Taking these cases together, one notices how local healing is not always the first
resort (see also Lambert 1996). On the contrary, when possible and available (for
example in villages like Pata and Baghial, which are located close to the road leading
to the district’s main city), biomedicine is either the first option or a therapy which is
being pursued alongside ritual healing. Nevertheless, as was also shown by
Amarsingham Rhodes (1984) in a Sinhalese context, even when the efficacy in
biomedical terms could be attributed to biomedicine, people often attribute it to the
territorial deity. As Amarsingham Rhodes points out, this is not only due to the fact
that the diagnoses given by deities are powerful polyvalent symbols that can confer
meaning and sense on individual experiences in religious and social idioms. It is also
due to the fact that the patients undergo a powerful performative aesthetic
experience, which makes them feel healed (Desjarlais 1996). The performative
practices linked to the institution of the territorial deity – with the ritual traversing of
its space, the rich aesthetic of dancing and oscillating in different directions, and the
Anthropology & Medicine 89
variety of bodily activities involved in its healing and divination sessions – make
possible the experience of bodily empowerment, together with the feeling of the link
between the body, the deity, the territory and the community.