Gourdvines, Fires, and Wixarika Territoriality.

This article explores the social relationships and practices expressed in the Wixarika (Huichol) terms nanari (gourdvine) and nanayari (root or rootedness). Wixaritari (Huichols) in the community of San Andres Cohamiata say that the genealogies and social bonds constructed in ritual grow along divine ancestral migration paths, just as gourdvines grow out across the earth. These ancestral vines connect the ceremonial fire of the xiriki (shrine) of a kie (rancheria), where people live, to a great temple (tuki), from which the kie's founding ancestors first "borrowed fire," to creation sites throughout 90,000 square kilometers of western and north-central Mexico. If the rancheria expands and ramifies like a gourdvine, those ancestors' descendants must "borrow" and "register" (inscribe or legitimate) new fires, and their xirikite ultimately grow up to be tukite. This historical process of establishing land tenure ceremonially entails fulfilling cargos (five consecutive annual cycles of ritual obligations) at the tuki, from which people make the growing gourdvine paths of divine descent extremely vivid by retracing them in sacrificial treks to the creation sites, most notably Wirikuta, the birthplace of the sun.

NANAYARI AND HISTORICAL TERRITORIALITY

Images of Wixarika (Huichol)(1) culture as historically static and geographically isolated are mistaken and harmful to these resilient but hard-pressed mountain people in the southern Sierra Madre Occidental of western Mexico. Nowhere is this truer than in the area of ceremonial territoriality; this article questions static conceptions of territoriality by exploring the flexible social and spatial relationships expressed in metaphors about roots, vines and lianas (nana), gourdvines (nanari), or more abstractly, rootedness (nanayari). Nanayari is said to connect the ceremonial fire of a kie (rancheria, the inhabited site of family subsistence production; plural kiete) to the fire of a great temple (tuki) and beyond that to primeval creation sites that extend across 90,000 square kilometers in five states of western and north-central Mexico. This kie-tuki-creation-site hierarchy is basic to San Andres Wixarika territoriality (kiekari) because even as it changes its relationship to the natural and historical landscape, it remains the society's fundamental hierarchical principle (figures 1 and 2).

[Figures 1-2 ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

More precisely, I want to show how an ostensibly timeless Wixarika (and anthropological) model of social hierarchy is reconciled with the actual growth and change of settlement patterns in time and space. Symbolically, the male-dominated, "diurnal" social order descends from primeval creation sites in the east through great temples to rancheria shrines in the central part of the Wixarika cosmos (kiekari in its broadest sense), whereas feminine proliferation and growth rise from the "nocturnal" west. These constitute deep structures or principles for processes of historical change. Wixaritari seek to reconcile these male and female principles through a set of metaphors about rootedness and inscription. These metaphors set historically shifting settlement patterns into the forms given by myth and ritual practice, thereby modifying those forms. In the first two sections of this analysis, I outline the social structures (especially tuki organization) and ceremonial practices (especially sacrificial treks and narratives) that define and legitimize territory in terms of cardinal creation sites and colonial comunidad boundaries. This general framework is intended to make the more detailed ethnography of xiriki ritual practice, kinship, myth, and metaphor that comes in the last two sections readable with something approaching local understanding.

But first, a bit of cultural geography: about 20,000 Wixaritari inhabit the area in western Mexico where the states of Jalisco, Nayarit, Durango and Zacatecas meet. Most of them live widely scattered (about four persons per square kilometer) throughout the roughly 5,000 square kilometers "granted" to the three comunidades indigenas of San Andres Cohamiata (Tateikie), Santa Catarina Cuexcomatitlan (Tuapurie) and San Sebastian Teponahuaxtlan (Wautta) by the Spanish king around 1725. The portions of these "original" comunidades still recognized by the Mexican state cover about 4,000 square kilometers (1,600 square miles or one million acres); San Andres Wixaritari living in about 1,000 square kilometers of the crown lands are now under non-indigenous control (to say nothing of those spread across Nayarit and living in the cities), but they continue to identify with their mother communities through kinship and ceremonial activity. Before the great hacienda land grabs of the Reforma (1856-1876) and Porfiriato (1876-1910) and the ranchero invasion underway since the Cristero phase of the Mexican Revolution (1926-1940 in this zone), the Wixaritari of San Andres controlled nearly twice as much land as they do now, including rich forests, upland pastures, and valleys (see Meyer 1983). The social memory of this officially repressed part of Wixarika "cultural patrimony" is still reproduced in ritual practice both inside the comunidades and at contested sites throughout the broader kiekari.

The remaining parts of the three comunidades lie deep in the Sierra Madre Occidental. There the Chapalagana River and its tributaries have cut precipitously down to create colossal, torrid canyons measuring up to 1,200 meters (4,000 feet) deep and regarded as fecund but sinister spaces. The canyons have left small, temperate, relatively densely populated, and cultivated high mesas of a few hundred hectares in area. Windswept, pine-clad peaks--often deemed to be ancestral sites--reach up above the mesas to about 8,000 feet (2,400 meters) and some overlook virtually the entire Gran Nayar region (see figures 3-6 for illustrations of these ecological zones). Many Wixaritari shift their residence among their kiete's varied ecological niches by moving up and down the mesas and canyon slopes according to their seasonal and more long-term needs for slash-and-burn maize plots, pasturage, and water. If they do not in fact migrate elsewhere in the region, people also move throughout the "original" comunidad, driven by shifting marriage patterns, the rapid demographic recovery of the post-revolutionary period, and economic specialization in art and labor markets oriented around the cabeceras (head towns).

[Figures 3-6 ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

"REGISTERING" THE KIE-TUKI-CREATION-SITE HIERARCHY

This section describes a hierarchical system of ceremonial narratives, practices, and offices (cargos) that reproduce and expand Wixarika territory (kiekari). Wixaritari themselves define kiekari--with an illuminating variety of emphases--as the natural and cultural landscape in its most inclusive sense.(2) This landscape encompasses people, plants, animals, architecture, forms of economic production, social organization, and ceremonial exchange--all saturated with historical and mythical referents as well as the overwhelming omnipresence of life as they know it (figure 7). I summarize this Tylorean sense of kiekari as an inventory of things and relationships in space and time, as "cultural domain" or "territoriality."

[Figure 7 ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The main point I want to make here is how the apparently stationary, freestanding house (kie) is symbolically established, connected, extended, and renewed in terms of kiekari--the larger "household" as it were.(3) One metaphor Wixaritari informants use to describe this process is "registration" (registracion). They "register" their kiete by making sacrificial treks to sacred sites in the immediate locality, to the temple, and ultimately to Wirikuta and the other four cardinal emergence sites (Xapawiyemeta, Haramaratsie, Hauxa Manaka, and Teekata). These emergence sites define the limits of Wixarika kiekari in its broadest, cosmological sense as the sun's daily path from east to west and as the domain of rain ancestors in the north and south. Although it may seem paradoxical, Wixaritari fix and legitimate their settlement system of little rancherias widely scattered across the "isolated" mountainous kiekari of Jalisco, Nayarit, Durango, and Zacatecas by traversing the space that separates them from regional temples (tukite) and distant ancestral emergence sites, especially Wirikuta in this case. That is, in order to claim a place, they have to describe and relive how their ancestors moved there from an authenticating sacred site. But this may be a defining feature of many frontier or nomadic peoples, including the early Mexika Nahuas.

Strikingly, Wirikuta, the sacred desert in San Luis Potosi where one must ultimately trek to "register" one's claim to a piece of land, is some four hundred kilometers distant from the Wixarika heartland in the Sierra Madre Occidental. It is as if the peyote-rich desert and the bare, cleft Reu'unaxi Mountain looming above it (which is deemed to be the birthplace of the sun) were the capital of a metaphysical republic where one must petition to receive title to the land and the life that it gives. This is why for centuries Wixaritari have gone there to deposit sacrificial essences and objects which represent elements of the desired properties.

Even before they arrive to make these offerings at primordial emergence sites such as Wirikuta, they vividly embody their territorial and broader cultural claims in the very process of getting there because they are reliving mythical ancestral treks. So, if only by virtue of its great length, this particular trek forms the Wixaritari's principal territorial narrative and therefore the most expansive claim for renewed access to Wixarika kiekari. Also, once they are in Wirikuta, Wixaritari are especially moved by peyote-enhanced visions in which they identify with their ancestors, origins, and ancient practices, so it is where they ultimately "root" their kie-based settlement pattern. In short, Wixarika land tenure must be understood in terms of its integrated relationship to a vast 90,000-square-kilometer territory, not as a set of separate--much less isolated--parcels or communities.

By the same token, extended family estates (kiete) do not automatically "belong" to this territory simply because they fall within its boundaries on a map; instead, they must actively articulate themselves to the sentient, morally charged kiekari by replicating ancestral dramas. They do this by performing sacrificial rituals (mawarixa) and by undertaking the …