Land of the Turkey and the Deer: Recent Research in Yucatan (review)

Land of the Turkey and the Deer: Recent Research in Yucatán. Edited by Ruth Gubler. (Lancaster, CA: Labyrinthos, 1999. xii + 144 pp., preface, about the contributors, bibliography.)

The first impression to emerge from reading this essay collection, selected from papers presented at the Fourth Miami Conference, held at the Miami Museum of Science in 1995, is its imbalance in favor of archaeology. The book contains ten articles, seven related to archaeological research, one on the Yucatecan henequen elite, and two on modern Yucatec literature. However, excepting those on archaeology, which all speak the same tongue, these essays do not say anything to each other and probably should have been collected into three different books. They are very specialized and are separated by a huge time lag. It is worthless to try to overcome this double barrier with a geographical link and the title Land of the Turkey and the Deer.

The essays on archaeology exhibit the problem that distinguishes anthropological discipline: to study societies and their symbolic productions simultaneously according to their meanings and functions. In other words, to understand both—what they signify and what they are for.

Traci Ardren and Ramón Carrasco, writing on “termination” and “initiation” rituals in Yaxuná and Calakmul, respectively, as well as James E. Brady, Alfredo Barrera Rubio, and Carlos Peraza Lope, referring to rituals related to rock art in the Gruta de Jobonché and the Tixcuytún cave, respectively, evoke the magical powers of priests and shamans to produce what Carrasco calls ch’ulel (after Freidel, Schele and Parker): spirit or universal essence. In Yaxuná, according to Ardren, some of the termination rituals associated with ceramics, sculpture, and tools, burned or intentionally broken, are to be related to an Itzá war. A war of conquest—one surmises—would have imposed the Itzá warriors and priests’ ch’ulel (the “water witchcrafts” from the Campeche and Tabasco lowlands and maya-chontal speakers¹) over the Maya ch’ulel in Cobá, the site being Yaxuná Cobá’s outpost of Chichén Itzá and the allied cities of the Puuc. In Calakmul, conversely, the offerings found by Carrasco included big cylindrical vessels and yellow plates associated with objects and sometimes with the decapitated heads of victims who had been sacrificed. These vessels and plates presumably would be ch’ulel containers, thought to have magical powers to inaugurate a building.

On the other hand, the essay by Tomás Gallareta Negrón, Lourdes Toscano H., Carlos Pérez A., and Carlos Peraza L., as well as those of George Andrews and Edward Kurjack, ignore the meaning of artifacts for the sake of their function. Thus in a detailed study on the architecture of the Santa Rosa Xtampak Palace, a three-story, forty-four-room building in the Chenes region, Andrews does not bother to place the palace in a specific cultural context or in a historical sequence. His interest is function, and because of this, he offers a typology with three variables—room / doorway / and space distribution—and concludes that the palace functioned as a residential-administrative-ceremonial complex.

With the work of the well known “yucatecólogo” Gilbert M. Joseph, we enter into the realm of history. This is not to say that we switch from “primitive” societies, producing symbolism, to “modern” societies, producing ideology. That some societies signify and that some others function and manipulate does not mean they are opposite. As Joseph’s recent book, written in collaboration with Allen Wells, puts it: “The historian has to infer intention or motivation from the acts themselves.”² Using a variety of sources, Joseph admirably portrays rural insurgency in Yucatán between 1909 and 1915 and how it fostered different elite groups (camarillas) to reconcile in order to survive. In fact, manipulating their local allies and maintaining relations with federal politics, all in an intricate patron-client relationship, he explains how and for what Yucatecan elites were able to stop...