Desjarlais, Robert

Name not available

Sadness, Soul Loss and Healing Among the Yolmo Sherpa

DigitalCommons@Macalester College

HIMALAYA, the Journal of theAssociation for Nepal andHimalayan StudiesVolume 9Number 2 Himalayan Resesarch Bulletin Article 51989Sadness, Soul Loss and Healing Among the YolmoSherpaRobert DesjarlaisUniversity of CaliforniaFollow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/himalayaThis Research Article is brought to you for free and open access by theDigitalCommons@Macalester College at DigitalCommons@MacalesterCollege. It has been accepted for inclusion in HIMALAYA, the Journal ofthe Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies by an authorizedadministrator of DigitalCommons@Macalester College. For moreinformation, please contact scholarpub@macalester.edu.Recommended CitationDesjarlais, Robert (1989) "Sadness, Soul Loss and Healing Among the Yolmo Sherpa," HIMALAYA, the Journal of the Association forNepal and Himalayan Studies: Vol. 9 : No. 2 , Article 5.Available at: http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/himalaya/vol9/iss2/5Robert DesjarlaisUniversity of CaliforniaThe Yolmo Sherpa of Helambu, Nepal often experience illness in the form of "soul loss"wherein a sudden fright causes the b/a or 'soul' to vacate the body and wander about the countryside.When the soul is lost (b/a ka/sin) one lacks the strength and volition to eat, work, travel, and socialize.One has trouble sleeping, witnesses inauspicious dreams, and is prone to further illnesses. If a Yolmofalls sick in this manner he summons a bombo. This shaman divines how the soul was lost, and whereit has wandered, how best to retrieve it. He then ritually searches for and 'calls' the lost soul back intohis patients' body.I wish here to examine why and how such souls are lost, and how Yolmo healers return themto their owners. Specifically, I wish to study the relation between emotion, knowledge, illness andhealing among this Himalayan people. What are the emotional and epistemological foundations of soulloss? How do emotions and knowledge play into the bombo's healing efforts?To begin to answer these questions, we must first consider Yolmo epistemologies of self andother. As for the self, the Yolmo consider it difficult to fathom all aspects of self-experience. Thoughthe sem or 'heart-mind' is the locus of personal knowledge and consciousness, there is much that goeson in one's life that this organ of thought and consciousness is not privy to. While the villagers say that"one can know everything about, and that is in, one's sem," one can never know all that happens to one'sself. For instance, while one's fate and constitution is written on a mirror lodged in the forehead, onecan never obtain knowledge of what is stored there. The Yolmo cite a Nepali proverb that catches thisdilemma: "written by gods, covered by skin, how can it be seen?"These limits to self-knowledge directly effect Yolmo understandings of illness. As much ofone's existence is hidden from conscious view, often one falls ill without knowing the cause of one'sdistress. Souls are lost and other illnesses occur without one being aware of it. Only shamanicdivination can reveal what has happened and how to ameliorate it.It is even more difficult to know of others than it is to know oneself. The Yolmo think of thebody as a house with one's life-forces dwelling within it. As the body hides its contents from the eyesof others, the Yolmo consider it extremely difficult to know what one's neighbors are thinking or feeling.As villagers have asked me many times, "how can you know what is in another person's heart [sem ]?"A Yolmo tser-/u, or "song of sadness," bemoans the consequences of such for personal distress:When a forest catches fireeveryone sees it[but] when one's heart catches fireonly one's own self knowsThe import of this song is that while a forest's distress is visible to all, the torments of the heart lienoticed solely by the sufferer.Along with lamenting the limits of emotional empathy, the Yolmo strive to maintain anequilibrium in their social lives by controlling the expression of personal desires which may run againstthe social grain. They therefore feel it inappropriate to let others know what they are feeling, and soone needs to control or "hide" one's thoughts and emotions from others. The Yolmo thus exhibit aculture of privacy, revealing little of their inner worlds of others.'First prepared for the panel: "When Life is Hard: Cultural Forms of Coping and Healing" at the88th Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association Washington, D.C., November 15-19, 1989.These epistemological limits effect the communication of emotions, for there exist profoundcircumscriptions on emotional expression. As personal experience is hidden from the gaze of others,anger, sadness and grief are not easily communicated in day-to-day interactions. When angry, a Yolmowill not show it; when grief-stricken, he will hold it within his heart. One sad song sums up theconsequences of all this as follows:If I stay sadness falls to me,if I go my little feet may achethe sorrow of little feet hurting,to whom can I tell?Now despite the need to "hide" one's emotions, the Yolmo strongly value the ability to expresspersonal distress--to "clean the heart, that is, of distressful emotions." "Lice fill my hair," sings the tragichero of one folk song,but I've no mother to extract themthoughts fill my heartbut I've no mother to explain them toSeparated from family, the singer bemoans a head infested with lice and a heart full ofworrisome thoughts. One villager, in explaining the significance of this song, told me that just as oneneeds to clean one's clothes when dirty, so one needs to clean one's heart when soiled by emotions.However, the absence of intimates can make it difficult to do so, and the heart may go uncleansed.In general, the Yolmo tend to avoid emotionally intense situations, either through avoiding thecircumstances which can lead to such situations, denying their relevance, or refusing to dwell upon them.Rather than confront the terms of their sadness they evade them. As one song puts it,Better not to think,if I think I feel sadto work with one's thoughtsit doesn't help anythingThis avoidance of emotionally intense situations spills over, I believe, into the ways that theYolmo are able to think about emotions. In short, the Yolmo lack a detailed idiom to articulateemotional distress, either interpersonally or intrapsychically. Grief, sadness and anger are, to useRobert Levy's (1973; 1984) term, "hypocognized."I wish to suggest that these cullurallimitations on self-knowledge and emotional expression andempathy relate to the experience of "soul loss." As it is difficult to express emotions to others, personalexperiences of distress are left "uncleansed." "Soul loss" thus results. from intense experiences ofemotional distress which cannot be readily communicated to others.Case studies support the claim that soul loss is founded upon emotional distress. Often Iobserved villagers losing their souls after suffering intense grief or sorrow--usually triggered by the deathof an intimate. For instance, one middle-aged woman fell ill soon after learning that a close relative haddied. She suffered from headaches, fever, a loss of appetite, frightening dreams, and a "heaviness" inthe body that weakened her desire to work, move about, and socialize. Soon after falling ill, sheconsulted a bombo who divined that she had lost her soul upon stumbling into a stream while travellingto her relative's funeral.Another, elderly man fell ill while mourning for a close friend who died in his sleep. Sufferingfrom insomnia, a loss of appetite, and troublesome dreams (such as encountering graveyards and deadpersons), he said he probably lost his soul while "walking, alone and frightened, upon a road at night."When I first talked with him, he said he was "just ill from old age, getting older, and afraid of dying,"but in fact he was very weak and fragile.While these example give a sense of how soul loss relates to emotional distress, we must turnto shamanic healings to understand how knowledge ties into illness and healing. During the curingceremony, bombos beseech gods to enter their bodies. These deities then speak through the shaman'smouth to reveal to an attentive audience the cause, nature and potential cure of the patient's illness.In one divination, for instance, a god revealed the following concerning a patient's ill-health:Within the last seven months and seven days,part of the 'soul' (tse, or 'life') was lost (nyamne, or 'diminished')During this time, you did not know (of this) in the sem,you did not see with the eye.When the 'soul' was lost,you had fallen into fierce anger.While this passage relates one man's anger to soul loss (specifically, a 'diminished life-span'),in another the god links this illness to a woman's sadness and emotional distress.The 'soul' has been lost. When the 'soul' was lost,many tears fell from the eyes....When these tears fall from the eyes,the sem is ill with "confusion,"and she is unable to hold the sem ....in the sem there is much "restlessness."What is most striking about these divinations is that the relationship between soul loss andemotional distress, though readily noted through divination, is not acknowledged on an overt levelamong the Yolmo. When I subsequently asked the villagers if excessive anger or sadness could causeone's soul to be lost, they doubted the possibility of this happening. And yet the deity 'possessing' thebombo clearly states that grief and "fierce anger" induced these illnesses.What's going on here, then? For one, it would appear that emotional distress lies at the veryroot of the 'soul loss' experience. It would also appear that the bombo's divinations provide a mediumto communicate such distress to others. These two ideas are intertwined: if the healing ceremonyserves as a forum to communicate emotional distress, then illness itself may be effected when anindividual experiencing grief, sadness or anger is unable to express these feelings to others--preciselybecause the culture deems it inappropriate to do so. The bombo's divinations thus provide a discursiveoutlet to communicate or "cleanse" emotions which cannot be otherwise expressed in Yolmo society.Healings, then, are a strategy for communication.But note that the divination communicates not only to others the play between emotions andillness. Divinations inform the patients themselves of the emotional basis of their illnesses before thedivination: as the deity put it, they did not "know in the sem," they did not "see with the eye." I wouldsuggest that because Yolmo society prohibits certain understandings of self-experience, including thatof emotions, sufferers of soul loss are unaware of the specific emotional foundations of this illness.Shamanic divinations, in turn, are an education into self-experience.These divinations thus form part of a cultural system of knowledge, the elements of which areas follows. As we have seen, knowing of self and other is a difficult task for the Yolmo. Unable to seewithin another's heart nor fathom those dimensions of self-experience external to what the sem or 'mindknows, there is much to life that one cannot obtain knowledge of through profane means. Hearts arebroken and souls are lost without one being aware of their occurrence.But the same culture that imposes such harsh limits to personal and interpersonal awarenessalso provides mechanisms through which this knowledge can be tappe:d into, for divinations into self andother enable the Yolmo to get some sense of those experiences consi'icred unknowable through secularmeans. This is where the bombo comes in, for he is able to map the 'last areas of experience that thesem or conscious 'mind' itself cannot approach. A trickster of knowledge, the shaman is able totranscend the limits of self and interpersonal knowledge as set by the culture.The total self-corrective unit which processes information, or, as I say, "thinks" and "acts" and"decides; is a ~ whose boundaries do not at all coincide with the boundaries either of thebody or of what is popularly called the "self"or "consciousness."If we compare Bateson's epistemology of the self to that of the Yolmo, we can see that thelaUer's "self-system" includes aspects of personal experience exceeding the boundaries of the 'consciousmind' or sem. There is much that one can not know with the heart, nor see with the eye--but the "self-system" still knows about such matters at some implicit, "unconscious" level. If these matters are of adistressful nature (as with the anger and grief above), then the system communicates to the 'consciousmind' what it knows through divinations into realms of human experience deemed "unknowable"--knowledge, that is, which the west deems as tacit, covert, or unconscious (Levy 1984:227).I take the divine to be a metaphor for such knowledge. Said to "know everything," the godsstand for all that humans cannot obtain insight into through profane means. Invoked when someonelies sick, their job is to make known what culture does not (and perhaps cannot) permit its membersto know in their everyday lives.As this knowledge comes into play primarily when one is sick, it is evident that the gods aretelling the Yolmo mostly about the corrective mechanisms necessary for health. Indeed, these cures arein large part epistemological ones. To divine is to heal. For a while it may be "healthy" and perhapsnecessary for Yolmo society to inhibit certain understandings of self and other, these same limits mayspawn pathological side-effects. As the body hides its contents from the eyes of other, it is difficult tocommunicate personal distress to another when the heart, as the song goes, is on fire. And since whatis not known cannot be put into words, many of the less tangible aspects of self-experience, such asemotional distress, cannot be communicated to or understood by the conscious mind of the sem. Illnessis thus evoked when the self fails to express its distress to others or the 'mind', and a break-down of thecultural system of knowledge occurs. Lacking a language, emotional distress leaves no lasting footprints,either in the mind of another or the charted regions of the self.In sum, the shaman's art is to map those uncharted regions of self-experience, giving image topain by voicing the language of the gods. As we have seen, soul is one such language, a language ofgrief, sadness, and emotional distress.LEVY, ROBERT. 1973. Tahitians: Mind and Experience in the Society Islallds. Chicago: Universityof Chicago Press.1984. Emotion, Knowing and Culture. Culture Theory: Essays 011 Milld, Self alld Emotions.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1215&context=himalaya

Sadness, Soul Loss and Healing Among the Yolmo Sherpa

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

Name not available

DigitalCommons@Macalester College