Edward Absecomfort. Sorcery, then, represents the ultimate betrayal and violent
inversion of that confianza, or “trust,” which the compadrazgo rela-
tionship is intended to epitomize.
The current discourse of kjoaxíntokon or envidia bears witness to a
sharp increase in the suspicion of its occurrence, suggesting epidemic
proportions on a scale not unlike that of the ravages of previously un-
known diseases that have afflicted populations in the highlands in re-
cent years. People claim that, like the local outbreaks of cholera in the
1980 s and 1990 s, the predominance of envidia in their lives is some-
thing new in their experience. Taking seriously their comparison of
past and present, which structures this widespread discourse of plain-
tive nostalgia, I have been able to discover plenty of historical evi-
dence indicating that the uneasiness manifest in this kind of talk finds
its source in something beyond any sort of collective forgetting or the
moral deficiencies of this generation as compared with previous ones.
Instead, these anxieties and their consequent cultural expressions tes-
tify to a contemporary social experience of unprecedented, unbear-
able ambiguities that have resulted from radical transformations and
ruptures in traditional, institutionalized forms of authority, associa-
tion, and exchange among the Mazatecs. While these changes have
occurred over the past century, they appear only recently to have ar-
rived at a point of crisis.
All they say is simply that there is too much evil in the world now-
adays. This malignancy is discussed with vague reference to any num-
ber of now-prevalent sins, but primarily in terms of what they per-
ceive as an intolerable increase in sorcery activity among themselves.
This is what I eventually learned Don Agustín and others really mean
by the common expression that “people no longer know how to live
together.” Furthermore, many who are farmers often speak of how,
in the not-so-distant past, harvests were much more abundant than
they are now. Decreasing returns on agricultural labor are taken as
a sign confirming their increasing awareness that the Earth itself—
its fertility and thus its capacity to support the regeneration of life—
is rapidly becoming exhausted. “Our Mother Earth,” understood to
be an organic entity, indeed, a sentient being, “is getting tired” and
“drying out,” they say.