Renewing the Maya World: Expressive Culture in a Highland Town

Chapter 6. Continuity in the Quichean Expressive Culture Tradition

6. Continuity in the Quichean Expressive Culture Tradition continuity In the 1970s and early 1980s ethnographers and ethnohistorians reconstructed the intellectual foundation for investigating continuity in Maya culture. The new perspective, given seminal expression by Eva Hunt (1977) and Victoria Bricker (1981), argued that ‘‘deep generative principles , which are essentially metaphysical premises, underlie an extraordinary array of surface diversity in the expression of native Mesoamerican verbal and iconographic ideas’’ (Gossen 1986: ix). This loosely structuralist thesis sees ‘‘Indians’’ as ongoing creators of a ‘‘reconstituted Indian culture’’ which, following Nancy Farriss (1984), is a cultural configuration that emerges through adaptation from a central core of aboriginal concepts and principles (Carlsen and Prechtel 1991: 25). Maya culture in this view has adapted and been transformed but has retained a distinctive Maya character. Not a search for survivals in the backward ‘‘traditional’’ society of modernization theory,1 the continuity thesis attempts to identify the central aboriginal elements and themes in ethnographically described village cultures,and to explain how fundamental cultural patterns persist within and give coherent structure to changing institutions. This thesis underlies McAnany’s (1995) recent argument that ‘‘armatures ’’ (following Hunt 1977) related to ancestor veneration were originally derived from the needs of nascent elite descent groups to control estates and can be identified in Maya cultures from the Early Classic Period to the ethnographic present. McAnany’s theoretically important investigation relates the power of the ancestors to social and political dynamics, showing that at least some armatures persist by serving an ideological function, in this case legitimizing status and the control of estates. This chapter applies the continuity thesis to the Momostecan case study, investigating the patterns of continuity and transformation in this particular Maya expressive culture understood as an adaptive embodiment of Maya cosmology, political ideology, and social philosophy. Metaphors for the Undertaking Two basic approaches, sometimes acting in combination, have characterized recent investigations of continuity in Maya culture. One, described above, tends to focus on expressive culture, like ritual or myth, and seeks to discover underlying morphologies or structures that may be retained over long periods of time, but with superficially variable expression, especially through substitution of elements. The other borrows extensively from historical linguistics. It is based on the premise that a single Maya protoculture existed in the distant past and that it is possible to reconstruct that protoculture from features shared by its descendants in today’s local village cultures. Several metaphors illustrate how these approaches have been developed in the literature. Maya Culture Is Like a Jigsaw Puzzle. One metaphor suggests that a cohesive culture that existed in the past has been broken into pieces, with different pieces surviving in different local cultures. It implies a theoretical possibility of reconstruction, though noting formidable practical difficulties. Each community seems to be a collection of jigsaw-puzzle pieces, but no collection ever amounts to a complete puzzle. The pieces suggest an archetypal puzzle now lost: in any collection pieces will be found in different places; sometimes pieces will be lacking; sometimes there will be two seemingly identical pieces kept together side by side. (Mendelson 1967: 405) Mendelson argues that traditionalists hold onto their status, offices, and cults by maintaining the mythic and ritual system, fragmented as it may sometimes be, in the form of costumbre, which they define as a legacy from the more powerful and glorified ancestral past. While Mendelson’s approach, like McAnany’s analysis of the role of ancestor worship mentioned above and my interpretations below, is explicitly ideological— the retention of selected expressive culture complexes serves the inter186 The Ritual Symbols and Their Meanings ests of those that maintain them—it calls attention to the possibility that formal elements, especially in public ritual, may be retained rather faithfully for long periods of time even as the understanding of what they mean changes or simply becomes irrelevant and is forgotten. Maya Culture Is Like a Ceiba Tree. Using a different metaphor but with similar practical implications, Freidel and Schele have suggested that we envision contemporary Maya culture as a single tree with many branches in its varying community expressions (Freidel, Schele, and Parker 1993: 41). The tree becomes a phylogenetic branching diagram in which widespread homologous traits in the present—for example, world tree symbolism or the legitimization of leadership via visionary shamanic mediation with the ancestors—hark back to prototypical ancestral culture. The branching tree...