Comments on the Navajo Healing Project

hese articles from the Navajo Healing Project illustrate the strengths of a methodology that is becoming more prevalent in anthropological research. This method uses research teams that combine anthropologists from outside the community being studied with researchers who are from the community itself or members of the same ethnic population. Team research has meant that the Navajo Healing Project can examine a much broader range of healing traditions throughout the reservation than has been possible in the past. This study included four teams that interviewed 95 healers from three healing traditions (Traditional Navajo religion, the Native American Church [NAC], Pentecostal Christianity) and 84 patients of these healers. The teams were located in different parts of the reservation (Tuba City, Tsaile, Shiprock, and the Gallup area). In addition to conducting a series of visits and interviews with each healer, the teams followed the patients of several healers in each site. They attended healing events for these patients and also interviewed them, one interview taking place three months after the observed healing intervention. The result is undoubtedly a rich database that is only touched on in these articles, but one that will be further explored in the project's future publications. Only team research could have elucidated such a complex and multi-layered set of experiences in these three healing traditions. In addition, the inclusion of Navajo researchers has meant that frameworks more compatible with Navajo categories can evolve as the research progresses. This is perhaps most dramatically seen in the chart used by David H. Begay and Nancy Cottrell Maryboy to describe Sister Grace's experience of illness and healing (see Figure 2, Begay and Maryboy). The chart is divided into directional quadrants representing four types of healing systems, and a circle anchors the quadrants, just as the four cardinal directions and the circle organize Navajo cosmology and the Traditional Navajo hataal or "sing" within the hoghan. Likewise, Elizabeth Lewton and Victoria Bydone present their analysis of the three healing traditions using the Navajo principle sq'ah naaghdi bik'eh hlzho. This phrase is roughly translated "in old age walking the trail of beauty," but its meaning can also be approximated through the English terms long life, happiness, blessing, and well-being. Although researchers on this project could have paid closer attention to the actual categories being used in Navajo to interpret illness and healing, members of the team are moving in this direction in the second phase of the project (Csordas, personal communication). Storck, Csordas, and Strauss have already examined