Curing and curers in Piste, Yucatan, Mexico
Description
There are a number of practitioners of traditional Maya medicine working in and around Piste, a small town located in the center of the northern half of Mexico's Yucatan peninsula. These curers treat the physical, spiritual, and emotional ailments of their clients using a variety of indigenous and introduced plants, Western medicine, and traditional rituals that include magical elements. I examine the process of curing from the time the curers begin to acquire their skills through their administration of treatments. The ethnographic present is linked to the past by an analysis of the relationship among current curing practices and their colonial antecedents Collecting plants with traditional healers provided me with an opportunity to become acquainted with them on a personal level. Portraits of the curers are presented in an attempt to humanize the literature on the subject, which tends to focus on what these specialists do rather than on who they are. The healers included in this study either learn their craft from elders, or are recruited through dreams Traditional concepts of disease, its cause, and its treatment are based upon an underlying ideal of mental, physical, and spiritual balance. The concepts of 'culture-bound' illnesses such as evil eye, evil winds, bilis, and pasmo, tend to overlap and blend together, much in the same way as the curing practices blend plant medicine, massage, magical practices, and Western medicine. Although the components of individual practices vary, all of the practitioners in this study are herbalists. Plant medicine is the common denominator The close relationship between present-day plant names and plant uses I recorded and those in colonial period sources demonstrates that the same set of plants has been utilized for a fairly long period of time by those who know the local flora best. The curers with whom I have worked manage to maintain their traditions and simultaneously incorporate new elements into their practices. This seemingly contradictory cultural conservatism and flexibility may well have contributed to the longevity of traditional Yucatecan curing, and may influence its current evolution