Introduction

About this SiteNotes on the TextRobert M LaughlinRobert M Laughlin Bibliography [PDF]AcknowledgementContact

This website documents the village of San Martín Soyaltepec (Oaxaca, México) in the mid-1950’s. A series of dams were being constructed in the Papoloapan River basin, and San Martín was one of several lowland Mazatec villages in the region slated for relocation due to the eminent flooding. Robert Laughlin, an American student studying at La Escuela Nacional de Antropología e Historia in México City (the National School of Anthropology and History), spent a month San Martín in the spring of 1957 conducting a series of wide-ranging, ethnographic interviews. This website includes his entire set of fieldnotes and the photographs he took as documentation

Upon his initial arrival, the waters were just beginning to rise around the original settlement, and when he returned for a brief visit a year later, the community had relocated to nearby New San Martín. His notes briefly touch on the relocation, but mainly focus on everyday life in the village. He spoke with twenty-four men (and one woman) on topics ranging from witchcraft to agriculture, and made detailed field notes in Spanish. After initial attempts to learn Mazatec (a difficult, tonal language), Laughlin conducted his research in Spanish, though he continued to use Mazatec greetings and salutations-- much to the delight of the villagers.

This website presents the full text of Laughlin’s original field notes in Spanish and English. (It is hoped that in the future a Mazatec translation will be available as well.) The notes are organized into a number of topical categories (see Contents), with the date and collaborator’s name indicated at the heading of each entry. Occasionally Laughlin included his own observations on a given topic (indicated with his initials (RML) in place of a specific Mazatec collaborator). At the time, he provided no over-arching narrative or analysis.

In the course of this fieldwork Laughlin also took over two hundred photographs: most of these are integrated into the written text, and the full photographic archive is included as a separate slide show. Towards the end of his fieldwork Laughlin visited a number of villages for which there are no field notes—these locales are included in the “Places” slide show in the Photo Gallery.

“It’s the Custom!” Mazatec Notes opens a window on time and place now quite remote to many of us. This website is presented in the spirit of sharing and celebrating a bygone era, one replete with practical knowledge, social intricacies, and a robust spiritual life.

Most of the entries include a date of entry, though in a number of cases a date is not provided. It may be that the conversation occurred on the same day as the previous entry, but there is no way of knowing for certain. In any and all cases, all entries were written between April 9 and May 11, since April 10 and May 10 (1957) are the earliest and latest recorded dates of Laughlin’s fieldwork.

At times the narrative shifts between present and past tenses. This apparent inconsistency has been preserved not only to render the notes accurately, but also to give a sense of these events happening before our eyes, as they did for the ethnographer.

Parentheses that appear in the text are simply transcribed from the original document. Translator notes added for clarification are enclosed in brackets. Phrases and words in Spanish are italicized, and they are transcribed word for word when they are within quotation marks in the original text. These quotations are reproduced to offer a sense of the Spanish text, and may well give an exact rendering of what was said by the person in question. Quotations that indicate different characters in a narrative are in most cases transcribed as well as translated, especially if and when the Spanish gives a special sense of character, tone, or humor. In some cases the quotation marks may indicate an instance where the ethnographer felt the respondent was emphasizing a word, or where a word’s meaning was being stretched in some way. Mazatec words are both italicized and underlined. In some cases, as in some plant names, translations of Mazatec words are not yet known.

In a few cases the identities of people are being protected through the use of the term “fulano,” the Spanish equivalent of “John Doe.” (When fulano appears in the original text, it is placed within a single quotation mark.) In the text, RML refers to the ethnographer, Robert M. Laughlin.

Robert Lauglin at a work party, April 13, 1957

This website is dedicated to a place and time past-- a tiny village that was uprooted and relocated in the wake of a massive public works project-- a project the scale of which had not been attempted in México since the building of the great urban centers of Precolumbian civilizations. The President Miguel Alemán Dam was completed in 1955, and was, at the time, one of the largest and most extensive hydroelectric projects in America. A small team of cultural anthropologists was assembled to monitor the social impact of the project, specifically issues facing displaced communities. Amidst this company was Robert M. Laughlin, a recent college graduate from the United States, studying at the Escuela Nacional de Antropología e Historia in Mexico City. Looking for an opportunity to do anthropological fieldwork, Laughlin heard from his professors at ENAH about the large-scale project in the Papaloapan watershed. In April of 1957 he set out for the village of San Martín Soyaltepec, a village of lowland Mazatec speakers that was amongst the last groups being relocated from the Papaloapan watershed.

Laughlin lived in San Martín for a solid month, conversed at length with the men of the villager (and one woman), and, during communal work parties, labored alongside his new neighbors. Laughlin took extensive and meticulous fieldnotes: they make up a fascinating compendium of ethnographic detail and gentle-- even bemused-- social commentary and observations of the human spirit. Since his notes were part of his academic training at ENAH, they were written in Spanish. An excerpt of these notes was published not long thereafter (Pozas 1960). Of great interest, and one reason this website is coming to light (some sixty years after the fact), is that Laughlin took photographs. In the archive there are nearly two hundred and twenty color slides, including daily life—portraits, the market place, life on the edge of the rising reservoir—and ritual life—including a funeral and Eastertide celebrations. A number of these photographs (35 of the total) were taken when Laughlin returned for a short visit in September of 1958. His 35 mm still camera captured a way of life that was in profound and irreversible change.

BACKGROUND: A COLLISION OF WORLDS

México has, seemingly, always been a place of deep and stark contrasts. From the time Cortez purportedly described the topography of the country to the Spanish court by crumpling up a piece of paper and then only roughly flattening it out, and undoubtedly long before, México has been a place of steep inclines, sharp juxtapositions, and clear divides. To claim then, that mid-twentieth century México was a time of particularly pointed contrasts, might best be thought of in context of a place of long-lasting, deep-seated differentiations. Nonetheless, rural México in the 1950’s was a place where, at the very least, social worlds were in sharp juxtaposition.

Indeed, the coordinator of the anthropological team of the Papaloapan Dam Project, Alfonso Villa-Rojas, described the region in the following way.

La amplia diversidad de modos de vida que allí se observan hacen en el Cuenca un veradero mosaic de culturas o, si se quiere, un album viviente en el que se puede repasar las paginas del proceso evolutivo por el que ha pasado el hombre en su largo trayecto de lo primitive a lo modern (Villa-Rojas 1965:26).

The wide diversity in life ways one observes in the watershed is a true mosaic of cultures, or if you like, a living album in which one can leaf through the pages of the evolutionary process that man has passed in his long trajectory from primitive to modern.

Villa-Rojas went on to draw out this disparity even more explicitly, contrasting what he described as a “rudimentary” level of culture “with people of modern life, who have industries, large businesses, banks, luxury hotels, excellent highways, and other amenities belonging to advanced urbanism.” Villa-Rojas took pains to extoll the advances of western civilization (“excellent highways”), while placing indigenous culture somewhere in the past on the timeline of human evolution.

Such was the world of marked contrasts-- both actual and conceptual-- that greeted the young ethnographer on his first assignment in the field. However, it should be pointed out that Laughlin, despite what at first blush might appear to be a sheltered, conservative, university-town upbringing and an elite education (a New England preparatory school and an ivy league college), was uniquely prepared for the rigors of rural life in México-- what was then still considered “primitive,” even amongst the most learned scholars of the day.

THE EDUCATION OF AN ETHNOGRAPHER

Robert Laughlin grew up in Princeton, New Jersey, the fourth of four sons. His father, Ledlie Laughlin, had left the family business of Jones and Laughlin Steel to work as the assistant director of admissions at Princeton University. As a youngster, Robert accompanied his father on bird watching expeditions to nearby woods and fields. In the summer of 1951, father and son took their passion for bird watching to Panamá, traveling to the Canal Zone Biological area on Barro Colorado Island. His father, discouraged by repeated and ferocious attacks of chiggers, soon de-camped, leaving Robert to the business of bird watching.

Working from a viewing area of the station itself, Laughlin identified a nesting pair of double-toothed kites (Harpagus bidentatus). Over the period of several days, he observed their hunting strategies, nesting behavior, and the eventual loss of an egg to a marauding swainson toucan (Ramphastos swainsonii). As he recalled in 2015, the resulting research article he wrote was entitled “How a Toucan Stole and Gobbled Down the Egg of a Double-Toothed Kite,” a designation reminiscent of the titles of folk tales he devised for Tzotzil narratives he collected over the course of his career (see bibliography), since these stories were recounted without titles of any kind. In fact, the actual title for his published article was “A Nesting of a Double-Toothed Kite in Panama,” and its careful and exacting prose was at once economic and colorful. He was not, however, even at a young age, shy about entering into the fray of academic disputation, claiming that, contrary to an earlier report, the preferred diet of the double-toothed kites was arboreal lizards and insects, and not small birds (Laughlin 1951).

For the next two summers (he was still a full time student) Robert Laughlin pursued his interest in ornithology, perhaps in part following his father’s advice to “pick a niche where you will be the top person.” His father had certainly followed his own counsel, and had become a leading authority on American pewter. Ledlie Laughlin’s monograph on the topic remains the definitive text on the topic, and Robert remembers his father as “a careful worker, a careful scholar.” Robert’s mother, Roberta Howe Laughlin, was also an enthusiast of American antiques, and an amateur naturalist as well. Following the Laughlin penchant for specialization, she was an expert on lilacs, and tended a grove of lilac trees at their home in Princeton.

In the summer of 1952 (as best we can reconstruct it), Robert Laughlin travelled to a remote corner of Costa Rica, where he studied with noted ornithologist (and sometime philosopher) Alexander Skutch at his famed Finca Los Cusingos. Skutch was an iconoclastic fieldworker in that he refused to trap, band, or kill any birds he was studying. He was also a vegetarian, a dietary practice that Robert Laughlin took up from that summer onward. The following year Robert went to study in the Venezuelan northern Cordillera at the Rancho Grande Biological Station. The research center was based in a presidential residence (also reported to be a hotel) that had been abandoned mid construction, and was then headed by a German expatriate who was rumored to have had ties to right-wing politics in his former homeland. The accommodations were decidedly makeshift: Laughlin recalled finding the footprints of a jaguar in one of the rooms.

It was shortly after his Venezuelan adventure that Laughlin “lost” his ornithological field notes. In fact, discouraged by an emphasis on statistical studies and the need to routinely kill the birds under study, Laughlin realized he could never pursue ornithology as a profession, and literally threw his notes away. Nonetheless, Laughlin’s interest in the careful observation of the lives of birds had by then brought him to Panamá, Costa Rica, and Venezuela, places where he was introduced to a wide vista of life in Central and South America. And apart from the wildlife, he began to pick up Spanish, formulate his own lifestyle, and was introduced to a decidedly fascinating cast of characters.

Laughlin followed the family tradition and enrolled as an undergraduate at Princeton University. (His grandfather, father, uncle, and three elder brothers had all preceded him as Princetonian “tigers.”) During one summer break Robert assisted in his brother’s parish (Ledie Laughlin was an Episcopal priest), working with Puerto Rican youth as a councilor. In addition to bringing his Spanish up a notch, Robert Laughlin’s constituency migrated from avian to human. During the summer of 1956 Robert Laughlin went to México for the first time, where he worked as a volunteer on a Quaker project, building a school in Tlaltenango, Puebla. The construction was not a great success. They were unable to complete the school, though locals did do so after the team departed. Of the actual work, Laughlin mainly recalls planting trees and “breaking medium sized rocks into smaller rocks.” What he did discover was a love of the life and liveliness of a Mexican village, commencing a life-long connection to México and its people.

Laughlin graduated Princeton with honors in English in 1956. His senior thesis was on William Henry Hudson’s Green Mansions: A Romance of the Tropical Forest, an early 20th century novel that brings together a quest for a lost, gentle civilization, star-crossed lovers, and a rousing rain forest adventure. Given the young Laughlin’s experience with Latin American ex-patriot ornithologists, and that Hudson was essentially all three (Argentinian, the son of ex-patriots, and an ornithologist), one might expect that he would have some insight into the author’s motives, skills, and perspectives. Laughlin earned an A+ for his thesis, but, despite this success, he did not feel comfortable following writing as a career. He was, however, drawn to anthropology, and enrolled the following academic year at the Escuela Nacional de Historia e Antropología in México City.

Some of Laughlin’s experiences in the classroom are recollected in the preface to his fieldnotes (most likely written in 2004 or 2005. See Preface, with proviso). While certain details of the preface are difficult to confirm with absolute confidence, its tone is pure Laughlin as raconteur. The school was then located in downtown Mexico City, subject to frequent power outages. He claimed that all of his fellow students had grey hair—with graduation put off by the constant student strikes-- and that Karl Marx was everyone’s hero. In any case, the faculty suggested that he do fieldwork with the Mazatec in Oaxaca, perhaps on account of the large-scale ethnographic research projects going on in the area, or perhaps because one of his professors, Roberto Weitlaner, had done extensive research with the Mazatec for many years.

IN THE MAZATEC FIELD

Laughlin arrived in the region some time in early April, 1957. In the town of Temaxcal he visited the local office of the Instituto Nacional Indígenista (roughly equivalent of the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs). There he was introduced to Ecuadorian ethnologist Dr. Armando Aguirre (Torres), who was to accompany him during his ensuing fieldwork. The local officials of INI suggested that they go to San Martín for their ethnographic research. That first night they were put up in a house infested with poisonous spiders. When he felt a bite, Armando pulled out a pistol and fired it in the air! While there are just a few explicit references to Armando Aguirre in Laughlin’s notes, internal evidence suggests that he was with him throughout his time in San Martín, as well as for some additional travels in the area.

The arrival of Robert and Armando coincided with two important events in the village: the death of a young woman, and the beginning of Easter celebrations. The Easter rituals began on their third day in San Martín, and took place over a ten-day period. Laughlin was able to document in detail the entirety of this celebration. The deceased woman’s name was Carmen Andrate, and her widower, Silvestre Cuevas, became Laughlin’s friend and confidant during the course of his fieldwork. As it turned out, Silvestre rather quickly re-married, as was the custom, and Robert eventually became godfather to Silvestre’s son, Epigmenio.

It is significant that, from the very start, Laughlin took photographs, and, even more remarkably, that he was granted permission, basically carte blanche, to do so. It is clear that Laughlin and Aguirre came with decent recommendations. Laughlin recounted that upon arrival they were introduced-- presumably by INI officials-- to two prominent locals: Camilo Jimémez, the Municipal President, and Melchor García, the local religious leader. This most certainly legitimized their project on an official level. However, it is also clear that there were simply not the kinds of prohibitions around photography found in other villages in rural México. On their second day in San Martin, Robert tried to photograph the passing funeral procession, only to slip and fall. Everyone laughed, and Laughlin continued to take photographs, both of the funeral rituals and of significant events in the village for the next month. There is also a photograph of a photographer in actions: Laughlin snapped a picture of Aguirre taking a photograph in the neighboring town of Ojitlán.

Laughlin’s entry on April 14th opens a window on their initial reception in the village. “During the procession of Palm Sunday we took photographs of the women. Some girls covered parts of their faces with their shawls. Roberta Jiménez gave me a big smile, raised her right hand with its palm towards me, and looked straight at me. She did the same to Armando, and greeted us whenever she could. In the church a prominent woman greeted us enthusiastically. All the children run and cry when they see the monster with blue eyes and blond hair. I am just gaining their confidence.” As the reader may discover, over time they made great strides with respect to community rapport. That said, certain fascinating ideas persisted, such as the rumor that gringos were poised to take over the land they were leaving because of the rising waters.

THE FIELDNOTES

We do not have access to Laughlin’s original fieldnotes. Whether they are in some archive, either at the Smithsonian Institution or in México City, remains to be seen. At any rate, the fieldnotes we have access to are an electronic file, transcribed from notes that were organized according to a number of headings, from “Witchcraft,” the first in the list, to “Earthquakes,” which is the last of fifty-three in the transcript. Our best guess is that in submitting his work to his professors at the Escuela Nacional, Laughlin took his daily entries and parceled them into appropriate subject areas. In doing so, he retained the name of the person he was speaking with and the date of their conversation, important information in re-constructing Laughlin’s time in the field.

Laughlin recorded information from his conversations nearly every day, from April 10th through May 10th. On most days he recorded the views of two or three men (only one women was briefly interviewed); six days record the views of just a single person; two days he recounts his own observations only (credited with his initials, RML); and on April 22, there is no record of fieldnotes. It happened to be the day after Easter, so one can well imagine that he took that Monday off-- not a bad record, in that there are entries for the previous twelve days, and the following eighteen days. There is a final, very short entry for May 20th, but it is credited with only his initials, so one might presume that he was simply remembering a single social fact at a later date.

In reconstructing some of Laughlin’s days in the field, one can see that he recorded information based on natural conversations: the topics do follow themes, but an impressive number of unrelated issues come up, dutifully recorded. There are entries for days of great social activity -- communal plantings, for example-- and for intense ritual, such as funerals, wakes, Good Friday, and Easter. As an example of Laughlin’s open interview technique, for Easter Sunday not only do we get a detailed description of the processions, but we also learn about common household greetings among family members from Juan Florentino, and, from Melchor García, the causes of lightning and thunder: “Lightning is caused by the encounter of two angels in the sky. The collision causes the light. The two of them, angered, throw things like beans at each other, and this is thunder.” And on the theme of discord, Laughlin makes no effort to rectify contradictions in the reportage. In numerous cases, his collaborators disagree—on whether birthdays are celebrated, for example, or the proper number of wives. Laughlin allows contrary statements to stand on their own, giving readers a complex and nuanced portrait of Mazatec life.

Despite the fact that the village of San Martín was then on the cusp of relocation due to the rising waters of the Papaolapan dam project, Laughlin devotes surprisingly little attention to this topic. He does record opinions both pro and con, though he did not get wind of the witchcraft attempted to foil the project in its entirety (Villa Rojas 1955:143). Clearly, he saw his mission aligned with salvaging as much information as possible concerning Mazatec traditional practices and beliefs, or least his extensive entries on traditional medicine, ritual, and the like give that clear impression. He was also a keen observer of everyday life, and his description of, for example, how a mother ties her shawl into a sling to hold her infant, is a unique contribution to Mesoamerican ethnography.

In a 2003 interview, Laughlin recalled the conclusion of his work in Oaxaca, most likely during his visit in 1958: “I accompanied a member of INI to the various towns that were being displaced. People were living in rock fields and in towns where it was said that ‘even the fleas had died here.’ I had never in my life seen such terrible things being done to people. While I was there, I got a telegram from my father saying, ‘You have been drafted into the army, call me tonight.’ The telegram had been sent two weeks before. Finally I called my father and miraculously, during those two weeks, my acceptance had come from Harvard and I was able to get a student deferment.” (“An Interview with Robert Laughlin,” Palenque, December 22, 2003) Laughlin had despaired of ever finishing a degree in México, and had applied for post-graduate work at Harvard. And so, in time, began his work in Zinacantán, first for the Harvard Chiapas Project, and then as the curator of Mesoamerican Ethnology at the Smithsonian Institution. An endeavor of words and plants, stories and theater productions, learning, sharing, and mentoring, it would absorb him for the next several decades.

It’s interesting to note that of the fifty-three topics Laughlin listed in the Mazatec Notes’ table of contents, there is one that is conspicuously absent: folk tales. This is not to say that he did not record this information—he simply did not set it apart from the rest of the narrative. One can easily remedy this oversight by searching the database for “story,” which appears nine times, and lead to narratives of mythological, cultural, and historical interest. Laughlin, who is himself an inveterate teller of tales-- and went on to collect an impressive archive of Tzotzil narratives in the highlands of Chiapas-- in fact began this aspect of his storied career with the Mazatec.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Breedlove, Dennis E., and Robert M. Laughlin (1993). The Flowering of Man: A Tzotzil Botany of Zinacantan. Smithsonian Contributions to Anthropology, no. 35. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press. 1993

Cruickshank, Gerardo
“Some Problems of the Papaloapan River Basin” Proceedings of the University Seminar on Pollution and Water Resources Columbia University, Volume V (1971-71) second Edition 1980. http://www.state.nj.us/dep/njgs/enviroed/oldpubs/bulletin72d.pdf
Retrieved 2/7/15

Hudson, William Henry
Green Mansions: A Romance of the Tropical Forest.
London: Duckworth & Co. 1904

Laughlin, Ledlie Irwin
Pewter in America: Its Makers and Its Marks.
New York: Barre Publishing Company.
Vols. I and II, 1940. Vol. III, 1969.

Laughlin, Robert M.
“A Nesting of a Double-Toothed Kite in Panama”
Condor, Vol. 54, #3: 137-39
(May 1952) Submitted, Princeton, New Jersey, September 11, 1951 https://sora.unm.edu/sites/default/files/journals/condor/v054n03/p0137-p0139.pdf
Retrieved 2/8/15

Laughlin, Robert M.
The Great Tzotzil Dictionary of San Lorenzo Zinacantán. Smithsonian Contributions to Anthropology, no. 19. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press. 1975

Laughlin, Robert M.
Of Wonders Wild and New: Dreams from Zinacantán. Smithsonian Contributions to Anthropology, no. 22. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press. 1976

Laughlin, Robert M.
Of Cabbages and Kings: Tales from Zinacantán. Smithsonian Contributions to Anthropology, no. 23. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press. 1977

Laughlin, Robert M.
Of Shoes and Ships and Sealing Wax: Sundries from Zinacantán. Smithsonian Contributions to Anthropology, no. 25. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press. 1980

Laughlin, Robert M.
The Great Tzotzil Dictionary of Santo Domingo Zinacantán. Smithsonian Institution Contributions to Anthropology, no. 31. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press. 1988

Laughlin, Robert M. (Carol Karasik, editor)
Tales from Zinacantán: Dreams and Stories from the People of the Bat Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press. 1988

Pozas, Ricardo
“Etnografía de los mazatecos,” Revista Mexicana de Estudios Antropológicas, Vol.16: Cuidad de México. 1960

Villa Rojas, Alfonso
Los Mazatecos y el Problema Indigena de la Cuenca del Papaloapan. Memorias del Instituto Indigenista, Vol. VII. Mexico, 1955

ON-LINE RESOURCES

Laughlin’s page on the Smithsonian Institution’s Website
http://anthropology.si.edu/staff/Laughlin/Laughlin.html

“An Interview with Alexander Skutch” http://www.angelfire.com/bc/gonebirding/skutch.html

“An Interview with Robert Laughlin”
http://www.mayaexploration.org/pdf/interview_laughlin.pdf
(Palenque, December 22, 2003)

I would like to thank Thor Anderson for his appreciation of the material and patience in creating a web page for these photographs and notes I took so many years ago. I hope that they may be enjoyed by Mazatecs, and others, and provide them with a glimpse of a world which no longer exists.

Robert Laughlin

info@etnografiamazateca.org