Link to the original piece: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/21/world/americas/21witch.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
Let me know if you think I'm overreacting...
On August 1st, a few days before I returned to the U.S., my co-father and his brother bundled up and headed to the cumbre [mountain top] to perform a misa/mesa [offering] to the Pachamama [mother earth], because she's especially hungry in August; her mouth is open. I met two dear friends for lunch that day -- one of them a dirigente [union leader] for The National Federation of Indigenous and Peasant Women "Bartolina Sisa." Her first question: have you done your Misa/Mesa yet?
Later that night I met friends Cleo, Ely and Anali (Ely’s daughter) to do a Misa/Mesa: pijchar coca (chew coca leaves), ch’allar (offer libations), reflect on our antepasados [ancestors], talk about the various challenges we are facing in our lives, and burn the mix of herbs, purple, yellow and orange–dyed wool, and sweets molded into the shape of animals that represent wisdom and life journeys (our mesa did not include llama fat or a llama fetus as they sometimes do). It was a time to reflect on the year, our shared and individual struggles, and to offer gratitude to Pachamama and the achachilas, awichas, and antepasados in our lives.
I’ve participated in mesas/misas aimed at reconciling Catholic, evangelical and Aymara members of the UMAVIDA network I used to facilitate, and at other ecumenical gatherings; mesas with a group of Aymara women who have organized a cooperative for fair trade export; and I’ve watched friends consult yatiris (wise healer, practitioner of traditional medicine) and do mesas/misas at the Boca del Sapo (mouth of the toad) at Lake Titikaka.
Now the August mesas/misas are getting coverage in the New York Times. But while I’m always glad to see Bolivia getting news coverage, I also worry about what that coverage conveys. For example, I’m not happy with journalist Simon Romero’s emphasis on “luck” in this article. It reduces the mesas to a kind of Bolivian rabbit’s-foot and diminishes the extent to which such community and familial rituals are deeply ingrained in people’s everyday lives and ways of thinking about human and non-human relationships, as well as the social and political critiques that are often implicit in the practice. The article exoticizes the mesa (Llama fetuses! Witches’ market! Oooo!), rather than illuminating the meaning of those practices and the roles they play in peoples’ lives.
While the August and other mesas/misas are important and widespread practices, I’m always a little anxious about what stories like this one do, what kind of representational patterns they perpetuate. In their accounts of conflict in Bolivia, North American policy makers and political commentators frequently fall back on categories like modernity (reason) and pre-modernity (irrationality/emotionality/religion). They have not seen indigenous protests as the stuff of rational actors reflecting on policies they find inimical to their personal or national interests. Instead, indigenous protesters are infantilized and portrayed as hyper-emotional, irrational. On the other hand, Bolivians working to forge alliances with larger social and environmental movements outside of the country have been romanticized, exoticized and spiritualized in ways that may inadvertently reinforce that same rational/irrational divide. The American news media has tended to depict Bolivia’s indigenous and peasant protests as “an expression of mindless passion ” rather than hearing and taking seriously protests as rational and legitimate critiques of unjust policies. One of my professors at Harvard Divinity School, anthropologist Michael Jackson argues
"not only against the false dichotomy of reason and unreason, but the way these terms have been used to distinguish between two different kinds of society, and two classes of humanity, conventionally labeled civilized and savage, or modern and pre-modern. This language game, in which reason is assigned to oneself and unreason to the other (though we are careful now days to euphemize unreason as cosmology, myth, religion, folklore, cultural values, traditionalism, fundamentalism or spirituality) is a strategy for denying coevalness and, when applied to entire societies, has no empirical justification. All human beings think and act rationally and irrationally, depending on circumstance, and to consider oneself intrinsically or wholly reasonable is itself a form of irrationalism" (Jackson, 372-373)
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