my research plan began to inscribe itself onto
western Ngamiland, the area of Botswana where Ju/’hoansi is spoken,
as a kind of master route around the area to meet key people, these
“points of light” of whom I was told.
I thought of Kauri, and my solidifying relationships with people
there, as a base from which to explore my evolving mental map. This
kin-based, language-based, and culture-based map was becoming
studded with places where special things had happened or could hap-
pen if I traveled there, and with the names of individuals I heard about
who “!’han tcisi”—knew things—whether storytellers, healers, or mu-
sicians. Most of them lived to the west of Kauri, at !Aoan, Dobe, and
/Kae/kae, but some were as far east and south as Ghanzi. At Ghanzi,
Ju/’hoansi, a Northern Khoisan language, intersected with Naro, a Cen-
tral Khoisan language
.......................
That the Ju/’hoansi and other indigenous peoples like
them had long-developed social strategies for staying in relative peace
with their kin, living face-to-face in small groups for their entire lives.
One of the very effective Ju/’hoan strategies we observed was indi-
rect commentary on others’ behavior through song.
https://www.berghahnbooks.com/title/BieseleOnce#toc
.the Ju/’hoansi (“Jutwansi”) to hold on to some of their land in western Ngamiland..., Kxao Giraffe described his voyage
into the abysmal waters of an underworld, his ascent to God’s camp on “sky threads,” and his own initiation into the powerful mysteries
of the healing dance. He wove together his otherworld journeys, his
trance journeys as a curer into the bodies of sick people, and his own first experience of an altered state into a single unified narrative. It was his own story, different from those of other healers, yet accepted by them as a facet of the “truth” of what was beyond ordinary human consciousness. Translating it later, I also understood that Kxao saw all of his own journeys as one, despite what we who haven’t been on such journeys would understand as chronological time gaps. They all took
place in what was truly another—dare I say timeless?—world. I later
included a translation of this narrative in my thesis, saying, “In a sense, all three of these themes—the curing journey into the body, the journey to the sky, and the reception of power (n/om) for the first time—are one in that they are all initiations, leaps of faith requiring that one dare the loss of soul.” This was my first inkling of the great courage required for this kind of healing.
I saw that what Lorna Marshall translated as “half-death” (Mar-
shall 1999: 88–90) was a willingly undertaken near-death experience, one that took immense daring, immense willingness to offer oneself. I mused on the close verbal relationship between the word for the healing trance—!aia—and the word for death itself—!ai—and awaited a time when I could adequately ask questions about this relationship, hoping for ultimate answers.
To trance is to !aia. !Aia is a verb that is cognate to !ai, to die. A healer has to “die” to this world temporarily to access the beyond-normal powers of another world, in order to use them for healing. Once a healer has “died,” he or she can travel on the vast web of threads in the sky said to then become visible and beckoning. Kxao =Oah grasped these threads with his fingers or inserted them under his toenails and ascended on them to the place of God to plead for the life of the sick child—and the many other people he healed through the years. Other healers told me they took the threads in their hands and climbed them, sometimes carrying younger, novice healers on their backs to, literally, “show them the ropes.”
Many anthropology students are by now familiar with Ju/’hoan heal-
ing power from Richard Lee’s article “The sociology of !Kung Bushman trance performances” and from Richard Katz’s classic book, Boiling Energy. Katz and Lee did their work with healers in the sixties, a few years before I joined the HKRG. When I later read the draĞs for Katz’s Boiling Energy, published in 1976, I realized the extent to which my two predecessors had also worked with Kxao. " p. 71
"I should emphasize that Ju/’hoansi describe the healing n/om
as power or energy, a kind of supernatural potency whose activation
paves the way for curing. Associated with it are special powers shared with many other shamanic traditions of the world, like clairvoyance, out-of-body travel, x-ray vision, and prophecy. N/om, residing in the belly, is activated through strenuous trance dancing, beautiful polyphonic singing, and the heat of the fire. It is said to ascend or “boil up”
the spinal column and into the head, at which time it can be used to pull out any sickness or unrest afflicting the people in the group. Arriving at this state where healing becomes possible also involves an experience in the chest and midriff called //xabe (being set free, being untied). Over half the men in Ju/’hoan society at that time had experience as healers, as well as a large number of women. Kxao’s account was one of many I ended up recording over the years."
......................
One key element that seemed to hold dances together was the ubiq-
uitous, fragrant sa. The women were enveloped in the earthy, musky
perfume of sa powder they pounded from the hard liĴle ball-shaped
roots of certain water-pan plants. Seeing how the people loved this
magical powder, and loving its varied scents myself, I asked some
women friends to take me to the dry water pans where it could be dug,
and to make me some. I traded oranges and sometimes liĴle contain-
ers of cooking oil for sa and for sa-scented ochre. The Ju/’hoan women
were sometimes able to obtain this ochre from Herero women, whose
men had horses to take them to the far-off places where ochre was to
be found. Ju/’hoan women and Herero women alike loved to dry and
pound orange peels to add a citrusy aroma to their sa. And every Ka-
lahari dweller I ever met coveted any sort of oil or creme to spread on
their perpetually dry skins. Dressing up specially for a dance meant
women’s faces were shining with creme or oil, or were dramatically
scarlet or yellowed with ochred oil, or that the scent of newly pounded
sa enveloped them—or all three, whenever possible. When you saw a
woman thus adorned striding purposefully toward a dance, oĞen with
layers of beadwork around her neck and freshly cleaned and soĞened
skin blankets on her body, you knew she meant to enjoy that dance to
its fullest.
...................
The blind man was the healer
I had once seen healing a child there at !Aoan, when I was still with
Marjorie and Mel. Dick Katz had also told me about this man, Kxao
=Oah (Giraffe), named for the spirit animal that had led him to become
a healer.
I scrambled to turn on my tape recorder, and for the next few hours
an extraordinary narrative of one man’s acquisition of healing power in
his youth, and his use of the power in midlife and into old age, spooled
onto the brown cellophane tape. There was no chance or need to ask
questions, had I even been able to. I knew I was not catching everything
that was being said, but it was clear to me that this was an important
firsthand account of religious healing. For the time being, it seemed
vital not to interrupt this sustained burst of enthusiasm. Fortunately,
the borrowed tape recorder had not yet been made useless by the omni-
present blowing sand, and it faithfully recorded the whole of this freely
offered (or should I say imperiously demanded?) communication.
Humorous and intense by turns, Kxao Giraffe described his voyage
into the abysmal waters of an underworld, his ascent to God’s camp
on “sky threads,” and his own initiation into the powerful mysteries
of the healing dance. He wove together his otherworld journeys, his
trance journeys as a curer into the bodies of sick people, and his own
first experience of an altered state into a single unified narrative. It was
his own story, different from those of other healers, yet accepted by
them as a facet of the “truth” of what was beyond ordinary human
consciousness. Translating it later, I also understood that Kxao saw all
of his own journeys as one, despite what we who haven’t been on such
journeys would understand as chronological time gaps. They all took
place in what was truly another—dare I say timeless?—world. I later
included a translation of this narrative in my thesis, saying, “In a sense,
all three of these themes—the curing journey into the body, the journey
to the sky, and the reception of power (n/om) for the first time—are one
in that they are all initiations, leaps of faith requiring that one dare the
loss of soul.”
..........................
!Aia—
trance—is an obvious cognate of !ai—to die. The Marshalls had trans-
lated !aia as “half-death,” and Richard Lee used koe !ai, “like death,”
but to me it seemed as frightening and absolute as the real thing and
was clearly held by the Ju/’hoansi in much the same awe and respect.
Healers in the coveted altered state in which healing can take place are
first and foremost gaining access to that realm where their parents—
and other relatives who have passed on—abide. Relationships with
deceased elders persist vividly aĞer death. As in everyday life, rela-
tionships are the most powerful resource of all
..............................
, Ju/’hoansi and other San hunter-gatherers had at least one great
thing that was theirs alone—n/om. Their healing dance medicine was
the arena in which they were the acknowledged masters. “We are poor
people with liĴle to give,” they oĞen said, “but we can tell other people
about n/om, our healing dance. It is so beautiful! We can teach other
people, and they can learn it and do it for themselves and their people.”
Herero, Tswana, and other Bantu groups spoke admiringly of Ju/’hoan
expertise in healing through dance and singing.
......................................
. They [cannabis, drugs] were seen as substances from
another context altogether, to be kept strictly apart from the dance, as
things that would interfere with the serious business of spirit travel and
healing. I was impressed with the degree to which people honored this
contextual separation and underscored its importance.
It was almost impossible to imagine, for instance, that a healer like
Kxao Giraffe would ever dissipate his fine healing focus by trying to
cure someone on a day when he had been drinking. People I spoke to
about this told me that healing simply took too much concentration.
The first time I saw Kxao =Oah (Kxao Giraffe) healing was at !Aoan,
near Dobe, before Mel and Marjorie leĞ. Present at that healing were
Herero, Tswana, and Kavango, as well as Ju/’hoansi.
.......................................
The power seemed to lie in the connectedness between the bodies
of the dancers and singers as the music and their movements came
together. This was what my colleague Richard Katz had spoken of as
“interpersonal synchrony.” I saw that once this synchrony had been
achieved, once people had seen that the mysterious power had reliably
arisen yet one more time, people leĞ the dance with liĞed hearts no
maĴer what the occasion for it had been, and no maĴer what the out-
come. “Outcomes,” in fact, seemed beside the point, once everyone had
participated in the dance. The dance itself was the point.
Years later I read that Dorothea Bleek, of the Bleek family of lin-
guists, who had done so much work with the /Xam in South Africa and
had also traveled through part of the Ju/’hoan area in Botswana in an
oxcart during the 1920s, had noticed that healing dances were as oĞen
held in times of plenty as in times of hunger or sickness
.........................
!ao was associated by some Ju/’hoansi with a certain part of the
body, the skin of the upper back at the base of the neck. This area is
called the n//ao or n//aosi (plural)—note the different click from the
one in n!ao. It is explicitly designated as the spot from which sickness,
drawn from the body of an ill person, is expelled from the body of a
n/omkxao, a “master of n/om” or working curer. (Only a n/omkxao, how-
ever, can see sickness leave this spot on another healer.
If a young man is being given the power
to trance and cure by an experienced curer who is siĴing behind him he might feel his n//ao tingle, as well. In the story of G!ara and his sons,
echoes of the beliefs about the sensitive n//ao spot and the n!ao complex
regarding weather......
...................................
the tight constriction
of the abdomen that accompanies trance is thought to be dangerous for
women of child-bearing age. This constriction is conceptualized by the
Ju/’hoansi as small, potent, invisible arrows of n/om shot from the fin-
gers of expert healers into the solar plexus area of a novice. Once inside
the novice, the arrows are thought to multiply, causing the pain and
constriction of trance. I learned that Ju/’hoan women could dance and
sing all they wanted in their younger years, but aĞer menarche should
wait until menopause before seeking n/om,... women, once
past bearing children, could awaken in themselves immense n/om that
was respected by men and women alike.
..................................
mostly the women sang, and clapped joyously and resolutely, to
enable the men to dance. The men said oĞen that the song could not
rise to the sky, could not help the men’s n/om to boil in their bodies,
unless the women sang it. The men encouraged the women by singing
with them for a time, and by praising them in turn, with the result that
the women’s voices came through louder and longer, more expertly
ringing the changes on each cadence, than I could have believed pos-
sible.
...........................
dancing n/om was not just a Ju/’hoan thing
but “a human thing.” When I next have a chance to ask a Ju/’hoan man
whether being a healer is a men’s thing, the answer may well be, “It’s
not a men’s thing, it’s a human thing.”
