Healing Through States of Consciousness: Animal Sacrifice and Christian Prayer Among the Kachin in Southwest China

ABSTRACT

Healing rituals can be understood in terms of configurations of two states of consciousness—a culturally elaborated everyday waking consciousness, and an enhanced and culturally elaborated state of consciousness. Two healing rituals performed by the ethnic Kachin in Southwest China differentiate these two states of consciousness in their theories of life and death. The first ritual, animal sacrifice, employs the ordinary consciousness, including will and expectation, of participants through the enhanced state of consciousness of the ritual officiant. The second, Christian prayer, utilizes the enhanced consciousness of Christian Congregation to achieve psychic transformation. These two rituals maneuver different configurations of the two states of consciousness in achieving healing efficacy.

KEYWORDS:

• Animal sacrifice
• China
• Christian prayer
• healing rituals
• states of consciousness

Acknowledgments

IRB was approved by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (IRB Protocol Number: 09422). I thank F. K. L. Chit Hlaing, Janet D. Keller, Pamela J. Stewart, Andrew Strathern, and my anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on my earlier drafts. I also thank Shiping Li for her assistance with my fieldwork and for her discussions about fieldwork data.

Notes

1. The term ‘Kachin’ is used in English and French to refer to people who call themselves Jinghpaw across the borders of China, Burma, and India. Currently the term, used as a multi-ethnic category by the Jinghpaw elites, involves a number of other ethnic groups. The word Kachin is the transliteration of the Kachin term Gachye (meaning ‘red land,’ referring to the Kachin origin place in their genesis legends). The term Jinghpaw is written in the Chinese Pinyin orthography as Jngpō, and is pronounced in the Kachin dialect in India as Singhpo. In China, they are known as one of the nation’s 55 officially identified ethnic minorities (mínzú). Both Kachin and Jngpō include the same six branches of the people, while in China Jngpō also includes ethnic Lìsù that live together with Jngpō and in Burma Kachin includes Hka Hku (see Sadan 2013). The largest branch of Kachin is also called Jinghpaw. The language of the Jinghpaw is used as the ritual language, and their political system is treated as a model, for all the other branches. In this article, I focus on the Jinghpaw branch in China, most of whom live in Tongbiguan and Kachang Townships, Yunnan Province. When I say Kachin, I refer to the Jinghpaw branch unless otherwise specified.

2. Kachin is a language with four tones: 33 (mid-level); 31 (low falling); 55 (high-level); 51 (high falling). Each digit represents one of the three basic voice pitches, respectively 1 = low, 3 = mid, 5 = high (for details, see Xu et al. 1983). For the purpose of economy, I do not mark tones for names of place and person. All personal names used in the article are pseudonyms.

3. About half of the Christians (mostly men) in the village are not committed to Christianity. They often join sacrificial rituals and enjoy alcohol. When facing serious illness not properly cured in local hospitals or by Christian prayer, they resort to animal sacrifice.

4. Although animal sacrifice is also part of the Judeo-Christian tradition, the type of Christianity recognized and appreciated by Christians in my fieldwork sites is free from sacrifice. This feature of Christianity has been ridiculed by sacrifice makers, who claimed that Christian prayer does not work simply because following each prayer Christians make chicken soup for their own consumption, rather than offer it to God. Sacrifice makers then asked: Why should God help these selfish Christians?

5. I thank one of the reviewers for helping me to address the issue of the binary and to articulate a more open argument.

Additional information

Funding

Fieldwork during 2009–2010 was supported by a Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant from the US National Science Foundation (BCS 09-18290 DISS), a grant from the Lewis and Clark Fund for Exploration and Field Research, and a Dissertation Travel Grant from Graduate College at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Fieldwork in 2011 was supported by a Cognitive Science/Artificial Intelligence Award from the Beckman Institute at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. My write-up was also supported by a Josephine de Karman Fellowship in 2013 and a grant from the Chinese National Social Science Foundation in 2014 (13AZD099).

Notes on contributors

Wenyi Zhang

Wenyi Zhang is an assistant professor at the Department of Anthropology, and Center for Medical Humanities, Sun Yat-sen University, China. He is a co-author of Individual and Collective Memory Consolidation: Analogous Processes on Different Levels (MIT Press, 2012).