5. The Performance of Healing

Abstract

The performance of healing is a collection of essays by anthropologists covering a wide range of medical, holistic, and religious aspects of healing and death. The contributors broaden the field of medical anthropology by demonstrating that healing involves the senses in treatments whose efficacy depends in part on dramatic performance. Music, movement, and dialogue; comedy and poetry; audience, players, and props - all constitute the performance of healing. If healing is to be effective, the patient's body and mind must be engaged through the sensory impact of dramatic media. Curing is not just about "making people well" - it also forms a crucial means of reproducing relations of power. A performance directed toward a particular individual might also heal a traumatized social group, expanding the definition of "cure" from its narrow sense of restoring a victim to health to the larger goal of restoring social relations. Medical systems need to be understood from within, as experienced by healers, patients, and others whose minds and hearts have become involved in this undertaking. These essays on the performance of healing, in societies ranging from the rainforest horticulturalists to dwellers in the American megalopolis, will touch readers' senses as well as their intellects.

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