Performing Healing: Repetition, Frequency, and Meaning Response in a Chol Maya Ritual (original) (raw)
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The Oxford Handbook of Ritual Language, 2024
Language often plays an indispensable role in ritual healing practices, where it is characterized by distinctive prosodic, grammatical and discursive resources. Questions of how language marks and contributes to the therapeutic efficacy of ritual healing practices have invited numerous claims over the decades, from symbolist, semiotic, performative and phenomenological perspectives. This chapter explores those features of ritual language that are commonly employed in ritual healing, with special attention to the relative importance of semantic content or structural form as they relate to these claims concerning therapeutic efficacy. Case studies from around the world are examined, with special emphasis on those from the indigenous Americas.
The manuscript known as the Ritual of the Bacabs is a rare corpus of Yucatec Maya– language incantations and medical remedies put to paper in the eighteenth century. When a given instance of discourse such as a healing incantation is put into writing, it is rendered as a detachable unit of text that can be lifted out of its interactional setting so that it may be successfully recontextualized in future performances. Deciding what signs are essential to convey in writing requires a judgment about what constitutes an ee ective performance of the text. Such a judgment is based in a group's semiotic ideologies. In this essay I examine the role of semiotic ideologies in colonial Maya literacy through an analysis of abbreviation conventions , metalinguistic commentary, and the various kinds of signs explicitly employed in these written incantations' performance: " speech " (tħan); " written character " (uoh); and " icon " (uayasba).
Ritual Effigies and Corporeality in Kaqchikel Maya Soul Healing
To treat some cases of soul-loss, Kaqchikel Mayas use ritual effigies of the sufferer. These effigies, called k'al k'u'x, are made by wrapping the sufferer's clothing around a wooden armature. For the effigy to be a viable ritual surrogate, the ritualist must douse it with water, heat it, and strike it during a soul-calling ceremony. This handling instantiates corporeality in the effigy by kindling normative body states in it, states that must be stimulated in the sufferer's own body for it to spiritually reintegrate. Such Maya ritual substitution practices are how Kaqchikels deploy ritual surrogation processes that hinge on both an understanding of the body and knowledge of the sacred landscape. This article explores the settings and applications of ritual surrogation, which is a recurrent feature of Maya healing. (Kaqchikel Mayas, ritual effigies, corporeality, surrogation)
"The Great Speech of the Mopan Maya cannot be simulated, for fear of supernatural consequences. Above all, sexual partners may not engage in it. On one occasion, however, a Mopan husband and wife did agree to demonstrate this genre to me. They were well aware that what they were doing was highly taboo, as their use of containment strategies makes clear. I propose from examining the details of this example that utterances which are immune to hedging by explicit quotation may nevertheless be mitigable by indexical double-voicing, because indexical double-voicing inverts the process by which taboo is produced. Indexical signs, with their necessary relation of form to content, are mobilized in taboo and ritual speech as semiotic icons of the desired necessary relations between proximate form and primary, authoritative motivation. Such an iconic function is unavailable to arbitrary symbols, whose sign relations are instead icons of contingency. Key words: Maya, respect, compadrazgo, taboo, arbitrary, indexical, double-voicing"
Dialogic and ritual language resources in a colonial Mayan text to heal smallpox
Arts & Humanities Open Access Journal, 2020
This essay describes language practices in a 16th Century colonial Yucatecan Mayan text to cure smallpox, included in the Ritual de los Bacabes (Bacabes Ritual) by Joan Canul. The textual characterization involves the dialogical nature of the spell, performed in the different roles assumed by the healer or magician priest when interacting with his interlocutors, mainly, the deities and spirits related to the creation and healing of smallpox, and the bacabes, who hold the sky. The analysis includes multiple meanings in symbolic and contextual perspectives. The Mayan ritual exhibits evidence of oral tradition and reading practices from ancient codex texts. Language ritual resources include lexical, semantic, discursive, and stylistic manifestations to achieve certain communicative intentionality. In these ritual documents, it is possible to appreciate the transmission of spoken tradition to the alphabetic written texts in practices involved to cure a variety of physical and emotional illnesses in the colonial Mayan culture.
Repetition, Parallelism and Creativity Showcases (REPACS), 2023
https://repac.at/research/repacshowcases-magic/#purificationthroughwordanddeed -------- Rinderer, M., 2023, “Purification Through Word and Deed: Phonological Repetition and Analogical Thinking in Two Maqlû Incantations, Version 01,” Project REPAC (ERC Grant no. 803060), 2019-2024, at https://doi.org/10.25365/phaidra.385 (accessed day/month/year). -------- Two incantations at the beginning of the Babylonian anti-witchcraft series Maqlû reveal, upon textual analysis, a thick web of associations on the phonological level with the magical objective of this part of the ritual, i.e., the purification of the patient. In this showcase, I will discuss these associations and their implications for our understanding of Ancient Mesopotamian magic.
Once More with Feeling: A Forbidden Performance of the'Great Speech'of the Mopan Maya
Anthropological Quarterly, 2011
The Great Speech of the Mopan Maya cannot be simulated, for fear of supernatural consequences. Above all, sexual partners may not engage in it. On one occasion, however, a Mopan husband and wife did agree to demonstrate this genre to me. They were well aware that what they were doing was highly taboo, as their use of containment strategies makes clear. I propose from this example that utterances which are immune to hedging by explicit quotation may nevertheless be mitigable by indexical double-voicing, because indexical double-voicing inverts the process by which taboo is produced. Indexical signs, with their necessary relation of form to content, are mobilized in taboo and ritual speech as semiotic icons of the desired necessary relations between proximate form and primary, authoritative motivation. Such an iconic function is unavailable to arbitrary symbols, whose sign relations are instead icons of contingency. [