Gender, Social Conflict, and Shape-Shifting Witchcraft in Colonial Guatemala

This paper explores the gender and cultural dynamics of shape-shifting practices in malevolent witchcraft in multi-ethnic social relations in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century colonial Guatemala.  Using criminal and Inquisition records, I draw on accounts that describe male and female ritual specialists who shape-shifted into birds and animals (turkeys, vultures, tigres, and coyotes) to steal souls, children, chickens, or money. I compare this to narratives of malevolent witchcraft that targeted the body of others: the transformation of a woman into a man complete with "virile member," and the transfiguration of a fetus in utero into a half-toad/half human. I consider these accounts within the historical context of European, Mesoamerican, and hybridized colonial shape-shifting cultures. I contend that their gendered nature must also be taken into account, as shape-shifting narratives gendered some transformative animals female (birds) and others male (four-legged mammals), and targeted reproductive bodily locations (the uterus and sexual organs) as sites for the physical display of malevolent sorcery in community conflicts in colonial society.