Magic and Medicine in Eighteenth Century Yucatan

FAIN: FT-61675-14

Ryan Amir Kashanipour
Arizona Board of Regents (Flagstaff, AZ 86011-0001)

This project examines disease and medicine in eighteenth-century Latin America. In late colonial Yucatán, the focus of this study, medical practitioners were treated as both suspicious and integral elements to colonial society. Shared experiences of sickness and disease allowed Spaniards, Mayas, Africans, and people of mixed ethnicity to create material and social networks that stood outside the bounds of colonial institutions of authority. Native and African ritual healers incorporated European literary traditions to navigate the secondary colonial positions while Spanish folk curers looked to local native methods to build new social relations. Sickness and healing represent fundamental aspects of human experience and, as this project argues, authority over individual bodies in the early modern world rested not in colonial institutions of power, but in fluid social relations that brought colonizer and colonized together.