Word: navajoized
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...behind their exterior mask and pipe," says Psychiatrist E. Fuller Torrey of the National Institute of Mental Health. Most of his colleagues would not go that far, but some believe that witch doctors can help their emotionally troubled patients. That is why the institute is now providing scholarships for Navajo Indians studying "curing ceremonials" under the tutelage of tribal medicine men on the federal reservation at Rough Rock, Ariz...
...program was conceived by the Indians and encouraged by Psychiatrist Robert Bergman of the Indian Health Service. Without it the Navajo medicine man might die out, because potential students need to work at paying jobs and have no time for training. Describing the program at a recent meeting of the American Psychiatric Association, Bergman explained that the ceremonials are based on a belief that disease is "caused by disharmony with the universe, including the universe of other men." To restore harmony, a medicine man or "singer" conducts a traditional "chantway," leading the ailing victim, his relatives and friends...
Most traditional scientists look on such ceremonials as merely quaint performances that have no significant effect. But Bergman has long disagreed. He was particularly impressed six years ago when he met a Navajo medicine man named Thomas Largewhiskers, who had apparently cured a psychotic Indian woman after a modern psychiatric hospital had failed to help...
Besides, says Bergman, Navajo medicine has much in common with psychoanalysis. Both have an "ordered method of establishing intense, helpful relationships" between doctor and patient. And both are based on a belief that much behavior is shaped by unconscious processes. "There is a part of the mind that we don't really know about," Largewhiskers told Bergman. "That part is the most important in whether we become sick or remain well...
...Francisco Bay near the home of Bride Daria Halprim, who starred in Zabriskie Point. The music began as a composition for synthesizer, ram's horn, flute, and a Yemenite trumpet recorded especially for the wedding. Then, to the melody of a flute song, Daria, in a purple velvet Navajo dress, walked to the bridal canopy designed by her father, Landscape Architect Lawrence Halprin. After the ceremonial crushing of the wineglass under Hopper's foot, everybody danced a hora to the traditional Hava Nagila-arranged for guitar and Congo drum...