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Article

Three Mazatec Wise Ones and

their Books

Benjamin FeinbergDepartment of Social Sciences, Warren Wilson College, NorthCarolina, USA

Abstract ▪ Most accounts of psychedelic mushroom use in Mexico’s Sierra Maza-teca describe the practice as a prehispanic survival degraded by tourism. Thisarticle explores how - through chants, self-descriptions and life stories - Mazateccurers who deal with ’outsiders’ use the discourse surrounding mushrooms toconstruct a mimetic model of power and the relationship between inside andoutside that highlights the importance of the border and the position of themediator. The themes of shamanic travel and the book make both sense and

power out of magical mushroom mediation and involve the outsider as an essen-tial component of Mazatec identity.Keywords ▪ drugs ▪ metaculture ▪ Mexico ▪ shamanism

Valuable Book, saysMeasured Book, saysIt’s certain, saysIt’s true, saysAdmirable Book, saysImmense Books, saysIt came forth Lord, it came forth sacred, saysMany years ago, saysMany days ago, saysAdmirable Book, immense Book, saysWhoever is able to see it, saysWhoever is able to touch it, saysIt’s true, saysCan’t estimate its value, saysCan’t take its measure, saysValuable Book, saysMeasured Book, saysThey are true words, saysStraight words, saysLittle woman who resounds, says(Estrada, 1981: 180)

I am a lawyer woman, saysI am a woman of transactions, saysHoly Father, says

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That is his clock, saysThat is his lord eagle, saysThat is his opossum, saysThat is his lord hawk, saysHoly Father, saysMother, says(Estrada, 1981: 189)

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In the Sierra Mazateca of Oaxaca, Mexico, the three varieties of psychedelicmushrooms (hongos) are the centerpiece of what Taussig (1993) would callthe Mazatec ’mimetic machine’. Although the fungi themselves are, theysay, less common than in times past, so that local curers and dealers mustsend for them from far away spaces, driving up the price, images of hongossprout everywhere: in the lettering of the taqueria Maria Sabina, the casa dela. cultura Maria Sabina, the water tank of Huautla dejim6nez; in murals onthe elementary school named for Ricardo Flores Mag6n and the ceiling ofone of the town’s ’Helados’ ice cream shops; as nothing more than a simpleicon on the backboards of the basketball court in the center, on the centerof the basketball court in the INI (National Indigenista Institute) com-pound, and embroidered onto the skirts, pants, shirts and dresses sewn andsold by local artisans and entrepreneurs.

These are some of the physical sites of the visual representation of themushroom; the places where it appears to the eye - sometimes as a Panopti-cal eye, as in the ice cream mural, where a monstrous eyeball wells upbeneath the fungus from underground. Are these mushroom images thevisible hidden cameras of The Prisonersl village, striving - inevitably withonly limited success - to trap the play of identity and difference, prisonerand guard, commodified other and commodifying sell

But the mycofilic organization of the play of identity and differencesprouts from many other sources besides the visual, mostly from the chatteron the streets that presses close to any 97-into - have you tried the mush-rooms yet?/you should try the mushrooms/my great grandmother MariaSabina taught me all about mushrooms - and the reams of written materialdocumenting mushroom use and the mushroom experience from almostevery conceivable position - The Life of Maria Sabina, The Other Life of MariaSabina, Maria Sabina and her Magic Muslaroom Velada, on and on - all ulti-mately sounding the same.2 The discourse is omnipresent, it surrounds andengulfs you; it projects you into another world.

This space, this space of ’space’ or ’magic world’ to use R. GordonWasson’s (1957) often repeated label, has been opened and shaped froma variety of angles. Wasson sought the racial past, the survival of an ancientAsiatic religion, and his writings on this ecstatic primitive attracted hordesof First World pilgrims eager to consume the primitive in the form ofMexican indigenousness. Then, as Eric Zolov (personal communication1994) has pointed out to me, the Mexican middle class developed its own

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hippies - performing a desired modernity by miming foreign hippies per-forming a desired primitive authenticity by miming Mexican Indians.

But the chain does not end there. The Mazatec-speaking mushroomstitchers, talkers, vendors, eaters and chanters are not the bottom, the baseof a rising pendulum oscillating between attractions and distinctions. Theydo not play the role that Bourdieu (1984: 34) ascribes to the French

working class, whose aesthetic tastes are said to emerge naturally from’more direct, more immediate satisfactions’ like the ’sense of revelry, theplain speaking and hearty laughter which liberate by setting the social worldhead over heels, overturning conventions and proprieties’. Mazatec rep-resentations cannot be isolated from ’Western’ appropriations of them soeasily; they are not the natural by-products either of their ’culture’ or theraw materiality of their being, their Nanook-like struggle to survive.

Mazatec-speaking Wise Ones, it can be argued, even in the least specu-lative models of anthropological theorizing, enact a representation of some-thing both through shamanic mushroom practice and shamanicmushroom meta-practice. In all likelihood, it is not something but somemany things, many of which escape my competence to contain, contact ordescribe. But one thing seems to strike me, for whatever reason, and thatis how shamanic mushroom discourse seems to perform as well as copy theway that power is perceived to circulate from the vantage point of thiscorner of the world, and also how it theorizes identity, otherness and theprocess of interpenetration, or metaculture. From this angle, Mazatec-language, real Indian chants and mushroom knowledge cannot be isolatedfrom presumably inauthentic tourist appropriations of indigenous religiouspractice - the mimetic force of mushroom identity derives from anddepends upon its interlocking unity with the ’outsider’s’ gaze. Shamanismevokes and transcends a particular sort of border which becomes in thisevocation what I have called a pictorial mode of reporting culture. This prac-tice, which uses foreigners just as the foreigners use the locals, provides aspecific sort of power and also the sorts of envy that accompany it.

I have elsewhere (Feinberg, 1996) discussed the conversations aboutmushroom rituals between outsiders and Huauteco residents that were a

frequent part of my fieldwork experience. In this article, I jump from theperiphery of the mushroom discourse to the very center. I will begin withthe mushroom ritual and move outwards to explore discourses that are pro-duced at two distinct sites: the event itself, and the conversations that

precede and follow it. with the men and women who manage the event.A close examination of the careers and stories of three Wise Ones,

including two personal acquaintances of mine - Ricardo Rocha of thevillage of Santa Cruz de Juárez and Estela Navarro3 of the center of Huautlade jim6nez - and the internationally famous Maria Sabina, who died in1985 but whose story has survived through Wasson’s recordings of herchants and through two versions of her autobiography transcribed byHuautecos, should illuminate several different themes that seem to inhabit

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the Magic World. The chanting voice of Maria Sabina, as recorded byWasson and included as an appendix in Alvaro Estrada’s version of the greatcurer’s autobiography, runs through the article as a supplement and cor-rective to my stories and analysis.

We will see how the discourse surrounding shamanism emphasizestravel, both the Wise One’s drug-aided travel across a named landscape andthe travel of clients to see a Wise One, and we will explore how thisrepresentation of travel forges theories of place, space and a form of powerthat accrues to the shaman as an intermediary. This intermediary positionalso produces a fear of envy, and we shall see that all three of our Wise Onesworried about envious neighbors.

We shall see how shamanic discourse mimetically reproduces an objec-tification of the Overview, the dominant (linear) mode of representingculture and space and producing experts, but we shall examine the impli-cations of this objectification for the meaning of the Overview in the

shamanic context.All of these stories and themes demonstrate how the shamanic dis-

course is not a native world view or cosmology that belongs deep in theheart of some ’non-Western’, ’indigenous’, ’Mazatec’, ’disappearing’ or’oppositional’ culture. These stories and practices instead highlight a viewof the world and its peoples that focuses attention on the vague and con-fusing borders between groups, particularly between those at the marginsand those at the centers of power. The border, here represented by WiseOnes, mushrooms, and the humans and discourses that come from all overthe world to congregate around them, becomes far more meaningful thanany imaginary hinterland or cultural core. It is seen as a complex place,embedded in strange practices and bizarre narratives, infused with danger,envy and betrayal.

Description of my Mushroom Experiences in the SierraMazateca: A Conventional Story

First, let’s take a look at what happens when you visit a Wise One to takemushrooms and he or she starts to sing and chant. This is the obvious placeto start - this is where traditional accounts of the magic world begin andend - the true stuff (and the real non-stuff or epiphenomena) . He or sheknows your name and where you are from, at least. Maybe he or she knowsa little more, so from the Wise One’s perspective you appear as if a gueston Oprah or Jenny Jones: Carlos, from Tejas, just wants the experience;Armando, of Mexico City (Coyoacan), depressed since his wife divorcedhim; Jorge, German, writing a book on herbal medicine. Sitting there inthe darkness, you tingle with anticipation and the first effects of the drug.The Wise One prays or sings, and fiddles with copal incense. You may beleft alone in the darkness, or he or she may stay with you.

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Estela left me and a companion alone most of the evening in a smokycabin while she attended two Italians in another building at her husband’srancho. My companion and I finally left the cabin, since we felt suffocatedby the smoke, and sat outside by another fire surrounded by coffee trees.Julia, the high-priced lady of wisdom from the center of town, sat and sewed,or left me alone to contemplate the extremely loud popular music andannouncements blaring from a loudspeaker in the elementary school nextdoor, seemingly from right inside my head. ’Ignore the noise’, she advisedme, frowning. I remembered what another Wise One, a man who lived wayup in Maria Sabina’s old neighborhood, had told me as we struggled up themountain towards his house. ’The mushrooms don’t work in the Center.There are too many people, too much noise.’ He was wrong, of course, butJulia was insane if she thought I could ignore the amplifiers right next door,no matter how lost I was in the monotonous and predictable commandsand analysis offered by those pesky ninos santos.4

Only with Don Ricardo Rocha, in the neighboring village of Santa Cruzde Juarez (a one-hour walk from Huautla), did I feel that I got my money’sworth. I ran into a Rosario, a human rights lawyer from Veracruz whom Ihad met earlier in the month, on the street.5 She invited me to walk withher and her Queb6cois (monolingual French-speaking) boyfriend to SantaCruz to meet Ricardo. She and the fellow were going to participate in a cer-emony, and I could come and at least meet Ricardo, who was said to be an

interesting man. He was asleep when we arrived, but his family served uscoffee and he stumbled out to join us and chat. He seemed like an upbeat,cheery old fellow in his ’I [heart] Jesus’ baseball cap, and we signed thebook that he kept that noted the names and addresses of all his clients,

Rosario, the Queb6cois, and I paid for the doses for ourselves, Ricardo,and his assistant. Each of us foreign men were judged to be unusually largeand given what was called a ’double dose’. A family of comerciantes fromHuautla joined us - the mother, who sold gordita.s in the market, her 19- and16-year-old sons, and the oldest son’s fianc6e. The wedding, scheduledthree days hence, was the nominal reason for the trip. They arrived late,after we had already dosed, and we three outsiders sat on chairs in the backof the room, with the Huautecos on benches in front; we silently observedthem in the pitch darkness for the rest of the night.

This is a conventional story in the literature; it shows the level of mycommitment, or adventurous spirit, or the authenticity of my culturalimmersion. This immersion requires a prior clearly recognizable subjectposition within ’The West’, which is somehow juxtaposed or transcendedin the psychedelic Other.6 It is a great moment, told from the point of viewof the naive, doubtful pragmatist (the woman FBI agent of The X-Files,Carlos Castaneda (1968), Wasson’s first vela.da with Maria Sabina) andhis/her partner, the earnest spiritualist sincerely seeking any kind of truthhidden within other cultures and their secret practices (the ones who toldold chinga sabz*7 that they were looking for God, the male partner on The

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X-Files). At first I did not plan to tell it, but conventional stories are therefor a reason and should not be ignored; we must enter and explore themand probe around, hoping to get caught instead of dreading that ’exquis-ite pain’ that we, like the unfortunate folklorist killed by an urban legendin the movie Ca~~a~, must experience as we allow ourselves to be caught,contaminated and broken by our own myths.

It is a convention that parallels all of ethnography, I suppose. It is thepeak moment in the ethnographic enterprise. The Western self partici-pates, observes, feels and then textualizes the experience. Castaneda writeshis notes in three columns: what happened, what was said, and what wasfelt. Something ambiguous is gained in the process.

Ricardo asked the Huauteco family if they had eaten mushroomsbefore. The mother had once, a long time back, and the bride-to-be alsohad, but nothing had happened. They had not taken effect. Now they atethem again, sitting in front of us before the candles were put out. Ricardoshowed them a chart with a man and a woman surrounded by saints andimages of Christ. He interpreted the chart, explaining how it describedChrist’s design for the institution of marriage, prescribing the utter

merging of the two families into one unit. He told the young couple that itwas very important for them to attend church frequently, at six in themorning, at least three times a week. ’Yes Godfather’, said the young man.’Six in the morning’. We all stood and pressed close to the couple, touch-ing and stroking them with all of our arms. Then all the lights went out, wesat, and Ricardo and his assistant proceeded to sing and chant for about 5hours. During the chants in Mazatec, the assistant would repeat Ricardo’ssyllables a second or two afterwards, creating an impressive effect. I did notknow where the voices came from; I forgot the dimensions of the room inwhich I sat; I imagined various spatial arrangements for my companions andfrequently became convinced that one of them was slipping into or out ofthe room. Occasionally I fought the urge to get up and leave myself.

Unlike Wasson, I was very familiar with these sensations, which hadbeen internally textualized in my youth through the frames of ’tripping’ -going somewhere else for knowledge or experience not easily accessiblehere - or ’frying’ - a more internally oriented experience that presumablyproduces pleasure out of annihilation (like sniffing glue), not exchange ortravel. I tried to pay attention to what songs in Spanish I could and to followthe difficulties of this unfortunate family, but mostly I tried to relax andenjoy the chanting and ignore the ubiquitous seemingly internal mono-logue and its harping self-criticisms.

The songs and the chants of Don Ricardo traveled over and through alandscape of places he saw and/or named. Every once in a while I heardmy name, or that of the other participants in the ’trip’ and then I wouldhear ’Estados Unidos’ or ’Veracruz’ or ’Canada’, referring to our respec-tive places of origin. Sometimes he referred to Rosario by name; at othertimes her presence was indexed by the word ‘licenciada’s or ’derechos

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humanos’.9 Ricardo saw many things; at one point he saw a shining goldenfield of corn in the west that seemed to spread out forever. On anotheroccasion he came to Chiapas to check out what was happening with regardsto the Zapatista rebellion, which was at the time less than two months old.He exhaled the syllables of ’Chiapas’ and ’Zapatista’. ’Where there is war’,he sang, ’that there be peace. Where there is war, that there be peace. Thatthe President of the Republic not sell us.’ Afterwards, he explained someof his vision, and asked if any others had shared it. ’Did you see the shiningfield of corn? One thousand hectares. No. It was vast and beautiful; youdidn’t see it?’ And after a pause: ’It means (quiere decir) prosperity’. Manyother events marked that particular ritual, including the identification of awitch who had brought a great deal of trouble to the family of Huautecos,one of whom experienced a great deal of discomfort and anxiety duringthe ritual, but I can only focus on what I can understand and what I heard,and that was the constant marking of space.

Traveling for Good and Evil

I am going to receive the bewitched spirit in the traced path, I am going toreceive its soul, I am going to receive its destiny, I am going to receive the tracksof the path of its feet. (Estrada, 1981: 123)

His work lies among the nerves, not in the underworld, but on the heights,places of as much anguish as the depths, where the elation of elevation is

accompanied by the fear of falling in to the void of chasms. (Munn, 1973: 108)

Like English-speakers, the Mazatec mushroom eaters refer to the experi-ence as a ’trip’. But unlike its use by American devotees of the hallucino-genic experience, this signifier refers to a voyage through a space that isidentical to, or at lease closely parallel to, the actual geographical and physi-cal spaces of the world. The man who eats mushrooms travels through andmarks places. The places are seen with the eyes and mentioned with thevoice; they are embodied within the ’child saints’. ’Yes, I traveled there’,people will say, ’by means of the mushrooms’. Through mushroom chantssuch as those voiced by skilled practitioners like Don Ricardo and MariaSabina, one can hear the emergence of a local sense of place and travel inthe tracing of path maps that both connect the participants in the eventand perform the power to manage intercultural and inter-regional com-munication in a locally conventional way.

These connections are intimately associated with the travel-orientedtense of power, in which naming a place - embodying that place in the voice- bears a close relationship to both visiting that place, knowingit, and accru-ing the power derived from including the place in one’s network of mutualobligations. It shares the power of the chikonio who gave places there names,dropping them as he passed them while chasing another spirit through the

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mountains (Inchaustegui, 1977). It recognizes these networks of obli-gations as the ultimate source of power, which helps to explain why theritual performer Estela, during her ceremony, named the areas and streetsof Mexico City where various of her benefactors reside.ll In the 1960s,Henry Munn quoted another man of wisdom whose chant invoked thenames of such sources of power:

’Father Bank. Big Bank. Where the light of day is. C6rdoba. Orizaba.’ He namesthe cities where the merchants of Huautla sell their principal commercial crop- coffee - in the market. ’Where the Superior Bank is, says. Where the Big Bankis, says. Where the Good Bank is, says. Where there is money of gold, says.Where there is money of silver, says. Where there are big notes, says. Where thebank of god is, says. Where the bank of well-being is, says.’ (Munn, 1973: 116)

These representations of the role of the mushroom masterer as mastertraveler are elaborated more clearly in conversations with Wise Ones thatoccur in the context of what we might call ’normal reality’, that conditionmarked by the absence of the ninos santos. There are two explicitly statedreasons to take mushrooms: to cure a specific ailment and to see the future.But the content and style of casual conversations with Wise Ones revealadditional meanings to the experience beyond those that are admitted.

Some have books, some do not. In the book are written the names andaddresses, or at least the home towns, of all the clients who have used theservices of the Wise One in question. Ricardo began to keep a book aboutseven years ago, and I glanced through the pages before signing. Men andwomen had come to him from all over Mexico, the United States, SouthAmerica and Europe. Many had come, like the unfortunate family ofHuauteco comerciantes, from other parts of the Sierra Mazateca. One hadeven come from as far away as Japan. There is always one from Japan. Japanrepresents the ultimate signifier of exotic and absurd distance, the powerof the Powerful One to stretch across the globe as magically as capitalism.Don Juanito tells me of the arrogant youngjaponis Samuel, who ate six pairsdespite many warnings and went insane, roaming about on all fours andslobbering like a dog to his great shame the next morning, when he awokewithout much face. ’Even Japan’, I have heard, many times.

Ricardo is also extremely proud of another book. ’I am the curanderoon page 131 of the Maria Sabina book’, he shrieks with excitement.l2 He isreferring to a compilation of musings, trippy drawings and narratives ofmushroom experiences by one Enrique Gonzalez Rubio Montoya, whichincludes a chapter called ’Clairvoyance of Don Ricardo, Curer of SantaCruz’ (Rubio Montoya, 1992). Rubio Montoya reports a night spent withRicardo, in which the curandero had known that the author had just trav-eled by airplane to the United States and that his companion was seeing awoman who was deceiving him.

Ricardo has a book, as does Marcelino. Other men like Juan Peralta havebooks that were dedicated to them by foreigners. He shows it to me so that

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I can read the inscription: ’To Don Joan Peralta’. The book is a Master’sthesis in French called ’Les Granjes du jour’. Maria Sabina had a book, butthat is something different. Julia’s husband, ’a great and powerful Wizard’,does not have a book, to my knowledge, but the phone rang as I spoke tohim. He had finished a hard day of labor on one of his pieces of land (hecultivates bees for honey, as well as ’a lot of coffee’ and corn) and he hadbeen drinking (although I am told that he only rarely imbibes).

He was talking about how the truth is here, right here, in no otherhouse. And how the others, like Ricardo, chant and sing but don’t knowanything. ’Puro nientira’, he says, ’Puro engaiia’, (Pure lies. Pure deception).He says he knows, but only here do they know THE TRUTH. ’Ricardo[Rocha] is sick and cannot even cure himself. And people come here fromall over the world, from Europe. I can communicate from this house withany government in Europe. Through communication, through know-ledge.’ He listed many countries in Europe. ’They come well recom-mended. They come back. This house has been the center of power for 600years’, he said. When he hung up the phone he said that people call fromGermany to say when they will come here. ’Does Ricardo have this? ¡r..sbueno!’ and he laughed.

For this master, the truth may have been ’right here’, in the frequentlyderided (by those of other pueblos, barrios and ranchetias) center of Huautla,but the power that accompanies that truth was expressed through the tele-phone line, in the connection that mushrooms both produce and mimebetween this world and another.

Stephanie Kane (1994) and Anna Tsing (1993) have also discussed therelationship between shamanism and travel. Kane, writing about theEmbera Indians of Panama, describes how:

While shamans are strongly linked in service to their own family groups, thereputations of great shamans are spread by word of mouth, attracting peoplefrom great distances. Discourse about shamanism is a discourse of journeys.Long journeys to meet shamans of powerful repute are undertaken by thosewho want to tap their power, either because they want to learn how to becomeshamans themselves or because they search for a cure - endeavors that areoften one and the same. Journeys give narrative form to a patient-student’ssearch and to the actual curing event itself. Journeys bring a patient-student tothe homes of shamans, and from the ritually marked spaces in the central plat-forms, the shamans use their songs to call spirits to come and lend vision.(Kane, 1994: 142-3)

The distances that men and women travel to visit Wise Ones in theSierra Mazateca do not have to be across the vast deserts and oceans thatlead to big cities and foreign countries, although these days, at least whenlocals are talking to a foreign anthropologist like myself, these latter sitesseem to take on the most significance, dominating the discourse. Even inthe old days, before Wasson and the hippies, travel was an important partof shamanic discourse. Alfonso Terdn, the ex-municipal president whose

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grandfather was a great and powerful Wise One (as attested by Maria Sabinaherself [Estrada, 1981]) tells me how people traveled from all over theSierra to see this man, from Tenango and all of that part, just as clients inPanama who are not ’ethnic’ outsiders travel to seek particular EmberAhealers. The difference, in the post-Wasson era, seems to be that the travelsbetween c.omunidades and ranchos once traced by the Chikon seem trivialin comparison to the trekkers sucked in from far away sites like Japan, justas the inter-Sierra Huautla-centered trade routes that once connected thewhole region, Mazateca Alta and Baja, are now dead and insignificant astmcks plow into the remotest regions direct from the cizidad.

Shamans make particularly attractive subjects for ethnography. Theyare entertaining; they say strange, compelling, exotic and insightful things.They sometimes speak in a register that titillates the outsider’s desire for an’authentic’ and ’anti-Western’ discourse. Sometimes they are read orlistened to as the vehicles for a resistance to the evils of capitalist advance-ment that is based in localized, ancient, non-Western values, as Neiburg(1988), Boege (1988), Portal (1986) and Barabas and Bartolom6 (1973)suggest may be the case for parts of the Sierra Mazateca. It was the shamanswho tried to chant down the Miguel Aleman dam that flooded most of thelowland Mazateca in 1955 and today some men and women of wisdomoppose the road-building process that is desecrating sacred bits of land.Sometimes this reading may be accurate; I don’t know.

But reliance on shamans as spokespeople for the elicitation of the ’cul-tural’ world view, counter-hegemonic ideology, folklore, etc. may prove tobe misleading, as a closer examination of the careers of two popular curers,Ricardo and Estela, may demonstrate. Such a reliance over simplifies theprocess of speaking-for or representing, missing the more complex natureof the relationship between Wise Ones and the ’cultures’ they speak for andto.

Ricardo: Mushrooms for Protection -

As I walked with Rosario and Jean Jacques along the road to Santa Cruz dejudrez that first afternoon, we passed some children, who asked us formoney. When we gave them nothing, they gave us insults and laughed. Afterwe passed further on; they screamed more - ’gringo, gringo’ and things I

could not understand or don’t remember, although I did catch the nameof Ricardo Rocha - and threw rocks, still laughing at us. Perhaps, I thought,we were not loved, at least by some, in Santa Cruz de JuArez. Perhaps DonRicardo Rocha, the pleasant old shaman, was not loved either in his hometown.

Later conversations confirmed this suspicion. Ricardo says that hebegan to ’move it’ in 1954, three years after the disastrous climate changeof 1951 left Santa Cruz with no rain for 4 or 5 months, destroying the corn

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and coffee crops and causing a great deal of hardship and disease (althoughnobody died). By ’moving it’, Ricardo means that he began making thingshappen in this, the material, world; he became a player. It was Ricardo, hesays, who brought the road, the water, and the electricity to his village: ’I

moved it’.He admits that he is hated by the townspeople because of his activities.

Apparently, many people in the community did not want the road, did notwant to work on its construction and did not appreciate the six workers sentby the government. They were envious of Ricardo, and thought that he wastoo young to be managing these things. Ricardo took on the role of middle-man between them and the government, a role with inevitable repercus-sions for his local reputation.

They thought that I was doing all the bad things that people do - to sell them,to sell everything. I know they think that. I know that’s what they say. But lookat how I live, look at my house. I didn’t make any money at all. Until now I amstill working with my hands.

Ricardo says that he first decided to take mushrooms when he was

working in another village in the Mazatec lowlands, in Rio Seco. He likedit down there, and, along with two of his brothers, bought some land andraised goats. He lived there for 20 years; 10 years in which the people likedhim well enough ( me lleg6 bien la gente) and ten years of envy, when thepeople wanted to kill him. He says that his motive for taking mushroomswas protection from envious rivals whom he suspected of plotting againsthim. ’I returned to take [mushrooms] again so that they wouldn’t do meany harm because I thought that they were going to kill me.’ Through themushrooms he could foresee and ward off the inevitable enemy attacks that

accompany the continual intrigue of factional Mazatec politics. There themushrooms signaled three microphones to him, in the place that is calledMirador in this Cerro Mirador which means that you can see a long way,how beautiful it was and there he returned to work, all the way until now.’Three microphones - the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.’

Others put it differently. When I returned to Huautla after this inter-view with Don Ricardo, I told a friend about my visit. He said yes but ’He isnot good. He is bad.’ I asked why and he made the symbol for money withhis hands and grimaced. ’He has a lot of money.’ I asked where the moneycomes from. ’He sells ceremony. He charges a lot. But it is not good. Hedoesn’t know.’ And besides that, says my friend (who has some professionalinterest in trashing Ricardo, since his wife, Estela, also performs cere-monies), Ricardo doesn’t speak Spanish, Castilian.

This last criticism, of course, is not accurate. Although Don Ricardo isclearly more comfortable dealing in Mazatec, and conducts 90 percent ofhis ceremony in this language, he speaks Spanish with perfect competence.Even Rubio Montoya (1992: 131) mentions Ricardo’s fluency in Spanish,writing that ’his song was not in the Mazatec dialect like that of Maria

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Sabina, but in Spanish, and with Christian litanies’. Estela and her husbandcommonly use monolingualism as a critique of their rivals, and this perhapsrelates to the Huauteco discourse about the comunidad, the space of ignor-ance, backwardness, monolingualism, all the things that constitute thenegative side of Indianness.

Another man, active in Huautla’s leftist opposition party, describesRicardo as ’a cacique, puts, the Rochas are the family of caciques in thattown’.13 In the spring of 1994, the three presidents of Huautla received acomplaint that one of Ricardo’s sons was firing gunshots into the air, andone of the presidents, accompanied by an armed posse, came to Santa Cruzto arrest him. The culprit was taken to Huautla and put in jail, exacerbat-ing the ongoing conflict between the state legal system and the municipalpresidency. The state-appointed sheriff told me that the presidents did nothave the power to arrest and detain this man, and he forcefully protestedthis action, but these stubborn men refused to listen. Perhaps the sheriff’sstatement also suggests some closer ties between the Rochas and the officialPRI and Government of Oaxaca that validate the various accusations againstthe family.

Anyway, Ricardo’s shamanistic activities have done nothing to dimin-ish the suspicions of those who believe that he is ’selling out’ his people.The first outsider came to eat mushrooms with him in 1984, but it was notuntil 1990 or 1991 that he began keeping a book, when someone told himthat he should do so in order to be like Maria Sabina. He admitted that

the people of his village felt he was profiting off this sideline, but heargued forcefully that this was not the case, that he did not charge anymoney for this service, that he continued to live the same poor and

humble lifestyle as everybody else, that performing rituals was hard anddraining work.

Ricardo’s View and Habermas’s Overview

I am a diviner woman, saysI am a woman who searches, saysAh, Jesus ChristI am a lord eagle woman, saysI am an opossum woman, saysI am a woman who sees, saysAh, Jesus ChristI am a clean woman, saysShe is a woman who resounds, saysShe is a woman torn up out of the ground, saysI am an Ustandi woman beneath the water, saysI am an Ustandi woman beneath the sea, saysI am a shooting star woman, saysI am a woman laborer, says(Estrada, 1981: 125)

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I am a woman who looks into the insides of things and investigates, saysThe tracks of the feet, says(Estrada, 1981: 136)

Habermas (1989) has shown how the public sphere, an organization of dis-course that arose in the post-Renaissance period as a critique of or alterna-tive to the medieval representation of power and discourse before thepeople, was based in large part on the concept of the overview. The over-view is a critical component of what I have called linearly reported culture,where different ’cultures’ are separated by hard borders but are repre-sented through the same style (Feinberg, 1996). This separation is enabledby proposing an objective, uncontaminated space of analysis metaphori-cally ’above’ the object of analysis. The idea of the overview perhaps reachesits fullest manifestation through Bentham’s design for the Panopticon, aprison space engineered for maximum surveillance.

One of the key points of this article is that the overview, the emblem ofthe dominant, linear way of imagining social space, becomes objectified inshamanic discourse and infused with magical meaning. Ricardo recognizesthe relationship between power and a particular mode of seeing, and repro-duces it both through his mushroom practice and through his stories abouthis relationship with outsiders and the experience that marked his birth asa Man of Wisdom.

It is important, then, that his first important trip occurred at a placecalled El Mirador, meaning ’The View’ or ’The Viewer’, a place at the edgeof the highlands that affords a commanding view of all the Mazateca Baja.The metaphorical or magical sight that accrues to the Mazatec Man ofKnowledge under the influence of the child saints - evidenced by his tourof Mexico, the Sierra, Chiapas, the thousand hectares of corn - is graftedon to the actual landscape of the Sierra through this conjunction with aphysical feature that bestows enhanced sight.

There, at that place, he was given God in the form of three micro-phones, the power to communicate his visions audibly with the aid of amagical mimetic technology, given to him by masters who have apparentlykept up with the times. They only gave Maria Sabina a book.

I do not mean to suggest that this Overview is the ’Western’ epistemol-ogy of space opposed by the ’non-Western’ Indian way, but that the Over-view is symbolically associated, in a marginalized place, with power, andpower here is also associated both with light-skinned wealthy outsidersand with the position of traveling back and forth between the outsideand the inside. In the mushroom ritual, the Overview is represented andobjectified; the idea that one can see a great distance from an objectiveheight is included within a context of exploring from within through lan-guage. In the chants, the places are ’seen’, but this sight is embodied

through the words that continually trace maps from one named place toanother.

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Estela - Mushrooms for Candy .

I feel very good, saysHealthyMy race is very good, saysWhat is of value is the ceremony, what is of value is gold, says(Estrada, 1981: 136)

I return from Mexico City with a new blender that I have bought for thefa milv.Her middle son, 9-yea’r-old Antonio, comes in and sees it. ‘What did you win on

Llevatelo (Take it’zuith You)?’ )ae asks his mother, referring to the countr.v’s mostpopular TV game show.

Estela, unlike Ricardo, is not from the comunidad, but the pueblo ofHuautla; in fact the m~-o centro de Huautla de Jimenez. Also unlike Ricardo,she can claim a personal connection to la santisima Maria Sabina and hasbeen around foreigners her entire life. One of her favorite childhoodstories concerns her relationship with John Lennon, who came to townwhen she was only 8 years old (in 1967 or 1968). She ran into Lennon inthe central market. He was wearing the same glasses as in all the photo-graphs, black pants, a black shirt and really nice boots. He was accompaniedby a tall, thin woman - not the Japanese one. She was French, probably. Atthat time very few vendors in the market could speak Spanish, and Lennoncould speak no Spanish or Mazatec, so precocious little Estela, using anEnglish-Spanish dictionary left her by another foreign friend, helped therock star with his purchases and took him where he wanted to go, to thehouse of Maria Sabina. He gave a her peso coin, one of those big ones thatthey used to make, when a peso was a lot of money, especially for an 8-year-old girl. That night Lennon stayed in a hotel in the center. Back then, therewas only one hotel. There was no electricity, so the hotel lobby was filledwith candles, very pretty. He played a song on the guitar, the one that goes’duh duh duh duh ... [And I Love Her]’ and Estela danced in the centerof the room. Twenty-seven years later, she is still dancing to the same song.

Other less famous outsiders would come to the household of Estela’smother and father. When she describes this period of her life, she speaksof the excitement, but also the gifts. Visitors like the psychiatrist SalvadorRoquet would bring gifts, she said. Every time he came, he brought meshoes, and sometimes a doll or a game. When the shoes broke I would gobarefoot so he would bring more, she said. Without these things, we hadnothing, she said. When she was a teenager, a gringo asked for her hand inmarriage. Her father told her that the decision was hers - a very non-traditional response for the monolingual old man - and that she shouldthink about it carefully. She decided that she had no desire for him, anddid not want to leave Huautla to live in the United States with some hippie,in a situation where she had no control, she said.

People from all over Mexico and the world visit Estela and stay in herhumble house. I lived there for 2 months, but her most fn1Ítful alliances are

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with several Spaniards who own hotels in Veracruz and are the godparentsof some of Estela’s children. These hotel owners have provided substantialgifts on special occasions, such as baptisms, where they are allowed to

perform starring roles and violate local norms - miserably failing to respondwith the proper catechistic response, dressing outlandishly in locally pro-duced mushroom embroidered pants, appearing with both a wife and a mis-tress and publicly kissing and groping the latter. When these Spaniardssummon her, Estela packs her bag and hops on a bus to Veracruz to do theirbidding. One of them operates a tour for European (mostly French) thera-pists and mental health professionals under the name of the Center forTranspersonal Psychotherapy. About 20 middle-aged Europeans spend aweek on the coast learning traditional breathing techniques and then cometo Huautla, where they take mushrooms under Estela’s supervision forseveral days. They sleep on mats spread on the dirt floor in the house, takingup all the surface area. Estela and her oldest daughter run around in afrenzy, while her husband and I relax with our coffees, enjoying the flow ofpeople and gently poking fun at the guests. ’Look at that one’, he says. ’Helooks like George Bush. Is that how you say it? How funny.’

A larger portion of Estela’s income is derived from her work sellingembroidered shirts, dresses, pants, tablecloths and handkerchiefs. Shedraws the designs and buys the material, and then pays other Huautecowomen to do the stitching. All out of town guests are given a sales pitch,and she also travels to Mexico City or Veracruz about once a month to sellto certain regular buyers.

Estela is, first and foremost, a woman of transactions (like MariaSabina). She gains her status and cash flow by positioning herself as anintermediary between the Sierra Mazateca and another world. Her cus-tomers buy embroidered shirts and mushroom rituals as tokens of a sepa-rate, indigenous world, and view Estela as a model representative of thatchronotopic world (space-time). ’How wonderful it must be for you’,gushes a beaming 16-year-old from Mexico City who had tripped with herboyfriend and Estela the previous night, ’to live here in this beautiful placeall the tirne.’. For her, in turn, the mushroom ceremonies and stitched

designs are not tokens of a clearly separated place, but markers of theborder and the position of the border crosser, whose identity derives notfrom a horizontally imagined ethnicity, but from the vertical webs formedby relationships of friendship, compadrrzz,,uo, and cocnmerce that criss-cross apowerfully charged distance.

She does not pretend to view the clothes she sells as being authenticallyor traditionally ’Indian’. Instead, they belong to the process of coming andgoing, buying and selling, being outside one’s home. ’Why don’t you wearsome nice calzones, Benja?’ she asks me. ’Some nice calzones with littlemushrooms on them, and a nice embroidered shirt with flowers or

mushrooms. That’s what the Spaniard wears. That’s what the other gringoswear. You would look bien bonito [very handsome].’

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Nor does she, really, associate the mushroom ritual with any idea ofMazateco-ness. In fact, she uses the mushroom discourse to elucidate the

negative stereotype of monolingual Indians, criticizing her rivals (oftenincorrectly, as in the case of Ricardo Rocha) for not understandingSpanish and thus failing to provide a proper service for visitors. Her cer-emony, she boasts, is conducted entirely in Spanish - she sings Spanishhymns, prays, and has the client read from a book of Catholic prayer anddogma that is written in both Spanish and Mazatec. She also, as I men-

tioned earlier, names the places that are powerful to her; these are notmountain springs or waterfalls or caves inhabited by spirit owners, butstreets and neighborhoods in Mexico City where her most important con-tacts live. 14

Flushed with excitement, Estela and her oldest (13 years old) daughterare back from a week in the capital city, where they were exhilarated by theIndependence Day celebration in the Zocalo. I joke that Juvenal’s wife hasbecome media clailanga.l5 Juvenal, who still stubbornly insists on callinghimself a campesino and talks about retiring one day out to the rancho,frowns knowingly. Estela grins. But her position, in this particular episte-mology, is not that of ’a campesino’ or ’an Indian’ or ’a chilanga’. She isnot a this or a that or a half-this and half-that, constructions that imply aparticular view of culture and identity as emerging from underlying hori-zontal ’identities’ or ’cultures’ that are combined in particular ratios. In thismetacultural discourse, Estela occupies the space profoundly representedby mushrooms themselves; the space of mediation and the manipulation ofspace, which cannot be subsumed under a proportional relationshipbetween cultures and culture fragments.

The importance of Estela’s contacts and the constant flow of guestsinevitably lead to a discussion of envy. On one occasion, I drove Estela

and a young relative to Veracruz, where the girl planned to seek employ-ment as a maid (her heart wasn’t in it, and she ended up coming home).Estela explained to the girl her hostile relationship with her next-doorneighbor, the wife of one of Juvenal’s brothers. ’Because I am not lackingin friends and that makes her jealous’, Estela said. On the 24th all thosepeople had come over to Estela’s house and she told this neighbor not toclean on her property since it does not pertain to the neighbor and shewas angry, almost crying and said that Estela was the reason she was sick.Estela responded with an insult. ’She doesn’t ever talk to me, or anyonereally, she is so jealous. I cannot talk with her husband. Joaquin has manygirlfriends, and this also gives her coraje, makes her madly jealous.’ Estelacounts all the foreigners she knows, all her friends, and recounts whatthey do for her, especially the free stuff they give her, the help. Shedoesn’t need anything, was married by both laws, and is cien por cientoHuauteca. For this, she says, nobody except her husband can commandher.

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Maria Sabina and her Book

Because it is the paper of the judgeIt is the Book of the lawIt is the Book of governmentI know how to speak with the judgeThe judge knows meThe government knows meThe law knows meGod knows meSo it is in realityI am a justice womanI am a law womanIt is not anything salted, it is not a lieJesus Christ(Estrada, 1981: 111-12)

The book of Maria Sabina was slightly different from the books possessedby contemporary shamans like Don Ricardo and Maria’s relative up in ElFortin Don Marcelino; books of processed pulp that merely record thenames and addresses of clients and the dates of their appointments. Herbook was given to her by powerful spirits during the incident that witnessedthe birth of Maria Sabina as a legendary healer. When she was a child, shehad seen a Man of Wisdom sing and chant under the influence of the mush-rooms. She told Alvaro Estrada that:

His language was very pretty. I liked it. At times the Wise Man sang, sang, andsang. I didn’t understand the words exactly, but they pleased me. It was a differ-ent language from what we speak in the daytime. It was a language that withoutmy comprehending it attracted me. It was a language that spoke of stars,animals, and other things unknown to me.... The Wise Man Juan Manuel ani-mated him [a sick uncle] with his strange language. (Estrada, 1981: 39) ’&dquo;

At this point in her young life, Maria Sabina associated mushrooms witha special, non-everyday form of language that spoke of an unknown but very’natural’ world. So, since she and her sister had no toys to distract themfrom their poverty (Garcia Carrera, 1986) they ate the strange fungi in thefields where the two girls worked tending the goats.

And not only did we feel our stomachs full, but content in spirit as well. Themushrooms made us ask God not to make us suffer so much. We told him thatwe were always hungry, that we felt cold. We didn’t have anything: only hunger,only cold. I didn’t know in reality whether the mushrooms were good or bad.Nor did I even know whether they were food or poison. But I felt that they spoketo me. After eating them I felt voices. Voices that came from another world. Itwas like the voice of a father who gives advice. Tears rolled down our cheeks,abundantly, as if we were crying for the poverty in which we lived. (Estrada,1981: 39-40 )

For the first time Maria Sabina ’felt’ the voices that spoke this strangelanguage, but the transmission was still completely oral, which makes

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sense, since the world that the young girl lived in out by the village of RioSantiago was almost entirely devoid of books, papers and literate people.But that does not mean that the people of Rio Santiago lacked a con-sciousness of the importance of literacy, even in the first decade of the 20thcentury.

Gordon Wasson goes to great pains to deny the fact that Maria Sabinawas illiterate.

The reader should note that Maria Sabina is unlritered, not illiterate. The poetswho composed the Iliad and Odyssey, the Vedic Hymns, the Song of Deborah,were all unlettered. The whole world was unlettered then, and immense areasstill are. Maria Sabina was never exposed to the written word in the societywhere she grew up. The pejorative illiterate applies to those who, in a worldwhere writing reaches everywhere, have not the wit to learn to read and write.(in Estrada, 1981: 15)

Wasson’s whole intellectual project, which depicts the mushroom ritualas a contemporary survival of the sorts of religious practices that created allof the world’s great religious traditions, depends on this rigid line between’worlds’ or ’cultures’. For Maria Sabina to be a great figure worthy of study,she must come from an uncontaminated, separate world, like that of ourancestors. As a marginalized Mexican, she could not be an Indian walkingin the glory of ancient knowledge but could only be an ignorant, super-stitious hillbilly without the ’wit to learn to read and write’.

But books and writing have been a part of the consciousness of indigen-ous Mexico for many hundreds of years as an important symbol that infuseshierarchies and center-periphery relationships with power and meaning.In the late prehispanic period, Mixtec, Mayan and Aztec leaders used thewritten word to legitimize their rule, and shamans shrouded their texts inmystery to heighten their power. Bishop Landa reports that Mayan priestsannointed their divining books with water from a mountain where nowoman treads. Linda King (1994: 35) explains that ’the Mayan codices werenot intended to be read in a quotidian sense; they were essentially esotericin nature and required lengthy study and preparation because onlyshamans could decipher the secret knowledge locked in the texts’. Booksoccupied a central place in prehispanic rituals, and recitations were

accompanied by singing and dancing (King, 1994: 48).

I am a woman violinist, saysBecause I am a woman of letters, says ,

,

Because I am a Book woman, says . _

That is your Book, saysWhere our Principal Ones are, saysOur people of reason, says

’

.

Beer of value, saysBeer, says .

’

.

My one and only father, says . ,

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Beer that my friends drink, saysBeer that the Archbishop drinks, saysAnd my Nun also, saysMy member of the Sisterhood, saysArchbishop of Clean Water, saysThe sainted Pope, saysThere I am, saysThat is your paper, saysThat is your Book, saysBecause we are the children of God, says(Estrada, 1981: 151)

After the Conquest, the Maya and Nahuatl languages were adapted toEuropean-style phonetic alphabets and became the mediums for law andadministration in Indian areas, as well as for works of literature like theChilam Balam. The religiotts specialists of the colonial period Ltsed books intheir rituals. John Chance ( 198~): 1(2) writes that:

most maesti-os ~ljf’ lllO~lltl7ll (masters of idolatry)] operated with the aid of a 1111311’calendar book’ that was handed down to them or purchased in another

pueblo. Written in the Roman alphabet, these books contained the names ofall the days in the ritual calendar.

After around 1700, the community-level rites that these maestros oversawwere vigorously attacked by the Church and the books destroyed, but theemphasis on a covert sort of literacy continued.

After Mexican independence, indigenous written languages wererepressed and gradually disappeared, but books and papers, now only inSpanish, remained powerful symbols of the difference between those withwealth and power and those without. As King writes:

If illiteracy is a culture of silence, those who cannot read and write and who

conceptualize their situation in terms of blindness, deafrless, or dumbness per-ceive literacy as an instrument that will provide them with the means to over-come their economic and social subordination. It will enable them not only to’read the word’ but also to ’read the world’.... It provides a metaphor forbecoming a full member of mestizo society, for one who is illitrrate is outsidethis society in the same way’ as ethnic minorities who do not speak the domi-nant langLrage. (King, 1994: 160)

Maria Sabina, although she lived in a remote area with no schools andfew books, was not isolated from the idea of literacy. Her first husband, theyoung comerciante Serapio Martinez, who traveled on foot to Cordoba, Vera-cntz, Tehuacan and Puebla buying and selling dishes and the thread that wasused for huipiles (traditional dresses), was literate. She said of him that:

he liked to dress in clean clothes and didn’t appear to be a wastrel. I found outlater that he was good-hearted. He didn’t drink much ll~’illl)Y~1P11~P, almost none,and he didn’t like to work in the fields. With pride I say that he knew how toread and write. (Estrada, 1981: 41)

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Unfortunately for Maria Sabina, who was much less lucky with her nexthusband, Serapio died of a disease contracted in the lowlands, at the houseof his mistress, after six years of marriage.

At this point in her memoir, Maria Sabina clearly distinguishes betweentwo sets of characteristics. On the one hand we see the good comerciante,who is not limited to the Sierra but goes back and forth between the moun-

tains and the city, wears clean clothes, does not waste his money and is liter-ate. On the other hand we see the bad campesino, best represented byMaria Sabina’s abusive second husband Marcial Carrera, a drunk who ‘hitme frequently and made me cry. He didn’t like to work in the fields anddidn’t even know how to use a hoe witl dexterity’ (Estrada, 1981: 51). Thebad campesino is associated with liquor, filth, violence, waste and laziness.In Serapio’s case, disdain for work in the fields seems like a virtue, since heworks hard in his chosen profession, transporting the merchandise on hisback on those long 8-day treks to and from Puebla, while in Marcial’s caseit is clearly a vice that only confirmed Maria Sabina’s opinion that ’really, Ididn’t have any need for a man because I knew how to support myself. I

knew how to work’ (Estrada, 1981: 51).So if the great shaman was not literate herself, literacy clearly had a

place in her world. She remarks on this herself, telling Estrada in onemoment how ’in truth I was born with my destiny. To be a Wise Woman.To be a daughter of the saint children’, and in the next:

And I never went to school where I could have learned to read, to write or speakCastilian. My parents spoke only Mazatec. I never learned another language.What’s more, I didn’t know what school was, nor did I know if it even existed;and if there had been a school I wouldn’t have gone, because there wasn’t time.In those days, people worked a lot. (Estrada, 1981: 40)

In her old age, she admits the importance of Spanish and literacy, butsignals the parallel function of mushrooms for someone like herself who livesin the chronotope of poverty, where all time is consumed by constant work.

Maria Sabina realized her destiny in between her first and second mar-riages, during the period when she supported her mother and her threechildren through ’arduous constant work ... I worked like a strong man’(Estrada, 1981: 45). She planted corn and coffee, chopped wood, boughtpots in T’eotitlan to sell in Huautla, and sold bread and candles fromHuautla in the outlying ranchos and comunidades. During this period, hersister Man Ann fell sick. In her desperation, Maria Sabina resorted to thelittle saints. She gave her sister three pairs and ate something close to thirtypairs herself. For what followed, I now resort to a long quote from Estrada’sversion of her autobiography:

I couldn’t sleep. The little saints continued working in my body. I rememberthat I had a vision: some people appeared who inspired me with respect. I knewthey were the Principal Ones of whom my ancestors spoke. They were seatedbehind a table on which there were many written papers. I knew that they were

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important papers. There were a number of Principal Ones, six or eight of them.Some looked at me, others read the papers on the table, others appeared to besearching for somcthing among the samc papers. I knew that they weren’t offlesh and bone. I knew that they weren’t beings of water or tortilla. I knew thatit was a revelation that the soint children were giving me. Right away I heard avoice. A voice that was sweet but authoritarian at the same time. Like the voiceof a father who loves his children but raises them strictly. A wise voice that said:’These are the Principal Ones.’ I understood that the mushrooms were speak-ing to me. I felt an infinite happiness. On the Principal Ones’ table a bookappeared, an open book that went on growing until it was thc size of a person.In its pages there were letters. It was a white book, so white it was resplendent.

One of the Principal Ones spoke to me and said: ’Maria Sabina, this is the Bookof Wisdom. It is the Book of Language. Everything that is written in it is for you.The Book is yours, take it so that you can work.’ I exclaimed with emotion: ’Thatis for me. I receive it.’

The Principal Ones disappeared and left mc alone in front of the immenseBook. I knew that it was the Book of Wisdom.

The Book was before me, I could see it but not touch it. I tried to caress it but

my hands didn’t touch anything. I limited myself to contemplating it and, atthat moment, I began to speak. Then I realized that I was reading the SacredBook of Language. My Book. The Book of the Principal Ones.

I had attained perfection. I was no longer a simple apprentice. For that, as aprize, as a nomination, the Book had been grantcd me. When one takes thesaint children, one can see the Principal Ones. Otherwise not. And it’s becausethe mushrooms are saints; they give wisdom. Wisdom is in Language. Languageis in the Book. The Book is granted by the Principal Ones. The Principal Onesappear through the great power of the children.

I learned the wisdom of the Book. Afterward, in my later visions, the Book no

longer appeared because I already had its contents in my memory.... Since Ireceived the Book I have become one of the Principal Ones. If they appear, Isit down with them and we drink beer or (ig-ii(ii-(Ilei2te. I have been with themsince the time when, gathered together behind a table with important papers,they gave me wisdom, the perfect word: the Language of God.

Language makes the dying return to life. The sick recover their health when

they hear the words taught by the saint children. There is no mortal who canteach this Language. (Estrada. 1981: 47-50)

In this story we can see how the young Wise Woman, despite her lackof schooling, was given the sacred power over language that is the domainof the Principal Ones. This form of power is clearly mimetic of a fonn ofpower that Maria Sabina sees operating in the world around her, wherewisdom and power comes down from men who sit around tables piled highwith books and documents.

I don’t know what Mazatec word Maria Sabina used for Principal Ones,

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but the Spanish words are los principales. Principales were the hereditarymembers of the Indian upper class during the prehispanic and colonialperiods. Their appearance in Maria Sabina’s story next to the phrase ’ofwhom my ancestors spoke’ could signify the persistence of a form of ances-tor worship, as the shaman communes witch an ancient Mazatec noble class.But these are also the words that people of this region use to refer to impor-tant and powerful people, such as the bigshots in the state and nationalgovernments. These are the people who run things, making secret decisionsand manipulating the people for reasons that are only known entire ellos’(between them). When the presidential candidate Colosio was shot in 1994,everybody knew that the conspiracy was one of those things that happened’entre ellos’, and that we would never know the truth. Yet association withthe secret rulers is greatly desired, a fortune to brag about, and the secretnature of the power of los principales does not always lead to their con-demnation. It is important to note that Maria Sabina, when referring to herfirst trip to the gue.lague.tza festival in Oaxaca City in the years of her fame,used the same word for the powerful mestizo humans that she met there asshe had for her spirit masters/drinking buddies: ’I put on my best huipiland sat there next to the Principal Ones’ (Estrada, 1981: 89).

One could look at this shamanic mimesis of the way power is derivedin the world as a sort of parodic resistance of an imposed colonial regime.Keesing (1992: 7), for example, argues that use of dominant terms andcategories often constitutes ’a logic of opposition and inversion’, in which’the categories and semiology of domination are mirrored, inverted, evenparodied’. Tsing (1993: 27) makes a similar argument about the role playedby a Meratus shaman in Borneo. ’Her opposition occurred in the mimicry,hyperbole, and distortion of her attempts to get closer to power, rather thanin defining herself against this power. In her obsession with ceremony, UmaAdang overfulfilled state requirements for attention to order.’ The appli-cation of this formulation to the verbal perfornances of Maria Sabina andother Mazatec Wise Ones, it seems to me, accepts the categorization ofthese Wise Ones as representatives of a linearly conceived marginalizedgroup. It also ignores the seriousness with which Maria Sabina honors herbook, replacing a focus on the epistemology of this ’woman of transactions’speaking in a marginalized place in favor of imposed categories, such asparody, imported from a privileged analytical space, an overview.

Or one could see Maria Sabina as an unthinking agent of a dominantideology, expanding a political common sense to the realm of the super-natural and thus fixing it in the cosmology of the universe. Power andwisdom, she tells her listeners, come from ’Principal Ones’, ’lawyers’, ’menof letters’ and books, and thus the lowly Indians should not bother makingmore egalitarian claims for knowledge of their situation and destiny.

Or one could take a more traditional view and argue that all of her

chanting, singing and praying is an ongoing part of the indigenous Mexicanresponse to colonialism that presented a passive, compliant face to the

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conquerors while establishing hard, impenetrable borders as a mode ofdefense. This line of reasoning sees Indians developing complex cos-

mologies, religions and other practices to heighten ethnic difference, andthus maintain a space of autonomy outside the reach of the dominant

Spaniards/mestizos/gringos (Boege, 1988; Bonfil Batalla, 1987).It should be clear by this point that Maria Sabina’s religious discourse is

not an autonomous product of an indigenous, non-Western culture, even ifone sees that ’culture’ as a conscious or unconscious construiction motivated

by self-defense or oppositional impulses. It is about a particular way oforganizing power, discourse and culture (through books, Principal Ones andthe intermediary position). And it also creates a similarly organized power.

Maria Sabina’s literacy and book-knowledge are simultaneously:1 A parallel alternative to the official hierarchy of book-based knowledge in

which mushrooms and mushroom-spirit books replace the other badges ofauthority and the Wise One replaces the official ’expert’.

2 An objectification of the dominant hierarchy of knowledge of power anddiscourse that reproduces its power for Maria Sabina and other practitioners,and emphasizes how this power is derived from the position of the inter-mediai-y, the ’woman of transactions’.

3 A transformation of the linear metacultural style based on the Overview

through an objectification that makes it ’pictoi-ial’.17 Maria Sabina reads thebook and soars like an eagle over a space which she sees clearly from a greatheight in order to ’see the insides of things’. But she does this as part of aprocess of probing around in language, exploring through words, following thetraces left by footprints, both of the men and women who travel to visit her andof the signs she encounters during her velada. The mighty far-seeing eagle ismade equal to the ground- and tree-crawling opossum that always accompaniesit in her chants. The Expert uses the Overview, but in a changed way. There issomething weird about her book. 1&dquo;

My Book of KnowledgeMaria Sabina was given a Book of Knowledge by a panel of beer-drinkingspirit Principal Ones seated behind a desk piled with papers. I was given theopportunity to see a similar book by an important man, a strangely sinisteragent of the State government, in a taqueria in the center of Huautla acrossthe street from the bus terminal.

He invited me over to his table, where he sat in front of several emptycans of beer. This taqueria catered to commercial traffic in Huautla, to thebureaucrats, teachers and tourists who go and come between the mountainsand the ciudad. It only served the inore expensive canned beers, ModeloEspecial and Tecate, instead of the cheaper bottled brands found elsewherein town: Victoria, Corona and Superior. It served unusual and expensive var-ieties of taco-like foodstuffs with names that evoked the wide world and its

many varied inhabitants - gringas, suizas, arabes. These meat-filled delicacieswere wrapped not in the usual corn tortillas but in tortillas of flour, so I couldsay this Principal One, in a sense, was not a ’being of water or tortilla’.

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He knew, somehow, where I was from - ’you are a gringo, aren’t you.It’s true that you are a pi.n~hi gifngito’ - and also the nature of my mission -’I know why you’re here. You’re here to study the Indians, aren’t you. Toknow their history, their customs, their traditions.’

And he offered to help me. He offered me a Book of Knowledge. ’I

have here’, he told me, waving a folder filled with papers, ’everything youneed to know about the Sierra Mazateca. All the customs, the history - whenthe Spanish were here, and the Jesuits. The washing of the heads, the mush-room ceremonies. Not just for Huautla, but for all the region around. AndI will give it to you.’

The offer flabbergasted me, and I gazed into the Principal One’s flat,drunk, mestizo face. He claimed to be a Cuban, but this assertion of Cuban-ness was expressed in a vocabulary and accent that was as Mexican as amissed penalty kick. Here I was, being offered the same opportunity as thegreat Maria Sabina: ’You will have it all here, in one place, so you won’t haveto go wandering around.’ The book would make me the master of space,the comunidades, rancherias and pueblos would magically come to methrough the Book of Power, enabling a supernatural form of travel.

I glanced at the folder, and before he snatched it away I noticed the

papers appeared to be official government documents of some sort.But alas, the deal was not to be consummated. Maria Sabina would find

her book and read it to know the solutions to the problem at hand, andafter many years she knew the book so intimately that she would not needto open it; it was memorized completely. But I was only afforded one fleet-ing glance and memorized nothing. The deal fell through because thespace of the Magic World sits precariously next to and around and insideanother, darker space with overlapping associations; the space of the

Underground. And to understand why this quirk of (ethno-, meta-?) geog-raphy did not allow me to become a Man of Wisdom (like many of my aca-demic peers, I am certain) I would have to delve into other abysses wheremuch would be demanded of me, even my soul.

Notes

The research for this article was funded by a Fulbright/García Robles fellowshipsponsored by CIESAS of Oaxaca. I wish to thank Kathleen Stewart, Louise Meintjesand Erica David for their insightful readings and comments. Several of the anec-dotes used in this article were related to me by Michael Duke, who was enormouslyhelpful in shaping my perspective on mushroom use in Huautla.

1 The Prisoner was a British television program in the early 1970s. PatrickMcGoohan played a spy who woke up one morning in a quaint Foucaultian’village’ in an unknown location, characterized by an ambiguous relationshipbetween prisoners and guards and by constant surveillance. He was now’Number 6’ and every week he tried to escape, while a new ’Number 2’ tried

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to extract ’information’ from him, usually by messing with his identity. Both 2and 6 always failed.

2 Much of this literature was written by R. Gordon Wasson, the banker andamateur mycologist whose ambition it was to found a new science, ethnomy-cology, based on the huge idea that all cultures can be divided between themycophilic and mycophobic, and that mushroom practices in Mexico repre-sent the survival of ancient Siberian forms that gave birth to religion. Wassonheard about Mazatec uses of mushrooms in the 1950s. He visited the regionand wrote an article for Life magazine (Wasson, 1957) in which he coined thephrase ’magic mushroom’. The resulting publicity persuaded thousands ofAmerican hippies to descend on Huautla in the 1960s, and they were finallyevicted by the Mexican army in 1969. Michael Duke has analyzed Wasson’svision and his effect on Mazatec subjectivity in great detail (Duke, 1996).

3 Some of the names have been changed to protect privacy.4 The mushrooms are often referred to as ’child saints’.5 Rosario worked with a group of radical Jarrocho (from Veracruz) lawyers whose

project was actually funded by a grant from the government’s Solidaridadprogram. The previous year, during the turmoil over the election, this groupheld seminars in Huautla where they explained the political rights granted toindigenous pueblos under the Mexican constitution. They also produced a filmabout the contested election that came down firmly on the side of the ancianosor PRI dissidents who wrapped themselves in the flag of tradition. Their currentproject involved a study of indigenous customary law in the Sierra Mazateca,but they were fun to party with.

6 Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing discusses this problem as it affected her relationshipwith a Mcratus shaman in Borneo:

Much of the literature on the dialogic nature of ethnography presentsjust two positions: the Western anthropologist and the Other. My experi-ence with Uma Adang suggests that this neat dichotomy obscures thenuances of cross-cultural relationships and privileges the unself-

consciously elite observer who comfortably represents the West. (Tsing,1993: 22).

7 A Mazatec nickname for Maria Sabina that roughly translates to ’Old LadySabina’.

8 ’Licenciado’ or ’licenciada’ refers to someone who has completed the equival-ent of any graduate degree. In Mexico, one generally uses this title, the way onewould call an MD ’doctor’ in the United States.

9 Human rights. Ricardo refers to Rosario as a ’human rights lawer’.10 Chikon means ’light-skinned person’ in Mazatec; the Spanish gloss is güero. But

the word also refers to the spirit-owners of different geographical areas withinthe Sierra. The most powerful chikon is Chikon Tokoxo, who lives in the Moun-tain Adoration above Huautla. These beings sometimes give gifts to travelers,and some people are said to bury eggs or live turkeys in exchange for magicalChikon-blessed wealth (see Feinberg, 1996).

11 It is not just mushroom curers and mythic figures who have the habit ofnaming places to accrue a sort of power. On my first trip to the Sierra Maza-teca in 1987, Pedro Sanchez of Ayautla surprised me by saying that he ’knew’a variety of countries including the United States, Honduras, Nicaragua, El Sal-vador, Guatemala and Panama. Later I asked him a question about his travels,and he denied that he had ever left Mexico. He had been recounting a list ofcountries that he knew of and thus could claim some sort of relationship with.

12 I want to thank Michael Duke for this anecdote.

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13 The Arawak word ’cacique’ refers to a local boss who uses his position as an inter-mediary between the state and the local community to accrue wealth and power.

14 This observation was relayed to me by Michael Duke, who participated in a cer-emony with Estela many months before I dared to. No such chanting occurredat the ceremony I attended at Estela’s husband’s rancho.

15 Half-Chilanga. ’Chilango’ is a usually derogatory term for a native of MexicoCity. People in the rest of the country (referred to by those in the capital as laprovincia - the provnces) often view chilangos with suspicion, but the term canbe used in a joking way, like gringo.

16 It should be noted that many Huautecos, including several who have not readit, have privately told me that Estrada’s account of María Sabina’s life, whichtakes the form of an autobiography, is not entirely accurate; that Señor Estradatook many liberties with the truth in the interest of his own status and profit.This is the position taken in another biography of Maria Sabina written by aHuauteco, Juan García Carrera’s La Otra Vida de María Sabina (1986).

17 The terms ’linear’ and ’pictorial’ refer to different styles of reporting culture, andderive from Volosinov’s (1986) discussion of reported speech. Representingculture and cultural difference creates hard borders between each of its objects- its ’cultures’ - but each of these cultures is made to represent itself in more orless the same way. The linear style creates ’clear-cut, external contours forreported [cultures], whose own internal individuality is minimized’ (Volosinov,1986: 121). The Olympics would be the ideal example of linear reported culture.The borders between each nation are as clear as the differences in their uniforms.Yet each nation is represented identically - through a uniform of a particularcolor, a flag, a national anthem, and an ideal of athletic excellence and compe-tition (often represented on television through the lexicon of religion).

Pictorially reported culture, on the other hand, is derived from Volosinov’s’pictorial reported speech’. Volosinov describes this tendency as obliterat-ing precise boundaries while individualizing reported speech. Unlikelinear reported culture, this metacultural style is less likely to be statedexplicitly, and more likely to be embedded in narratives and speechgenres. Pictorially reported culture locates identity not in some culturalhinterland, but in borders that are not drawn by experts but embedded inpuzzling narratives and practices of travel.

18 The presentation of spirit-books to shamanic leaders by supernatural beings isnot an uncommon incident in the global story of colonialism and marginality.Often, the revelation of these books or papers leads directly to rebellion, as inthe case of the Sonthal uprising of the 1850s in India. One impetus to this revoltcame when a god, a white man dressed in native clothes and holding a whitebook, appeared before two men. As the god disappeared, 20 pages of the bookfell to the ground, and the men were able to know the meaning of the writingon these pages (Guha, 1988: 79-80).

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a Benjamin Feinberg is Professor of Anthropology at Warren Wilson College.Address CPO 5065 Warren Wilson College, PO Box 9000, Asheville, North Car-olina 28815-9000, USA. [email: bfeinbergC~?unca.campus.mci.net]