Book Review: People Of the Peyote edited by Stacy B. Schaefer & Peter T. Furst

People Of the Peyote:

Huichol Indian History, Religion, & Survival

edited by Stacy B. Schaefer & Peter T. Furst

      If you’ve ever been to Mexico, you might have seen some brightly colored yarn paintings on black backgrounds or other crafts in similar styles using pointilist technique or depicting animals or other objects in ways that might be considered mind altering or psychedelic. You would see these in markets or tourist trinket shops. Sometimes they are on display in art galleries. Chances are you were seeing the creations of Huichol Indians whose vibrant artwork is known for its depiction of mystical and shamanic themes. Their cultural and religious traits are largely intertwined with the use of the hallucinogenic peyote buttons found in the desert. People Of the Peyote, edited by Stacy B. Schaefer and Peter T. Furst, is a collection of essays about the Huichols, mostly centered around their shamanic traditions and religious practices and how they influence their community.

This book starts off with the definition and history of the Huichols who are a sub-branch of the Azteco branch of North American Indians. They live in the Sierra Madre Occidental region in the states of Nayarit, Jalisco, Zacatecas, and Durango. Culturally and geographically they are close to the Cora people and linguistically they are connected to the Pimas of southern Arizona. These early chapters give brief information about pre- and post-Conquest interactions with the Spanish and mestizo population of Mexico. Their social, political, and economic organizations are introduced as well. One chapter is written by a German traveler from the 19^th century named Konrad Preuss. Despite not being proficient in anthropological fieldwork techniques, his writings are highly valued because they provide some of the only accounts of Huichol religion and ritual from that time. Unfortunately, his writing isn’t very good. Another chapter lists the botanical and pharmacological properties and applications of peyote and other plants in Huichol medicinal culture. Also a theory is asserted that the Huichol’s use of peyote, while still being considered traditional, is actually of recent historical origins in their shamanic practices. These early chapters are sometimes difficult to read due to both poor writing, a serious problem for authors of history, as well as an abundance of technical terminologies and analyses that alienate a layperson. Fortunately, the book gets more accessible and interesting as it goes along.

As the more interesting parts of the book begin to pick up, we get some good chapters on the shaman’s role in society. The Huichol word for shaman is “ma’akame” and, as difficult as it may be fore an English speaker to pronounce, it is used throughout the entirety of the book. The mara’akame’s purpose is to organize and lead ritual practices. It gets more complicated than that though since the Huichol rituals are tightly intertwined with social structures and hierarchies, familial roles, seasonal calendars, and agricultural practices. A missing or altered piece of these interrelations can throw a whole village out of balance so the position of mara’akame is one of great responsibility. He also holds the place where the human and spirit worlds interact so of course that is a position of great power and influence. Aside from community rituals, the mara’akame also leads people on ritual peyote gathering expeditions and pilgrimages to the sacred mountain where it is believed that peyote originated. The psychotropic effects of peyote ingestion are also examined from neurophysiological and spiritual perspectives. The authors make it clear that peyote use is taken seriously by the Huichols for creative cultural purposes and that recreational indulgences in the drug is strictly forbidden.

Huichol mythology gets an interesting examination. They have a complex web of deities, elemental spirits including a pantheon of malevolent wind spirits, and animals. They have two deities superficially corresponding to Santa Maria and Jesus Christ although they don’t appear to play a major role in religious practices. Deer occupy a central place in the theoretical aspects of the mara’alame and they believe in a unified trinitarian spirit made up of deer, peyote, and corn which they are different manifestations of the same element. One way to think of it is the way water can hold the three forms of mist, ice, and liquid. This might be hard to grasp for people outside the Huichol culture, but to them it is obvious. This is the challenge of encountering a culture other than your own and that is where anthropologists come in for the sake of explaining this insider knowledge to outsiders. Otherwise, the ritual deer hunt is a sacred practice and a mara’akame who takes peyote can speak with living deer or deer in the spirit world. Huichol religious rituals are re-enactments of mythological stories so the mythology can be seen as an instructional guide to religious practices.

One standout chapter describes the practice of a rare subset of Huichol mara’akame, one that practices shamanic lycanthropy. Through ritual and peyote use, these shamans interact with wolves in the spirit world, eventually learning how to turn into wolves, and communicate with them for guidance on living in the human world. In the older days of anthropology, especially during the colonial era, anthropologists could be guilty of exoticizing the people they studied, especially by over-emphasizing the parts of other cultures that appear bizarre due to being the most different from the culture of the anthropologist. That accusation could apply here to this chapter, but it is probably unjust since the author makes it clear that this is not an ordinary practice among Huichol mara’akame. She didn’t write this essay to dazzle or entertain her audience either; it is a serious attempt at explaining a practice that may baffle anybody outside Huichol society.

By the end, the essays address the issue of how Huichols interact with the modern world, the market economy, and the problems these cause while they try to preserve their traditional culture. More and more, they are forced to interact with mestizos, some of which respect them and some of which don’t. Being at the margins of the economy makes them subject to exploitation for cheap labor. The importation of alcohol and guns are also causing disruptions. An even bigger problem is how they should deal with outsiders coming into their villages. Once the Huichols lived in remote mountain farming communities; now the building of new roads has resulted in busloads of clueless tourists gawking at them like exotic animals and burned out hippies showing up and demanding a shamanic spiritual experience that sometimes results in them running around naked and screaming at the sky until they pass out. Patronizing new age types are showing up hoping to find the crap that Carlos Castaneda wrote about in his fake anthropological books with the fictional character Don Juan. Such intruders are a nuisance and the hospitable Huichols have difficulty knowing what to do with these louts. They have reacted to all this by retreating deeper into the privacy of their own traditions and minimizing their contact with outsiders.

Aside from the previously mentioned difficulties of reading the opening chapters, my only real complaint about this book is that it says very little about day to day life in a Huichol community. Almost every essay is about the religion, mythology, or shamanism of the mara’akame and how they relate to the community as a whole, but it doesn’t give any real sense of what it would feel like to be born into this culture or to live in it for a lifetime. While the things written about in this book are fascinating and written about with sincere interest, sometimes it is worth hearing about the mundane parts of a society too since those also play a major part in holding a society together. My guess is that those mundane details are left out for commercial purposes. The essays were written and collected in good faith by professional anthropologists whose intentions are clearly enthusiastic so I’m assuming they questioned this as they pieced the book together. But very few people read books, an even smaller amount read anthropology books, and of those that do, most of them are probably casual readers who want to read about mysticism and drug experiences without much concern for the people being studied. Book publishing is a business and sometimes authors need to make compromises in order to send something to press. But otherwise these are excellent essays, written with care and clarity so for what it is, it is a great book.

People Of the Peyote leaves me with one last thing to consider. Given that I, and many others, can’t accept the beliefs and practices of the Huichol people as objectively true or as scientific facts, does that mean that I have to reject those beliefs in totality? The anthropologists demonstrate how important their rituals are in maintaining and regulating their society and also how any disruption in these rituals can cause lasting damage to the Huichols who practice them. Should it be considered that scientific objectivity should always be supported as the primary goal of human knowledge? What if believing in something that isn’t real is necessary to maintain social order? But it’s difficult to believe in something once you’ve admitted that it isn’t factually true. As of now, I can’t answer these questions. But what I can say is a big thank you to the anthropologist friend I had in Albuquerque who recommended this book to me after I returned from a trip to Mexico 30 years ago. Good luck Dr. S.T. wherever you happen to be these days.

 

Book Review: Attention, MOVE! This Is America!

Attention, MOVE! This Is America!

by Margot Harry

      By the 1980s, the number of radical political activist groups in America had begun to dwindle. Those who were most serious about change got more involved in things like lobbying, holding public office, and working in the educational system. Urban guerilla movements like the Symbionese Liberation Army and the Weather Underground might have been exciting to other radicals, but they largely scared mainstream America away from the Revolution. As African American people moved into the middle class and the mainstream, the Black Panthers and other Civil Rights and Black Power organizations began falling by the wayside. But there were some diehard, holdout groups that refused to go away. One was MOVE, a predominantly African American anarchist faction based in Philadelphia with several communal houses around the city. MOVE did not get along with their neighbors and the conflict ended in deadly violence, perpetrated by the police and the city government. Activist journalist Margot Harry in Attention, MOVE! This Is America! gives an account of the police’s acts against MOVE in a style that is both analytical and incendiary.

In Harry’s book, not much is said about MOVE’s history, beliefs, or practices. They started in the 1970s as a Black Power group, practiced communal living, vegetarianism, organic farming, and preached an ordinary message of ending racial inequality. They wore their hair in dreadlocks, each member changed their last name to “Africa”, and were led by an obscure man named John Africa. They had the outward appearance of a political cult, a perception reinforced by their unwillingness to socially engage with people outside their group. Although they had communal houses in several locations around Philadelphia, it was the one on the south side, located in an upwardly mobile African American middle class neighborhood, where the violent confrontation with the police occurred. Neighbors complained about them to the police because their yard was messy and vermin-infested due to the compost heaps the kept for growing their own organic food. Some neighbors made accusations of child abuse and neglect against MOVE because the four children living in the house were often seen wearing ragged clothes. The worst of it was that MOVE boarded up their windows, built a barracks on top of their roof, and set up a loudspeaker so they could give obnoxious sounding speeches, loaded with profanity, about armed revolution that the whole neighborhood could hear. Sometimes these amplified rants went on all night long. In short, they were bad neighbors and many feared they were planning some kind of violent confrontation with the government.

The conflict ended with the police fire bombing the MOVE house, killing all its members except for one child who escaped.

There are no spoilers in this story. Harry starts her book with the bombing of the MOVE house and most of the story isn’t linear. Most of this book is her investigation into how the government planned the attack, what happened during the day of the attack, and how the government responded to the public outcry that resulted. The whole issue started in 1978 when police raided a MOVE house in another part of the city. The result of the raid was humiliating to the police and Harry’s unproven claim is that the bombing, which happened in 1985, was a retaliatory attack for that humiliation. The whole story is complicated by the fact that the mayor of Philadelphia at that time was Wilson Goode, the city’s first Black mayor who also organized the military-style assault on the MOVE house. The author tests Goode’s claims that the operation was poorly executed, the bombing was a mistake, he had no knowledge of the bombing when it happened, and he had not worked with the police in any way to plan an attack the group. She digs deeply into publicly accessible records to disprove all of these claims. Not only had the mayor lied about his role in organizing the action, but he had also been planning and preparing it with the police for over a year before the killings took place. She also digs deeply into why the local police force had access to military grade weapons, including bomb making materials, that were heavily restricted to anybody outside the armed forces.

Harry’s account of the police attack is just as harrowing as you can imagine. They raided the house before sunrise with snipers located all over the neighborhood. They used water hoses, tear gas, and explosives to drive MOVE out of their home. It is impossible to know why they decided to hide in the basement rather than come out, but one can conjecture that since the house was surrounded by cops with rifles pointed at them, they were probably afraid of getting killed. Such fears could later be justified since after the bombing, the house caught fire and the four children ran out the back door to escape, only to be shot dead by police in the back yard. Fortunately, one boy did survive the shooting and ultimately was the only survivor of the massacre. The fire then spread from the MOVE house, burning down 66 other homes in the neighborhood. And all this happened while the fire department was on the scene with firehoses ready to be used. The police later claimed that they were afraid of an armed confrontation with MOVE, but after looking through the wreckage, investigators found only four guns, not the arsenal they claimed would be there and certainly not enough fire power for eleven adults and four children to use against an army of police using military tactics and weapons.

Margot Harry can’t be accused of not taking her opponents’ positions into account. In fact, almost this whole book is an examination of their accounts and her dismantling of their excuses for the onslaught. If anything, Harry can be accused of not taking her own side into account, at least not to the extent that she could have. She says very little about MOVE as an organization. She doesn’t say much about who they are, their history, their beliefs, or their practices. That’s not to say she portrays them in a positive light either since she never holds back in saying that they were not the kind of people you would want to live next door to. A more complete explanation of MOVE would have done more to make this book more rounded and probably would have made it more gripping as a story too. But her intention in writing this was to prove the government’s role in the injustice and that is something she accomplishes with ease.

So MOVE were bad neighbors. There is no death penalty for being a bad neighbor. Even if there was, the members of MOVE still have a Constitutional right to due process of law. Their neighbors should not have had their houses burned down. And no matter what crimes the adults in MOVE might have committed, there is no justifiable reason for murdering three of their children when they tried to escape the burning house. Even worse, there are so many other non-violent ways the police could have gotten MOVE to vacate their home. Negotiation with them was never even considered. In the end, nobody from the police or the government who were involved in the attack were found guilty of any crimes and many of them even claimed to be proud of what they did. If you can read Attention, MOVE! This Is America! Without getting angry, then obviously there is something wrong with you.

 

Book Review: Corn Is Our Blood by Alan R. Sandstrom

Corn Is Our Blood:

Culture and Ethnic Identity In a Contemporary Aztec Indian Village

by Alan R. Sandstrom

      “That’s a weird name for a book,” said the bookstore cashier where I purchased Corn Is Out Blood by Alan R. Sandstrom. Of course, things that are unfamiliar are thought of as weird by default. And there is nothing more unfamiliar than a culture you know nothing about. Besides, the title is an idiom and, linguistically speaking, an idiom is a metaphorical phrases that makes no sense when translated into another language. Only those fluent in the language and culture will understand what it means. That is the value of the social sciences and, in this case specifically, anthropology. The author of this book did fieldwork in Mexico for the purpose of being able to explain a foreign culture to those from outside that culture. His intention is to prove that, contrary to what outsiders say, the people he studied are making effective rational choices in the maintenance of their ethnic identity given the living conditions they are faced with.

Sandstrom spent several years off and on over two decades with Nahua Indians in Mexico located in the Amatlan region of Veracruz state. The Nahuas are contemporary descendants of the pre-colonial Aztecs and speak Nahuatl as their language. Very few of them are fluent in Spanish. They mostly survive by subsistence farming, largely maize and beans, although they sometimes take surplus produce to market. Through language, religion, and clothing, they maintain a fiercely independent ethnic identity that is remote from the dominant mestizo identity of most Mexican citizens. Loyalty to their traditions and identity has caused many mestizos to call them irrational, especially because they live so precariously, being marginalized socially and economically, when they could join modern society and live more comfortably with greater wealth. Sandstrom therefore desires to prove that their supposedly irratoinal clinging to tradition is actually a strategy for survival in a host culture that is hostile to them.

The book starts out with a brief history of the Indian people in Mexico beginning with the pre-Conquest Aztec empire up to contemporary post-Mexican Revolution times. The Nahuas have suffered persecution and marginalization all along the way from the conquistadors, the Catholic church, and the modern mestizo state. They are therefore relegated to remote ejidos, or communally owned farmlands, and have little contact with the outside world. But they aren’t hostile people at all. Sandstrom describes them as gentle, quiet, good natured, and avoidant of conflict. The opening chapters are useful, interesting, and informative. The biggest problem is that some of the personal testimonies are dry and a little difficult to follow. However, they do illustrate the types of problems the Indians have with government officials and law enforcement that is corrupt, violent, and exploitative.

The book progresses into chapters on daily life for the Nahua people. Since they are subsistence farmers, agriculture plays a central role in their lives. Their milpas, or farming territories, are arranged according to ownership and, after a chapter describing those ancestral categorizations of geneologies and familial structures that anthropologists love so much, we learn that the Nahuas are patrilocal with groupings of brothers being the central building block of social organization in their society. The distribution of milpas is based on this form of social organization. They also use slash and burn techniques of agriculture and crop rotations that are loosely related to their sometimes unpredictable rainy seasons. All of these horticultural realities have a direct influence over the Nahua’s world view and religious practices. When they say that “corn is our blood” they literally mean that without corn they would die. As a source of food, health, income, and meaning it is the most important thing to them. In America we might think of money in a similar way since, like it or not, we can’t live without it within the context of our culture.

At one point, Sandstrom argues his case that Nahua people are highly rational even though mestizos insist they aren’t and just blindly follow traditions even though it would make more sense to modernize and join the market economy. One claim they make against the Nahuas is that they inist on making maize their staple crop even though beans fetch higher prices at the market. Sandstrom points out that maize is more cost effective, less labor intensive, and easier to grow in high quantities on a regular schedule. Beans on the other hand require higher monetary investments, grow irregularly, and are more likely to get eaten or contaminated by vermin. Beans are also more difficult to harvest and transport to the market. Maize is simply more efficient and more reliable. The mestizos could always ask the Nahuas why they prefer it, but they are human and that means it is better to live in the certainty of their own illusions than to find out the truth.

After describing the material culture of the Nahuas, Sandstrom goes on to examine their religious practices, most of which revolve around their horticultural cycle. They believe in a type of animism or pantheism that is similar to what Hindus and Buddhists believe. There is one unifying spirit permeating the entire world and we only see it in fragments because of our own natural limitations. Like other Aztec derived cultures, they believe in wind spirits that cause illness, accidents, and death. During ceremonies, they attract and then banish them through the use of figures made out of colored paper. Their religious rituals are performed to maintain a balance in the interaction between the material and the spiritual world. Shamans are the religious authorities of the Nahuas and aside from performing rituals, they also act as doctors, fortune tellers, and politicians in the ejido.

By the time Sandstrom returns to Amatlan in the 1980s, the Nahuas have begun to change. The government has built roads into Amatlan along with sturdy houses. They are in the process of bringing in electric power. More Nahuas are learning Spanish and going into the cities to work. American missionaries have also discovered them and done some damage too. A rift in the community happens as Protestant converts refuse to interact with the other Nahuas and the missionaries insist that vaccines are evil so a portion of the converts die from an outbreak of measles that could easily have been prevented.

The end of the book is a thorough examination of how the Nahuas benefit from having a strong ethnic identity that sets them apart from the mestizos in the surrounding areas of Veracruz.

Alan Sandstrom has written a fascinating book about the Nahua people. He advocates for them by making and defending the claim that Nahuas are rational despite what others think. There is one point where he drops the ball in his argument. He addresses the reason why Nahuas keep farm animals even though they don’t eat meat, don’t use them for farm labor, and don’t see them as status symbols. They are economically inefficient because they cost a lot to feed, but he claims the Nahuas keep them so they have something to use their unusable milpas for. But if those milpas are unusable, why have them in the first place? Despite this one weak point, the other arguments he gives are sufficiently strong enough to support his claim. Even without the theoretical argument he makes, this book would still be interesting as it gives such a clear impression of what it is like to live in this culture. And it seems like the ultimate work on anthropology since it is so accessible to lay people without losing its value for professional anthropologists. It isn’t bogged down or made confusing with abstract theories and endless references to other scholars in the field the way a lot of anthropology books tend to be. Better still, the author doesn’t glorify the Nahua people by making them look quaint or by turning them into noble savages of the 20^th century. He makes them out to be ordinary people living ordinary lives in a way that is outside the ordinary for most of us.

I’m no expert in the social sciences, but if anybody ever asked me to recommend books from that field Corn Is Our Blood would be one of the first suggestions I would make. Humanizing people in other cultures isn’t a task that should have to be done, but unfortunately it is and this book does a good job of it. It also adds another dimension to whatever it is you know about Mexican society and culture. Like anybody else, I love Mexican food, but there is so much more to this fascinating country and its richly layered culture that should be learned about. You might as well start by letting Alan Sandstrom point you in the right direction.