Social Structure and Role Allocation in Tzeltal Oral Literature

Abstract

ONE WAY OF WORKING TOWARD THE GOAL Of constructing an adequate ethnographic description of a society is to provide a delineation of what one needs to know or believe in order to operate in a manner acceptable to its members and to do so in any culturally specifiable social role.2 Put this way, the goal of the anthropologist doing an ethnographic study appears to differ only in degree from that of the child being socialized to community norms. But, of course, the child's methods of obtaining the necessary information are quite different from those of an anthropologist: after all, the latter has not the time available to devote to the task as does the former. There are, however, areas of cultural expression from which both anthropologist and child can draw much the same information concerning social structure and norms for role performance. Oral tradition is one such area of cultural expression in societies whose oral literature embodies relatively accurate portrayals of the knowledge to be attained, especially when it is deliberately used as an instrument for child socialization (or enculturation). The Tenejapa Tzeltal exemplify such a society. Moreover, their oral tradition does more than reflect important elements of the social structure and norms (real and ideal) of social interaction in the real world. It also spells out sanctions employed in the real world. Furthermore, some supernatural characters that are actors in Tzeltal narrative are presented as legitimate agents of social control, again in the real world, and children who misbehave are threatened with punishment by these agents. For this reason the anthropologist can turn to Tzeltal oral literature for much ethnographic information that may be interpreted directly rather than analyzed in purely symbolic terms. I propose to substantiate this claim by presenting some of the components of real-life Tzeltal social structure and role allocation as reflected in a corpus of forty-three Tenejapa texts. Ten of these texts