The Value of the Community and Ritual
In the “Healing Wisdom of Africa” Malidoma Somé argues that the agents that heal people in Africa, specifically the Dagara people in West Africa, are ritual and community. Community is important because according to Somé, “there is an understanding that human beings are collectively oriented” that is to say that the health, both physically and mentally, of the individual are directly related to the overall health of the community, and vise versa (Somé 22). Somé goes on to argue that many of the problems we face in the west are a longing for a sense of community.
It is important to understand that Somé’s notion of community is much broader than just the human beings you deal with on a day-to-day basis. There are a whole host of supernatural beings afoot and they are all a part of the community. These beings, as well as other supernatural invisible forces, are what people call upon when during rituals.
Rituals are missing from the west, however Somé says that doesn’t westerns are totally devoid of things that take the place of rituals. People still go through things like initiation, it’s just that we are more disorganized and chaotic about it.
This invisible world that exist alongside and beyond our world consist of ancestor spirits as well as an innumerable amount of other spirits. Such as the Siura, which is like a personal guardian spirit that everybody has. A Siura might help you make sure that you’re living up to your purpose and potential (33).
Everybody is born with a purpose and innate gifts (27). We need to live up to these talents or else we’ll become mentally or physically ill. The community plays a big role in making sure that we don’t get sick because they acknowledge our innate gifts. The simple act of acknowledging a problem if it exists goes a long way towards curing it, a theme that’s been common in a lot of our readings.
The language used to talk about people’s innate talents is to talk about “remembering” things instead of learning things (32). There is a ritual in place where the community talks to an unborn fetus and asks it what its purpose is (33). Whether or not this means the person has a real purpose or not is irrelevant but Somé talks about it as if it is true. The very fact this institution exist and the whole community gets behind it makes it true enough that it can have a profound efect on somebody’s life. Somé gives me the impression from the introduction to this book, that he was at least somewhat inspired by the prophecies about him that the community believed before he was born.
The idea that everybody has a purpose needs to be further understood in the contexts of the spirit-body connection. Somé says that the spirit and the body need each other to exist, at least for humans in a living form. The spirit and body are intensifications of the Spirit and as such need to be in harmony with the spirit world. That is why people are born with a purpose and it is also why not living up to that purpose can cause problems (66).
Since the world of the Dagara includes non-human and non-corporeal beings, illness caused by being misaligned with the community can be invisible and unseen, except for their symptoms (29). For this reason, problems that we wouldn’t usually think of as illnesses, the Dagara do think of as illnesses. If you are having trouble studying it may mean that you need to perform some kind of ritual to bring you back into alignment with the community (30).
While supernatural beings are apart of the community and encounters with them can heal you, such as Somé’s encounter with the green lady healing his feelings of alienation, but it isn’t fair to say that they are members of the community in the exact same way living people are. Spirits from the Other World have rules that they have to follow so that they do not interupt the daily lives of people too much and it is also said that seeing their true form would be traumatic so they usually don’t show us that (Somé 55-56).
Somé blurs the line between what is nature and what is community, but he says that it is nature that is the foundation for healing (38). What rituals need to be done depend largely on what the natural conditions you are at are like (38).
Illness is always understood in terms of breakage of a relationship (73). It is for this reason that when an African herbist is selecting herbs it isn’t just a simple procedure, the herbist has pick out the right herbs with the right energy that’s appropriate for that person.
Being aware of these energy flows is important for a good ritual, and rituals are important because they nourish our souls and spirits. Somé argues that some emotionally pains cannot be healing by any other method except through ritual (160). Because correct rituals are so important it is necessary to have a good understanding of Dagara cosmology in order to understand those rituals.
The Dagara cosmos is made out of five elements; water, fire, earth, mineral stone, and vegetative nature (165-166). Each of these elements is connected with spirits and is also connected to an innate quality that a person has. Somebody people are more into fire others into earth etc. Because of that there are not blanket rituals that are good for everybody, a shaman must get in touch with the essence of the person and then from that decide how to continue with the cure.
Just to put Somé into the context of some of the ideas we’ve talked about in class this semester, Somé and Sudhir Kakar seem as though they would agree on the value of recognizing supernatural forces as a tool to heal people. It seems to me though that Somé is more Jungian than Somé because Somé always takes the position that the supernatural reality they are tapping into is real, while Kakar may be obliged to say that the supernatural forces experienced are externalizations of something from inside the persons own mind, and he would point to the closed system of Freud. From a Lévi-Straussian point of view, the method here is totally irrelevant and all that matters is what the community believes; Somé’s explanation of how people are suppose to just give themselves over to and trust the natural and invisible forces around them also stresses the idea that the community’s collective belief is the most important thing even more so than the faith of the individual practitioner. And from a Victor Turnerian point of view, he may look at examples like the Dagara grieving as an example of communitas. The notion that, either the person or the community need to readjust in order for healing to take place, has echoes of Jerome Frank’s theories. And the last I’ll mention Mary Douglass may be glad to point out the use of purity to strength community bonds and define what it means to be Dagara, and by implication what it means to not be Dagara.
For Lévi-Strauss all elements of a society can be understood in terms of a duality. What we experience and the conclusions we draw from it is highly subjective to our experiences, but there is a constant give and take between a society and its members. However because culture shapes how we think there is no such thing as an uncontexted idea. Cultures through out the world are constantly coming up with and changing old ideas about religion, healing, science, etc.
What many in the West consider to be the “right way” to do things is simply a case of ethnocentrism. When looking at things like cultural institutions there are no right or wrong ones, only more and less adapted ones. What works here might not work somewhere else and vice versa.
According to Lévi-Strauss there are three things to consider when looking at the effectiveness of a healing practice; the belief of the sorcerer, the belief of the patient, and the belief of the group as a whole (Lévi-Strauss 168).
Lévi-Strauss tells of a boy that’s accused of being a sorcerer and giving a girl a seizure (Lévi-Strauss 172). Through the course of the trial against him, he begins to accept and enjoy his role as a sorcerer, and because the group views him a sorcerer he may as well literally be one (Lévi-Strauss 174-175). Because the group is telling him he’s a sorcerer he ultimately gives into that reality and for all intents and purposes it might as well be true.
When looking at Shamans, Lévi-Strauss says that you need to look at the experiences of the Shaman, the patient who may or may not get cured, and the feelings of the over all community (179). Each of these things is further qualified by the experiences of the individual versus the experiences of the group. In the case of Quasalid, it is really irrelevant that he does not believe in his own teaching method, or that the method in and of itself is nothing special. What matters is how the community feels about his method. The community, drawing from its collective experiences views Quasalid as a great spiritual teacher and as such the power of the community literally makes him into a powerful teacher.
For Lévi-Strauss argues that healing is a function of abreaction but unlike in our traditional scientific point of view, the abreaction doesn’t only need to take place between the patient and the Shaman, it needs to take place between all three agents; the shaman, the patient, and the community (183). Healing takes place when the patient reorganized his worldview into one that is more appropriate, or when the larger community reorganizes its worldview (184).
This system puts very little emphasis on the method used and a lot of method on how the individual and society view each other. Lévi-Struass’ ideas fit in well with Somé’s because they both argue that the community has a very important role to play in healing.
When looking at the case of a healing ritual of the Cuna Indians, Lévi-Strauss argues that the patients world is full of spirits and supernatural beings, she believes in them and they are incorporated into her world (197). The pains she feels however are not incorporated into her world (197). One of the things the Shaman does is to personify her pains in the form of an animal spirit (195). Now that the pains are presented to her in a recognizable form that she and her society are used to deal with, her and the Shaman can now work on curing her.
It does not matter if the myths are real, or even if they are coherent, what matters is whether she and her society believe them or not. Somé talks about his experiences with the supernatural as though they were real, and I have no intention on passing judgment on his claims, but if you look at them from a Lévi-Struassian point of view it doesn’t really matter if the myths are right or not. All that matters is if the community and/or patient believe in them. To a certain extent it doesn’t even matter if the Shaman or patient believe in cure, as long as the larger society does. The patient will eventually get caught up in the communal healing experience and be cured. The Shaman’s ability to make effable deep psychological feelings in his or her patients puts the Shaman somewhere between our modern psychologist and doctor (198).
Both Somé and Lévi-Strauss stress the importance of the community, and both off them stress the value of ritual. Lévi-Strauss says that it is paradoxical that blaming an illness or something supernatural may have better effects than blaming it on germs because germs are real. Somé offers that same paradox to us as a gift and invites us to get in touch with our spiritual side again and develop rituals.
Works Cited
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Structural Anthropology. Trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke B. Schoeph. New York: Basic Books, 1963. 04 Apr. 2008 <http://books.google.com/books?id=RmeUknlauJAC>.
Somé, Malidoma P. The Healing Wisdom of Africa: Finding Life Purpose Through Nature, Ritual, and Community. New York: Penguin Putnam Inc, 1998.
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