Khoisan wind: hunting and healing

Abstract

In this paper I draw on my findings and those of historical and recent Khoisan ethnography to attempt to explain how these southern African ‘Khoi’ and San peoples relate to wind and how the environmental phenomenon has informed their epistemology and ontology. I begin by fleshing out the knowledge and experience of wind among these past and recent hunter‐gatherers and, pointing to continuity in wind relationships and the ideas that stem from them, I go on to demonstrate how wind weaves into Khoisan understandings of the body and illness. Despite extensive interest in Bushman healing, anthropologists have overwhelmingly concentrated on the ‘trance’ healing dance. My findings suggest this partiality has obscured the wider healing context in which the dance operates. Exploring the wider context, including massage, ‘medicinal cuts’, and witchcraft, reveals that the ‘potency’ conceived as central to the healing dance is, in certain contexts, equivalent to overlapping ideas of wind, arrows, and smell. Examination of the ethnography reveals that a number of the associations I make between wind and potency have been partially recognized in specific Khoisan contexts but, because comparative studies of Khoisan are difficult and unpopular, these similarities have gone largely unnoticed.

Salutogenic Education? Movement and Whole Child Health in a Waldorf (Steiner) School

“…Beyond physical activity, these forms of movement subsume embodied engagement with, and expression of, various metaphysical flows of potentiality. Bringing movement, thus broadly defined, more centrally into medical anthropology's purview helps make visible the generative, health‐promoting power of even those activities that fall beyond the conventional limits of medicine (see Low ). An analytic that accommodates health's “becoming” provides another tool for those with a theoretical interest in understanding health as fluid and emergent rather than as a fixed state that people either do or do not enjoy (see Manderson and Smith‐Morris ).…”

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“…En isangoma (tradisjonell zulu helbreder), lukter ut (ukubuhla) hekser på samme vis som en hund sporer et bytte ved hjelp av nesen (jf. Low, 2007). Videre viser historiske kilder at sykdom ofte ble forestilt som et aspekt ved vinder og kunne sanses med nesen (Flikke, 2016a: 103).…”

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