ritual healing and the politics of identity in contemporary Navajo society THOMAS J. CSORDAS—Case Western Reserve University My point of departure is the intersection of three heavily traveled conceptual highways that wind across American anthropology. The first is ritual healing, which has preoccupied anthro- pology as religion, performance, therapy, and, broadly speaking, as cultural process (Csordas and Kleinman 1996; Dow 1986; Kleinman 1980; Levi-Strauss 1966). The second is identity politics—that is, the deployment of representation and mobilization of community within plural societies in the name of gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, race, or religion—which in recent years, has captured the attention of scholars in both cultural anthropology and interdisciplinary cultural studies (Calhoun 1994; Friedman 1992; Giddens 1990; Lash and Friedman 1992). The third is Navajo society, which remains one of the most heavily documented, most frequently plundered for ethnographic examples, and most irritated by the persistent probing of anthro- pologists of all stripes (Farella 1984; Kluckhohn and Leighton 1946; Lamphere 1977; Wither- spoon 1977). In this article, I elaborate the relation between ritual healing and identity politics in contemporary Navajo society by presenting a conceptual framework that can potentially be applied across a wider range of societies. What is the purpose of questioning the relation between ritual healing and identity politics? Doing so allows me to address in specific fashion the perennial issue of the relation between religion and politics, both of which are forms of power but with ostensibly different motives and modes of operation (Fogelson and Adams 1977). It allows me to address the parallel issues of the individual in relation to the collective and of microsocial in relation to macrosocial Ritual healing and identity politics interact on three levels in contemporary Navajo society: representation of Navajo identity in relation to the dominant Euro-Ameri- can society, interaction among religious healing traditions within Navajo society, and transformation of individual experience with respect to dignity and self-worth as a Navajo. The first is illustrated with two events: an epidemic ofhanta virus and a serious drought. The second is examined with respect to the coexistence of traditional Navajo healing, Native American Church healing, and Navajo Christian faith healing. The third is discussed in terms of case studies of Navajo patients who have used these forms of heal ing. These levels constitute a framework for analyzing the relation between healing and identity politics that is potentially more nuanced than either the position that ritual healing is a futile expression of frustration—the opiate of the masses interpretation—or that ritual healing is a subtle form of political resistance—the postmodern liberation of the indigenous voice interpretation. Future studies using such a framework could begin to distinguish more clearly between a personal politics of collective identity, in which individual actors with clear commitments struggle to assert a shared identity, and a collective politics of personal identity, in which each actor among a group of actors with ambiguous commitments struggles to attain individual identity, [religion, healing, ritual, iden- tity politics, Navajo, Native American Church, Christianity] American Ethnologist26(1):3-23. Copyright© 1999, American Anthropological Association. healing and identity politics 3