The following "Researcher Reflection" from Dr. Barakatullo Ashurov is part of an ongoing series where we spotlight CSWR scholars and their research.
Traditional healthcare practices in Central Asia are embedded in local cultures, histories, and religiosities. They are more than just different or alternative healing methods that contrast modern medicine. Interpreting such healing practices as religious survivals, reflections of pre-Islamic culture, or evidence of some universal shamanism fails to appreciate their holistic approach to care, which resonates with diverse cultural and religious beliefs. Healing practices must be studied in local contexts, informed by local histories, practices, and phenomena.
Traditional healers play a prominent role in Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan) due to their deep understanding of health and healing beliefs and conceptual frameworks specific to their communities. Physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being are interconnected in traditional healing health beliefs. Illness and wellness are part of God's will and destiny. Practices ranging from herbal remedies to intricate spiritual healing rituals are rooted in cosmological beliefs and a profound understanding of the human condition. Healing rituals are either habitual or curative.
Habitual practices are part of daily life, especially reciting duas: ‘supplicatory/benedictory prayers’ intoned by an individual or on behalf of another person, customized to address specific or general concerns. Duas are recited before going to bed and also when seeking help at the tomb of a saint. They are performed when welcoming guests and saying goodbye to someone leaving for a trip. Reciting duas promotes health, provides protection, and ensures prosperity. The duas and their recitations manifest culturally significant concepts about health and reveal Central Asian perceptions of well-being.
Curative practices display a structured approach, including diagnosis, prescription, and then ritual interventions by a specialist healer who has the clairvoyant ability to determine causes of ill health and misfortune. The types of rituals and durations of treatments depend upon the malady. Curative healing rituals include dietary changes, ritualistic purifications, visiting sacred sites, and observing solitary retreats.
The study of traditional healers and healing practices in Central Asia dates back centuries. The earliest record of traditional healing practices was made in 1769 by Peter Simon Pallas, who documented Kazakh (Kyrgyz) healing rituals and the important role of the healer in the local language called baqsi. Devin DeWeese highlights the deficiencies in extant scholarship, particularly from the 1920-91 Soviet Era, that depict traditional health and healing practices as "religious survivals," "pre-Islamic," or "shamanic." Despite presenting valuable ethno-anthropological data, interpretations by outsiders must be critically revisited, for etic categorizations fail to capture indigenous ways of knowing and ways of being underpinning the practices. Traditional healers, with remarkable resilience and adaptability, eschew such labels, viewing their craft as a continuum of ancestral traditions adaptable to diverse historical contexts.
One critical example demonstrates why we must understand healing practices and practitioners in their local, lived context. Almost all prior studies declare that traditional healers attain their ‘call to heal’ by undergoing spirit-afflicted maladies and ‘spirit possession’ states that impart spiritual aptitudes like clairvoyance to foresee the causes of ill health and other misfortune, and ritual abilities, prescribing and performing complex ceremonies to restore health and resolve patients’ problems. However, scholars have excluded Islamic healing practitioners, namely the mullahs, from being considered traditional healers because they do not undergo spirit possession.
Muslim clerics continually engage in health and healing practices (Qur’anic healing – ‘al-‘ilāj bi-l-qur’ān’), including divination. They possess karamat – an extraordinary, miraculous, or supernatural ability God bestows on select individuals out of His divine benevolence. Some clerics are connected to certain ‘sacred families’ such as išans, sa’ids, khojas, and sheikhs that are believed to possess barakat ‘grace, blessing,’ a divine force that brings abundance to the physical and happiness to the psychic realms. Those needing healing seek to receive the barakat from these figures. Scholars deny these clerics are traditional healers even though they are observed performing traditional healing practices every day.
It is essential for scholars to thoroughly explore the vast array of health-related terminology, therapeutic practices, cultural beliefs, cognitive frameworks, and doctrinal foundations present within Central Asian cultures and languages. This exploration is not a mere suggestion but a foundational necessity for scholarly inquiry. Scholars must exercise caution when categorizing practices as 'shamanism,' as this term originates from European ethnographic discourse and lacks linguistic representation in the local context. Instead, a rigorous and sensitive methodological framework is required, deeply engaged with Central Asia's epistemological and ontological foundations underpinning traditional healing practices. This approach allows for a nuanced understanding that goes beyond superficial categorizations and leads to an authentic comprehension of the cultural milieu being studied.
Recommended Papers
1. Basilov, V. N. 1992. Shamanstvo u narodov Sredne ̆ı Azii i Kazakhstana [Shamanism of the Peoples of Central Asia and Kazakhstan]. Moskva: Nauka.
2. DeWeese, D. (2014). Shamanization in Central Asia. Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 57(3), 326-363.
3. DeWeese, D. (2011). Survival strategies: Reflections on the notion of religious ‘survivals’ in Soviet ethnographic studies of Muslim religious life in Central Asia. Exploring the Edge of Empire: Soviet era anthropology in the Caucasus and Central Asia, 35-58.
4. Penkala-Gawęcka, D. (2014). The Way of the shaman and the revival of spiritual healing in post-Soviet Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan.
5. Penkala-Gawęcka, D., & World Health Organization. (2017). Perceptions of health and illness, and the role of healers in Kyrgyzstan. Public health panorama, 3(1), 80-87.
—by Dr. Barakatullo Ashurov, Research Associate, Transcendence & Transformation Initiative