Healing Power

Hidden healing practices exert fascination as well as stimulate extensive scientific and public interest. It is a contested topic for many indigenous peoples. Throughout the ages, numerous spiritual healing forms have been marginalized or severely persecuted. Nowadays, however, there is a growing interest in these traditions all over the world. Some are recovered and sometimes also mixed resulting in the blending of different indigenous and Western approaches.

After the loss of the original spiritual contexts during the colonization period, Indigenous peoples around the world revive parts of their cultural heritage. They also find inspiration in foreign cultural traditions. Next generations develop new ways to connect to the ancestors and search for new healing practices. This publication explores a limited selection of the manifold collective and individual healing practices, such as shamanism, winti, vodou and European witchcraft. Practitioners and/or academics share their insights and perspectives. Power objects and healing related art from the collection of the National Museum of World Cultures in the Netherlands reveal hidden meanings of sacred traditions. Contemporary artists are inspired by spiritual healing and renew its meaning in the present.

Table of Contents

0. Introduction – Cunera Buijs & Wouter Welling

1. Invisible forces and spirits – Cunera Buijs & Wouter Welling
1.1 Getting a second pair of eyes. The precarious balance of healing and killing in Cameroun – Peter Geschiere
1.2 Intimate relations between hunters and spirits in Northwestern Greenland – Terto Ngiviu
1.3 Winti healing in Suriname & the Netherlands – Marjan Markelo
1.4 Magical Consciousness and healing spirits – Susan Greenwood

2. Healing stories and images – Cunera Buijs & Wouter Welling
2.1 A Dutch Way to Witchcraft – Coby Rijkers
2.2 Visions and stories at work – Barbara Miller & Sigvald Persen
2.3 Drawings in Balinese healing and magic – David Stuart Fox
2.4 Enchanted world: Invisible forces and spirits – Daan van Kampenhout

3. Museum magic – Cunera Buijs & Wouter Welling
3.1 Powerful things, transformations and museum magic, cases from the Arctic – Cunera Buijs
3.2 Roots and the art of healing: Anatoly Donkan – Ulrike Bohnet
3.3 Kabra healing. Ancestors and colonial memory in the Netherlands – Markus Balkenhol
3.4 Sacred goes secular? Tourist art among the Piaroa of Venezuela – Claudia Augustat

4. Balance and harmony – Cunera Buijs & Wouter Welling
4.1 Aakujk’äjt-Jotkujk’äjtën. Balance and Harmony in Ayuuk Culture – Juan Carlos Reyes Gómez
4.2 Mentawai shamans in Indonesia: Restoring threatened harmony – Reimar Schefold
4.3 Life itself is a polyrhythm. On healing – Maria van Daalen

5. Global interactions – Cunera Buijs & Wouter Welling
5.1 Transforming traditions – Ayahuasca in the Netherlands and Peru – Sebastiaan van ‘t Holt
5.2 Healing music, Psychedelic trance and the search for harmony – Iris Hesse
5.3 Art and the Other World: Visualizing the invisible – Wouter Welling

Wouter Welling (1964) is curator contemporary art at the National Museum of World Cultures. Since the 80s he has been working as an art critic and curator, mainly in the field of globalization and interculturality in the art world.

He has published numerous articles, books and catalogues about both western and non-western art, such as Ad Fontes! An intercultural search for hidden sources (2001), Kijken zonder Grenzen – hedendaagse kunst in het Afrika Museum, de collectie Valk en verder (2006), Roots & More – The Journey of the Spirits (with Irene Hübner, 2009), Dangerous and Divine – the secret of the serpent (2012), a Jungian approach to serpent symbolism. He has a special interest in esotericism and occultism in the visual arts. He curated solo exhibitions such as The Dono Code (Heri Dono, Tropenmuseum, 2009) and Abdoulaye Konate (Afrika Museum, 2013). He is co-curator of the exhibition Healing Power – Winti, shamanism and more (2011).