Politics and memories in rural Chiapas: Languages of power at the dawn of the twenty-first century

The configuration of politics consists in unfinished and negotiated processes. This appears clearly in regions where the advent of governmental institutions has occurred under a weaker centralised surveillance. Among the Tojolabal population in Chiapas, Mexico, state institutions like the ejido and rural schooling have had an important presence. However, the integration of this population into national society was different from that characterising other areas and has opened up a vast field of dispute between diverse organizations. In addition, this population reproduces a particular understanding of a social world rooted in its dependency on cultivation of the milpa. This understanding is expressed in ritual practices (as ways of coping with uncertainty in seasonal corn cultivation) and special narratives (about harm, disease, death, hunger, and rain, and about witches and entities like the lord of the underworld). Ritual and narrative are analyzed as foundations of an idiom for recalling social tensions and allowing for the articulation of explanations and memories of broader social events (such as Nation-State formation). Rather than a coherent worldview, symbolic system, or structure of values, what we find here is a varied and ambiguous language of power, an idiom to talk about power differences and their contradictions. Such language generates not a closed social theory but an open, flexible field of expression that is reproduced because the world is experienced, both in the finca and in the ejido, as a hierarchical yet changing and contested space, filled with constant dangers and struggles, characterized by scarcity and need.