Ch'ul Mut - by Maruch Méndez Pérez & Diane Rus (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Tsotsil-Maya elder, curer, singer, and artist Maruch Méndez Pérez began learning about birds as a young shepherdess climbing trees and raiding nests for eggs to satisfy her endless hunger. As she grew into womanhood and apprenticed herself to older women as a curer and seer, the natural history of birds she learned so roughly as a child expanded to include ancestral Maya beliefs about birds as channels of communication with deities in the spirit world who had dominion over human lives. In these testimonies dictated to her lifelong friend, anthropologist Diane Rus, Méndez Pérez describes her years of dreams, instruction, and experience. Her narrative sheds light on the basic values of her Chamula culture and cosmovision and has remarkable parallels to concepts of the ancient Maya as interpreted by scholars.

Review Quotes

"To my knowledge, Ch'ul Mut is only the fourth book about Chiapas written from a woman's perspective, alongside a groaning shelf of conventional ethnography. It's a gift of many colors. It gives us an intimate account of Maruch Méndez's extraordinary life. It provides a firsthand account of how traditional knowledge is acquired and transmitted--not someone's field notes about what other people said. And in a remarkable set of notes and color plates, Rus makes a compelling case for the preconquest roots of these beliefs. The book thus shines new light on one of Mesoamerica's enduring mysteries: how Indigenous people preserved and modified their unique worldview under fifteen generations of grinding Spanish rule. 'Maya and other original Mesoamerican peoples have never stopped having their own Native view of the universe," she says. 'Maruch's text demonstrates the continuity of this grand pan-Mayan intellectual tradition over time and space.'"--Robert Wasserstrom, Ethnohistory

"An extraordinary document. . . . It is not just a fascinating study of an indigenous woman's wisdom about birds, the sacred, and their role in the workings of the cosmos, it is also an exemplary model of intercultural conversation and experimentation. . . . A work of great ethnographic density and expressive beauty."--Pedro Pitarch, author of The Jaguar and the Priest: An Ethnography of Tzeltal Souls

"This book is a masterpiece. Méndez Pérez has not only given us a narrative of inestimable importance, but Rus has enabled us to compare her understandings and knowledge of birds with those of other Maya peoples in Mesoamerica."--Christine Eber, author of Women and Alcohol in a Highland Maya Town: Water of Hope, Water of Sorrow