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were like mental patients was superseded by that of how they were like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 Leighton'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

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 cosmological 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 Crapanzano'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

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 sandpainting, 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 healingthat 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

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

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
weightthat 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
notby 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 protophenomenological theory of the self based on "orientation" with respect

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 phenomenological 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 selfawareness 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 Gurwitsch, 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

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 objectification, 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 xhepreobjective 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, MerleauPonty 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

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 "prereflcctive." 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 objectification 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 precultural, but a preabstract. The concept offers to cultural analysis the openended human process of taking up and inhabiting the cultural world

INTRODUCTION

in which our existence transcends but remains grounded in de facto

situations.
In effect, Merleau-Pontes existential analysis collapses the subjectobject 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 unsystematically 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 senseswhich never escape the structuring

10

INTRODUCTION

action of social determinismsbut 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, McrleauPonty 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 itselfbecause 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 selfrcferentiality 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 inevitablethere can be no other consequence
of reflexivity and effort. Yet, and this is its final advantage, insofar as
rcflexivity and effort arerespectivelygrounded 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-objcctification 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 theoreticalthe result of objectificationour 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 faithhealing. 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 welleducated, 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 predominandy 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, personalistic 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 Pentecostalism, 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 middleclass 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 selfcontrol 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 thematize 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 nurturance 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 linguisticality, 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, oneon-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. Hallowell (1960) showed that among the Ojibwa persons are many phenomenologically real beings that inhabit the cultural world, and with which
human beings presumably may come into interaction. Among Charismatics, 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 psychocultural 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 significanceor of embodied existencewithin 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 thenDominican 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 selfmortification 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 eightyseven 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.

psychology
ministry (pastoral counseling psychology)
(3 priests and 1 ex-priest)
psychiatry
M.D.
internal medicine
counseling psychology
Masters
social work
Nursing degrees
Other training (spiritual direction, clinical pastoral education,
pastoral counseling)
Total
Ph.D.

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 moreexperienced 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.
Years of Education
Total
Occupation
Category
Professional
Skilled
Semi-skilled
Housewife
Student, Retired,
Unemployed
Total

6-8
N
%

9-12
N
%

13-16
N
%

17+
N
%

N
%

4
.79
4
.79
6
1.18
6
1.18
7
1.38
27
5.31

43
8.46
63
12.40
42
8.27
54
10.63
50
9.84
252
49.61

44
8.66
43
8.46
16
3.15
38
7.48
35
6.89
176
34.65

24
4.72
7
1.38
7
1.38
12
2.36
3
.59
53
10.43

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, Bourguignon 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 o f 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 onethey 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 nonCharismatics 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 devotionalism 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 ofAlternate 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

Supplicants Reporting
Emotional/Relationship
Problems

79%
15%
17%
24%
5%
2%
2%
16%

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 illocution and predication in ritual healing constitute an explicit repertoire
of empowerment.

36

RITUAL HEALING

Events of Ritual Healing

Healing services were introduced to Catholic Charismatics 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 aspergillum 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 practicea kind of team
habitushas 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 "brokenness" 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.

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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 allbenevolent 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 undergirded 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 Charismatics.
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

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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
Empowerment
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

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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 sensationtrembling, lightness, heaviness, heatthat 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 psychocultural 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

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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 anointingin 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

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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 offlowwith 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 meand 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-

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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

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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 energyfieldof 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

TC:
H:
TC:
H:

TC:
H:
TC:
H:

TC:
H:

TC:
H:

TC:
H:

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.
And the energy comes up, emerges from within their body?
Emerges from within the person. Wouldn't want to just limit it to the
body.
Okay. And then the energy that's coming from Jesus through your
hands . . .
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.
So it brings it up in the sense of bringing to consciousness and bringing
it into [what] you can talk about.
Exactly.
I see. Whereas, the therapeutic touch is your hands moving the energy
that's within them . . .
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.
Well, therapeutic touch is not directly derived from the Christian tradition,
is it?
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.
How about massage then? A third way of touching.
Well, with massage, what's really important is the intention. So, for instance, 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.
When you use massage this way, is it for the same purpose of bringing
things up so that they can be discussed?
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

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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 multidimensionally in terms of their place in ritual practice, their implicit cultural meaning, and their explicit experiential content. It will not do, as some have

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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

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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, hefirmlygrasped 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

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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 tonea 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 prayersflowedrapidly,
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 wasfilledwith 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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THERAPEUTIC PROCESS AND EXPERIENCE

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 unblinkingly 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 afifty-five-year-oldCharismatic 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 positivelyalthough 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":

THERAPEUTIC PROCESS AND EXPERIENCE

61

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 comingfromabove that wentrightthrough 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
atrophiedI 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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THERAPEUTIC PROCESS AND EXPERIENCE

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

THERAPEUTIC PROCESS AND EXPERIENCE

63

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, ifs 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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THERAPEUTIC PROCESS AND EXPERIENCE

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 pelvicframeto 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-

THERAPEUTIC PROCESS AND EXPERIENCE

65

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 allFr. R simply held feet or arms together in his hand and prayed.
What he anticipated was spontaneous rotation/alignment/balance of skeleton/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 preobjective 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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THERAPEUTIC PROCESS AND EXPERIENCE

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 tonepull 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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67

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 worldthe appropriation of both spontaneity and of its resultsis 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 ofattention (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 attentiona
capacity for orientation in the world and hence an aspect of selftoward 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
torsohe 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 couldfeela 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 feltFm 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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69

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
timesusually November isflumonth, 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 posthealing 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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71

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 (MerleauPonty 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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73

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 ofchange 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