If you read one book this year on the much-covered but rarely path-breaking issues of space and place studies, make it Paul Liffman’s Huichol Territory and the Mexican Nation. Having read in this multi-discipline sub-field (Native Studies, Religious Studies, Anthropology, Folklore, and Cultural Geography) for a couple decades now, I have difficulty imagining a book more inclusive of all those previous works, and one that also develops an original claim grounded in a particular indigenous history. Liffman excels because he consistently frames the oceanic range of issues in space/place debates within Wixarika/Huichol perspectives. To cut to the chase, Liffman thinks and writes brilliantly, setting a new bar for critically understanding how one indigenous community strategically navigates colonial governmentality to maintain control of its homeland. These issues are of paramount concern across the globe, and Liffman’s book is a scholarly model deserving wide attention.
Liffman’s first chapter surveys theoretical treatments of space, maintaining a through-line about territorialization as it looks on the ground for the Wixarika within both state and nation frameworks. Liffman moves from this theoretical outset to describing how tribal members understand their landscape. Accordingly, these cultural geographies quickly become ontological because you cannot discuss Wixarika geography without discussing Wixarika ancestors. But in the skilled hands of Liffman, this second chapter also includes a precise treatment of land tenure, nationalism, and indigenismo in Mexico. One might feel in these sections that he moves too fast, except that, as the next few chapters unfold, his more central argument emerges, necessitating less detail about Mexican history.
I slowly recognized that Liffman is selectively careful, paying attention to minute details of language, ritual, and material culture. He shows us the intentional use of particular words in the Huichol’s discourse, the directionality and strategic orientations of their sacrificial performances, and the ways community members manipulate symbols of Mexican nationalism in relation to their aboriginal religious practices. One example is rich and will return later in this review. Liffman sharpens his focus on folk terms throughout, and particularly on one phrase that suggests that the Huichol intentionally resist “sacred” as a category. Liffman discusses the fascinating Huichol use of lugar sangrado instead of the Spanish term, lugar sagrado. Rather than “sacred (sagrado) place,” Huichols sometimes say, “blood-soaked (sangrado) place.” Highlighting the ritual sacrifices that Liffman discusses thoroughly, this adding of the “n” uses the colonizers’ language to affirm the aboriginal maintenance of land through rituals that feed the ancestors (69). As Liffman shows elsewhere, the Wixarika are centrally concerned with nourishing, in multiple directions. The land is not sacred as ordained from above, but living and reciprocally nourishing as Huichols recognize. Here and elsewhere, Liffman insightfully traces how Wixarika strategically ground their identity.
Liffman proves (not just claims) how Huichol territorialization is not defined as a cartographic object but rather as active ceremonial articulations which effectively maintain reciprocal relations between the ancestors, the human and other earthly living beings, and the geography that constitutes their shared heritage. This research is a needed update to Hugh Brody’s work (1981) on embodied mapping in native contexts. And yet Huichol Territory is much more. In chapter 3 we learn how Wixarika religious leaders traditionalize historical experience through their chants and peyote dreams. Chapters 4 and 5 lay out the solid evidence for Liffman’s conjoined claims: Wixarikas ritually connect domestic space, regional territory, and cosmic dimensionality. They also linguistically affirm and assert these connections in their social relations.
Liffman’s recognition of the omnipotence of the ancestral caretaking and consistency of the ritual, relational logic throughout Wixarika life is the fullest development of a worldview approach to ethnography. Liffman’s thesis is remarkable to sovereignty studies because such a worldview cannot but register as resistant to certain forms of nationalism and to the geographic and ideological affronts of colonialism. That Liffman then shows how such community knowledge is taught and learned (chapter 6), as well as contested in popular and cross-cultural media (chapter 7) further verifies that this study and this people are not locked in some mythistoric time of bows and arrows. Like a few works before his (Furst and Schaefer 1997; Schaefer 2002), Liffman’s provides a contemporary analysis of a native community that is overly and easily (thanks to Castaneda and others) misrepresented as mystical and pre-capitalistic.
I feel it is almost unreasonable to ask more from a book that already does so much and does so much so well. Another of the book’s successes, though, is that it opens doors for further research. For sure, Liffman creates work for the rest of us. One of the topics I found absolutely relevant to discuss is the connection between Wixarika territory and knowledge and the scholarly debates surrounding cultural and intellectual property. In chapter 6, Liffman begins to explore the frictions between local assertions of indigeneity and the politics of neoliberalism. This short section introduces a few of the arguments from the 1990s, but mostly serves as a transition to the next chapter. As in other parts of the book, this subsection does not feel completely integrated into the larger argument of the chapter. My sense is that the range of perspectives on intellectual property rights is too complex for such a rigorous scholar to treat well within this particular text.
I hem and haw over mentioning my problems with the text since I am deeply impressed with Liffman’s overall project. I do think, however, that Huichol studies have been lacking a critical recognition of the problematic ways that we interpret indigenous religiosity. When I first picked up Huichol Territory, I was hoping this work would diverge from some of the hermeneutically challenged ethnographic scholarship on the Wixarika, not to mention within indigenous studies broadly. Within the first few pages of this text, I was disappointed to see the uncritical use of “divine,” “supernatural,” “sacred,” and “symbolism.” Previous scholars, Barbara Meyerhoff (1976) and Schaefer (2002) for example, sometimes recognize the difference between these categories and actual Huichol understandings. While Myerhoff and Schaefer go some distance to stress the difficulty of translation, neither they nor Liffman offers us a metadiscursive analysis for using these interpretive terms.
But if my work in indigenous Mexico, and the works of Meyerhoff, Schaefer, and indeed that of Liffman himself, are correct, then much of Wixarika activity contradicts such interpretations. “Divine” implies ontological hierarchy, which would then necessitate subservience, worship, and placation; such hierarchical reasoning does not seem wholly evident in Huichol kinship solidarity. “Supernatural” implies a trichotomy of the world into natural, supernatural, and the cultural. Yet, Huichols do not reflect on their perceptions and behavior either as unnatural, cultural, or as supranatural. Using “sacred” implies that the world is dichotomized between the binary sacred/profane; but we are not given evidence here or elsewhere that Huichols conceive of the “profane,” or all objects as lifeless. One only needs to think of their use of “sangrado” rather than “sagrado.” And finally, “symbolism” means that things represent or signify something else. The Wixarika sometimes affirm just the opposite, that other-than-human persons have ontological status and therefore embody spatial reality, not represent it. The term “symbolism” needs care since language has ontological efficacy. Symbolism can distort the performative efficacy of ritual and the relational character of reality. Liffman does not see the contradiction: he affirms Huichol intersubjectivity, yet he uses objectifying terms such as “symbols” and the categorical notion of symbolism.
These cosmological and terminological doubts aside, Liffman’s larger study details how a historically subjugated people control space over time within a larger national context. According to Liffman, this control is really an aversion to chaos achieved by ritual leaders’ work maintaining reciprocity with their ancestors. Achieving relational intimacy, as Liffman shows, is a “subaltern, practice-based, place-centered version of territorialization” (12). Making these claims is one thing; but this book follows through. Liffman’s analysis is not light on tribal history or ethnographic detail. His argument is quite complex. Keep this in mind before adopting for classroom use: undoubtedly an incredible choice for graduate courses, though best excerpted for undergraduates.
Connecting the dots across the chapters, the reader is rewarded with the most rigorous treatment of indigenous place-making available. Huichol Territory and the Mexican Nation demonstrates the difficult work of understanding cultural maintenance within colonial contexts without losing sight of cosmic, visceral, political, and intellectual effects of the labor. This is a uniquely significant contribution, without peer in its comprehensiveness and attention to the complex details of contemporary Huichol life.
WORKS CITED
Brody, Hugh. 1997. Maps and Dreams: Indians and the British Columbia Frontier. Long Grove, Illinois: Waveland Press.
Furst, Peter, and Stacy B. Schaefer, eds. 1997. People of the Peyote: Huichol Indian History, Religion, and Survival. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
Meyerhoff, Barbara G. 1976. The Peyote Hunt: The Sacred Journey of the Huichol Indians. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Schaefer, Stacy B. 2002. To Think with a Good Heart: Wixarika Women, Weavers, and Shamans. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press.
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[Review length: 1489 words • Review posted on September 14, 2011]