"The Hands Know": Bodily Engagement and Medical Impasse in Highland Maya Bonesetting

Abstract

In southern Middle America, highland Maya bonesetters are called on to treat many cases of bodily injury. While Guatemalan Maya bonesetters vary greatly in their techniques and specialties, they prioritize manual treatment modalities, using their hands to address problems in clients' bodies. For bonesetters, the hands achieve direct knowledge of the suffering body, enabling them to work and securing the trust of those they treat. Nonetheless, Maya bonesetters face opposition from physicians who argue that bonesetters are untrained in Western trauma techniques and can inflict irreparable harm on people. This article examines how Maya bonesetters work in an environment hostile to their craft and explores some important vectors of bodily and ideological engagement between Maya bonesetting and Guatemalan biomedicine. [Maya bonesetters, manual medicine, embodied knowledge]M anual medicine is a set of healing traditions prioritizing the use of the hands and manual manipulation of the body to bring about healing. It forms a critical part of the healing landscape in Guatemala, a country in which the majority of inhabitants live in rural areas and practice small-scale agriculture. People recognized as bonesetters or as other types of massagers are found in virtually every community of Guatemala and southern Mexico. It is somewhat surprising, then, that the work of hueseros, as bonesetters are often called in Middle America, is quite underrepresented in the literature (Huber and Anderson 1996). These specialists are often mentioned as part of the cultural backdrop of particular communities, but specialized coverage of their work is rare (Paul 1976; Paul and McMahon in press). Ethnologists have paid closer attention to practitioners of divination, herbalism, shamanism, and midwifery.Closer inspection of the Maya bonesetting craft, however, not only enhances our general understanding of healing specialties but also reveals how the body can constitute a source and starting point of knowledge. The avowed ability of the Maya bonesetter's body to directly engage the suffering body entails a mode of Medical Anthropology Quarterly 16( 1): 22-40. 22'THE HANDS KNOW" 23 attention that Csordas (1990Csordas ( , 1993 says occurs on an unconscious, preobjective level. In his framework, bodies continually attend to other bodies in ways not always consciously perceived by the persons involved. Csordas (1993:135) argues that through this somatic attention, the body constitutes the existential ground of consciousness and enjoys a direct engagement with the world. When Maya bonesetters place their hands on a suffering body, in accordance with this formulation, information about the client's body becomes somatically available to them. Hueseros report that 'the hands know" the unseen problems in the suffering body, apprehending the problems directly. This direct engagement, then, makes it possible for the bonesetter's hands, in a self-guided mode, to redress the problems.The centrality of embodied knowledgejn the Maya bonesetter's practice dis...

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