Maya Cosmovision: Exploring Formative Processes of Q’eqchi’ Medical Aesthetics, Morality, and Healing Practice

Exploring Formative Processes of Q’eqchi’ Medical Aesthetics, Morality, and Healing Practice

Abstract

Throughout history, individuals and communities have developed complex cultural visions of the world around them shaped by local ecology, history, language, and interactions with neighboring peoples and their ways of life. To better understand, interpret, and appreciate the contemporary healing practices of Q’eqchi’ Maya healers, this article describes two “formative processes” or “interpretive activities” of Q’eqchi’ cosmovision: a relationship to the Mountains and Valleys; and a moral economy of permission. Each of these aspects influence the interpretive structures of Q’eqchi’ medical reality and thereby shapes Q’eqchi’ conceptions of illness and health and the medical “objects” to which traditional healers attend. Through a detailed case study drawn from over ten years of ethnographic fieldwork with Q’eqchi’ Maya communities in Southern Belize, this paper outlines a contemporary worldview and ethos where aspects of medical reality are spread out beyond interactions between patients and healers to include vital relationships with the spirits and local ecologies, aesthetic moralities of social and spiritual significance. In this “cosmic-centered” therapeutic framework, we can appreciate more fully how Q’eqchi’ Maya knowledge and aesthetic ways of being shape contemporary therapeutic encounters in ways that externalize and personify the source of affliction and suffering.