What is the connection between traditional shamans and traiteur?
How may a healer's personal illness experiences affect his/her own healing practice?
In works by Mircea Eliade, a prototype for the traditional shaman is presented. Some of his/her characteristics are being in a "marginal" position in society, knowledge gained through intuition and experience rather than through "book-learning," and a severe past illness experience(s). The traiteur named Lawrence exhibits all of these qualities in excess. As a child, he was obese, slow, and sickly and spent much of his time with "the old people" in his family and at the doctor's office. His illnesses have run the gamut of high blood pressure, a brain tumor, gland trouble, diabetes, obesity, liver cancer and epilepsy. In the film, he poignantly relates one of his battles with illness: "I was in the hospital, in bed, for two years with epilepsy — strapped more or less like an animal, I would say. And I saw what a treater done for me with my epilepsy, cured me from it." His close relationships with treaters — both as a relative and a patient — and his own illness experiences have added to his ability and desire to empathize with and reach out to patients, making Lawrence the archetypical wounded healer.

Because of his epileptic fits and self-described "slowness" as a child, Lawrence did not go very far in his conventional education and is therefore illiterate. When combining that with his disability, which leaves him unable to perform manual labor, few regular job opportunities exist of which he can take advantage — leaving him unemployed. He has also been divorced twice and left mostly without family. All of these characteristics relegate him to a marginal position in society where he lives on his welfare checks while working as a full-time healer. Nevertheless, he should not be underestimated. Despite his lack of formal education, Lawrence possesses qualities that make him an affective healer: a wonderful bedside manner, great sincerity, the improvisational abilities and arrogance of a gifted showman, and an uncanny ability to interpret what a person must witness to believe that he/she will get well. These gifts may become problematic when, as discussed later under the "TV" section, his confidence becomes excessive to the point of endangering a patient by giving him/her a false sense of security in the infallible power of his treatments.

In Robert Anderson's Magic, Science and Health, he presents various scholars definitions of shamanism. In short, a shaman is distinguished as a healer who mediates between the spirit world and his/her patients to bring about social, psychological and physiological healing. According to this definition of shamanism, of all the traiteurs in the documentary, Miss Ella comes closest to the role of the shaman in that she received the gift directly from "the Spirit" in a series of dreams and visions. As evidenced in her following quote, Miss Ella intercedes with the spirit world to gain insight and information to help the people for whom she prays.

The Spirit talk to me. Sometime you hear me talking to somebody; I'll be talking to the Spirit.... Sometime I'll be laying down on the sofa in the daytime, and somebody'll come and touch me in my back...a hand cold, cold, cold...and they try to tell me something and I can't make out what they say 'Blah, blah, blah, blah'...I got my Bible there and i'll pray...After a while, the phone rings from California, Detroit, Alabama, Chicago, New York, Tennessee, Las Vegas, somewhere. And I figure that's what that was. I work with the spirit all the time. I don't ever do nothing unless I talk with the Lord.

Miss Ella believes that the Spirit awakens her when a patient needs her either on the phone or for a visit. Her powers as a "two-head person" also enable her to be able to "see" events that have or will happen in order for her to counsel her patients. These abilities are especially serviceable when diagnosing and healing harm caused by witchcraft.

How does witchcraft help to explain misfortune?
Traditional healers often treat for supernatural illness. Miss Ella, the Creole traiteuse, combines her visionary gift of sight with a testing process to diagnose witchcraft. In the following exchange, the interviewer is trying to ascertain the steps of Miss Ella's conclusion that one of her patients is afflicted with witchcraft and not rheumatoid arthritis (the physician's opinion):

She had something [wrong] with her foot. She thought it was a sprained ankle, but it wasn't a sprained ankle. She had walked in something.

Interviewer (off camera): In what?

I don't know, witchcraft or something.

How did you know it was witchcraft?

I tried it. I told her what to do...she did it, it worked. Salt and vinegar remove witchcraft.

And if it hadn't worked?

Well, if it hadn't worked, it was a sprung ankle.

According to some anthropologists, witchcraft is a supplementary system of logic that is used to explain misfortune when it occurs outside of the obvious system of cause and effect. Anthropologist Regis invokes Evans-Pritchard's classic example to explain this functionalist assessment of witchcraft:

Witchcraft becomes a way of explaining things that can't be explained in any other way...A classic example, I stubbed my toe and, of course, I stubbed it on a root, but why did I stub my toe when I've walked on this path a thousand times and I've never stubbed my toe before? I know that there's a root there. Witchcraft answers a different question: why me and why now?

Miss Ella's ability to remove the harm caused by witchcraft and to "see" events and truths that others cannot is a dualistic power. Although Miss Ella obviously employs her gift for the "good" of humanity, that same power is used by others to cause hurt. As her patient with the injured ankle in the film states, "They have traiteuse that do damage. You know what I mean? They do damage."^* For a more in depth discussion of the ambivalence of healers' powers to cause both cures and harm, see Michael Brown's article "The Dark Side of the Shaman."

Another aspect of Miss Ella's practice is her distinction as a specialized healer in her community. She provides services for illnesses that medical doctors do not acknowledge as legitimate. Miss Ella contends:

The doctor can't help you for that. A lot of people take sick with something, and they go to the doctor. The doctor don't know what it is. He can give you a shot, and he can treat you, but he don't know what it is. You still have it. You have to go to a two-head person or a person can treat. (Interviewer: "What's a two-head person?") Well, like me. They can think of more than one thing. They can tell more than one thing. That's a two-head person.

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^* This labeling of a traiteur as a witchcraft practitioner only occurs among some people and usually within the Creole ethnic group.