Converting Words: Maya in the Age of the Cross (review)

The story of the introduction of Christianity into the New World is a complex one that has long fascinated scholars of many disciplines. In recent decades it has become clearer that indigenous religions were not simply destroyed and replaced, but were gradually transformed even as new forms of Christianity were forged. The study of this process in Mesoamerica is enhanced by the survival of a powerful writing tradition. The resulting literature—numerous manuscripts written alphabetically in various native languages—has been given increasing attention in the last twenty years. The result has been a dramatic shift in our understanding of not just the so-called Spiritual Conquest but the entire nexus of conquest and colonization processes.

William Hanks's new book makes a major contribution to that shift in knowledge. He succeeds by approaching a well-defined colonial moment (the small province of Yucatán from the late sixteenth century through the eighteenth century) from the perspectives of his discipline (linguistic anthropology) to analyze a broad body of textual sources (written by Yucatec Mayas, and by Spanish clergymen and friars) in ways that are accessible to scholars of other disciplines (historians, for example) and fields (such as linguistic anthropologists with little knowledge of Yucatán).

This is a large book by any reckoning—long, densely argued, meticulously evidenced, an intellectual magnum opus. Hanks first started studying and publishing on colonial Yucatec Maya language and text almost thirty years ago; here he draws and builds extensively upon his earlier work, deploying it in support of a grand thesis about colonization, colonial language, and the Spiritual Conquest. This thesis is that the colonial project created a new language—or rather, a new version of Yucatec Maya, which Hanks calls Maya reducido. The definition of Maya reducido is effectively the purpose of the entire book, but reducing it (no pun intended) to a single term is a clever touch, emblematic of Hanks's ability both to simplify and to complicate the same problem.

As Hanks explains, reducido (from reducir) does not imply reduction, but rather conversion and pacification, persuasion and ordering. The colonial project of reducción took three forms. One was to reorganize the Maya population into centralized, ordered towns; another was to instill in them a Christian lifestyle, a new daily social conduct. In Hanks's view, "the reducción actually had a third object, equally important with space and conduct, and equally salient in the peaceful conquest. That third object is language" (p. 4). What began as an effort by Franciscan missionaries to record the grammatical rules of Yucatec Maya ended up as a reorganization of the language into something new, with Maya reducido not just a means of converting indigenous peoples and keeping them Christian, but itself a goal of colonization. Thus, by viewing conversion through the lens of language, Hanks is able to throw new light on the entire cultural history of colonization in Yucatán. "Language was pivotal," he shows, "both as an object to be analyzed and altered and as an instrument with which to analyze and alter other aspects of Indian life" (p. 5).

The reader is taken methodically, over eleven chapters, to that larger, bolder point: the first three chapters (based mostly on Spanish sources) explain how language fits into the larger reducción project; the middle five chapters (based mostly on Maya sources) detail how Maya reducido was created as a native language imbued with Christian ideas; and the last three chapters explore "the movement of the new language into notarial genres, where the voices of prayer commingled with the voices of rule" (p. 276). By the end, the reader is convinced that this new form of Maya had spread into everything that indigenous Yucatecans wrote and, by extension—and the implication is resoundingly significant—into the ways in which Mayas both inside and outside the colonial boundaries viewed their material and spiritual worlds.

Hanks does...