The World below: Body and Cosmos in Otomi Indian Ritual
336
The World below: Body and Cosmos in Otomi Indian Ritual
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Overview
In The World Below, Jacques Galinier surveys both traditional Otomí cosmology and colonial and contemporary Catholic rituals to illustrate the complexity of continuity and change in Mesoamerican religious ideology and practice. Galinier explores the problems of historical and family memory, models of space and time, the role of the human habitation in cosmology, shamanism and healing, and much more. He elucidates the way these realities are represented in a series of arresting oppositions - both Otomí oppositions and the duality of indigenous and Catholic ritual life - between the upper and lower human body.
Drawing upon both Freud and theories of the carnivalesque, Galinier argues that the "world below" (the lower half of the body) provides the foundation for an indigenous metapsychology that is at once very close to and very far away from the Freudian conceptual apparatus.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780870817731 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University Press of Colorado |
| Publication date: | 11/01/2004 |
| Series: | Mesoamerican Worlds Series |
| Pages: | 336 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d) |
About the Author
Jacques Galinier is research director at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique's Laboratoire d'Ethnologie et de Sociologie Comparative, Université Paris X. Howard Scott and Phyllis Aronoff are the award-winning translators of Gilles Havard's The Great Peace of Montreal (McGill-Queen's University Press).
Read an Excerpt
The World Below
Body and Cosmos in Otomí Indian RitualBy Jacques Galinier
University Press of Colorado
Copyright © 1997 Presses Universitaires de FranceAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-87081-773-1
Chapter One
The Two Strands of Memory
Enigmatic and secret, the prehispanic religion of the Otomí to this day remains shrouded in mystery. It cannot be dissociated from the systems of thought of the societies at the heart of Mesoamerica before the arrival of the Spanish. Generally speaking, the cosmology of the Otomí had profound similarities to that of the Mexica, which has been illuminated by an impressive corpus of glosses, extensive exegeses, and iconographic and architectural documents of many kinds. These similarities, in various areas of knowledge, mark the horizon of a comparable polytheistic universe and are negotiated within a pantheon dominated by an ancestral couple, the "Old Father" and the "Old Mother." The veneration of both Otontecuhtli-the God of Fire-and Tezcatlipoca-the God of Pulque (the fermented juice of the agave), whose nocturnal powers were particularly dreaded-was marked by a similar fear of the secondary forces associated with vegetation and the natural world in general. A veritable reference chart of public activities setting the rhythm of work and days, the Native calendar marked the major stages in thelife cycles of distinct groups, specifically indicating activities in the cult of ancestors and agrarian fertility ceremonies. The Huichapan Codex, a unique document, reveals a remarkable series of correlations between the calendar system of the Mexica and that of the Otomí, both based on annual cycles of eighteen months of twenty days.
For lack of explicit documentation, it would be impossible to do a detailed inventory of the components of the prehispanic ritual system. However, historical sources can shed some light on the establishment and consolidation of the ceremonial apparatus that still exists today. This is the case for the southern Huasteca region, the geographic area covered by this book. This eastern border country of the Otomí world is a space of confluence of indigenous traditions of the coast and the high central plateau. In the period before the conquest, it was a mountainous buffer zone controlled by two kingdoms independent of the Aztec Empire, the Tutotepec and the Huayacocotla.
SEDENTARIZATION AND EVANGELIZATION
As a result of the conquest and the Spanish quest for alliances with the tributary populations of the Aztec Empire, the Otomí of Tlaxcala, as well as those of Meztitlan and Tutotepec, took part in the collapse of Tenochtitlan in 1521. However, the submission of Tutotepec and Meztitlan did not last long. Though forced to pay tribute-in particular, the quinto due the viceroy-the region proved to be a very poor source of revenue for the Conquistadores. By about 1550, the territory corresponding to the former states of Tutotepec and Huayacocotla seems to have been completely under control. Given the title of Repúblicas de Indios, these two provinces were integrated without resistance into the encomienda system, an institution that granted the Spanish colonists the income from lands farmed by the Indians, who were forced to provide all kinds of services, in exchange for which the colonists were expected to evangelize the Indians.
In the early decades of the sixteenth century, the Spanish authorities were driven by one major concern: to settle the Otomí in the poorly controlled hinterland of the Sierra. This policy went hand in hand with Christianization, the enlightened initiator of which was the Augustinian Fray Alonso de Borja, an exceptional character, the first of the rare missionaries to preach the Gospel in the Otomí language. Starting in 1542, the educational activity of these men was combined with the settlement of the Otomí in estancias and barrios, of which there were twenty-seven by 1570 (Gehrard, 1972: 337). It was the Franciscans, however, who founded a convent in Tulancingo (in 1528) and built a church in Metepec. The construction of a church in Tutotepec dedicated to the Three Magi was begun in 1542. While it was later celebrated in Santa María Magdalena as well, the cult of the Three Magi was maintained in Tutotepec, and there is still a major festival dedicated to them in the village today. In fact, Tutotepec was one of the few mission stations where the presence of priests was almost continuous from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. Tenango de Doria was visited by the Augustinians in 1558, and in 1557 Huehuetla was placed under the patronage of San Benito. Huehuetla was attached to the vicaria of Pahuatlan and then to the diocese of Tulancingo (Azcue y Mancera, 1932: 307). In the same period, a church was built in Achiotepec; the Augustinian facade and a dilapidated choir loft can still be seen today. Acatlan, several miles from Tulancingo, was the site of an important Augustinian monastery. Its numbers included a theologian, a preacher, and a confessor in Spanish, Nahuatl, and Otomí, as well as another nahuatlato monk. Fray Alonso de la Cruz left Acatlan to found the monastery in Huayacocotla. During this time, missionary activity expanded greatly in Tulancingo.
There is an important document from this period written in 1569 by Gaspar de Valdès, the vicar of Huayacocotla, addressed to the archbishop of Mexico City in answer to a series of questions on the state of the visita, his priestly jurisdiction (Descripción, 1897: 248). The document records the religious activities of the days of the vicar's visits, the frequency of which Valdès does not indicate. It is certain that for the most part, the rancherías or barrios were not visited by the priest more than once a year (Gibson, 1964: 114). Our vicar also speaks with some bitterness of communication problems and the rugged topography of the region: "because one has to walk in a spiral, making many turns, it is impossible for me to say in what direction each village is located" (Descripción, 1897: 248; translators' note: our translation from the French). This may explain why the Spanish authorities, wanting to put an end to Native resistance, established a drastic policy of grouping the Otomí populations in villages where the authorities could be strictly controlled and it would be easier to do missionary work. Starting in 1593, the justicias of Indian pueblos were ordered to hunt down the dispersed Otomí and force them to live in the congregaciones to which they were assigned (AGN, Indios, vol. 6, l° p., exp. 951, f. 258 vta). In 1595, the dispersion of the tributary populations was such that the administrative and legal authorities refused to admit Indians fleeing Huayacocotla into the villages of the Sierra (AGN, Indios, vol. 6, l° p., exp. 1075, f. 292 vta). In 1502, Chicontepec was divided into four congregaciones. These measures gave rise to insurmountable resentment of the missionary policy and passive resistance to the doctrina taught by the priests. The hostility toward evangelization that was prevalent in the Sierra contrasted with the attitude of calculated submission shown by the Indians of Tulancingo, where control was established under more humane conditions, and Indians were even assigned to serve the regular priests of the town, with the sanction of the viceroy (AGN, Indios, vol. 6, l° p., Exp. 1260, f. 351).
By the end of the sixteenth century, the Indians' attitude was one of passive resistance to control by the missionaries. I would now like to attempt to uncover the places in this confused history where the anticolonial struggle and the resistance to evangelization were articulated. To do so, I will need to examine the mechanisms at work in the festivals, and in particular, the process of their financing. In the sixteenth century, the major purpose of the bienes de comunidad, which included all the public resources of the Indian communities, was to carry out projects of collective interest and celebrate religious festivals. These resources were thriftily assigned to cajas de comunidad, social funds, and the surplus remaining after the payment of tribute was used for ritual purposes. As Gibson observes, the establishment of the festivals, on the initiative of the clergy, made possible the systematic financing of ceremonial events and the use of the funds by the priests themselves. After 1550, the resources of the cajas were used almost exclusively for the celebration of Christian festivals (Gibson, 1964: 124).
This institutional mechanism-the creation of which was supported by Viceroy Mendoza-increased the Indians' dependence on a system in which the confusion between public spending for the community (such as the payment of tribute or the buying of seed in periods of poor harvests) and expenditures undertaken by the priests was largely maintained. This situation quite naturally led to sporadic outbursts of violence in the Indian settlements.
CEREMONIAL DRUNKENNESS: A MISUNDERSTOOD PHENOMENON
In the Valley of Mexico, where evangelization was most active, the Otomí were the people who most resisted indoctrination, which was further hindered by the fact that they lived in the most remote areas of the Sierra de las Cruces (Gibson, 1964: 116). But the underlying causes of this failure lay elsewhere. The priests were unanimous in their complaints about the brutality, adultery, and, especially, the incorrigible drunkenness of the Otomí (Gibson, 1964: 116). As far as they could, the priests condemned the immoderate use of pulque and the extravagant costs of the indigenous rituals. But it is certain that many of them shrank from public condemnation of sorcery, which they imputed to devil worship, for fear of being excluded from the isolated communities (Gibson, 1964: 116). Nevertheless, the criticism they expressed of the Otomí throughout the sixteenth century contrasts markedly with their indulgence toward the Nahua Indians. Among measures suggested by Gaspar de Valdès to speed up evangelization, the fight against alcohol abuse came before the recruitment of new priests (Descripción, 1897: 233). The priests' fixation on what they saw as intolerable drunkenness among the Otomí shows the extent of the phenomenon and sheds light on its hidden dimensions. The consumption of alcohol was probably a means of escape from living conditions that had deteriorated in the colonial period, plus an emotional reaction to cultural aggression and political, economic, and religious domination. But it cannot be denied that the consumption of pulque was highly regimented in prehispanic times. It had grown significantly since the beginning of the colony. What most of the missionary commentators seem to have missed is that drunkenness for the Otomí was part of extremely intense ritual experiences, expressing the men's hidden desires and their sense of the sacred with a desperate violence.
It seems clear that this tragic escape into drunkenness maintained the Native eidos and the religious sensibility of an oppressed people. One would have to examine their entire philosophy of life through the texts in order to understand how the first adjustments of the worldview of the eastern Otomí to the religion of the conquerors came about, and how, over the centuries of domination, the two strands of memory, the native and the colonial, fitted together. One can easily imagine the broad outlines of the indigenous religion from the notes provided by the missionaries for the Descripción del Arzobispado (Descripción, 1897). These texts, covering the period immediately preceding the conquest, were actually written in 1579. The Descripción del pueblo de Ueipuchtla (Alonso de Contreras) makes reference to Huytzilopoch, who is considered a major deity ("era el demonio"), but whose attributes the missionaries' glosses seem to confuse with those of Tezcatepoca (Descripción del Pueblo de Yetecomac). In fact, Huytzilopoch may be considered the main deity of the Otomí pantheon. We will see that, in many guises, this is still the case, in particular in the region of Huayacocotla and Tutotepec, the geographical heart of the field study.
One fact must be kept in mind: at the turn of the seventeenth century, the Otomí religion was still largely intact. Only the most spectacular rites had been eliminated under pressure by the Spanish authorities, the first being human sacrifices, including the self-sacrifice of legs, of which there was no longer any trace by the seventeenth century. There is discernible in local resistance movements a desire on the part of the indigenous peoples to preserve their cultural identity, the main aspects of which are revealed in strong images. The detailed report by the vicar Valdès is in a sense a confession of the radical failure of the missionary policy in the Otomí communities of the Sierra Madre, a failure that can be attributed to a shortage of men but is more readily explained by the discouragement of the priests, who were impeded by the inertia of the tradition and by a baffling cosmology. On this point, there is a particularly sharp contrast with the methods used with the Nahuatl-speaking Indians, as is noted by Ricard with regard to the giving of communion by the Augustinians. It is regrettable that Ricard repeats the missionaries' harsh judgment of the Otomí without critical examination. We must, however, give him credit for identifying-in a very superficial, psychologizing formulation-the cultural specificity and profound character of the Otomí, which are still very much misunderstood. The chroniclers' unanimous condemnation of the Indians as devil or demon worshippers is ultimately not inaccurate, as we will discover.
THE OTHER SIDE OF MISSIONARY EDUCATION: THE STRATEGY OF CAMOUFLAGE
If we now return to the discussion of rituals, we are again faced with the fact that, for this region, the sources concerning Christian festivals in the sixteenth century are very incomplete and not at all clear. The same is true of documents on the organization of public and religious offices. Yet it was this period that saw the gradual implementation of the cargo system, which all individuals were obliged to submit to at some point in their lives, in the communities of the Sierra. Gibson shrewdly notes that the Spanish strategy of eliminating the central authorities and maintaining the local indigenous elites (in order to ensure the continuity of authority and integrate it into the Spanish administrative framework) proved totally inoperative in the areas occupied by the Otomí.
At the time of the conquest, there was not a single major community in what is now the country of Mexico that was controlled by the Otomí (Gibson, 1964: 30). There was cultural regression even in the mountains near Atzcapotzalco, where, in the seventeenth century, Otomí could be found eating grass, using crude technology, and living extremely precariously. Lacking centralized political structures, the Otomí groups were able, as Gibson clearly explains, to escape Spanish influence, which was not the case for their Nahuatl-speaking neighbors. For the southern Huasteca, Valdès mentions the existence of tequitlatos, who collected the tribute in each new community, but he is silent on the functioning of the ritual apparatus. There is every reason to believe that, aside from the days when the priests visited, the Catholic ceremonies did not take place, or at least were very modest. In contrast, the celebration of Corpus Christi in Tlaxcala, in another area inhabited by the Otomí, was spectacular; Motolinía witnessed it in 1538 (Motolinía, 1971: 99-101, and Torquemada, 1943: 231). These complex events, which had a considerable mobilizing effect on the Indian population and appealed to their sense of decorum, were reduced to very modest proportions in the Sierra Madre. Cajas de comunidad provided most of the funding for the celebration of religious festivals. The cargo system saw its greatest expansion in colonial Mexico beginning in the seventeenth century.
In the early days of the colony, non-Christian rituals had already acquired the scope they have today. It was around these rituals, which formed a system centered on the worship of fire, mountains, and ancestors, that the cultural cohesion of the Otomí congregaciones crystallized, despite the restructuring of the habitat imposed by the Spanish. This was due to the extreme flexibility of a social organization that had until then been based on total dispersion.
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
Contents
Foreword by Davíd Carrasco and Eduardo Matos Moctezuma....................viiPreface....................ix
Introduction....................1
1. The Two Strands of Memory....................13
2. Spaces and Powers....................37
3. Shamanic Sessions....................67
4. The Big Life....................95
5. In the Name of Christ and the Ancestors....................119
6. The Carnival of the Gods....................151
7. The World Below....................193
Conclusion....................243
Glossary....................247
Bibliography....................251
Index....................261