The Memory of Bones: Body, Being, and Experience among the Classic Maya by Stephen Houston, David Stuart, Karl Taube (review)

The Latin Arnericanist, Spring 2007 regions.” Yet he still asserts that they can”showus some of the forces at work throughout the country and some of the possibilities that could be realized in other locations” (12). As readers will ascertain, this is path-breaking history at its best. Andrew Grant Wood Department of History University of Tulsa THE MEMORY OF BONES: BODY,BEING, AND EXPERIENCE AMONG THE CLASSIC MAYA. BYSTEPHEN HOUSTON, DAVID STUART, AND KARL TAUBE. AUSTIN: U TEXAS P, 2006, P. 324. $55.00. Writing from the standpoint of a literary specialist researching representations of the body in Latin American literature, I am very taken with this book. Houston, Stuart, and Taube, three leading Mayanists, have exhaustively compiled information from linguistic and iconographic sources to assert a general sense of Classic Maya conceptualizations related to the body. Purveyors of ostensibly universal -yet flagrantly Eurocentric -fare such as the Oxford Compaizioiz to the Body would do well to take note of this book and other publications (such as a special 2004 issue of Arqueologia Mexicana, ”Ser humano en el Mexico antiguo”) that chronicle progress made in reconstructing ancient American understandings of humanity. In their introduction, the authors recognize the potential dangers of comparing, for example, Maya and Aztec iconography, or even comparing images frommore than one Maya site. Nevertheless, they conclude that crosscontextual comparisons can be fruitful in certain aspects, given the necessary provisos, and the comparisons they proceed to make are indeed insightful without seeming forced. Important research by predecessors singled out in the introduction includes works by Alfred0 Lopez Austin and JillFurst. Citing theorists from Foucault to Geertz to Lacan, the authors provide an extensive introduction to ways of thinking about the body, both in the preamble and in the individual chapter introductions. The volume’s well-selected visuals amply illustrate the main ideas, and there is an excellent index as well. Select poetic imagery of Octavio Paz, related to the gaze centered on corporeal phenomena, informs the gestalt of the text, from the title throughout the chapters on ”TheClassicMaya Body,” ”Bodiesand Portraits,” “Ingestion,” “Senses,“ ”Emotions,” ”Dishonor,” ”Words on Wings,“ ”Dance, Music, Masking,” and the summary epilogue. Particularly impressive is the authors’ recourse to different kinds of sources to flesh out their themes. The volume’s typical chapter structure consists of an introduction to the theme featuring relevant summaries of Western theoretical thought on the matter, followed by an exploration of words related to the theme in extant and colonial Maya languages such as Tzotzil and Ch’olti’, and then a consideration of iconography illustrating what can be known about the theme. For instance, in Book Reviews the chapter opening on the emotions, the authors reference Darwin, Rosaldo, and Spiro, among others, on the theory of emotions. Later on in the chapter we learn that in Tzendal, nichinz yotavz (”flowery his heart”) means “happy,” while tse’el (y)o’tan (“hearts laughing”) means ”love” or ”desire.” Finally, the images in the chapter include scenes from two- and three-dimensional sources representing lust, mourning, comedy, and the heart as source of emotions. One of the most fascinating aspects of the text is the authors’ exploration of synesthesia in Maya iconography as a means of recording ideas beyond the purely visual. A fairly well known example of this is the ”speech scroll,” a curlicue issuing from a depicted person’s mouth indicating speech or song; it turns outthat thecurlicuecan be squiggly (torepresent an underwater setting), bony and angular (speech of the dead), flowery (song),or flaming (powerful rhetoric). Similarly, the authors highlight earspools found engraved with images representing the sounds that the earspool wearer would thus ”hear.” An outstanding demonstration of synesthetic imagery involvesflowers drawn with eyes which, given the Maya belief in light emanating from the eyes, seem to convey the idea of the ”projective force of [the flowers’] scent” (169). Similarly, flowers are related to breath, the sun, the face, the mouth, cave openings, birth, and incense in a web of meaning related to origin and essence. In general, Maya pictographic writing allows for semantic embellishments of this type even within purely syllabic or phonemic illustration- what the authors term ”intrinsic vitality”-such as a head representing the...