Hunting For The Virgin Meat Money and Me

Hunting for the Virgin: Meat, Money, and Memory in Tetiz, Yucatán
Author(s): Paul K. Eiss

Source: Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 17, No. 3, Value in Circulation (Aug., 2002), pp. 291-330
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Hunting for the Virgin: Meat, Money,
and Memory in Tetiz, Yucatan
Paul K. Eiss
Carnegie Mellon University
Those who come to Tetiz typically arrive on pilgrimage during the widely at-
tended yearly festivals and processions dedicated to the Virgin of Tetiz. In ser-
mons, religious pamphlets, and by word of mouth, the faithful recount the
story of the most notable miracle of the Virgin that led to the founding of the
pueblo church. In the winter of 1730, according to a published account
authoredby the 19th-centuryYucatecan bishop Crescencio Carrillo y Ancona,
the Virgin of Tetiz journeyed to Spain appearing as a mendicant. Clad in tat-
tered garb, she sought out a Franciscan friar in Seville and begged for alms to
rescue her and her son from the torments of poverty. While Fray Francisco
searched for money, the woman continued her entreaties for any donation, no
matterhow small. She assured Francisco that they would see each other again,
declaring: "One day you will see with your own eyes the miserable state of my
humble shanty. Then you will know my entire history, and you will do for me
everything that the holy charity that burns in your heart inspires."'
Impoverished himself, Francisco could find only a single Spanish peso,
which he gave to the woman as she departed. Although Francisco never saw
the mysterious beggar again, he dreamed of her often and rememberedthe coin
he had given to her. It was "inscribed in his memory," seeming always to "lie
before his eyes, with its bust and seal on both sides, marked by the date and
place of its coining." Francisco was certain that if he ever saw the coin again he
would recognize it "clearly and distinctly," even if it was presented to him
"mixed up with many others, apparently identical in form." Francisco sub-
sequently rose through the Church hierarchy and traveled to the New World,
first through an appointment as Titular Bishop of Tricali, then as Auxiliary
Bishop of Cuba and Florida, and finally as Bishop of Yucatain.Despite the pas-
sage of the years, he forgot neither the peso nor the mendicant whose voice,
gestures, and gaze continued to haunt him in both his dreams and waking life.
One day during a pastoral visit in Yucatain,Francisco decided to stop at
the small indigenous pueblo of Tetiz. Followed by a procession of Indians,
Francisco entered a "rustic" building that "less than a temple, less than a
church, was a hut on the point of collapse." He was shocked to see before him
CulturalAnthropology 17(3):291-330. Copyright 0 2002, American Anthropological Association.
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292 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY
an image, carved in wood and dressed in tattered and stained silk, of the
woman who had visited him. As he drew closer to kiss the fringe of her dress
reverently, Francisco recognized before him, hanging on the figure amid other
coins and offerings of gold and silver, the coin that he had given away in
Seville: "His astonished gaze fell upon the very same peso [aquel peso fuerte
de 61 muy conocido y sefialado] that, fourteen years earlier and two thousand
leagues away, he had given as charity to the beggar." Overcome by the coin's
miraculous reappearance,Francisco fell to his knees in an ecstasy of the spirit.
The Virgin began to speak to him once more, declaring that the people of Yu-
catainhad become "very dear"to her from the moment of their "discovery and
conquest" by her "beloved sons, the Spaniards."Yucatecan shrines dedicated
to her worship were, however, impoverished and decrepit, leading the Virgin
to warn Francisco: "The day the Yucatecos forget my love will be the day of
their complete disappearanceas well." The bishop immediately devoted him-
self to fulfilling his earlier promise, the "sacred debt" that he had contracted
with the mendicant Virgin. The pueblo's failing system of confraternities was
revived and the resources of the Church were channeled into the construction
of a sanctuary,which was founded in Tetiz in 1751.
More than 250 years after the Virgin traveled to Spain and more than a
century after Carrillo y Ancona transcribed her story, residents of contempo-
rary Tetiz continue to honor her and to retell the story of her journey, both in-
side the pueblo's church and beyond its walls-even as far afield as Seattle and
Los Angeles. For present-day Teticefios, the Virgin's messages about displace-
ment, poverty, charity, and redemption have special currency and global reach.
The story of the Virgin is a narrative suspended between opposing poles of
poverty and wealth, of physical displacement and return, of trivial alms and
great works, of material wealth and spiritual grace, and of the power of mem-
ory and the perils of forgetting. The story is driven by the redemptive power of
money, which appearsin the form of a charitable gift, a sacred adornment,and,
finally, as a recognizable mark of history that miraculously defies currency's
generic appearance. The Virgin's story, retold in the present, carries a wealth
of significance about the significance of wealth. It speaks to money's
power-when sanctified by the Virgin's grace-to redeem, construct, liberate,
bind, mark, and remember.
The ethnographicliteratureon money and commodities is wide-ranging in
subject and approach.In addition to a long-standing ethnographic literatureon
exchange in noncapitalist or informal economies (notably Malinowski 1922),
there is a substantial body of recent ethnographic work that attempts to unite
the material and cultural analysis of commodities and money within capitalist
economies and at their margins (for instance, Akin and Robbins 1999; Ap-
padurai 1986; Comaroff and Comaroff 1992; Coronil 1997; Ferguson 1985,
1988; Hutchinson 1996; Lemon 1998; Parry and Bloch 1989; Taussig 1980).
Many recent studies (Appadurai 1986; Ferguson 1988; Parry and Bloch 1989)
have eschewed an earliertendency to pose starkoppositions between societies in
which gift-basedtransactionsaredominantand those governedby the production

MEAT, MONEY, AND MEMORY IN YUCATAN 293
and exchange of commodities. Similarly, many have questioned overly sche-

matic conceptual distinctions between "noncapitalist"and "capitalist"systems
of production, exchange, and circulation. Some studies have explored sugges-
tively the multiple meanings and interrelateduses of both state-issued and non-
state currencies in formal and informal exchanges (Akin and Robbins 1999;
Coronil 1997; Hutchinson 1996; Lemon 1998).
The story of the Virgin, however, highlights several issues that have
tended to escape consideration. Many studies have lent great autonomy to the
study of commodities independent of money (the "social lives" of commodi-
ties) or of money independent of commodities (the significance of money in its
diverse forms and cultural contexts). With few exceptions, these studies (for
instance, Appadurai 1986; Parry and Bloch 1989) focus on the domain of ex-
change rather than the systems of circulation within which the exchange of
money and commodities operates and out of which money and commodities
emerge as apparently distinct but integrally related and transitory manifesta-
tions of value.2 While quite revealing, such analyses risk reifying the commod-
ity and money forms as objects of analysis. That is, once conceptually removed
from circulation, commodities and money are also removed from the space and
time of their genesis. How are we to understand the miracle of Francisco's
coin, without understandingits travel through space and time from Seville in
1730 to Tetiz 14 years later?What was the mysterious process of circulation by
which Francisco's money was transformed from a secular coin of the realm
into a miraculous token of the Virgin's grace? Most importantly, why does the
story of the travels of this coin in the 1730s seem to speak so directly to the ex-
perience of contemporaryTeticefios?
This article represents an attempt to explore such questions by rereading
the story of the Virgin of Tetiz from a perspective that is both circulatory and
contemporary.I draw inspiration from Marx's Grundrisse (1973), in which he
explores money as a commodity and how, as commodities move through ex-
change, they assume monetary functions and forms. This account thus begins
with a brief overview of the ways in which social and spiritual life in the Yu-
catainpeninsula have been reshaped amid the advent of commercial capitalism
and henequen agriculture. It then proceeds to an exploration of the worship of
the Virgin as a circulatory complex, of which the serial transformations of
commodity into money and money into commodity are constitutive features.
Here, I focus on a deer-hunting confraternity (the Gremio de Cazadores) that
plays a key role in financing yearly fiestas of the Virgin, both through the sale
of venison and throughthe crucial symbolic role the gremio plays as a protago-
nist of processions and other festivities. To follow a deer hunted by gremio
members along the stages of its journey toward the Virgin is to witness its
three deaths in the apparentlydistinct realms of production, exchange, and cir-
culation. In this way, I attempt to trace the spatial outline and temporal rhythm
of a wider circulatory system within which Mexican pesos effectively are "re-
coined" or "reminted"as the Virgin's money and, in the process, are absorbed
into an economy of quotidian miracle and sacred debt. I aim to demonstrate

that in Tetiz the sacralization of money occurs neither through the removal of
money from circulation and its sanctification in ritual (Taussig 1980), nor
through strict ethical distinctionsbetween "good" and "bad"money (Greenberg
1995). Rather, it is precisely through circulation that the powers of the capital-
ist money form are appropriatedand sacralized in the name of the Virgin. The
result is a sacred economy that is hybrid in nature(cf. Greenberg 1995) and mi-
raculous in spirit. Here, the story of the travels and sanctification of Fran-
cisco's coin in 1730 find particularresonance in the present.
Beyond the question of circulation, however, an understandingof the mir-
acle of the Virgin also must confront the centrality of memory and of history in
Francisco's story. To consider this issue requires overcoming the limits of
most analyses, which have tended to leave unexplored the place of money in
the construction of communal social identity, ratherthan its erosion, and in the
elaboration of historical memory, ratherthan its effacement. In Marx's analy-
sis in Grundrisse and in Capital, money fetishism represents the highest ex-
pression of the fetishism of commodities. While containing within it the value
produced by the concrete labors of people, money appears to those who have
produced its value as an autonomous, external, and alien object. Through the
process of circulation, the qualities of money as a universal form of exchange
facilitate wider processes of alienation and a resulting state of amnesia: first,
by stripping value of its concrete history in the specific labors that produced it;
and second, by securing, via the effects of commodity fetishism, the alienation
of workers from the world that they have created but that confronts them as an
external reality independent of their labor and control.3
Several recent anthropological studies of money and commodities have
expanded upon Marx's account of money and commodity fetishism, rejecting
the assumption of a universal logic of commodification and "monetization"
and advocating for greater sensitivity to the cultural embeddedness of those
processes (Comaroff and Comaroff 1992; Ferguson 1988; Hutchinson 1996).
Nonetheless, most recent studies have tended to share Marx's view of the in-
herently amnesiac, alienating, and disintegrative characteristics of the money
form under capitalism. "The coin," John and Jean Comaroff argue in their
study of the Tshidi, "does not have the same capacity as the cow, symbolic or
substantial,to embody a biography,let alone to bearwithin it an entiregrammarof
social relations" (Comaroff and Comaroff 1992:151). Similarly Hutchinson ar-
gues that the Nuer deploy an ideology of blood links between people and cattle
in order to counter money's "powers of effacement" and to "preclude the pos-
sibility of any direct equation between money and people" (Hutchinson
1996:98). With the advent of the fetishism of commodities and especially of its
purest manifestation in the fetishism of money, the dissolvent, alienating, and
amnesiac characteristics of the money form would seem to erode the basis for
communalidentity,unless checkedby a countervailingideological framework.4
How, then, are we to account for the greatestmiracle of Francisco's coin-
its extraordinarypower to persist, distinguish itself in memory, mark its own
uniqueness, and incite recognition? How might we explain the coin's uncanny

ability to bear within it a "grammarof social relations," and even, apparently,

to "embody biographies," whether those of Francisco, of the Virgin, or of the
people of Tetiz? Is the story of the Virgin and Francisco, understood as the
story of Tetiz itself, merely a mystified surrogatefor the pueblo's complex his-
tory? Or might the coin of the story have a role to play as a focus of communal
identity and a register of historical memory in contemporaryTetiz?
In seeking answers to these questions, this article concludes with a discus-
sion of the role of the Virgin's money in the gremio system in general, where
the circulation of the Virgin's money provides a framework for social identity
and historical memory. The money of the Virgin, like money in circulation un-
der capitalist social relations in general, works via a dramatic alchemy. It
fetishizes and abstractsvalue in the form of currency and effaces the origins of
value in productive human labor. Yet it is precisely through money's abstrac-
tion and fungibility that the circulation of money around Tetiz's Virgin facili-
tates a form of "counterfetishism"(Coronil 1995) that sustains the collective
identities of Teticefios as such and establishes a framework for the historical
conciousness upon which pueblo identity is founded. In its various forms and
manifestations, the Virgin's money constitutes a living archive, a material
framework of "documents" upon which personal and historical memory is
founded in Tetiz. Read against the backdropof the sacrifice of deer and the cir-
culation of money in the gremio system, the story of Francisco and the Virgin
demonstrateshow a coin may bear within it not only abstractvalue but also the
concrete histories of deer, persons, and pueblos.
Tetiz's Money: Profane and Sacred
Money has a history, and that history weighs heavily on Tetiz. Like most
of rural Yucatain,the area was almost entirely populated by indigenous Maya
speakers through the 20th century. Until the late 19th century, most of them
worked in swidden agricultureand other forest activities, while performing oc-
casional wage labor on cattle and maize ranches. During the rule of Mexican
dictator Porfirio Diaz (1876-1911), a period popularly termed the epoch of
slavery (epoca de esclavitud), the ruralnorthwest underwent a rapid transition
to a monocrop plantation economy. The landscape quickly came to be domi-
nated by haciendas dedicated to the cultivation of henequen, a spiny plant used
to produce fiber for sale to North American cordage companies. While Yucate-
can hacendados and merchantsreaped immense profits from the henequen bo-
nanza, indigenous populations lost most of their access to forest lands and were
forced to reside and work on the henequen estates. Men were subjected to a
daily regime of intense labor and beatings in returnfor little monetary compen-
sation. Women were subject to sexual abuse by overseers and owners, forced
marriages with peons chosen by the hacendados, and coerced domestic labor.
Inexorably, workers accumulated large debts enumerated in pesos, which le-
gally bound them to the estates and transformedthem, in local perception, into
slaves (Joseph 1988; Peniche Rivero 1994; Topik and Wells 1998; Wells 1985).

Tetiz, like other pueblos located on the western peripheryof the henequen
zone, experienced this transition to monoculture somewhat later and in a less
complete fashion than did more centrally located pueblos. The area also evi-
denced a greater degree of conflict than most as pueblo dwellers joined in re-
peated uprisings and rebellions against henequen planters and the state govern-
ment (Wells and Joseph 1996). With the fall of Diaz in 1911 and the advent of
the Mexican revolutionary government came the epoch of liberty (dpoca de
libertad), a time when the revolutionary government abolished debt peonage
and restrictions on the movements of rural populations and enforced the pay-
ment of cash wages to hacienda workers (Eiss 2002; Joseph 1988). However,
the haciendas continued to produce fiber after the revolution, and indigenous
workers continued to suffer exploitative working conditions. In the late 1930s,
workers were given control over the henequen fields, but at the same time they
became increasingly dependent on state banks for funds and technical assis-
tance. Collective debts accumulatedby workers on the collectivized haciendas
(ejidos) became the new measure of their subjection to a different master. Fe-
male estate residents remaineddoubly oppressed, excluded from most forms of
wage labor and from the benefits of agrarianreform, except through their hus-
bands (Bailos Ramirez 1989; Brannon and Baklanoff 1987; Joseph 1986; Vil-
lanueva Mukul 1990).
Recent years have brought the decline of the haciendas and the ejidos as
commercial agricultural enterprises (Bafios Ramirez 1996). In the 1970s and
1980s, with a decline in prices for henequen fiber on the world market and a
gradualelimination of state subsidies for the henequen industry, henequen cul-
tivation has been largely abandonedand unemployment has soared both in the
haciendas and neighboring pueblos. As dense overgrowth covers the remains
of the henequen fields, workers and their families seek other kinds of wage
money. Large-scale industrial chicken farms and egg-collection facilities have
been established near the old haciendas, profiting from the availability of an
impoverished Maya-speaking labor force with few alternative sources of em-
ployment. Many men who previously combined labor in ejido henequen fields
with swidden subsistence agricultureare now subject to an intensified labor re-
gime-a six-day, highly supervised and disciplined workweek that precludes
their involvement in henequen and maize agriculture. Only in hunting do most
adult men find an occasional connection with the forest that had once been the
center of their productive lives. Many Teticefios, mostly males but also fe-
males in increasing numbers,have migrated to Canctin, Los Angeles, and Seat-
tle in search of dollars, some of which return to their families in the form of
money remittances. Some women travel to M rida to earn cash by selling pro-
duce or doing housework in middle-class homes.
While subsistence agriculture is no longer a viable alternative for most
Teticefios, a sense of deep crisis is as characteristic of Tetiz as it is of maize-
producing areas located outside the former henequen zone." Like most of the
pueblos of northwesternYucatin, the prospects of Tetiz have been overshad-
owed by the persistent poverty and unemployment that have accompanied the

decline of commercial henequen agricultureand the ejido sector. Social differ-

entiation and class division have intensified with unequal access to employ-
ment and money remittances from the United States. Sharp partisan political
and labor conflicts and the devaluation of the Mexican peso in the mid-1990s
have deepened the crisis. While increasing numbers of young men and women
choose to depart Tetiz for Los Angeles or Seattle, those who remain confront
the devaluation of Mexican currency and price inflation. They see their wages
and their work worth progressively less.
It should come as no surprise, then, that many Teticefios find in money a
metaphor well suited to conveying their experience of poverty. "We are still
enslaved today," one resident of Hacienda Nohdzonot, near Tetiz, told me at
the height of the economic crisis and devaluation of the peso in 1995: "Now we
are enslaved to the peso." Whether appearing as the money of henequen, the
money of chicken, or the money of migration, the peso as wage and as a fre-
quently devalued currency of exchange has long symbolized the exploitative
work relations, indebtedness, and the quotidian struggle for survival that have
dominated the experience of both male and female residents of Tetiz.6
The rise of a money economy throughout Yucatan has had deep conse-
quences outside the domain of livelihood as well, transforming the nature of
popular religious practice in the pueblos. The secularization of local confrater-
nities and the fiesta system throughoutthe peninsula has long been noted in the
ethnographicliterature.By the 1940s, large-scale patronfiestas across the pen-
insula evidenced a process of transformationfrom "holy day to holiday," that
is, from being acts of communal homage to supernaturalguardiansto becom-
ing, in Robert Redfield's words, a "commercial undertaking for the profit of
individuals" (1941:xix). In a similar vein, a recent study of popular religion in
the western pueblo of Maxcantifinds that the system of confraternitiesthere ef-
fectively fosters class division and serves the aspirations of privileged or "cul-
tivated" town residents. For wealthier pueblo residents, the gremios hold out
the prospect of social advancement through the legitimacy and status afforded
by "traditional"Yucatecan cultural practices and through multifarious acts of
conspicuous consumption associated with the fiestas (Loewe 1995). The domi-
nance of this commercial ethos is neither total nor uncontested, however. One
analyst has noted the structuraltension between "official" and "popular"relig-
ion in Yucatecan patron-saintfiestas (Fernindez 1994). Others have searched
for popular agency in the fiesta system in embedded cultural forms like the
"dance of the pig's head" (k'ub pol)-which has been interpretedby various
authorsas a residual practice of popularcarnivalesque ribaldryand as a form of
symbolic capital available for appropriation, use, and reinterpretation by
authorities both local and anthropological (Hervik 1999; Loewe 1995). These
differences of interpretationnotwithstanding,there is broad agreement that the
"sacred"enjoys little if any autonomy from the "profane"world of commodity
consumption and money relations. Religious life has been deeply shaped by
the increasing social differentiation, class distinction, and social and political
conflict characteristicof contemporaryYucatin.

This is certainly true of the veneration of the Virgin of Tetiz and the cycle
of pilgrimages that are consecrated to her. Although situated at the center of
Tetiz religious life, the Virgin is in constant motion. On procession through the
streets of the pueblo or between Tetiz and nearby haciendas and pueblos, she
travels on foot, by truck, and even by boat. Extending across numerous pueblos
in northwestern Yucatan, a cycle of processions, fiestas, and other events or-
ganized for the Virgin by numerous religious associations and gremios culmi-
nates in a series of fiestas and bullfights attended by thousands of people in
mid-August. A diverse series of institutional actors take part in organizing the
festivities, ranging from church leaders to the men and women charged with
various ritual obligations, such as dressing the Virgin and bearing her during
processions. Most important of all are the gremios, which have a large and
fairly autonomous role in organizing fiestas and other events honoring the Vir-
gin during the festivals (Fernandez 1994). The festivities help to fuel a local
economy geared to worshippers and to servicing the celebrations. A wide
range of people and institutions profit through their enthusiastic participation
in the purchase, sale, and consumption of a host of commodities, ranging from
foodstuffs to firecrackers. The church itself raises a good deal of money
through the sale of tacos and beer at the festivals, as well as through direct
money donations to pay for masses and other religious services. As in other
pueblos in Yucatan, the fiestas of Tetiz clearly partake of a commercial ethos
and the distinction between sacred and profane is hard to make.
Throughoutthe preparationof the yearly festivals in Tetiz, gremios play a
key role in the planning, elaboration, and financing of the fiestas, processions,
masses, and other activities involved in the celebrations. Both men and women
participate and many are members of multiple gremios. Although the gremios
differ in membership and to some extent in style, they are organized in similar
ways, channeling their members' contributions of cash, kind, and labor into the
fiestas of the Virgin. Among them, the Gremio de Cazadores stands out as a
central actor in supporting the fiesta cycle through the sale and provision of
venison. It ranks among the largest and best financed gremios, and it plays a
leading role in organizing the fiestas as an occasion for symbolic display and
public spectacle. The Gremio de Cazadores is thus a particularly significant
point of departure for an understandingof the gremios in general-although
the exclusively male nature of hunting as an activity may introduce a mascu-
line bias to some elements of this study.7
Igor Kopytoff (1986) has proposed the study of the "culturalbiography"
of commodities as a way of understanding "commoditization" as a cultural
process. Inspired by such a biographical perspective, let us consider not only
"commoditization"but monetization as well. To do so is to imagine the move-
ment of the deer as meat, commodity, and coin as it undergoes multiple
"deaths."A death in production occurs when the live deer is transformed into
consumable venison. A second death in exchange transforms the deer into an
object of sacrificial exchanges between hunters and supernatural agencies,
among which the Virgin is paramount.A final death in circulation transforms

the venison-an amalgam of living labor and dead deer-into a sum of Mexi-
can pesos that subsequently undergoes serial transformationsinto other com-
modities and currencies. In the process, the deer, the hunt, and the other
sources of the Virgin's money are alternately revealed to, and concealed from,
public view. To follow the multiple deaths and incarnations of a deer as crea-
ture, commodity, and currency is thus to move beyond the "social life" of a
commodity to explore the secret life of the deer's flesh as it is transubstantiated
into the Virgin's money.
First Death: Production

By the time it hears, it is too late. The sounds of whistling, breaking foli-
age, barking, and the smell of human sweat-all these signal danger. The deer
(keh) bounds off downwind in flight. As it leaps throughthe wood, it races past
a peccary and another deer, also on the run. Leaving its pursuers behind, the
deer bolts through an open clearing and braces for a jump over a barbed-wire
fence. There is one explosion and then another.It falls for a moment, wounded,
and then rises and bolts sideways in a staggering run, evading the hounds for a
moment. The sound of barking closes in as the dogs follow the scent of blood.
Suddenly the slowing deer is cornered and falls, struggling to rise as the dogs
circle round. There are shouts and the sound of men running nearby. Then
there is one more blow and it is over.8
Deer and peccary are protected species in Yucatain;forest rangersfine, im-
prison, and confiscate the guns of those thought to be guilty of poaching. In
1995 and 1996, in the state of tension that accompanied the Zapatista uprising
in Chiapas, forests adjacent to the pueblo were subjected to particularlyintense
supervision. With the military presence on the rise, even the most experienced
of huntersexercised extreme caution or avoided the hunt altogether. That year,
the priest and presidente municipal of the pueblo requested special permission
from the forestal authorities to hunt deer legally for the festivals of the Virgin.
The officials showed them a book of laws forbidding the hunting of deer and
peccary and offered permission for the entire pueblo of several thousand peo-
ple to kill a maximum of only three adult male deer. While the priest and the
presidente were subject to the anger of pueblo residents (not just hunters, but
also those not directly involved in the gremios) for having asked in the first
place, the forest rangers became the object of widespread derision. How can
you tell the sex of a deer as it bounds past you in the brush? Had the officials
brandishingtheir books of laws ever ventured out into the woods at all?9
Such restrictions are seen as unfair by pueblo residents, who are quick to
cite the importance of the hunt for subsistence and the worship of the Virgin.
"With these restrictions they are harming us," one hunter explained, "but our
poverty obliges us to continue. You have to eat, don't you?" Faced with the
possibility of imprisonment and the confiscation of their weapons if captured,
the gremios reacted in a way that indicated their familiarity with forest surveil-
lance: They decreased their visibility. They reduced the size of hunting parties,
kept themselves to little-used paths and roads to evade detection; and they

avoided the public display of deer carcasses and sale of venison tacos for the
rest of the summer.10
Amid such concerns, the hunters, who were all members of the gremio,
had agreed to meet the night before outside Tiger's house on the outskirts of
the pueblo. It was around4:00 a.m. The men straggled in one by one with their
gear: sandals, long-sleeved shirts, patched and torn trousers, old single-bar-
reled breech-loading shotguns, satchels to carry water bottles, and balls of corn
dough for making gruel. There were a few scrawny dogs, mangy but experi-
enced in the hunt. When a rickety flatbed truck arrived, dogs and men leaped in
and crowded together, making room for the latecomers who ran up as the en-
gine roared. We set off, about two dozen in number, clinging to ropes as the
truck lurched on its way. Before long, we left the main road and the truck
swerved onto a rocky dirt path. Furtheron, thorny branches, sharp enough to
rip fabric or skin, whipped the unfortunate men standing on the sides of the
truck bed. The truck lurched and rolled on the rocky trail. Tiger shouted at the
driver, "Step on it, son of a bitch!" We laughed. Rabbit followed his lead, low-
ering his shotgun toward a cow standing by the roadside: "I'll shoot that deer!"
There were more laughs and then silence.
Several hours later, we arrived at the camp. Chen Sotzil was just a clear-
ing by a small ranch. There was a well and a hunter's shack built of three ram-
shackle walls of piled stone with a palm leaf roof. The sun had not yet risen but
the sky was lightening. Dragon lit a fire and every man produced something he
carried in his bag-eggs, liver, and some tortillas-passing them aroundto the
rest of us. The sun was just rising as we set off silently in single file. We
paused for a moment as a few men turned off the narrow trail to head down-
wind. They were to hide themselves in the brush, lying in wait for the deer (the
pa'atal, "waiting"). The rest of us continued the quiet march into the woods to
flush the deer (the p 'uh, "drivingout").
We walked for perhaps a kilometer. Then Tiger turned and pointed at
Rabbit, who moved into the woods to take up a position on the side of the path,
shouldering his gun. We continued on and soon Tiger pointed to the next man,
who turned and stepped off the path. There were only five of us left. Tiger
pointed to Bug, who steered me into the woods, telling me with his eyes to
wait. The rest were lost to sight. Listening attentively, Bug gripped his shotgun
and scanned the trees and bramble. Then there was a low whistle-Tiger's
whistle, followed by Bug's whistled response and more whistles ever fainter in
the distance, each man in turn signaling his readiness. Bug headed straight into
the woods, easily finding holes in what seemed an impenetrablewall of brush.
I marked his passage and followed, crashing clumsily through the thicket and
trying to fight off the thorny branches and an insistent cattle fly. Bug looked
ahead to identify the flora and tried to teach me, "This is called chucum. Look
out for its spines!" Every few minutes he stopped, whistling and listening for
the others. Moving too far ahead of or behind the others would allow the deer
to escape, too far to one side or the other and we risked being mistaken for
game or being hit by a stray shot. Ever vigilant, Bug scanned the ground for

spoor: deer feces, tracks, or mounds of earth that betrayed the rooting of pecca-
ries.
There was a rustle nearby as something ran alongside us. Bug pointed his
gun at the brush, but it was only one of the dogs racing ahead. There were more
whistles and we moved faster, for Bug sensed that the quarrywas near, fleeing
the advancing line of hunters. A shot rang out ahead and then to the right-
downwind from where the group of men on pahtal waited. Then there was the
sign that the first of the p'uh had made it to where the group on pahtal were
waiting-a five-tone whistle that marked the syllables of ts'o'ok in k'uchul (I
have arrived!). In another moment, we reached a barbed-wire fence enclosing
cattle pasturage. We headed alongside it until we met the others who had cir-
cled the dead deer. Chicken Thief swiftly bound the deer's feet while the dogs
licked at its wounds, eager for blood. Corn Cob had already hoisted a small
peccary onto his shoulders, strapping it to his forehead with a rope. Chicken
Thief followed suit, hoisting the heavy deer onto his shoulders. We crawled
under the barbed wire and continued on our way.
Through forest and milpas, cattle land and old henequen fields, there
would be other sorties. We kept to trackless thickets and narrow paths to es-
cape the notice of forest rangers and army patrols. Returning to camp we were
laden with carcasses-four deer, two peccary, a wild turkey. Dragon and
Squirrel set gnarled, skilled hands to dressing the animals. A swift cut from
neck to belly and the stomach and organs were lifted out and hung to dry on a
nearby branch.More cuts and the flesh came away in chunks that were thrown
into a pot of boiling water. Squirrel dangled a peccary over the fire, singeing
the bloated carcass. Tiger hoisted some deer onto the truck, concealing them
under a layer of freshly cut wood. The rest of us poured hot water over our
limbs and plucked out ticks we had picked up in the woods. The sun set and, af-
ter eating deer stew, we settled down to sleep on palm leaves spread over the
hard ground.
After another day of hunting, we returned to the pueblo. It was growing
dark. We met by Polito's house where the carcasses of deer and peccaries lay
hidden behind closed doors. Soon a roasting pit (pib) was dug to cook the meat.
A bucket filled with watered-down cane liquor and ice was passed around to
drink, along with a bowl of deer brains flavored with lime juice. Soon the meat
was ready. It was laid out before us and every man chose his portion according
to the rules of the hunt. One leg was for the driver of the truck that carriedus to
the forest. The stomach was for the man who shot the deer. In this case, two
men had fired and now each challenged the other's right. Then equal shares
were apportioned to every man who participated in the hunt, regardless of his
role or whether he had brought down a deer. There was laughter and joking,
bickering over choice pieces of meat and drinking. Finally each man returned
home with a bag of meat to be consumed at home or, if there was enough, to be
passed along to relatives and friends."
For the gremio hunters, taking a deer is hard work. Considerable energies
and material resources are dedicated to the hunt, and the venison brought back

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Carrying a deer to camp. All photos by Paul Eiss.

Figure2
Backin the pueblo,dividingthe spoils(photoblurredto protectidentities).
to the pueblo is a vital and valued contributionto family subsistence. The deer
hunt is clearly a communal form of productive activity, but the hunters them-
selves do not see it as a form of productive labor. Rather, they understandthe

interaction between men and deer very broadly as a relation of exchange. Gre-
mio hunters view the forest less as a resource to be exploited or as a place of la-
bor than as a governed arena of sacred exchanges in which humans, animals,
spirits, and divine actors are joined as participants. It is in terms of exchange
and in terms of the sacred economy in which the practice of hunting is embed-
ded that the deer dies a second death.
Second Death: Exchange

For Mayan populations in the Yucatin peninsula, the forest has always
been as much a place of exchange as of production. Pre-Hispanic Yucatec Ma-
yan sculpture, glyphs, codices, and colonial era texts that refer to pre-Hispanic
Mayan society depict the forest as a world inhabited and guardedby supernatu-
ral agencies like YumKax (lord of the forest), Chac (god of rain), and YumKeh
(lord of the deer), as well as a host of lesser beings charged with protecting the
forest and its denizens. Those who dared to cut and burn the forest to make
milpa offered sacrifices and performedrituals aimed at appeasing the anger of
the guardians of the forest by recompensing them for the right to clear and
plant the land. The same was true of hunters who, in a manner not unlike con-
temporarypractice, formed large groups to hunt deer and creatures of the for-
est. After hunters shot the deer with arrows and cooked its flesh in a roasting
pit, the venison was shared among all participants in the hunt. Large-scale
ceremonies were held each year to appease the spirits of the forest for the blood
spilled and ask permission for future hunts with offerings of sacrifice, ritual,
and prayer.12
The public worship of such Mayan deities as Yum Kax was radically cir-
cumscribed following the Spanish conquest. Nonetheless, belief in and ex-
changes with a wide arrayof supernaturalactors in the forest continued. Under
Spanish rule, Mayan populations integrated Christian and Mayan religious
frameworks of ritual and belief (Farriss 1984). Such spiritual hybridity has
continued through the present among many contemporarypopulations, though
Mayan deities are generally conceived of as subordinates of the dominant
Christian god. An extensive ethnographic literature has documented the con-
tinued importance of the Mayan supernaturalentities for many Yucatec popu-
lations, such as balamob or yuntzilob (the protectors of human settlements,
milpas, and beehives), kuilob kaaxob or yumil kaxob (guardians of the forest),
and the chacob (spirits of the rain), alongside a host of Christian saints and
other supernaturalentities. Ritualized exchanges link the presence and disposi-
tion of such entities to the fate of the milpa, to the arrivalor absence of rains, to
the maturationof maize and its protection from animals, and to the protection
of beehives. Throughsuch public ceremoniesas the ch'a chaak (to plea to god and
the chaco'ob for rain), and the u janli kol (which gives thanksfor the beginnings
of the maize harvest), men offer their prayers and sacrifice in exchange for
divine bounty and protection, as well as forgiveness for the clearing of the
forest. Typically these ceremonies involve the overlay of Christian and Mayan
ritual practices and often center on sacrifices of chickens and offerings of corn

gruel or other foods (Hanks 1990; Redfield and Villa Rojas 1962; Terin and
Rasmussen 1994; Villa Rojas 1978).
Other supernaturalentities known as the metan lu'um (along with the
saints San Gabriel, San Cecilio, and San Marcelino) are charged with guarding
forest lands and animals. Beneath these figures are the laj kajo'ob or sepo'ob
(stones that guard particular areas of the forest and the creatures that reside
there). The most feared protector of the deer, however, is the zip, a supernatu-
ral creaturethat looks like a small deer with large horns, from which a nest of
wasps often hangs suspended. To protect the deer, the zip deceives hunters into
shooting at iguanas ratherthan the deer. If a hunter misses his target, the zip is
often held responsible. The zip cannot be killed with normal weapons, and its
appearance is taken as a warning that hunters are exceeding the acceptable
number of prey. If the zip decides to punish hunters, it will either afflict them
with a fatal illness or release its wasps with their lethal stings (Peniche Barrera
1982; Redfield and Villa Rojas 1962; Sobrino Campos 1940a, 1940b; Terin
and Rasmussen 1994; Villa Rojas 1978).
The deer play a crucial role in the exchanges of which their flesh is the ob-
ject. This is most evident in the case of the venado de virtud (an enchanted
deer), which is much more difficult to hunt and kill than an ordinarydeer. In its
stomach, the venado de virtud carries a tunich keh (deer stone) that reputedly
will bring its bearer great fortune in the hunt. With such a talisman, a hunter
will bring down deer every time he enters the forest, while others returnempty
handed after days on the hunt. However, the stone only works as long as it is
kept hidden in a small bag that the hunter carries with him. The moment the
hunter reveals its existence to another man, the stone loses all its power.13 In
any case, the stone will only work for four years, after which it must be shal-
lowly buried in the forest where another deer will soon come to recover and
consume it, thereby becoming a venado de virtud in turn (Sobrino Campos
1940b).
Hunters make frequent offerings to the metan lu'um, laj kajo'ob, and
sepo'ob, burning incense or making other offerings in returnfor permission to
hunt. Upon killing a deer, it is customary to put the animal's head, liver, and
stomach on a tree for one hour as a way of symbolically offering the animal to
the forest guardians. In Mayan pueblos, chicken sacrifices and other offerings
are made to the lords of the forest and the zip in ceremonies like the loj tson
and the k'eex, which are conducted in recognition and recompense for the suc-
cesses of the hunt.14 Even in areas like Tetiz where such rituals are no longer
regularly performed, other practices insistently mark the hunt as a relationship
of exchange between men, forest, and supernaturalentities. If a hunterhas poor
luck in the woods, he may regain his fortune by making an offering for the
lords at crosses placed along roads and paths leading into the woods. He places
three stones in a pile and recites an Ave Maria and a Padre Nuestro. If he
brings down a deer that day, then he should returnanotherday to light a candle
as an offering to the same cross. Similarly, if excessive hunting has led the for-
est to become "exhausted"or "stale," an offering of food, sugar, or matches in

the woods may regenerate it. If a rancher wants to keep others from hunting
deer on his land, he may bury the liver and entrails of a deer on his property.
From that moment forward, deer will not be found on his ranch.'5
As a productive activity, the hunt is exclusively male. While women take
in
part some sylvan occupations such as cutting wood and gathering oregano,
powerful sanctions operate against their direct participation in the hunt. The
gun is considered to be masculine in gender, and its effectiveness is directly
linked to the moral characterand honor of its male possessor (Sobrino Campos
1939). Some believe that if a woman so much as touches a shotgun, she will
take away the weapon's force forever.16 If the possessor of a tunich keh allows
it to be seen or discovered by a woman, he will go insane (Terin and Ras-
mussen 1994). The ritual and sacrificial exchanges realized between hunters
and the lords of the forest are masculine provinces. Women are not allowed to
participatein, attend, or view rituals like the loj tson and k'eex (Terin and Ras-
mussen 1994). In so many ways, hunting, both as a productive activity and
form of exchange, is defined as a male prerogative; females who trespass upon
this prerogativebring great peril.
Greater still is the peril to hunters who violate the norms of restraint and
respect and the spirit of reciprocity that structurethe practice of hunting and its
rituals of exchange. The yumil keh appears in stories and the ethnographic lit-
eraturein the form of a man who cares for the deer as a rancherwould tend his
cattle and afflicts avaricious hunters with fatal illnesses. In one version re-
counted to me in Tetiz, a man who hunted excessively (as often as three times
each week) began to have bad luck, missing most of his targets. When he fi-
nally wounded one animal and set off in pursuit of it, he was led to a corral full
of deer in the middle of the forest. A yumil keh approached, scolding him for
killing so many of his deer, and then struck him with a whip. Fleeing the forest,
the hunter soon fell deathly ill. Though cured of his malady by an herbalist, he
would never enter the forest again." Similar stories have been noted in other
Yucatecan pueblos (Burns 1983; Ligorred Perram6n 1990).18
The severest of penalties are reserved for the hunter who misuses the
tunich keh by killing excessive numbers of deer. Stories are often told of the
punishment meted out to hunters who violate the terms of exchange by not re-
turningthe stone. A group of deer, who keep count of the numberof deer killed
by each hunter, turns the table by chasing him down and devouring him along
with his clothing and gun (Burns 1983; Hanks 1990; Sobrino Campos 1940a,
1940b). One man with whom I spoke reported that a friend of his father had
suffered such a fate. After excessively hunting the deer for personal profit, he
found himself one day in the forest surroundedby a voracious horde of deer.
Terrified, he climbed up into a tree to save himself, but he died later that night
from a mysterious illness-presumably inflicted on him by the deer or their
protectors.19
Tetiz is by no means a "traditional"indigenous Mayan pueblo. Many of
the rituals and practices that have been documented in eastern Yucatan no
longer exist in the pueblos located in the former henequen zone or are no

longer practiced with frequency. However, when men from Tetiz organize a
hunt-whether on their own or for the gremio-they act in cognizance of the
forest as a governed domain of exchanges with its own system of norms, custo-
dians, punishments for violators, and rewardsfor those who respect its customs
and authorities. Moreover, in Tetiz the Mayan understanding of the hunt and
the interaction of hunters with the forest as a sacred exchange has been deep-
ened, ratherthan attenuated,by the wider set of practices of worship associated
with the gremios of the Virgin of Tetiz. All the gremio members obey a strict
prohibition on the consumption of alcohol while in the woods on a hunt and de-
scribe their abstinence, like the hunt (and other ritual charges, such as acting as
carriersof the Virgin in processions), as the fulfillment of promises (promesas)
that they offer in tribute to the Virgin.20
The presence of the Virgin in the hunt reinforces longstanding Mayan
practices and beliefs regardinghunting and the exchanges that link men and su-
pernaturalagencies in the forest. Strikingly, however, such exchanges are not
perceived simply as sacred acts but as miracles (milagros). If a deer is missed
by a sure shot fired at close quarters,it is because it was not so decreed by the
Virgin. If a deer falls, whether the shot is fired from a distance or close by, it is
seen as a miracle evidencing the Virgin's intercession. Every deer that falls is
thought to bear a mark on one ear, which indicates that it was chosen by the
Virgin. Every death is thus a miracle and evidence of divine or supernaturalin-
tervention. Even the tunich keh is referred to not only as a magical talisman
but, in the words of one hunter, as a "greatmiracle."21 The miracles of the hunt
are not limited to the bounty of the forest and its guardians. They also extend to
the protections given to those who hunt by the Virgin or the saints or by Jesus
himself, whom I have heard referred to by older residents as the Lord of the
Deer (El Sehiorde los Venado, an appelation that further suggests the overlay
of beliefs of Mayan and Christian origin). Thus, when a rattlesnake bit Don
K'at, leader of the Gremio de Cazadores of Hacienda Nohdzonot during a
hunting trip, the absence of symptoms of poisoning was taken as evidence of
the protection of San Antonio, the saint to whom the gremio was devoted. If
hunters go unharmedby stray bullets, escape the fangs of poisonous serpents,
and are unafflicted by sickness, these outcomes are, like the carcasses they
carry home, seen as miracles. Hunters defer to the intervention of the Virgin or
other figures honored by the gremios when they enjoy the bounty of the hunt
and emerge unscathed.22
That the concept of "miracle"is applied to such quotidian events and ac-
tions suggests that the embedding of communal hunting practices and sacred
exchanges within fiestas of the Virgin may move interactions with the forest
beyond the realm of production, and even beyond the sacred exchanges that
typically take place there. This was evident in the words of one older hunter,
Don Mauro,as he explainedthe tunichto me: "Thetunichgives you good fortune,
but it is all counted. Like money, the tunich becomes devalued." It will, in the
end, bring misfortune to its possessor. In comparing the tunich with money,
Don Mauro indicated the significance taken on by that talisman once it is

embedded in a wider, sacred circulatory system. The tunich, a magical talis-

man that derives from the deer's body and thus shares its substance, configures
the hunt as a relationship of exchange, both with the deer and with their guardi-
ans. But as the act of the hunt is connected to a wider economy of relationships
in the pueblo, the tunich begins to appear like a coin, a medium of exchange
that set in motion a series of further exchanges of money and commodities
across space and time. For Don Mauro, it thus made sense to think of the tunich
as a bearer of quantifiable value in a wider set of relationships and exchanges
mediated by the money form. The tunich, by analogy with money, was for him
a token of exchange whose overuse might bring the kind of perils that are often
associated with the misuse of money in violation of communal norms (Parry
and Bloch 1989).
The Virgin's quotidian miracles suggest that the hunt has been doubly
transformed as a form of production and exchange. First, through such mir-
acles, the Virgin takes her place as the primary benefactor of the sacred ex-
changes through which gremio hunters receive the bounty of the forest in the
form of deer. Second, the cycle of production and exchange in the forest is
transformedthrough its relation to the Virgin's worship. If hunters do not offer
sacrifices to the Virgin in the forest, as was previously the case with the for-
est's supernaturalguardians, how do they reciprocate her beneficence? It is
only when hunting is related to the circulation of deer meat and deer money in
a sacred economy encompassing both forest and pueblo that the full signifi-
cance of the deer's miraculous sacrifice and the resolution of the hunters' sa-
cred debt may be understood. Here we must follow the half of the venison un-
consumed by gremio huntersthat is transformedvia sale into money for the use
of the Gremio de Cazadores. In that moment, the deer's flesh is transformed
into deer money (taak'in keh) in the form of pesos. Here the deer dies a third
and final death-in circulation. At the same moment, it undergoes a miracu-
lous rebirth,reincarnatedas the money of the Virgin.23
Third Death: Circulation

After falling prey to the hunters, the deer proceeds onward to multiple
fates. It offers part of its substance, as venison, to the hunters for their con-
sumption. As the yield of the hunt, the deer accompanies the hunters to their
homes, providing sustenance to their families as well. It helps them cement so-
cial ties through gifts of meat that hunters and their immediate family make to
other relatives and friends, as the meat is carriedfrom house to house in plastic
bags or trays. The rest of the deer, however, escapes immediate consumption,
runningfurtively to M6ridawhere it sells itself at the high prices offered on the
black market for illegally poached venison.24Thus the deer dies a final time,
exchanging its substance for a quantity of Mexican pesos. This is directly re-
lated to the state's effective interdiction of deer meat, which keeps prices high.
But this death is also the animal's rebirth as money of the Virgin and as pay-
ment toward the liquidation of Tetiz's sacred debt to its miraculous benefactor.

Figure 3
Fiesta of the Gremio:makingtortillas.
In monetary form, the deer immediately returnsto Tetiz, leaping into the
coffers of the gremio. It mingles there with other monies donated by nonhunt-
ing gremio members, both female and male, derived from the sale of produce
or from labor in chicken farms and domestic work. It also joins the abundant
pesos, confiscated by gremio members who have left Tetiz to work in Los An-
geles and Seattle but continue to make yearly cash contributionsto supportthe
gremio and honor the Virgin. Accompanied by, and merged with, these funds,
the deer continues its relentless transformationsfrom money to commodity and
back to money as it passes through alternating moments of exchange and
use-for it has become a hybrid entity infused with the deer's blood and flesh
but gilded with money. Though dead in body, the deer survives in its monetary
form and reappearsin the form of the food and drinkthat are publicly distributed
and consumed at the fiestas of the gremio. Exchanged for money, the deer meat
enables the purchase of sacks of maize, beans, onions, sugar, flour, and rice

Figure 4
The keh k'ak'.
and in this form merges with the nonmonetarycontributions of gremio mem-

bers. It becomes reanimatedin the form. It reanimatesitself in the form of live
turkeys and chickens, which peck at their feed as the sacrifice approaches.The
deer, now appearingas a variety of staples, is furthertransformedby the inten-
sive labor (i.e., cooking and food preparation)contributedby female members
of the Gremio de Cazadores and offers itself to devotees of the Virgin in the
form of tamales, deer stew, and drinks of chocolate or corn gruel. Refusing
simply to disappear into the bellies of the faithful, the deer exchanges itself
once again, this time for beer. In the sale of that beer by the gremio to the men
and women who come to its fiestas, the deer sprints back with monetary in-
crease to the treasuryof the gremio.
The deer engraves its mark, permanentlyand publicly, in the ledgers (li-
bretas) of the gremio, which record the numerical sums of cash credited to

Figure 5
On procession.
each hunteras shares of the total cash derived from venison sales-from as lit-
tle as 100 pesos for Squirrel, a sporadic hunter, to 1,000 pesos for Tiger, who
never misses a hunt. However, it masks or laundersitself as simple sums of pe-
sos without any trace of its origin in the deer's flesh and its illicit commerce.
However, while the deer modestly effaces itself in the ledgers to protect the
faithful, it enthusiastically announces itself in colorful and costly banners

(estandartes) that are commissioned by the gremio (see cover photo). These
banners are fashioned by women at great cost in time and materials and were
valued at as much as 600 or 700 pesos in the late 1990s. After so many trans-
formations, the deer triumphantly, if momentarily, reasserts its nature in the
banners, upon which the Virgin typically appears surroundedby flowers and
kneeling deer, with large embroideredletters proclaiming the name of the gre-
mio whose devotions the worshipful deer convey.
On the morning of the fiesta of the gremio, the deer, now taking the form
of a banner, proudly takes its place in procession among others carried by hun-
dreds of women and men as they walk toward the church. It further assumes a
churchly form in the rosaries, decorations and lights for the altar, and candles
to light the chapel-all financed in part with the money from its sacrifice. The
deer offers itself to the Virgin in paid masses and sings her honor in the guise
of groups of mariachi musicians, who are employed at considerable cost to
sing to the Virgin. The deer races skyward and explodes as fireworks, the pre-
cise cost of which is a subject of endless public discussion. It dances for the
Virgin in the form of female dancers paid to perform a traditional dance
(jarana), sometimes accompanied by a man dancing with a pig head held aloft,
or even a deer head, as if to recall the animal whose presence, in the form of
money, animates the fiesta. At night, the deer exuberantly gallops through the
plaza outside the church, metamorphosed into a fire cow (wakax k'ak') or
even, recovering its form in life, as a fire deer (keh k'ak')-a deer bearing fire-
works and carried on the back of a man. As fireworks explode in every direc-
tion, observers scatter, laughing excitedly.
As the fiestas of the Virgin proceed, the money from the deer loses itself
among the monies from other sources and other gremios that circulate in the
pueblo and joins the flow of commodities and prestations typical of the fiestas
of the numerous gremios of Tetiz. Toward the climax and conclusion of the fi-
estas in mid-August, there are increasingly large processions, celebrations, and
traditional dances as visitors from neighboring pueblos and from across Yu-
catainarrive to join in the celebrations. The church sells deer, chicken, or pork
tacos, as well as beer and soda to raise funds for its own treasuryand activities.
It is said that in the past, dozens of deer would be displayed in the church, fes-
tooned with ribbons awaiting their transformation,first into meat and then into
money, to feed the faithful and honor the Virgin.25
As in forms of circulation associated with commercial capitalism, the cir-
culation of goods and commodities in the fiesta system begins and ends in the
exchange of money and other forms of symbolic wealth. However, to accom-
pany a deer throughout its three deaths and final reincarnationas the Virgin's
money is to encounter a mode of circulation that in many respects is remark-
ably different. While commercial capitalist circulation typically involves the
purchase and sale of commodities for quantitatively distinct, but qualitatively
identical money for commodities,26the hallmarkof this remarkablecirculatory
process is the qualitative transformation of diverse means of exchange: the
tunich keh, the deer as a quantity of pesos, the valuables "adorning"the Virgin

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Figure 6
The Virgin in procession.
in Carrilloy Ancona's story, the gremio money consecrated to the Virgin. This
qualitative difference is reflected in contemporaryperceptions of Francisco's
coin. While some Teticefios identify the coin as a Spanish peso, others call it a
Spanish real, while others even report that it was an American dollar. All
agree, however, that it was not a Mexican peso. Thus, the story of Francisco's
coin and of the other coins and valuables adorningthe Virgin takes on a differ-
ent meaning, as a story not only about the recognition of a lost coin, but about
the Virgin's power to transform apparently identical currency into qualita-
tively and recognizably distinct forms, whose apparentsimilarity as currency
masks their radical difference as coin. Though deer pesos, like Francisco's
peso, may appearidentical to Mexico's secular currency, they are "re-coined"
throughcirculation in a sacred economy as tokens of a different authority.
Considered as a circulatory process, then, the conversion of deer into the
Virgin's money reveals an ambivalent and hybrid social logic, one that allows
for transaction with a wider capitalist economy and the appropriationof its
forms (cf. Greenberg 1995). More than simply articulatingolder forms of com-
munal production and exchange with the capitalist economy, the Virgin's
money demonstrates an appropriationof both capitalist and communal social
forms of productionand exchange united in a hybridized sacred economy. The
movement of a deer traces the outlines of a sacred economy that joins forest
and pueblo, unites the people of Tetiz with the Virgin, and producesthe Virgin's
grace as a transcendentmaterial and spiritual value. To follow a deer through
its multiple lives is to survey the gifts and debts that link those human and

divine actorsthrougha series of transactions,moving from the momentthe Virgin

marks the ear of a deer through the hunt, to the sale of venison and the offer-
ings made to the Virgin by grateful worshippers. Gremio members not only re-
tell Francisco's story, they relive it, as they honor sacred debts and bear wit-
ness to the miracles of the Virgin.
The Money of History

In Tetiz, as in all places, time flows in multiple currents.27There is the
yearly passage between the cool, dry season and the season of intense heat and
rains. There are cycles of labor and movement associated with different kinds
of activity. Milpa lands are cleared, burned, planted, and harvested. Henequen
is cut and processed, and new shoots are planted. Men set off for Los Angeles
and returnwith their earnings. Women and men travel to neighboring pueblos
or to M6rida to marketproduce or to find work. Labor in the chicken farms is
experienced as a series of tasks, paychecks, raises, dismissals of workers, work
stoppages, and strikes. Newspapers arrive daily and, along with television and
radio broadcasts, advertise the passage of holidays, elections, and newsworthy
events that link the time of Tetiz with the time of the nation of Mexico.
Time's deepest channel, however, may be that of public ritual time-the
yearly cycle of fiestas, processions, and other events associated with the adora-
tion of the Virgin. In addition to the quotidian cycle of masses and church
events that take place under the Virgin's gaze, a series of processions and other
events extends throughout the year, typically occupying hundreds and some-
times even thousandsof people. These processions take place within the pueblo,
but they also accompany the Virgin to nearby pueblos, such as Hunucmdiand
Kinchil, and to haciendas in the area, such as Nohdzonot, or fartherafield, as
for example in the Virgin's yearly boat journey from the coastal pueblo of Ce-
lestdininto the Gulf, accompanied by dozens of fishing boats. While the largest
processions of the Virgin accompany her journey to and from Hunucmaiin late
January and early February, the cycle of activities reaches its climax in the
yearly festivals of the Virgin, which take place in the first half of the month of
August. The very sense of time passing in Tetiz is strongly related to the cycle
of events related to the Virgin. Every week and every day is filled with her,
since some public and widely commented event relating to her worship is
either happening, or has just happened, or is about to happen.
Where is the place of money in these events, and what is its role in the ex-
perience of time and the reckoning of history? There are large movements of
money associated with the processions and other events in which the Virgin
figures. In fairs accompanying the processions, the church sells beer and tacos,
and money is spent by pilgrims in local stores and restaurants.Of course, these
events and their temporal flow depend on money to the extent that currency is
integral to the festivities at every level. However, these monetary transactions
do not dominate the processions, nor do they take on an important symbolic
role in the public celebrations. However, other kinds of money do play a cru-
cial material and symbolic role in determining the rhythm and structureof the

Figure 7
Fiestaof the Cazadores:dancingwitha deerhead(photoblurredto protectidentity).
yearly cycle of gremio activities. A sizable proportionof the adult population

of Tetiz, both male and female, belongs to one or more gremios, while also par-
ticipating in other smaller-scale practices (i.e., donating a mass or paying a
group of mariachisto sing to the Virgin) that do not rise to the scale of organi-
zation characteristicof the gremios. While a gremio will sometimes tender an
invitation to a particularindividual to join its ranks, in general, membershipin
the gremio is open to whoever elects to make a donation in cash or in kind. The
act of donating even a small quantity,often called a bit of money (dinerito), es-
tablishes the new member on a par with all other participants.Even the dead
may remain members by willing that donations be given in their names in the
years following death. Membershipis often indicated by reference to the dona-
tion of money, as in the case of one man who referred to his membership in
multiple gremios by saying, "I put my bit of money here; I put my bit of money
there."Nonmembershipin a gremio is generally ascribed to poverty or stingi-
ness (ts'ut).28
The gremios' managementof funds effectively structuresthe temporalex-
tension of their activities and makes them comprehensible to participants as
three phases. In the first, called collection (recaudo), membersjoin and money
and other donations to the gremio are collected from Septemberto July. In the
second, called assembly (junta), meetings are held in June and July to organize
and account for gremio funds, plan for the fiestas, and make appropriatepur-
chases. In the third phase, which is the "fiesta"itself, masses, processions, and
other events are organized, financed, and attended by the gremios and other
participantsin August.

In the recaudo phase, members of the gremio begin making donations of

money, as well as in-kind contributions. Monies from men's labor in the fields
and chicken facilities, from the sale of fruit and vegetables by market women,
from migrant workers in Los Angeles, and from the sale of venison enter the
coffers of the gremios. Members tend to aim at giving a respectable quantity of
money in line with the norms of the gremio, while not attempting to outdo the
donations of other members through ostentatious and competitive giving. It is
generally thought that one should give according to one's possibilities, and that
all gifts, whether one peso or 100, are equal in the Virgin's eyes. In recent
years, as partisan conflicts between the dominant and opposition political par-
ties (the Institutional Revolutionary Party [PRI] and the National Action Party
[PAN], respectively) reached the point of open violence, gremio leaders con-
tended openly, leading to the politicization of the gremios and the departureof
some gremio members who belong to the PAN. More recently, however, they
have been able to reduce the level of conflict and recover levels of member-
ship. In part, this has stemmed from the efforts of the Church hierarchy in Yu-
catan to reduce the severe partisan political conflict in the region and, in part,
from the efforts of members to militate for "true faith" and depoliticized gre-
mio participationagainst the actions of those who broughtpartisanpolitics into
the gremios.29
The management of the gremios and their resources is typically entrusted
to a junta composed of a president, secretary, treasurer, vice president, and
other committee members. The responsibilities of leadership are burdensome.
While the Treasurermust occupy him or herself with collecting and managing
funds, the president hosts the fiesta of the gremio in his or her own backyard
and usually must dedicate three days to preparing for the fiesta, as well as do-
nating several turkeys for the gremio lunch. As gremio leaders age, they are
seen as less likely to be able to meet the arduousresponsibilities of leadership,
and eventually the offices are shifted onto younger members, either through a
vote or the uncontested offer of a volunteer.30
It is in the meeting of the juntas in June and July that the large-scale pub-
lic accounting of money begins. The management of the recaudo phase re-
quires particularskill, since the money does not arrive all at once but accumu-
lates in the form of small quantities sporadically given by individuals to the
gremio officials. As the fiestas approach, the gremio leaders face the difficult
task of making sure that the income of the gremio will cover its anticipated ex-
penditures for the year as they begin to arrangefor the purchases and supplies
(including the costly wakax k'ak and keh k'ak [fire cows and fire deer] and the
estandartes). When funds prove insufficient, as in the case of the Gremio de
Cazadores, additional hunts, deer sales, and sometimes the sale of tacos or beer
are arrangedto cover the short-termdebt (p 'ax). Although there are sometimes
surpluses or debts of a few hundredpesos after the fiestas are concluded, the
goal of the gremio is to finish the fiesta cycle even (nivelado), with neither sur-
plus nor debt.

Gremio leaders often use metaphorsderived from the world of business to

describe the scope of their responsibilities and to set the gremios off from less
complicated enterprises. As Don Mauro said of the gremio F6 y Misericordia,
the fiesta of the gremio "is held for the Virgin ... that is why we are in this
business more or less" (negociando, where negocio is used to refer to a busi-
ness). As Tiger said of the smaller groups, "mina'an muisica,mina'an p6sibili-
dad, mina'an dconomia, mina'an taak'in ... yaan a beetik mas gast6" [they
have no music, no possibilities, no economy, no money ... you have to spend
more (to make a gremio)]. The size of the gremios, the complexity of their ac-
tivities, and the level of their income and expenses distinguish them from other
forms of small-scale individual or group donations, such as paying for a mass
or hiring a mariachi band to sing to the Virgin outside the gremio system.
The fiestas center on a series of processions, masses, and fireworks dis-
plays, but among their central moments are the fiestas of the gremio them-
selves, which are typically held in the backyard of the Presidents or gremio
founders. These events include presentationsof tacos, tamales, and atole to any
pueblo resident who visits the gremio mass and a fiesta for gremio members
and their guests, in which substantial amounts of food, drink, and music are
provided to the members (however, beer is sold rather than distributed for
free).31 In every rocket exploded, every mass conducted, every candle burned,
and in the large-scale gifts of food and drink made by the gremio to nonmem-
ber pueblo residents, even in the music of the fiesta and the mariachis paid to
sing to the Virgin, gremio members recognize their own investment in, and
contribution to, the gremio as a share in every moment of the spectacle. Like
Francisco's coin, the value of their modest contributions seems to return to
them with increase.
Outside of planning the fiestas themselves, the central activity of these
juntas is the drafting of the libretas that record the income and expenses of the
gremio. Throughout the junta phase, the gremio junta members render ac-
counts, often by memory, of gifts given them in cash or in kind, and the secre-
tary records these in a draft ledger. The expenses of the gremio are divided into
"house expenses," such as the purchase of corn, turkeys, chickens, beans, on-
ions, sugar, banana leaves, and chocolate, and "fiesta expenses," such as mu-
sic, fireworks, masses, and candles. Each item is carefully listed with price and
quantity noted when relevant. At the last junta before the fiesta, the final list of
members, individual donations, and expenses are inscribed in the libreta of the
gremio, a ledger that often extends back through decades of gremio fiestas and
activities. These ledgers, which are typically composed of dog-eared school
notebooks or sheaves of papers, are carefully guarded and are understood and
described by members as constituting archives, the formation and conservation
of which are essential to the gremio. All money collected or spent by the gre-
mio must be scrupulously recorded in written form in the libretas. As one
secretaryput it: "Yaanu abonarta'alti u lista" [It must be credited on the list].
In the ledgers, the money form does indeed efface the particularnature of
the value contributedby individuals to the gremios (that is, the money's origin

in a particularkind of labor or livelihood), and in effect abstractsthe producer

from the product by presenting those values as exterior to and independent of
the persons who produced them. All members are acknowledged, but the ex-
tensive and largely female labor of the preparationof food for the fiestas is not
quantified in the ledger. While such labor does not take the form of an account-
able sum of money or a commodity, women who contribute labor to the fiestas
are still recognized in the lists. Female members of the Gremio de Cazadores,
while of course aware of the masculine nature of the hunt, are nonetheless in-
sistent on the parity of their own contributions to the gremio, whether in cash,
kind, or labor.32
The accounting of the gremio's resources is only provisional until the
public reading and approval of the libreta by the secretary before the assem-
bled members. In the reading of the ledger, which is heard by all members in
rapt attention, these contributionsare publicly declared as a series of quantities
of money attached to the names of gremio members. At this time every mem-
ber has the right to challenge publicly the amount attached to his or her name.
The right of challenge is seen as the guarantee of the legitimacy of the gremio
and the honesty and competence of gremio leaders, rather than as a form of
competitive recognition of the contributions of members (which in any case
tend to be roughly equivalent in value).33
Even if the money's origins in particular forms of labor are effectively
"laundered,"34 the recited sums of money are identified publicly with the social
personalities of the named members and are grouped by sex as well (i.e., in
separate recitations of male and female lists), marking the gender of donated
funds. Hence, while the term laundering typically refers to the strategy of hid-
ing the origins of money in order to facilitate its appropriationby individuals,
in the gremios, the opposite is the case. While the reading of the ledgers pub-
licly marks the individual contributions to the Virgin as cash values and com-
modities (ratherthan as labor performedor deer hunted), the public display and
consumption of collective wealth at the fiestas also facilitates the broadest pos-
sible notions of every individual's share, far beyond the potential purchasing
power of the original individual contributions. As participantsin the gremios
frequently emphasize, although one might have contributed only a single peso,
or even if one contributes labor ratherthan money or commodities to the gre-
mio, one "owns" a stake in every aspect of the costly fiestas, processions, and
gifts to the Virgin. Far from a symptom of alienation, the money form also se-
lectively reassociates gremio members with the total value accumulatedby the
gremio, precisely through the process of abstractionin which the particularla-
bors of participants may be by turns laundered, represented in accountable
form, and visibly expressed in the gremio's works and festivities.
Most importantly,the money fetishism of the gremio system is not entire-
ly amnesiac in effect but ratherenables a long-termconsciousness and accounting
of history. It is through an explicit accounting of, and relationship to, money,
as a measure of value and means of accounting, that the decades-long careers
of the gremios as corporationsunfold. Each gremio tends to be associated with

a particulargroup of people, often connected by ties of family or friendship,

whose lives shape the course of the gremio from its birth, to its subsequent ex-
pansion, and eventually-as gremio members age and hunting and other fund-
raising activities become more difficult-to its contraction, impoverishment,
and disappearance. The oldest existing gremios of Tetiz are about 50 years
old.35
The long-term history of the gremios is inscribed and made manifest to
gremio and pueblo members in several forms, all of which depend on the
money form as a conveyance and representationof value. The first consists of
the costly estandartes, or banners of the gremio, which are in effect symbolic
"banks"of surplus funds of the gremios after the fiesta expenses. They also
serve to commemorate importantdates such as the founding of the gremio. In
addition to ornate depictions of the Virgin and, in the case of the Gremio de
Cazadores, deer, the bannersare markedwith the date and year when they were
first exhibited in procession in the fiestas of the gremio, and they are displayed
on the church altar flanking the Virgin on the day of the gremio fiesta. They are
"archived"-guarded, stored, and maintained as public records of great impor-
tance. They serve to "document"the bounty, charity, and fiestas of previous
years.
The most important document of the gremios, however, is the libreta it-
self, which records the previous history of the gremio: its members, their con-
tributions, and gremio expenses. At the meetings of the junta and at the public
readings of the ledgers at the fiesta, the records of the gremio from previous
years or decades are often reviewed and discussed by members. The libreta is
not only kept for its value in the administrationof the gremio, but it is also read
with interest for an accounting of the contributions of present, previous, and
deceased members to the gremio's material and symbolic wealth. In the libreta
may also be found evidence of wider processes, such as the meteoric rise of
commodity prices and the dramaticdevaluations of the Mexican peso over the
decades. One may read evidence of the changing fortunes and misfortunes of
the gremio and speculate on the political conflicts, economic crises, luckless or
bountiful hunts, and waves of immigration to Los Angeles that have affected
the coffers of the gremio. As one gremio leader remarked on inspecting the
ledger for a previous year, "iMare! iApretado'on le afio6!" [Mother! We had
hard luck that year!]. In comparing it with the present he exclaimed, "Look at
how much money we raised on those three hunts! The hunt was good to us this
year."
Gremio leaders explicitly refer to the libretas as an archive. When asked
why they retain records of the previous years, for instance, one secretary re-
sponded simply: "Yaan u archivarta'al"[It must be archived]. Those charged
with maintaining records of the income and expenses think of themselves as
contributing to the formation of an archive, as one gremio leader expressed
during the festivities: "I record those who bring money. Year after year, I re-
cord .... Everything is recorded.I have everything, written down in the libreta.
How much the men give, and how much the women give." In maintaining and

inspecting the libretas of previous years and decades and in storing and dis-
playing the estandartes,the gremio officials demonstratean acute awareness of
the historical trajectory of the gremio from the times decades ago, when "just
pennies were collected" and the entire fiesta cost 50 pesos, to the fiestas of the
present day, which cost thousands of (devalued) pesos.36
In addition to the libretas and estandartes, the other material manifesta-
tions of the gremio's works-even the exploding fireworks whose cost is dis-
cussed with such interest-may be seen as transitorydocuments of a living ar-
chive. Perceived by Teticefios as representative of quantifiable sums of the
Virgin's money, these material objects bear readable traces of the past. Even
the physical structure of Tetiz's church is perceived by many older gremio
members as historical evidence-a record of the gremios of the past and their
money. As Tiger is quick to recall, in earlier years the lack of restrictions on
hunting and the sale of beer and deer tacos by the gremio allowed it to amass
surplus funds sufficient to make significant improvements to the church itself:
fans for the chapel, florescent lighting fixtures inside and around the Virgin,
and, many years before, an organ.37The gremio is no longer in a position to do-
nate sums of money sufficient to such purchases. However, the history of their
successful efforts to do so, along with the large amounts of money that the
church is able to make through bazaars and the operation of food and beer
stands catering to thousands of procession-goers, lead many to see the small
amounts of deer meat and money that they contribute to the gremio as the mi-
raculous means through which their church and, to some extent, their pueblo
have been made.
Gremio members join and contribute to the gremios as individuals, but
they experience their place in it and look upon its works as Teticefios, for
whom the works of the gremio and of the Virgin are the most convincing evi-
dence not only of religious faith but also of the autonomy and honor of Tetiz.
Hence, in response to my questions about how gremio members felt upon wit-
nessing the results of the fiesta and the reading of the libretas, they would typi-
cally avoid any statement of individual pride or accomplishment but would
displace such sentiments onto the Virgin and the pueblo. As Tiger explained
when referring to construction works financed by the gremio: "You feel
pride ... but pride for your pueblo [orgullo ti a kahal]. You feel happy, you
feel satisfied ... because you are focused on supporting the fiesta of the Vir-
gin. You are dedicated to her ... because all the money spent is an homage to
the Virgin .... It is a pleasure to be able to collect the few pennies which the
members give us." Similarly, when I asked a former president of the church of
Tetiz to recount the story of the Virgin's journey to Seville, he quickly
switchedto an accountof the historyof the church'sexpansionandreconstruction
in recent years. For him, processions, new chapels constructed, materials
amassed to expand the altar, and funds raised to build a new church in the sea-
side pueblo of Celestin were all evidence of new miracles of the Virgin,
whether they were financed by the gremios or by the Church.38

Figure 8
At the bullfight:collectingcoins for the Virgin.
In Tetiz, where the population is divided by social position and political

affiliation, by class and gender difference, the fetishism of the Virgin's money
makes possible the construction of the social identity of a community united in
worship. It does so through money's abstractingpowers, which facilitate both
amnesia and recollection, launderingand recognition, alienation and the "reas-
sociation" that allows even poorer pueblo residents to represent themselves,

and to be recognized, in monetary form. The Virgin's money provides a mate-

rial and symbolic medium for the expression and negotiation of personal honor
and communal belonging, despite the legacies of capitalist economic transfor-
mation and the conflictive divisions of class and political affiliation. Thus, the
Virgin plays a significant role in the self-definition of Teticefios as members of
a community in a tense relation with wider polities and economies, whether na-
tional or-increasingly in the case of migrant members of the gremios-trans-
national (cf. Rouse 1991).
The Virgin's money, as with other kinds of money, conceals many aspects
of its history in acts of production and exchange, and it separatespersons from
products, temporally and spatially. However, for many Teticefios this sacred
money is the purchase price of Tetiz itself. By collecting and counting coins,
the people of Tetiz honor their sacred debt to the Virgin and bring value,
honor, and grace to their pueblo. Like Francisco, they recognize themselves in
her money.
Conclusion
In 1885, Crescencio Carrillo y Ancona left for Tetiz, determinedto follow
the footsteps of Fray Francisco de San Buenaventura Martinez de Tejada. He
walked along the road into the pueblo, passing the series of large wooden
crosses that Francisco had ordered erected along the route to the church. These
monuments inspired Carrillo y Ancona to "rememberthe entire history and
populartradition [of Francisco and the Virgin] ... that I was hearing recounted
for the hundredthtime." Arriving in the "historic sanctuary,"the visitor fell to
his knees, like Fray Francisco had before him, and adored the "miraculous
statue" of the Virgin of Tetiz. Searching for Francisco's coin, Carrillo y An-
cona could not find it and was told that it had been lost years before. Like Fran-
cisco, he decried the "decadence" and generalized poverty of the pueblo and
the decrepit state of the sanctuary, some of which was in "ruins." Carrillo y
Ancona became an advocate for the sanctuary's restoration. Perhaps he enter-
tained the idea of continuing Francisco's works in the present on his way to be-
coming, like Francisco, bishop of Yucatan.
More than a century later, during one of my own trips to Tetiz, I asked
Carrillo y Ancona's question during an interview with Don Marcos Cui, a for-
mer leader of the church in Tetiz, "What about Francisco's peso? Whatever
happened to it?" Don Marcos answered me without hesitation, "Look-it is
everywhere, all around you."39 His answer identified the presence of the coin
in the world that surrounded him, especially in the gremio system and the
Church and its works. The miracle of Francisco's coin did not stem from its
presence as an object fixed in place but from its apparitionin varied forms and
moments. Perhaps this was the greatest miracle of the Virgin and her money-
the power to transformher own history into the history of Tetiz. Thereby, Fran-
cisco's coin is transformedfrom a relic of the past into a miraculous force in
the present, and the story of Francisco and the Virgin becomes a document of
origins. Francisco's coin conveys a history as much by its movement as by its

MEAT,MONEY,AND MEMORYIN YUCATAN 323
presence. The coin was and is transported, spatially and temporally. Its pres-
ence, recognition, and remembrance testify to the Virgin's miraculous powers.
The story of the Virgin is the story of a coin's alchemical transmutation into a
pueblo.
In his discussion of primitive accumulation, Marx argued that money, like
capital, is marked by an original sin from the moment of its conception, the
congenital blemish of its historical origins: "If money, according to Augier,
'comes into the world with a congenital blood-stain on one cheek,' capital
comes dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt"
(1977:925-926). In Tetiz money, like capital, may well bear the historical stain
of origins polluted with human misery and, as in other places, it has long been
associated with corruption, dirtiness, and danger. The Virgin, however, acts to
redeem money and to purify it-even if only momentarily-of its conception
in sin. The residents of Tetiz have inherited the results of a violent history of
colonization, expropriation, enslavement, and repeated impoverishment that
have found their highest expression in monetary forms: the peon's debt, the
falling price of henequen fiber, the devaluated peso. Through the Virgin and
the deer-and the coin that links the two-they choose to relate themselves to
a history of wealth, miracle, and grace, while not forgetting the other histories
and other monies of which their evident poverty is made.
Notes
Acknowledgments. Support for my fieldwork (January 1995-August 1996,

May-August 1997, and May-August 2001) and for writing the dissertation from which
this article is drawn was provided by the Fulbright IIE Dissertation Research Abroad
program, the University of Michigan (particularly the Institute for the Humanities and
the Michigan Society of Fellows), and Carnegie Mellon University. For critical reac-
tions to earlier versions of this article, I am grateful to participants in various reading
groups, panels, and colloquia at the University of Michigan, Carnegie Mellon Univer-
sity, the University of Pittsburgh, and Columbia University, at the meetings of the
American Anthropological Association, and especially to Ann Anagnost and anony-
mous reviewers for Cultural Anthropology. I also thank Partha Chatterjee, Fernando
Coronil, Nick Dirks, Elizabeth Ferry, Michal Friedman, Donna Harsch, Webb Keane,
Oren Kosansky, Alaina Lemon, Mani Limbert, Mary Lindemann, Kate Lynch, Rick
Maddox, Aims McGuinness, David Miller, David Pedersen, Len Plotnicov, Rebecca
Scott, Julie Skurski, Genese Sodikoff, Ann Stoler, Paul Sullivan, Terry Turner, Tom
Trautmann, and Tom Williamson. Above all, I am grateful to numerous residents of
Tetiz and Hunucmaifor generously inviting me to become a member of several gremios
and for their patient and insightful explanations of the gremios and of the Virgin of Tetiz.
1. The story of the Virgin of Tetiz is presented in Carrillo y Ancona 1895. The ver-
sion cited here is a pamphlet-lengthexcerpt of that text which is often sold at processions
of the Virgin.
2. For examples of studies that do investigate circulation, see Hutchinson 1996 and
Coronil 1997.
3. See, for instance, Marx 1973:157-158, 196-197, 222; 1977.

324 CULTURALANTHROPOLOGY
4. For critiques of the view of the money form as a necessarily insidious and disin-
tegrating phenomenon, see Parryand Bloch 1989 and Akin and Robbins 1999. For stud-
ies that link money and memory, see Hart 2000 and Lambek 2001.
5. For instance, residents of the town of Chan Kom continue to experience the clash
between a commitment to the subsistence ethic and the rise of a capitalist economy
through the development of Canctin and the influx of wage money from employment
there (Re Cruz 1996).
6. Interview with Dofia Tomasa, Nohdzonot, April 15, 1995.
7. For a similar point about Malinowski's analysis of kula see Weiner 1976. While
many of my observations on the gremios apply to the participation of both men and
women, an analysis that focused more specifically on the forms of labor and exchange
performed by women would likely yield a substantially different perspective on the gre-
mios and the fiestas of the Virgin (also see Sklar 2001).
8. The following account of a hunting trip is based on my recollections and field-
notes of hunting trips in pueblos and haciendas in northwesternYucatainand in wooded
lands in the region, in which I took part in 1996 and 1997. As in the rest of this article, I
have changed place and personal names and changed and consolidated other details in
orderto protect the identity of the huntersI accompanied. I have retainedthe use of Tetiz
as a place name since the Virgin of Tetiz is well known throughout Yucatain.However,
the practices described here are drawn from other places as well and should neither be
assumed to be characteristicof Tetiz, nor only of Tetiz. I have retained the spirit of local
nicknaming customs by giving people the names of animals, vegetables, or objects. For
another account of hunting practices in Yucatan, see Sobrino Campos 1940a.
9. Interview with Huech, Hacienda Nohdzonot, May 25, 1996; interview with Don
Mis, Tetiz, July 4, 1996; and interview with Don Mauro, July 4, 1996.
10. Interview with Tiger and Dofia Teresita (his wife), Tetiz, July 6, 1997. Tiger
represented the history of government regulation of hunting as divided between a pre-
vious era of liberty and a time of prohibition beginning six years before. There is, how-
ever, a much longer history of state attempts to regulate hunting and, especially, the
possession of arms by ruralpopulations in Yucatin from the 19th century to the present.
11. There seems to be some variance in the assignment of portions of deer meat to
participantsin the hunt. According to one account, the shooter would receive the skin,
stomach, liver, and perhaps a leg, while according to another recent account, he would
receive the head, liver, and stomach, while two legs would be given to the owner of the
rifle (if borrowed) and one leg to the owner of the hunting dogs. See Redfield and Villa
Rojas 1962, Sobrino 1940a, Terin and Rasmussen 1994.
12. See Ligorred Perram6n 1997:163, Sharer 1994:526, and Terdinand Rasmussen
1994:275-83. On the importanceof sacrificein Mayanculturesee Schele andMiller 1986.
13. Interviews with Huech and Don Pedro, Nohdzonot, July 3, 1997.
14. Specific entreaties are made to them for their assistance during the ch'a chaak
ceremony as well (Redfield and Villa Rojas 1962; Terin and Rasmussen 1994; Villa Ro-
jas 1978).
15. Both Don Mauro and Don Dragon mentioned the offerings to exhausted for-
ests. Interview with Don Mauro, Tetiz, July 12, 1997; and interview with Don Dragon,
Tetiz, June 21, 1997. See Hanks 1990 for an analysis of Mayan beliefs regarding forest
guardiansand the rituals performedto appease them. On offerings to stones, see Sobrino
Campos 1940a. For an interesting comparison with indigenous Bolivian miners, see
Nash 1979.
16. Interview with Dofia Leonor, Tetiz, November 19, 1995.

17. These stories were recounted at interviews with Don Mauro, Tetiz, July 12,
1997; and with Huech, Nohdzonot, July 3, 1997.
18. The figure of the yumil kaax or the viejo del bosque (old man of the woods) is
frequentlyevoked in Yucatecanletters(Mediz Bolio 1934:189; MimenzaCastillo 1940).
19. Don Pedro, Nohdzonot, July 3, 1997. Pedro's father was reportedly among the
men who searched the forest for the hapless hunter.
20. Field notes, Nohdzonot, June 12, 1996. For a comparison with "sacred work"
performedfor the Virgin of Tortugas, New Mexico, see Sklar 2001.
21. Interview with Huech, Nohdzonot, July 3, 1997.
22. The use of the title Sefior de los Venado to refer to Jesus seems to be typical
more of elderly town residents than of those who currentlyparticipatein the hunting gre-
mios. Interview with Don Juan Ek, Tetiz, October 14, 1995; interview with Crescencio
and Chino, Nohdzonot, December 9, 1995; interview with Huech, Nohdzonot, July 3,
1997; interview with Don Mauro, Tetiz, July 12, 1997; and interview with Don Dragon,
Tetiz, June 21, 1997.
23. The following account of the gremio system and fiestas of the Virgin is based
on participantobservation of gremios and fiestas in the summers of 1995, 1996, 1997,
and 2001. In addition to general participationin the festivities, Ijoined two gremios. As
in the preceding sections, some information has been changed or suppressed in order to
protect identities.
24. On average one deer of every two hunted is consumed while the other is sold. I
never witnessed the sale of deer and, when interviewed, gremio leaders generally alleged
ignorance of the details of the black markettradein venison. Such transactionswere fre-
quently referredto as taking place underthe table (muy bajito la mano, literally, with the
hand held low). Interviews with Tiger and Dofia Teresita, Tetiz, July 6, 1997; and Don
Mauro, Tetiz, June 21, 1997.
25. These public displays of deer (in one man's words, "they are exhibited" [ku ex-
hibirta'al]) have ceased due to the increased vigilance and the Church's unwillingness to
involve itself in sanctioning illegal activities. They are wistfully remembered by many
residents and are perhapsevoked in the dances with deer heads that are performedfor the
fiesta of the Gremio de Cazadores. Interview with Don Miis, Tetiz, July 4,1996; inter-
view with Don Mauro, Tetiz, July 4, 1996; and interview with Tiger and Dofia Teresita,
Tetiz, July 6, 1997.
26. For Marx's discussion of patterns of circulation using the formula M-C-C-M,
see Marx 1973:201-204; and in more systematic and repeated form in Marx 1977:
200-212, 247-257. For a very suggestive analysis of these formulae in the context of the
circulation of money and cattle among the contemporaryNuer, see Hutchinson 1996.
27. For an ethnographicperspective on the diverse registers of time and memory in
daily life, ritual, political practice, and the formation of archives, see Rappaport 1994,
1998.
28. According to Tiger who, in addition to leading the Gremio de Cazadores, was
recently presidente municipal of Tetiz, as much as 40 or 50 percent of the adult popula-
tion was directly involved in the gremios. Interviews with Tiger and Dofia Teresita,
Tetiz, July 6, 1997; and Don Mauro, Tetiz, June 21, 1997. There are highly competitive
and conspicuous donations involved in the festivals of the Virgin, but these take place
primarilyoutside of the gremio system (typically in the form of well-to-do families who
pay for their own mass or hire a group of mariachis to serenade the Virgin in their name).
29. Interview with Don Mauro, Tetiz, June 21, 1997.

30. In the case of the Gremio de Cazadores, there was no formal hierarchy of of-
fices, but rathera group of recognized nohoch maak (big old men) who managed the af-
fairs of the gremio. Some vagueness of responsibilities seems to be common, as Don
Mauro reported:"I'm partpresident, parttreasurer,and part secretary."The donation of
turkeys is seen as an act of "giving thanks"for the privilege of hosting the fiesta. Inter-
views with Tiger and Dofia Teresita, Tetiz, July 6, 1997; and Don Mauro, Tetiz, June 21,
1997. For an interesting comparison, see Rappaport1994.
31. The sale of beer seems to have been practiced more widely in the past than it is
today (perhaps due to heightened regulation of alcohol sales in the pueblo). Some gre-
mios avoid alcohol sales in any case, since they are seen as often leading to discord and
even physically violent conflicts. Interviews with Tiger and Dofia Teresita, Tetiz, July 6,
1997; and Don Mauro, Tetiz, June 21, 1997.
Before such sales were restricted, the Gremio de Cazadores used weekly beer sales
as a means to raise additional money for the purchase of estandartes.According to Tiger,
such sales were only for the gremio and not for individual profit. Hence, if a gremio
member dranka beer while selling, he would be responsible for paying for it.
32. Interview with Tiger and Dofia Teresita, Tetiz, July 6, 1997.
33. Theft and misappropriationof gremio funds for personal use are considered
grave offenses and this, in part, drives the careful and public accounting of funds, even
at the level of the junta. Tiger claimed he knew of no cases of theft of gremio funds and
said that such an act would be unreasonable:"You would only be defrauding yourself if
you did that."Interview with Tiger and Dofia Teresita, Tetiz, July 6, 1997.
34. I borrow this usage of the term launder from Parryand Bloch 1989:25.
35. The gremio F6 y Misericordia (Faith and Mercy) is about 50 years old (estab-
lished 1951) whereas the Gremio de Cazadores is 26 years old (established 1974). I do
not have exact information regarding the Gremio de Campesinos, the oldest gremio of
Tetiz, which includes, or did include, delegations from the pueblos of Hunucmfi and
Tixkokob.
36. Don Mauro expressed distress about the lackluster record keeping of the gre-
mio in its first years, which frustratedhis attempts to make an ordered libreta of scraps
of barely legible paper, often undated. Don Mauro, Tetiz, June 21, 1997.
37. One measure of the effectiveness of this form of fundraising is the formation of
hunting parties to raise money for improvements (to buy building materials)for an Evan-
gelical temple on nearby Hacienda Nohdzonot. Don Fredi, Nohdzonot, November 18,
1995.
38. Interviewswith Tiger, Tetiz, July 6, 1997; and with Don Marcos,Tetiz, June 21,
1997.
39. Interview with Don Marcos, Tetiz, June 21, 1997. A replica of the coin is af-
fixed to the base of the Virgin's figure, but Marcos was quick to explain that it is not the
"real"coin given by Francisco.
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Hunting For The Virgin Meat Money and Me

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Hunting For The Virgin Meat Money and Me

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Hunting for the Virgin: Meat, Money, and Memory in Tetiz, Yucatán

Author(s): Paul K. Eiss

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CulturalAnthropology 17(3):291-330. Copyright 0 2002, American Anthropological Association.

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Theme Issue: Value in Circulation

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and exchange of commodities. Similarly, many have questioned overly sche-

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ability to bear within it a "grammarof social relations," and even, apparently,

Tetiz's Money: Profane and Sacred

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decline of commercial henequen agricultureand the ejido sector. Social differ-

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First Death: Production

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. . .. .... .......................... ..:•, •

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Second Death: Exchange

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embedded in a wider, sacred circulatory system. The tunich, a magical talis-

Third Death: Circulation

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and in this form merges with the nonmonetarycontributions of gremio mem-

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divine actorsthrougha series of transactions,moving from the momentthe Virgin

The Money of History

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yearly cycle of gremio activities. A sizable proportionof the adult population

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In the recaudo phase, members of the gremio begin making donations of

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Gremio leaders often use metaphorsderived from the world of business to

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in a particularkind of labor or livelihood), and in effect abstractsthe producer

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a particulargroup of people, often connected by ties of family or friendship,

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In Tetiz, where the population is divided by social position and political

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and to be recognized, in monetary form. The Virgin's money provides a mate-

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Acknowledgments. Support for my fieldwork (January 1995-August 1996,

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Akin, David, andJoel Robbins,eds.

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