Dr Ryan Kashanipour (Northern Arizona University)
Paper Title: “Between Magic and Medicine: Healing in Late-Colonial Yucatán”
Abstract: “To cure,” claimed a European healer in seventeenth century Yucatán, “one needs a spell.”
This declaration created an uproar among the ruling elite in colonial society because it overtly situated
magic and medicine as allied practices that stood to upend the colonial hierarchy by creating broad
inter-ethnic relations that minimized the distinctions of native, African, European, and creole. In
seventeenth and eighteenth century Yucatán, the focus of this paper, medical practitioners were
treated as both suspicious and integral elements to colonial society. Healers created inter-ethnic
networks that integrated diverse knowledge systems. At the center of these ethnic encounters were
native remedies and indigenous perspectives on the natural and supernatural world. Native healers,
who built on centuries of tradition, incorporated European literary traditions to navigate the secondary
colonial positions. Spanish settlers looked to local native methods to build new social institutions.
Africans and people of mixed ethnicity, widely overlooked in the historiography of the region, operated
as productive intermediaries by merging heterogeneous practices into a Yucatec system of healing.
This paper highlights unique nature of Yucatec medicine by exploring cases of noteworthy healers
who drew the suspicions of Spanish authorities. The distinctive Yucatec healing system detailed in
this paper demonstrates the fundamental ways that attributes of subaltern society were integrated into
foundation of the colonial cultures of the Spanish Atlantic World.
Biography: R.A. Kashanipour is a social historian and historical anthropologist of indigenous
Mesoamerica and an assistant professor of Latin American history at Northern Arizona University
(Flagstaff, Arizona, USA). He has conducted ethnographic research in indigenous communities in
Chiapas and Yucatán, Mexico and historic investigations in Mexico, Guatemala, Spain, England, and
the United States. His research into the discourse of medicinal and botanical knowledge systems in
colonial and contemporary indigenous communities has been funded by the Mellon Foundation,
Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Max Planck Institut-fürWissenschaftsgeschichte, and the Ministerio de
Cultura de España. Professor Kashanipour has published on findings on contemporary Maya
ethnobotany and influence of Latin American colonies in the development of scientific philosophy in
the Journal of Ecological Anthropology and Atlantic Studies. He received his PhD in Latin American
history from the University of Arizona. He is presently preparing a manuscript for the University of
Arizona Press called A World of Cures: Yucatec Healing in the Colonial Atlantic World, which
examines intersection of witchcraft and folk healing in the construction of medical knowledge in
seventeenth and eighteenth century Mexico.