Indigenous Religion and Cultural Performance in the New Maya World

Introduction: Understanding Maya Religion in the New Millennium

xiii Introduction Understanding Maya Religion in the New Millennium R ecently two books (Molesky-Poz 2006; Hart 2008), authored by nonanthropologists with intimate knowledge of Maya religion, have depicted an ongoing tradition of Maya religious thought and practice, a Maya spirituality, which is portrayed in both books as an indigenous religious system with roots in the preconquest Maya culture. At the same time, other research reported in recent years (Mackenzie 1999, 2005; Deuss 2007) clearly indicates that there are two somewhat different, and potentially conflicting, takes on Maya religious tradition within the indigenous communities of highland Guatemala today. One is embodied in perpetuation of the syncretized local community religions known as Costumbre, the practice of which, in its many local manifestations, has been documented by anthropologists over the past seventy-five years. Another, Maya Spirituality proper, derives initially from efforts at systematization and communication of a standardized Maya religion by indigenous religious entrepreneurs (Mackenzie 2005:452–81) and is based primarily on use of the K’iche’ divining calendar and on reading and application of the Popol Wuj, the surviving sixteenth-century charter myth for the K’iche’ polity centered on K’umark’a’j (Utatlan). Maya Spirituality is a religious movement situated culturally and politically within the broader patterns of Guatemalan indigenous cultural activism. Informed by a historical understanding of the evangelization of the Maya, it xiv introduction seeks to eliminate Christian influence from Maya religious practice and to return to a pure Maya religion. Thus it has been characterized by Mackenzie, utilizing terminology developed by Stewart and Shaw (1994) from the analysis of similar nativistic religious movements within the postcolonial world, as an antisyncretic movement that is in some respects opposed to the syncretized Costumbre tradition from which it emerged. We see these currently as reform and orthodox sects, respectively, within indigenous Maya religion. The writing of this book reflects an effort on the part of three ethnographers working in Santiago Momostenango, and focusing there on the expressive culture performed in the annual festival, to account for how these two traditions are interacting within a single local community and how community members’ agendas for adapting Maya religiosity to a very new and continually changing, transnationalized political economy are perpetuating and changing Maya religious tradition. To place this effort within the context of an academic tradition in Maya-focused ethnographic work, we seek to continue the investigation of the deep generative principles expressed in local Maya cultures (Gossen 1986), an idea recently reformulated as the schemas that define a characteristically Maya cultural logic (Fischer 2001) resulting in the perpetuation of a Maya way of life and a distinctive Maya worldview, even in the face of sometimes radical societal and economic change and pressures to assimilate to national and transnational cultures. Our central focus, though, is on efforts by traditionalists to perpetuate the Costumbre tradition, which allows us to investigate how the production of Maya religious expressive culture is adapting to a rapidly changing and transnationalized festival. Clearly Maya Spirituality has emerged from Costumbre, and specifically from K’iche’an variants of Costumbre, and so is one such mode of adaptation. For now, though, it is best understood as a cotradition with local variants of Costumbre proper and in some respects, in its antisyncretism , as a competing, alternative sect, a different tradition, though one with a shared ancestry and some common interests, for example, in the protection of sacred sites. Our approach to the traditionalist religion develops case studies related to a traditional sacred dance and to the sponsorship and production of the cofradía ceremonies within Santiago’s festival that illustrate the dynamics of this latest effort at the “reconstitution” of Maya culture (following usage in Farris 1984), an effort that can finally be observed and documented while it is occurring rather than reconstructed by looking at snapshots of several ethnographic presents arranged like beads on a string and then trying to interpolate process. This on-the-ground investigation of unfolding adaptive strategies also facilitates the documentation of individual agency in a way that has been largely missing from previous studies of Maya xv Understanding Maya Religion in the New Millennium religious change and reconstitution processes. Finally, Fischer’s (2001) analysis of the effects of his imputed cultural logic on the production of identity and on new models for economic production did not explore the implications of Maya cultural logic for the production of religious culture, an...