ABSTRACT
This chapter examines sequences of imagery not as elements in healing performance to push the issue of experiential specificity but as performances in their own right, as a kind of performance within performance that may not even be observable. The shaman's formal narration of his journey to the realm of spirits is taken as data by anthropologists, but he is rarely questioned about the qualities of that realm and what it is like to move about in it. The shaman's narrative is treated as an element within the ritual performance-is it not the case, however, the experience he narrates has the structure of performance in itself, prior to narratization. Anthropologists have applied the concept of performative acts cross-culturally to conventional forms of ordinary speech as well as to forms of ritual language, and have reinforced the theory's implicit blurring of the line between word and deed by including non-linguistic ritual acts in their analyses.
