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Proceedings of the annual meeting of the Southern Anthropological Society

James Sarbaugh

Abstract

Health and well-being are maintained in traditional Cherokee communities by carefully balancing the social, and sacred, relationships between all spiritually significant beings, human or otherwise. An imbalance in these relationships results in ill health that affects the entire community. Balance is maintained or restored through ritual practice in which both women and men may play critical roles as trained specialists who rely on medicines, physical therapies, and ritual language and non-verbal means to communicate sacred knowledge. Practitioners must also constantly monitor, evaluate, and make use of new knowledge gained from the surrounding environment, employing methods that are intrinsically conservative, yet dynamic and flexible.

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