Maya Bonesetters: Manual Healers in a Changing Guatemala.

• Author: Zentella, Yoly

Hinojosa, Servando Z. Maya Bonesetters: Manual Healers in a Changing Guatemala. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2020.

Bonesetters, practitioners of joint manipulation, are part of the discipline of natural medicine. An additional definition of a bonesetter is, for this reviewer, embodied in my maternal grandmother, a huesera, a sobadora, a woman welcoming injured workers from the surrounding mines in rural Mexico to her humble home for healing. Some books have elements that stir a readers ancestral connections. For this stirring to occur, particular ingredients need to be present, the form the book takes, the space where the reader is at the time the book makes its way into their hands, and the relationship of the reader to ancestral practices. Servando Hinojosas Maya Bonesetters should appeal to anthropologists and those in the disciplines of natural medicine, indigenous healers like curanderas, and individuals with traditional healing in their ancestral memories.

Hinojosa, professor of anthropology at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, offers his gathered knowledge on a fascinating topic. His previous research and a book coauthored with Kathryn S. Oths, Healing by Hand: Manual Medicine and Bonesetting in Global Perspective (2004), sets the foundation for the book under review, a first study published in book form on bonesetting in the Guatemalan highlands, with the Kaqchikel and Tz'utujiil Maya as protagonists. The book begins with a global history of the tradition, including descriptions of roots and plants used for bone healing remedies. For example, there are passages on bonesetting in antiquity, and in the European Middle Ages during which time the hostility of the Christian Church toward this tradition is evident.

Chapters 2 and 3 describe bonesetting through the lived experiences of the practitioners, showing how variations in their approaches are linked to individual personalities and beliefs. Two branches of bonesetting are described, the sacred and the empirical. Such variations reflect overlapping worlds in which the Maya...