Chamulas in the World of the Sun: Time and Space in a Maya Oral Tradition PDF
Preview Chamulas in the World of the Sun: Time and Space in a Maya Oral Tradition
A:vaila ble en~. ~ u& o t ,. u n dl' R10'i, J'i,imaao-J'1nt" llnllu ~ \ ~ \\ I \ \' \\ ~-~181/ : ~. ~ ,. , ( w~~,\ ~· I \ ··'" \·-~'I \ The D es truction o f the F.l r(s Ste eC Treeaxtt1· 401 n) m. a Rain of BolT I ngWater Chamulas in the World of the Sun Time and Space in a Maya Oral Tradition Gary H. Gossen WAVELAND PRESS, INC. Prospect Heights, Illinois For information about this book, write or call: Waveland Press, Inc. P.O. Box 400 Prospect Heights, Illinois G0070 (312) G34-0081 The cover illustration is an original Chamula drawing of a courting scene-the subject of many Chamula narratives. Copyright© 1974 by Gary H. Gossen 1984 reissued by Waveland Press, Inc. Second printing. ISBN 0-88133-091-4 All rights reserved. No part of thz's book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher. TT_!,_..] (."'..__ .... ___ £A-..--......... !.-..-. To the memory of my grandparents Gerhardt and Marie Gossen and David and Maude Hamilton who taught me their understanding of tradition in wonderful summers on their farms on the Kansas prairie Preface Ethics and Aesthetics are One and the Same. -L. Wittgenstein This book is about the oral tradition and cosmology of the Chamula Indians of Mexico. It is based on fifteen months of field research in Chamula, a Tzotzil-speak ing Maya community in the state of Chiapas in southern Mexico. My aim is to present the oral tradition of a contem porary Maya community as a complete information system. That is, all genres as defined by the Chamulas are considered, both in themselves and in relation to the rest of the com munity's verbal behavior and to its world view. Such a broad sweep is necessary because language is both the means and the manifestation of knowledge about the world. Within each society the specialized knowledge and linguistic forms contained in an oral tradition are always related to the rest of that society's language, cosmology, and social behavior. Too often, however, oral tradition has been treated in piece meal fashion, as in a collection of sayings, an appendix of myth texts, a corpus of tales stripped of their cultural con texts of meaning or performance, or a catalogue of motifs and tale types. Yet people in traditional nonliterate soci eties ordinarily learn and use a full complement of genres in their respective oral traditions. To describe these genres holistically is a major goal of this book. (viii) Preface To consider the whole of an oral tradition in addition to its parts requires a contextual orientation to the data. Thus, the function of genres within the social fabric must be ex plored. Yet folklorists and anthropologists have had a tradi tional liking for the study of oral tradition as "item" or isolated text, rather than as "event" or the performance of texts within specific cultural contexts. They have shown a preference for what Edmund Leach called butterfly collect ing. This orientation, while valuable in providing a reservoir of reference material, nevertheless implies that oral tradition is marginal to the mainstream of social life, that it is what A. Irving Hallowell called a "floating segment of culture." This is an unfortunate view, for in many traditional societies, oral tradition is as important for the maintenance of the social order as are kinship systems and social organization. To borrow a phrase from Dell Hymes, oral tradition should be considered a part of the "ethnography of speaking." A holistic, contextual approach to traditional verbal behavior requires great caution in the use of Western termin ology, for such behavior is as variable as is human culture. Even the term "folklore" is so ambiguous that to anthro pologists and folklorists it means quite different things. The word may exclude gossip, for example, on the ground that it has not yet stood the test of time, yet today's gossip may be tomorrow's traditional narrative. Terms like "verbal art," "oral literature," and "oral narrative" present similar prob lems in that they may be interpreted by the Westerner to include traditional prose and poetry but to exclude such forms of verbal behavior as punning games. Such imprecise labels are avoided whenever possible in this study. Experi ence shows that the segment of cultural behavior to which they variously refer is not uniform in content from culture to culture. Some cultures, like those of Polynesia, stress the role of reporting genealogical history in traditional verbal behavior. Others, like the Siriono of Bolivia, have minimal interest in cosmological or etiological explanations and abso lutely no interest in genealogical history. Still others, like the tribes of the Northwest Coast of North America, empha size the verbatim recitation of mythical precedents for ritual Pre face ( ix) organization and ritual action. In parts of central Africa, "minor" genres such as the proverb figure prominently, on a par with etiological narratives and genealogical history. A use ful term that describes the whole of the verbal aesthetic tradition in all cultures without an ethnocentric bias is the expression "oral tradition," which emphasizes the process of oral transmission while allowing for each culture's particu lar tradition. In order to identify the forms and genres that belong to the oral tradition of a particular culture, folk taxonomies are of considerable help. They consistently demonstrate that Western genre labels do not correspond precisely to folk genre labels. In any major collection project, therefore, an initial step should be to elicit the folk taxonomies, which enable the investigator to ask relevant questions of inforc mants about all important genres and may suggest further useful areas of exploration. Once a collection has been obtained, a model must be con structed for interpreting and understanding the texts as they operate in the real social milieu. The model should attempt to describe a whole oral tradition in terms that generalize and abstract the immense amount of diverse empirical data without ignoring the fact that models do not have an auton omy of their own, that they refer at all times to what people do, say, and think. As Edmund Leach observed in relation to myth: "Myths for me are simply one way of describing certain types of human behavior; the anthropologists' jargon and his use of structural models are other devices for describ ing the same types of human behavior. In sociological analysis we need to make frequent use of these alternative languages, but we must always remember that a descriptive device can never have an autonomy of its own. However abstract my representations, my concern is always with the material world of human behavior, never with metaphysics or systems of ideas as such." One purpose of this book is to offer an alternative analytical language that takes into account the general sociological nature of the data on oral aesthetic forms as well as concrete data on a specific oral tradition. In anthropological and folklore studies it has been the
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