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Ethnohistory 47.3-4 (2000) 813-815



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Book Review

The Maya World:
Yucatec Culture and Society, 1550–1850


The Maya World: Yucatec Culture and Society, 1550–1850. By Matthew Restall. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997. xiv + 441 pp., preface, introduction, maps, glossary, bibliography, index. $75.00 cloth).

This impressive book provides a broad cultural and social history of the Mayan peoples of the Yucután Peninsula, based on indigenous language notarial records drawn from archives and libraries in Mexico, Spain, and the United States. Matthew Restall uses these documents to build on the works of ethnohistorians who relied primarily on Spanish sources (such as Nancy Farriss, Grant Jones, Robert Patch, and Inga Clendinnen) to reconstruct daily life in local Yucatec communities. According to Restall, Mayan society revolved around two central institutions that have received scant attention in earlier studies—the cah (plural cahob), a community with a defined geographical territory, and the chibal (plural chibalbob), a patrilineal descent group identified by a common surname. He then uses Mayan-language documentation to demonstrate the social and cultural resiliency of the cah under Spanish colonial rule. Although the paucity of Mayan-language documentation from the earlier periods limits most of Restall’s findings to the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, this meticulously researched and cogently argued book makes important substantive and methodological contributions to Mesoamerican ethnohistory.

In the first section of the book Restall explains the importance of the cah, indigenous naming practices, and the structure of local government and politics. Despite Spanish ideas about territorial and political organization, the cah remained the fundamental social, political, and cultural unit throughout the era. He also explains the increasing importance of patrilineal descent groups, the chibalbob, in Mayan society, particularly as the use [End Page 813] of matronymics slowly declined and the appropriation of Christian names increased. Restall then explores the political arena, demonstrating how the local municipal council (cabildo) became a focal point of political life in the cah. In doing so, he demonstrates how various elite factions vied for control of important municipal offices that regulated local affairs within the cah and relations with outsiders, especially Spaniards.

The second part of the book deals with topics such as social stratification, kinship and household customs, personal possessions, inheritance and land tenure, gender relations, sexuality, and religion. Restall explains that class divisions endured within the cah, as some chibalbob apparently maintained prominent political and social roles from the preconquest era on. Moreover, his full descriptions of community life provide information about mundane matters dealing with land use, clothing, and even common work tools. Restall also shows that a mixture of individual and communal ownership of property obtained within each cah. On gender relations he uses data from wills and municipal records to demonstrate that women exercised economic and social power, despite being virtually excluded from political offices. Finally, Restall provides suggestive information about Mayan sexual customs by examining complaints against local priests, and also how the Maya integrated Christian precepts into the framework of their own religious system.

The final two segments of the book examine both material culture and Mayan literacy practices. The treatment of settlement and migration, land ownership, trade, and local conflicts build on discussions begun in earlier chapters, providing much new information on the stability and endurance of Mayan society. Restall explains, for example, that permeable boundaries and a tendency for Mayan kin groups to migrate together minimized the societal dislocations that usually accompanied such widespread population movements. His explanations about how local indigenous institutions handled litigation over land disputes, managed long-distance and petty trade, and the demands of Spanish authorities for labor, tribute, and agricultural resources also testifies to the resilience of the cah and kin structures over time. His discussions of Mayan literacy and documentation in the final chapters provide much needed information about the extant Mayan-language documentation, which form the basis for this fine book.

Restall’s painstaking analysis of Mayan-language documentation has yielded a substantive book that provides fascinating insights into the internal workings of indigenous communities in colonial Yucatán. In...

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