A Medico-anthropological Study on Religious Practices of the Yucatec Maya in Mexico.

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This research was aimed at clarifying the religious practices of the Yucatec Mayas in Mexico, in relation to their medical view.First, as the fundamental work for this purpose, I carried out electronic text-ization of the Maya-Spanish dictionaries, in order to extract the Mayan vocabularies of the human body and the diseases. The used dictionaries are "Motul dictionary", the 'Vienna dictionary", the "San Francisco dictionary", and J. Pio Perez'"Dictionary of the Language of Maya"(1866-1877). As finished this work, I proceeded in analyzing the vocabularies so as to know about the body view and the physiological view of the diseases of the Yucatec Maya.On the other hand, I conducted field researches in Yucatan, Mexico, in September of 2000 and August of 2001, in which occasions I had the vocabularies obtained from the work mentioned above, checked by the Yucatec Mayan informants, and I observed their religious and medical practices.By this research, it became clear how the Yucatec Mayan people use the physiological knowledge on the human body to explain and treat the illness, which has been conventionally overlooked by the researchers on the Yucatec Mayan cultures. And it became clear also how the Yucatec Maya transformed their original medical view under the Spanish colonial rule, into the so called traditional medicine.I presented the result of this research in the Japanese Latin American Society's Research Convention held in Nagoya University on June 2, 2001, and at the 5th International Mayanist Congress held in Xalapa, Mexico on July 25, 2001. Moreover, I prepared the last report "The Illness of the Yucatec Maya - A Taxonomical Analysis of the Vocabularies of the Maya-Spanish Dictionaries"