The Cause and the Cure: Rum’s Paradoxical Role in Pedrano Life Anna Liebelt College

“K’op, the Tzotzil word for both problem and prayer, recalls rum’s dialectical role in both causing and healing imbalances” (Eber 135). In the Highland Chiapas of southern Mexico, Pedranos live in a vicious cycle of drinking rum to forget their daily emotional and economic hardships, then becoming addicted to the numbness it brings, and then counteracting their addiction by using rum in prayer, hoping to end their reliance on it someday. In her ethnography, Women and Alcohol in a Highland Maya Town, author Christine Eber illuminates such paradoxical relationships and discusses their effect on the Pedranos’ ways of life. Although Pedranos understand the violence, gender oppression, and social deprecation brought upon by their overconsumption of rum, and have experienced such anguish first hand, they ironically continue to drink due to social or cultural traditions, rum’s involvement in religious rituals, and because of their ultimate, societal failure to control it.

Pendrano children grow up surrounded by the drinking culture and are launched into adulthood at an early age. Obedience is instilled in their minds and if children do not fulfill their parents’ orders, especially when the parents are intoxicated, they are...