Boiling Energy: Community Healing Among the Kalahari Kung

by Richard Katz

Book Overview

This account of the ancient healing dances practiced by the Kung people of southern Africa's Kalahari Desert includes vivid eyewitness descriptions of night-long healing dances and interviews with Kung healers.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0674077369
• ISBN13: 9780674077362
• Release Date: January 1982
• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Length: 352 Pages
• Weight: 1.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.1" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

remarkable glimpse into indigenous healing

This is a treasure. It is the Kalahari Bush people who are the story here. They speak click language. -A living experience of an indigenous culture's intimate healing rituals. The photos are touching. The rituals are delightful and palpably real. The personal profiles are playful, honest, and humane. The story of a simple people living on the edge of survival and thriving on the spirit that sustains them. Richard Katz, the author , has a gift for respecting the reality of the peoples he studies and enriching the lives of those who read his work. How we could learn from the wisdom of these !Kung people.!!!

Great "fly on the wall" ethnography of !Kung life

Taking a medical anthropology course, the teacher happened to assign this obscure ethnography of the Kalahari !Kung. It's an easy read, a fast read, and if you lend a bit of trust to the author Richard Katz, you get a critical view into the probably now vanished !Kung of South Africa (they've been placed on reservations by the then white South African government). The focus of this ethnography is the ritual healing dances of the !Kung, where healers dance to attain "num", an ancestral/divine energy that has tons of physiological affects, whereby they achieve "kia", an altered state of consciousness utilized in their mode of healing. Films I've seen of the Kalahari !Kung show the healers screaming (known as kowhedili) and "pulling sickness" from fellow tribesmen and women. This book is a great read about a modern hunter-gatherer tribe, by now probably vanished from the face of the earth. Indexicality incompatibility is fairly bridged by Katz, and his concluding recommendation about traditional !Kung practices and correlations to modern cummunity medical outreach strategy is useful. An old ethnography (1982) but a goodie.