The Apotheosis of Janaab' Pakal: Science, History, and Religion at Classic Maya Palenque

Foreword

xiii Foreword The study of Mesoamerican worlds has been enormously enriched by breakthroughs in decipherment of Maya writing during the last thirty years. As our understanding of Maya writing has advanced, giving us insight into the imaginations and rituals of Maya scribes and priests, public and published debates about glyphs, gods, myth and history, political order and social hierarchy, and culture and ecology have spread with precision and intensity. Maya studies has become a site for cooperation, opposition, dialogue, and disputation. Gerardo Aldana’s The Apotheosis of Janaab’ Pakal: Science, History, and Religion at Classic Maya Palenque is an impressive example of these interpretive styles. Working from the borderlands of the disciplines of xiii xiv Foreword Chicana/o studies and indigenous studies, which supply him with a strong sense of accountability to the communities being studied and a deep concern for honoring the agency of indigenous cultures, Aldana interacts critically and cooperatively with the works of Linda Schele, Nikolai Grube, Simon Martin, Anthony Aveni, David Friedel, among many others. Central to his approach is a strong critique of what he considers to be a highly influential but thinly contextualized “scientific” approach to Maya religion, ritual, calendars, and politics. Maya astronomy and calendars can indeed be studied as scientific practices but always in relation to the social processes and political struggles that supported astronomical practices and shaped their usages. According to Aldana, adequate attention has not been paid to the ways Maya social realities and religious imaginations shaped and reflected calendrical patterns and innovative ritual practices. Aldana uses what he considers to be a new contextual method (in Maya studies at least) to reveal a new awareness of the “historically contextualized human agency” of Maya kings as well as a “more sophisticated job description” for Maya astronomers than has heretofore been realized in Maya studies. Aldana also calls for a more rigorous standard in the use of our science to understand their science, a practice that has concerned Anthony Aveni, among others, for a number of years. The results of this new rigor and social contextualization, Aldana hopes, will be something akin to a new revelation of the “intellectual history” of Maya people, incorporating a deeper sense of what their specific intellectual agendas were as practiced in kingship, interpolity relationships , genealogical world views, and esoteric calendrical visions. The specific Maya site for this study is Palenque, and Aldana focuses on the ritual and political life of Janaab’ Pakal and especially his son Kan B’ahlam, who, according to the author, used his scientific patronageasaritualstrategytocarryouthisroyalagendaofcontrolling local and international politics in pressured historical circumstances. Aldana has used this social contextualization and astronumerology to discover a “specific creative spurt underlying some of the thematic coherence of the architecture and iconography of Late Classic Palenque.” From there, he suggests that the 819-day count was part of a ritual language created to ensure that the ruling elite remained in power. Aldana argues that he has uncovered in the Classic period what others have found in the Postclassic—namely, a secret language xv utilized by the nobility to “restrict the size of the community with access to the throne.” There is much to admire in this inventive addition to our Mesoamerican Worlds series, which aims to lead us in a “journey into modern interdisciplinary research.” Some years ago Paul Wheatley cautioned me about new approaches in the study of Mesoamerican cities and religion, stating: “Some scholars believe that by finding new data they are able to overthrow a long-standing theory or approach to society and culture. But the only thing that overthrows a theory is a better theory.” It will be up to the readers to determine to what extent Aldana, through his work of cooperation and disputation, has achieved a new theory, or at least a new approach to the study of Maya kingship, calendars, and social history. Davíd Carrasco General Editor Foreword ...