Making Selves and Meeting Others in Neo‐Shamanic Healing

Anthropological accounts of healing tend to draw, either explicitly or implicitly, on the notion of “symbolic” healing initially developed in Lévi‐Strauss's seminal article, “The Effectiveness of Symbols.” Within this framework, therapeutic efficacy is understood as the result of a transformation of meaning or the manipulation of symbols. This article seeks to challenge and refine this approach by suggesting that the transformative potential of the healing ritual may be located prior to the establishment of symbolic meaning and manipulation in the course of the healing ritual. Through an experientially specific analysis of soul retrieval, a neo‐shamanic healing ritual practiced by contemporary Euro‐Americans in the United States, I demonstrate that the healing process begins with, and hinges on, a successful encounter with alterity or otherness, which is established in the course of the ritual but extends beyond it. Serving as a counterweight to accounts of ritual healing that emphasize processes of meaning making as anchored in the creation of coherence, the article argues that a fuller understanding of therapeutic or healing processes must also include an appreciation for the transformative effects that discontinuities or disruptions to one's implicitly coherent sense of self can have.