Trust, talk and touch in Balkan folk healing

Soc Sci. Med Vol 21, No . 3, pp . 319-325 . 1985 Printed in Great Britain . All rights reserved

Copyright ,-

0277-9536185 $3 .00+0101 1985 Pergamon Press Ltd

TRUST, TALK AND TOUCH IN BALKAN FOLK HEALING BARBARA KEREWSKY-HALI'ERN Department of Anthropology, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA 01003, U .S .A . Abstract-Broadly based in long-term anthropological fieldwork in the Balkans (in Serbia, Macedonia and Bulgaria) . this discussion of folk healing techniques illustrates how convergence in the patient/practitioner relationship is of prime importance in effecting a positive outcome . $umadija in central Serbia is selected as an example, and treatment for erysipelas . a common health problem which villagers call 'the red wind', is described and analyzed . Against a sociocultural background in which the collective wisdom of the past is retained and transmitted orally to contemporary healers, especially to the bajaliea, or conjurer who heals with words, it is shown how shared communicative modes of trust, talk and touch are essential to the ritual psychomancy by which the treatment 'works' . Also considered are the ritual roles of women in this patriarchal society and peasants' perceptions of folk pharmacology as being extraneous to the eventual cure . Connections between cultural responses and physiological responses as manifested in the villages are suggested as counterparts of Western symptomatic treatments related to behavior modification .

village community or from the exigencies of peasant life . The practitioner is not a member of a privileged subset . There is no special training, other than being of appropriate age and being a retentive and willing aural recipient of centuries of orally transmitted collective wisdom . There are no constraints of honorific hierarchical language ; with both parties speaking the vernacular dialect of the Siokarski variant of Serbo-Croatian, there are no barriers to communication . And since all the villages from which data for this discussion are drawn are part of a communist state which restricts activities in the private sector, healing rituals are practiced discretely, if not clandestinely, and not in a public place . which might attract attention and approbation . In like manner, there is no economic differentiation between practitioners and other villagers . If it turns out that there is some manifestation of overt material difference, this may be due to special circumstances . For example, a particular morning of research comes to mind : two kerchiefed women, both with knee boots encased in mud, ploddingly guide a recalcitrant sow and her litter of squealing piglets along a muddy lane . One of them, baba Zorka, is a healer, simultaneously explaining the preparation of balms and poultices as she herds the pigs ; the other is the CONVERGENCE IN BALKAN FOLK anthropologist . Progress, such as it is, is interrupted HEALING by a young man on a new motorbike, an admired rural status symbol . He brakes alongside us with a When carrying out ethnomedical investigation, splendid arc of mud and asks, "Excuse me, Aunties, degrees of divergence or convergence in the 'patient/ which of you is 'onoga Orasanka' (that woman from practitioner relationship' or 'client/healer interaction' are among the first features noted . In Balkan folk Ora'sac)?' He explains that he is acting as courier for healing covergence is so apparent-i,e . the social gap a man from Garage, three villages or a half-day's between the two participants is so small-as to render journey away by cow cart . He tells us that the a conventional dyad is almost meaningless . This fact Gara'sanin is presently enroute to our village and sets is of importance in developing explanatory ap- off in another spray of mud. (The announced patient had suffered a stroke during the night and arrived in proaches based on shared modes of communicative Orasac later that day .) [2] competences implementing mind and body response Thus no geographical differentiation is made other interactions . Villagers refer to one another as nroj sefjak (`my, than as means of introductory identification . Alfellow villager') . Being skilled as a folk practitioner though they may be separated by distance and does not set the healer apart from the rest of the topography, participants are of the same culture . The

It has been said that biomedical models are designed to manage diseases, whereas ethnomedicine is modeled on people who are ill . Probably there is some truth to this generalization, but such a dichotomy may be partially unfair and incorrect . Some biomedical research is beginning to acknowledge relationships between perceptions and body responses that folk practitioners have long 'known' . In order to look in depth at one side of the issue, that is, to present a case study which documents effective health care delivery within the ethnomedical model. this article examines treatment procedures in a contemporary Balkan village . An example is selected from central Serbia [1] . Data are drawn from a cultural setting where pluralism in health care delivery now is available, but it is significant to note that most peasants (as well as some townspeople . all of whom have relatively easy access to medical facilities) usually select the folk way, performed in the village, This makes a strong statement about villagers' attitudes toward healing techniques at a time when both biomedical and ethnomedical alternatives are accessible .

319

320

BARBARA KEREw 5KY-HALPERN

man from Garage was not called 'the outsider* . Instead he was nag Garasanin ( our man from Garage') . thereby incoporating him into the immediate collectivity of village society and local concerns . As for differentiation due to physical condition, while in Ora'sac ne was never referred to as 'the stroke victim' or something similar. Such would not be compatible with village ethos related to hospitality and etiquette . Also, and surely of equal consideration, the less differentiated appellation served to deflect the evil eye . In peasant Southeast Europe in the 1970s and '80s, this remains a significant concern . For reasons detailed subsequently, those who provide health care are females . The practitioner (who may be a grandmother, cooperative farm laborer or herder in other aspects of her life) is referred to below as 'she' . The patient may be male or female, of course, but for pronominal clarity will be called 'he' . Another necessary definition is 'traditional' . Here traditional refers to folk practices or ethnomedicine, as compared to biomedical procedures (3] . Setting and social structure Villages in the field sample are located in the region of ~umadija . a gently rolling area which comprises the heartland of Serbia, the largest of the six constituent republics of Yugoslavia . Being an ethnic Serb formerly assumed being a member of the Orthodox Church, using the Cyrillic alphabet and participating in a set of cultural features which have been eroding at differing rates since the end of World War II and the introduction of a socialist government . In the early 1950s when fieldwork was initiated, a basic reform was a limitation of ten hectares on all private landholdings . This change affected few villagers since most peasant holdings in Sumadija were less than this size . Industries began to be established in nearby market towns, and many peasants opted for employment in the social sector, thereby becoming peasant-workers . Paved roads, electricity, easy access to medical facilities, increased literacy progams and the appearance of television, which opened windows on the wider world, all became part of the village scene [4] . Interestingly, other aspects of village life have been less affected . A significant one among these is oral tradition . Most villagers under age 50 now can read with ease, but a viable and valued skill remains the ability to transmit cultural inheritances in the form of epic poems, proverbs, aphorisms, genealogies and healing charms . The efficacy of oral charms for healing is a main consideration in this article [5] . Social structure, too, has changed relatively little . Rural Serbia still can he characterized as a land which is patriarchal, patrilineal and largely patrilocal . These factors have direct relevance to a discussion of folk healing. In this area it has always been men who have controlled the ongoing cycles of secular and ritual life, whether these deal with agricultural activites or religious and other annual rites . Women are excluded from such events except in prescribed female roles . A widow with no grown son at home may he a titular household head, but she is prohibited by societal convention from hosting her household slava, the ritual feast day honoring her affinal (husband's family's) patron saint.

Women as mediators Yet there appears to be an important and subtle complementarity at work in the villages . The regularized, cyclical activites of daily, seasonal and annual agricultural life, as well as the ordered secular and ritual cycles, continue to be performed by men . However, there are certain aspects of life which can be characterized as non-regularized and non-ordered . Intervention in these is carried out exclusively by women . They relate to women's skills as mediators with the past, the future and the unknown [6] . Communion with the past takes the form of ritual lamenting for the dead [7] . Foretelling the future is also the realm of women . Interceding with chthonic forces that blow through caves and lurk under rocks as bearers of diseases again is practiced by women . Especially here, in serving as go-betweens with the unknown, women are perceived in both their biological and ritual roles as providers of sustenance and comfort, as protectors and, ultimately, as healers . On a symbolic level, village women are archetypal mothers, a significant theme which resonates not only throughout the rich but little-studied genre of healing charms, but also throughout the ritual procedures for various healing techniques . While this complementary balance is acted out . women in the village are viewed (by village men) as mysterious, complex beings . polluting and dangerous but nevertheless imbued with unique powers of purification . For this reason a woman cannot engage in healing practices until she herself is non-polluting, i .e . ritually clean (very rarely pre-menstrual ; most usually post-menopausal) [8] . These circumstances are relevant to the writer's temporarily stepping out of the impersonal role of anthropologist and making a brief subjective detour . The privilege of having lived considerable portions of my adult life in Balkan villages imparts validity to these observations . Over the course of three decades of intermittent fieldwork recording changes in all aspects of peasant life, quite naturally peasants have taken account of changes in the observer as well . Over time I have moved through their recognized statuses of bride, woman, mother, matron and, lately, old woman . A turning point in my investigation of folk healing practices occurred a few years ago when our eldest daughter, then a college student, came to visit in the village . People who had known her since early childhood and at stages as she grew to maturity saw her that summer as rrela .'ripe', herself a grown woman ready to bear children . Their perceptions of her in turn elevated me to the status of baba, 'old woman' or ritually clean female . all euphemisms for presumably menopausal and therefore a safe and suitable recipient of the kinds of secret knowledge I had been trying for years to elicit without much success . Since then I have been incorporated into the informal sisterhood of village practitioners, an event unmarked by ritual of its own but one which, by its existence, makes my own understandings more sensitive . Therefore, this documentation of Balkan folk healing comes from the vantage point of a woman in the village, and, in a sense, of the village . As a result, the usual dyad, 'what the folk think'i'what the investigator thinks' may not be clearly marked . The following observations are based on research on



Trust, talk and touch in Balkan folk healing aspects of healing techniques used by four folk practitioners in three villages . PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE HEALING RITE

How and why does folk healing work so effectively? Shared expectations and shared behavioral competences are key to eventual resolution . Once a trust bond has been established, the communicative modes that bear the trust relationship along convergent tracks are founded in talk and touch . A focused look at these modes is demonstrated by selecting a common health problem and by showing how the communicative skills work in combination with the healer's psychocultural and ancillary pharmacological knowledge . In Serbian villages and elsewhere in the Balkans a health concern is erysipelas, known in Sumadija as crieni velar, 'the red wind' . This designation places erysipelas within an ancient system of folk taxonomy in which external characteristics of an ailment are color matched to perceived disease-bearing winds which come from 'out there' in the unknown world [9] . Erysipelas is a streptococcal infection brought on when bacteria invade an open wound or laceration . This results in a reversal of the body tissues' own healing mechanisms and causes a hard, hot and painful red ring around the wound [10] . Peasants are not concerned with medically-defined etiology ; their implicit understanding of cause and effect has to do with ill winds . Diagnosis is based on experience . The incidence of erysipelas is frequent in villages, where people work with sharp tool such as axes, scythes and pitchforks . and with livestock at dawn, dusk and in ill-lit barns amidst dung, mud and other accessories of everyday rural life . Risk is increased by relatively recently introduced occupational hazards such as tractors . combines and other machinery with cutting edges operating on topography better adapted to beasts of burden than to mechanization . In its most dangerous form 'the red wind' may progress to gangrene, caused when blood no longer circulates to diseased tissue and massive tissue death occurs . (Amputations observed in the village, however, result from wartime and other traumatic accidents and not from removal of a gangrenous limb brought on by an infected wound . This fact underlines the effectiveness of folk cures for 'the red wind' ; when treated appropriately, apparently it does not advance to a dangerous stage [I I] .) The trust bond

An individual afflicted with 'the red wind' seeks out a hajalica . a conjurer who heals with words . There are

usually one or two within a few hours' walk from any village . The ill person's relationship with the hajalica is based on referral and reputation, and so a trust relationship exists even before initial contact . As in the anecdote described above, sometimes a messenger is sent in advance, but usually an ill person simply chooses a hajalica and shows up in her yard . For her part the conjurer is extremely interested to learn who 'sent' him . This represents neither economic networking nor a conventional Western patient ;

321

practitioner relationship . Rather, it is an important form of social bonding . Both parties spend time getting to know one another, conversing about mutual acquaintances and potential affinal ties, thus exploring the possibility of an actual kin tie however far removed, and, in any case, creating a viable social link and a reaffirmation of the initial expression of trust . The ill person, aware of the rules of ritual psychomancy as part of a shared system of communicative competence, knows his part . He must he prepared to halt his own afternoon activities for the ritually prescribed three successive days (or, if too ill to walk, to arrange for someone to transport him by cart or car) and appear at the home of the bajalica when the sun begins its downward journey on each of these days [121 . For her part the conjurer makes an equal time commitment, and thus the two establish a treatment schedule reinforcing mutual trust . Baba Zorka maintains that she must place greatest trust in herself and appends modestly 'Prco bog, pa ja (First God, then I)' . Patient and practitioner may be cohorts . Even an older patient often begins by addressing the bajalica as Mother, an affirmation of his faith in her nurturance and care . As the days of ritual unfold, and as the practitioner instills in the ill person a sense of his own ability to help the process along, some patients discard the need for a surrogate mother and perceptively shift part of the trust and responsibility to themselves . The setting is unremarkable . It is a corner of the bajalica's yard, or her kitchen or a sleeping room, depending on the season . (In cold months the kitchen stove is the only source of heat .) Members of her household may be nearby . They try to be unobtrusive . The equipment one bajalica uses is neatly organized in a woven wool bag hanging from a peg on the wall . Another usually calls out to a daughterin-law or grandchild to fetch needed items . The structured ritual takes place in an unstructured environment . It is the bajalica's conveyance of trust, and her skillful use of talk and touch as she embarks on her intervention with the unknown and her interaction with the patient, that enwrap the two in sacred space and sustain a sense of sanctuary in the midst of this informal setting . Healing with talk

The very designation bajalica [from hajati (v) 'to heal with words' ; also hajanje 'healing with words', derive from Indo-European hha-'speaking out') [131 . indicates the phenomenological power of talk in this form of curative intervention . A skilled bajalica, being part of an oral traditional culture where all wisdom considered worthy of preservation and transmission to descending generations is retrieved from the storehouse of the mind and, in appropriate contexts, passed on orally, has the ability to tap into this inheritance in order to conjur up images and metaphors and thus to create variants on charms to dispel illnesses and other situations of disorder . Since these are never recorded (except by the anthropologist), the charms are fresh and 'correct' each time and in whatever form they are uttered [14] . For treating erysipelas some healers conjure up an inventory of red metaphors and then proceed to

322

BARBARA KEREWSKY-HALPERN

banish them orally from this world, where 'the red wind' has intruded, to 'out there' in the netherworld, the domain of ill winds . She does not know about red cells and white cells, but she understands well the classic balance between good and evil . She knows the sence of harmony when order is restored from disorder . By assigning dis-order and dis-ease a series of red colored metaphors she then is able to cast them away and to return to a non-red state, i .e . to order and ease . An inventive bajalica may also draw on her reserve of oral skills to create visual and phonetic inventories and later to reframe them in other parts of her charm . To evoke the unknown world an elaborate catalog of animals behaving inappropriately may be intoned : . . . where the cat does not meow, where the dog does not bark" and so forth . In Serbo-Croatian the sequence of animal names and negation of corresponding animal sounds creates a particularly hypnotic tonal charm. The listener, nodding off to this concatenation of brays, bleats, peeps, clucks, crows, and whatever else the conjurer adds in, abetted by the lull of syntactic repetition, allows himself to slip into that strange domain . With a pause and a reframing, she abruptly brings him back to a level closer to reality by calling up a new catalog, this time of inappropriate references to the accessories of traditional religious ceremony . Here the catalog is 'known', but the juxtaposition with the unknown, unnatural animal catalog is confusing . Such a'scrambling' technique serves to play the conscious mind against the unconscious with the result that the patient gives up conscious thought and drifts off to wherever the bajalica's hypnotic talk may lead him . Another ploy is to devise structured metaphors from the strange world, often in simple four-line narrative frames in which red animal mothers nourish their red young on red food . Here redness (erysipelas) is fitting for that red world . To give an idea of how this kind of metaphor takes shape (ideally it should be heard, not read), here is an example of a symbolic `animal mother' frame : Otud ide crvena kvoeka . Vode deret crvenih pilica, Padose na crceni bunjak, Pokupi%e crveni cruici.

there comes the red hen . She leads nine red chicks . She fell upon a red dung heap, She gathered up red worms . Out of

Using this structure, similar frames can be composed for a cow, sow, ewe or other barnyard mother . But the hajalica, the consumate non-red, healing mother, nourishes with her words and thus restores the red-afflicted patient from redness to lack of redness, from illness to health . The sounds she uses are augmented by employing the aorist verb form in the second couplet of the 'animal mother' frame . This special form, not used in ordinary speech . imparts a ritual quality to the sounds . Beyond that the strong sibilant suffixes (-ose/-ise) serve to soothe and shush . The final banishment of erysipelas to 'out there' often is accomplished by means of a closing metaphor in which the conjurer sends the disease away

through the co-mediation of a wolf whose forelegs and hind legs bridge both worlds (literally through, from anus to muzzle) [l5] . Site concludes by proclaiming the cure as a result of her own odgoror . In Serbo-Croatian (as in English) this term has the dual meaning of 'speaking out' (i .e . 'response') and 'responsibility', a situation which affirms her power of mediation with the unknown and her verbal skills in effecting the magic of the charm [l6] . In addition to the psychological affect of the semantics of the charm, structure and sound impart power as well . The conjurer's choice of sequential syntactic arrangements and her phonological repetitions make strong acoustical patterns . Shaped by alliteration, assonance and inflection, they work together with semantics toward precipitating two important responses . The talk element in the healing ritual enhances trust to a point where the patient eases readily into an altered state . Further, within the healing context induction of trance can activate endorphins, analgesia-producing endogenous compounds which, like morphine . may alleviate pain and produce calm [17] . Talk thus functions as healing metaphor, as exorcism and as tranquilizer . It provides the psychodynamic that moves the healing process toward resolution . Pliny the Elder, the Roman historian, raised the issue of the validity of healing by means of talk in his Historia Naturalis : "Have words and incantations any effect? This is a most important question and one never settled" [18] . Closer to our own time, analyzing the power of therapeutic talk provides explanatory models of process in oral tradition as well as of process in therapy and healing . Aged baba Radcjka interprets how she draws together the components of her charms : "Well, what I recollect, I recollect . What I don't recollect, I dream (up) at night' (19]. Touch as communicator

Touch is the communicative mode which keeps the healing process intact . Here proxemics are prime . Serbs interact with each other in extremely close proximity, often touching while sitting or standing together . Ordinary g reetings . to say nothing of animated conversations, are sealed with physical contact . This is more than a prolonged handshake or touch on the shoulder . It is a grasping of the other's clothing or sometimes a rhythmic tapping on the partner's arm or thigh, echoing the linguistic pulse . In intervention for curative purposes the quality of touch is more subtle . It is a connection . a bonding between two participants . The point of contact may not be directly at the locus of the problem . The type of therapeutic touch used by old women in the villages is all the more remarkable for its gentleness . Usually the conjurer takes her time, observes, touches with her eyes before she physically touches the patient . Her peasant hands are work-worn, so she warms and softens them with an emollient of heated lard . When she eventually makes contact with those rough-appearing hands, her touch is sure but delicate . During the healing ritual, practitioner and patient sit facing each other as closely as possible, either on a low bed and stool, or kneeling opposite each other on the floor or ground . As the conjurer utters her charm some of her spittle may land on the patient-

Trust, talk and touch in Balkan folk healing

323

Fig . 1 . Balkan bajalica and patient, 1984 . (Photo by B . Kerewsky-Halpern .) This he views as another form of beneficial touch, much like the power of fluids in Immoral medicine (especially interesting in view of the fact that our example is from contemporary Europe) . Gifted conjurers touch with sound as well . As suggested above . they caress with voice, using evocative words or utterances which alternately induce into trance and then punctuate to altertness at moments of exorcism . The patient appears to anticipate these special effects and to learn to respond to them with his body language in the course of the daily repetitions . Some healers also touch with verbal pacing, with eye contact and with breathing . Baba Gica seems to scan her own breathing and adjust it to that of her client . As the breaths deepen, the matched respiration pattern is readily apparent to the observer . When her attention is called to this sensitive response she replies, "I don't know . It just happens . We become as one" [201 . A patient of hers reacts saying, "Afterwards, I feel calmed down and, you know, livened up" . The ritual closure to each segment of the healing rite to banish 'the red wind' is purification by fire . Just as the oral charm conjurs up a clever collocation of red images, the sounds of which work their own special spell, so . too, the non-verbal communicative mode utilizes a strong visual red symbol to expedite the banishment . After each of the repetitions of the charm, a glowing red ember from the woodstove is scooped up in a coal scuttle and waved before the patient . Practitioner and patient bend toward and away from each other as the bajalica manipulates the live fire in minimal space between the two of them, weaving an unspoken, elegant choregraphy . Here again is convergence, a shared knowledge of appropriate communicative interaction . When the ember is extinguished (or sometimes casually tossed back into the stove) for the third time . this ends the ritual frame

and signals the formal close of treatment for the day . That the purification by fire is perceived by both participants as a closing act is noted by a change in breathing patterns, mood and body arrangement, by scraping of stools on the plank flooring or in the mud courtyard and by a fairly abrupt return to the secular world . Baba Draga invariably marks the passage by muttering, "Well, it's done . Now to put on a bit of balm" . FOLK PERCEPTIONS, BODY RESPONSES

The healer then matter-of-factly applies some common sense nostrums . These are considered activities outside the healing ritual . The bajalica examines the wound and the larger infected area . She washes her hands with rakija, a homemade highly distilled plum brandy (which has a wide range of practical uses in villages) and, dipping clean boiled rags into more brandy, carefully disinfects the wound . She draws the affected limb into a position where she can brace it on the bed or against her own body and glides the fingers of both her hands along skin surfaces surrounding the infected area, always palpating in the direction of the wound . What she appears to be doing is effecting lymph drainage, a procedure which may prevent further infection and ameliorate healing . Touching in this particular manner is explained as doing it kako treba, 'the right way' . The healer does not know that she is facilitating the movement of lymph and thus aiding healing ; what she does know is that according to the folk aesthetic she is performing the proper action . By the second day of treatment a bajalica will have prepared a balm to seal the wound . This she concocts from readily available village ingredients . They include pharmacologically effective fresh or dried pulverized sage and camphor leaves . These are strained

BARBARA KEREWSKY-HALPERN

324

with simmered lard . The herbs and fat are worked smooth with thumb and forefinger and bound with beeswax, resin and incense into an aromatic paste. This ointment is applied carefully, and the wound is wrapped with strips of clean rags . In the course of the three days necessary for the oral charm to do its 'work' the patient's erysipelas visibly subsides . Further infection is halted, and the healing process takes over . At the same time, the bajalica's reputation is maintained, the power of her charm is reinforced and the value of folk healing over a trip to the clinic in town is reaffirmed . In urban Serbia reaction to this phenomenon is mixed . A physician born in a village and on the staff of a hospital in an urban center in Sumadija asks me, "Why are you interested in these old-fashioned things? It's all be= veze ('nonsense')!" Another doctor, whose family have been city-dwellers for three generations, muses, "Who knows, maybe there is something to all this EXPLANATORY APPROACHES

Participants in this kind of intervention maintain that trust in the bajalica and faith in her words and touch are the treatment . The disinfecting, application of balm and protective bandaging (the biomedical aspects) viewed as coincidental to the healing process are nursing ministrations which are appropriate and successful . However, the fundamental efficacy of the healing ritual, and an explanation for its demonstrable power, resides in culture elements embedded in a people's collective knowledge . In the village setting these work because they are known as truths . Beliefs can help heal (21) . Dismissing the process as 'placebo healing' or 'faith healing' falls short of full explanation . In rural Serbian society particularly, another facet is the perceived benefit of active social intervention at all stages of the process . Interaction with a nurturing bajalica is regarded as infinitely more satisfactory than the impersonal biomedical option [22] . There is a third explanatory approach . Increasingly acknowledged by some neurologists, endocrinologists, immunologists, psychiatrists, anthropologists and others are vital correlations between brain and body responses . Research in the new fields of neuroimmunomodulation and psychoneuroimmunology are beginning to shed light on what popular writing has (relatively) long been calling the body/mind connection . The neurological linkages are complicated two-way paths . Understanding these interactive processes can clarify how the mind may influence the immune s ystem . as in the example selected . and, significantly, how the reverse procedure also may be effected . In our illustration the folk treatment described is good psychotherapy . Further, the ritual as played out in its diverse communicative modes incorporates aspects of many behavior modification methologies which usually conservative biomedical practitioners are beginning to appreciate . These approaches include forms of biofeedback, imaging, metaphor, stress reduction and relaxation techniques, hypnosis, massage and therapeutic touch . All these procedures in creative combinations are employed in the case

material as described, including ways in which the patient is helped to 'let go' of anxiety and illness and sometimes to start to take control over getting well . Self-esteem is enhanced . Finally the whole person feels better (" . . . calmed down and . . . livened up") . For centuries Servian conjurers have been using such symptomatic methodologies to banish 'the red wind', techniques modern medicine is just beginning to apply to treatment of cancers, infectious diseases and irregularities of the autoimmune system . There may be important lessons about treating people who are ill that biomedicine can learn from the Balkan bajalica . REFERENCES

1 . In addition to material from Sumadija in Serbia, field data is corroborated from other South Slav-speaking areas of the Balkans. Research supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities and International Research and Exchange Board are acknowledged with appreciation . 2 . Of interest in this traditional oral culture is that he identified himself as oofaoda, archaic designation for the advance guard serving a medieval hero such as those immortalized in Serbian epic poetry . His feat was accomplished on flashing motorbike instead of charging steed, 3 . Students and others regard the biomedical establishment as 'traditional' in the area around the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where alternative health care is abundant . 4 . Halpern J . M . and Kerewsky-Halpern B . A Serbian Village in Historical Perspective ; Case Studies in Cultural Anthropology . Holt . Rinehart & Winston, New York, 1972 . 5 . See Lord A . The Singer of Tales . Atheneum, New York . 1968 . See also Kerewsky-Halpern B . Genealogy as an oral genre in a Serbian village . In Oral Traditional Literature, A Festschrift for Albert Bates Lord (Edited by Foley J . M .), pp . 301-321 . Slavica Publishers, Columbus, OH, 1981 . On oral charms see KerewskyHalpern B . and Foley J . M . The Power of the word : healing charms as an oral genre . J. . Am . Folklore, 91, 901-924, 1978 and Kerewsky-Halpern B . Watch out for snakes . ethnosemantic misinterpretations and interpretation of a Serbian healing charm . .4nthrop . Ling . 309325. 1984 . 6 . Kerewsk y- Halpern B . On the complementarity of women's ritual roles . Die geselleschaftliche Stellung der Frau out dent Balkan, Frei Universitat . Berlin . In press . 7 . Kerewsky-Halpern B . Text and context in ritual lament . Can : Am . Slay . Stud. 15, 52-60, 1981 . 8 . See also Douglas M . Purity and Danger. Routledge & Kegan Paul . London . 1966 . 9 . In parts of rural England erysipelas is called 'the ruse' or 'St Anthony's tire' . The Balkan folk taxonomy is analyzed in Kerewsky-Halpern B . Speech as ritual and process: aspects of the ethnoeraphy of communication in Serbia . Ph .D . dissertation, Department of Anthropology, University of Massachusetts . Amherst, 1979 . 10 . Occasional untreated cases of erysipelas are the subject of rural horror stories . especially when infection occurs on the face . Folk diagnoses are based solely on observation and experience: the practitioner 'knows' the difference between 'the red wind' and an infected bug bite . for example . See also Majno G . The Healing Hand: Man and Wound in the Andent tForld. pp . 2-6 . Harvard University Press. Cambridge . MA . 1975 . 11 . Checking an earlier folk term for gangrene to see if it were crni retar . 'the black wind' (cf . Greek melm'mos),

Trust, talk and touch in Balkan folk healing reveals that 'the black wind' refers to blackheads ; this retains the integrity of the Serbian taxonomy based on superficial skin characteristics . 12 . This is another example of past wisdom carried over into the present . It is said that after noon is the propitious time to perform healing rituals, with the illness letting up as the day wanes. 13 . Pokorny J . Indogermani .cchc .s Etnmologi.sehes Warierbuch, pp. 105- 108 . A . Francke, Berne, 1953 . The English term banns, as in posting the banns, derives from the same root . 14 . On this process in epic poetry see Lord A . op . cit ., p . 101 . 15 . For a drawing of this phenomenon by the Serbian artist Milic od Macve, see journal issue cover . KcrewskyHalpern B . and Foley .1 . M . op . cit . . reproduced from Srpski mitnlo .fki refnik . p. 82 . Nolit, Belgrade, p . 82, 1970 . 16 . Formal linguistic analysis of semantic . syntactic and phonological variants of this charm appears in Kerewsky-Halpern B . and Folcy J . M . op . cit . The bajalica s embedded metaphors . scrambling techniques and framings bear a marked resemblance to methods used by medical hypnotherapist M . Erickson, whose writings illustrate the psychodynamics of trance induction through talk . 17 . Shamans and Endorphins, special issue Ed ties . Journal of the Society for Psychological Anthropology (Edited by Prince R .). Vol . 10, 4, 1982 . especially James H .

325

Possible involvement of endorphins in altered states, pp . 394-408 . 18 . Pliny . 76 CE, quoted in Manjo G . op . cit . .. p . 345 . Pliny notes further, "we certainly still have formulas to charm hail, various diseases and burns, some actually tested by experience, but I am very shy of quoting them, because of the widely differing feelings they arouse . Wherefore everyone must form his own opinion about them as he . please"" 19. In Serbo-Croatian her utterance is, . Sta aunt . upanuim . ja upamtim . $ro ne upamiim, ja sasnim noci" . 20. Her process and commentary parallel approaches in movement awareness; see Feldenkrais M . 71re Elusive Ohriou .s. Meta Publications, Cupertino . CA . 1981 . 21 . Hahn R . A . and Kleinman A . Belief as pathogen, belief as medicine : 'voodoo death' and the 'placebo phenomenon' in anthropological perspective . Med. Anthrop . Q . 14, 1, 3 ff, 1983 . See also Brody H . Does disease have a natural history? Med . Anthrop . Q . 14, 1, 4 ff and Stein H . F. To cure, to control, to please : medicine after the demise of 'the placebo' . Med. Anthrop . Q . 15. 1, 4 ff, 1983 . 22 . A sexist issue suggests itself here . There are men who are gentle, caring and nurturing . Why cannot they be healers? The explanation lies in attributes of purity and power ascribed to ritually clean woman only and to the underlying balance in realms of intervention in a society defined as male-dominated .