know . . . secure, relaxing, kind of feeling.

TC: Would you say a tugging, did you feel any kind of tugging? Fr. R: Why don't you sit down, Tom, and I'll do it on you and you'll

be able to experience it. Okay, . . . both feet. Okay, all right. All right. YouVc got some deviation right in there. You can't see that, can you?

TC: Left one's a little big longer. Fr. R: The left one is longer, I'd say oh, half inch. Okay, in Jesus'

name I command you. . . . In Jesus' name. Now, the left is shorter. In Jesus, I command the pelvic frame to rotate into normal position. There you are. You're equal. There. Arms full length. Arms full length. [He whispers] You're not too bad. I command the frame in Jesus' name to go into normal position. In Jesus' name . . . [he whispers prayers] Let me do that head adjustment. Just stand up. In Jesus' name I command that cervical to go back into normal position. In the name of Jesus, in the name of Jesus, rotate three times, in the name of Jesus, name of. . . the other way, three times, in Jesus' name. Let me put your toes together and do that head adjustment. Although you seem to be not too bad. In Jesus' name we command that pelvic frame to line up. In Jesus' name . . . in Jesus' name. Can you feel the healing?

TC: Sort of a little bit side to side. RD: Just let it move, it's rotating back into position. In Jesus' name,

in Jesus' name.

In opening a discussion of this text we must note the forthright and empirical attitude expressed by Fr. R toward his practice, and his casual understanding of it as a spiritualized chiropractic. There is a distinct "ethnophysiology" in his conception of bodily alignment and skeletal pressure on muscles and nerves. This ethnophysiology is fully integrated with both a notion of spiritual energy (i.e., when pressure is taken off the nerves energy is free to flow through the body), and a notion of spiritual power by means of which the divinity grants control over bio­logical nature (i.e., the skeletal adjustment is commanded in the name of Jesus).

It is essential that we consider this text in relation to the other two, and not privilege Fr. R's account over the others as a more accurate statement of what is "really3' going on. The excerpt opens with a men­tion of how he spiritually "picks up" information about whom suppli-

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cants "need to forgive." Yet in comparison to the ethnographic account, the verbal and affective content of the healing interaction is downplayed in favor of the physical and neurological technique. The man in our second account quite likely attended only to the immediate effect of lengthening of his leg and the gradual decline in pain, whereas the healer attends to the postural adjustment of pelvis and spine. He expects an immediate and observable change in his demonstration, but neither subject is able to report anything definitive. Both in his focus on physical technique and his eagerness for empirical results, he expresses awareness that he is engaged with the anthropologist in a scientific pursuit.

Taken together, there are several clues in this account that lead us to the analysis of leg-lengthening as a self process. One is the explicit reference in the second account of the man's kg spontaneously stretching (not growing). The other is an apparent contradiction between the first and third accounts. Whereas the research assistant described a firm tugging on supplicants' legs, in my own experience there was no tug at all—Fr. R simply held feet or arms together in his hand and prayed. What he anticipated was spontaneous rotation/alignment/balance of skel-eton/nerves/musclc tension. To understand these clues, we introduce the concept of the postural model, originated by the psychologist Head and elaborated by Schilder (1950). The postural model refers to the gestalt sense of coherence and orientation of the body to its own parts and movements. It is thus related to our earlier discussion of the body as orientational locus of the sensorium and as our setting in relation to the world. The postural model is a function of self precisely as a preob-jective capacity for orientation in the world, and we must show how leg-lengthening is a cultural objectification in which that capacity is altered, and in which bodily self-awareness is framed as awareness of divine empowerment.

Consider the following experiment described by Schilder that dem­onstrates the spontaneous coordination of the postural model based on a phenomenon he describes as persistence of tone:

We order a subject to stretch his hands forward, so that one arm is parallel to the other. One arm is now raised in an angle of about 45 degrees above the horizontal. (One may also bring the arm 45 degrees below the horizontal plane.) Bring the arm of the subject passively to the inclined position or let the subject take this position in an active way. Either support the resting arm (R. arm) and the raised (or lowered) mobile arm (M. arm) or let the subject keep the position actively. The subject may have his eyes open or closed. After 25 sec­onds, the subject is ordered to close his eyes (if they were open) and to bring

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his M. arm into the same position as the R. arm. When the M. arm is raised, the subject does not bring his arm into the same plane as the R. arm, but the M. arm remains several centimeters higher than the R. arm. When the M. arm is lowered, the M. arm is not brought back to the horizontal line, but remains several centimeters lower than the R. arm. The subject does not know that he has made a mistake and is of the opinion that both arms arc at the same height. After a few seconds, the M. arm returns into the same position as the R. arm. The subjeas generally do not know that they have changed the position. A registration with the kymograph shows that the disappearance of the difference does not decrease steadily, but by jerks which bring the arm back into the position of the R. arm.

The theoretical meaning of this phenomenon is that the normal position of the M. arm, after the tone has influenced it, is the position into which the tone-pull would bring the arm; or the tone of the postural persistence influences the body-image in the sense that it is pulled into the direction of tone. The limb, therefore, is felt in a position which is opposite to the direction of the muscular pull. Or, in a more general formulation, the postural model of the body is dependent on the pull of the tone. This formulation has considerable general importance. The phenomenon of postural persistence is a phenomenon all over the body. It is also present for even' single posture of the body. We are dealing therefore with a phenomenon of general significance. (1950:75, 77)

I would suggest that the extension of the limbs in the religious practice and the elevation of limbs in the experiment arc both based on this persistence of tone, which is a phenomenon "all over the bod/' and "for every single posture."2 This conclusion is reinforced by the apparent existence of both psychological and physiological (sympathetic and spinal) connections between symmetrical parts of the body (ibid.: 19, 26, 291). In addition to persistence of tone, the influence of a second factor can be illustrated with respect to the man described in our second text. This factor is the habitual posture. Schilder refers to the persistence of tone as a motor factor, whereas the habitual posture is sensory. Specif­ically, it is the "persistence of a sensory impression" of one's own body, or a kind of "sensory aftereffect" (ibid. :81-83). In our case the influence of the habitual posture on the injured man's postural model could ac­count for the persistence of his pain for days following the readjustment of that model to a more normal tone.

That leg-lengthening, an operation performed on the postural model, is a common form of Charismatic and Pentecostal healing is very much in line with an understanding of healing as a self process. Insofar as the body is the existential ground of self, it is critical that the postural model is first a "product of the gestalt creative powers of our psyche" (ibid.: 21), but second that it is "in perpetual inner self-construction and self-

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destruction" (ibid.: 15). Thus we see ritual efficacy as a kind of creativity and ritual transformation as an essentially indeterminate self process. The primary cultural objectifkation inheres in making the spontaneity of this process thematic as divine power. The new mode of orientation in the world—the appropriation of both spontaneity and of its re­sults—is thus accurately described as a sacred self.

Somatic Modes of Attention

I will offer another example that is complementary to the preobjective transformation of postural model. Here it is a question of modulating what I will call an explicit somatic modi of attention (Csordas 1993). Alfred Schutz, the premier methodologist of phenomenological social science, understood attention as the "full alertness and the sharp­ness of apperception connected with consciously turning toward an object, combined with further considerations and anticipations of its characteristics and uses" (1970:316). Therapeutic process in Charis­matic physical healing can be an alteration of the mode of attention—a capacity for orientation in the world and hence an aspect of self—to­ward one's own body in a way that is vigilant, but that sharply contrasts with the vigilance of hypochondria. The following two cases, drawn from our follow-up of public healing-service participants, show the role of a somatic mode of attention in the phenomenological definition of what it means to be "partially healed" of a physical problem.

The first is a fifty-six-year-old married man, a Ph.D. biologist and active Charismatic, partially healed of periodic backache approximately three years prior to the interview. The backaches were not seriously debilitating, only "painful and a nuisance." They required no more care than his wife shining a heat lamp on him. They would typically occur after yardwork or house repairs, especially if he would twist his torso—he remarked that his occupation is quite sedentary. His wife reported that he could still "do things," but that his movements would be very constrained and cautious. She never had to drive him anywhere, he always came to the tabic for meals, and he was never bedridden, although he would sometimes lay down for a couple of hours. He had never consulted a doctor about the backaches. This was not, he said, because of reliance on faith healing, but because he is "a kind of person

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that doesn't go to a doctor that much," and it did not seem to him like the kind of problem a doctor could take care of:

It was primarily the upper back and would get debilitating enough that it would take me a week and sometimes two weeks to get over it, and I would have difficulty sleeping from rolling over, this kind of thing. And it was even painful in a chair. It was extremely difficult to drive with it. They were becoming fairly frequent [over the course of ten years], I was probably at the point where I was getting a half-a-dozen a year.

The man felt that the healing occurred in one session and not over the course of several sessions, but he reported no sensations in his back. He recalled only a "purely spiritual" experience at the healing session, including resting in the Spirit. He did not realize he was healed of backaches till he had passed a month and a half without getting one, when it "became pretty clear" that he had in fact been healed:

I ceased to get backaches with very rare exceptions, and even those I got have been unlike the others. Every once in a while I would feel a backache just barely starting, and I would thank God for having cured it, and usually it goes away. I'll just feel the start of a tightness of the muscles, of a spasm, and all Til do is say to God, 'Thank you for curing my backaches." And then it will go away, and may do the same thing once or twice more during the day and so I say the same thing and it never develops into anything, with very few excep­tions. . . . On two occasions I could feel a burning nerve sensation in my back, I thought it was a nerve that was inflamed. I felt burning. That happened a couple of times, but I never felt any stiffness or soreness at all. I could just feel the inflamed nerve [not painful]. I was just keenly aware of it. And it dicing last long, and I felt—Fm not a medical doctor, but I felt I probably would have had a heck of a backache if I had not gone to the healing service. It was almost as if I could feel the origin of the problem but without the symptoms or the spasms.

Although he is not always successful in preventing backaches, those that do occur are qualitatively different than prior to his healing and require no heating pad or heat lamp treatment. Of two such incidents, he de­scribed one as follows:

Amazingly enough I could even shovel snow with it. Even though it was quite sore, as soon as I would do anything it didn't impede me at all. It was not as sore as prior to the healing, but it was significantly sore.

When he felt the burning that indicated potential relapse, and prayed his thanks for healing, the sensations would subside "very quick, about half hour or less." For the two instances that were actual sore backs,

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contrary to their typical duration of one to two weeks, the problem only lasted one to two days. Because he had not had any problem in the past year he reported seldom thinking about it at all: "So I doubt very much that it's a psychologically induced thing. Because I've got too many other problems right now to be catering to something like this."

In this last statement the man is anticipating the judgment that his problem is "psychosomatic," a judgment that would help us just as little as concluding that his healing was effected by "suggestion." Instead, consideration of his reflections allows us to observe a somatic mode of attention in which the man recognizes incipient backache as a tightness, spasm, or burning sensation. It is clear that he remains prone to the problem, but now has a preventive consciousness attuned to signs of onset and even, in his words, to "the origin of the problem" in a particu­lar inflamed nerve. His mode of attention includes active response with a prayer that is also an affirmation of his healing. This is not an unusual technique among Charismatics, and what is ostensibly a reminder to the deity that he has granted a healing is pragmatically a self-reminder to monitor one's physical state. In this case, although the patient is unaware of moving and walking diffcrendy or adopting different typical positions, what is in question is doubdess the state of his postural model.

Our second case is that of a fifty-six-ycar-old married woman, a teacher and active Charismatic partially healed of a chronic susceptibility to flu two years prior to the interview. She reported a lifelong problem in which a third of her winter months were spent in sore-throat, cold and flu misery, causing her to miss a lot of school days as a youth and considerable work time as an adult. She decided to attend a healing service following a flu during which nasal irritation resulted in a nose­bleed that could not be stopped, and led her to consult a physician for cauterization. During the service she rested in the Spirit, but did not perceive any immediate result:

I just felt very peaceful, and nothing spectacular happened at all. I felt that things were well between me and the Lord, there was nothing dramatic, nothing special. I didn't really know [I was healed] until I started passing through the times—usually November is flu month, the worst. I really had to pass through these times of year before I would get much clue. Otherwise I felt absolutely nothing special, and I no idea of being healed, I just kind of felt, "Well, I hope I am." Ever)' winter since, perhaps six to eight times I would feel the onset of a cold or flu. And then maybe for a day or two I would take it very, very easily, and take some antihistamine just so I could get through. But then I would take it very easily so as not to run my own self down. Then maybe after two days

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or so these symptoms would disappear and they never did get very bad. On one occasion I felt that I was being more threatened with it, and I did decide to take the week off and take it very, very easy. So I took it easy but I didn't have the total debilitating body weakness that I had previous times. I was able to at least creep around.

Quite like the man in the previous example, this woman experiences periodic near onsets of her problem, and even an instance that she defined as enough of a threat to take a week off from work. She under­stood this one as less debilitating than other episodes, though she was still reduced to "creeping around." Her interpretation of these post-healing episodes is that "the Lord is reminding her he did something." Whereas this may sound like a divinity insisting on gratitude, it is remi­niscent of the technique of thanking God cited by the man in our preced­ing example. The significant observation is not that the woman has reinterpreted the persistence of her symptoms, but that she has adopted a preventive consciousness of those symptoms, a self-reminder not only to behave "as i f she were healed, but a somatic mode of attention constructed to preempt those symptoms. She states that although the healing can be traced to a specific event, she experienced a "very gradual recognition" that it had taken place.

I suggest we understand this as a therapeutic process that may be initiated in a healing service, but transcends the event and continues as an everyday self process. The recognition of healing is a modulation of orientation in the world, so that one monitors one's symptoms and responds to them by modifying one's activities. This reorientation not only preserves but actually constitutes the healing. Interestingly, this woman had wondered whether her conviction of being healed made her guilty of "indulging in superstition." Neither theology nor motivation is primary to our account, however, for the critical factor is a specific self process, the modulation of somatic attention.

Meaning and Self Process

Students of religious healing have for some time sug­gested that its most common effect is not to remove a disease and its symptoms, but to transform the meaning of the illness (Bourguignon 1976a). This transformative power is such that it has been argued that ritual healing both precludes its own failure (Klcinman and Sung 1979),

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and is positively creative (Kleinman 1980, Comaroff 1983). Yet an understanding of meaning only in the semiotic sense would likely lead us right back to construing therapeutic efficacy as the global result of a nonspecific mechanism. It was only by grounding our accounts in the phenomenological notions of postural model and somatic mode of attention, that is, on concepts originating with the preobjective body in the world, that we were able to identify- the specific efficacy of the practice and understand it as a subtle modulation of the self. It follows that anthropological description of therapeutic efficacy as "transforma­tion of meaning" can bear greater methodological productivity when the notion of "meaning*' is granted greater existential weight (Merleau-Ponty 1962:146); greater, that is, than when transformation of mean­ing is understood only in semiotic instead of phenomenological terms, or only as the substitution of representations instead of as a modulation of being in the world, or again only as a different standard of judgment instead of a different sensibility about oneself as a culturally defined person.

We will press the relation between phenomenology and semiotics in the next chapter. For now we can apply our discussion of the persistence of tone, habitual posture, and the somatic modes of attention to a gen­eral account of therapeutic process in Charismatic healing. First, ritual healing appears to operate on a margin of disability that is present in many conditions. It is well known, for example, that some people who become "legally blind" are able to engage in a wide range of activities, whereas others retreat to a posture of near total disability and inactivity. Likewise, persons with chronic pain in a limb may be physically able to move that limb, but refrain from doing so for lack of sufficient moti­vation to make the risk of pain worthwhile. Disability is thus constituted as a habitual mode of engaging the world.3 The process of healing is an existential process of exploring the margin of disability, motivated by the conviction of divine power and the committed participant's desire to demonstrate it in himself as well as by the support of the assembly and its acclamation for a supplicant's testimony of healing. To be con­vinced of this interpretation one need only consider the hesitant, falter­ing steps of the supplicant who at the healer's request rises from her wheelchair and shuffles slowly up and down a church aisle, or again the slowly unclenching fist of the sufferer from chronic arthritis whose hand is curled by affliction into a permanent fist. Healing allows this by challenging the sensory commitment to a habitual posture, by removing

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inhibitions on the motor tendency toward normal postural tone, and by modulating the somatic mode of attention.

Second, the methodological focus on specificity in therapeutic pro­cess shows that ritual healing is probably best characterized by an incre­mental efficacy. We exclude the occasional claim that miracles of sponta­neous and total healing occur. Far more common, and with greater significance for the self processes with which we are concerned, are the "partial" and "everyday" healings that sustain the ritual system. In such instances a person's exploration of the margin of disability is not com­pleted, but only initiated, by the event of ritual healing. As we have already observed (cf. also Csordas 1988), ritual process transcends the ritual event, and each "reminder" in the incipient onset of an illness episode continues the performance of healing. It is reasonable to assume that the degree to which a supplicant is cxistcntially engaged in the process is critical to this incremental efficacy. Ncu (1977) has pointed out the importance of the degree to which different forms of therapy engage participants' thought processes, but one must understand the importance of engagement to include emotional and other self processes as well. Because of the fundamental indeterminacy of the self, there is no guarantee that the creative products of ritual performance will be permanently integrated into a person's life. To the extent that the incre­mental efficacy of an open-ended process is common across forms of healing in different cultural traditions, we may understand why some require the totalistic personal transformation and involvement in a reli­gious community described by Crapanzano (1973) as a "symbiotic" cure.

Perhaps, in fact, anthropological analyses should not be aimed at identifying definitive therapeutic outcomes, but at specifying the incre­mental efficacy of therapeutic process. Such a goal requires an interpre­tive approach sensitive to the kind of subde modulations of meaning and experience we have begun to identify in the examples we have examined. I would suggest that such accounts include at least the follow­ing four components. First is the disposition of supplicants, both in the psychological sense of their prevailing mood or tendency for engage­ment in ritual performance, and in the social sense of how they are disposed vis-a-vis the interactive networks and symbolic resources of the religious community. Second is the experience of the sacred, taking into account not onh' the religious formulation of the human condition in relation to the divine and the repertoire of ritual elements that consti­tute legitimate manifestations of divine power, but also variations in

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individual capacities for experience of the sacred that may influence the course of therapeutic process. Third is the elaboration of alternatives or possibilities that exist within the "assumptive world" (J. Frank 1973) of the afflicted. Healing systems may formulate these alternatives in terms of a variety of metaphors (new pathways, becoming unstuck, overcoming obstacles, getting out of trouble, expelling demons, healing emotional wounds), and may use ritual or pragmatic means that encour­age either activity or passivity, but the possibilities must be perceived as real and realistic. Finally, what counts as change as well as the degree to which that change is regarded as significant by participants cannot be taken for granted in comparative studies of therapeutic process. The actualization of change is all the more problematic where efficacy is incre­mental and there is no definitive outcome. We offer these four elements of therapeutic process as a general framework for comparative studies and hope to demonstrate their usefulness as they guide our search for specificity in subsequent chapters.4