|
Please tell us about your research.
I have been working in the Sierra Mazateca in the northern
tip of Oaxaca
since 1993.
The Sierra Mazateca is a rugged, remote, difficult to get to
region, but at the same time its residents have had intense
relationships with people from outside -- missionaries, government
officials, cave explorers (the mountains are limestone and riddled
with deep caves).
Most famously, the region attracted international attention
beginning in the 1950s when an account of Mazatec ritual use
of hallucinogenic mushrooms was published in the 1950s. In the
60s, thousands of foreign jipis invaded the mountains looking
for various kinds of transcendent experiences, and the Mazatec
shamaness María Sabina became an international celebrity
and icon. My research has looked at the diverse ways in which
these outsiders and different Mazatec folks perceived each other,
and the relationship between the stories they tell about caves
(and the underground world in general, including various supernatural
beings), the past, and the use of mushrooms both by locals and
outsiders correspond to different ideas about what "culture"
and identity mean.
Can you tell us more about your book?
The title of the book -- "The Devil's Book of Culture" --
comes from an odd experience I had one January night in Huautla
-- the largest town in the mountains. I met a strange man (whom
I never saw again) who offered me a sheet of documents that
would enable my book, in effect, to write itself. This man seemed
to know a great deal about me and my research and promised me
that the papers in his bag would solve all my problems, and
if I left the taquería with him, he would let me have
them for free. I declined his offer, but discovered shortly
thereafter that this stranger fit the modus operandi of "El
Chato" -- a goat-bodied white demon who lives in a nearby cave,
and provides magical wealth to men in exchange for their fertility
and their willingness to become one of his lovers.
This got me to thinking about the symbolic significance of
the "book" in the Sierra, and how "culture" is conceived of
as something akin to the illicit wealth bestowed upon by El
Chato -- something tangible, economically rewarding, but dangerous,
that is obtained through secret transactions with morally ambivalent
(or worse) powerful outsiders (the Devil, gringos, the government).
In my book I explore the way this conception of culture as intimately
connected to transactions with the "outside" -- a concept that
contrasts with the taken-for-granted conception of culture held
by most anthropologists and outsiders -- gives meaning to Mazatec
talk about shamanism, tourism, caves and cavers, and just about
everything else.
What is the history of tourism in Sierra Mazateca?
A North American banker named Gordon Wasson visited the area
in the fifties, took mushrooms with a few curers, including
María Sabina, and, after promising not to reveal their
secrets, wrote an article, complete with pictures, for an obscure
journal called Life Magazine in 1957. In the sixties, Huautla
became a well-known counterculture destination for Americans
who could not afford a trip to India or Nepal.
At the peak of the 'jipi' invasion, hundreds of foreigners
were camped out along the banks of a river a few miles from
Huautla. Their behavior scandalized locals -- they wandered
around naked or close to it, they ate mushrooms in broad daylight,
and they did not follow the four day proscription of sexual
intercourse after eating mushrooms. In 1969 the army kicked
them out, and maintained a roadblock until 1976. However, while
Huautecos generally express shock and horror at the behavior
of most of these hippies, they proudly recount their belief
that many celebrities, such as John Lennon, Donovan, and the
Rolling Stones, visited their town as well, to trip with María
Sabina. A Huauteco engineer wrote about his experiences growing
up in the 60s and taking advantage of the foreign ladies' more
liberal attitudes towards sexuality in an interesting book called
"Huautla en Tiempo de Jipis."
After the hippies were expelled, they were replaced by visitors
whom the locals tend to describe more positively -- people who
respected Mazatec norms and customs, stayed in cabins or hotels,
dressed more appropriately, and generally spoke Spanish. Huautla
is much more accessible than it was in the 60s and 70s, but
the number of visitors has never returned to the pre-1969 levels.
The nationality of the visitors has changed as well.
While the 60s hippies were virtually all North American, there
are very few gringos today. Most tourists are Europeans or members
of the Mexican urban middle class. In the last few years, the
area has received a second boomlet of attention because of salvia
divinorum, another hallucinogenic plant that has become fashionable
in the United States.
How do tourists and locals define authenticity?
This is a tricky question. Authenticity is a concept that
has undergone a lot of criticism recently. In general, I can
say that outsider discourses about indigenous people tend to
define authenticity as stemming from an "untouched," "pure,"
or "prehispanic" heritage -- a kind of timeless Indian culture
that will inevitably be replaced as Indians are absorbed into
the dominant Mexican culture. Local discourses, as I mentioned
above, tend not to stress this imaginary isolation and see authenticity
as stemming from different kinds of relationships with outsiders,
both mortal and supernatural.
What other books have been published about the Sierra Mazateca?
There isn't much available in English, although a search of
the web will reveal a number of personal stories about travellers'
experiences with mushrooms or salvia. The best book is the autobiography
of María Sabina as written by Alvaro Estrada and translated
into English by Henry Munn. This book has been out of print
for a while, but thankfully the University of California Press
is coming out with a new, revised edition this October. This
book includes transcriptions of the great shaman's beautiful
chants, which show important connections with the themes of
prehispanic poetry.
Munn, who came to Huautla in the 60s as one of the hippies
and married a Mazatec woman, has also written a number of fascinating
articles about Mazatec shamanism. In Spanish, there are a few
books by anthropologists -- Eckart Boege's "Los Mazatecos Ante
la Nación" and another by Federico Neiburg.
Alvaro Estrada, the author of the María Sabina book,
also wrote "Huautla en Tiempo de Jipis" and another Huauteco
author, Juan García Carrera, wrote "La Otra Vida de María
Sabina" which reveals the old shaman's anger at the many people
who profited off of her name and image. García Carrera
has started a wonderful cultural magazine in Huautla, called
La Faena, which is an excellent source of information about
Mazatec folklore and recent history.
Unfortunately, there isn't much information available about
older history in the mountains. Most of the Mexican sources,
following the work of anthropologist Alfonso Villa Rojas, skip
over the four hundred years between the Spanish Conquest and
the mid-twentieth century, as if nothing important or historical
happened in those years.
For the prehispanic period, they all seem to site each other,
giving a strangely precise exact date for the founding of Huautla
in the 1170. It turns out that this date comes from a misreading
of a colonial document tracing the lineage of a particular ruler.
The first ruler of this line was born in 1710 (not the date
of the town's founding). One Mexican historian misread this
date in 1910, and everyone else followed suit.
|
