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Clothing the Body in Otherness
of women who have undressed beyond their human flesh and trans-
formed into nawals, spiritual animal others. Realizing that in both the
tale and the field of interaction, more than one reality was interweav-
ing, and that the appearance of things was crucial to understanding
the multidimensionality of knowing, I concentrate here on the rela-
tionship of dressing, specifically between the traje that Vera always
wears and the manifestation of the power of another dimension of
her world, demonstrated by belief in and representations of nawal-
ism, “animal transformation.”
Belief in the ability of humans to change themselves into animals
or their association with an animal spirit is recorded in Maya hiero-
glyphic writing, in sculptural media, and the iconography of the tzolkin
(the Sacred Calendar round of the Maya). The deep background of
Vera’s tale refers to the relationships between humans, itz (magical
power), and the chíulel, or tonal, an elemental or animal co-essence
connected to each human by the moment of birth (Chouinard 1995 ,
73 – 79 ). A human’s ability to actually transform into an animal (not
necessarily their tonal) is a manifestation of force that may be for good
(that is beneficial to the community) or for malice and selfish gain.
One term often used in Maya communities and in the literature for
this ability is nawalism, and in many Maya communities it has car-
ried a strong negative connotation, giving rise to charges of brujeria
(witchcraft), shaped by five hundred years of Catholic and colonial
agendas. Humans, by changing appearance, have the ability to de-
ceive others, and their motives are to be suspected. In one story that
Vera told, she posed the dilemma of interpersonal relations: “Who
can know why? Perhaps it is jealousy, perhaps they are angry, perhaps
they want something? Your land, your house?” A transformed being
can enter the private areas of the house and cause bodily harm to its
inhabitants. The contrasting roles of the two wives could also be de-
scribed as statements about clothing and posture, about upstanding
social behavior versus the incomprehensible behavior of an animal or
an animal in the wrong place.
The contrast of animal to human behavior, the way of telling ex-
perience and the warping of the perceptual field in the aftermath of
violence come into sharp focus around an incident that occurred in
