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Clothing the Body in Otherness
culture and multiple fashionings of knowledge. While I have experi-
enced dislocation and a heightening of the senses while visiting her
culture, I became the coordinator for her work in California. In the
process, as I shall describe, what I take as my known world has some-
times been shot through with uncanny experiences that defy explana-
tion. Such a long-term engagement in fieldwork, while piecemeal, has
opened the process of interpretation to consultation over an extended
period in our developing life courses. The exchange has become in-
creasingly dialogic as Vera and I discuss ideas about the phenomeno-
logical versus the real, and ways that the Mayan peoples around Lake
Atitlun speak about and practice time and space.
While worldviews and templates for behavior within Maya societ-
ies are instilled in multiple ways, I would hold that one of the more
powerful modes has been the telling of traditional tales. Certainly, for
tellers such as Vera, it is the chosen genre to convey complex meta-
phors and beliefs and to frame the relationships among humans, so-
ciety, and nature. At one level, the two episodes of her Nawal tale
describe a set of positive and negative values for women, thereby de-
lineating the balance of power between woman and man deemed nec-
essary for the reproduction of family and culture. It contrasts the first
wife as an asocial being, incapable of human reproduction and wild
with power, with the second wife, who was a worthy partner to en-
gender a lineage, “the house” of the grandfather. Viewed in this man-
ner, neither woman had much agency or control over her desires. Such
a tale seems to function to control the social power of women, con-
fining their labor to the domestic sphere and requiring their bodies
in the reproductive strategies of a male hierarchy. In this narrative,
this fate is denoted by the woman’s return to the house of the father
in each episode.
The anomaly about the tale’s performance is that Vera, telling the
tale, was a twenty-four-year-old woman who was moving far outside
the spheres of the good wife as described in the story. On the contrary,
Vera was seeking employment to help support her infant son after she
left her alcoholic husband. She went to work caring for the child of
agringa, an American woman who eventually invited her to come to
California. She left her infant son in the care of her maternal family.
