Prayer as Precisely Structured Ceremony

This entry records that Dine, or Navajo, religion centers prayer within an elaborate system of ceremonial healing rites, known collectively in English-language scholarship as chantways, each requiring extensive training for the medicine person, or hataalii, who performs it, and each involving specific, precisely structured prayers, songs and sandpainting imagery understood within Dine tradition as needing to be performed with exactness for the ceremony to properly restore hozho, a Dine concept often translated as beauty, harmony or balance, without presenting that specific content here. This emphasis on precise ceremonial correctness, where a rite performed with error may be considered ineffective or even harmful, has been documented by anthropologists working closely and collaboratively with Dine communities, and it underlies why Dine religious specialists themselves have historically been cautious about how, by whom and in what context this material is shared, given both its ceremonial seriousness and a documented history of outside researchers publishing ceremonial content without full community consent in earlier twentieth-century anthropological practice, a practice contemporary scholars broadly regard as having fallen well short of appropriate ethical standards.