Narrative gestures, geographical, and mental maps in Copalillo Guerrero Nahuatl

[Frye, David]

Interesting! I lived for a few years (early 1980s) in a village in San Luis Potosi, Mexquitic, that was founded in 1591 by people from Tlaxcala, and I remember noticing after a while that almost everybody had a habit of pointing in different directions while they told stories. These weren't myths or legends, but stories about themselves and their families and their travels, mainly in search of work but also for religious pilgrimages etc, through Mexico and the US. Eventually -- after I had oriented myself -- I realized that they were not pointing at random, but in fact pointing quite accurately in the actual direction of the places they were talking about (California, Yuma Arizona, Dallas, Chicago, Saginaw Michigan, Monterrey, Mexico City, as well as nearby towns, cities, and shrines).

There are two aspects to this gestural habit (or whatever you call it) that I find fascinating: 1) that they found direction important enough to indicate it with hand gestures (which were so casual that they looked almost unconscious, not that they were of course); and 2) that the speakers were so well-oriented themselves that to my knowledge they never erred in pointing, seemingly to the exact degree, at the place they were mentioning. My guess is that these two are linked, i.e. that if direction is important to you, you are more likely to be attuned to it and more likely to keep your orientation, even inside a stranger's house.

I wonder if others have noticed this.. cultural habit, or what might one call it?.. in other parts of Mexico and environs? It certainly is not universal. In earlier fieldwork that I participated in rather lacksadaisically in a tiny village in Leon, northern Spain, back in the 1970s (how young we once were!), I noticed that almost anyone could tell the time to within a half-hour by looking at the position of the sun and shadows, and for that matter they had two words for "hill", one referring to the side that faced the sun (solana) and the other to the side that remained in shade (abesedo, a word you won't find in the dictionary), but few of them had much of a sense of direction. In Mexquitic, quite the opposite: most people told time only to the nearest half-day (buenos dias vs buenas tardes -- do I exaggerate? not much...), but everyone had an exquisite, and expressive, sense of direction.

-David


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From: nahuatl-bounces at lists.famsi.org [nahuatl-bounces at lists.famsi.org] On Behalf Of Mr. Tezozomoc [tezozomoc at hotmail.com]
Sent: Thursday, September 03, 2009 2:38 PM
To: Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org
Subject: [Nahuat-l] Narrative gestures, geographical, and mental maps in Copalillo Guerrero Nahuatl

ABSTRACT:
A review of the current Nahuatl literature contains no work in the area of Nahuatl speakers and their gestures. This paper presents one case study of Nahuatl speakers from Copalillo, Guerrero (CG). The narrative is the retelling of a CG myth entitled, “El Primer Mexico”. While currently living in California, the speakers were able to reconstruct through gestures a narrative space. They imposed their local geography on to the narrative space. Furthermore, the mythic aspects of the story that were not from the real world were laminated upon the same narrative space. This study finds evidence that CG Nahuatl speakers feel compelled to make narrative space an accurate reflection of geographical space. At the same time they intregate mythic aspects into the narrative space. Referents are clearly laid out and repeated and accurate references are made upon the narrative space.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/19115934/Narrative-gestures-geographical-and-mental-maps-in-Copalillo-Guerrero-Nahuatl



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