To better understand therapeutic practices and their healing effects, we need more precise means of analyzing and comparing how the experiences of healing are organized and communicated. This research project focuses on comparing communication and experience across three different Navajo therapeutic practices: Traditional, Native American Church, and Christian. The data are a series of interviews with Navajo healers who are also patients and who participate in one or more of the three practices, together with field notes and clinical interviews. The research question is: How are the experiences of healing related to specific practices of communication? We expect linked, systematic variations in the use of communication and healing practices to become evident in the comparison of Traditional, Native American Church, and Christian Navajo healing practices. Our method of analysis allow us to recognize, describe, and compare communication and embodied experience in three Navajo healing traditions at three levels of analysis: the communicative functions of referentially and transitivity, strategies for the uses of those functions, and the experiential domains of language, thought, social relationship, and psychological self-processes. Our method of analysis also allows us to reflexively account for cultural presuppositions about how experiential domains are constituted. If we understand how Navajo healers' and patients' uses of communication organized specifically Navajo domains of experience, will contribute to understanding Navajo therapeutic uses of communication and embodied experience on Navajo terms. Understanding Navajo therapeutic practices on their own terms is a significant step toward comparisons of inter-and intra-cultural variations of communication and embodied healing experiences, and toward articulating their theoretical consequences.
