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Arthur Lawton - Review of David W. Kriebel, Powwowing Among the Pennsylvania Dutch: A Traditional Medical Practice in the Modern World

Abstract

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Based on ears and mind that are open to understanding the practice of powwowing as participants see and experience it, David Kriebel’s book attentively engages in conversation with believers of the faith-based healing practice known in Pennsylvania Dutch as braucherei, or powwowing, an alternative healing method that for the most part is practiced quietly and behind the scenes. Kriebel clearly follows David Hufford’s lead in accepting the life experiences of both healer and healed as valid real experience that is to be taken seriously. Following a concise primer containing both the history and traditional resources of powwowing, he describes in detail the structure and the performance of curing by powwowing. Set in a context of the powwow experiences of others who seek healing, he describes his own experience of being powwowed. Consistent with his embracing and positive approach to the subject, he reports the failure of his treatments without drawing undue attention to it.

Kriebel places the Pennsylvania Dutch practice of powwowing in the context of developing nineteenth-century practices of homeopathic and allopathic medicine and the broad effect of professionalization of medical practices. He sees the 1929 York County, Pennsylvania, Hex Murder trial as a pivotal moment at which point, in the interests of rehabilitating the “dumb Dutchman” image resulting from negative nationwide publicity, powwowing and its spiritual opposite, hexerei, began to slip into the background.

Presenting the self as consisting of multiple identities, Kriebel defines powwowing as a negotiation of identities taking place between the healer, the patient, and God. Aspects of personal and social identity involved in this process are positioned along a bipolar continuum defined by success and lack of success in the healing act. For the healer, there is the parallel continuum of identity in terms of closeness to God who is the source of all healings, and for the patient there is the parallel continuum of identity between curable and incurable patient. Position on these continua contributes meaning and identity for the participants which Kriebel structures in terms of four aspects: real, claimed, feared, and ideal identity. This work of identity negotiation uses identity claimed by each participant to position perceived real identity closer to ideal and farther from feared identity.

Powwowing, he says, has undergone a transformation from “an eclectic form of ‘white magic’ interpreted through a Christian lens, to a form of spiritual healing coming directly from God” (169). Daisy Dietrich, “the best example of a professional powwower that I have encountered in my fieldwork,” (165) accepts only free-will offerings and exemplifies Kriebel’s transformation from magic to spiritual healing, because she cannot touch the offering left under the Bible until the patient has left the premises. Otherwise, she says, “That would be saying I’m the one doing the healing, and by no means; I’m not. So it’s God” (169).

Kriebel acknowledges his openness to participation in the healing process of powwowing through his essentially non-committal description of the ineffectual results of his own treatments. Avoiding a clear-cut statement of his own expectations, he positions his work among the Pennsylvania Dutch as one to be compared with other ethnographic studies of healing and harming through belief systems. Direct involvement of the ethnographer in the practice under study may be compared with similar ethnographies of alternative healing practices such as In Sorcery’s Shadow, Stoller and Oake’s memoir of apprenticeship among the Songhay of Niger, and in Harry G. West’s short Ethnographic Sorcery, an account of sorcery among the Muedans in Northern Mozambique. Each presents a very different approach to direct ethnographer-involvement in the process, with widely differing consequences, yet all describe healing and harming through faith systems.

Kriebel organizes his material using a hierarchical cultural model based on primary, secondary, and tertiary beliefs. In this model, subsumed under the Pennsylvania Dutch Worldview are two relevant components, the Cultural Model of Healing and the Cultural Model of Divinity. Sources of Illness at the secondary level are constituted by natural factors, and Sources of Healing divide three ways, into Spontaneous Healing (God’s will), Biomedical Treatment (God-given skill), and Healing Power Channeled from God, including powwowing. At the tertiary level, in Biomedical Treatment, physicians freely control the use of their skills, and so may be paid. God controls the use of His power in powwowing, and so powwowers may not be paid for healing (though free-will gifts may be left to be found).

Filling his book with anecdotes, case histories, biographical sketches of many practitioners, and detailed descriptions of varied healing processes, David Kriebel makes it clear that not only is powwowing frequently practiced today, but that it may well be experiencing an increase of interest consistent with rising interest in alternative forms of healing by the medical community. An important quality of this book is that it makes available to both the wider readership as well as the academic community an opportunity to sympathetically meet both healers and healed, presented as community neighbors whose beliefs and practices engender a mixed response but which also are systematically organized by the author and available for ethnographic comparison and analysis. The reader is provided with a glossary of illnesses treated, statistics on the practice, and many case summaries. For the general reader it is an engaging introduction to the practice, and for the academic it is a serious source for the study of a field to which there has been paid far too little attention.

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[Review length: 895 words • Review posted on April 6, 2009]