"The Performance of Healing" is a collection of essays by anthropologists covering a wide range of the medical, holistic, and religious aspects of healing and of death. The contributors to this volume broaden the field of medical anthropology by demonstrating that healing involves the senses in treatments whose efficacy depends in part on dramatic performance.
Music, movement, players, audience, setting, props, plots, comedy, poetry and dialogue constitute the performance of healing. If healing is to be effective, the patient's mind, body and emotions must be engaged through the sensory impact of dramatic media.
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 repairing social relations.
Medical systems need to be understood from within, as experienced by healers, patients and others whose minds and hearts have both become involved in this important human undertaking. These essays on the performance of healing in societies ranging from rainforest horticulturists to dwellers in the American megalopolis will touch readers' senses as well as their intellects.

Medical systems need to be understood from within, as experienced by healers, patients, and others whose minds and hearts have both become involved in this important human undertaking. Exploring how the performance of healing transforms illness to health, initiate to ritual specialist, the authors show that performance does not merely refer to, but actually does something in the world. These essays on the performance of healing in societies ranging from rainforest horticulturalists to dwellers in the American megalopolis will touch readers' senses as well as their intellects.