Excerpt from The Talisman by Yoko Tawada ---

"In this city there are great many women who wear bits of metal on their ears. They have holes put in their earlobes especially for this purpose. Almost as soon as I got here, I wanted to ask what these bits of metal on people¹s ear meant. But I didn¹t know if I could speak of this openly. My guidebook, for instance, says that in Europe you should never ask people you don¹t yet know very well anything related to their bodies or religion. Sometimes I thought these bits of metal ­ especially when I saw one in the form of a scythe, bow, or anchor ­ might be a kind of talisman."

Alvar Nunez Cabeza De Vaca in Castaways was a Spanish colonialist whom set foot on the American continent for the first time in 1528 where he encountered the Natives. These are excerpts from his writings---

" All through this land they stupefy themselves with a certain smoke and will give all they have to obtain it. They also drink something that they brew from the leaves of a tree resembling an oak and toast in pots over a fire; and after it is toasted they fill the pot with water and keep it over the fire, and when that water has boiled twice they pour it into another vessel and cool it with half a gourd, and when it has a great deal of froth they drink it as hot as they can bear it."

"During the time that I was with them I saw a devilish thing, and it was that I saw a man married to another man, and these are effeminates and impotent and go about covered like women and do the work of women and do not shoot arrows, and carry very heavy loads; and among these folk we saw many of them who were thus effeminate, as I have said, and they are heavier and taller than the other men; they can bear extremely heavy loads."