Category Archives: Folk medicine

Quarantini Recipe

Nationality: American
Age: 54
Occupation: none
Residence: Marin County
Performance Date: April 20, 2020
Primary Language: English

Main Piece: 

Informant- “In my quarantini I like to combine orange juice, vitamin C, and tequila. So the vitamin c and orange juice give great energy and revitalize your immune system. And of course, the tequila kills germs! It’s a great way to relax and cleanse after a day in this quarantine.”

Background: The informant is the mother of three daughters, 54 years old. She lives in Northern California. The quarantine described above is a recipe created by the informant and represents her vision for an alcoholic beverage styled for the quarantine.  The beverage is a fun way to drink alcohol and disguise it as a medicine for the quarantine. 

Context: Here, the informant shares her recipe for a quarantini. I collected the information while watching her make and talk about the quarantini. 

Thoughts: The combination of the word Martini and Quarantine is an interesting way for people to bring some humor to a liminal uncertain time period. This time of quarantine is very liminal, allowing for many new adaptations of folklore. This new phrase ‘quarantini’ is popular because it brings lighthearted humor to an at home bar scenario. This new drink can change from house to house and usually incorporates alcohol, to protect from virus bacteria, and vitamins, to boost immune systems.  Alcohol sales have seen an increase during the quarantine and possibly because everyone is eager to make their own qaurantini folk medicine. 

Folk Healing by Reenactment of a Story

Nationality: Pakistani
Age: 73
Occupation: Homemaker
Residence: Bahadur Khan, Attock, Pakistan
Performance Date: 04/23/2020
Primary Language: Panjabi
Language: Urdu

Context: The following is an account from the informant, my grandmother. She told me this over the phone.

Background: She related a story that people believe in and emulate in order to try and heal the sick. For example, when her younger sister had severe asthma, her mother had once emulated the actions related in the story and circled her daughter’s bed while praying for her to be healed, ready to give her own life for her daughter.

Main piece: 

There was once a Mughal king named Babur and his son Humayun. His son was very sick and on his deathbed, despite the attempts of many doctors to cure him. Babur became very desperate to save his son and gathered his advisors for direction. They advised him to give in charity to help remedy the situation. 

One person told him to sacrifice animals and another recommended that he should give away wealth. When Babur was confused as to what course of action to take, one wise man told him to not think too much, and just give away whatever was most dear to him. Hearing this, Babur realized the thing most precious to him was his own life.  

With this in mind, Babur kept circling around the bed of his son while praying for him to be healed. He was ready to sacrifice even his own life so that his son would recover.After a while of doing this, Babur himself developed a fever while his son started getting better. Eventually, Babur collapsed and died, while Humayun made a full recovery. 

Analysis: As a story, there can be many morals derived from this account. This can include the strong relationship and love between son and father as well as the necessity to sacrifice in order to achieve a goal or result. However, this was mentioned as a means of healing that people actually believed in, with the example of my grandmother’s mother re-enacting the story in an attempt to cure her daughter. Although this is the case, it is not clear whether such an event ever did happen in history, with a strong possibility that the story has just inserted real life characters into it, as many stories did.

Shungite Crystal Healing

Nationality: White
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: LA/Seattle
Performance Date: April 20, 2019
Primary Language: English

Context:

The informant – LF – is a 20-year-old female from the Seattle, Washington. She currently is a sophomore in the USC Thornton School of Music. Her parents are part of a small sect of Islam, Sufism, and often lead meditation retreats that teach the meditation techniques of George Gurdjieff. Here, I asked LF about some of the spiritual healing methods used by her parents.

 

LF: She, like, aligns these crystals up in fashions, kind of. And there’s this one specific crystal called a shungite rock, I think, and she makes you hold it in your hand if you, like… I don’t know what it does. But literally when I held it – I’m not even kidding – it felt like my whole body was vibrating. It was whacko.

 

Me: What context did she tell you to hold it?

 

LF: I was feeling sick. It’s an energetic thing – it holds really powerful energy I think.

 

Me: So if you’re feeling sick, your mom would…

 

LF: Yeah, she’d be like, “Honey, take your crystals…” (Laughter) Yeah, I was vaccinated with crystals, haha.

 

Analysis:

I couldn’t find much on a relationship between Gurdjieff’s teachings and using crystals in spiritual healing, so I believe that the two could be unrelated. LF seemed to find the methods somewhat humorous, often making jokes about the methods, but also believed in the potential power of the crystals. It’s unclear exactly why LF’s parents use crystals in their healing methods/which, if any, tradition they’re drawing upon, though using crystals in spiritual healing seems to be a fairly common tradition among many different people.

Gurdjieff’s Movements

Nationality: White
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: LA/Seattle
Performance Date: April 20, 2019
Primary Language: English

Context:

The informant – LF – is a 20-year-old female from the Seattle, Washington. She currently is a sophomore in the USC Thornton School of Music. Her parents are part of a small sect of Islam, Sufism, and often lead meditation retreats that teach the meditation techniques of George Gurdjieff. The following is from a conversation about the meditation retreats hosted by her parents.

Piece:

LF: On the retreats, they go out to an isolated place – like a retreat center. And their daily routine is, they wake up for 6am meditation. So you have to get up and be there before that. After breakfast, there’s practical work. For practical work, they do some sort of physical labor, wherever they are. At the retreat center they’ve stayed at, they’ll re-roof a building, or build a deck, for example. It’s not like charity: the work itself is a meditation; you’re getting in your body, and you’re being really physical.

There’s not a lot of talking. There’s this idea throughout the retreat of staying collected, which is, kind of like, maintaining sensation throughout your body. And it’s kind of like meditating – it’s not super talkative or out of your head. You’re supposed to, like, stay really aware. And my parents actually met at a meditation retreat, and these are traditions that have been passed down from this Turkish dude named Gurdjieff… I don’t know, he just has a lot of these philosophies and shit like that.

But after the practical work, they have these things called the Movements, which are these dances, kind of, but they’re like, derived from the whirling dervishes. It’s from this religion they associate with, Sufism. But it’s more derived from the mystics from, like, the Quran.

Me: So what is the purpose of the Movements?

LF: It’s like a meditation, and they’re really hard to do, so they take a lot of concentration and focus and intention.

Me: Do they know the moves beforehand? Did you grow up knowing them?

LF: No, my mom teaches them. She knows all of them, because she’s been doing this shit for hella long. And I don’t know them – I was always too young to participate in the retreats. But then as I got older, I would play the piano to accompany them.

Me: Do the meditations each serve a particular purpose?

LF: Yeah, they’re kind of like overcoming different physical… It’s all about the struggle. That’s the thing, is they’re enduring the struggle, and the struggle is good. And you breathe through it, and you get through it.

 

Analysis:

Like LF said, it seems that Gurdjieff’s movements and the whirling dervishes, while part of a religious tradition, transcend religion, and are ultimately meditations that allow the participant to reach a transcendent state by persevering through physical and mental struggle while maintaining a meditative mental state. Though the practices are part of the religious tradition of Sufism, the meditations can be used – and are used, evidently, by participants in LF’s parents’ retreats – for anybody wishing to strengthen their mind through meditation.

 

For more information regarding Gurdjieff’s Movements, see George Adam’s (1998) Gurdjieff: Essays and Reflections on the Man and his Teaching, Nova Religio, 2(1), 161-163.

Salt Balls From the Dead Sea

Nationality: Persian American
Age: 22
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: April 17, 2019
Primary Language: English

Context: A friend of mine had missed about a week of school, so when she finally returned, I visited her at her apartment in Downtown to catch up and hear about what had been happening.

 

Background: My informant explained that she had been falling victim to a string of bad luck for about one month. She was very sick and decided to spend a week at her parent’s home in Beverly Hills to recover. While at home, her mother instructed her to take a bath with salt balls that she brought back from the Dead Sea in Israel. Salt from the Dead Sea is known to have different forms of healing power, both internally and externally. She believes that this ritual has the power to heal, as well as dissolve negative energy. 

 

Main Piece: “For the last month it was just thing after thing coming my way. I was feeling pretty down overall. I kept getting sick over and over again. I had a couple of ruptured ovarian cysts. My family was fighting a lot and it was getting really heated and out of control. I kept losing things, I was doing poorly in school. It was just so much negativity surrounding me and I was losing my mind. So I go home and I was just miserable so my mom gave me these salt balls she brought back with her from Israel. The gist of it is like you can either use them in the bath as a bath bomb or something, or you can use it as a scrub in the shower and just scrub it all over your body until it dissolves into your skin. The salt in general is a healer, it heals physical cuts and wounds and it’s supposed to help your skin. But a lot of people think it heals internally too. It’s really renewing and cleansing both inside and out. My mom always tells me that it dissolves the negative energy, the illness, just the bad all around. She says it’s purifying and yeah it cleanses the toxins out of your body, but it’s supposed to really boost your energy and stamina too. I sat in the bath with it for like an hour a couple of times and I honestly felt so much better. There’s definitely things I’m still dealing with, but I swear afterwards I just felt completely cleansed. I felt at peace with a lot of things, I just felt the negativity clear from my mind. It could have been some placebo effect type of thing, but it helped regardless.”

 

Analysis: People from all over the world visit the Dead Sea, and revel in the salty pool of water. It attracts tourists for its’ power to make the body completely float, and for the physical healing power of the salt. What I found interesting was this interpretation of its’ power to heal internally – to heal energy, to erase negativity, and to cleanse the body and the aura.