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Postscript
"Talk of many things, ... of cabbages and kings"—no scholar's array of
evidence to prove a favorite theory, no logical design, no academic
pyramid, just a few samples of the talk of the town to whet the appetite of
those who dare to wonder "why the ocean boils and whether pigs have
wings."
Imagine an archeologist attempting to reveal a buried civilization with
only the potsherds he finds littering the surface of the ground—so has been
my frustration in trying to gain an understanding of life in Zinacantan from
this random collection of tales.
The comparative material displayed in the commentaries is no less
random. Scattered far and wide in fieldnotes, mimeographs of federal
Indian development programs, in missionary publications, in journals of
linguistics, ethnopoetry, and folklore, tucked into anthropology monographs,
this material defies easy discovery. Even after examining every
scrap that reached my attention, it became clear that there is only the
spottiest knowledge of the stories that the Indians of Middle America tell
each other at home and at work. Indeed, outside Chiapas no study has focused
on the role of folk literature in a single community.
Of Cabbages and Kings is a first endeavor to present a common tradition
through the personal styles and interpretations of a variety of townspeople
who made no claim to special knowledge, but who told with relish what
came to their minds during a few insignificant mornings and afternoons of
their lives.
They never would dream of the care that has been lavished on their
ordinary words—the hours, the years spent by countless persons laboring
with reels and pens, typewriters and word-processors, computers and
Linotrons to reproduce their voices, then to reduce their words to writing
for the amusement and edification of mere strangers.
For those of us who assume without question the value of literacy, may
this volume have intimated the exuberance of living speech!
Paraded here in black stripes, these letters have reached their limit, but
in Zinacantan the real words rush heedlessly into tomorrow, recreating and
repeating, forever and forever.
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