ABSTRACT
The healing power of symbols is central to the whole subject of symbolic meaning. Now that Turner’s four volumes on Ndembu are published (1957, 1962, 1967, 1968), we should see where we stand, as anthropologists, on ritual healing. In the long run nearly everything he has written is concerned with the efficacy of symbols. This is partly because Ndembu rituals claim to have power to heal the body as well as to enlighten the mind; consequently every piece of the jigsaw puzzle of how to interpret their symbolic acts contributes to understanding the great moments when sickness is brought under priestly control. So the climax of the sequence of Ndembu studies is the performance of ihamba, the rite which cures one Kamahasanyi of his lassitude and backache by extracting from his body the tooth of an angry dead hunter’s ghost. His body purged thus of a symbol of jealous backbiting is itself the symbol of the village which is purged, by the same ritual, of intrusive elements in its system. It is also a symbol of the matrilineal principle reaffirmed in its purity and solidarity – to the confusion of intrusive patrilateral segments and unbrotherly brethren. The rite is not only symbolic in the expressive sense. It even brings about the required changes at the physical and social levels.
