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A Different Medicine: Postcolonial Healing in the Native American Church (Oxford Ritual Studies)

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Description

Drawing on two years of ethnographic field research some of the Navajos, this book explores a controversial Native American ritual and healthcare practice: ceremonial consumption of the psychedelic Peyote cactus in the context of an indigenous postcolonial healing movement referred to as the Native American Church (NAC). The NAC arose in the nineteenth century in keeping with the creation of the reservation system and increasing societal ills, including alcoholism. The movement is the locus of a cultural conflict with a long history in North The united states and stirs very strong and steadily opposed emotions and moral interpretations. Joseph D. Calabrese describes the Peyote Ceremony as it is used in circle of relatives contexts and federally funded clinical programs for Native American patients. He uses an interdisciplinary methodology that he calls clinical ethnography: an approach to research that involves clinically informed and self-reflective immersion in local worlds of suffering, healing, and normality. Calabrese combined immersive fieldwork among NAC members in their communities with a year of clinical work at a Navajo-run remedy program for adolescents with severe substance abuse and associated mental health problems. There he had the unique opportunity to provide conventional therapeutic intervention alongside Native American therapists who were treating the very problems that the NAC addresses through ritual. Calabrese argues that if people respond better to clinical interventions that are relevant to their society’s unique cultural adaptations and ideologies (as appears to be the case with the NAC), then preventing ethnic minorities from getting access to traditional ritual forms of healing may in fact constitute a human rights violation.

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