Paradoxically speaking it is clear that the tradition of "traditional medicine" is not traditional but inventive. In the entropic discourse in which any kind of traditional things has fate of disappearing in future, we can find easily that traditional entity has authenticity. We can figure out this type of characteristics of the traditional medicine in modern ethnographic writings.

I will show first the Maya Medicine as both traditional and modern practices in the Mesoamerica, a cultural area from southern Mexico to western Honduras and northern El Salvador. Two representative concepts, holism and cosmology of life and death can be characterized throughout data. On the one side the Maya is similar with and the other side is also different from the other traditional societies. I will present the example of the influence from long term colonialism by European particularly Spanish. The characteristic of new world traditional medicine has not only genuine authentic tradition but also colonial tradition, and the interaction process between two culture, that we can suggest the hybrid nature.

Second the postcolonial experience on the Mayan is also very important to think on actuality of the Maya medicine. For long time many western historians and ethnographers have collected ethnomedical data from long term research tradition through the conquest and the evangelization.

But today the Maya themselves can reconstruct and reuse their own traditional medical knowledge for their health, that can be described as the repatriation of traditional knowledge under the world scenery of the UNDRIPS, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples that was adopted in 2007. This is not revitalization nor invention of traditional medicine, but a kind of identification of their own medicine.

Can be the medicine identification tool for the people? Finally I propose that to discuss on ethical nature of the traditional medicine would be to think historically on people's appropriation to their medicine.

Mitzub'ixi Quq Chi'j

• The Mayan Traditional Medicine: Theories and Ethics [full paper]
  

Mitzub'ixi Quq Chi'j