Flores de lujuria e influjos siniestros: Fuentes nocturnas del simbolismo huichol del cuerpo humano

Abstract

In this study the nocturnal sources of human body’s symbolic configuration were investigated in order to understand some of the cultural mechanisms of meaning production that belongs to huichol’s worldview. As a result of fieldwork and the study of mythical narrations, we noticed that huichols divide human body in five basic parts, emphasizing the presence of three corporal portions on a vertical axis and two on a horizontal plane. Besides, certain fundamental cosmological figures were detected; this was the case of the Moon (Metsa), the Kieri and the Devil (T+kakame). These figures that are confined to the night’s (t+kari) cosmological space, scope dominated by the sexuality, the desire, the opulence and the death, constituted the lines of observation through which we investigated some of the huichol’s epistemological foundations of the social construction of human body.