Family-Borne Efficacy: Shamanic Healing in Contemporary Xibo Households in Xinjiang

Abstract

This article examines how patients and their relatives in contemporary Xibo families come to understand whether shamanic healing has “worked.” Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2017 and 2026 in Qapqal Xibo Autonomous County, Yili, Xinjiang, it analyzes two closely observed healing rituals performed by the same shaman for two members of one family: a mother suffering from severe emotional distress and her adolescent son during a period of intense educational pressure. Drawing on Thomas Csordas’s tripartite framework of procedure, process, and outcome, the article relocates the analysis of ritual efficacy from the individual patient to the family as a relational unit. Three arguments follow. First, participation in healing is driven less by individual belief than by family responsibility, obligation, and affective reciprocity. Second, the family does not merely host the ritual but actively organizes, sustains, and helps confirm it. Third, efficacy is recognized incrementally through shared observation, retrospective interpretation, and everyday relational adjustment in the months and years following the ritual, rather than being determined now the ritual ends. Understood in this way, contemporary Xibo shamanic healing persists not as a survival of premodern medicine, but as a family-borne mode of acting, waiting, and making sense of uncertainty.