Navajo Ritual Healing

In this paper I deal with two traditions of ritual healing in Navajoland, namely with the traditional Navajo ritual healing and the peyote healing of Native American Church. I introduce them in three dimensions when I consecutively describe a cosmological framework, a social organization and a specific example of a ritual. At the core of my analysis is the grid & group method that was developed by Mary Douglas, when I look for the correlations between cosmological notions and social structures, and the ways they are established by the ritual. This way I point out how the colonial oppression weakened community ties and created ground for the growth of Native American Church in Navajoland, because NAC is able to offer existential answers for life in such a desolate space. However this does not mean that the Traditional Navajo healing was wiped out by colonialism, and both traditions continue to exist side by side and are quite often combined by particular patients. I offer a way to interpret this medical plurality when I fuse Mary Douglas' method with certain traditional Navajo notions and psychological analyses by Friedrich Nietzsche. In this view, every person would be permanently situated in socially and phenomenologically heterogenic space, and particular healing traditions would heal different social..