This book covers a range of the medical, holistic and religious aspects of healing and of death. The contributors broaden the field of medical anthropology by demonstrating that healing involves the senses in treatment whose efficacy depends in part on dramatic performances. Curing is not just about making people well - it also forms a crucial means of reproducing relations of power. A performance directed toward a particular individual might also heal a traumatized social group, expanding the definition of cure from its narrower sense of restoring a victim to health to the larger goal of...

Music and dance play a central role in the "healing arts" of the Senoi Temiar, a group of hunters and horticulturalists dwelling in the rainforest of peninsular Malaysia. As musicologist and anthropologist, Marina Roseman recorded and transcribed Temiar rituals, while as a member of the community she became a participant and even a patient during the course of her two-year stay. She shows how the sounds and gestures of music and dance acquire a potency that can transform thoughts, emotions, and bodies.