ABSTRACT
Despite the impressive new hospital at Juchitán, the well-stocked drugstores, and the roaring business done by the few local doctors with medical degrees, belief in supernatural causes of illness and death is still rampant on the Isthmus, in a combination of naive and fantastic elements of Indian magic and Spanish lore, elaborated upon by the vivid Zapotec imagination. The most prevalent diseases are malarial and typhoid fevers, intestinal disorders caused by inappropriate diets, parasites, colics, amœbic dysentery, and fatal diarrheas. The tehuanos make a clear differentiation between the ordinary supernatural spirits-the bise and the binizi-and the really dangerous witches and sorcerers (biza’ a), who turn into animals to commit all sorts of depredations on fellow human beings. The Zapotecs look death in the face without fear, as something unavoidable and as a part of one’s fate. People talk about death, even their own, as the most natural thing in the world.
