Ritual, Spiritual And Morals:the Construction Of Witch Doctors’ Discourse Power

In this paper, the author tried to portray the way that the witch doctor establish their discourse power and accomplish the diffusion of semantic through the observation of the form and content of communication between the witch doctor and patient. The author observed several cases of five witch doctors by the method of participant observation.nonstructured interviews,to explore the form and content of doctor-patient communication, from the perspective of dialogue analysis, and discussed this topic using the theory of ritual communication and discourse power.The paper reviews the origin and development of the witch doctor, people’s understanding of the concept of disease and death in ancient China, the application of modern witchcraft in medical treatment of ethnic minority areas. At the same time, it presents the process of the witch doctor’s establishment of discourse power and the diffusion of semantic, by studying the doctor-patient dialogue process of the five witch doctors. The research shows that, witch doctors established their discourse power by establishing the relationship between diagnosis and treatment logic and mainstream philosophy, using folk concept of ghosts to establish and reduce the fear of patients, using ritual performance to display authority in the method of ghost and deity. They always used means of making promise, make predictions, showwing their love and true selflessness. Thereafter patients’ fears and anxieties about the disease would be alleviated. The paper also discussed the connotation of discourses in doctor-patient communication. In this process, the witch doctor would transfer the concept of health and morality to the patient, try to form the patient’s moral self-discipline and then construct their moral power.