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Don Patricio’s Dream
That is not to say that I am free from ethical responsibilities con-
cerning secrecy and the issues of consent, confidentiality, and expo-
sure. I want to be clear that I will never disclose anything any Maza-
tec shared with me and asked me not to repeat or publish. My hosts
requested that I keep silent in many ways. For example, some of them
asked me to preserve only their anonymity, while others insisted that I
never publish transcriptions or translations of their sacred chants. In-
evitably, then, my ethnographic record of Mazatec shamanism must
remain somewhat incomplete. Will this lead to distortion, some sort
of misrepresentation by omission, in the published results of my re-
search? My answer is a qualified no. That is, I do not believe the issue
of secrecy poses a special case in the problems of ethnographic repre-
sentation. After all, even if we felt free to tell all that we know about
our host culture, all that we can say must fall short of the subject, or
even of the way we ourselves conceive of it, both of which always re-
main to some degree refractory to representation. Indeed, it may well
be that this quality of elusiveness and inexhaustibility is what the out-
sider’s ethnographic insights and insider’s secrets have in common,
and what in some significant degree determines their compelling effi-
cacy as forms of symbolic knowledge.
Conclusion: The Play of Shadows of a Doubt
I have so far presented a reading of Don Patricio’s dream from an an-
alytic perspective involving the discovery of meanings latent in the
symbolism of the text as recorded in my fieldnotes. What I have yet
to mention is that the shaman provided his own equally cogent in-
terpretation of the dream at the time of its telling. For Mazatecs, the
conventional understanding of a dream wherein a person turns his
back on you is that the person has doubts about you. It indicates
that there is a hidden lack of trust toward the dreamer on the part
of the dreamed. After recounting his dream, Don Patricio was care-
ful to insist that the usual explanation was inappropriate in this case,
that there was no real problem of trust between us, that we have no
doubts about one another. Rather, he said, the dream indicated that
“there must be ’ntjao, an evil wind. That is, from the people who see
