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Clothing the Body in Otherness
to study. But I was deluded, for if anything, the tales actually had me.
Over the next few years, the tales surfaced at various moments, always
associated with Vera’s image and the cadence of her voice, rising and
falling. I began to interpret the tales, as I shall presently convey, but
these ideas were but strands I followed across a field that came into
being over years of study and Vera’s friendship.
At first my research followed standard folklore lines, focusing on the
historical–geographical distribution of the tales and finding versions re-
corded since the Spanish Conquest in Mesoamerica. The Franciscans,
on a conquest of the souls of this heathen world, detailed accounts of
idolatry and beliefs that humans could shapeshift into animal others,
a belief that has been called nawalism (Coe and Whittaker 1982 , 63 –
68 , Sahagún 1979 , vol. 4 ). Such accounts were traces of alternate real-
ities and power sources, hidden behind the masked faces and laboring
bodies that the indigenous peoples presented to colonial authorities.
The Inquisition in the New Indies sought to identify recalcitrant be-
liefs that prevented the complete Christian conversion of subject peo-
ples (Few 1997 , Obregon 1912 ). After the Independence movements
of the early 1800 s, state authorities sought to track subversive forces
that might fuel rebellion (Brinton 1894 , Bricker 1981 ).
From the nineteenth century on, anthropologists and linguists work-
ing in Mesoamerica have recorded variants of such narratives about
nawalism (for an overview of scholarship see López Austin 1988 , I:
362 – 275 , II: 283 – 284 ). Since the mid-twentieth century, epigraphers
have made progress decoding ancient Mayan hieroglyphs, a labor that
suggests deep roots for such representations of relationships among
humans, animals, and power (Houston and Stuart 1989 , Klein et al.
2002 ). Tracing tales and beliefs, I sensed that the archival record did
not present an unbroken continuity of custom and belief from the Pre-
Columbian to the present but rather showed how tales, as a genre,
were employed to recount experience, tapping core beliefs pertinent
to moments in sociopolitical movements, representing actors and their
choices, and potentially changing the course of events.
Academic literature provided models for interpretation of the tales,
but these were framed within the disciplinary flows of Western culture.
I had thought to collect and study tales, to describe them in academic
