"Brujos", mitos y modernidad en la historia oral k’iche’.

Abstract

This paper examines the relationship between oral traditions and K’iche’ representations of history and current social and cultural dilemmas in the Guatemalan highlands. I show that oral tradition includes a great variety of genres with different discourse structures and illocutionary force. I discuss apparent inconsistencies among narratives and show that they embody dissent and anxieties in K’iche’ communities in regard to changes provoked by Guatemala’s violent modernity. In particular, I examine stories of patron saints and “witches” and the different stances vis-à-vis religious conversion that they dramatize after the expansion of Catholic Action and Pentecostal denominations in the 1950s and 1960s. Oral traditions are also prescriptive models for the emerging K’iche’ narrative prose.