Num

Among the Ju'hoansi, San hunter-gatherers of the Kalahari Desert in present-day Namibia and Botswana, num (often written n/om) is described as a healing potency that skilled practitioners, n/om kxaosi ("owners of num"), learn to activate and control within their own bodies, chiefly during the all-night communal healing dance that remains a regular feature of Ju'hoansi social life rather than an occasional emergency ritual. During the dance, women sit in a circle around a fire, singing and clapping specific medicine songs, while n/om kxaosi dance around them in a circle for hours, building heat that practitioners describe as num "boiling" up from its resting place at the base of the spine.

As num rises and intensifies, the dancer enters kia, a state of heightened perception and altered consciousness, at which point the healer is understood to be able to see sickness within community members and draw it out, often through touch, trembling and a cry believed to expel the extracted illness. Richard Katz's detailed ethnographic study, Boiling Energy: Community Healing among the Kalahari Kung, documents the dance as an egalitarian institution: num is described as potentially available to any adult willing to undertake the demanding, sometimes frightening training needed to control it safely, rather than restricted to an inherited priestly class.

Katz's fieldwork, along with later work by ethnomusicologists and medical anthropologists studying San healing practice, situated num and the Ju'hoansi healing dance within a broader anthropological interest in trance and altered states of consciousness across hunter-gatherer societies, drawing comparisons, not always careful ones, to shamanic practices documented elsewhere in the world. Num has occasionally been discussed alongside other vital-force concepts such as mana, orenda and qi in general surveys of comparative religion, a comparison that can usefully highlight a shared human interest in embodied, cultivable healing power but risks obscuring how specifically the Ju'hoansi dance, its songs, its social structure and its physically demanding technique for raising num, differs from unrelated traditions grouped with it under a single broad label.

The Ju'hoansi healing dance and the concept of num remain living practice, documented respectfully and at length by researchers working directly with San communities, and this entry follows that documentation rather than the older, thinner colonial-era ethnography that first brought San religious life to outside attention. As with the other living traditions in this set, num is described here in the terms Ju'hoansi practitioners and their ethnographers use, not measured against a scientific standard external to the tradition.