Boiling Energy: Community Healing among the Kalahari Kung

Richard Katz's Boiling Energy, Community Healing among the Kalahari Kung, published by Harvard University Press in 1982, is an ethnographic study of the Ju'hoansi, San, all night healing dance and the concept the Ju'hoansi themselves call num, or n/om, based on Katz's own direct fieldwork among the community. Its strength is that sustained participant observation of a specific living healing practice, describing the dance, the trance state healers enter and the community structure that supports it in the practitioners' own terms rather than through outside medical or psychological categories imposed from elsewhere. Its limit is that it is one anthropologist's account from fieldwork conducted in a particular period, and Ju'hoansi life has changed substantially since, so a claim about the present day practice of the healing dance, rather than the dance as Katz documented it, needs more recent fieldwork alongside this foundational study.