Selfhood in C. Laderman’s and C. Levi-Strauss’s Works

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The notion of selfhood implies both individuals and social creatures, shaping one’s personal existence and his or her relations with other members of society. “Self” means a particular being any person is; selfhood distinguishes one person from another, draws the parts of human existence together and outlines the perspectives of future development of one’s personality. By investigating and realizing what the self truly is, people expect to gain greater happiness; they hope to become free from fetters and restrains, they long for establishing better relations with other people and achieve power over them.

Many attempts have been made by scientists, philosophers, writers, etc., to reveal the mystery of selfhood, the concept of self has been studied in various dimensions. The current paper is also aimed at investigating it, and it is concerned with the notion of selfhood as Carol Laderman, and Levi-Strauss see it. Medical Anthropology is the field of interest of both scientists.

Also, Carol Laderman, a professor who received her Ph. D. in Anthropology, studied Southeast Asia, nutrition, reproduction, and sex roles. Her works include Wives and Midwives: Childbirth and Nutrition in Rural Malaysia, Taming the Wind of Desire: Psychology, Medicine and Aesthetics in Malay Shamanistic Performance, and The Performance of Healing.

Claude Levi-Strauss is a French anthropologist who is well-known for his development of structural anthropology. His books include The Raw and the Cooked, The Effectiveness of Symbols, The Savage Mind, Structural Anthropology and Totemism. The author’s countless travels to Brazil and his fruitful visits to North and South American Indian tribes (in fact, he spent more than 30 years studying the conduct of the North and South American Indian tribes) enabled him to conclude that the characteristics of man are everywhere identical. The social organization of the tribes that the author used is structuralism.

As far as Carol Laderman investigation is concerned, we should start with the scientist’s trip to Malaysia. The author’s main target was to study childbirth practices in an area where shamanism must have died out 75 years earlier. But Laderman observed that the healers still remained an integral part of the village medical system. Pak Long Awang is one among many representatives of shamanism there, and he serves as a country doctor. Pak Long Awang makes the diagnosis by inducing a deep trance, and then when the diagnosis is cleared out, he treats aches and pains.

The methods that the shaman uses seem to be sort of fantastic in the present day when medicine strikes with new technologies that hasten its development. But Pak Long’s ritual healing works its magic by altering the levels of brain endorphins in his patients. Brain endorphins are the body’s natural opiates that are produced by every human in response to various extreme situations. As psychoanalysis comprises theories concerning the functioning of the mind, this ritual healing may be compared to psychoanalysis; revealing a person’s self that is an integral part of any ritual trance may also be regarded as a kind of psychoanalysis.

As Carol Laderman confesses, in the beginning, she refused to undergo Pak Long’s trances. Being a Westerner and a scientist Laderman was afraid to place herself under the shaman’s control. Still, she kept on investigating the sensations that patients under the trance had. But they could never give her the description she needed, and the shaman explained to her that one might realize something only when he or she experiences it (Laderman).

Once, the scientist found herself in the situation when the magic of the shaman influenced her. Laderman sat beside the shaman on a special mat recently occupied by a cured patient. Pak Long made a signal to the musicians to start the music; this was the one common for healing trances. First, it was the drums and gongs with their steady rhythm and then it was the play of the spike fiddle. The music stimulated the scientist’s desire to submit to trance and to give away to herself.

Laderman describes her feelings under the trance in such a way:

As the vibrations of the drums and gongs entered my body, my eyes seemed to glaze over. As the music became louder, my mouth opened, trembling uncontrollably. I began to feel cold winds blowing inside my chest, winds that increased in intensity as the music swelled and accelerated until it felt as if a hurricane was raging within my heart. I put my hands on my chest to try to calm it, but instead, I began to move my shoulders and then the whole upper part of my body as if I were about to get up and dance. With the last vestiges of my self-control, I prevented myself; I still feared embarrassment. But as the music swelled to a climax, I began to move my head so quickly and violently that, had I not been in a trance, my neck would undoubtedly have snapped.

The music stopped abruptly. Instantly, I stopped shaking my head and sank to the floor. Pak Long began reciting spells to bring me out of trance. I came out very quickly, literally as though a spell had been broken. I felt good; the only aftereffect was a slight pain in my stomach. Women crowded around me to wash my face with jasmine water and massage my stomach. The whole thing had taken about 20 minutes (Laderman).

The Malays believe that the universe exists due to the interrelation of four basic elements: earth, air, fire and water. When this system does not function appropriately, the person falls ill. What can save the person’s health and self is his or her talents and desires; they are called airs or winds. When these inner winds are expressed, they are powerful and can guard the person from all possible diseases; when, on the contrary, they are denied or neglected, they become dangerous and cause various health problems. The shaman’s actions are aimed at releasing these winds out of the person. When the winds are released human self also releases.

As it has already been mentioned, Malaysian shamans use music to submit a person to trance; the most commonly used beat is four beats per second. This is exactly the optimum frequency for pain relief through electrically stimulated acupuncture. This beat also matches the EEG frequency of theta waves produced by the brain when the person meditates.

The role of endorphins is also important. They are generated in the brain in response to pain, stress and the like. Laderman suggests that they can be generated in response to a belief as well. And when the patient believes that he or she has been given an effective medication, he or she recovers in response to this belief. When the person fights with a disease, his or her self reveals: the person collects all his will and power, both physical and moral, thus hardening oneself.

Laderman’s investigations have proved that Malay shamans always recognize the interaction of mind and body and try to benefit from it as much as possible; therefore, the notion of the self is comparable to psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis in this context is referred to as a type of treatment in which the analyst studies the unconscious side of the person’s self. The doctor analyzes the free associations, fantasies and dreams of the patient and uses this insight to solve the patient’s problems. In the case of the Malay shamans, this is ritual healing that helps the doctor to get the necessary material.

One can observe this similarity between the notion of self and the psychoanalysis theory while reading Laderman and Roseman’s work Performance of Healing (1996). This is a story of a shaman through which the reader can understand how the human self is revealed through ritual healing: the work focuses on “Chini as “patient”, “victim,” or “afflicted” and cast the authorial voice as an analyst, recounting her “problem” and its resolution.

As a narrative strategy, the case study reduces and simplifies the complex interactions of several family members, shamans, gods, and ancestors brought into play by ritual as rich and complex as a Korean kut … Chini’s story, and its realization in the performance of her kut, comes to us linked with other stories; stories from her family who see Chini’s calling as tied to their own troubled history, and from the shamans who find resonances with their own experience.” (Laderman and Roseman 114)

In this book, the authors write that “sometimes only the performance of words and music, poetry and drama, comedy and dance can restore health where other forms have failed.” (Laderman and Roseman 214) Being engaged in these performances, the patient unravels the mysteries of his or her soul, thus shaping one’s selfhood.

The significance of Laderman’s studies is that she searched for reasons why healing rituals performed by Malaya shamans are considered to be successful; she described the shaman’s situation in society and the way they explained the reasons for illness. The scientist analyzed the texts that shamans used in their rituals and investigated the influence of these texts on the human psyche. Also, the author analyzed the texts in order to grasp the nature of the rituals.

Before considering how selfhood is depicted in the works of another scientist, namely Levi-Strauss, we should understand what concept of self he had. For him, the truth of self-consciousness is always functional, and it is understood only in reflection or praxis. “This self is entirely an activity (praxis), but the activity of being aware of an object; the self, then, is dissolved into that object by its awareness, and the object, in turn, is dissolved into its constituent symbols. In this way, the self is actually an object among other objects, a thing among things, a thing in the world. In short, for Lévi-Strauss, it is nonexistent: “my ambition being to discover the conditions in which systems of truth become mutually convertible… the pattern of those conditions takes on the character of an autonomous object, independent of any subject.” (Shalvey 123)

Levi-Strauss sees self the same way Rousseau sees it in the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, that is “by giving myself to all I give myself to no one and consequently am free, only within the collective.” (Shalvey 105) It is also important that Levi-Strauss believes that an individual is marked by ambiguity; this ambiguity results not from the person’s freedom, but from his or her being determined, “for the mind is ambiguous only because it is metaphorical, which … means rigorously scientific (that is, ambiguous in the message, but isomorphic in the code).” (Shalvey 134).

Levi-Strauss claims that everything is meaningful in self, “for if there is meaning anywhere, there is meaning everywhere. This omnipresence of meaning suggests that Ricoeur is correct when he calls Lévi-Strauss’s view of the self as “a Kantianism without a transcendental subject”, but one that is homologous to nature even is nature itself. Lévi-Strauss acknowledges the similarity of his work to some sort of nontranscendental Kantianism.”(Shalvey 123)

Reading the author’s essay The Sorcerer and his Magic from the Structural Anthropology, one better understands how Levi-Strauss sees selfhood. In this work, the author described a Kwakiutl sorcerer named Quesalid. This tricky character wants to debunk shamanism and becomes a shaman himself with this purpose. During a ritual healing, a newly-made shaman pulls out an object, pretends to extract it from the patient’s body and presents it as the incarnation of the disease. When the object is pulled out, the patient is cured. Then, the shaman decides to subvert the treatment by replacing the object with a few drops of his saliva, thus identifying entirely with the illness.

In such a way, Quesalid hardly compromised his reputation – in fact, “he enhanced it to the point where he eventually attributed some real “power” to the psychological impact of these “performances” and even refused to disclose his method to the elder shamans.”(Levi-Strauss 134)

The undertaking of the main character seems to be rather reasonable if we suppose that it was aimed at understanding the shamans instead of refuting them. Many psychoanalysts argue that critics cannot understand the nature of the psychoanalytic claims and the evidence for them without themselves being psychoanalyzed. But in Quesalid’s case, he dealt with a practice that depended on concealment: the character decided to appreciate the character of magic by practising it rather than experiencing its effects.

The story of Quesalid is told in order to emphasize the importance of social myth: communities or groups of people commonly believe in cure by magic. Levi-Strauss expresses his point in the following way: “Quesalid did not become a great shaman because he cured his patients; he cured his patients because he had become a great shaman.” (Levi-Strauss 180) The community’s belief in the shaman’s powers helped Quesalid to produce those powers. Freud himself recognizes the importance of the community’s belief in physicians, which can win him immense prestige and contribute to the effectiveness of his technique. Freud stated:

Hitherto, this authority, with its enormous weight of suggestion, has been against us. All our therapeutic successes have been achieved in the face of this suggestion: it is surprising that any successes at all could be gained in such circumstances… I can only say that when I assured my patients that I knew how to relieve them permanently of their sufferings, they looked around my modest abode, reflected on my lack of fame and title, and regarded me as the possessor of an infallible system at a gambling-resort, of whom people say that if he could do what he professes he would look very difficult himself.

Nor was it really pleasant to carry out a physical operation while the colleagues whose it should have been to assist took pleasure in spitting into the field of operation, and while at the first signs of blood or restlessness in the patient, his relatives began threatening the operating surgeon. … Social suggestion is at present favourable to treating nervous patients by hydropathy, dieting and electrotherapy, but that does not enable such measures to get the better of neuroses. Time will show whether psycho-analytic treatment can accomplish more (Freud 146).

Quesalid himself attributed his first success to the patient’s faith. The treatment worked “because he [the sick person] believed strongly in his dream about me.” (Levi-Strauss 176)

Levi-Strauss does not only points to the content of the rituals and symbols that produce cures but to the acceptance by the community as well.

According to Levi-Strauss, symbols are effective not because of their being literary true and not because they change beliefs, thus transforming the associated mental state, but because they correspond with the underlying reality.

The significance of the work under consideration is that the author offers parallels between the shaman and psychoanalyst. The comparison acquires special interest in terms of abreaction (in psychoanalysis, this process discharges the negative emotions associated with trauma, whereas in a shamanic ritual, the patient’s physical, psychological, or spiritual problems are discharged at a particularly intense juncture in the narrative) that the author suggests:

It is true that in the shamanistic cure, the sorcerer speaks and abreacts for the silent patient, while in psychoanalysis, it is the patient who talks and abreacts against the listening therapist. But the therapist’s abreaction, while not concomitant with the patient’s, is nonetheless required since he must be analyzed before he himself can become an analyst. It is more difficult to define the role ascribed to the group by each technique.

Magic readapts the group to predefined problems through the patient, while psychoanalysis readapts the patient to the group by means of the solutions reached. But the distressing trend which, for several years, has tended to transform the psychoanalytic system from a body of scientific hypotheses that are experimentally verifiable in certain specific and limited cases into a kind of diffuse mythology interpenetrating the consciousness of the group, could rapidly bring about parallelism (Levi-Strauss 156).

Levi-Strauss claims that the comparison between psychoanalysis and psychological therapies that were widespread long ago is common in the present day. This comparison encourages psychoanalysis to re-examine its principles and methods: psychoanalysis transforms its treatments into conversions. “For only a patient can emerge cured; an unstable or maladjusted individual can only be persuaded. A considerable danger thus arises: The treatment (unbeknown to the therapist, naturally), far from leading to the resolution of a specific disturbance within its own context, is reduced to the reorganization of the patient’s universe in terms of psychoanalytic interpretations.” (Levi-Strauss 178)

One more work of Levi-Strauss is interesting in terms of studying selfhood; this is the Effectiveness of Symbols. Here Levi-Strauss studies the song of the shaman, which is sung to facilitate difficult childbirth. The shaman’s role is to fight against the abuse of power by Muu. Muu is a power responsible for the formation of the fetus; she has exceeded her function and captured the soul of the mother. The shaman wants Muu to release the soul of the mother, and his spirit helpers help him in this affair. The author observes:

The shaman provides the sick woman with a language, by means of which unexpressed, and otherwise inexpressible, psychic states can be immediately expressed….bring[ing] to conscious level conflicts and resistances which have remained unconscious…. The manipulation must be carried out through symbols, that is, through meaningful equivalents of things meant which belong to another order of reality (Levi-Strauss 201).

Levi-Strauss claims that the song can evoke and does evoke a physiological response that helps the patient to relax: when the mother is relaxed, childbirth goes easier. The role of myth is to work on the image to produce a psychological and physiological response. The cure of the patient comes from the manipulation of the sick organ that results from singing. The myth serves here as a concrete interpretation of a more abstract concept.

In this work, Levi-Strauss also compares the shaman’s role to that of the psychotherapist, who is a mediator between the patient’s unconscious and consciousness. He states, “in both cases, the purpose is to bring to conscious level conflicts and resistances which have remained unconscious owing to their repression by other psychological forces or to their own specific nature which is not psychic, but organic or even simply mechanical.” (Levi-Strauss 218).

As well, as the shaman’s ritual begins with a narrative that induces details specific to the patient’s life, the psychotherapist gets detailed narratives from the patient during treatment.

During the abreaction, both in the case of psychoanalysis and ritual treatment, a patient’s experience is either provoked or evoked. Though the roles of the shaman and the psychoanalyst differ in that the shaman is a narrator and the psychoanalyst is a listener, they both achieve healing by establishing the link between the unconscious and the conscious. But if in psychoanalysis one implies the conscious and the unconscious, in shamanism, it is the world of humans and the world of spirits. In psychoanalysis, the healer performs the action, and the patient supplies the myth, whereas, in shamanism, the healer supplies the myth, and the patient performs the action.

The author claims that both psychological and physiological trauma can be restricted and resolved if they are made accessible to conscious thought. For example, in childbirth, the patient is provided with the myth: some symbols or language to express psychic states that cannot be otherwise expressed. This “induces the release of the physiological process, that is, the re-organization in a favourable direction of the process to which the…woman is subjected.” (Levi-Strauss 198)

The significance of the work under analysis is in the author’s examination of the complex interrelationship between symbols, thought, and bodily processes by comparing the shamanistic cure and Freud’s psychoanalytical method. Through therapies involving various forms of symbolization and modelling of experience (such as the use of language, imagery, etc.), the author demonstrated that physiological reparation and healing involve closely parallel processes.

Thus, we see that in his two essays, The Sorcerer and the Magic and The Effectiveness of Symbols, Levi-Strauss makes the following suggestions: In the first essay, he argues that shamanism is effective when there is the provision of a theory or conceptual scheme that enables the patient to reintegrate his or her alien experience. The shaman’s theory should not be necessarily true as society accepts it, and as long as the patient believes it, it is significant to the patient. In the Effectiveness of Symbols, Levi-Strauss insists on at least “structural” correspondences over and above coherence.

If we consider the current situation with psychoanalysis and shamanism, we will see that psychoanalysis is a case of a private matter, as it is accessible only to the patient and doctor, whereas shamanism is radically different: the narrative performed in a shamanic ritual becomes known to an extended family or even an entire community. For example, in Korea, shamanic ceremonies are still held for the entire nation, and it does not prevent the people who take part in the ceremony to get a better understanding of their selfhood.

As long as humanity exists, people’s attempts to understand the concept of selfhood will never run out. The authors whose works we have examined in the current paper made this concept more understandable for the readers and evoked their burning desire to decipher the codes of their selves.

Works Cited

Allport, Gordon. The Individual and His Religion. New York: Macmillan, 1950.

Bahr, Donald. Piman Shamanism and Staying Sickness. University of Arizona Press, 1982.

Brandt, Allen. No Magic Bullet. Oxford University Press, 1987.

Child, Alice B., and Irvin L. Child. Religion and Magic in the Life of Traditional Peoples. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1993.

Cradon-Malamud, Libbet. From the Fat of Our Souls. University of California Press, 1991.

Eliade, Mircea. Myth and Reality. New York: Harper and Row, 1963.

Eliade, Mircea. Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964.

Estroff, Sue E. Making it Crazy. University of California Press, 1980.

Freud, Sigmund. Future Prospects of Psycho-Analytic Therapy Standard Edition XI, 1910.

Harner, Michel J. The Way of the Shaman: A Guide to Power and Healing. New York: Harper & Row, 1980.

Laderman, Carol, and Marina Roseman. Performance of Healing. New York: Routledge, 1996.

Laderman, Carol. “Trances That Heal: Rites, Rituals and Brain Chemicals.” IOBA Standard Feb. 2008. Independent Online Booksellers Association. Web.

Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Structural Anthropology. Trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf. New York: Basic Books, 1963.

Stanley, J. Tambiah. Magic, Science, Religion, and the Scope of Rationality. NY: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

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Selfhood in C. Laderman’s and C. Levi-Strauss’s Works

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