The Two Maya Bodies: An Elementary Model of Tzeltal Personhood

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to draw attention to the indigenous Maya-Tzeltal distinction between two types of human bodies: a carnal body, shared with animals, and a specifically human phenomenological body. This distinction, in turn, is equivalent to the indigenous distinction between two souls: a soul in a human shape and a soul in a non-human shape, generally that of an animal species. The parallelism between bodies and souls leads me to propose a reorganisation of the indigenous concept of the person in terms of a quaternary model, which remains essentially binary (body/soul) yet permits the integration of elements which are different from each other, like the two bodies and the two souls, and yet mutually necessary to make up the person.

Keywords:

• Bodies
• personhood
• shamanism
• Maya-Tzeltal
• Mesoamerica

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Jérôme Baschet, Johannes Neurath, Peter Mason, Gemma Orobitg Perig Pitrou, Lydia Rodríguez, Alexandre Surrallés, Anne-Christine Taylor, as well as two anonymous ethnos readers, for their clarifying comments on this paper.

Notes

One of the main exceptions is without a doubt the brilliant study on the body and Otomí cosmology by Galinier (1990).

The verbal root kojt indicates the position adopted by ‘four-legged’ animals and feathered bipeds (Levinson 1994:838), and also the little traditional indigenous bench shaped like an animal (generally an armadillo).

With regard to the meaning of pre-Columbian human sacrifices, it can be conjectured that what was offered to the gods was just the flesh-body and not the presence-body. The Aztecs cut their victim's hair from the crown of the head, and children sacrificed to the rain god had only their nails pulled out, as though to offer only carnal matter and blood. If ritual cannibalism is intended to assimilate the subject in the victim, and hunting requires the de-subjectification of the prey, then Mesoamerican human sacrifices would be closer to the latter than to the former. If, moreover, we consider that certain parts of the body offered were also eaten by the sacrificers, the individual sacrificed had conceivably become an ‘animal’ (unspecific) prey that was to be shared in communion by humans and gods.

An examination of contemporary and colonial Mayan language dictionaries shows that the distinction I make between presence-body and flesh-body is common to this linguistic family. Apart from winik and its cognates for translating “body” and/or “person” (Kaufman 2003), there are other terms, in this case, very different from each other, that designate the carnal body, as can be inferred from the meaning of its root: ‘flesh’ in each language. The Nahuas of the Sierra de Puebla provide another sign of this distinction by recognising a carnal body (nacayo: flesh, muscles) and second body called nequetzaliz, which means ‘standing up’, ‘with a human shape’ (Lupo 2009:5).

Taylor (1996:205) and Surrallés (2003) both point out that, among the Jibaro groups, what distinguishes one species from another is their physical appearance.

I am simplifying here, for the Tzeltal language is ergative, and therefore a distinction between a transitive and an intransitive body would be more accurate. I am indebted to Lydia Rodríguez for calling my attention to this point, which needs to be studied in greater depth.

In Hultkrantz's (1953) study on North American Indians, in general, two types of souls can be recognised: one soul with the same outline as the human body in which it is lodged – a ‘double’, commonly called a ‘shadow’ or ‘image’ – and another that appears in a number of non-human shapes, mostly of animals, but occasionally of trees, flowers and even rivers, bones and stones (pp. 256–8). Likewise, for the Amazonian area Viveiros de Castro (2002b) notes: ‘I think a basic distinction should be made between the concept of the soul as a representation of the body and the concept that does not refer merely to an image of the body, but to the body's otherness’ (p. 443).

In fact, the human-soul is given the same numeral classifier (tul) as the presence-body, a biped form, whereas the numeral classifier for spirit-souls is kun, which Berlin (1978:201) defines as ‘large piles of individuated objects with maximal horizontal extension’, that is, objects that are not enumerated by their shape but by their contiguity. Hultkrantz (1953) also observed in North America how the second soul changes between forms: ‘We have already stressed the fact that the many extra-physical forms in which the free-soul is manifested do not occur simultaneously but alternately, so that they exclude one another’ (p. 248).