Family-Borne Efficacy

Shamanic Healing in Contemporary Xibo Households in Xinjiang

Dados Bibliográficos

ID24033031
AutoresHaiyan Xing (0000-0003-1174-6441, Shanghai Normal University, autor correspondente), Shuyi Jia (Shanghai Normal University), Dongzhi Sangji (0009-0003-3002-6578, Shanghai Normal University)
Ano2026
Volume17
Fascículo8
Páginas972
Data de publicação2026-08-17
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoReligions (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 2077-1444 • E-ISSN: 2077-1444
EditoraMDPI AG (PUBLISHER • IT)
DOI10.3390/rel17080972
OpenAlexW7203614979
IdiomaEN
Referências citadas18

This article examines how patients and their relatives in contemporary Xibo families come to understand whether shamanic healing has “worked.” Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2017 and 2026 in Qapqal Xibo Autonomous County, Yili, Xinjiang, it analyzes two closely observed healing rituals performed by the same shaman for two members of one family: a mother suffering from severe emotional distress and her adolescent son during a period of intense educational pressure. Drawing on Thomas Csordas’s tripartite framework of procedure, process, and outcome, the article relocates the analysis of ritual efficacy from the individual patient to the family as a relational unit. Three arguments follow. First, participation in healing is driven less by individual belief than by family responsibility, obligation, and affective reciprocity. Second, the family does not merely host the ritual but actively organizes, sustains, and helps confirm it. Third, efficacy is recognized incrementally through shared observation, retrospective interpretation, and everyday relational adjustment in the months and years following the ritual, rather than being determined now the ritual ends. Understood in this way, contemporary Xibo shamanic healing persists not as a survival of premodern medicine, but as a family-borne mode of acting, waiting, and making sense of uncertainty.

Distress · Emotional distress · Ethnography · Expression (computer science) · Period (music) · Shamanism · China's Ethnic Minorities and Relations · Chinese history and philosophy · Indian and Buddhist Studies