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 chapter five Exploring the Spectrum of Curing Specialties: Common Practices During the course of both field and library research on the curers ofYucatan, I became aware of a number of different terms that seemed to represent different kinds of curers or curing specialties. The first part of this chapter contains the results of research I conducted in order to understand the differences among them and determine whether the categories mentioned in the literature still exist. The following section examines common curing practices or components of individual practices. When I first began to work with DonTomás, he mentioned three terms repeatedly: h-men, dzadzac, and pulyah. I began my investigation with them, first consulting Chan Kom: A Maya Village (Redfield and Villa Rojas ) and then eliciting definitions of these terms from curers. Redfield andVilla Rojas (:–) claim that the h-mens were the shamanpriests of the village and that they were exclusively male. They served as intermediariesbetweenmenandsupernaturalsbutwerealsousuallyherbalists. The dzadzac were male or female (x-dzadzac) herbalists. Often the h-men’s wife was an herbalist. Although women could not be h-mens, they might be either witches or parteras. The Spanish term partera was widely used at that time, with the Maya x-hiikab (“she who does massage”) or x-ilah-kohan (“she whoobservesthesick”)recordedasalternates.Midwiveswereexclusivelyfemale, and kaxbaac (bonesetters) were exclusively male. Males could be witches or pulyahs (sorcerers). Essentially, the authors describe a hierarchical arrangement, with the categories “male” and “sacred” ranked above “female” and “secular.” Clearly, the categories overlapped. My research was motivated by a typicallyWestern impulse to sort out the categories in order to understand them better. I also hoped to learn something about how the curers saw themselves in relation to these categories. The practice of midwifery and plant medicine overlap. A midwife is almost certainly also a x-dzadzac or yerbatera (herbalist). The two midwives I have come to know both use plant medicine and massage therapy as part of their prenatal and postpartum care; as I have already mentioned, the termsobadora   literally means “masseuse.” Three of the male curers also utilized massage in their treatments. The male masseurs seem to focus on realigning bones and muscles in patients of both sexes. Don Cósimo states that he does some things“to stretch the bones” but that he does not deal with setting them at all, adding that “there are specialists for that.” Male curers who do massage may be the direct descendants of Redfield and Villa Rojas’ kaxbaac, although when Don Tomás described the practice of his father, he used another term, utzkil a bac (fixes your bone) rather than kaxbaac. Don Pedro and Don Cósimo also used the former term. I have not met any male practitioner whose entire practice consists of massage. Although Don Tomás and his father helped the women in their family give birth, I have not met a male midwife per se. Male curers rarely oversee pregnancies or attend births. When I asked the three curers with whom I have worked the most, Don Tomás, Don Pedro, and Don Cósimo, to explain the difference in the meaning of the termsdzadzac,h-men,andpulyah, their responses provided an interesting point of comparison to what Redfield and Villa Rojas (:) had recorded in Chan Kom. The three curers agreed upon the following definitions: a yerbatero/a or (x)dzadzac (the Maya word was known to all but used infrequently) is simply a person, male or female, who knows about traditional plant medicine and uses it to cure people, often for a fee. So, also, is a h-men. The defining difference between a yerbatero and a h-men is that only the latter “works with” sastuns given him by the balams. The first year that I worked with Don Tomás, I took notes as he described the relation between the balams and sastuns. His explanation went like this: Balams are the Dueños del monte (Masters of the Forest). They live in caves, and they bring winds. The crystals are a gift from them that you use for talking to them. Balams give power to men in the woods when they are fourteen or fifteen years old. Women can learn to use sastuns from a man in the family, but they do not receive power from the jungle. . . . Balams take care of you in the woods. When you hear whistles, they are caring for you, warning away animals. But you have to...

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