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The Rite from Which the Others Are Reckoned

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The Rite from Which the Others Are Reckoned

Navajo ceremonial practice is organised into complexes, and Blessingway sits apart from the rest of them. The curing ceremonials address a specific disorder, understood as the consequence of a broken relation with some power in the world, and they work by identifying and correcting it. Blessingway does not diagnose. It addresses hozho directly, and it is invoked at the beginning of things rather than after something has gone wrong. Singers describe it as the backbone of the system, and parts of it are taken into other ceremonials, so that a rite performed for a different purpose may still close in Blessingway songs. Its narrative frame is Changing Woman, the being made at the beginning who is the source of the ordering the ceremony renews.

Kinaalda, the girl's puberty ceremony, is a Blessingway rite: the girl is identified with Changing Woman and is moulded, made to run, and fed into her adult condition, and the songs sung over her through the last night belong to this complex. The same complex covers the consecration of a hogan, which makes a building a place where life can properly be conducted, and the blessing of officeholders, which has carried the ceremony into the formal business of the Navajo Nation. Its range is the point. It is what is done when something is to be set right from the start rather than repaired afterwards.

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