Maya and Catholic Cultures in Crisis by John D. Early (review)

This lengthy text concludes an ambitious study of Catholicism's encounter with highland Maya indigenous in Mexico and Guatemala beginning with the Conquest¹ and, in this second volume, into the new millennium. Drawing on a lifetime of field experience and reading across several disciplines, John D. Early, professor emeritus of anthropology at Florida Atlantic University, insists on the indispensability of religion to cross-cultural understanding and focuses on its decisive significance for the Maya.

The "crisis" of the title refers, in the Maya sphere, to disruption of the articulation between social-cultural tradition and peasant subsistence that explains the persistence of the Maya in the modern era. Early agrees with the scholarly consensus on the causes of this crisis. Scarce arable land was lost to ladinos, plantation labor opportunities evaporated, and population exploded, while national economic policies and global market forces accelerated Maya impoverishment in the last third of the last century. Deepening deprivation undermined belief in the saints who, according to Maya tradition, guaranteed well-being in return for ritual propitiation under what Early calls the Maya "covenant."

In his account "crisis" also denotes the rupture within Catholicism ensuing from Vatican Council II's revision of Catholic orthodoxy as defined in early modern Europe by the Council of Trent ("Tridentine Catholicism" in Early's vocabulary). In the context of the Maya "subsistence crisis," the teachings of the Council (1962–65) challenged longstanding sacramentally and doctrinally oriented missionary practice. Early points further to the rise of biblically-inspired critical liberation praxis and the attempt to "inculturate" Catholic teaching and liturgy known as teología india (Indian theology).

Of particular value, the study shows how these two crises figured in contentious undertakings by well-known Catholic missionaries (e.g., Father Stanley Rother) and bishops Juan Gerardi (Guatemala City) and Samuel Ruiz Garcia (San Cristóbal de Las Casas, Chiapas). Those interested in the theological permissibility of violence and Catholic entanglement in widely-reported political upheavals—civil war in Guatemala and the Zapatista uprising and its effects in Chiapas—will find enlightening detail here, some from the author's personal experience.

The book also relies substantially on the multiple case studies, political-economic analyses, and historical narratives produced by anthropologists, historians, journalists, and other observers drawn to the Maya in recent decades. Extended quotations from such sources invite readers to pursue these and other studies included in an ample bibliography. Evocative photographs and clear prose enhance the study.

Perhaps inevitably, given its broad scope, the book repeatedly directs readers to consult earlier or later chapters to grasp the author's meaning. Many unfamiliar with the recent history of the Catholic Church and/or the highland Maya could find such referrals perplexing. Others might treat the book as a compendium to be consulted rather than read straight through.

Expertly researched and richly informed, the book's value is nonetheless diminished by questionable theoretical moves. For one, it subsumes culture, social formations, and religion under the concept "worldview" deployed as an all-purpose heuristic. Doing so blurs distinctions essential to the meaning and analytic usefulness of these notions. It also neglects substantial contemporary advances in social thought. The text's coinage "Action Catholicism" collapses Catholic Action and liberation practice, though the difference between them remains quite consequential politically and theologically. Finally, the dubious proposition that the biblical idea of "covenant" entails cycles akin to Maya calendrical myth obscures the author's paramount point: the Bible's historical realism is precisely what moved Maya Catholics to reject ancestral myth and reassert their own historical agency.

This book and its companion volume remain a significant achievement that will serve anthropologists, church historians, missiologists, and others who understand that theory risks sterility without local knowledge, amply displayed here.