Boiling Energy/The Last Lords of Palenque
Highwater, Jamake
A tradition of spiritual energy BOILING ENERGY Community Healing among the Kalahari Kung Richard Katz Harvard, $25, 329 pp. THE LAST LORDS OF PALENQOE The Lacandon Mayas of the Mexican Rain...
...Robert HASSENGER, now at Empire State College (SUNY), directed the Office for Educational Research at Notre Dame...
...In fact, dance was an amalgam of art and science long before humankind was aware of the scientific or artistic disciplines...
...To most modern Western people dancing is a form of mindless amusement with strong sexual overtones...
...They are performers of a more complex kinesthetic reality, for they recognize the body as an organ of spirituality...
...But authors Perera and Bruce resist sentimentality and the inclination to romanticize tribal cultures...
...For centuries body movement possessed a very humble and static existence in European cultures...
...It is more than the machinery of procreation, digestion, and other functional activities...
...Old Chan K'in has a well-earned fame among his people for his powers of k'inyah (divination...
...For the "disease" to be cured by such ceremonies is an illness of the "spiritual body" that has somehow lost touch with the cosmos - that has faltered in its conceptual kinship with nature...
...It was not until the turn of the century that dance was finally reestablished as an important expressive form in the West...
...For them the body is not simply a utilitarian organization of limbs, nor is it the millstone of the disembodied Christian soul...
...Such approaches to illness make us think about what the real forces of healing consist of in various societies, who controls them, and how they are manipulated...
...The result is an excellent rendering of the arcane mysteries of the Kung culture without reductionism and without anthropological condescension...
...In fact, ethnocentricity is happily non-existent in this very level view of one culture by i another...
...jamake highwater, of Blackfeet-Cherokee heritage, is the author of The Primal Mind and a forthcoming novel, Eyes of Darkness...
...Worship is dance," Susanne K. Langerhas written...
...Katz describes the healing rituals in great detail, and he demonstrates how they are perceived at the experiental mode both by the healers and the healed...
...saul maloff is a regular contributor to Commonweal...
...As Richard Lee points out in his foreword, numerous reports have been written about the Kung, yet certain aspects of their healing dance remained little understood until psychologist Katz wrote his in-depth study of the altered state of consciousness which occurs during the dance, of the long and rigorous training required to become a healer, of the folk theories of illness and healing that lie hidden behind the visible ritual...
...Their spiritual guide through the cosmos of the Lacandon mind was Chan K'in, the community's hereditary chieftain and its religious leader...
...We also realize that the Kung are part of the contemporary world and not simply "living fossils" from the mythic, ancestral cave, which we too often envision as an everlasting Eden inhabited by "primitives...
...Our bodies live through motion...
...At the dawn of civilization," Langer has pointed out, "dance had already reached a degree of perfection that no other art or science could then match...
...The idea that spirituality can be associated with the body is extremely remote from the traditional Caucasian's belief in the dichotomy of mind and body, spirit and flesh...
...Gregory baum is professor of reli-gious studies and sociology at St...
...But in the term "ills" the significance of the primal view of ailment is easily lost...
...But they are not "dancers" in the specialized and highly aestheticized way in which the West understands dancers...
...This process is the basis of richly metaphoric rituals for which there are few equivalents in Western culture...
...JOHN kotre 15 completing a book on life history and generativity...
...In the Lacandon view, he has the ability to sound those realities that are not yet manifest-(what any occidental language calls foretelling the future...
...There are some touches of mystic self-consciousness in the narration, and more than a bit of Castaneda: "I came to accept telepathic and even televisual communication between Lacan-dones as a matter of course...
...Instead they provide a lively first-hand account of their limited experiences among the Lacandone Indians, describing the eloquent folk history and the religious parables told to them by Chan K'in, as well as charting the disturbing interactions of tradition and modernization in the lives of this small band of Mexican Indians...
...And the book is also flawed by a rather one-sided and highly controversial premise...
...The body is the organism in which motion makes visible the sacred forms of life itself...
...Boiling Energy and The Last Lords of Palenque deal in drastically different ways with the primal mentality which underlies the distinctive realities of various primal peoples: a reality fundamentally different from the daily world that is familiar to white Europeans and Americans...
...Primal people, she concludes, "are tribes of dancers...
...A dream, properly interpreted, may give the clue or the formula for escaping a potentially adverse destiny...
...We come away from Boiling Energy with an exceptional insight into the concept of the "spiritual body...
...We also learn that the Kung, like the rest of us, are changing and being changed by those human achievements and human frailties which affect all of us...
...In the late 1970s, journalist Victor Perera and linguist Robert Bruce continued Stephens's quest, living among the northern Lacan-done Indians, a small ethnic group in the jungles of the state of Chiapas in southern Mexico...
...Chan K'in is also renowned for his abilities to cure ailments...
...But The Last Lords of Palenque is always intriguing reading and provides a glimpse of the present-day realities of the Indians of Hispanic America...
...thomas F. staley, professor of- modern literature at the University of Tulsa, has published several studies of British writers...
...In the dream world one is able to see tendencies, potentials,, and all that is hypothetical or not-yet-manifest reality...
...It was not until very recently inconceivable, at any rate in the post-Cartesian world of Christianity and Judaism, that there could be any essential relationship between spiritual and physical realities...
...Finally, it provides us with some notion of what lies before all of us for whom the "real" world of progress and technology has become a tangible source of fear...
...Boiling Energy by Richard Katz is an altogether different kind of book: one which we can admire both for its scholarship and its excellence of style...
...And, finally, Katz describes how this primal social order of the Kung is being challenged by the economic and political changes now sweeping Africa...
...it is also an organ of expression...
...The Last Lords of Palenque is an engaging book which perpetuates the kind of serious "travel" writing published in the middle of the nineteenth century by John Lloyd Stephens, the American attorney/adventurer who rediscovered the Maya civilization...
...He provides views of a culture totally dissimilar to his own without either trying to pretend that he has "entered" into another ethnicity or drawing exotic conclusions that present the Kung as oddities...
...the present-day Lacandones of Naha are in fact the direct descendants of the ancient Mayas of Palenque...
...and an important factor in determining "the supernatural causes of illness, and the chances of its being cured, is the recollection and analysis of recent dreams, either of the sick person or anyone associated with him...
...The ultimate impact of this splendid book is to vivify a community's tradition of spiritual energy that endlessly revolves from healer to community and back again in a dynamic process that reaches every Kung, and that extends deep into the past...
...He does all of this with respect but withoutawe...
...Michael's College in Toronto...
...It was so detested by both church and synagogue that it was officially prohibited after a brief but important use in early religious ceremonies: like the Christian "Circle of the Angels" and David's dance before the altar...
...THE LAST LORDS OF PALENQOE The Lacandon Mayas of the Mexican Rain Forest Victor Perera and Robert Bruce Little Brown, $17.95, 311 pp...
...Jamake Highwater THERE is among primal peoples a fusion of chant, music, and motion which is "art" before art exists...
...The healing rituals of such primal people are events often concerned with a practical reality constructed as a trance-ceremony, specifically in the case of curative rites enacted by holy people to remedy the ills of tribespeople...
...He traces the role that healing plays in the lives of the entire community, and he offers a brilliant sociological analysis of how the form and function of ritual healing are shaped by the Kung social structure...
...We are confronted here among primal peoples with the much belabored and sentimentalized idea of "holistic medicine...
...A perfect example of the continuing conception of dance as an art/science is found in the community healing among today's Kalahari Kung of Africa and among the Lacandon Maya Indiansof the Mexican rain forest...
...His most recent book is The Priority of Labor (Paulist...
...And thus motion is often the most important and pervasive means by which primal peoples celebrate living...
Vol. 109 • November 1982 • No. 19
