María Eugenia Olavarría, Cristina Aguilar y Erica Merino
Hitebi: Flower and Temple
Among the Yaqui (yoemem) of Sonora, México, a person receives from God the gift that will help him/her meet his/her ritual commitment: air or spirit is essential, as are the fluids that possess a transcendent sense: blood, tears, milk. The yoemem destined to be healers receive the flower of the earth, a dark stone that is found in the entrails of the deer, and their own body – the temple – is conceived of as an altar, as a center in which the cosmological directions come together. The hitebi or curandero – as the yoemem translate it into Spanish- is the person that cures, the one who has received from God and the other protector entities such as virgins and saints the gift of healing. This gift can be manifested through dreams or experiences in which the said entities or relatives of the hitebi comunicate their talent for healing..
The present work is an exercise in ethnographic writing in which, by means of the stories and testimonies of a group of yoemem women recognized as healers, the universe of traditional yoeme healers is presented with respect to recognition and initiation, notions of the person and the body, as well as the set of symbolic representations to which they refer in their practice.
Ethnographic research was carried out in the communities of Cócorit, Tajimaroa, Vícam Estación and Loma de Guamúchil, Sonora, México, between April 2001 and February 2002 as part of a wider study of kinship, notions of the body, and their relationship to cosmology.
* This presentation was produced with support from the Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología (CONACYT project U40611-S) and the Programa de Apoyo a Proyectos de Investigación e Innovación Tecnológica de la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (PAPIIT project IN308602).
CLARIFICATION: The ethnographic materials of this presentation – photographs, text, and exegesis – were recorded with the authorization of yoemem familias and authorities. The term yoeme is a generic ethnographic term for Yaquis and Mayos; the Yaqui variant designates yoeme (singular) and yoemem (plural). In this article I employ the terms Yaqui and yoeme synonomously.