ABSTRACT
In southern and central Africa, regional traditions of healing techniques and health knowledge and practices have flourished in decentralised societies and on the margins of powerful states. Today these professional traditions maintain a place side by side with biomedicine and folk curative practices. Through an analysis of a particular professional African medical knowledge system, the present study attempts to arrive at an endogenous understanding of how interacting bodies in healing processor, more precisely, in the intertwining of affect, imagination, becomes complaisant with sensory forces, imagery, and symbolism fueling the cult. The healing cult is best understood by demonstrating its consonance with the group's life world and its dynamics of intercorporeity and intersubjectivity. These healing cults involve cultural, embodied, and cosmological traditions in which the initiates culture-specific sensorium and kinesthetic sensibilities, their most vital kin relations, their core social values. The Yaka notion of personhood is, premised on this uterine engagement with others in the embodied field of perception and practices.
