Customer Reviews

The Straight Path of the Spirit: Ancestral Wisdom and Healing Traditions in Fiji

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Katz offers much compassion and insight into both the Fijian healing arts as well as the Fijian soul. Great reading for anyone interested in learning more about Fiji. The connection between the land and the culture is especially valuable, since it shows the need for tribal land ownership and sustainability. This very concept is vital for the survival of the Fijians.

Through the process of reading The Straight Path, one cannot help but notice the degree to which Katz becomes increasingly assimilated into Fijian culture. Obviously, such full immersion as that represented by this book is beneficial if one is to ever "truly" understand another culture, especially in terms of dialogical hermeneutics. In fact Katz's experience, in many ways, reflects the ultimate embodiment of dialogical hermeneutics, a type of "research" where the ethnographer attempts to understand another culture from that other culture's perspective, utilizing a methodology based on discourse. Of course, the ideal way to achieve this understanding is to actually "experience" that culture, seeing it through unfiltered eyes. The problem is that one cannot ever completely succeed in this objective because one cannot ever fully separate his or her cultural views from his or her cultural background. In short, one's ideas will always be shaped according to one's own experiences. However, Katz comes close -- very close.

Accordingly, reading The Straight Path almost ineluctably leads the readers to one central question: How much can a foreigner actually "become" another culture? Unfortunately, an empirical answer to this question is more or less impossible to produce, but we can, with certainty, assert that immersion can lead to profound and enduring personal recodings of thoughts and culture. In other words, a person absolutely can, as Katz demonstrates, incorporate certain essences of a foreign culture into his or her horizon of understanding.

Take the goal of Katz's The Straigh Path as an example: No longer was his goal to explain the Fijian culture to others in a way that fit his previous cultural understanding; instead, he holds desperately to an ideal of relating his tale in terms of a Fijian concept of "Straight Path," a concept he had previously been unexposed to. However, through time, discourse, repeated discourse, and almost absolute immersion, he begins to understand how the Fijian's view the "Straight Path" because, ultimately, their view becomes his view. In short, no longer was he seeing the book in strict accordance to his prior cultural codes; instead he saw it through Fijian eyes.

His success should give all anthropologists hope.