Edward Abseits, and Owners of the Earth. The paradigmatic instance of what is
called in Mazatec chi’in, the encompassing category for “sickness,”
was apperceived as a rupture in the established order of things as the
result of some imbalance or transgression in human–spirit relations.
Through the process of divination and other forms of performative
and visionary diagnosis, the shaman usually led the afflicted to un-
derstand that he or she was suffering as the unfortunate consequence
of his or her own actions. For example, by associating their memo-
ries of everyday-life events with what was revealed to the shaman in
reading the positions of corn kernels tossed onto a cloth or the smokes
of burning copal tree-resin incense, a patient was likely to remember
that on some occasion they had crossed a stream at midday, the very
hour when the spirits—the chikones or “owners” of the place—come
out to eat, and, as a result, he had “stained” their table. Or perhaps,
equally typical, it turned out that the patient had cut down a tree in
the territory of a chikon nindo, a spirit who lives in a nearby cave,
without asking permission, that is, without first presenting the ap-
propriate offering. In either case, he had provoked the ire of the spir-
its who, at that moment, had seized his sén-nizjin, literally, his “day
image” or “reflection,” the soul that remained trapped there in that
very place as punishment. For this divined reason, then, the patient
had been experiencing all the debilitating symptoms of soul loss. The
shaman who discovered the explanation then worked to calm the spir-
its’ anger by praying in negotiation on behalf of his patient and then
paying a ransom in the form of ritual offerings.
The fear and dangers of soul loss at the hands of the spirit-owners
of nature are these days for the most part only an aspect of older per-
sons’ memories. In contrast to this emphasis on supernatural forces
beyond human control, the meanings associated with contemporary
experience of illness tend to evince that it is the behavior of fellow hu-
mans that has come to be more difficult to predict, more worrisome,
and potentially even more dangerous. In an overwhelming majority
of cases I documented over the course of three years of fieldwork, the
preponderant cause of illness and other misfortunes is thought to be
the malicious action of others in the immediate social environment.
Obviously, then, the relationship between oneself and others in the