Place and Identity in Classic Maya Narratives by Alexandre Tokovinine (review)

In his recent piece “Yaan Muuk’ Ich Cha’anil/El potencial de Cha’anil: Un concepto maya para la revitalización lingüística,” Yucatec Maya anthropologist, Genner Llanes-Ortiz, presents the Maya notion of cha’anil, roughly equivalent to “performance” in English, as a concept through which Maya and non-Maya alike may rethink Maya language revitalization efforts in the Yucatán Peninsula. Given that these efforts have historically focused on the production of Maya-language literature as an end in itself, cha’anil becomes a way to better grasp the complex interactions between Maya-language texts and performance, particularly in the context of the readings that Maya authors and intellectuals give at the now yearly Cha’anil Kaaj or “Fiesta del pueblo.”

Of singular importance to this review is the fact that Llanes-Ortiz cites a 2003 article by Alexandre Tokovinine to articulate cha’anil as a Maya conceptualization of performance and spectacle with roots that transcend histories of European invasion. Articles like Llanes-Ortiz’s thus participate in broader processes of pan-Maya organizing, in which Maya intellectuals make free use of work by non-Maya Western academics, a topic that has been explored by scholars like Kay Warren and by Maya intellectuals such as Jakaltek-MayaVictor Montejo.

Within this context, this review also demonstrates the profound potential that multidisciplinary engagement with texts such as Tokovinine’s recent book, Place and Identity in Classic Maya Narratives, has for scholars working in Indigenous Studies, Native American Studies, and Maya Studies. In this sense, the volume takes its place among the invaluable works on pre-Hispanic art and culture published over the years by the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection in Washington, D.C., a facility administered by the Trustees of Harvard University. For readers unfamiliar with Dumbarton Oaks, this year marks the venerable institution’s seventy-fifth year as an important research center in Pre-Colombian Studies, Byzantine Studies, and Garden and Landscape Studies that, in addition to publishing monographs in these fields, also supports scholarly work on its considerable collections. Although many of the glyphs in the text will remain somewhat ambiguous to those of us who lack expertise in Maya epigraphy, Tokovinine’s thorough grounding in previous scholarship and concise justifications of his own interpretations make the work’s six chapters a convincing, enjoyable read that offers insights and challenges to how we understand the connections between pre-Hispanic texts and those written in Latin script after the Conquest.

The book’s introduction outlines the author’s theoretical orientation with regard to “landscape as a means to see the environment in a certain way, to represent and to modify it in accordance with such perceptions and representations” (1). Though, in the words of the author himself, the monograph “does not pursue the immediate goal of reviewing or critiquing other landscapes” articulated by previous scholars, the work’s engagement with Maya terms used to perceive and represent landscapes nonetheless “may serve as a basis for a discussion about the analytical usefulness of some categories and concepts in Classic Maya landscapes as we see them today” (4). For example, among its arguments, Chapter 2: “Classic Maya Places,” demonstrates quite effectively the centrality of corn and houses in many place names, suggesting perhaps the role that human interaction with the environment played in Maya conceptualizations of space with regard to human settlement.

Even more interesting, Chapter 3: “Classic Maya Landscape Categories,” takes up the specific ways in which language participates in how one understands aspects, built and natural, of the environment in the Classic Maya world. Indeed, Tokovinine’s readings of the inscriptions for ch’e’n and kab are fascinating in both their implications and for how these terms intersect (or fail to intersect) with understandings of landscape in colonial documents. For the author, ch’e’n goes well beyond its traditional translation as “well” to encompass the ritual precincts of cities, if not entire cities...