From feet to head: a first approach to the p'urhépecha's body's image through the Relación de Michoacán

Abstract

Even if ancient sources do not provide us enough information to reconstruct the tarascan image of the human organism, a meticulous analysis of the Relación de Michoacán and its correlation with other archaeological and historical data, helped us to recover some of the meanings of the most representative body sections. Many of these parts symbolize social roles, others are related with vitality; but they are all involved in the social development of individual beings. At the end of this paper we will conclude that the p'urhépecha's human concept can not be reduced to the duality body/soul and we will show, as an alternative, the image of an open body merged in a socio-cosmical web where the internalization and externalization of different organic substances constitutes a way of interaction between the bodies and their environment.