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Don Patricio’s Dream
I experienced in the field: the problem of secrecy. The Foucauldian
or so-called postmodernist insight into the Gordian entanglement
of power and knowledge is a basic cultural principle and an implicit
working assumption of social life in many Native American societ-
ies. This idea is probably not so exotic as it might at first sound; after
all, it is one that guides plenty of our own decisions and behavior in
everyday life about what to say to whom. Even so, the Mazatecs and
other Amerindians do appear to be especially adept at either conceal-
ing or carefully imparting potentially efficacious knowledge by eva-
sion, dissimulation, formal pretense, ellipsis, euphemism, and other
forms of indirect speech, including the telling of half-truths, and the
lie. Also worthy of mention is every Mesoamericanist’s favorite, the
wall of “Quién sabe?” (“Who knows?”), a common-enough response
to the ethnographer’s questions when it appears that almost everyone
except you does indeed know.
Secrecy is not a thing in itself but an aspect of human sociality and
as such always culturally specific in its attributes; furthermore, it is
subject to different rules and takes on variant qualities at the bound-
aries between distinct spheres of communication within any given
culture. I am not concerned with the full range of Mazatec secrecy in
this chapter. Rather, I foreground the issue of esoteric knowledge that
pertains to shamanism, both because this is the domain within which
the more general principle of secrecy operative in Mazatec culture be-
comes most explicit, in the form of voiced imperatives, for example,
and because it was the focus of my own field research and presented
me with the most difficult ethical problem.
However, let the reader beware (as I should have) that what I pose
here as the special problem of secrecy in our terms, that is, as if it were
simply that which impedes the transfer of certain information, finds
no equivalent in Mazatec language or ideas. For them, what is at is-
sue is not so much knowledge of what is secret but of who is party to
the sharing of knowledge, where what is most importantly hidden and
revealed is not so much the object or content of secrecy but rather the
intentions of one’s interlocutor. For this reason, the question of ac-
cess to the esoteric in the Mazatec case is densely interwoven with the
more widespread and most pressing existential problem of confianza,
that is, of establishing and maintaining mutual “trust.”
