The Hot and the Cold: Ills of Humans and Maize in Native Mexico

The Hot and the Cold: Ills of Humans and Maize in Native Mexico J. M. CHEVALIER AND A. SANCHEZ BAIN UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS, TORONTO, 2002 344 PP. $65.00 HARDCOVER In The Hot and the Cold the authors enter an ongoing debate regarding the "humoral system" in Latin American ethnomedical systems championed by Foster (e.g., 1994) and Lopez Austin (e.g., 1980 and 1986) respectively. The central thesis of this work is that George Foster's theory of the humoral origin of the Latin American hot/cold system is incorrect. In addition, they argue that the basic hot/cold system should be modified to include a heliotropic model. This shirting focus plagues die book and weakens dhe authors' argument throughout. Chevalier and Sanchez Bain, following Lopez Austin, take the position that the hot/cold system in Latin America is of pre-Columbian origin, not a Spanish colonial artifact. The claims against the Spanish humoral source are threefold. First, the authors argue, the humoral system has no "humors." Because there is no reference to blood, phlegm and the biles, nor to air, earth, wind and fire, the system must not be humoral. They then argue that, furthermore, there is no wet/dry continuum to consider alongside the hot/cold and that this is of prime importance. Fosters (1994) position is that the system has been reduced over cime via transmission from colonizers to colonized and from individual to individual. Chevalier and Sanchez Bain categorically do not accept this possibility and suggest that the acceptance of this position is racist because it denies New Worlders the ability to perform abstract and complex thought. Instead, they assume that the humoral system would have been transferred carefully from specialist to specialist. In Fosters model, the system was transferred from the Spanish to the general population, with the specialists holding on to their traditional system, while the secular masses picked up a bit here and there. Second, the authors contest Foster's argument that the medical system is empirically based. They claim that if the humoral categories of medicinals and illnesses are learned, the system can not be empirical. Thus, they argue, Foster is wrong. It seems chat the authors' faulty logic misses the point-while one may label diarrhea, for example, as a "cold" illness, this has no effect on the empirical observation that a particular plant cures it. Furthermore, they ignore the work of Matthews (1983) who demonstrates how inconsistent che ethnomedical system is, which allows it to conform to disjunctures between empirical observations and theories. This suggests that the system is a recent adoption as a theoretical framework to explain observed results. Third, it is suggested by Chevalier and Sanchez Bain that according to Foster's model, there is one perfect and rarely attained thermal value for health and chat any activity is risky "to the point chac a stable health condition becomes painfully rare (Foster 3335)" (p. 17). In fact, on the pages cited here from Foster's work, he discusses how hot and cold insults to body equilibrium usually do not precipitate illness unless they are extreme. I will further discuss this issue below. One of the goals of this book consists of developing a "heliotropic," as opposed to the basic humoral, model of health. By heliotropic the authors refer to a cyclical model that not only varies in the course of the day, as the term suggests, but also over the lifetime of the entity in question. Here lies the book's strong point. Rich edinographic data is explored in the realms of health and illness, agricultural beliefs and practices, and mythology. Health and agricultural practice are shown to be interrelated in very direct ways while the inclusion of multiple versions of the corn myth adds to the ethnographic documentation and helps support facets of the heliotropic model. Also included are a series of related graphic models that are informative, easy to understand, and distill the text quite nicely. …