Performance
It restores the Rarámuri to a full history, landscape, and living culture, correcting the tendency to reduce the community to the runners portrayed in Born to Run.
A community can keep centuries-old customs even while living close to all the pull of modern industrial society. The authors treat this persistence as a central part of the story that needs explaining, not as a leftover. Nearness to modern life does not by itself make old ways disappear.
A people's identity can grow directly out of how their land forces them to move. In their own language this mountain people are called the "foot runners," because steep, rugged country left them no other way to get around. What outsiders admire as a special talent began as an everyday answer to the landscape.
Some cultures divide the day between body and soul: the body works by daylight, and the soul works at night while the body sleeps. In this view night is the "day of the moon," when the souls of the living and the spirits of the dead travel about. Sleep is then a shift change, not an empty stretch of time.