«It’s a spirit that takes over the place». Stories of Mayan oral tradition by Hermilo Caamal Couoh

Abstract

The material presented here is an interview with Hermilo Caamal Couoh, a Mayan speaker who lives in Cobá, a farmer and chiclero by trade. It was documented on July 12, 2013, by Santiago Cortés Hernández and Berenice Araceli Granados Vázquez. This material constitutes one of the documents stored in the Repositorio Nacional de Materiales Orales richest in information about the oral tradition of the Mayan peoples and their worldview. Caamal Couoh tells a series of stories about numinous entities that inhabit the spaces of the jungle, the cornfield, the mountains, the town, the thoughts and behaviors of men and women of the past and present, as well as the rituals for «negotiate with them». He also talks about the history of the founding of his town and the surrounding archaeological zone. Caamal Couoh’s interview constitutes a valuable discursive unit of knowledge, which is important to analyze in its entirety, since only then does the cultural mechanism that activates the narrator’s thinking and that affects all areas of his life become visible.