Imagining Authenticity in the Local Medicines of Chiapas, Mexico

Abstract

This paper describes and discusses the existing gap between local medicines as practiced by healers in the Highlands of Chiapas and the way in which NGO personnel and other foreigners imagine them. It is argued that non-indigenous people in the region possess a tourist gaze that creates a distance (spatial and temporal) between cosmopolitan and local practices that lead them to view local medicines as exotic knowledge. The Museum of Maya Medicine described in this article demonstrates how, through this same tourist gaze, local medicines are confined into a secure space and tied to another time. I discuss how, while cosmopolitan medicine’s practitioners and ‘tourists’ recreate local medicines in the museum as something culturally authentic, local medicines are, in contrast, characterized by their hybridity.