Content Warning: Brief discussion of colonization of indigenous peoples, slavery, disease, political strife, classism, and exile.
In this episode, I tell the myth: "Opossum Steals Fire ", from the Mazatec people. The story was related by one Pablo Guerrero, and seems to have been quite popular throughout the region of Oaxaca. The story was told by multiple groups of people, even some Christianized accounts exist. The tale follows an archetypal narratological structure unique to mythology. It relates the story of how a trickster reversed the fortune of the people against all odds. The Mazatec have a complicated history, that we will be attempting to connect to this story.
We'll discuss in detail the history of the Mazatec people of Teotitlan, Cuicatlan, Tuxtepec, and Huautla. This is, as far as I know, a first in the world of podcasting, as the only collated history of the Mazatec readily available for purchase exists in a book by an anthropologist named Benjamin Feinberg. This makes discussing the history of the Sierra Mazatec region quite difficult and confusing, as no definitive history has truly been developed. However, we will use this complexity to inform our understanding of how diverse metacultural discourses are imagined into unified cultures, and how this process can damage a people. We'll also discuss the hazards of analysis without proper context and the multiplicity of readings permitted by the myth.
You can find all of my work through the following links:
