Telling and Being Told: Storytelling and Cultural Control in Contemporary Yucatec Maya Literatures by Paul M. Worley (review)

The Latin Americanist, September 2014 The Chile Readerisaninvaluableteachingtool. Graduateandundergraduate students will find inspiration for research projects among its pages. This remarkable volume is essential for scholars, students, travelers, and anyone who wants to learn about Chile’s complicated and fascinating history. Brandi Townsend Department of History, University of Maryland College Park TELLING AND BEING TOLD: STORYTELLING AND CULTURAL CONTROL IN CONTEMPORARY YUCATEC MAYA LITERATURES. By Paul M. Worley. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2013, p. 216, $50.00. Paul Worley’s Telling and Being Told is a critical inquiry into orality, storytelling , and literature in the Yucatán peninsula. It comes at a time when indigenous cultural production all over the Americas is gaining ground and demanding critical attention. Worley sets out to show the importance of oral storytelling in the study of contemporary indigenous literature, but more importantly he presents us with an innovative approach that privileges the voices of those who have been traditionally marginalized. As the book’s initial chapter makes clear, indigenous cultural production has been typically analyzed from a perspective that privileges the West and its values, as it asserts dominance and authority over the other and his or her world. This process results in a classification system that determines how, when, and why indigenous cultural production is to be read, and it loses sight of the power and violence that it exercises. Telling and Being Told is divided into five chapters, each detailing important aspects of oral storytelling, in particular as it relates to a locus of agency where traditions are preserved, updated, and transmitted and a contemporary Maya Yucatec experience is negotiated. The first part opens with a discussion of the limitations of traditional critical approaches, which privilege the written word over orality, and often fail to account for other possible modes of thinking. One of the biggest obstacles that oral literature faces is its folklorization and subsequent relegation to a state of voicelessness, where it is often seen as nothing more than an artifact. Noting these challenges and misconceptions, Worley turns to the Maya notion of tzikbal and to a Yucatec Maya understanding of narrative forms that is not bound by literacy. What is most significant about these two notions is that they point to an active and participatory process of storytelling, which requires the interaction of a storyteller and a listener. It is in this interaction that a Maya “discursive agency” and an “embodiment of indigenous knowledge” can be found (6). To address the issue of agency, in the second chapter Worley turns to two non-indigenous 19th -century interpretations of the story of the “Dwarf 78 Book Reviews of Uxmal.” This story, as mediated by Western author-narrators, relies on an indio discourse that legitimizes the power structures of the hegemonic culture that they represent. In contrast, when told by Maya Yucatec storytellers in the 20th century, the story of the “Dwarf of Uxmal” is a counter narrative that highlights the resilience and vitality of present-day Maya people. More importantly, as Worley shows, the performance of the story being told reveals that Maya Yucatec oral tradition has withstood the test of time and is as important as the story itself. Turning to the most recent past, in the third chapter Worley zeroes in on the relationship between cultural brokers and storytellers in 20th -century anthologies and collections of oral stories to further show the processes that alter the voices of the storyteller in order to promote an ideology that privileges non-Mayas. Specifically, we observe how cultural brokers “participate in the ideological reimagining of the mestizo nation through their respective treatments of the Yucatec Maya storyteller and his voice” (93). The fourth chapter provides an analysis of contemporary oral stories as told to Worley by the storyteller Mariano Bonilla Caamal. This chapter is crucial, for it shows the exercise of Maya agency within Maya modernity, as well as a discursive resistance to hegemonic structures, from a point of view that privileges its own way of thinking. In addition, Worley clearly identifies a number of key elements of Yucatec oral tradition that are a testament to the survival of an oral storytelling tradition that actively transmits knowledge in 21st century...