Abstract

This abstract outlines aspects of the ritual practice of a Maya shaman with whom I was fortunate to work and record over the last 16 years of his life. His name was Sebastian, known locally as Don Chabo, and he is referred to in this paper by his initials DC. Here I hope to spell out two fundamental elements of DC’s practice and way of being. The first is what I will call his ontological commitments, that is, what he held to exist as the necessary basis and frame of reference of his own practices. I am concerned equally with what he asserted to exist, and how that shaped his ritual practice and lifeworld. Among DC’s existent beings were scores of named spirits with whom he worked regularly. This meyah, ”work,“ entailed invoking them by name in precise ways and sequences, all of it articulated to an elaborate cosmology and chanted in highly marked language.

The second element I will examine are the transformations that DC himself underwent in the process of ritual performance. The key focus will be the ways in which DC relinquished aspects of his own subjectivity, in order to channel the creative and restorative force of spirits. He moved spirits into the altar space, bodies, homes, and lives of his patients, beneficiaries, and indeed into himself. At times he became a sort of Doppelgänger of the patient, whose suffering was occurring synchronously in DC’s body, during exorcism known as paá' 'ìik', ”smash spirit/wind.“ In his prayer across all genres of performance, DC routinely spoke not from his own bodily perspective, but from the perspective of the santo that was opposite and physically facing him on his altar, relinquishing his own Origo for that of his divine addressee.

The transposition is motivated by the fact that the santo is a counterpart of Jesus, and DC is giving himself over to Jesus. But what makes it work is the ontological framing of the altar space, and the play of transpositions it potentiates. There are several other features of performance that progressively attenuate DC’s subjecthood, emptying him, narrowing his attention focus, and reducing him to a state he called chichan, ”tiny.“ To be tiny was to be maximally receptive, unburdened by thought, channeling the spirits who spoke their names through his throat, as he sounded them in the chanted prayer.

William F. Hanks

Research

William F. Hanks studies the history and ethnography of Yucatan, Mexico, and Yucatec Maya language and culture, including early modern Spain and Spanish as a necessary step towards understanding the colonial formation of Yucatan and New Spain. He examines the organization and dynamics of routine language use (semantics, pragmatics, interactional sociolinguistics and the social foundations of speech practices). He has studied ritual practice, comparative shamanisms, and the relations between religion and health care in rural Mexico. His most recent work concerns the colonial history of Yucatan and New Spain, with a special emphasis on missionization and the emergence of colonial discourse genres.

Profile

Hanks received his Ph.D. in linguistics and anthropology from the University of Chicago in 1983, and remained on the faculty of both departments from 1983 to 1996, when he was appointed professor of anthropology and the Milton H. Wilson Professor of the Humanities at Northwestern University. In July 2000 he joined the University of California, Berkeley as the Berkeley Distinguished Chair Professor in Linguistic Anthropology. He has been a visiting professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Science Sociales (1988, 1992), the University of Paris X (1995), the University of Copenhagen (1996, 1999), the Casa de America, Madrid (1993, 1999) and the International Center for Semiotic and Cognitive Studies, San Marino (1998). His work is resolutely interdisciplinary and international.

The empirical basis of his research has been the history and ethnography of Yucatan Mexico, where he has conducted about 30 months of fieldwork and archival research. His speciality is Yucatec Maya language and culture and all of his fieldwork has been conducted in Maya language. He has become increasingly interested in early modern Spain and Spanish as a necessary step towards understanding the colonial formation of Yucatan and New Spain.

His work is oriented towards three areas, and the theoretical frameworks needed to understand them. The first is the organization and dynamics of routine language use (semantics, pragmatics, interactional sociolinguistics and the social foundations of speech practices). Here he has been particularly concerned with how people make reference to, describe and orient themselves in space. His first book (1990) was a study of lived space in contemporary Maya interaction and the contribution of demonstratives and deictics to communicative practice. The second area in which he has done sustained fieldwork is shamanism. This began with an extended collaboration with a contemporary Maya shaman in Yucatan, and has led him to study ritual practice, comparative shamanisms, and the relations between religion and health care in rural Mexico. The third focus of his work is the colonial history of Yucatan and New Spain, with a special emphasis on missionization and the emergence of colonial discourse genres. The latter include a wide range of evangelical texts in Maya, the grammars, dictionaries and other analytic works by missionaries in Yucatan, as well as a substantial corpus of texts authored by native Maya speakers (notarial documents as well as so called ”Indigenous genres“). Among the key concepts engaged in this work are translation, religious conversion, semantic change, discourse genres and social fields.