Experience and Myth in a Colombian Chocó Case of Attempted Murder

Abstract

This essay presents a dramatic instance of the push and pull that may occur between discourses of experience lived and experience as prefigured in myth. The structural homologies between this personal history and this myth invite attention to the relation between these discursive forms. The relation is a contestative one. My interest in it stems from a more general concern with how it might come about that patriarchal myth, as a mode of interpreting, representing, and constructing experience, continues to have a certain cachet among men and women in society despite personal histories that contradict mythic illusions. This interest led me to question whether or not folklorists and ethnographers, carrying patriarchal presumptions with them, have perhaps been overemphasizing the importance of patriarchal myths as scripts-for-living in the indigenous societies they study. I label the Emberá Indian myth in question here as patriarchal because it presents only male kin as active agents and women as passive, protected objects of exchange. This is consistent with gender asymmetries that pervade the Emberá mythic corpus, and indeed, the larger corpus of South American myth with which it shares many affinities