530 UNIT 4 MESOAMERICAN CULTURAL FEATURES
with a bisexual honorific title, for example, “Fathers-Mothers” or “Grandmothers-
Grandfathers.” Power, divinity, age, and honor seem to evoke the complementary
whole (male and female), rather than the everyday mode in which the male has pri-
macy over the female in the public arena of community life and the female dominates
the male in many spheres of domestic life. Obviously, public and domestic life coexist
now, as they always have, in the Mesoamerican world (see the discussion of gender
in Chapter 12).Complementary Dualism as a Key to Understanding
Religious Process and Social Change in Mesoamerica
Is it not plausible that the male-dominated public arena has been the active assimi-
lator of new codes (new languages, economic systems, political authority systems,
state religions) and, thus, seemingly able to respond quickly, even apparently capit-
ulating to the winds of change; whereas the female-dominated domestic sector si-
multaneously guards the older order (native languages, agricultural ritual, curing
and divinatory knowledge, ancestor cults, shamanistic knowledge) for present and
future reference and security? This arrangement renders intelligible the enigma that
has impressed many scholars and casual observers of Indian communities in
Mesoamerica: People seem at once to be modern Mexican or Guatemalan peasants
and living shadows of a vanished pre-Columbian world.
Which is the “true” identity? This may well be a moot question; surely it does
not concern the average Mesoamerican rural family. Yet we are, as students and schol-
ars, interested in making sense of what we observe. It seems clear that both identi-
ties—Mexican and Indian, Guatemalan and Indian—are, simultaneously, true
identities, for Mesoamerican ideology accommodates such complementary duality
easily. Perhaps it has also always been so in the ebb and flow of Mesoamerican his-
tory, as the little communities of the hinterland absorbed wave after wave of new
state ideas and religions that emanated from the urban centers. The public sector vol-
untarily adapted or involuntarily capitulated to the ideological demands of the more
inclusive system, while the domestic sector held fast. This is not unrelated to the fact
that female deities have played a singularly important role in the initial moments of
Mesoamerican nativistic movements and major syncretic adjustments. The Virgin of
Guadalupe herself may be usefully interpreted in this light, for she chose to make her
appearance on Tepeyac, a hill that, according to legend, housed a shrine dedicated
to the Aztec Tonantzín, an honorific title referring to “Our Dear Mother” (see Box 5.1
in Chapter 5). New political authority and new religions were pragmatically accom-
modated, yet the integrity of local identity and local knowledge was not annihilated;
rather, it was, somewhat conservatively, transformed.The Extraordinary Power of Spoken and Written
Language as a Symbolic Entity in Itself, Beyond
Its Neutral Role as Medium for Routine Communication
The great American linguist Edward Sapir wrote long ago of language as “those in-
visible garments that drape themselves about our spirit.” He, of course, was writing
about language in general. Mesoamericans, reflecting on their own languages, would