While there is no denying that the government practices surrounding the Night of the Dead have adversely affected the village, there is also no denying that there is a contradiction between Brandes' analysis of the transformation and his description of the Tzintzuntzanians' reactions to the changes. While Brandes sees these changes as sacrilege because the villagers are "no longer actors in a ritual drama played out, as Geertz would have it, by and for themselves," the Tzintzuntzanians themselves do "not seem reluctant to adopt this new stance and become part of the great performance that the Ministry of Tourism had produced and directed" (Brandes 1988, 88).
The contradiction between Brandes' analysis and description, coupled with Brandes' inability to reconcile the transformation of the Night of the Dead (his nostalgia for the older "traditional" fiesta), exposes the shortcomings of his analysis. These shortcomings stem from the fact that Brandes' analysis, for all its historicity, still rests upon the conception of the fiesta as an observed otherness, upon the notion that the fiesta is a "metasocial commentary . . . [whose] function, if you want to call it that, is interpretive" (Geertz 1973, 448). This interpretive stance‹which conceives of culture as "an ensemble of texts. . . which the anthropologist strains to read over the shoulders of those to whom they properly belong" (Geertz 1973, 452) ‹has both epistemological and ethical pitfalls.
