The proposed project is a cross-cultural extension of a research program on therapeutic process in religious healing, grounded in the anthropological analogy between religious healing and psychotherapy.
The aim of the proposed project is to examine the experiential specificity of therapeutic change processes in religious healing among Navajo Indians. The methodological perspective is that of cultural anthropology, and is based on a qualitative, ethnographic, interpretive research paradigm. The project will have two phases, an ethnography of therapeutic practice, and an ethnography of therapeutic process. The first phase will be to construct a systematic description of the contemporary Navajo religious healing system, which includes three principal categories: traditional Navajo healing, Native American Church healing, and Christian healing. Data from forty healers in each of these three categories (N= 120) will be collected by means of ethnographic interviews and observation of religious healing events.
The specific aims are description of the repertoire of therapeutic procedures and events within each form of healing, their underlying ethnopsychology of self and transformation, the rhetorical resources available to healers, and healers' perceptions of the compatibility of theirs with other forms of healing. The second phase will examine experiential process in subsets of eight healers working with four patients each, for a total of thirty-two patients in each category of healing (N= 96). Methods include ethnographic interviews, clinical diagnostic interviews, and elicitation of experiential commentaries (using the Interpersonal Process Recall method of psychotherapy process research) from participants in healing events.
Specific aims are to determine how each form of Navajo healing calls into play the elements specified in a previously elaborated model of therapeutic process, to construct prototypic accounts of patients engaged in each form of religious healing, and to determine the role of religious healing in addressing psychosocial problems frequently associated with the disorders of depression and alcohol/substance abuse, problems which conventional mental health resources have proven inadequate to resolve.
| Csordas, Thomas J; Dole, Christopher; Tran, Allen et al. (2010) Ways of asking, ways of telling: a methodological comparison of ethnographic and research diagnostic interviews. Cult Med Psychiatry 34:29-55 |
| Csordas, Thomas J; Storck, Michael J; Strauss, Milton (2008) Diagnosis and distress in Navajo healing. J Nerv Ment Dis 196:585-96 |
| Csordas, Thomas J (2004) Healing and the human condition: scenes from the present moment in Navajoland. Cult Med Psychiatry 28:1-14 |
| Garrity, J F (2000) Jesus, peyote, and the holy people: alcohol abuse and the ethos of power in Navajo healing. Med Anthropol Q 14:521-42 |
| Lewton, E L; Bydone, V (2000) Identity and healing in three Navajo religious traditions: sa'ah naaghai bik'eh hozh [symbol: see text]. Med Anthropol Q 14:476-97 |
| Csordas, T J (2000) The Navajo Healing Project. Med Anthropol Q 14:463-75 |
