‘Now You Got Your Answer...’

Abstract

Understanding the apparently effective bodily transformation by traditional Navajo healing rituals as the part of a consistent technological practice is, perhaps too quickly, perceived as undermining a foundation of western science in objectivity and logic. However, some of the differences that make a difference between Navajo and western technologies of the body may be due to contradictory spatiotemporal axioms for recognizing bodily boundaries. Attempting to explain what we don’t understand about a Navajo Shooting Way ceremony - our directly perceived experiences and talk in English about the ceremony by others - we draw analogies between the intentional bodily spaces cryptically described by Merleau-Ponty, linguistic studies of Navajo spatiality, and non-Euclidean projective geometry. We find that the Navajo healer takes a strong, phenomenological standpoint, but we also find much of what the healer tells us about her ceremony and its intended effect on bodies, to be nonsensical. However, we begin to hear more cogent sense in the healer’s words by means of spatial metaphors suggested by both the structure of the Navajo language and by projective geometry: codeterminative processes in place of dichotomies, ratio relationships in place of part/whole hierarchies, and manifesting temporalized space in place of linear, spatialized time.