The Shaman's Touch: Otomí Indian Symbolic Healing (review)

170 BOOK REVIEWS these anorexic fasters and contemporary practitioners of civil disobedience . Take, for instance, Saint Veronica, whose personal testimony covers 22,000 diary pages that her superiors ordered her to write for thirty-three years. Her confessor, describing her response when he orders her to lick the walls of her cell, says that to his displeasure she also swallows the spiders and their webs: " 'And she answered that I had done well, done her a great favor, and she stayed two months ... in that cell. . . until I finally ordered her to return to her usual cell' " (p. 77). After all, "good girls" such as this—and whether holy or nervosa they are always defined as such—are simply carrying out to absurdity one ideal of their particular society—to be good in the one case, to look good (that is, thin) in the other. Because both asceticism and moderation are sine qua nons for their respective cultures—medieval faith in the one case, contemporary Western middle- and upper-class culture in the other, it is difficult to fault practitioners of either. The would-be interventionist who does try to fault the anorexic consequently enters a no-win situation: If he or she forces the anorexic to eat, the anorexic typically rebels; conversely , if he or she allows the patient to fast, that decision facilitates the patient's demise. This seems a rather neat counterpart to another psychological phenomenon—the classic double bind. And of course, as Bell consistently argues, women anorexics, as all women, have themselves always lived in patriarchally dominated cultures (by definition all historic cultures), which automatically places them in a no-win situation as well. Hence a kind of poetic justice lurks behind the anorexic "victim's" "disease ": Who, then, is the real victim? While others may (and many already have) disagree, the interpretation Bell gives to holy anorexia rings true from the perspective of at least this feminist. Furthermore, it points up the relative nature of the meaning of a disease vis-à -vis the potentially different symbol systems of sufferer and interventionist. —Kathryn Allen Rabuzzi Syracuse University James Dow. The Shaman's Touch: Otomi Indian Symbolic Healing. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1986. xv + 180 pp. $13.95. The Otomi inhabit the Sierra Norte de Puebla, northeast of Mexico City. An anthropologist at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan, Book Reviews 171 James Dow has done fieldwork among the Otomi over a period of fifteen years and gained the friendship of a shaman named Don Antonio. The outstanding strength of this book is its rich ethnographic data. Its major weakness is its perspective. Dow restricts his ethnography to the viewpoint of the "average people" who consult Otomi shamans: "When they do not understand shamanic methods, the shaman himself explains the methods in terms that the average person can understand" (p. xii). The result is an account of shamanism that is within reach of Otomi patients, as though no deeper understanding were known to Otomi shamans. The initiations, seance procedures, and beliefs of shamans in most cultures are at least partly esoteric, but Dow is not privy to Don Antonio's secrets. Don Antonio admits to having apprentices (pp. 131-32) but claims that his own abilities are a "gift by God" (p. 14). Again, Dow states that he does not dare to offend Don Antonio by asking him how he regards his practice of sucking a physical object from the patient's body without breaking the patient's skin (pp. 107-8). Dow infers that Don Antonio, like his patients, regards the event as magical; but comparative data suggest that shamans secretly regard sleight of hand as dramatizations of spiritual events. Don Antonio's remarks on shamanizing are presented fully and at length, in commentary on seances that Dow has unfortunately described summarily. We never quite get a clear picture of the seance procedures. Dow strangely thought it necessary to request the reader's indulgence before reporting the one seance that he did describe more fully (pp. 97101 ). Even so, we are not told when Don Antonio uses psychedelic drugs (pp. 50-53), how helping spirits are invoked, envisioned, and utilized (p. 29), how...