Katz, Richard – Clinical anthropologist whose research in the late 1960s on San (Bushmen) healing practices in the Kalahari Desert is published as the seminal volume Boiling Energy: Community Healing among the Kalahari Kung (1982). Katz adopted a method of participantobservation grounded in sociological theory, and his work outlines the importance of the trance or healing dance to community well-being. Anthropological research in this area has been crucial to the shamanistic interpretation of Southern African and other rock art traditions. In the late 1970s Katz continued his research with fieldwork on healing and witchcraft in Fiji, published as The Straight Path of the Spirit: Ancestral Wisdom and Healing Traditions in Fiji (1999). Katz is currently professor of cross-cultural psychology at the University of Saskatchewan (First Nations University of Canada).
SOURCE:
Historical Dictionary of Shamanism by Graham Harvey and Robert J. Wallis 2007
