The Indigenous Social Imaginary and Zapatista Masks169in Chiapas; secrecy in conduct among themselves and secrecy in their conduct with outsiders. The invisible forces at work (naguals, allied entities, etc.) behind the public manifestations of self imply, in many cases, an intrinsic danger for other individuals. Not only is it the case that, when envy or hatred is involved, one allied entities can be instructed, by means of sorcery, to cause pain, misfortune or even death to somebody, but also some of these entities are by nature aggressive and threaten the existence of somebody else entity and therefore his life. Imagine, for example, a case where one nagual is the tiger and the other the rabbit; the latter is always in danger and living in ontological fear since the nagual of the former can at any point devour his nagual. This implies, as Pitarch (1996) argues, that social conduct is somehow surrounded by anxiety, fear and suspicion of each other; fear and suspicion that people try to minimise by developing homogeneous patterns of behaviour varying from dress codes to ways of conducting a conversation. These patterns of behaviour, which hide individual expressions that could reveal the hidden part of one self, one nagual(s), make social and emotional life less threatening and thus keep the social fabric together. Secrecy, however, characterises conduct with foreigners for obvious historical reasons concerning the preservation of indigenous culture. In the following passage, Rigoberta Menchu (1984), from another conct in neighbouring Guatemala, explains: We Indians have always hidden our identity and kept our secrets to ourselves. This is why we are discriminated against. We often d it hard to talk about ourselves because we know that we must hide so much in order to preserve our Indian culture and prevent it from being taken away from us. So I can tell you only very general things about the nagual. I can tell you what my nagual is because that is one of our secrets. (quoted in Gossen, 1999, p. 243) Menchu, though, tells us a half-truth here. She situates secrecy exclusively within the struggle against the fearful Ladinos to keep indigenous culture alive which is undoubtedly true. What she does not tell us, however, is that the enemy is not only outside the community but also within, and that one nagual is a secret not only for foreigners but for one fellow Indians too. The truth that Menchu hides is the enemy within the community. This is the secret the Zapatistas do not reveal either; the secret of fear of sorcery because of envy that is rife among the Indian communities; the fear of deities and naguals; the secret of internal gerontocratic
