492 UNIT 4 MESOAMERICAN CULTURAL FEATURES
Whether you look or whether you listen, you cannot spend time even as a ca-
sual visitor in a Tzotzil community without coming away impressed by the intensity
and vitality of public ritual life. There are no scripts or notes, of course: only knowl-
edge, precedent, and advisers. All that is done—the processions, the songs, the seem-
ingly endless prayers and exchanges of ritual language—is carried in the oral
tradition. In similar fashion, the daily round of domestic life in Tzotzil households
typically begins with prayers to the Sun-Christ and other deities at the household
shrine, and ends with tortillas, beans, gossip, and joking around the fire.
Most narrative accounts of Tzotzil history emphasize the learning of batz’i k’op
(the “true language,” or Tzotzil) and its specialized forms—such as prayer, ritual
speech, and song—as the diagnostic moment in human “progress” through the four-
period creation cycle. As it was in progress as a species, so it is with Tzotzils as they
move through the life cycle. Infants are classified as monkeys (mashetik),precultural
beings without language, until they are named and baptized, usually in the first two
years of life. According to Tzotzil theories of self and individual being, a human life
is a cycle of heat, beginning as a cold fetus and acquiring ever-increasing measures
of spiritual heat as the individual moves through the life cycle.
Language-learning and increasing sophistication in language use, particularly
in punning and joking behavior, are signs of increasing social maturity. Skillful use
of language, like sexual maturity and wealth, is likened to powerful heat, the desired
and the desirable. Those men and women who achieve rank and status in shaman-
istic careers and public ritual life do so in part through their linguistic competence.
So complex are the specialized linguistic requirements of civil and religious office-
holders and shaman that formal and informal apprenticeship is the norm.
Major civil and religious offices carry as a requirement the engagement of ritual
advisers (yahvotik),typically past holders of the office, whose task is to accompany the
officials and to teach them proper ritual behavior, prayers, songs, and ritual formu-
las. Aspiring shamans must not only dream to receive their calling but also find (and
sometimes pay) a mentor from whom to learn prayers and other specialized knowl-
edge. Musicians (those of string ensembles, harp, and guitar) occupy a culturally im-
portant role as ritual accompanists and as informal ritual advisers. A prestigious
musician not only knows song sequences involving hundreds of formal couplets but
also is able to prompt ritual officials and assistants about matters of etiquette, pro-
tocol, and specialized language use.
If specialized language use is crucial to the success of a “public service” career,
it is also laced into the fabric of countless everyday social transactions. To borrow
money, to ask a favor, to ask for help, to share a drink of rum, to enlist a ritual kins-
man (compadre)for the baptism of one’s child, even to pay a visit to one’s neighbor’s
house, all require the use of formal language, a style of speech that is formulaic and
fixed rather than spontaneous and free-form.
Box 13.2 is a transcription of a casual visit of two compadres(ritual kinsmen), as
recorded in Zinacantan by Robert Laughlin. There has apparently been a misun-
derstanding. The visitor seeks to assuage bad feelings by offering rum, talk, and ca-
maraderie. A bewildering number of processes, abstractions, and things can be