#enmirado

This story posits an unusual (to us) relationship between reality and language. In essence, it says that the world was created by speaking it: it was thought and spoken into being all at once, perfectly. As Gill put it, “When creation was completed, the world was beautiful. All things were formed and set in place, and proper relationships existed among them.” The anthropologist Gary Witherspoon wrote that this fits with the Navajos’ underlying presumption about the relationship between language and reality: “Navajos do not postulate the possibility that language may distort reality or the perception of reality. Such a proposition goes directly contrary to the Navajo scheme of things. This world was transformed from knowledge, organized in thought, patterned language, and realized in speech. . . . [R]eality was created or transformed as a manifestation of language. In the Navajo view of the world, language is not a mirror of reality; reality is a mirror of language.” [...] The world was perfect at its creation, so retelling the story in ritual actually restores this original perfection. This is essentially Gill’s point. As he put it, “rather than reenactments or dramatic performances, [Navajo ceremonies] are the actual creation of reality.”

No matter how we translate this phrase, its importance to Navajo ritual helps us address a question posed to all healing rituals: Do such rituals objectively restore people to health? Do they actually cure? Many Navajos would say ‘yes’, though they recognize that ceremonies do not cure cancers nor make tumors disappear. Instead, they reinstitute the world’s original perfection, of which the patient’s long life and happiness is a part. They reorder a disordered universe. Navajo philosophy is realistic: we are all going to die. “The goal of Navajo life in this world,” wrote Witherspoon, “is to live to maturity in the condition described as hózhǭ, and to die of old age, the end result of which incorporates one in the universal beauty, harmony, and happiness described as ‘są ‘áh naagháí bik’eh.” In this view, Navajo rituals do something much more important than curing patients. They restore the world’s original perfection. Looked at from the point of their participants’ subjective experiencing, they do so by reframing the original illness as the result of disorder. The ritual renarrativizes the situation, to use anthropologist Thomas Csordas’s term. That is, it sets the patient’s illness within a culturally meaningful story about an originally perfect world that has decayed, then been restored to its pristine significance. It does so by leading the patient through a multi-day event that recapitulates that perfect world’s creation. In experiencing this restoration, the patient experiences the restoration of her or his health. Simultaneously, the community experiences the restoration of hózhǭ (beauty, harmony). Navajo ritual rebalances a world that has become out of kilter.