0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6
Don Patricio’s Dream
Notes
1. The first section of this chapter is derived from a revised version of a paper presented
at the American Anthropological Association meetings at Chicago in November of 2003 ,
as part of a panel on “Indigenous American Conceptualizations and Transformations of
Alterity,” while the substance of the second section was in large part presented at the 2000
aaa meetings in San Francisco for a panel on “Forms of Power/Knowledge.” The field re-
search was carried out with funds provided by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropo-
logical Research. Many thanks especially to Jean-Guy Goulet, and to Julie Thacker Abse,
Susan McKinnon, Elizabeth Abse, and Michael Kaufman for their contributions to earlier
drafts. Also, I am very grateful to Don Patricio Hernandez for his bravery and protection
and for his efforts to further my understanding of Mazatec shamanism. I owe the great-
est debt to Antonio Briseño of San Martín de Porres (Chilcholta), Oaxaca, who was my
steadfast friend and co-researcher throughout many a harrowing adventure in the Sierra
and without whom none of the fieldwork experience directly related to this chapter would
have been possible.
2. For earlier theoretical debate among Latin Americanist scholars regarding envy and
the “image of limited good,” see, for example, Foster 1965 , 1966 , 1972 ; Kaplan and
Seler 1966 ; Gregory 1975 ; Rubel 1977 ; and Dow 1981. For more recent ethnographic des-
criptions that convey subtleties of indigenous Latin American concepts and experiences of
“envy” analogous to those characteristic of the Mazatec case briefly described here, see es-
pecially Monaghan 1995 , 131 – 136 , and Taussig 1987 , 393 – 412.
3. Benjamin Feinberg has provided a historically sensitive and politically astute interpre-
tation as to why the vehicle of Mazatec shamanic knowledge and claims to legitimate au-
thority should be objectified in the form of a “book” (Feinberg 1997 ).
4. For a comparative example, Goulet has stated essentially the same thing as true to his
experience with Native Americans in the context of fieldwork with the Dene Tha of north-
western Alberta, Canada: ‘‘Dene tend to exclude those who are not perceived as knowing
from those among whom they discuss experiences of dreams, visions, and power. Such dis-
cussion occurs only between those who are ‘‘in the know.’’ To one who ‘‘knows’’ and un-
derstands, Dene offer a degree of explanation according to their estimation of his or her
understanding. This estimation of the ethnographer’s knowledge, more than the investiga-
tor’s own research agenda, determines the flow of information between the two, informa-
tion that most often takes the form of stories, the significance of which at first simply es-
capes the ethnographer’’ (Goulet 1994 b, 114 ).
