Abstract
The Yezidis, speakers of a Kurdish dialect living mainly in northern Iraq, are distinguished from the (Muslim) Kurds and other neighboring communities by their religion, a syncretism of Islamic and Christian elements with local indigenous cults. They are at pains both to distance themselves from the Kurds and to keep their rituals secret from outsiders, having gone so far as not to adopt Arabic or any other writing system and to stigmatize literacy. This report of field research among the exilic Yezidi communities of Armenia and southern Russia sketches the relationship of their traditional healing practices with their social structure and describes both a sanctioned treatment by a sheikh of one of the clerical castes and the practice of a non-traditional, but tolerated, woman healer and fortune-teller.
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