San Healing Trance Dance

The healing trance dance is a central ritual practice of San (Bushmen) peoples of the Kalahari Desert in southern Africa, most extensively documented among the Ju/'hoansi (!Kung), in which community members gather at night around a fire while women sing and clap rhythmic medicine songs and men, and sometimes women, dance in a circle for hours until a number of them enter an altered state of consciousness the San describe as boiling n/om, a form of spiritual healing potency believed to reside in certain experienced individuals. Dancers in this trance state are understood to be able to draw sickness out of community members through laying-on of hands and to travel spiritually to confront the spirits or ancestors believed responsible for illness or misfortune, and the dance functions simultaneously as medical treatment, religious ceremony, and a central occasion of community cohesion and shared experience. Extensively studied by anthropologists including Richard Katz and Megan Biesele from the 1970s onward, the San trance dance is widely regarded in the anthropological and archaeological literature as one of humanity's oldest continuously documented ritual healing traditions, and its imagery is thought by many researchers to be depicted in southern African rock art dating back thousands of years.