American Indian Culture and Research Journal

In a recent essay, Csordas and Kleinman conclude their discussion of an agenda for future research in medical anthropology by calling for studies that develop an analytic of power in conjunction with the examination of healing as process. The present article takes seriously their directives, applying the most pertinent of their suggestions to a case study of ritual healing among the Tarahumara, or Rarámuri as they call themselves, an indigenous people in northern Mexico. This essay is concerned with examining the process whereby power is restored to a patient through the gradual embodiment of a working identity, that is, an identity that manifests a normative and corporeal self capable of participating with others in the everyday give-and-take of society. On the one hand, Csordas and Kleinman urge describing the “connection among therapeutic, political, and spiritual power in both the practice of healers and the experience of the afflicted.” They recommend a method which strives to recognize “distinctions among healing as a form or reinforcement of oppression, healing as a[n] ... attempt to address the misery of poverty and powerlessness, and healing as a mode of empowerment wherein small changes can mean the difference between effective coping and defeat.” While an examination of the structures of power are significant, they go on to say, “Perhaps more important than any other principle for guiding research is the observation that the therapeutic process does not begin and end with the discrete therapeutic event.” Like the analysis of power, they suggest that this also needs to be comprehended in several ways. “First, therapeutic systems and the events they generate exist in historical and social context, as both products of that context and performances that construct it.... Second, the therapeutic process cannot be understood as bounded by the therapeutic event precisely because it is ultimately directed at life beyond the event.”