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The Person, Destiny, and the Construction of Difference in Mesoamerica Author(s): John Monaghan Source: RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, No. 33, Pre-Columbian States of Being (Spring, 1998),

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The person, destiny, and the construction of difference in Mesoamerica

JOHN MONAGHAN

Introduction

In many Maya languages the word for person is vinik, the same term used for the number twenty. A link

between the two is sometimes said to have to do with

normal humans having ten fingers and ten toes. This is

interesting because it assumes that Maya definitions of

personhood would be based on what characteristics humans share with one another. Combined with a listing of characteristics that separate humans from other

creatures, this is the assumption that traditionally informs our own definitions of humanity and

personhood. The Maya (like primatologists), however, have been more cautious in drawing distinctions

between humans and animals?judging by the kinds of creatures to which the term vinik could be applied. In a

late-sixteenth-century TzotziI dictionary from Zinacant?n we read the following gloss under person: A cualquier animal llamaran vinik, y as? lo llaman muchas veces

pero comunmente cuando dicen vinik entienden hombre ("They may call any animal vinik, and they often do so, but usually when they say wn/A:they are

understood to mean man" [Laughlin 1988:733]). The

meaning of vinik does not seem to be based on anything that is unique to humans.

The categorization of animals and humans together as

vinik (which the anonymous Spanish author of the Tzotzi I dictionary seemed to want to explain away) suggests that in this respect, Mayan ideologies of

personhood do not begin where ours in the West usually do.1 And if Mayan conceptions of personhood do not

encode an absolute distinction between humans and

animals, then perhaps the other assumptions our notions of personhood traditionally begin with?that it arises out of shared capacities and rights?is not as salient for the

Maya as might be expected. This paper examines the

association of personhood with the number twenty not

just in terms of what characteristics people share with

one another, but also in terms of what it is that makes

people different from one another. Specifically, it

explores the idea that personhood in Mesoamerica is

defined by the possession of a destiny, which one has by virtue of being born at a particular moment in time.

Destiny

Twenty is a significant number in Mesoamerica. The

twenty named days form the basis of both the 260-day calendar (where they are marked by the numbers one to

thirteen) and the solar calendar of eighteen months, with five special days at the end. In the pre-Hispanic and

early colonial periods, people were named for the day they were born. Because the Spanish had great faith in

astrology and because it was obviously something of

importance to the people they conquered, we have

detailed descriptions of Mesoamerican calendars and the practices associated with them by both indigenous and European authors.

These sources indicate that in addition to one's name, one acquired on one's day of birth something called vach (in Kaqchikel), pixan (in Poqomam), or tonalli (in

N?huatl). The Spanish often translated phenomena like the Kaqchikel vach as dicha, suerte, hado, fortuna, or

estrella. An example of what they meant by this is

contained in Cobarruvias's seventeenth-century dictionary, where he glosses hado as "the will of god

. . .

what is determined beforehand ... the occurrences in one's life. . . . One can have good or bad luck ... it cannot be avoided" (Cobarruvias 1977:470, 605, 674, 947, 1000). In other words, hado is the notion that success in life is decreed from outside the individual by a superior force and that one is relatively powerless to

change it. The Spanish chose to label vach in this way, since, like an astrological reading, it was something that could be determined through calendrical calculations. For example, Duran tells us that the sign X?chitl, or

"Flower," is associated with the arts and those born under it would be painters, weavers, sculptors, or wood carvers. Flower people would also be diligent, neat, and

hardworking (Duran 1977:403-404). One's destiny thus would encompass not only one's general fortune in life but also things like one's profession and character.

1. In addition to living humans and animals, vinik could also be

used for un ?dolo que antiguamente hac?an de las cenizas de sus

caciques o gobernadores, or "an idol that they used to make of the

ashes of their caciques or gobernadores" (Coto 1983:249, see also

289), suggesting that in at least some cases, the dead could continue

to enjoy the status of personhood.



138 RES 33 SPRING 1998

It is often the case that the Mesoamerican word

translated as destiny is morphologically linked to the

word for sun and heat. The sun, of course, marks time

by its movement, and in almost all Mesoamerican

languages, the word for sun and time are the same (for

example, La Farge and Byers 1931:327). (In one Mixtee

community in the Mixteca Baja, where the indigenous term for sun has been lost and replaced by a Spanish term, it is not called sol, but ora). In colonial Kaqchikel,

X/z, the word for day, was also the word for sun and in

an anonymous eighteenth-century dictionary was

translated as "The name of the saint that one takes when

one is baptized" (Vocabulario de la lengua cakchiquel). To bring this full circle, in Mixe, the word xaa embraces

day, fiesta, sun, and name (Schoenhals and Schoenhals

1965:135), and in Mixtee, one's kivi, or "day," is one's

destiny (Monaghan 1995:198-199). It is also well known that the sun defines spatial

orientations for Mesoamerican people, so that "cardinal"

directions usually describe either solar positions or refer

to the ideal orientation of the body as the sun moves

across the sky. It is this orientation that provides the

basic framework for processions, the model for house

constructions, the schema for placing bodies in the

grave, and many other things. As this perhaps suggests,

space and time are closely integrated in Mesoamerican

cosmologies. Gary Gossen discovered that the people of

Chamula identified their town as the center of the

world, since the sun's position at noontime is directly overhead. He also found that Chamulas believed

Massachusetts to be so far away that it is no longer in

the present era of creation, existing rather in a primitive state when the world was populated by monkeys (Gossen 1974:29).

The connection between social intercourse and

conventional definitions of space and time has been a

recurring theme in Western social theory. To select an

example from anthropology, Irving Hallowell, in a series

of papers beginning in 1937, suggested that self

awareness and intelligible action are predicated upon a

shared orientation toward space and time. He argued that it was through a reflexively and culturally constituted spatiotemporal orientation that a self was

given a location in physical and social space, as well as

a past and a future. Without this continuity and stability, it would be impossible for interpersonal relations to be

maintained, since no one would be morally responsible. Hallowell also noted that an inability to abide by

temporal conventions is a key diagnostic of psychosis (Hallowell 1955:92, 95, 100, 218).

It is clear that in Mesoamerican conceptions, destiny is what links the self to the prevailing "spatio-temporal

orientation," to use Hallowell's term. This can be seen in

two ways. First, in calendrically based curing sessions, the cure typically takes place through a determination of

the patient's destiny. It then proceeds, in part, by

aligning the patient's body with directions defined by the

sun's movement; steps in the cure are taken in

conjunction with significant points in the sun's daily

journey?at noon, midnight, daybreak, or nightfall. In

addition, destiny provides an interpretive framework for

the past and future of particular persons. It explains why one has been lucky or unlucky, why one holds a certain

position in society, and why someone acts the way they do. It provides a self with continuity and stability. Second, it is clear that destiny organizes a large number

of life states into an overall pattern. The sun's movement

generates individual human destinies and in their

aggregate, the human order. As we saw with the examples

provided from Duran, human destinies produce the

personnel needed to fill the essential positions: artisans,

warriors, leaders, scholars, and so on. It is also available

to others, in the form of names and birth dates.

In labeling Mesoamerican notions such as the

Kaqchikel vach, Poqomam pixan, and N?huatl tonal I i as

hado, or "destiny," or viewing them in terms of a

spatiotemporal orientation imposed on individual selves,

ambiguities emerge, however. For example, pixan, the

word translated as dicha or fortuna by Zu?iga in his

Poqomam dictionary (1610:453), is translated by others

as alma, or "soul." Likewise, the N?huatl word tonal is

translated variously as alma and suerte, and it is labeled

"the heat soul" in some modern ethnography (for

example, Sandstrom 1991). Recall that for the Spanish, destiny is a fate caused

by circumstances or forces beyond one's control. As in

the case of Oedipus, one's "character is largely irrelevant to one's misfortunes, which are decreed by

fate irrespective of one's desires" (Morris 1972:4). But as

the translations of pixan and tonalli as "soul" suggest, for Mesoamericans, destiny is not only a fate due to

circumstance, but a primary component of one's

identity. This is by no means something confined to the

ancient past. As Kearney tells us, Ixtepeji destiny

encompasses personal and moral characteristics: "why some are better in school than others, why some are rich



Monaghan: The person, destiny, and the construction of difference 139

and poor, why some have special knowledge" (Kearney 1972:92-93). Or as one of my Mixtee friends rather

pessimistically put it: "there is one day that the lazy man

is born, there is one day that the thief is born, there is

one day that the assassin is born" (Monaghan 1995:199). In some traditions, destiny encompasses

physical characteristics, so that those born on a certain

day might have pretty skin (Crain and l^eindorp 1979:23). Since people were named for\the day they

were born on (a practice that corrjjfiues i(vith saint's

names) they in effect referred to one another by their

destinies. We can appreciate how much a part of the

Aztec self destiny was felt to be in the care they took to

conceal their full calendar names by dropping the

numerical coefficient, so as not to reveal too much

about themselves (F?rst 1995:81). In addition to being a part of one's makeup, very

much internal, like a soul, the idea that a destiny of

circumstance "is unalterably predetermined,"2 does not

accurately capture the Kaqchikel vach or N?huatl

tonal I i. Rather the vach or tonal I i seems to be more like

a general property or orientation. While it is bestowed at

birth, the sources are clear that for a particular destiny to

be realized, it must be cultivated. Bruce mentions, for

example, that the Lacandon feel a good destiny can be

lost through negligence or carelessness, while a bad one

can be avoided through penance, sacrifice, and

diligence (Bruce 1975:27-28). There are of course limits

(Kearney 1972:92), but just as destiny is not something external to the self, it is also not something that is

inevitably fixed. The internal quality of destiny, coupled with its being

an aptitude or potential of the person, make it seem

more like a theory of personality than the spatiotemporal orientation imposed by convention that Hallowell spoke of. But is personality any better? Personality did not

become a recognized topic in psychology until the

1930s, when it began to replace the German term

charackter (there were also a number of competing terms, such as personology). Partly because personality theories start with untestable assumptions about the

basic nature of human beings, the term ends up being used in ways that reflect the ontology the analyst begins

with. However, most theories of personality concern

themselves with elements of behavior that convey

individuality and attempt to account for behavior by

reference to forces emanating from within the person, rather than external factors or situations. They also

identify causes for individual differences in personality (for example, early childhood experiences) and are

designed to suggest therapy or explain why certain

people are more disturbed than others.

Within this general framework, there are two distinct

approaches to personality. In one, personality is defined as an aggregate of traits. Although it is recognized that

the configuration of traits gives uniqueness to the

individual person, this is of less interest than the

rigorous definition of particular traits. In the other set of

theories personality is defined as an interplay between

wishes and fears or the dominance of a particular drive, such as sexuality.

Returning to the Mesoamerican data, destiny appears similar to a typological theory of personality: it identifies

significant traits that distinguish persons from one

another, are internal (that is, soul-like), and often

function within a clinical context. It is not without reason Jill F?rst called One Rabbit people "a kind of

compulsive prehispanic type 'A' personality" (1995:79). One can parenthetically add that the Mesoamerican

theory of destiny, with its twenty basic types and

thirteen permutations on each type, recognizes more

complexity than the typological theories generated by modern psychologists.

While the view that destiny constitutes a

Mesoamerican theory of personality can be productive, we are left with the fact that destiny is not wholly

internal; recall that it is fixed by one's day of birth, and that it does endow one with fairly specific social

functions and physical skills. So just what is destiny? This question shows how difficult it can be to deal with some of the subtler kinds of variability one sees in

conceptions of personhood. In the case of

Mesoamerican notions of destiny, as Jeffrey Quilter

suggests more generally, the problem we have is that we

want to view it in terms of familiar dualisms?in this

instance the external (destiny or spatiotemporal orientation) versus the internal (soul or personality). A

conception such as destiny however crosscuts such

divisions. Perhaps the Kaqchikel word for destiny, vach, which also means "face," would be the best translation,

conveying as it does that destiny, in both its conception and experience, is at the same time part of the body and

subject to an outside power?the internal and external

complexly intersecting. 2. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. "destiny."




Vinik and destiny

Translation problems to one side, the preceding discussion shows that for Mesoamerican people, destiny is an essential condition of being in the world. Let us

return now to the Maya word vinik and examine the gloss

given to it by Father Varea in his Kaqchikel dictionary:

. . . this means many things, which I will treat further on, but it does not mean person

. . . there is no word in this

language to say "my person" or "your person" nor do they say nuvinakil (nu being the pronoun) in order to say my person, but to say the people of my nation or chinimital. . .

one cannot use what does not exist, so we must introduce

the word person (persona) in order to speak of the Holy Trinity. Varea 1699:326

Varea tells us that early translators, who had used the

term vinik to refer to the three distinct persons who

make up the one god, were not accurately translating the gospel. So instead of asserting that there are three

persons in one god, the evangelist would be telling the

Maya there are three peoples in one god. In a later

work, Thom?s Coto summarized the debate surrounding the use of vinik (Coto 1983:413-424). Although he finds

linguistic support for using it to refer to single persons (for example, huna vinak, or "one person"), what seems

to be salient even here is class membership rather than

individuality (what Varea was looking for).

Following this, we could say the Spanish difficulty with vinik (and destiny) rests in the tendency to see

selves as autonomous embodiments of humanity as a

whole. Remember that men such as Varea were trying to

convey Christian concepts based on personal

responsibility in social and spiritual matters. As part of

this effort they tried to identify analogous concepts in

Mesoamerican culture. There was enough debate about

vinik to make one think, along with Varea, that it was a

poor choice and that a developed ideology of the

individual did not inform Maya ideas of personhood (it would in fact be more noteworthy if it did).

This brings us back to the interpretation that vinik?

twenty?is used for person because people have ten

fingers and ten toes. A better argument could be that

since vinik is primarily about class membership, at least

in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the

association has to do with the range of human destinies.

As one counts through the twenty day signs, one counts

through all possible social identities, all possible

physical combinations, all possible temperaments, and a

full range of lucky and unlucky personal contingencies.

While some might say that the most salient aspect of our

humanity is our capacity for rational thought, in

Mesoamerica, it appears to be the possession of a

destiny, which makes humanity, in this tradition, not so

much rational as "twenty." In contrast to individualistic ideologies that represent

persons as autonomous and society as generated by their free association, the vinik conception encodes an

ideology where the self is only a partial expression of

humanity and where the social order is, at least as far as

its members go, autonomous and unconditional: the

positions and obligations people have in it are as

inexorably imposed as the sun's rising each day at dawn.

One implication of this reading of the vinik conception is that personhood is relational. To put this another way,

personhood is not something that is a necessary

property of the individual human being, but is a status

that inheres in a collectivity. This helps to place into

context the great emphasis we see in Mesoamerican

societies on the maintenance of corporate rights and the

equally strong emphasis on collective versus individual

forms of worship. One can also see the functional role

such a conception of personhood might play in ancient

Mesoamerican states, where calendars were used to

order socioeconomic activity as well as name people and cure illness. Indeed, rather than view these

calendars as divinatory devices, it might be closer to the mark to view them as social charters.

Calendars and the five numberless days

Mesoamerican solar calendars typically divided the

year into eighteen months of twenty days each, with five

special days at the end called neomini in N?huatl.

During this time any number of potentially catastrophic events were likely to occur, including the death of the

sun and the end of time. Motolinia characterizes these

five days as ''sin a?o" (Motolinia 1914:29), a kind of

time out of time. In Santiago Chimaltenago, the divining beans, cast by priest shamans in conjunction with the

260-day calendar, could not be used during this time

(Wagley 1949:111). As this suggests, the normal practice of naming people after calendar days was suspended; in

Chenalho the five days are called "nameless" (Bricker

1973:10). Sahag?n tells us that a woman born during this day was called Nenchiuatl, while a man was called

Nenoquich (Sahag?n 1977:132), the root of which,

according to Molina, is "something that is done in vain, without return, not having any destiny or luck, to work




in vain" (Molina 1970:69). Likewise, in the Highland

Maya area, Father Varea says that the person born during this time is not named (1699:206).

There were grave consequences for those who were

not named. As Sahag?n tells us:

And if one were then born, there was great fear of it. . . .

Nowhere was he counted, nowhere did he belong. ... He

was a profitless

man. . . . Indeed nothing was his day sign

(?tonal); indeed nothing was his name. Therefore no one

might practice medicine, heal one, (read the day signs) for one. For in truth (the days) were not counted; nothing was

their number in all these four days. Sahag?n 1981:171-172

This lack of a name, an identity?in short, a destiny?can be seen in other areas during the five days at the end of

the year. Varea reports that the Kaqchikel felt that those

born during this period "do not grow, always remaining small" (Varea 1699). Lincoln, working among the Ixil in

the 1930s, observed that the five days (o'ki) were a time

of fasting and sacrifice. Boys born then would "be like

girls" and all children whose birthdays were one of the

o'ki would grow to be impotent, sterile, and without

molars (Lincoln 1945:118).3 It is as if they are empty, "useless" according to Molina. Uncertain and incomplete entities, those born during the five days at the end of the

year, were not confirmed in personhood. There was no

social role or status for them, they were ambiguous,

having no friends or kin. While a particular destiny could

leave one with an undesirable fate and place in society, it

did allow a fate and place. Those who lacked a destiny were asocial, amoral and, in conformity with the notion

that destiny is corporeal as well as being an outside

force, even seemed to lack a defined physical form, as if

they had no bodily stability or integrity. This evidence is significant because it suggests that the

development of a destiny was not regarded as an

inevitable or necessary condition of human life. While we

would not hold that an otherwise healthy individual lacks a personality, in Mesoamerica, it could be held that some

lacked a destiny. Those who were born on the five days at

the end of the year?not so much unlucky as "out of time"

and "without number"?would be devoid of character, social relations, moral status, without a coherent physical form, and would have no recourse to clinical intervention.

Such images of socially amorphous and shapeless persons

3. These may be normative statements, since births during the five

days at the end of the year could have been subject to the same kind

of manipulation one sees for those born on days with undesirable

destinies.

furthermore imply that differences between people are

nonessential. Unlike personality theory or ideologies of the

individual then, which take uniqueness as a given, the

Mesoamerican theory of destiny seems in part designed to

address the proposition that human beings are innately

homogeneous. In other words, the calendars, almanacs, and other so-called divinatory devices that make up such a

large proportion of the native Mesoamerican texts that

have come down to us positively assert difference in the

face of sameness?not unlike the way the U.S. constitution

positively asserts universal rights in the face of obvious

differences in ethnicity, class, age, gender, and so on. As

demonstrated by what could happen during the five empty

days at the end of the year, the alternative is a potentially sterile homogeneity.

It was pointed out earlier that in the Mixtee language, the word for destiny and the word for time are the same, kivk Yet to be more precise, the word kivi refers to a

period of time (a day) and not time in its most abstract

form (cu'va). More significantly, Mixtees in Santiago

Nuyoo define kivi as "our limit," giving the sense that it

makes what would otherwise be continuous, discrete.

Indeed, in the pantheistic cosmologies of Mesoamerica, the human soul, such as the Maya chulel, is regularly viewed as part of a universal life force that is

substantively, spatially, and temporally continuous

(Monaghan n.d.). What destiny seems to do is place

being in time, thereby giving it a manifest existence.

Extending the Kaqchikel expression, destiny is all about

giving being a face.

The coessence

This view of personhood as established through the

possession of a destiny affords a perspective on the

elusive concept of the coessence, considered an intimate

part of the self throughout native Mesoamerica even

though it is not physically attached to the body. Because

earlier observers did not recognize it as an aspect of self, a number of terms have been used to refer to the

phenomenon. Coessence, which appears to have been

coined by Ester Hermitte in her 1964 dissertation,4 is

preferable to nagual, tonal, spiritual alter ego, companion animal, destiny animal, personal totem, guardian spirit, or

4. Pitt-Rivers attributes the idea of "coessence" to Hubert and

Mauss, who in their 1902-1903 essay on magic distinguish between

the magician's auxiliary and his exterior soul. As they explained the

latter, "in form there are two beings, in essence they are one" (cited in

Pitt-Rivers 1970:204).




transforming animal. Nagual and tonal, originally

proposed by Foster (1944) in an attempt to distinguish between the coessence (what he called the tonal) and the

transforming witch (or nagual), ended up conflating several concepts and making distinctions where none

existed. Foster's choice of terms from the influential

N?huatl language also created difficulties, since they may be used in non-Nahuatl speaking areas in ways that do

not reflect the meaning he tried to give them (for discussion see Dow 1986:61-62; K?hler 1995:127-128;

Lipp 1991:42; Pitt-Rivers 1970:196). Companion animal

and destiny animal are weak because they suggest the

link is limited to animals. Humans may also be linked to

natural phenomena, such as lightning, comets, or rain, and even plants (for examples, see Kelly 1966:403; Cordero Avenda?o 1986:39, 40; Ichon 1973:178;

Greenberg 1981:101 ). The term spiritual alter ego and

personal totem, besides overtly referencing particular bodies of theory, are too human centered. Other things besides humans can have coessences, including the sun

(Greenberg 1981:93; K?hler 1995:139), lightning (Humberto Ruz 1982:59), the moon, rain, mountains,

even the Chatino village itself, which has as its coessence

the five sacred places where birth and marriage crosses

are placed (Greenberg 1981:93). Furthermore, the things that share a destiny may never interact, let alone serve as

spiritual protectors or guides (K?hler 1995:131) so the term guardian spirit is a poor choice. Also, the

relationship need not be a binary one, but can involve

multiple beings and phenomena (K?hler 1995:139-140).

Finally, transforming animal, with its suggestion of mere

appearance, borrows too heavily from European folk

traditions (K?hler 1995:136; Pitt-Rivers 1970:197, 199).5

Companion animal, evoking a relationship of association

rather than being, has the same shortcoming, even though it is based on a translation of a Mesoamerican term.

The term coessence is preferable to these others

because it highlights what seems to be in most areas the

central feature of the phenomenon: the coessential link

between what appear to be phenomenally distinct

entities, caused (usually) by their having been born at or

around the same time. One implication of this is that

one's coessence is usually linked to one's destiny, and

indeed, destiny and coessence are often the same term.6

Another important implication is that humans and their coessence may share a consciousness. This latter usually occurs during nighttime dreams, which are said to be

the experiences of one's coessence.7 In some cases, the

two may be linked by the sharing of a "soul" (for

example, Hermitte 1970:111; K?hler 1995:22; Lipp 1991:42; McGee 1990:111 ). Among the Jacaltec, the

animal that shares a destiny with a human being is even

called the soul-bearer of the person, since they share a

single pisan (Stratmeyer and Stratmeyer 1977:132-134). The possession of a coessence, like the possession of

a destiny, marks a special status. In the coastal Mixtee

town of Jamiltepec, persons are called uvi?a or uvira

after they acquire their coessence (Flanet 1977:111 ). Uvi

is a prefix meaning "two," while ?a means "woman," and ra means "man." Flanet follows the Mixtee and translates the terms

literally as "two-woman" and "two

man" (1977:111). It is true that when combined with

other numbers uvi- can function as a multiplier (so that

the word for forty is uvishiko, "two (times) twenty") but

uvi?a and uvira appear to be used no matter how many animals a person has. Throughout Mesoamerica, "twoness" is an abstract ?mage of wholeness (as in the

Nahau Omeyocan, the place of twoness or the site of

divine unity [L?pez Austin 1980:1:227]). What two

woman or two-man seems to evoke then is an abstract

5. While the idea of a transforming witch is present in

Mesoamerica, perhaps derived from the European tradition (Ingham

1986:118-119), K?hler (1995:136) cautions against treating the

coessence as a unitary phenomenon. Too often it is confused with a

local distinction between those who have an ability to control their

coessences and those who do not. K?hler mentions that the people of

San Pablo call coessences hchi'iltik, or "nuestros compa?eros." They furthermore classify these as chulel, or "soul," a part of the universal

life force (K?hler 1995:128). They then use the terms holomal or wayel for the "mas buenos" chulel (K?hler 1995:134). These are superior and

active manifestations of the coessence. These latter can be servants of

the gods, or they can also obscure the vision of the gods and impede the flow of prayers to them (like a cloud) (K?hler 1995:133-134). This

kind of distinction may also be seen among theTojolobal (Humberto

Ruz 1982:61) and among the Mixtee (Monaghan 1995:347-350).

Another complication concerns the idea of transformation, which

in ethnographic accounts is often the gloss of a native concept that

may highlight the ongoing connection between the states of being

linked by the transformation. Images such as dual-faced figures, which

are so readily read as depicting transformation, may represent the

same thing. 6. A good example comes from the literature on the Lacandon where

the word pixan, or "soul," which is manifest in blood and the pulse, can

be used for the heart organ and is also the word for "coessence"

(Boremanse 1993:343-344; see also McGee 1990:111). Lexicographers of other Maya languages have translated pixan as "destiny."

7. Most coessences are wild animals, which is consistent with the

notion that one sees the world through one's companion's eyes during a dream, since wild animals are most active at night.




image of plural singularity or unity; by acquiring a

coessence, one becomes a complete person. Another feature of the coessence that gives

personhood a distinctive cast in Mesoamerica is that it

does not restrict rational choice to the human body. It is

rather distributed among two or more bodies, each of

which may act in an autonomous way.8 Thus a

coessential animal may choose to raid a milpa and be

shot and killed in the process, dooming its human

counterpart as well. A failure to make rational choice a

defining human capacity caused some consternation

among colonial Spanish observers. In his 1767

dictionary of the Huastec language, for example, Tapia Zenteno tells us he searched for a term that makes

rationality a basis of personhood but was unsuccessful

and was left with only inicitalab something that he

abstracted to mean corporeal existence (Tapia Zenteno

1985:78; see also Coto 1983:414). To return to the main argument, if personhood is a

matter of having a destiny, and having a destiny means

one is made different by virtue of having been placed in

time, then the coessence conception represents a kind

of corollary to this, in that there can be no fundamental

difference between beings placed in time at the same

moment. Furthermore, coessential connections, informed as they are by destiny, enter into the process of

differentiation. In Chiapas, this has usually been

discussed in terms of the way coessences distinguish selves in a hierarchy of power and vulnerability, with

those who have strong or fierce animals (especially the

jaguar) or some awesome celestial phenomenon at the

top and those with weak or less ferocious animals at the bottom (Hermitte 1970:105; Holland 1963:111;

8. In Chiapas beings that are coessences to one another do not

seem to meet face to face. Moreover, when one is active (animals at

night), the other is inactive (humans asleep). Hermitte argues the

reason for this is that the soul, or chulel, can only be active in one

being at a time?in the human or in the animal (1970:94). This seems

to place too much emphasis on the notion of an individualized moral

soul, which the chulel does not seem to be. On the other hand, Pitt

Rivers suggests that the idea that coessences cannot meet face to face

is a function of a semiotic logic: the animal or other being linked to a

human can only be at the same time or the same place, but not both.

If they are at the same time, they must be separate in space; if they are

at the same place, one is inactive, while the other is active, or one

transforms into the other (1970:201). However, as Musgrave-Portilla

points out (1982), it is hard to reconcile this idea with accounts such

as the one in the Leyenda de Los Soles where an individual and his or

her coessence can have conversations with one another, so the

explanation does not hold generally for Mesoamerica. Although they are coessential, they are not the same.

Humberto Ruz 1982:58-59). Gossen (1993:432) even

makes the point that coessences are a direct

commentary on human inequality in the Chamula world view: that jaguars are not the coessences of all people explains why some are richer and others poorer, why some are more powerful and others weaker. This ranking can be seen in other areas as well (Dow 1986:62;

Monaghan 1995:348; Stratmeyer and Stratmeyer 1977:134-135). The number of coessential beings may

also rank individuals in some areas (Humberto Ruz

1982:58-59). However, the kinds of distinctions that are

created by coessences are not limited to hierarchical ones. Taggart notes that people are marked ethnically by the type of animal companion they have (tonalme).

Hispanics have a seven-headed snake monster, while

Nahuat have lightning; The two battle it out and

lightning often serves as the indigenous community's protector (Taggart 1983:72-74). As Baltasar Ajcot of

Santiago Atitl?n told E. Michel Mendelson, the coessence (aljebal) is simply "that which separates a

man from other men" (Mendelson 1965:91). Nor is the coessence formulation as consistently

anthropocentric as it first seems (see Hermitte

1992:93-94; Vogt 1976:88-89). If a jaguar is the coessence of a human, then a human is the coessence

of the jaguar. (This is perhaps what Hermitte means

when she says humans can be the coessences of other

beings [1992:49] and what Flanet refers to when she writes of people being doubles of animals [1977:114].) Just as humans are distinguished from one another by their coessence, so animals are distinguished from one

another by the coessential link they maintain with

humans. Jacaltec speakers say the animals that are

related to humans are considered to be different from "real" birds and animals. Some are kept by the Earth

Lords (witz) in carefully guarded enclosures to protect the soul they bear and others are kept by ancestral

spirits (Stratmeyer and Stratmeyer 1977:135-136). Hermitte (1970:45) tells us that coessences are unusual animals. When they kill another animal for food, they only eat its heart and liver. Whenever one comes close to a house, it remains isolated and alone. One can

always recognize the animal coessences of other people because they never mix with other animals (Kaplan 1956:234). In some areas, coessences are believed to

have physical features that set them apart from other members of their species (Wagley 1949:262), just as

humans sometimes display their shared identity with their coessence: men with hairy chests have jaguars as




their coessences, as among theTzotzil and Tzeltal, while those with hunched backs have turtles as their

companions, as among the Mare?os. Some coessences

have the ability to talk (Bunzel 1952:244-245) or walk on their hind legs. In one final example, Mixtee speakers in the town of Jamiltepec say the animal of a child's

godfather accompanies the godchild's animal until the

latter is old enough to take care of itself (when the child is fifteen years old). Similarly, the coessential animals of those united by kinship regularly interact with one

another (Flanet 1977:110-112). Not only does this point to a total identification between a person and his or her

coessence, it also shows that as humans are uniquely defined by the particular webs of social relations they maintain, so too are coessential animals.

Summary and conclusion

To briefly summarize, the Mesoamerican notion of

destiny?vach, tonalli, pixan?seems to confound and cut across inner/outer dichotomies encoded in notions

of soul and fate, and personality and spatiotemporal orientation. Evidence suggests that the ideology of

personhood these notions define is not based on the

assumption of the sacred individual. Rather, personhood seems to be relational, something that is a property of

collectivities instead of individual selves. Moreover, the

question that we assume ideas of personhood are based

upon?what makes us the same?does not appear to be at the basis of formulations such as vinik. Rather the

underlying unity is assumed, and what is problematic is how to explain particularity. Finally, even though vinik encodes the idea of an autonomous social order where individual selves are only partial expressions of

humanity, the coessence phenomenon indicates that such a conception need not be based on an absolute

assumption of human uniqueness.

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