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Maya Medicine: Traditional Healing in Yucatán. By Marianna Appel Kunow. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2003. Pp. vii, 152. Illustrations. Tables. Bibliography. Appendices. Index. $29.95 cloth.
This is a short book of less than 100 pages about curers and the plants they use in the Yucatan Peninsula. An additional 53 pages are given over to drawings, tables of botanical and Maya names, and relationships of plants the author collected to published sources of Maya ethnobotany. Kunow begins with an ethnographic account of the town of Pisté, Yucatán and brief vignettes of the seven curers who showed the author plants from their home gardens, cornfields, and pathways around the community. Yucatecan people in general are gracious and hospitable, and Kunow notes that the people she worked with were very enthusiastic about her project and the value of documenting plant names and their uses.
Pisté is a tourist city on the edge of the ruins of Chichén Itzá where most inhabitants work as guides, laborers in hotels and restaurants,...