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"As I received it in a whisper, so I told it to you in a whisper."

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Rabbi Shim’on son of Rabbi Yehotsadak asked Rabbi Shemu’el son of Nahman, “How did the blessed Holy One create the light?” He replied, “He wrapped Himself in a white tallit, and the world shone from His light.” He said this to him in a whisper. [Rabbi Shim’on] said, “Isn’t that stated explicitly in the Bible: Wrapped in light like a cloak (Psalms 104:2)? [I’m surprised that you whispered it.]” [Rabbi Shemu’el] replied, “ As I received it in a whisper, so I told it to you in a whisper. ” The Book of Splendor, Sefer Ha Zohar, Daniel Matt (trans.) Image: Eduardo Klingman, Abrazo Is there anything we learn, really learn, outside of personal relationship? I am not sure. I know that we can memorize and apply information from abstractions, to a certain degree. But I am not sure we can fully learn anything at a cellular level, in the depths of the psyche, without a sense of belonging to knowledge, of having community with it, of relating to it. I am not sure at all. The other options make me s...
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Renewal

 This blog is a neglected space in my life and I am considering reinventing it, taking it considerably further than just reflections on ethnography. In part, I need to do that because I am no longer mainly an ethnographer by profession, in the academy, but a student of social and clinical psychology who also has a practice as a systemic constellation facilitator. I am a scholar-healer, which is what my calling has always been. What has been on this blog so far really belongs to a past era, in many ways, although I do intend to bring forward these ways of knowing, in so far as they are actually practicable and helpful in the world of the psyche, the soul, and human life as it is lived. I don't express that to denigrate theory in any way. I just cannot remain as fixedly in that place as I have in the past, which has kept me completely stuck and feeling stuck under very difficult circumstances in which it was very important for me to find my way in a world bigger than the academy. Muc...
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Continuing on the Journey with Elena, Part Three

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Diego Rivera, El Curandero I am returning to repair and patch back up what has been left out of my last pieces of work on the ethnography I undertook about Elena Avila, a curandera from El Paso and New Mexico, who made a signficant impact on many lives in the US southwest and beyond, with her contribution to the revival of traditional Meso-American medicines. I say that there is an element of repair, because so much gets lost in the scholarly writing process, including much of the material that we begin with, knowledge that is not deemed acceptable by the academy, or which is authentically edited out by the researcher. I share this in the spirit of honoring every aspect of the work I have done, not just the final This writing project was initially intended as type of descriptive article that would touch on the ways in which she had been an integrator of discourses (medical, scientific, and cultural ones, to name a few), combining my personal experience with her, ethnographic interviews...
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Foucault and Governance, Kings and Laws

A quote from Foucault on our ahistorical views about monarchy and law...something I thought was interesting that I reread recently to prepare for a new class: "There is, perhaps, a historical reason for this. The great institutions of power that developed in the Middle Ages- monarchy, the state with its apparatus-rose up on the basis of a multiplicity of prior powers, and to a certain extent in opposition to them: dense, entangled, conflicting powers, powers tied to the direct or indirect dominion over the land, to the possession of arms, to serfdom, to bonds of suzerainty and vassalage. If these institutions were able to implant themselves, if, by profiting from a whole series of tactical alliances, they were able to gain acceptance, this was because they presented themselves as agencies of regulation, arbitra- tion, and demarcation, as a way of introducing order in the midst of these powers, of establishing a principle that would temper them and distribute them according to b...
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Elena Avila, Identity, Modern Medicine and an Interview with her Daughter

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The palimpsestic commentary-like  pieces of writing that I am sharing here on Elena, as a process in itself, show me how generative her whole life seems to be for so many people. It's so much the case, that with only a few mentions of her name, her story, or a blog post, people start to bring their own ideas, comments, their memories of her, or connections they have made to traditional knowledge systems that parallel my experiences with Elena. I feel the need to keep underlining that this has all been about relationship. Elena always emphasized that working with a genuine curandera was cocreative work, something very personal and relational. This was also what she pointed out as an element of modern biomedicine that had mostly died out. So, it fascinates me that even at a meta level, as I go about working through this material years after her death, her life story tends to magnetize a great deal of interpersonal exchange and relationship building. That's unsurprising,...
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Starting to Write About Elena Avila

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Years ago I started a process of writing about the contributions of Elena Avila, the author of a unique book on curanderismo called,'Woman Who Glows in the Dark.' In this process, two different pieces of writing emerged: One is more typically academic and the other is more descriptive. Here I am going to share a bit of the second, more descriptive version. This one is focused mostly on interviews and has some auto-ethnography, based on principles I work with from the indigenous research paradigm of Shawn Wilson. In that way of thinking, I must situate myself and my relationship to Elena and the subject because knowledge doesn't stand alone and without relationship. In the journal article I am resubmitting right now, most of this material is lost, which I thought  was unfortunate, and so now we have these two different approaches to the same subject. In the whole inquiry the basic question has been to try and look at what was unique about Elena. In this piece there is a ...
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