The pragmatics of aesthetics: the performance of healing among Senoi Temiar

The Flexibility Hypothesis of Healing

Theories of healing have attempted to identify general mechanisms that may work across different modalities. These include altering expectations, remoralization, and instilling hope. In this paper, we argue that many forms of healing and psychotherapy may work by inducing positive psychological states marked by flexibility or an enhanced ability to shift cognitive sets. Healing practices may induce these states of cognitive and emotional flexibility through specific symbolic interventions we term "flexibility primers" that can include images, metaphors, music, and other media. The flexibility hypothesis suggests that cognitive and emotional flexibility is represented, elicited, and enacted through multiple modalities in healing rituals. Identifying psychological processes and cultural forms that evoke and support cognitive and emotional flexibility provides a way to understand the cultural specificity and potential efficacy of particular healing practices and can guide the design of interventions that promote resilience and well-being.

The 'psychic surgeon' and the schizophrenic patient: crisis in a 'medicodrama'

This paper is concerned with a Filipino 'psychic surgeon' confronted by a particularly challenging case of a kind perhaps unprecedented in his practice. The paper describes and analyzes how the practitioner modified his usual clinical performance and adapted his actions to demands of an extremely difficult situation. The case is viewed in wider perspective relative to the significance of performative acts of healing in a pluralistic medical setting.

Yolmo aesthetics of body, health and 'soul loss'

To date, little attention has been paid to the cultural philosophies of experience which shape human behavior. The present paper contends that culturally constituted 'aesthetics' of everyday life underlies moments of health, illness and healing among Yolmo Sherpa of Helambu, Nepal. The author examines cultural understandings of bodily and social experience to show how implicit aesthetics--from values of harmony and balance to fears of loss and decay--shape the ways in which Yolmo manage and evaluate their lives and how they construe and experience incidents of 'soul loss.' An analysis of shamanic ritual suggests, in turn, that while themes of imbalance, fragmentation and deficiency haunt the body in illness, healing works to reinstate a visceral sense of harmony, completion and vitality. These values reflect pressing political concerns. The paper concludes that a phenomenology of embodied aesthetics requires an analytic approach distinct from current semiotic, intellectualist, or psychological paradigms.