Santa kiaui pilsintsi. : The corn rain and disembodiment among the Nahuas of the Huasteca

Abstract

Among the Nahuas from the Huasteca Veracruzana and Hidalgo region of Mexico there is a corpo-oral knowledge that occurs during certain offerings made to corn known as elotlamaniliztli, or syntlitlamaniliztli, which require ritual specialists who, with and through their body, make corn grains fall in an ecstatic liminal moment of the said celebrations. The ritual specialists detach themselves from their corpo-orality to provide carnality, existence, to the corn spirit, Chikomexochitl, from two possibilities. In the first, the spirit is incarnated in the body of the ritual specialist to personify itself, arrive and make the union between the verb and the flesh. The second, with the falling of the corn grains, our livelihood is embodied: tonacatl pilsintsi, our meat, the corn. The body of the healer, empty and fragile of himself, disembodied from reality to incarnate with the santa kiaui pilsintsi —or holy corn rain—, the God himself and thus be and have the body of God.

This knowledge is described and analyzed in the light of the phenomenology of incarnation, the anthropology of experience, along with deep ethnography, in order to restore its ontological weight to human experience; that is, investigating from the situated character of being and being in the world; the experiences lived in concrete situations, and two analytical categories are proposed: corpo-orality and incarnation considered as constitutive phases in the interpretive treatment.