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Don Patricio’s Dream
where I am not listening to him while speaking in a language that he
cannot understand. This imagery suggests his misgivings about the
cultural distance between us and indicates his feeling something be-
tween hope and despair about finding somewhere or some way for
us to speak together beyond the morally ambiguous terrain muddied
by the question of pecuniary self-interest. That is, he might very well
wonder whether he can avoid or overcome in his association with me
what could amount to a betrayal of the sacred commitment to pur-
sue the path of altruistic good in his shamanic vocation.
Overall, the sequential unfolding of Don Patricio’s dream manifests
a kind of teleological movement through a hierarchy of motives, from
the at least partial resolution of ambivalence and guilt about work-
ing with me toward the expression of his anxious desire for commu-
nication, recognition, and continued friendship. He does not want
me to turn my back on him and walk away. I must admit that at first
I took solace and encouragement from his placing my image in the
dream at the top of the road, at a spot free from mud. Nonetheless, is
there not also in this image the hint that Don Patricio suspects I was
in some sense actively deceiving him and perhaps all other shamans
and Mazatecs who so generously provided me with their knowledge?
Certainly, at least, it contains the premonition that his involvement
with me was something that would lead finally to disappointment and
that I would abandon our hard-won relationship in order to pursue
further my own purposes, which were unintelligible to him. This fore-
boding is clearly there, again, in Don Patricio’s memory of how the
dream ended: “I don’t know what he was doing, but the point is that
he was talking, he was speaking in English. And I wanted to talk with
him, and he did not speak to me. He turned and went away from me,
over the top of the hill and out of sight.”
There is more in this final episode of the dream than Don Patricio’s
accurate intuition that the very motivations that lead us (at least at
first) to develop close relationships during fieldwork are the same ones
that will take us away from them—that is, eventually we leave, per-
haps never to return. It also points to a more general ethical problem
of anthropological interpretations and representations entailed in the
fact that we speak about our host subjects in languages they themselves
