Boiling Energy: Community Healing among the Kalahari Kung

Features

• Cover Type: Paperback with 352 pages
• Published by: Harvard University Press January 1982
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 0674077369
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0674077362
• Book Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.1 x 0.8 inches
• Weighs: 1 pounds

Product Review
At a time when many voices rightly urge us to move toward a more holistic approach to medicine, healing and society itself, it is fascinating and valuable to read this thoughtful, eyewitness account of a culture which has always been holistic. This is a book not just for anthropologists or psychologists, but for a much wider readership. It is vivid and colorful.
--Harvey Cox, Harvard Divinity School

A brilliant sociological analysis of how the form and function of ritual healing are shaped by the Kung social structure. (Commonweal )

Product Review
At a time when many voices rightly urge us to move toward a more holistic approach to medicine, healing and society itself, it is fascinating and valuable to read this thoughtful, eyewitness account of a culture which has always been holistic. This is a book not just for anthropologists or psychologists, but for a much wider readership. It is vivid and colorful.
--Harvey Cox, Harvard Divinity School --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Reader Reviews
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.