Edward AbseNow, when I heard this in January of 1997 , relatively early on in my
fieldwork, it was far from clear to me exactly what kind of troubles
Don Agustin was talking about.
Indeed, when I first arrived among the people of the Sierra, I had
been very happily surprised by their conviviality. I left home for the
field anticipating a difficult encounter with the embodiment of a ste-
reotypical image of Mesoamerican Indians derived from my read-
ing in the ethnographic literature of the region, conjured up from de-
scriptions perhaps half-misremembered that seemed to portray them
as gruffly taciturn, closed, and xenophobic. Portending even worse,
soon after my arrival in Mexico I had been told by various persons—
most of them bureaucratic functionaries with whom I had dealings
in the state capital of Oaxaca—that of all the indigenous peoples in
the region, the Mazatecs were known to be the most canijos, that is,
calculatingly inscrutable, stubborn, and evasive, in short, very diffi-
cult to get along with. But when I finally came into their company, I
found them to be hospitable, generous, and visibly well disposed to-
ward me. Among themselves, they were obviously gregarious and
displayed a great love for music, dances, games, and fiestas. What I
witnessed from day to day at first was a lot of playfulness, frequent
laughing, and the telling of jokes—even at one another’s expense,
and without anyone seeming to take serious offense. I confess, then,
to having seen them in the beginning only hazily through the smokes
of an orientalist’s pipe dream, while looking forward to a relatively
easy time of it in the field.
Later, however, time and again, in conversation with people of the
Sierra, I heard expressed the idea that they find themselves currently
in a situation of acute social crisis, caught in a predicament apparently
without solution for the simple reason that, as they so often say, “Al-
ready now the people don’t know how to live together.” And, indeed,
the way they speak of this problem more generally is as if they were
faced with the irremediable loss of some sort of knowledge, what we
might refer to as the ethical capacity for peaceful coexistence. In its
stead, Mazatecs posit the theory of an inherently violent asociality,
and its elaboration has become an obsession that takes center stage
in the contemporary moral imagination. This is an idea that is regu-
larly expressed in the insinuating hushed tones of gossip and always