Between the Ethnographic Record and the Field Diary: The Hybrid Medical Practices in Zinacantán before Ethnomedicine (Mexico, 1940s)

Most of the anthropological knowledge production on traditional medicine (TM) and ethnomedicine in Mexico is based on the assumption that there are two medical compendiums—the traditional or Indigenous and the biomedical—that are clearly distinct and between which the main dynamic is one of conflict and competition. One consequence of this premise is that ethnomedicine functions more as a means of understanding the culture or worldview of a given social collective than as an explanation of disease and therapeutic practices. As stated in one of the first ethnographies devoted to health and illness among the Tzotzil-speaking inhabitants of Chiapas: “Nowhere are the generalizations about Tzotzil philosophy and worldview more clearly verified than in their interpretation of health and disease” (Holland 1963, quoted in Menéndez 2023, 158). The alterity that traditional medicine helps to delineate is then uncritically aligned with the presumed, rather than proven, existence of internally uniform collectives—usually Indigenous—who are supposed to act in neatly distinct ways from non-Indigenous collectives. 

This is the conclusion of a review of the literature on this subject by a specialist with decades of experience in the field: “When [studies on TM] conclude that indigenous peoples have a concept of the unity of body and soul, while medicine is characterised by taking only the body into account, they do not observe whether this is also the case among the non-indigenous population” (Menéndez 2023, 165).^[1]This is what José Luis Escalona (2016) calls “etnoargumento.” Moreover, cultural alterity is not only seen as a result of social practice but also as its motivation. 

An example of this appears in an excellent historical study of the first Centro Coordinador Indigenista, the regional headquarters of the recently created Instituto Nacional Indigenista (INI, 1948), inaugurated in Chiapas to deal with the “backwardness” of the Indigenous population. The official documentation of this institution is dominated by testimonies of the complaints and frustrations of anthropologists and doctors who tried, in vain, to introduce biomedicine into the region. In their perspective, the main obstacle they faced was, indeed, the cultural alterity of the local inhabitants: “no dimension of the INI’s development program clashed more directly with the spiritual foundations of Tzeltal and Tzotzil culture [than biomedicine]” (Lewis 2018, 80). 

To open a dialogue with this Special Focus Section on the history of ethnosciences, I would like to discuss these explanatory models. To do so, I use a set of diaries and ethnographic records created during the first ethnographic field trip to the Tzotzil village of Zinacantán, Chiapas, in 1942-43, which are housed in the Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collection (HHGSC) at the University of Chicago Library, in the Sol Tax Papers (STP) collection.^[2]Gee (2017) has also written about this expedition in this journal; see also, Mentanko (2020).

Among the enormous amount of data gathered in that expedition, I am here concerned with the records collected on the medical practices of the inhabitants of Zinacantán, at a time before the rise of ethnomedicine in Mexico. The documentary evidence from this expedition suggests that the exercise of demarcating a different Indigenous medical corpus that would index the Indigeneity of the inhabitants results more from the anthropologists’ research practices than from the lived experience of the inhabitants of Zinacantán. This article is therefore an invitation to reflect on how the link between traditional medicine and Indigeneity has been consolidated through the scientific practices of anthropologists.^[3] This commentary is part of a broader research project that draws on the anthropology of the state and the cultural history of science in a transnational dimension to analyze the spaces, materialities, contingencies, interactions, and subjectivities, experienced by anthropologists and—as far as the sources allow—Native inhabitants, when doing intensive field research in Mexico between 1940 and 1960.

Healing Espanto and Taking Aspirins

In January 1943, nine students from the National School of Anthropology of Mexico, led by the American professor Sol Tax, had already been in Zinacantán, a Tsotsil village in Los Altos de Chiapas, for a month in order to carry out one of the first ethnographic field trips for educational purposes in Mexico. Among them was the young Pedro Carrasco (1921- 2012), a Spaniard in his early twenties who had recently arrived as an exile from the war in his home country, and who would eventually become a well-known expert on the Mesoamerican world. In Zinacantán, Carrasco produced one of the first records on the theory of disease and healing techniques in the area, cataloged as “theory of disease” following George Murdoch’s guide (Murdoch 1938).^[4]In 1938, G.P. Murdock, an American anthropologist, published his Outline for Cultural Materials. This book soon became a popular tool for cataloging cultural items collected during ethnographic fieldwork, using numerals and scientific categories. The data obtained through this method was later centralized into the Human Relations Area Files at Yale University, starting from the 1950s. The aim of this integration was to enable comparisons between different cultures and populations. He began with the first letter of his name to identify the author of the file, the page number, and the number attributed by Murdoch to the subject the file dealt with, before recording the description:

P

29

543 Theory of disease

When a person falls, he is frightened [espanto], but only if it was in the place of enchantment. When he falls, his soul goes out of him. He gets a fever, headache, and pain in the body. […] To cure the fright they call the [Indigenous] doctor […] bringing him a gift, mostly bread, sometimes alcohol […] The doctor finds out about the illness by feeling the pulse [pulsar]. If it turns out to be espanto, they look for two 5-cent candles, the white ones. With them, the doctor goes with other boys from the sick person’s house to the place where he was frightened to pray. […] He brings incense which he lights in front of the candles in a basket. […] He stays there for about 30 minutes. […] While he is praying, he starts to whistle with a tecomatillo [flute]. When he leaves, he hits the place where [the sick person] was frightened, calling him by his name and saying that he was frightened there, that he has to get up, and let’s go, etc. On arriving at the house, he stops whistling. […] The sick person stays in bed for three days, starting to count the day of the cure (STP, Box 101, F.4, p. 20).

The norm that anthropology had established for itself was realized in files like this one. This ethnographic record, imagined as a newly “discovered” element, was noted, filed, and cataloged as part of the results of the research—ready to be compared and ordered, following the modernizing and evolutionary paradigm that characterized the discipline at that time. This data, a fragment of lived experiences, thus transcended the chaos of everyday life to be fixed and delimited as an object from which cultural specificity could emerge. 

But alongside these “ethnographic notes,” the field diaries document less predictable information that was left out of the demarcation exercise implicit in those records. In addition to Carrasco, the expedition included Ann Chapman, a 20-year-old American student, and Miguel Acosta (1908-1989), a Venezuelan doctor in exile like Carrasco who began his studies as an anthropologist upon his arrival in Mexico in 1941. Chapman and Acosta worked in tandem throughout the expedition. Just two days after settling in Zinacantán, Chapman met Antonia, a Native woman from Zinacantán who spoke Spanish and told Chapman that her son was ill. Chapman, who had been looking for an informant, seized the opportunity, offering to visit them with her medical companion. For the next two months, Chapman and Acosta visited Antonia daily to obtain ethnographic information and help her sick son.

Little by little, word began to spread in the village, and by the end of December, the doctor-anthropologist already had two rounds of patients that he visited every day. Acosta provided them with asprin, sulfates, and quinine for malaria. He injected some of them, for example, Juana, who had a severe infection in her foot caused by a wound that had not been treated in time. Chapman, excited, speculated in her diary: “It looks like we’re going to have a hospital and that will be very good, to really help them a bit and also to learn. I see the absolute necessity of knowing something about medicine” (STP, B. 101, F 5, p. 13). 

These recurring situations in which Acosta and Chapman visited “their” sick people from house to house were, of course, opportunities they did not miss to discuss the medical knowledge, theories of illness, and healing techniques of the inhabitants of Zinacantán. Toward the end of the stay, word of the student’s medical work had spread to such an extent that every morning there were two or three patients at the boarding school where they were staying. Even the town council authorities and the religious authorities called on Dr. Acosta:

[A]fter lunch, José Pérez Hacienda [mayordomo saliente] came with a bad cold and [also] the policeman Manuel Hernández, who is now better from an infection in his legs. […] I was called by the PM [municipal president] who also has a bad cold. The síndico came too, and the president told me to come and give him an injection. […] When I finished injecting them, another sick person came, and someone gave him an aspirin [cafiaspirina] for some pain he was suffering (STP, B. 101, F. 2, p. 134).

It is clear from Acosta’s notes that the inhabitants turned both to biomedicine and to the traditional doctor to be healed. This heterodoxy of medical practices did not fail to surprise Chapman, who noted her amazement on several occasions at what was for her a contradiction, but which seemed to be experienced as relatively natural among her informants:

It should be noted here that Antonia seems to have a lot of faith in the medicines, as she followed all the prescriptions given to her by M[iguel] for Antonio. And she herself, before we came [to Zinacantán], went to Las Casas to consult Dr. Ochoa for Antonio. But in spite of this, she gives much account to superstitions as an explanation for illnesses and bad luck (STP, B 101, F. 5, p 101-2).

These testimonies show that biomedicine did not compete or conflict with local medical knowledge. The resource that biomedicine represented for the inhabitants of Zinacantán, at least during this expedition, did not fail to be used by a variety of actors differentiated in terms of gender, status and class within the locality. The evidence suggests, then, that the line dividing biomedicine from ethno-medicine was not isomorphic with that dividing Indigenous from non-Indigenous. The type of medicine used was not necessarily a social marker of Indigeneity.

However, in terms of anthropological research, the heterodoxy of the medical practices that the students witnessed was not relevant in ethnographic terms. Indeed, the data retained as ethnographic notes were those considered relevant as cultural norms to characterize a population. Studying the field diaries allows us to know that this was not the only information available. Actually, healing practices in Zinacantán seemed to be more pragmatic and flexible, even though this dimension was left out of the anthropological record and treated as simply anecdotal of the field experience. Maybe that explains why no cataloged file for “adoption of allopathic medicine” was ever produced.

Biomedicine vs. Ethnomedicine?

These field diaries document the porosity of the boundary between traditional medicine and biomedicine, a boundary whose imperiousness often forms the premise of ethnomedicine. Indeed, according to these diaries, believing in “superstitions”—as the anthropologists arrogantly called them—did not prevent people from also resorting to allopathic medicine. In fact, the patients/informants used various types of experts (the traditional doctor, the doctor-anthropologist) depending on who best solved their problem. This evidence invites us to develop more complex explanations, rather than reinforcing the presumed otherness of Indigenous peoples as an explanatory cause. If these two bodies of medical knowledge did not always seem to be in conflict, then a better explanation of the power relations and rivalry between them is needed. 

The diaries also show us the central role that anthropology played in establishing traditional medicine—and other cultural practices—as important social markers of Indigeneity, and thus in the development of ethnosciences. To be sure, anthropological research at the time was situated within a modernizing and evolutionary paradigm in which Indigenous cultural practices had to be recorded because they were inevitably disappearing due to their (supposed) anachronism. It is worth remembering, however, that anthropological research was uncovering cultural specificities precisely by depurating what anthropologists perceived as properly Indigenous practices. Not without paradox, then, the essentialized representations of Indigenous medicine and alterity produced by anthropologists continue to justify and legitimize traditional knowledge. Perhaps a better understanding of the roles these anthropologists played in producing such representations will serve to unpack the complexities they necessarily entail.

Read another piece in this series.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful for the support of the Programa de Apoyo a la Superación del Personal Académico (PASPA) from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.

Archival Sources

Museum of Traditional Medicine, located in San Cristóbal de las Casas, the capital of the state of Chiapas. 

Sol Tax Papers in the Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collection, Library of the University of Chicago (STP).

Works Cited

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Escalona, José Luis. 2016. “Etnoargumento y sustancialismo en el pensamiento antropológico. Hacia una perspectiva relacional.” Revista INTERdisciplina, 4 (9): 71-92. https://doi.org/10.22201/ceiich.24485705e.2016.9

Gee, John. 2017. “Methodological Dissension on Sol Tax’s Training Expedition to Chiapas.” History of Anthropology Review. 12 July 2017.

Holland, William. 1963. Medicina maya en los Altos de Chiapas: un estudio del cambio sociocultural. México: Instituto Nacional Indigenista.

Lewis, Stephen. 2018. Rethinking Mexican Indigenismo: The INI’s Coordinating Center in Highland Chiapas and the Fate of a Utopian Project. Albuquerque, University of New Mexico Press.

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Mentanko, Joshua. 2020. “The Gendered Story of Fieldwork and State Medicine in the Altos of Chiapas, 1940-1960.” History and Anthropology, 34 (2):215-233.

Page Pliego, Jaime. 2023. El mandato de los dioses: etnomedicina entre los tsotsiles de Chamula y Chenalhó. San Cristóbal de Las Casas, Chiapas: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Centro de Investigaciones Multidisciplinarias sobre Chiapas y la Frontera Sur.

Pitarch, Pedro. 2010. The Jaguar and the Priest: Ethnography of Tzetzal Souls. Austin: Texas University Press.

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