ABSTRACT
People must go like thieves'Meme Bombo, a Yolmo shaman, said to the author one afternoon as they sat by the hearth in his one-room house in the Helambu region of north-central Nepal, 'without ghosts, demons, or witches knowing of their presence. Otherwise, they will attack'. Yolmo spirit-callings, in which the sensory dimensions are pivotal, goes against the grain of the dominant anthropological interpretations of ritual healing, which tend to privilege the symbolic, intellectual, and social features of such healings. To better appreciate what Meme's rites can tell us about the performance of healing in Nepal and elsewhere, people need to understand something of the nature of spirit-lessness among the Yolmo people. Yolmo wa possess several kinds of life-forces, each of which can depart from the body. The bla or 'spirit' is one such force. The absence of bla from the body leads to a dysphoric state that we might call 'spirit loss'.
