A ngangkari is a traditional healer of the Ngaanyatjarra, Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara Lands, the tri-state desert country where South Australia, Western Australia and the Northern Territory meet. The office is not entered by application or by training in the ordinary sense. In the accounts ngangkari have given of themselves, the capacity is given rather than acquired, usually through the family and often from a grandparent, and it is recognised in a child by adults who already hold it; the child is then taught over years by those relatives. Both men and women are ngangkari, and some specialise.
The work is organised around kurunpa, the spirit, which is understood as the seat of a person's health rather than as a separate religious concern: a spirit that has been frightened, dislodged or taken accounts for illness with no other visible cause, and the ngangkari's task is to find it, retrieve it and put it back. The methods described publicly are physical and specific. A ngangkari uses the hands to locate and draw out what should not be in a body, uses breath, and carries mapanpa, the healing instruments and substances that come with the office. Beyond that the atlas does not go. What a particular ngangkari knows, what mapanpa a particular healer holds and what is done in a particular case belong to that healer, and this entry records the office rather than the practice of anyone in it.