A World of Cures: Magic and Medicine in Colonial Yucatán

The Yucatán, sixteenth-century Spaniards declared, was tierra enferma (infirmed land) as the destruction of diseases regularly consumed the region. Spaniards, Mayas, Africans, and people of mixed ancestry all fell victim to the cycles of disaster. The shared experiences of disease provided a context for deep lived connections for all. This dissertation examines the beliefs, practices, and relationships related to sickness and healing in the Yucatán from the late-sixteenth century to the late-eighteenth century. At the core of this project are questions about the production and circulation of medical knowledge. How, for instance, did ideas of the natural and supernatural world migrate between supposedly distinct social groups? Why did magical remedies related to the social body whither while unorthodox practices related to the physical body thrive? And how did healing breakdown colonial barriers of ethnicity and status? By exploring matters related to the body, sickness, and healing, this project unveils the complex everyday interactions of a society constantly threatened by disaster. The practices of healing represented the everyday modes of cooperation that operated in direct contrast to the idealized structures of colonial life. Dealing with the intimate relations of healing positions, this work bridges the distinct sub disciplines of cultural and intellectual history. Revealed here are the fundamental limitations of socially-constructed notions of distinction and authority, such as colonial visions of calidad (color), clase (class), and costumbre (culture). The interwoven ideas of status, race, and culture reinforced colonial divisions that tied directly into institutions of exploitation, such as the systems of slavery, tribute, and religious instruction. Nevertheless, my analysis illustrates that on the day-to-day level inhabitants of the Yucatán frequently drew deep connections that cut across idealized divides. Instead of being separated by race, they were united in healing the ills of the colonial experience. And in this manner, the people of the Yucatán created a system of healing that empowered the subjugated, particularly the enslaved and colonized. As such, this project moves from a basic assumption of the commonality of disease to explore the social and intellectual ties of everyday experience in the early-modern Spanish Atlantic World.Release after 08-Aug-201

Northern Lacandon Maya Medicinal Plant Use in the Communities of Lacanja Chan Sayab and Nahá Chiapas, Mexico

The Lacandon Maya are rainforest farmers who inhabit the tropical jungles of southern Mexico and Guatemala. They number approximately 700 individuals and practice a traditional system of agriculture that incorporates introduced plants and the native flora of their environment. In this essay, we discuss a largely neglected aspect of Lacandon ethnomedicine. Our results include 47 medicinal plants used by the several Northern Lacandon living in the communities of Naha’ and Lacanja Chan Sayab. The plants are cultivated in three zones (house gardens, milpas, and secondary milpas) and wild plants are collected from the jungle. This method of healing exists amid numerous alternatives and intense pressure to use Western medicine. Nevertheless, many Lacandon Maya continue to practice healing with cultivated and wild plants. In this context, Lacandon ethnomedicine represents a dynamic aspect of their culture and serves to challenge an academic model that regularly essentializes their society and predicts their imminent destruction

The history of Atlantic science : collective reflections from the 2009 Harvard seminar on Atlantic history

For the purposes of this review essay, which seeks to capture the spirit of those early conversations in Cambridge, we propose calling the assemblages and interactions of the peoples, objects, institutions, and techniques that resulted in and from colonization during the early modern period ‘‘Atlantic science.’’ We recognize, of course, that not all colonization was bounded by an Atlantic frame. However, in terms of timing, scale, and scope, no other cluster of imperial enterprises can be compared with the conquest and colonization of the Americas in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. What made colonization in the Atlantic unique was that it involved the voluntary migration of more than two million Europeans, the forced migration of more than ten million Africans, the creation of a vast network of interconnected centers, and the political incorporation ofmuch of the hemisphere into the Western world, all between 1500 and 1825. Nothing of this scale has happened anywhere else in the early modern period. The Atlantic Ocean, rather than Europe, became the center of that world. And so, we see the Atlantic world as an outcome of this colonizing process