Huaves

The article proposes a reflection on a mythological theme found by the early evangelizers of the American people in the pre-Hispanic Nahua tradition, in which the first survivors of a flood in some respects similar to that of the Bible, offend the gods and are transformed into dogs, which in turn give origin to some of the peoples of Mesoamerica. A narrative motif that, blended with the arch-testamentary version of the ark, persists in the oral narrative of many indigenous groups in contemporary Mexico. By comparing and analyzing the early versions of the Aztec tale of the flood and those recently collected in an indigenous community in Oaxaca, the article offers some considerations about the reasons for the persistence of some narrative elements and the criteria that have inspired their re-elaboration and adaptation into the current version of the Huave flood story.

ABSTRACT: In the Huave village of S.D. (Oaxaca state, Mexico), alcoholism is perceived as a main source of social concerns, and is at the central stage of a number of daily discourses and practices. The complexity of this phenomenon, hereby analysed through its consequences on health, society, economy and the local culture, justifies its conceptualisation as a total social fact (Mauss). By conducting an ethnography of alcohol consumption, I identify three main patterns of alcohol consumption, each associated with distinctive times and spaces. In so doing, I outline the historical roots of alcoholism in the village and place it within the broader political and economical context.
RESUMEN: En el pueblo huave de S.D. (Oaxaca, México), el alcoholismo es percibido como un grave problema familiar y social, y ocupa una posición de primer plano en los discursos y en las prácticas cotidianas. Un análisis de sus consecuencias a nivel sanitario, económico, social y cultural evidencia la complejidad de este fenómeno, que podríamos definir como un hecho social total (Mauss). Una etnografía del consumo de alcohol individua tres modalidades de consumo diferentes, cada una asociada con tiempos y lugares particulares, y revela de manera provocatoria la historicidad del problema, contextualizandolo dentro de las dinámicas políticas y económicas glocales.

En el presente trabajo analizo la relación que, como estudioso de las prácticas musicales, entablé con mi objeto de estudio y la forma en que tal relación –construida mediante la escucha de grabaciones etnomusicológicas de campo y grabaciones de la Nueva Canción Latinoamericana– determina la elección de mis objetos de estudio, los modos de construirlos y analizarlos. Dicha relación se enfocó en el trabajo de campo realizado entre los huaves de San Mateo del Mar (Oaxaca) y en la forma en que articulé tal experiencia con otras instancias del trabajo etnomusicológico como el análisis de los datos relevados, escritura y comunicación de los resultados de investigación. La abstracción del sujeto de estudio fue una orientación empleada para analizar la experiencia y “la relación subjetiva [del sujeto cognoscente] con el objeto [de estudio]” (Bourdieu, 2001: 182-183), así como “las condiciones sociales de posibilidad […] de esa experiencia y […] del acto de objetivación” (Bourdieu, 2003: 44). Gracias a este ejercicio, ubico algunas de las determinaciones epistemológicas e histórico-sociales de la etnomusicología en México, campo disciplinario en el que me sitúo. Este ejercicio permite concluir que el análisis de las determinaciones que orientan las relaciones entabladas con nuestros objetos de estudio habilita la praxis profesional más reflexiva.

Resumen: El rico repertorio narrativo de los huaves de Oaxaca comprende varias narraciones en las que los animales tienen relaciones sexuales con hombres o mujeres. En este artículo presento la transcripción, traducción e interpretación de dos de ellas y el análisis de otra más: en la primera, dos muchachos descubren que su abuela alimenta y satisface sexualmente un venado, que ellos matan y dan de comer a la vieja; la segunda narra la trágica aventura de un pescador que no sabe resistir al deseo de juntarse con una lagarta; la tercera evoca las hazañas de un muchacho fratricida y caníbal quien, después de violar a la diosa lunar, es transformado por ella en conejo. Estos ejemplos paradójicos –que describen actos sexuales imposibles, pero dotados de una poderosa carga simbólica– nos permiten entender las concepciones indígenas acerca de los frágiles con nes entre las diferentes formas de vida y las ideas sobre el trabajoso proceso de construcción de la identidad individual, los roles apropiados para ambos géneros y los valores que deben inspirar la conducta de las personas. Abstract: e rich repertoire of narratives told by the Huave of Oaxaca includes several tales in which animals have sexual intercourse with men or women. is article provides the transcription, translation and interpretation of two of them, and the analysis of a third one: in the rst narrative, two boys discover that their grandmother feeds and mates with a deer, which they kill and give the old lady to eat; the second one tells the tragic adventure of a sherman who cannot resist the desire to copulate with a female alligator; the third one evokes the story of a fratricidal and cannibal boy, who rapes the lunar goddess and is then transformed into a rabbit by her. ese paradoxical examples which describe impossible sexual acts endowed with a powerful symbolic meaning help us to understand the indigenous conceptions about the fragile boundaries between di erent life forms, the arduous process through which a society constructs the individual identity, the appropriate roles for both genders, and the values that should guide people's behaviour.

Through the careful examination of ethnographic material collected in recent decades in some native Mexican communities, the volume examines the processes of transformation, synthesis, adaptation and invention that have occourred among the Amerindian religions and Christianity from the first, violent colonial contact in the XVI century. The book addresses some of the most typical and original conceptions and religious practices arising from the dispute between the acculturative pressure of evangelizers and the vitality of indigenous tradition: the ideas about the composite and changing nature of personhood, its ability to act magically at a distance, and the pitfalls that threaten its integrity; the continuity between the different life-forms (human, animal or vegetal); the characteristics and the spaces in which extra-human beings act and the relationships they have with humans; the forms and original applications of prayers addressed to them, as well as the heuristics importance of such ritual texts; the ambivalence of the representations of the leading figures in the extra-human world, like the Earth, at a same time giver of all nourishment and greedy predator of bodies and "shadows"; the proximity between ritual practices and traditional therapies and the misunderstandings that occur between these and scientific medicine. Finally there is an issue which cross-cuts all the others: the dynamics that constantly enliven the religious sphere, the true focus of the identitary discourse of (and about) indigenous peoples, who are about to acquire forms of autonomy too long denied. The final chapters are dedicated to the exemplary case of the extraordinary innovations introduced by the “Pastoral Indigena”, whose members are capable of accepting within the official practice of Catholic liturgy many (selected and reinterpreted) elements of the ancient "pagan" past, so as to invent entirely new symbols, such as the crosses made of maize.

En la ponencia se presentan en lineas generales algunos resultados del proyecto "Atlas Ikoots" que se está llevando a cabo en la Comunidad Huave/Ikoots de San mateo del Mar (Oaxaca, México). El proyecto se pone como objectivo la documentación, el análisis y la valorización de formas y géneros de la representación lingüística del paisaje (desde la toponimia hasta los géneros discorsivo que la contienen). Objectivo de la ponencia es tanto lo de presentar la metodología de investigación adoptada, como el análisis de los rasgos generales de la morfología de los topónimos indígenas (transparentes, icónicos y "perspectivistas") y, finalmente, algunos ejemplos gráficos de una cartografía en lengua indígena en fase avanzada de elaboración. Las etno-toponimias conllevan un enorme potencial para la revitalización lingüística pero, sin embargo, para que este potencial se pueda desarrollar, no se puede pasar por alto la participación conciente e informada de una red de actores sociales locales, involucrados desde el principio en el proyecto mismo de investigación.

The category of “indio”, recently supplanted by that of “indígena”, was coined in the sixteenth century by European colonizers to define the aboriginal inhabitants of the Americas and imposed on a multitude of  peoples, which were extremely diversified by language, history, culture, subsistence and social and political organization, and followed their own peculiar criteria and practices of recognition. Following recent substantial transformations on the juridical, political and economic level, the increase of mobility and forms of communication, as well as the interaction with a growing variety of external interlocutors, people who presently recognize themselves as natives have appropriated the tools for managing their own identity, rights and interests with increasing autonomy, effectiveness and awareness. The essays collected in this volume offer a broad and in-depth overview of the different areas in which these identity dynamics manifest themselves, which in changing and unexpected ways affect relations with supranational and national institutions, the Church, education, health, managers of the archaeological and intangible heritage, including tourists and ethnologists.

In this article I analyze some versions of a mythical Huave narrative, telling the tragic fate of a boy with extraordinary powers which, due to his indiscrete father, is forced by the municipal authorities to repeatedly face a giant snake that causes heavy rains and threatens to flood the village, and is finally killed by it. This tale not only stages the opposite cosmic forces which regulate the delicate climatic balance of the Huave region, but it shows how, since immemorial times, the ability to control rainfall constitutes a major symbolic attribute of the holders of political authority, which inspires important ritual practices and condenses tensions concerning the struggle for power between competing generations and individuals. The conduct of the various protagonists of this narrative also highlights the principles on which authority is based, the axiological and behavioral patterns to which those who aspire to attain and preserve it must adhere, as well as the dangerous consequences that await those who contravene these rules.

The Huave of San Mateo del Mar (Oaxaca, Mexico) have a rich repertoire of tales narrating the disputes in which small and weak individuals unexpectedly defeat antagonists with a powerful appearance. Usually these struggles attain to the cosmic struggle between the lightning, which regulates rain, and the giant snake, which can trigger storms and floods: this clash is the focus of the ritual dance that takes place in Corpus Christi, the main Huave ritual public celebration. Underneath the contrast between the opposing and complementary forces that determine the rain cycle, there is also the one between male and female gender, which appears in many other narratives, sometimes in a humorous tone. In this article I shall examine the tale of Guicha tunante, a sort of indigenous Taming of the shrew, in which a man ‘who is not worth it’ manages to win – assuming the form of an armadillo, and therefore defeating her magical arts – the most beautiful, haughty and coveted woman of the community, who first attracts and then rejects all suitors transforming herself into a snake. Through the representation of forms of courtship and seduction, implemented by resorting also to the metamorphic faculties and the alter egos of its characters, this Huave narrative highlights the values and patterns of behavior which inspire the ideas of male and female roles, the correct relationship between the sexes and the profile that must be observed, in public and in private, by those who venture into the treacherous path of love affairs.

Si la antropología puede brindar una valiosa contribución al estudio del alcohol, enriqueciendo la perspectiva médica y psicológica con el análisis etnográfico de las diferentes modalidades de consumo y de los valores sociales y culturales asociados a la bebida, igualmente la observación del papel del alcohol puede complementar nuestra comprensión de fenómenos sociales complejos, como el cambio cultural. Presentaré aquí parte de los resultados de mi trabajo de campo realizado en S.D., desde una perspectiva histórica y etnográfica. Con el análisis etnográfico se han identificado tres patrones de consumo, asociados con diferentes lugares, tiempos y consumidores: en las fiestas, en las cantinas y en contextos rituales. Para poder entender sus diferentes valores y sentidos es necesario considerar la historia de la región, por lo que se analizarán los acontecimientos y los cambios en las actividades productivas ocurridos al final de los 80 (en particular, en la pesca), que provocaron el ...

Resumen: Este artículo expone las principales técnicas de pesca utilizadas por los mero ikoots de San Mateo del Mar (Tehuantepec, Oaxaca, México), tratando de mostrar cómo su gran variedad obedece a una excelente adaptación al entorno biofísico, dado que son capaces de funcionar eficazmente en diversas condiciones ambientales, y a las particularidades de su entorno económico y social. Así, muestra la pesca con atarraya, con chinchorro corto y largo, a pie con red de arrastre, con papalote y con copos. El texto cierra con unas reflexiones que tratan de poner en relación las diferentes técnicas con la división por edades de las tareas pesqueras, así como contextualizar las mutuas influencias entre los mero ikoots y el complejo ambiente del Istmo de Tehuantepec.
Palabras clave: huaves; Istmo de Tehuantepec; pesca artesanal; pesca del camarón; Sistema Lagunar Huave.

The subject of this article is the difficult relationship between biomedicine – with its therapeutic practices oriented toward the resolution of organic troubles of individual patients – and the profoundly semantic and social nature of the experience of illness in those who seek treatment by health institutions – mostly, but not exclusively – in non-Western contexts. Starting from a dramatic ethnographic example, the case of a Native Mexican teenager suffering from meningoencephalitis, admitted at a health center in San Mateo del Mar (Oaxaca, Mexico) and also, at the same time, ritually treated by several religious therapists for attacks against her alter-ego, I intend to show the different logics that inspire the diagnostic processes, healing practices and strategic choices of the agents involved, highlighting the difficulties of communication between them, the contrasting horizons of sense and value that orient them and the possibilities for negotiation and interaction.

Broken men, severed relations and a polarised society: the repercussions of alcohol addiction require forms of care capable of reassembling the scattered pieces of broken subjectivities by reintegrating them into the social body. This holistic perspective on care contrasts with that of biomedicine, which detaches individuals from their social structure and again dismembers their bodies in parts, cog-like malfunctioning organs, as mandated by its Cartesian legacy. Religious care of addiction fills the gaps left by struggling, deficient public health systems, and strives thanks to its focus on the salvation, agency and social inclusion of the deviant par excellence: the addict. By refusing to separate physical health from the functional integration in a social network of relations and obligations, religious care acts on the phenomena that produced addiction in the first place. Responding to the invitation of critical medical anthropology to focus on the intersection of biography and history, I use the concept of alcoholisation to contextualise alcohol abuse and religious conversions in indigenous Mexico within historically produced conditions of inequality and marginality. My analysis, grounded in ethnographic research conducted in San Dionisio del Mar, a Huave village in Southern Mexico, considers two options for the care of alcoholism: biomedical treatment and the religious healing performed by evangelical congregations. By retracing the exemplary life of a former addict who found solace and acceptance in religion, I interpret evangelical conversions as strategies of care at the margins of the state, and analyse them through the temporal lens of chronicity.

*** Ponencia presentada en la segunda Jornada de Estudios Huaves, organizada por el Instituto de Investigaciones Antropológicas de Universidad Autónoma de México en 2014 ***

Presentación de la investigación sobre el alcoholismo en San Dionisio del Mar, una comunidad huave (Ikojts) del Estado de Oaxaca, México.
La ponencia introduce las diferentes modalidades de consumo de alcohol en el pueblo (lugares, tiempos, modos, valores, significados) y reconstruye las etapas históricas de su llegada e incremento.
Propone una comparación entre lo ocurrido en Centroamérica a la época de la conquista española y los acontecimientos que impulsaron el consumo de alcohol en la región huave en las últimas décadas. Procede describiendo las soluciones al problema del alcoholismo elaboradas localmente (A.A. y sobre todo la conversión religiosa) y en fin contextualiza el papel del alcohol en el cambio religioso y social en la región.

CITAR COMO / QUOTE AS:
Bresciani, Chiara. 2014. "Alcohol y antropología en un pueblo huave. Problemas y desafíos pasados, presentes y futuros." II Jornada de Estudios Huaves, Mexico City.

In its planetary diffusion, the episode of Odysseus meeting Polyphemus has also arrived among the Huave, a group of native of fishermen in southern Mexico, who have welcomed it in their rich oral tradition, adapting it to their mythological horizon. So the hero from Ithaca has become a poor fisherman, the anthropophagous appetite of the cyclope is stimulated by the pleasant taste of the flesh of men who eat fish and shrimp, the rocks thrown against the fugitives become coconuts. But, above all, the barbarous alterity of the one-eyed monsters is enriched by the presence of a series of female cyclopes, for whom the appetite that drives their husbands to devour the prisoners is declined in sexual terms, with the exotic peculiarity of an anomalous shape of their genitals.

After some brief considerations about the use of the category of shamanism in the Mesoamerican context, the article deals with the conceptions and practices related to the evils that the Huave of San Mateo del Mar – a Native people of fishermen living on the coast of Oaxaca - attribute to the misadventures that can affect people’s alter ego. Initially, the article illustrates the concepts concerning the spiritual endowment of the person, which is believed to be made up of an internal soul component and an external "double", who leads a life parallel to the subject and whose adventures affect the human counterpart, sometimes causing serious and sudden illnesses. The cure of such ailments requires a particular type of ritual intervention, in which a specialist with a specially powerful alter ego sends it under his own control where the patient's “double” is located, in order to free him from the dangers that threaten it. This dangerous ritual practice consists of the theatrical execution in the patient's home of the acts that the healer’s "double" performs there where the wounded alter ego lies. In the end, after highlighting the analogies of these ritual actions with the "classical" shamanic therapies (including the Kuna ones examined by Lévi-Strauss in a famous essay), some conclusive considerations are formulated about the mechanisms of the possible therapeutic efficacy of symbolic acts.

This is an introduction to the proceedings of the conference organized in Mexico City in August 2015 to commemorate Italo Signorini, ethnologist, founder and first director of the Italian Ethnological Mission in Mexico. It contains a profile of the Italian scholar and a sketch of the contents of the different essays contained in the volume entitled "La cultura plural. Reflexiones sobre diálogo y silencios en Mesoamérica".