“” Where it smells shit, it smells like it ». This maxim of Antonin Artaud announces wonderfully the purpose of the Mexican anthropologist Alfredo López Austin whose tests of scatology constitute a true history of humanity. Whether medicine, economy, even gastronomy, the domains of man do not escape shit.
In one of his usual dazzling, the ethnologist and linguist AG Haudricourt (1911-1996) had noticed that if Western anthropology had long reported the role of sexual prohibitions in human evolution, it had knowingly left aside the prohibitions linked to the issue of excrement. Where does the prohibition which prevents children from playing with their droppings or that from using scatology to joke ? Why, another tasty example, do we consume in some populations scatophilic animals like the dog ? Consumption attested very early in pre -Columbian America, for example. The work of the Mexican anthropologist Alfredo López Austin, richly illustrated by the painter Francisco Toledo, carries this questioning in the cultural universe of the Meso-American Indians-region straddling the north and the center of the continent. Twenty years after the only edition of the book in Mexico, this French translation gives to read a heterogeneous work, a sort of obscure history of Mexico where hair, nails, saliva, sweat, milk, urine and sperm, excrement and in particular “ The Mierda »Found at the heart of cosmogonies, beliefs, popular traditions and folklore of these populations.
Specialist in Nahuas societies, Lopez Austin features a mixture of stories collected from the prehispanic period to the present day, from scattered and often unexpected documentary sources (Spanish chronicles of the Spanish chronicles XVIe century, ethnographic and folk data, prehispanic literature …), which allows it to leave the agreed anthropological discourse and to observe, from the question of shit, whole sections of the extreme diversity and complexity of the Mesoamerician culture. It is not satisfied, for example, to identify the sometimes overwhelming weight of colonial history in the modeling of past and current Indian mentalities and prefers to make much cases unconscious and collective aspects of the indigenous representations which, as regards shit, pass from one people to another, from one language to the other repeating themselves and, he specifies, in a thousand different ways. The variants of the same theme, of the same story, are multiple and offer the reader a real kaleidoscope which, already, has the merit of showing how all the areas of human activity are, in one way or another, affected by this smelly substance. It is not a coincidence, either, if a strong entanglement exists in these societies between the bodily representations and the conception of a cosmos shared between the earth, the heavens and a nauseating inframonde where we can, on occasion and according to his desire, tamal stuffed with farts …
Funny, certainly, especially worrying, since beyond the anecdotes noted by the anthropologist, the shit holds a central position in the scientific and medical field: dried sheep dropped against hot piss, fresh shit against viper bodies, dindon poop mixed with alcohol to stop addictions … in this medicine, as in all other traditional medicines, reign the principle of Similar Similibus in which one seeks to remedy man by man. A purely symbolic system in which recipes, techniques are transmitted, but above all heavy images of symbols.
By seeking to make room for current myths as a complementary source to understand the Mesoamerician past, this slow “ exploration From López Austin can sometimes lack clarity. We would have liked to know more about the specificity of these religions: what type of ecstasy, what use of hallucinogenic plants, magic, sacrifice … The choices of the anthropologist express above all his fear of tarnishing his words with a devastating ethnocentrism which, he recalls, characterizes most of the attempts at anthropological analyzes of Mesoamerican societies. The question is simple: how to consider the “ thought Indian in her dynamics, her choices and her inventions, including when these are difficult to accept for our old world who has long stopped playing with her excrement to prefer to look at himself, sometimes up close, other parts of the ?
Photo : “ Cagan From Catalonia. Credit: Ariel, 2009.