Maya Medicine: Traditional Healing in Yucatán

1: Introduction and Setting

ix chapter one Introduction and Setting Introduction A surprising number of practitioners of traditional Maya medicine are consulted by the townspeople of Pisté, a small town located in the center of the northern half of Mexico’sYucatan peninsula. The curers I have come to know use a variety of indigenous and introduced plants in their practices. They utilize these abundant natural resources along withWestern medicine and traditional rituals that include magical elements. My goal in this book is to examine the process of curing from the time the curers begin to acquire their skills, through the administration of treatments.These treatments will be examined in depth. I link the ethnographic present to the past by examining the relationship between current curing practices and their colonial antecedents. Pisté is not an extraordinarily traditional town. As the town nearest the ruins of Chichén Itzá, it is neither isolated nor removed from acculturative influences . However, the curers practicing in the area share a tradition of plant use and ethnomedicine that is remarkably homogeneous given that not all the curers and not all their teachers are natives of Pisté.There is a body ofinformation on useful and medicinal plants that is known to curing specialists in the region and has been transmitted from one generation to the next since the colonial period. For the purposes of my research, this region not only includes the northern half of the peninsula, centered on the state of Yucatan, but also includes the adjoining states of Campeche and Quintana Roo. Collecting plants with traditional healers provided me with unusual opportunities to become acquainted with them on a personal level. Contrary to popular notions and scholarly writing on the subject, I found that the traditional healers are quite open in regard to their treatments, practices, and life experiences.Their willingness to share this information with a stranger made this book possible. The curers share a number of personal attributes: natural curiosity, the desire to help others, patience, a good memory, a measure of independence, and religious conviction. None of the curers I have come to know has become wealthy or famous from their skills. Although the role of the curer may once have been prestigious, this is no longer the case. The attitudes expressed by laymen and the selfperceptions of the curers suggest a high degree of ambiguity concerning the role of the traditional healer. Their medical skills may be acknowledged by some local people, but they are disparaged by others as rustics. Curers may   be suspected of witchcraft and are often vilified by evangelical groups (and some Catholics). Curing in Yucatan is at once deeply spiritual and empirically oriented, addressing problems of the body, spirit, and mind. In exploring the ways in which curers learn their craft, two basic patterns have emerged: curers either learn voluntarily from elders or they are recruited through revelatory dreams.The men who learned their skills through dreams also established a connection to supernatural beings called Balams. These supernaturals communicate with curers through the medium of the sastuns (divining stones or crystals) that are their gifts. Sastuns and their multiple uses are discussed in depth in chapters  and . My data on curing specialties, or components of curing practices, mirror those recorded in various ethnographic studies of the area undertaken with the support of the Carnegie Institute in the s and s (Redfield ; Redfield and Villa Rojas ; Steggerda , ). The works of Mary Elmendorf () and Rosita Arvigo () provide more recent points of comparison. Although curers tended to describe an idealized model with different specialists treating different ailments, the reality I encountered was a different matter. There is a tremendous amount of overlap. Individual practices freely combine a number of different components, such as prayer, massage, plant medicine, magical practices, and Western medicine. Plant medicine is the common denominator; however, there is no distinction made between it and plant magic, or between empirical and magical treatments. The curer may act as a doctor, priest, witch, and psychiatrist. It is difficult to contemplate common treatments without addressing traditional concepts of disease and its cause. The diagnosis and treatment of “culture-bound” diseases such as evil eye, evil winds, bilis, and pasmo are discussed in chapter . I hypothesize that an ideal of mental, physical, and spiritualbalance underlies the conceptions of these illnesses and guides their treatment.Imbalancesmayberectifiedbyritualactionsoravarietyoftherapies. The relationship between the present-day plant names and plant uses I recorded and those found in colonial-period sources demonstrates that the same set...