THOMAS J. CSORDAS HEALING AND THE HUMAN CONDITION: SCENES FROM THE PRESENT MOMENT IN NAVAJOLAND THE 2001 ROGER ALLAN MOORE LECTURE ABSTRACT. The encounter of Navajo spirituality and healing practice with modernity in the present moment must be understood within an existential appreciation of temporality, tradition, domination, and immediacy. Examining the practical exigencies and experiential nuances in a performance of the Navajo Nightway ceremony allows us to elaborate this insight. KEYWORDS: experience and intersubjectivity, modernity and the present, Navajo ritual healing I shall begin with three stories, each one a scene from contemporary Navajoland. 1. NASA and the Old Man. When NASA was preparing for the Apollo project, they did some astronaut training on the Navajo Indian reservation. One day, a Navajo elder and his son were herding sheep and came across the space crew. The old man, who only spoke Navajo, asked a question, which his son trans- lated: “What are the guys in the big suits doing?” A member of the crew said they were practicing for their trip to the moon. The old man got really excited and asked if he could send a message to the moon with the astronauts. Rec- ognizing a promotional opportunity, the NASA people found a tape recorder. After the old man recorded his message, they asked the son to translate. He refused. So they brought the tape to the reservation, where the tribal leaders listened and laughed, but refused to translate the elder’s message to the moon. Finally, NASA called in an official government translator. He reported that the moon message said, “Watch out for these guys; they’ve come to steal your land.” 2. The Navajo Nation Flag in Space. A NASA official had a cousin who had spent time on the Navajo reservation. He was impressed by her stories and thought it would be a wonderful gesture of respect if he could arrange for the flag of the Navajo Nation to be taken into space on one of the Space Shuttle missions. He proposed this to the tribal government, and caused an immediate firestorm of protest. The fact is that traditional Navajos are highly skeptical of space travel, on the grounds both that humans were created to dwell on the earth’s surface and hence it is unnatural for us to venture beyond, and that the blackness of Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 28: 1–14, 2004.  C 2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers.